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Every critic who writes about "Emma Zunz"1 points out that Emma is one of Borges's rare female protagonists; that hers is a detective story but lacks a detective, and that, despite the fact that Emma's crime is resolved, the story is unfathomable. Rarely mentioned is that "Emma Zunz" reworks one of Borges's favorite story models, a narrative whose the protagonist invents a plot in which he or she has not only a principal but often a tragic role. That plot reduces a life of infinite possibilities to a straight line leading to disaster.
This process is enacted in "La muerte y la brújula," in which Erik Lonnrot, an overly inventive detective, constructs a rabbinical solution to the murder of a rabbi, enabling his antagonist, Red Scharlach, to ensnare him in his own plot-a clever rewriting of Lonnrot's interpretation. In "El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan," Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy working for the Germans during World War I, must tell the Germans to attack a city named Albert. To do so, he murders a man with the same name, is arrested, and has his name linked with his victim's in the news. Prior to their decision to transform life into plot, these characters, like Emma Zunz, lead lives composed of random events beyond their control. By imposing a plot on their lives, they act the role of fate with regard to their own existence and ironically turn into fictions within fictions.
Also typical of Borges (and re-enacted in "Emma Zunz") is the plot's need for blood. This sacrifice in "Emma Zunz" is double and reminds us how the artist must sacrifice life for the sake of art: Murder and suicide are images of each other. The ultimate literary source for Borges's master plot, as Efrain Kistal2 has suggested, is Guillaume Apollinaire's tale "El marinero de Amsterdam," which Borges and Bioy Casares translated and included in their 1943 anthology Los mejores cuentos policiales. (The story disappears from subsequent editions of the collection, as if Borges wished to cover his tracks, though in his 1946 essay "La paradoja de Apollinaire" we see he still respects the avant-garde poet while disdaining the avant-garde.)
"Emma Zunz," like "La muerte y la brújula" is nominally a story of...