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May. 14th, 2009 04:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception"The Garden of Branching Paths" (the online Di Giovanni version is lovely) has the only perfect plot, but adds to that the perfect philosophy, and in a way where the two reveal themselves not just simultaneously but as one. The War brought Borges to his high point, as a thinker as well as artist, and this story contains his best thoughts. I'm not sure why this is, but I'd hazard it had something to do with his attitude toward gauchos and knife-fights, the bad or anyway merely good stories that, earlier and later, threatened to eclipse his great ones. Unlike Yeats, Borges always understood the ethical problems with the cult of personal courage and violence, but his fantasy life was shaped by his boyhood reading and environment and was what it was. Thinking about fascism, which he opposed publicly and heroically in a hostile intellectual environment, led to principled revulsion from violence: he felt the need to convince others why it was a problem, and to do this had to define what was not a problem, a coherent vision of the good - and why we fall out of it. Though the story is still a genre piece, working on our expectations of suspense, sudden murder, bravery, and clear embodiments of good and evil (often related to racist conceptions in his time and ours), Borges uses these elements to uncover the line between fascist and imaginative impulses.
Sounds like an undergrad paper introduction. And this isn't something I want to argue or that you'd need much help seeing if you don't. I'll just say what I love.
I love the physical descriptions and how they quietly but incessantly serve the ideas, fill the gaps between them with others.
I love the admission of the same disease of the mind on the Allies' part, in the figure of Madden - I don't think you can argue that Yu Tsun is falsely casting him in his own image. Tsun, crucially, is almost ready to get it. His not getting it is one of those match points we call a choice. Though I admit it might be a kind of poetic justice if, just as he eliminates the possibility of other choices, his own as well as Albert's, by deciding to fire, he also willfully closes off the possibility of Madden's acting out of principle rather than complex racial pride-cum-resentment like his own. But Tsun seems to know something about Madden's situation, through his spying, and the characters' national origins seem especially chosen to attack nationalism itself, to Borges even closer to the heart of fascism than racism is.
I love that Tsun says that something about Albert is immortal and unconquerable.
I love that Tsun's ancestor died at the hands of a stranger. Something keeps preventing this truth from being published and accepted, and that must have been a painful, constant knowledge during the world wars - those incredible human failures - especially for someone uninterested in patriotism or metaphysical evil.
I love that the infinite population of versions of himself and his interlocutor he imagines are all replaced by Madden. War does this, war's hierarchies of soldiers and peoples and all of its sudden black corners. And its way of talking people into making their own death a statement (from a short menu of provided statements).
I love the vision of happiness as he approaches the center in the countryside. A labyrinth going everywhere is not a labyrinth, except insofar as it contains a seeker and a sought. But supposing you want to seek everything, as briefly he does.
I love his failure to label his guilt correctly when he speaks of his remorse in family terms. And then at the end with no qualifications at all, something past his categories but heavy in his life.
I love the connection of family demands and fascism in general, and the Little, Big-prefiguring hints at what a family could be instead for you and you for it. The trick is to remember which is the it and which the you, I guess. For me this connects with the passage about how all and anything happens just to you just now, and his failure to properly come to terms with that: instead of seeing that it makes each human being a new time, he chooses to think it validates solipsism - or, much worse, the supplanting of all else by a single bad idea in the present, the heroic gesture that the opening lines of the story prove meant little. Because there is nothing else, I will impose my self-maximizing fantasy on the single, empty present. Why step down from infinity to some one effect, however sizable? Out of comparison, Borges makes clear: someone has half-convinced you theirs is larger, you grab what infinite you can and descend to compete. The 'weather delay' at the beginning conveys such beautiful scorn.
I of course love the final plot twist - has there ever been a better one? And this too is crucially meaningful - he chooses a sign over a life (to treat life as a sign rather than what it can be), and of course that choice costs him his own as well, since it is one that determines what a person is, himself as well as another. Others do what he did without ever killing or dying, but they lose (or merely compromise?) what makes us more than signs ourselves.
And I love that it's exactly never post-structuralist, never structuralist, not modernist in any meaningful sense, but Romantic to the core. We are not vortices, we are self-telling narratives that can learn to fascinate themselves. Not going everywhere like an infinite sphere, but some swath at a time, then another, of this everywhere before us: we are something evermore both being and about to be.
And I love the innocence of the mind and the labyrinth and of life, all of which he writes against or ambivalently on elsewhere. Compare with his (very strong) "Parable of the Palace", or almost any later story - except "The Congress" possibly (ludicrous, touching). The war made life look awful good, in some ways.
Sounds like an undergrad paper introduction. And this isn't something I want to argue or that you'd need much help seeing if you don't. I'll just say what I love.
I love the physical descriptions and how they quietly but incessantly serve the ideas, fill the gaps between them with others.
I love the admission of the same disease of the mind on the Allies' part, in the figure of Madden - I don't think you can argue that Yu Tsun is falsely casting him in his own image. Tsun, crucially, is almost ready to get it. His not getting it is one of those match points we call a choice. Though I admit it might be a kind of poetic justice if, just as he eliminates the possibility of other choices, his own as well as Albert's, by deciding to fire, he also willfully closes off the possibility of Madden's acting out of principle rather than complex racial pride-cum-resentment like his own. But Tsun seems to know something about Madden's situation, through his spying, and the characters' national origins seem especially chosen to attack nationalism itself, to Borges even closer to the heart of fascism than racism is.
I love that Tsun says that something about Albert is immortal and unconquerable.
I love that Tsun's ancestor died at the hands of a stranger. Something keeps preventing this truth from being published and accepted, and that must have been a painful, constant knowledge during the world wars - those incredible human failures - especially for someone uninterested in patriotism or metaphysical evil.
I love that the infinite population of versions of himself and his interlocutor he imagines are all replaced by Madden. War does this, war's hierarchies of soldiers and peoples and all of its sudden black corners. And its way of talking people into making their own death a statement (from a short menu of provided statements).
I love the vision of happiness as he approaches the center in the countryside. A labyrinth going everywhere is not a labyrinth, except insofar as it contains a seeker and a sought. But supposing you want to seek everything, as briefly he does.
I love his failure to label his guilt correctly when he speaks of his remorse in family terms. And then at the end with no qualifications at all, something past his categories but heavy in his life.
I love the connection of family demands and fascism in general, and the Little, Big-prefiguring hints at what a family could be instead for you and you for it. The trick is to remember which is the it and which the you, I guess. For me this connects with the passage about how all and anything happens just to you just now, and his failure to properly come to terms with that: instead of seeing that it makes each human being a new time, he chooses to think it validates solipsism - or, much worse, the supplanting of all else by a single bad idea in the present, the heroic gesture that the opening lines of the story prove meant little. Because there is nothing else, I will impose my self-maximizing fantasy on the single, empty present. Why step down from infinity to some one effect, however sizable? Out of comparison, Borges makes clear: someone has half-convinced you theirs is larger, you grab what infinite you can and descend to compete. The 'weather delay' at the beginning conveys such beautiful scorn.
I of course love the final plot twist - has there ever been a better one? And this too is crucially meaningful - he chooses a sign over a life (to treat life as a sign rather than what it can be), and of course that choice costs him his own as well, since it is one that determines what a person is, himself as well as another. Others do what he did without ever killing or dying, but they lose (or merely compromise?) what makes us more than signs ourselves.
And I love that it's exactly never post-structuralist, never structuralist, not modernist in any meaningful sense, but Romantic to the core. We are not vortices, we are self-telling narratives that can learn to fascinate themselves. Not going everywhere like an infinite sphere, but some swath at a time, then another, of this everywhere before us: we are something evermore both being and about to be.
And I love the innocence of the mind and the labyrinth and of life, all of which he writes against or ambivalently on elsewhere. Compare with his (very strong) "Parable of the Palace", or almost any later story - except "The Congress" possibly (ludicrous, touching). The war made life look awful good, in some ways.
