Labyrinths (collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges)
Monday, April 27th, 2009 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianProbably well... many of you have read Jorge Luis Borges, or heard of him, so I'll dispense with any introduction. Borges is like Kafka, not only thematically, but in the sense that he's become adjectival. I could talk about how after reading this collection, I thought 'though I have never read Borges extensively, it's odd that without having read him I suspect he's a 'necessary' writer for me, in the way that Poe or Valery were 'necessary' to Pierre Menard, because I see echoes and homages to him in so many of the other works which I've read.'
The short stories might be generically classified as metaphysical-literary, but certainly non-realist. In no way do I dismiss mimetic realism or generic realism, but probably a conviction of the essential artificiality of all fiction somehow makes me find, oft, tale-like fiction to be perhaps more fundamental rather than something which imposes an order sneakily in. In other words, Borges himself was fond of genre fiction like the thriller or detective novel, and these are just as artificial as the fantasy or sci-fi novel. In genre fiction the artificiality of the plot is front and center.
Er, back to Borges. The introductions to this collection are quite good, and I recommend reading them. Bolstered bymorineko saying that she found the parts of my book blogs entries that had spoilers to be oft the most valuable parts, I shall randomly discuss the content of the stories.
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius: The story of the fabrication of an entire other world. When reading it, I thought of the idea which had often occurred to me while reading fantasy fiction, that true subcreation is mostly beyond that of a single person. To really create another world, would be at the very least to create an encyclopedia of it. Yet, how many of us would be qualified to create an encylopedia of the world in which we live? To be a linguist is a good start, but then one would also need to be a cartographer, an economist, a biologist, a sociologist...
"Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius
Time, is one of Borges's major themes, its reality or unreality.
"In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...
Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a signle plot, with all its imaginable permustations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete."
Borges seems to attempt such a work in the Garden of Forking Paths, in which an author has attempted to create an infinite work. ("In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses-simultaneously-all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.")
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote: Perhaps this was my favorite story of the collection. Menard is a novelist, an inhabitant of literary salons, a writer of Symbolist poetries and mongraphs on philosophy, who re-creates Don Quixote. He does not attempt to forget who he is, as a modern, and become Cervantes. "To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible."
The story is an illustration of how the era in which a work is composed affects our readings of it; the narrator claims that the two texts are 'verbally identical,' but Menard's is 'almost infinitely richer.' The narrator then proposes a new technique, of reading works as if they were chronologically within a different period or attributing works to highly dissimilar authors (as in Tlon etc)
Or perhaps an illustration of the irony which Borges notes in his Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote: "For both of them, for the dreamer and the dreamed one, the whole scheme of the work consisted in the opposition of two worlds: the unreal world of the books of chivalry, the ordinary everyday world of the seventeenth century. // They did not suspect that the years would finally smooth away that discord, they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto.// For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well."
The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero: in which history re-enacts art and prefigures it.
Death and the Compass: Once again Zeno's parodox, which seems to haunt Borges.
The Theologians: "It is more correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia(the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorroer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person." For some reason I am always fascinated by stories of heresy and theological dispute, even though not myself religious.
The House of Asterion: A twist ending, so read it yourself.
Randomly, the everpresent theme of monism (I think?) all beings being one.
Apropos of nothing, but it's a good thing I never answer 'tell me what to write' memes these days, because I would say things like 'a story that ends, 'and it was all a dream,'' or 'a story in which the reader genuinely cannot figure out whether there really was a ghost or not' or 'provoking a sense of existential dread.'
The short stories might be generically classified as metaphysical-literary, but certainly non-realist. In no way do I dismiss mimetic realism or generic realism, but probably a conviction of the essential artificiality of all fiction somehow makes me find, oft, tale-like fiction to be perhaps more fundamental rather than something which imposes an order sneakily in. In other words, Borges himself was fond of genre fiction like the thriller or detective novel, and these are just as artificial as the fantasy or sci-fi novel. In genre fiction the artificiality of the plot is front and center.
Er, back to Borges. The introductions to this collection are quite good, and I recommend reading them. Bolstered by
morineko saying that she found the parts of my book blogs entries that had spoilers to be oft the most valuable parts, I shall randomly discuss the content of the stories. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius: The story of the fabrication of an entire other world. When reading it, I thought of the idea which had often occurred to me while reading fantasy fiction, that true subcreation is mostly beyond that of a single person. To really create another world, would be at the very least to create an encyclopedia of it. Yet, how many of us would be qualified to create an encylopedia of the world in which we live? To be a linguist is a good start, but then one would also need to be a cartographer, an economist, a biologist, a sociologist...
"Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius
Time, is one of Borges's major themes, its reality or unreality.
"In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...
Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a signle plot, with all its imaginable permustations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete."
Borges seems to attempt such a work in the Garden of Forking Paths, in which an author has attempted to create an infinite work. ("In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses-simultaneously-all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.")
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote: Perhaps this was my favorite story of the collection. Menard is a novelist, an inhabitant of literary salons, a writer of Symbolist poetries and mongraphs on philosophy, who re-creates Don Quixote. He does not attempt to forget who he is, as a modern, and become Cervantes. "To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible."
The story is an illustration of how the era in which a work is composed affects our readings of it; the narrator claims that the two texts are 'verbally identical,' but Menard's is 'almost infinitely richer.' The narrator then proposes a new technique, of reading works as if they were chronologically within a different period or attributing works to highly dissimilar authors (as in Tlon etc)
Or perhaps an illustration of the irony which Borges notes in his Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote: "For both of them, for the dreamer and the dreamed one, the whole scheme of the work consisted in the opposition of two worlds: the unreal world of the books of chivalry, the ordinary everyday world of the seventeenth century. // They did not suspect that the years would finally smooth away that discord, they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto.// For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well."
The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero: in which history re-enacts art and prefigures it.
Death and the Compass: Once again Zeno's parodox, which seems to haunt Borges.
The Theologians: "It is more correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia(the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorroer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person." For some reason I am always fascinated by stories of heresy and theological dispute, even though not myself religious.
The House of Asterion: A twist ending, so read it yourself.
Randomly, the everpresent theme of monism (I think?) all beings being one.
Apropos of nothing, but it's a good thing I never answer 'tell me what to write' memes these days, because I would say things like 'a story that ends, 'and it was all a dream,'' or 'a story in which the reader genuinely cannot figure out whether there really was a ghost or not' or 'provoking a sense of existential dread.'
