What do You think about Labyrinths: Selected Stories And Other Writings (1997)?
Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most imaginative writers I have come across, could have been a mathematician, a physicist, a philosopher or a theologian. I can see his influence on Umberto Eco in the manipulation of text and the blending between fiction and reality. To read Borges’s Labyrinth is immerse myself in a magical world where the concept of infinity manifests in space and time, where the boundary between dream and reality fades, where the past and the future converge into an instant, where levels of texts superimpose on one another, where fiction imitates nonfiction and life is a drama on stage. To read Borges is to become children again, listening to stories of magic and wonder, of unfathomable worlds. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges creates a fictional world, where Berkeleyan idealism dominates its inhabitant’s thinking. “The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts.” Through the narrator Borges, we encounter a language without nouns, but with “personal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value.” The author Borges has created an alternative world, where the language and the worldviews differ from our world and from it we learn of our biases and blind spots. And we can begin to imagine new worlds, new possibilities. We can create our own languages, as Tolkien has in his fiction, and as software engineers has BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, and so forth. We see similar blending of fact and fiction in Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” we encounter an infinitely long book where at every juncture of the story, all possibilities are written and the branches grow exponentially. “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.” When I was younger, I have read stories where the reader can choose one of several actions—the decision tree—and turn to the appropriate page for that choice. The story continues from there until there is another choice. And the story would have several endings. After reading this story, I realize where the idea came from. Perhaps, Borges read about the many world interpretation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that before an observation, a system could be in various states—position, momentum, time, energy—according to a probability distribution and only when someone has observed the system—photons bouncing off the object—would it collapsed into a single state. In science fiction, such as Star Trek, we read about parallel universes but this may be the first story with such a concept. In “The Library of Babel,” Borges again plays around with the concept of infinity, but this time also with combinatorial and I can imagine Borges as a mathematician or computer scientist. A labyrinth of infinite number of rooms stores books that include all combinations of a 22-letter alphabet plus spaces and the comma and period. Since we know the number of characters in each book, we can calculate the number of possible books (not infinite). Of course, most of them are meaningless. Is this universe of repeated rooms each with five shelves and thirty-five books a mirror of our world? Interestingly, in Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the blind monk who oversees the library is named Jorge of Burgos.I have heard of the argument that Judas betrayed Jesus to force the latter to reveal his divinity and complete God’s work, but in “Three Versions of Judas,” the controversial theologian reinterprets the Biblical text and declares Judas the savior and God’s incarnation. “To save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.” Borges’s fascination with text, whether historical documents or his own creation, dominates much of his stories and Eco certainly inherits that fascination. In “The Circular Ruins” where a man is only another’s dream figment and “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” where a man’s execution for betrayal is part of a drama, Borges again mixes fact with fiction to create worlds as ephemeral as mist. I recommend Labyrinth to anyone who wants to dream of magical worlds, who wants to reflect on reality and fiction, who wants to analyze the boundary between text and the interpreter, and who wants to contemplate on the nature of infinity.
—Leonard
This is the first Borges book I ever read. Since then, of course, he's died and all of his short stories have been collected in English. Mike Miley, the person who spends more money on books than anyone I've ever known (and is very generous in sharing them), purchased that complete collection, bringing it up to the cottage in Michigan during his last visit. When I saw it amidst Michael's travel bags (a small one for clothes, a big one for books and papers) I immediately asked if I could have at it. Permission granted, I probably got through the whole thing--and it's long--in a couple of evenings and nights by the wood-burning stove. Thus, all of the Labyrinths stories have been read at least twice now.What I particularly like about Borges is his creative erudition. Not only is he good at mimicking the style, say, of a early sixteenth century Spanish bureaucrat, but he cleverly mingles the real with the fantastical in his often copious references, notes and asides. It makes one wonder who is to be credited for the technique which is also employed by the American authors James Branch Cabell and H.P. Lovecraft.
—Erik Graff
Borges miniature masterpieces reverberate with the vastness of his imagination, each short stories is a snapshot of both his endless erudition and vast imagination, as vast as the eternity which Jaromir is trapped in as he composes his masterpiece before the firing squad, as multifarious as the Judas who occupies the mind of Nile Runeberg and as mysterious as the enigmatic planet Tlon; just as Pierre Menard’s plagiarising of Don Quixote creates a richer version of the original as he suffuses his imagination with Cervantes’s, so Borges is able to suffuse the imagination with the phosphorescent beauty of his mind, iridising with the brightness of his words, all chosen with Flaubertian precision and accuracy; each story is a unique universe condensed in a few thousand words. Borges’s surreal and wonderful descriptions echo throughout his short stories, his prose is a poetic as that of the imaginary inhabitants of the imaginary planet Tlon; “There are objects of many terms; the sun and the water on a swimmer’s chest, the vague tremulous rose colour we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also my sleep.”Indeed Borges’s stories are dream-like. They capture the limitless imaginative capacities of a dream; the freedom of a dreamer’s imagination, the vastness of the human mind is as vast as the universe in which we exist, in which all it takes is a mind to create whole new worlds and a pen and paper to suffuse these worlds with life. One feels like the paralysed Ireneo Funes who in the darkness of his room is able to recreate the world with an astonishing amount of detail, as the velvet darkness which envelopes him vibrates ceaselessly; “He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world. Babylon, London and New York had overwhelmed with their ferocious splendour the imaginations of men; no one, in their populous towers or their urgent avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of reality as indefatigably as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo…Funes, lying his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every moulding in the sharply defined houses around him…to think is to forget differences, to generalize, to make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”Borges’s world can be dizzying, as the reader seeks the navigate the labyrinths if his imagination, some passageways are macabre, such as ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, some mysterious as ‘The Circular Ruins’, yet all are magical, Borges in many ways resembles the character who wishes to bring forth another person via his dreams, Borges wishes to bring forth entire worlds via his fantasies, infinitesimal worlds which are the product of the ecstasy of the creative process;“He perceived the sounds and forms of the universe with a certain colourlessness: his absent son was being nurtured within the diminutions of his soul. His life’s purpose was complete; the man persisted in a kind of ecstasy.”Borges’s list of influences is as infinite as the Library of Babel; Kafka, Chesterton, Flaubert, folk tales, the Arabian Nights, Schopenhauer, medieval texts and the detective novel, all of these things coalesce within the synapses of Borges’s brain and send an electrical jolt down the readers spine, as they explore the world of Borges, the world of Chinese assassins and pathetic criminals, of unknown poets and lachrymose cripples, a world in which the reverberation of sunshine on the bars of a prisoner’s room is suffused with endless meaning-or perhaps, no meaning at all;“By way of a spiral staircase he arrived at the oriel. The early evening moon shone through the diamonds of the window; they were red, yellow and green.”“They arrived at their miserable destination: an alley’s end, with the rose coloured walls which somehow seemed to reflect the extravagant sunset.” “The end of his meditations was sudden, though it was foretold in certain signs. First (after a long drought) a faraway cloud on a hill, light and rapid as a bird, then, towards the south, the sky which had the rose colour of the leopard’s mouth; then the smoke which corroded the metallic nights; finally, the panicky flight of animals…In a birdless dawn, the magician saw the concentric blaze close round the walls…with relief, with humiliation, with terror he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”
—Inderjit Sanghera
