Time and Perennial Philosophy in Paulo Coelho’s Aleph

This essay examines Paulo Coelho's novel Aleph, which depicts time travel to the Spanish Inquisition through a magical point in the universe, and compares it to Jorge Luis Borges's earlier short story 'The Aleph.' The analysis draws on Greek and Judeo-Christian conceptions of time, as well as Gilles Deleuze's philosophical frameworks of Chronos and Aion and the three syntheses of time. The essay argues that Coelho's Aleph functions as a symbol of convergence and compassion between a Christian author and a young Muslim musician, suggesting the possibility of shared experience and reconciliation between followers of ostensibly irreconcilable religions.

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Abstract

ABSTRACT Paulo Coelho’s Aleph is a novel about ‘time’ and the human experience of time via Aleph, a magical point in the universe that renders possible time travel into the era of the Spanish Inquisition to witness the tragic process of condemning a group of young girls to death. The novel is also reminiscent of its precursor, ‘The Aleph,’ a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In this essay, I briefly examine Coelho’s novel in respect to Borges’s short story and the Greek and Judeo-Christian conceptions of time. More extensively, I probe the complexity of Coelho’s depiction of time, the two modes of Aleph, and the experience of time and reincarnation by drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s two diverse, albeit intersecting, approaches to time and its dimensions: the Chronos and Aion conceptions of time and the three syntheses of past, present, and future. As the novel delineates the contours of a shared experience of time by a Christian author and a young Muslim musician, I investigate how Aleph, in Coelho’s novel, functions as a perennial symbol of convergence and compassion among the followers of ostensibly irreconcilable religions.