(no subject)

I read the eight stories in The Garden of Branching Paths again, the versions that Di Giovanni put up on his website in anger and which Borges translated with him. He's since taken them down because of intimidation by Kodama's lawyers, but last I checked you can get to them via Google Cache. Hadn't really paid attention to the volume's intra-allusions before:


1. Tlön: 'The moon rose over the river' would be 'Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö' or, literally, 'Upward behind the lasting-flow it moonrose'. (Xul Solar translates this more succinctly as 'Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned.')

&

Babel: It is of no purpose to point out that the best book in the many hexagons I administrate is entitled Combed Thunder, and another The Plaster Cramp, and a third Axaxaxas Mlö. These titles, although at first sight meaningless, must lend themselves to some coded or allegorical interpretation. Such an interpretation consists of words and so, by definition, is in the Library.

[& the example name Stephen Albert uses in Garden is Fang...]


2. Tlön [last lines of initial story, before 1947 Postscript--thus last of the Garden version I assume?]: Things are duplicated on Tlön; also, as people forget them, objects tend to fade and lose detail. A classic example is that of the doorstep that lasted as long as a certain beggar huddled there but was lost from sight upon his death. On occasion, a few birds or a horse have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre.

I waver about this one, but in "The Circular Ruins" the ruins of the title are presided over by a worn stone figure that resembles a horse or a tiger and seem to have a dream analogue that is an amphitheater the size of the universe crowded with all possible people, from which the dreamer--who later proves unreal or at any rate contingent on his being himself dreamed, like the unwitnessed objects in Tlön--is awakened by a bird's cry.


3. Tlön: Authors are usually invented by their critics. They choose two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the Arabian Nights, let us say - attribute them to the same writer, and then with probity construct the psychology of their remarkable men of letters.

&

Menard [last lines]: Through a new technique, using deliberate anachronisms and false attributions, Menard (perhaps without trying to) has enriched the static, fledgling art of reading. Infinite in its possibilities, this technique prompts us to reread the Odyssey as if it came after the Aeneid and Madame Henri Bachelier's book The Centaur's Garden as if it were written by Madame Henry Bachelier. The technique fills the mildest of books with adventure. To attribute The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Celine or to James Joyce - would this not be a satisfactory renewal of its subtle spiritual lessons?


4. [Most direct one!] Quain: From the third tale, 'Yesterday's Rose', I was ingenious enough to fashion 'The Circular Ruins', a story which appears in my book The Garden of Branching Paths. [See later post involving Statements for what this implies about "CR"...]

(no subject)

Continuation of previous:

5. Quain: Still more unconventional is Quain's 'retrogressive, branching novel' April March, whose third (and only) part appeared in 1936. (See story for full description!)

&

Tlön: The books are different too. Fictional works embrace a single plot, with all conceivable permutations.

& of course...

Garden: The garden of branching paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'to various futures (but not all)' conjured up an image of branching in time, not in space. A re-reading of the book confirmed this theory. In all works of fiction, each time the writer is confronted with choices, he opts for one and discards the rest. In the inextricable Ts'ui Pen, he opts - at one and the same time - for all the alternatives. By so doing, he creates several futures, several times over, and in turn these proliferate and branch off.


6. Tlön: Works of a philosophical nature invariably contain both a thesis and an antithesis, the strict pros and cons of a theory. A book that does not encompass its counter-book is considered incomplete.

&

Menard: To this third view (which I consider beyond dispute) I wonder if I dare add a fourth, which accords quite well with Piere Menard's all but divine modesty - his self-effacing or ironic habit of propagating ideas that were the exact reverse of those he himself held.

(no subject)

Not to mention his allusions to works as yet uncreated (spoiler alert):


A. Quain: Toward the end of 1939, he published Statements, perhaps the most original and certainly the least praised or known of his books. Quain had taken to arguing that readers were an extinct species. 'Every European', he declared, 'is either potentially or actually a writer.' He also held that of the various pleasures writing can provide, the greatest was inventiveness. Since few of these would-be writers had any capacity for invention, most would have to make do with mimicry. For these 'deficient writers', whose name was legion, Quain wrote the eight stories in Statements. Each foreshadows or promises a good plot, which the author then deliberately sabotages. One or two - not the best - hint at two plots. The reader, carried away by vanity, thinks he has invented them.

The imaginatively capacious, peerlessly undeficient Calvino was to mimic the book itself forty years later. I'm not sure which of the If on a winter's night a traveler semi-stories could be said to have two plots--several do end with a couple different suspected murderers, kidnappers, spies, sisters. The book itself has something of a hidden plot. Marana, the villain, is never seen onstage but keeps providing self-sabotaging stories in response to the heroine's stated tastes of the moment. To have heard them, he must be nearby.


B. The central conceit of Quain's 'Secret Mirror' anticipates Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.


C. Tlön's northern hemisphere's nouns anticipate Deleuze's rhizomes--just one example of that story's heavy, pervasive influence on theory. Ironically pervasive, given Borges' undermining of the ideas he's presenting, and especially the association of these games and fascism in the Postscript.


D. Another example of that, also from Tlön, though less certain; these lines remind me of the culminating moment in De Man's (to me) infinitely enraging misreading of Shelley's "Triumph of Life":

To explain or assess a fact is to link it to another one. In Tlön, this linkage is a later state of the fact, which cannot affect or illuminate its earlier state. Every mental state is irreducible and the mere fact of naming it - that is, of classifying it - implies a falsification.

The De Man passage: 'The Triumph of Life' warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.

Borges' preemptive satire of this view, in Tlön: The sight of a puff of smoke on the horizon and then of a burning field and then of a half-stubbed-out cigar that produced the blaze is deemed an example of the association of the ideas.

You can guess what ideas about De Man this leads me to associate. But never mind.

(no subject)

Forgot one--highly spoiling:

E. Quain's God of the Labyrinth: There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding converation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental.' The words lead us to believe that the solution is wrong. The anxious reader, going back over the relevant chapters, discovers a different solution, the true one. In so doing, the reader of this curious book turns out to be cleverer than the detective.

I'm convinced there's something like this going on in The Invention of Morel, a novel reflecting Borges as thoroughly as Frankenstein does Shelley--perhaps the narrator is Morel after amnesia, or Morel is not himself Morel but an earlier Morel-supplanting interloper whose feelings went the way Morel's and the narrator's did. Both possibilities open up the ironic one that the vindicating recording will become an increasingly incomprehensible palimpsest; time will have its revenge on the attempt at timelessness.

The echo chambers in the basement haunt the most. I'd bet anything they were Borges' idea.

(no subject)

Forgot another intrallusion: Quain's and Menard's identical conviction that all ideas belong to everyone, that literary genius must not be reserved for the few. Too tired to quote.

(no subject)

Though some of these are presumably just repetitions--like Tlön, Babylon and Ruins all apparently involving noplaces between Asia Minor and Iraq. Borges always preferred his noplaces there or, Kafka-style, China, though "The Immortal" is set in Northern Africa I think.

Paradise is of course the original Middle Eastern noplace. Huh, just occurred to me for the first time why the Library of Babel might be called that: language itself is both the doomed, hubristic attempt to overgo God and its punishment, at least in its present form as a phenomenon relying on variation. Scattered bits and scraps of meaning, enough to promise the lost, unified plenitude and drive us mad for it. No hint there about why we were punished, unlike in Genesis, but then if the whole world is "the communication of a lesser god to a demon" (Tlön, I think?), that's not for us to interpret.