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Jorge Luis Borges’s Textual Labyrinths: Perspectives on the Metacognitive Mystery Tale
Abstract
This chapter presents close readings of Borges’s most famous meta-detective stories: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Death and the Compass,” and “Ibn Hakam al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth.” I argue that these stories share the ramifications and complexity of the labyrinth, a leitmotif that determines both their themes and structures. My point is that the texts’ essential ambiguity ensues from the paradoxical nature of the labyrinth itself, which works as a paragon of both order and disorder, design and arbitrariness: a very rational figure when observed from above, but an infernal structure in which the detectives inevitably get lost as soon as they cross the maze’s threshold.
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With "To a Woman Passing By" (1859), Charles Baudelaire created a modern myth of lasting depth and melancholy, a powerful miniature drama that intertwines old myths with present urban conditions. In this sonnet, love at first sight is also love at "last sight," in Walter Benjamin’s apt expression, an impossible love born out of a fugitive encounter. The urban setting deeply alters the traditional figure of the woman as muse. While the crowd - represented here by the street that imprisons the poet in its deafening roar - magically offers the woman passerby to the poet’s vision, it immediately reclaims her. The lyrical poet who experiences the city’s ephemeral gift of love links his writing of the poem to a process of loss (prefigured by the woman’s mourning attire), particularly the poignant loss of love. Portraying himself as an "extravagant" wanderer searching for love and his own identity, the peripatetic poet feels in seconds the intense shock and quasi-death inflicted by love at first/last sight and his own rebirth after the majestic, grieving woman has moved on. Recreating this trajectory of love and frustrated desire, the sonnet transforms the "fugitive beauty" into the addressee of the poem and the soul mate with whom the poet communicates beyond distance and death. As spectators of the poem’s miniature drama of melancholy intimacy, we, too, become passersby; as readers, we also reenact the poet’s quest to arrest the image and object of his mobile, ever-unfulfilled desire.
Borges's stories often valorize the figures of text and labyrinth, and, in "The Garden of Forking Paths," an identity is posited between them. This identity is the means to deconstructing the story and, at the same time, for refusing both structuralist and metaphysical readings of the work. The text of the story gradually subsumes the world it seeks to represent under and within an all-encompassing textuality without origin and without any clearly delimited meaning except absence, the destruction of meaning, death. The solution of the labyrinth is its dissolution, that is, the deconstruction of the text. This easily thematizable deconstruction is actually a far more radical and subtle deconstruction of the text as structure or "meaning." Intertextuality and fragmentation undo the work and underline what amounts to a series of transgressions. These transgressions, that is, the text itself, are attempts to fill the void of the signified with signifier. And these transgressions, read, understood, and thereby iterated by the reader, are the signs of the deferred desire central to the work, its fundamental and radical difference .
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis....
The , thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At...
In his forward to The Postmodern Condition, Fredric Jameson distinguishes Lyotard's theories from Habermas. Using Habarmas' idea of the legitimation crisis as a starting point, Jameson outlines two legitimizing myths: the liberation of humanity and the speculative unity of all knowledge. He explains the trend in philosophy to express skepticism for totalizing philosophical narratives as part of the linguistic turn in philosophy. In the introduction to the book, Lyotard establishes the differences between modern and postmodern thought. He defines modern as a science that uses a grand narrative to legitimate itself. Conversely, postmodern is a general distrust of such metanarratives.
DERROTA, MELANCOLÍA Y DESARME EN LA LITERATURA LATINOAMERICANA DE LAS ÚLTIMAS DÉCADAS
Detective fiction has played and continues to play a complex and curious role in relation to the broader field of literature. On the one hand, detective fiction, like other genre fictions, is seen as a popular and lesser subset of high or 'proper' literature. On the other, the literature of detection, with its complex double narrative in which an absent story, that of a crime, is gradually reconstructed in the second story (the investigation), its uses of suspense, and its power to give aesthetic shape to the most brute of matter, has been seen as paradigmatic of literary narrative itself. Tzvetan Todorov's 'The Typology of Detective Fiction', which remains one of the most significant contributions to the field, sought to uphold the distinction between 'genre fiction' and 'literature' (as a question of structure rather than of value). However, his identification of the two orders of story, inquest and crime, as equivalents to the Russian formalist distinction between sjuzet and fabula (often translated as 'discourse' and 'story' respectively), makes the detective story, as Peter Brooks writes, 'the narrative of narratives', its classical structure a laying-bare of the structure of all narrative in that it dramatises the role of sjuzet and fabula and the nature of their relation. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Borges was not a philosopher, and never considered himself to be one. His father was particularly interested in metaphysics and introduced the young Borges to the basic tenets of idealism, as well as to Zeno the Eleatic’s paradoxes (see p. 13 below). As a youth in Switzerland Borges learned German and, after finding Kant intractable, read for the first time the philosopher whom he would come to regard above all others, Schopenhauer. He subsequently read, or read about, many major thinkers, claiming in later life that there was a good deal in their writings that he did not understand and describing himself, in “A New Refutation of Time,” as “an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics” (SNF 317). Largely self-taught, he acquired a broad knowledge of philosophy from general guides, such as Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy, Mauthner’s Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Dictionary of Philosophy), and Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, from reading works of the philosophers themselves, and from discussions with his father’s friend Macedonio Fernández. Nevertheless, he returned time and again to the same thinkers – Heraclitus, Zeno, Plato, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – and to the same, predominantly metaphysical, problems: substance (matter or reality), time, identity, the limits of human understanding, language, infinity, eternity, death, causality, determinism and chance, and the question of design in the universe, as well as to mathematical and theological questions (he was particularly interested in Buddhism and in Swedenborg’s mysticism). He published a number of essays on philosophical issues, the longest and best known being “A New Refutation of Time,” and he planned a book on Spinoza which he never wrote.
In his essay “The Thousand and One Nights,” Borges addresses his perplexity about the East with a quotation from Juvenal: all that seems mysterious and remote is located precisely “ultra auroram et Gangem” – “beyond the dawn and the Ganges” – that is to say, in the East. Although the East is inscrutable, the Argentine maestro, like Kipling, finds it also irresistible: “Once you have heard the call of the East, you will never hear anything else” (SNF 46). Borges mastered with uncanny ease the literature of both the West and the East, and set them, like shifting mirrors, into an unexpected dialogue. The Islamic literary canon is one of the most important in Borges’s revision – and rewriting – of Western belles lettres, even though he did everything in his power to conceal his grasp of Islamic culture. In this chapter, however, I propose to decode some of Borges’s fundamental Islamic enigmas. How much did Borges really know about Arabic literature? More than he openly admitted, and certainly much more than his critics have so far presumed. Borges read deeply in Islamic literature, theology, and mysticism, so deeply that we are still in the process of understanding the real implications of his artistic experiment. His passion for this forbidding Eastern world was such that he even ventured to learn the rudiments of the Arabic language. But even had Borges been innocent of Arabic, he must have had at least some notion of its grammar and vocabulary, especially the complexities of that language’s triliteral root system. Throughout his life, he would quote the old quip which says that “every word in Arabic means itself, its opposite, and a kind of camel” and he used (ironically?) the concept of triliteral roots and the words that derive from them – individual verbs and nouns, verb conjugations, and forms of nouns – in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” where the system of derivations of the hrönir roughly parallels those of the Arabic noun.
In Chapter Eight and elsewhere Lisa Zunshine has made a powerful case that fiction is no mere epiphenomenon of natural selection but a critical instrument in the maintenance and improvement of a key survival skill: reading the minds of others. In How the Mind Works, Stephen Pinker developed a contrasting take on the subject: "Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them" (Pinker, 543). There are still other quite plausible accounts of the evolutionary utility of fiction, but where such theorizing runs into difficulties is when literature fails to perform what scientists say it is good for, notably in the alien terrain of some modernist and much postmodernist fiction. Tellingly, the response to such reader-resistant texts by Pinker, E. O. Wilson, Ellen Dissanayake, and others has been to write them off as various forms of perverse indulgence in effect, evolutionary misbehavior. In this they echo the outraged hosts whose disapproving response to works of the avant-garde has often been a key part of an intended effect.1 I believe humanists err in their response to such a critique when they argue that, strange as they are, such texts "capture in their own ways insights that Pinker and other cognitive scientists have been offering."2 Such a response implicitly bases the value of apparent misbehavior in the arts on its contribution to theorizing in other fields. It also sidesteps the tricky question of what such texts do for the evolutionary well-being of the common reader, which may well be nothing. But even if no evolutionary value can be found for the perversity of these texts, this does not necessarily mean that their perversity is of no value. In this chapter, I focus on a species of textual derangement that yields a kind of experiential knowledge rarely, if ever, available to us in the ordinary course of our lives and that is worth having. What it conveys is different from the "how true" effect of mimetic fiction "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed" (Pope 61) or the rich science that Wordsworth argued was what poetry delivered when it was at its best: "the primary laws of our nature . . . not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion" (Wordsworth 239-251). Readers have always known something like what Wordsworth claimed: that we lose ourselves in fiction, getting inside it, enjoying what Richard Gerrig has called "the phenomenology of being transported" (238). In narrative texts, especially, we feel and think with the characters in a process variously called projection, identification, empathetic understanding, or, currently, the exercise of our capacity to read minds. This is a rightly acclaimed distinction of fiction: it provides representations of human behavior that come alive in ways that the representations of analytical discourse do not. In this chapter, however, I focus on three closely related ways of not doing what fiction is so acclaimed for. My demonstration texts each provide examples of a deliberate failure to meet common syntactical or narrative expectations, for which the principal template is the garden path of a garden-path sentence (this will come clear below). Moreover, in their egregious failure, they replace an art of representation with an art of cognitive states that are inaccessible or understandably avoided in the ordinary course of life. As such, though they would seem to serve no apparent evolutionary purpose, indeed may even interfere with evolutionary success, they generate real knowledge of who we are. Wisdom may be a better term than knowledge, since what is often involved is knowing what it feels like not to know.
From the myths and legends that fashioned the identities of ancient city-states to the diversity of literary performance in contemporary cities around the world, literature and the city are inseparably entwined. The international team of scholars in this volume offers a comprehensive, accessible survey of the literary city, exploring the myriad cities that authors create and the genres in which cities appear. Early chapters consider the literary legacies of historical and symbolic cities from antiquity to the early modern period. Subsequent chapters consider the importance of literature to the rise of the urban public sphere; the affective experience of city life; the interplay of the urban landscape and memory; the form of the literary city and its responsiveness to social, cultural and technological change; dystopian, nocturnal, pastoral and sublime cities; cities shaped by colonialism and postcolonialism; and the cities of economic, sexual, cultural and linguistic outsiders.
From the myths and legends that fashioned the identities of ancient city-states to the diversity of literary performance in contemporary cities around the world, literature and the city are inseparably entwined. The international team of scholars in this volume offers a comprehensive, accessible survey of the literary city, exploring the myriad cities that authors create and the genres in which cities appear. Early chapters consider the literary legacies of historical and symbolic cities from antiquity to the early modern period. Subsequent chapters consider the importance of literature to the rise of the urban public sphere; the affective experience of city life; the interplay of the urban landscape and memory; the form of the literary city and its responsiveness to social, cultural and technological change; dystopian, nocturnal, pastoral and sublime cities; cities shaped by colonialism and postcolonialism; and the cities of economic, sexual, cultural and linguistic outsiders.
Traditional detective fiction celebrates the victory of order and reason over the senseless violence of crime. Yet in spite of its apparent valorization of rationality, the detective genre has been associated from its inception with three paradoxical motifs - the double, the labyrinth and the locked room. Rational thought relies on binary oppositions, such as chaos and order, appearance and reality or truth and falsehood. Paradoxes subvert such customary distinctions, logically proving as true what we experientially know to be false. The present book explores detective and crime-mystery fiction and film from the perspective of their entrenched metaphors of paradox. This new and intriguing angle yields fresh insights into a genre that has become one of the hallmarks of postmodernism. © 2011 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.
Introduction Deleuze's notions of difference and repetition are developed within a project that has both a negative and a positive component. The negative or “critical” aspect is the argument that philosophy, in its very conception, has laboured under a “transcendental illusion”, which systematically subordinates the concepts of difference and repetition to that of identity, mostly within what Deleuze calls the “regime of representation”. The illusion is “transcendental” (the term comes from Kant) in so far as it is not simply an historical accident that can be corrected with the right information, but forms a necessary and inevitable part of the operation of thought, and thus requires a perpetual work of critique. Part of Deleuze's project consists in diagnosing this illusion, and showing how it falsifies the “true” movement of thought. In this movement, difference and repetition, in and for themselves, would be appreciated as the ultimate elements and agents of a thought “of the future”: not a historical future, but the future as the essential object of a vital and liberated philosophy, implicit even in philosophies of the past. The positive component of Deleuze's project can already be glimpsed here, if only by default. © Editorial matter and selection, 2005, 2011 Charles J. Stivale.
Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine, George Butte and others have been building the case for reframing the action of novels as a busy, collective, reading and misreading of minds. Their work at once draws on and supports the idea that we have an evolved craving to read the minds of others and a corollary craving for the kind of narrative action that catalyzes this reading of minds. In this essay, I wish to supplement this research with a focus on intentionally created fictional minds that cannot be read, either by characters in the storyworld or readers in the actual world. Given our evolved proclivity for mindreading, their existence is a conundrum, and understandably, we tend to "naturalize" them by drawing on pre-existing literary forms (Jonathan Culler) or the larger range of our "real-world experience" (Monica Fludernik). I'll discuss in this essay three default ways in which unreadable minds are commonly naturalized or under-read: as an opaque type (e.g., the lunatic), as a catalyst in another character's drama of mindreading, and as a symbol. I focus on unreadable minds in works by Herman Melville, Kathryn Harrison, Alice Munro, and J. M. Coetzee-works that, I argue, cannot be fully appreciated unless the reader avoids naturalizing or under-reading and accepts that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder that is aroused by an unreadable mind. In an extension of this position, I suggest in my treatment of Coetzee an ethics of unreadability.
Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associated with postmodernism, from the ‘pioneers’, Beckett, Borges and Burroughs, to important post-war writers such as Pynchon, Carter, Atwood, Morrison, Gibson, Auster, DeLillo, and Ellis. Designed for students and clearly written, this Introduction explains the preoccupations, styles and techniques that unite postmodern authors. Their work is characterized by a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its status as fiction, and by the various ways in which it challenges readers to question common-sense and commonplace assumptions about literature.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was one of the great writers of the twentieth century and the most influential author in the Spanish language of modern times. He had a seminal influence on Latin American literature and a lasting impact on literary fiction in many other languages. However, Borges has been accessible in English only through a number of anthologies drawn mainly from his work of the 1940s and 1950s. The primary aim of this Companion is to provide a more comprehensive account of Borges's oeuvre and the evolution of his writing. It offers critical assessments by leading scholars of the poetry of his youth and the later poetry and fiction, as well as of the 'canonical' volumes of the middle years. Other chapters focus on key themes and interests, and on his influence in literary theory and translation studies.
I. Approaching Abjection2. Something to Be Scared Of3. From Filth to Defilement4. Semiotics of Biblical Abomination5... Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi6. C line: Neither Actor nor Martyr7. Suffering and Horror8. Those Females Who Can Wreck the Infinite9. "Ours to Jew or Die"10. In the Beginning and Without End...11. Powers of Horror
Introduction: Beginnings in Endings American Modernists in Modern London Modernism Deferred: Harlem Montage Inside Ethnicity: Suburban Outlooks Re-imagining London 'Hymn to the Great People's Republic of Brooklyn' Sarah Schulman and the Lower East Side In the Matrix: East West Encounters Postmetropolis and the Art of Fabrication Index