JORGE LUIS BORGES:
THE FORKING PATHS OF THE LABYRINTHS
© Farouk
Asvat
The forking paths of the labyrinths are
the pleasures of the text in Jorge Luis Borges: it is the fantastic conjunction
of encyclopedias and silhouettes, of dreams and disguises, of masques and mirrors.
Borges' subversive, wry literature creates
an imaginary and symbolic world outside time and space - a world of the
imagination like no other.
Reflecting the extraordinary scope of his
reading and the rigour of his craft, the technique of detective fiction and
fantastic literature combine in a quest for knowledge, to create a coherent
fictional world of the intelligence.
Adopting an indirect style that rejects
rationalist symbols, his essay-fictions of literary and metaphysical
speculation assert a self-confident cosmopolitanism which concentrates on form
and intellectual coherence, creating a literature that talks about literature,
offering an antidote to 'realism', questioning and subverting the monological
perception of the world.
The work of Borges is a constant
provocation. In his essays, short
stories and poems he is quietly polemical in undermining nationalism and
rationalism, the realist novel, philosophical rigour, the academy, regimes and ideologies
that purport to explain the world as a totality; questioning with mock
seriousness accepted definitions and cultural codes.
Borges has created a work like no
other. Perhaps the most striking
characteristic of his writings is their extreme intellectual reaction against
all the disorder and contingency of immediate reality, their radical insistence
on breaking with the given world and postulating another world. He is sceptical about the ultimate value of
mere ideas and mere literature. But he
has striven to turn this sheer scepticism into an ambiguity, to make of
disbelief an aesthetic system, in which what matters most is not ideas as such,
but their resonances and suggestions, the drama of their possibilities and
impossibilities, the immobile and lasting quintessence of ideas as they are
distilled at the dead centre of their warring contradictions.
Unlike the resolution of detective
stories, Borges' narrator-detectives set out to decipher the universe with
insufficient information, mendacious clues and without the possibility of
reaching a satisfactory solution. He
offers a relentless critique of pure reason, but also cultivates the view that
the search itself is rewarding since it will lead from book to book: each
forking path of the labyrinth a new and pleasurable text.
All his stories have the same
self-critical dimension: along with the 'vertical' superpositions of different
and mutually qualifying levels, they are also 'horizontal' progressions of
qualitative leaps, after the manner of fantasy tales or crime detection. Unexpected turns elude the predictable;
hidden realities are revealed through their diverse effects and
derivations. Borges uses mystery and
surprise in literature to achieve a sacred astonishment of the universe.
He explores the broadest themes within the
strict confines of a few pages, in the framework of the notebook - his
miniature forms intense realizations of unity of effect, of brevity, of the
exclusion of worldly interests.
Eclectic choices are given a new order and
a new meaning. Borges wilfully juxtaposes
the most varied readings, often ignoring the canonical texts in favour of his
own preferences, always asserting his own traditions and purified themes. Elevated terms are played off against more
humble and direct ones - images joining unlike terms are frequent, and
heterogeneous contacts are created by use of colons and semicolons in place of
the usual connectives to give static, elliptical, overlapping effects. Using piled up imperfects, and a arity of
adjectives, he deliberately works quotations into the texture of his text,
creating a radical 'intertextuality' which has had a profound influence on
subsequent generations.
There is also a constant clash in his work
between his Hispanic and British antecedents, the tension between civilization
and barbarism. The world of the library
offered the pleasure of reading in different languages, cultivating … ` and constructing
characters as in The Universal History of
Infamy, as an elaborate series of masks and disguises.
Using the four basic devices of fantastic
literature:
the work within the work,
the contamination of reality by dream,
the voyage in time,
and the double,
he deals with the
problematic nature of the world, of knowledge, of time, of the self. The reader is transported into a realm in
which fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, the whole and the part, the
highest and the lowest, are complementary aspects of the same continuous
being. The world is the book and the
book is the world, and both are labyrinthine, and enclose enigmas designed to
be understood and participated by all.
This all-comprising unity is achieved by the sharpest and most scandalous
confrontation of opposites.
No matter how mysterious they seem at
first glance, all Borges' works contain the keys of their own elucidation in
the form of clear parallelisms with his other writings and explicit allusions
to the definite literary and philosophical context within which he has chosen
to place himself.
Greater and more important than Borges' intellectual
ingenuity is his consummate skill as a narrator, his magic in obtaining the
most powerful effects with the strictest economy of means.
Borges' stories may seem mere formalist
games, mathematical experiments devoid of any sense of human responsibility and
unrelated to life, but his idealist insistence on knowledge and insight, which
means finding order, and becoming part of it, has a definite moral significance. It could be asked what such concerns of the
total man of letters have to do with our plight as ordinary, bedevilled human beings in our befuddled times. Borges' fictions, like the enormous fiction
of Don Quixote, grow out of the deep
confrontation of literature and life, which is not only the central problem of
all literature, but also that of all human experience: the problem of illusion
and reality.
Modernism in art and literature occurs at
a very specific socio-political conjuncture, and Borges became acquainted with
the modernist movements in Europe at a time when all the conditions applied to
Argentine too. But critics who see in
Borges a precursor of structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionalist
models convey only part of the story.
Borges' modernist ideas have been
extremely influential in the development of prose fiction in the twentieth century,
and extremely responsible for the boom of magical realism in Latin America -
influencing Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario
Vargas Llosa and Alejo Carpentier - : they are among the many indebted to
Borges, and we associate much of their brilliant short fictions with him. The techniques used by these writers are frequently
compared to those of Borges; so that Jorge Luis Borges has the same role as an
originator of fictional and critical prose, in the way Pablo Neruda has had for
poetry, and Pablo Picasso for the visual arts.
With Borges it is we who dream the
universe: we see in what it contains, the deliberately constructed interplay of
the mirrors and mazes of his thought - difficult but always acute and laden
with secrets. In all these stories we
find roads that fork, corridors that lead to nowhere except to other corridors,
and so on as far as the eye can see: an image of human thought, which endlessly
makes its way through conjunctions of causes and effects without ever
exhausting infinity, and marvels over human chance. His stories are parables, mysterious and
never explicit, the 'plots' remaining entirely intellectual.
In these narratives, the analytical and imaginative functions previously kept
separate in his essays and poems curiously fuse, producing a form expressive of
all the tension and complexity of Borges' mature thought. His fictions are always concerned with
processes of striving which lead to discovery and insight; at times achieved
gradually, and at other times suddenly, but always with disconcerting and even
devastating effect. They are tales of
the fantastic, of the hyperbolic, but they are never content with fantasy in
the simple sense of facile wish-fulfillment.
The insight they provide is ambivalent, dismal even: a painful sense of
the inevitable limits that block total aspirations.
Master of labyrinths and of mirrors,
Borges was a profound student of literary influences; and as a sceptic who
cared more for imaginative literature than for religion or philosophy, he
taught us how to read such speculations primarily for their aesthetic value.
In 1938, at 39, Borges, took to writing
Kabalistic and Gnostic essay-parables, perhaps under Kafka's influence, and
from there his characteristic art flowered - overtly absorbing and then
deliberately reflecting the entire canonical tradition - becoming the foremost
inaugurator of modern Latin American literature - his aesthetic universalism,
his sophisticated aggressiveness; and his political anarchism refreshing - even
to revolutionaries who desire to be innovative.
The stories in Labyrinths, for instance,
have a wonderful intelligence, a wealth of invention and a tight, almost
mathematical style. They are
unforgettable exercises in the art of astonishment. In Borges we find the very perfection of the
cosmopolitan spirit and one of the most extraordinary expressions of modern
man's anguish of time, space, and the infinite.
[] Pierre Menard, Author Of The "Quixote",
gives a sensation of tiredness and scepticism, of "coming
at the end of a very long literary period," as Borges himself said of the
story.
[] In
his early story Death and the Compass,
Borges remarks that to Gnostics, mirrors and fathers are alike abominable,
because they multiply the numbers of men - (perhaps, a reflection on the The Brothers Karamazov?). It is intensely literary: it knows and
declares its late arrival, and the inevitability that governs its relationship
with previous literature.
The story is an instance of what is most
valuable and most enigmatic about Borges.
It traces the conclusion of a blood feud between a detective and a
gangster chief (mortal enemies and antithetical doubles) in the visionary
Buenos Aires that is so frequently the context of Borges' characteristic
phantasmagoria. The intricate plot turns
upon the three images the gangster has used to ensnare the detective's mind:
mirrors, the compass, and the labyrinth in which the detective has been
caught. Confronting his death the
detective shares in the gangster's impersonal sadness, and coolly criticises the labyrinth as having redundant lines ,
while urging that in the next incarnation, he be killed again by his enemy with
a more elegantly designed labyrinth.
[] Narratives
like Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius might
be called pseudo-essays: mock scrutinies of authors, books and learned subjects
quite often of Borges' own invention - that in turning upon themselves make the
'plot' an intricate interplay of creation and critique.
Borges begins the story with the direct
statement, "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror
and an encyclopedia."
Tlön is the history of an unknown planet,
complete with its architecture and quarrels, the terror of its mythologies and
the uproar of its languages, its emperors and seas, its minerals and birds, its
algebra and fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies. Almost unconsciously we come to accept the
world of Tlön because it has been so subtly inserted into our own reality of
the imagination.
The impersonal and hereditary product of a
secret society of scholars and scientists, the invention of the new world of
Tlön is a Berkleyan and Kierkegaardian world where only inner life exists: on
Tlön everyone has his own truth, a new world where external objects are
whatever each person wants them to be.
The press leaks the story, and very soon
the world of Tlön obliterates our world.
An imaginary past takes the place of our own: a group of solitary
scientists have transformed the world -all this is mad, subtle food for endless
thought.
Tlön
is no figment of the imagination: the stimulus which prompted its formulation
is stated with clarity and irony in the story itself. Borges' metaphysical fictions, his finest
creations, all elaborate upon the varied idealist possibilities outlined in the
'story' on Tlön.
To demonstrate an impossible discovery, he
adopts the tone of the most scrupulous scholar, mixes imaginary writings with
real and erudite sources. Rather than
write the whole book, he analyses books which never existed.
Of the metaphysicians of Tlön, Borges
writes: "They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek
astonishment. They think metaphysics is
a branch of the literature of fantasy." - words that define Borges himself.
[] In
The Theologians two learned doctors
are rivals in refuting esoteric heresies; where the less gifted and therefore
more resentful Aurelian is obsessed with John, so that "Aurelian did not
write a word which secretly did not strive to surpass John." Aurelian instigates the burning of John at
the stake on a conviction of heresy, and then dies himself in an Irish forest
set ablaze by a lightning bolt - God, Aurelian and John being one single
person.
[] In
Three Versions of Judas, we live in a
phantasmagoria, a distorted mirror-image of eternity, which Borges conveys with
considerable gusto. "The lower
order is a mirror of the higher order; the earth's aspects correspond to those
of heaven; the blotches of the skin are a map of the incorrigible constellations."
In it a Danish theologian works out the
theory that Judas was the Incarnate God, somehow a reflection of Jesus (and
perhaps Borges himself?), thus adding to the complexities of evil and misfortune.
§
Borges is ruefully consistent: in the
labyrinth of his universe we are confronted by our images in the mirror, not
just of nature but also of our selves.
Borges is the literary metaphysician of
the age. A sceptical humanist, Borges interpreted Schopenhauer as insinuating
"that we are fragments of a God who, at the beginning of time, destroyed
himself in his desire for nonexistence."
A dead or vanished God, or an alien God, withdrawn from his false
creation, is the only trace of theism left in Borges.
In all of Borges' fiction a mirror and an encyclopaedia come together, because for Borges an encyclopaedia, existent or surmised, is both a labyrinth
and a compass.
The labyrinth is Borges' central image,
the convergence of all his obsessions and nightmares. His literary precursors, chiefly Kafka, are
drawn upon to furnish this emblem of chaos, for almost anything at all can be
transmuted into a labyrinth by Borges, above all ideas and libraries. In Borges the maze is an essentially playful
image, but its implications are as dark as in Kafka. If the entire cosmos is a labyrinth, then
Borges' favourite image is linked to death, and the myth of the
death drive.
The particular delight of Borges on
literature is its reversal of the older chronicles of influences, of the burden
of its own ancestry. He is a marvelous
writer sworn to obliterate reality as we have come to accept it, and convert
the universe, including mankind into a shadowy silhouette.
Jorge Luis Borges' burlesque paradiagm on the nature of reality ridicules the
inadequacy of ponderously inflated theoretical systems, so that Borges'
dreamtigers are alive in Borges' ingeniously conceived short fiction, in his
labyrinth of encyclopaedias and silhouettes, mirrors and masques, dreams and
disguises.
© farouk asvat
[] composed: August 1987 (Amsterdam) to
August 1989 (Berkeley).
[] Acknowledgements:
Jorge Luis Borges: The Forking Paths Of The
Labyrinths
was previously published in:
Weapons
of Words (kindle, 2016);
Weapons
of Words (amazon paperback, p67, 2016).
[§] Books by Farouk Asvat:
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Flames (poetry)
● The Time Of Our Lives (poetry)
● This Masquerade (short stories)
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● Weapons Of Words (comparative literature & literary criticism)
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