(no subject)
Some Borges observations:
1. "The Garden of Forking Paths" is still my pick for best story I've ever read. The Dead is wonderful, but this story somehow encompasses it. Or is it that there is a slight difference of opinion, and I side with Borges? Instead of a fellow feeling born of our shared dying, the one here endorsed (all the more forcefully by the consequences of its negation) is based on our being alive. Death is a powerful flavor but life is the dish. And I think the story hints at what gives death this power - and it is given, not natural to death. Our "blood" shames us out of our true inheritance.
2. Relatedly, the following is the passage that crushes me each time. Equivalent to the last page of The Dead in some respects, but fittingly taking place in the exact middle.
Under English trees I contemplated that lost labyrinth, imagining it pristine and inviolate in a mountain fastness. I imagined it obliterated by paddies or under water; I pictured it endless, no longer consisting of octagonal pavilions and of paths that turn back on themselves but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms. I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of a meandering, ever-growing labyrinth that would encompass the past and future and would somehow take in the heavenly bodies. Absorbed in these imaginings, I forgot my predicament as a hunted man. For untold moments, I felt I was a detached observer of the world. The living, twilit fields, the moon, the remains of the evening were playing on me; as was the easy slope of the road, which removed any chance of tiring. The evening was intimate, infinite. The road descended and branched across now shadowy pastures. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music drifted in, blurred by leaves and distance, and then moved off on wafting breezes. I reflected that a man can be an enemy of other men, of other moments of other men, but not of a country - not of fireflies, words, gardens, waterways, sunsets.
3. The Garden of Forking Paths is a novel, a story, and a collection. The novel is in the story which is in the collection. Ends it, in fact. Near the end of the story we are told that the novel is secretly about time. The story is not so secretly about time, but even more is about what ends it and why. What is the collection about? Our self-defeating insistence on trying to supplant a life we do not sufficiently control for our comfort with some artifice we control too well for our mental health? I'm not sure these can be boiled down to "attempts to stop time" (though replacing natural with narrative time does recur as a theme), but the various mistakes made do seem branchings out from a single root wilfulness. Comprise a sort of garden of errors. Perhaps the collection's expansion, Fictions, is similarly self-referentially titled - these are fictional narratives about people trapped in their own fictional narratives?
4. I used to think of Garden as a revision of Before the Law, a piece he'd translated in 1938, which I guess it is in a few ways (c.f. the narrator's admission of cowardice) but for whatever reason it's feeling more Joyce-directed this time. Maybe because of its presentation of a way out of the prison sketched out in the previous stories, like The Dead does in Dubliners? (And both do this by reaching back to a Romantic touchstone.) But there's also an antidote to Stephen's "Omphalos" vision in the "labyrinth of labyrinths" passage. Accept that there's no way out of the present and that that is exactly what we need anyway and this maze of life really does become a garden, and not the artificially ordered kind, but Eden. (Joyce knew this, too - hence Bloom. Maybe Stephen Albert, among the many other things he is, is a Bloom-healed Dedalus. Though I'm fascinated by how Borges associates him with Goethe: though Ibsen meant little to Borges and Goethe meant little to Joyce, Faust begets Peer Gynt begets Ulysses. Feels like Borges caught that lineage. Seems telling, too, that the Irishman Madden, the narrator's equally murderous nemesis and double, similarly feels he has something to prove to the English the way the spy does with the Germans. Madden's contemporary Joyce wrote his own time-obsessed maze-novel (or two, take your pick - a novel with the Wake's cyclical format gets described by Albert at one point), after having famously made peace with the inferiority complex and related nationalistic guilt he depicts in Stephen and Gabriel, who are largely sympathetic critiques of his younger self. Joyce joined Goethe, Stephen Albert (French-named but Nordic-seeming) and the Chinese writer of the Garden novel in the circle of cosmopolitans, to Borges the best of people (c.f. The Congress, which revisits that paragraph above with another vision of the manmade fading into - after providing a path into - the world). Madden and Fang are names suggesting violence to an English reader, as Borges primarily was, and particularly rabid dogs (Madden is etymologically "son of a dog" too). Stephen and the novelist are their healed or not yet infected selves. Stephen Albert means "crown prince;" while Yu Tsun can mean a lot of things, depending on what's being transliterated, two of the possible Yu meanings are "gemstone" and ... "joy." (Tsui Pen may be "allowed drumbeats" (?) which could just refer to his being supplanted by a war-enabling descendant?). But, yeah: joy. I think perhaps the story was intended as a tribute to Joyce, the sort you might make to someone sacred to you, a personal hero. Was it written after his death? It was published the same year is all I know. Joyce wasn't shot in the back, though IIRC he did die "painlessly" because under anesthesia. But perhaps in some sense he was a casualty of WW2? Rushed surgery in a war-isolated country or something? Or maybe Borges felt he or his Wake were being forgotten because of world events. Joyce's disciple/twin Woolf's suicide the same year (Borges translated both authors) seems to have been partly due to a feeling of the irrelevance of her art in a war-degraded world.
5. I have an argument to sketch out about some of the many subtle interconnections in the Paths stories when it's less late.
1. "The Garden of Forking Paths" is still my pick for best story I've ever read. The Dead is wonderful, but this story somehow encompasses it. Or is it that there is a slight difference of opinion, and I side with Borges? Instead of a fellow feeling born of our shared dying, the one here endorsed (all the more forcefully by the consequences of its negation) is based on our being alive. Death is a powerful flavor but life is the dish. And I think the story hints at what gives death this power - and it is given, not natural to death. Our "blood" shames us out of our true inheritance.
2. Relatedly, the following is the passage that crushes me each time. Equivalent to the last page of The Dead in some respects, but fittingly taking place in the exact middle.
Under English trees I contemplated that lost labyrinth, imagining it pristine and inviolate in a mountain fastness. I imagined it obliterated by paddies or under water; I pictured it endless, no longer consisting of octagonal pavilions and of paths that turn back on themselves but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms. I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of a meandering, ever-growing labyrinth that would encompass the past and future and would somehow take in the heavenly bodies. Absorbed in these imaginings, I forgot my predicament as a hunted man. For untold moments, I felt I was a detached observer of the world. The living, twilit fields, the moon, the remains of the evening were playing on me; as was the easy slope of the road, which removed any chance of tiring. The evening was intimate, infinite. The road descended and branched across now shadowy pastures. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music drifted in, blurred by leaves and distance, and then moved off on wafting breezes. I reflected that a man can be an enemy of other men, of other moments of other men, but not of a country - not of fireflies, words, gardens, waterways, sunsets.
3. The Garden of Forking Paths is a novel, a story, and a collection. The novel is in the story which is in the collection. Ends it, in fact. Near the end of the story we are told that the novel is secretly about time. The story is not so secretly about time, but even more is about what ends it and why. What is the collection about? Our self-defeating insistence on trying to supplant a life we do not sufficiently control for our comfort with some artifice we control too well for our mental health? I'm not sure these can be boiled down to "attempts to stop time" (though replacing natural with narrative time does recur as a theme), but the various mistakes made do seem branchings out from a single root wilfulness. Comprise a sort of garden of errors. Perhaps the collection's expansion, Fictions, is similarly self-referentially titled - these are fictional narratives about people trapped in their own fictional narratives?
4. I used to think of Garden as a revision of Before the Law, a piece he'd translated in 1938, which I guess it is in a few ways (c.f. the narrator's admission of cowardice) but for whatever reason it's feeling more Joyce-directed this time. Maybe because of its presentation of a way out of the prison sketched out in the previous stories, like The Dead does in Dubliners? (And both do this by reaching back to a Romantic touchstone.) But there's also an antidote to Stephen's "Omphalos" vision in the "labyrinth of labyrinths" passage. Accept that there's no way out of the present and that that is exactly what we need anyway and this maze of life really does become a garden, and not the artificially ordered kind, but Eden. (Joyce knew this, too - hence Bloom. Maybe Stephen Albert, among the many other things he is, is a Bloom-healed Dedalus. Though I'm fascinated by how Borges associates him with Goethe: though Ibsen meant little to Borges and Goethe meant little to Joyce, Faust begets Peer Gynt begets Ulysses. Feels like Borges caught that lineage. Seems telling, too, that the Irishman Madden, the narrator's equally murderous nemesis and double, similarly feels he has something to prove to the English the way the spy does with the Germans. Madden's contemporary Joyce wrote his own time-obsessed maze-novel (or two, take your pick - a novel with the Wake's cyclical format gets described by Albert at one point), after having famously made peace with the inferiority complex and related nationalistic guilt he depicts in Stephen and Gabriel, who are largely sympathetic critiques of his younger self. Joyce joined Goethe, Stephen Albert (French-named but Nordic-seeming) and the Chinese writer of the Garden novel in the circle of cosmopolitans, to Borges the best of people (c.f. The Congress, which revisits that paragraph above with another vision of the manmade fading into - after providing a path into - the world). Madden and Fang are names suggesting violence to an English reader, as Borges primarily was, and particularly rabid dogs (Madden is etymologically "son of a dog" too). Stephen and the novelist are their healed or not yet infected selves. Stephen Albert means "crown prince;" while Yu Tsun can mean a lot of things, depending on what's being transliterated, two of the possible Yu meanings are "gemstone" and ... "joy." (Tsui Pen may be "allowed drumbeats" (?) which could just refer to his being supplanted by a war-enabling descendant?). But, yeah: joy. I think perhaps the story was intended as a tribute to Joyce, the sort you might make to someone sacred to you, a personal hero. Was it written after his death? It was published the same year is all I know. Joyce wasn't shot in the back, though IIRC he did die "painlessly" because under anesthesia. But perhaps in some sense he was a casualty of WW2? Rushed surgery in a war-isolated country or something? Or maybe Borges felt he or his Wake were being forgotten because of world events. Joyce's disciple/twin Woolf's suicide the same year (Borges translated both authors) seems to have been partly due to a feeling of the irrelevance of her art in a war-degraded world.
5. I have an argument to sketch out about some of the many subtle interconnections in the Paths stories when it's less late.