What I do when I should be studying...or not taking part in a Reality Television show
Wandering through the labryinth
Published on May 29, 2004 By notsohighlyevolved In
Borges wrote consistently of libraries. His writing itself is the labyrinth that he spoke of so fondly. Borges’ labyrinth is, of course, singular. He writes, via Chesterton, “…that the words are many, but The Word is one.” We can paraphrase and mutate, and via Borges, say that the libraries are many, but The Labyrinth is one.

Borges was speaking of the universe when he presented the labyrinth but never the universe as we know it. They are convolutions that exists, not between the covers of volumes, but those that exist in-between the volumes themselves. In the world of Borges, language seeks its kin, words have their own blood lines and hidden histories.

This property of language is similar to the writings Borges produced, Even though he used language in his constructions, they were nothing more than language propagating itself. If Borges used language, then language certainly used him. The words on his page seek one another out, they desire to move closer to one another, one always recognising its distant relative, or more intensely, a parent. Indeed, it is doubtful if Borges had a mind at all, perhaps, he was nothing more than a page that language flickered across, a nexus of historical and philosophical insight that could not possibly posses the fragile frame of a mere mortal.

His writing is sublime in its hidden complexities, in the way it can be misunderstood and still stand as being comprehensible. It gives credibility to the layers of meaning that Barthes alluded to in his own work. And this is the world of Borges, the world of allusion and illusion, of always being acutely aware that what you write and think and speak is never truly your own, that it is the past speaking through you, that all writers are mediums along with their pen and paper, that they are midwifes, always giving birth to a child that is not their own, never present at the conception of their creations.

Borges often tells us that his words are merely re-enactments of some distant original that has reverberated inside the cathedral of his own mind. If anything, Borges’ mind seems to resemble an echo chamber, a place that is haunted and revisited by past glories and hallucinations. Tragedies are damned to replay themselves for the eternity that spans a human lifetime in the words that will not die. Even though death might reach the author, language is never afflicted, it moves to quickly, and when death seems to be closing on it, it will change, becoming someone, or something else, so death will not recognise it. Language is a thing that travels under alias’, forever escaping the clutches of natural law.

Borges was also infatuated with the problems of translation and this comes as no surprise. His writing is a translation whether through intention or through the very nature of the thing that he was writing about. Borges translated the universe into a language that is understandable to those of us who have fallen. Like the angels that followed Lucifer in his insurgency that can no longer comprehend the presence of God, most of humanity can no longer see the majesty and the miracle of the life that surrounds us. Borges in his subtle way is never parochial and always universal. If there ever was a man that had stepped outside of the cave of shadows and not been blinded by the never before seen sun, it was him. He embodied the Bohdi Savta in his inability to indulge selfishly in his privileged sight but felt compelled to return to the rest of us and give us glimpses of that light through the black of his words.

It is perhaps this paradoxical phenomenon that led to his insight in the first place, for Jorge Borges, towards the end of his life, was blind. Like the character in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, he was also a librarian that could not see but could divine, the latter being the forgotten precursor, not the result, of sight. Borges became a man that inhabited language, rather than it being something he understood. It was his labyrinth, a thing to be navigated rather than possessed. This is what transforms his writing from a collection of signs denoting a world that is external to it, into something that must be mapped for its own merits and its own existence. Even though it appears, at times, that the words point to or herald other things, they are often pointing to another page, not to another place.

When he wrote A Defence of the Kabbalah he could have been writing a defence for his own work. The Kabbalistic methods of interpretation rested on the foundations of abstraction. It is not this world that is of any importance, but the world of the world. Most profound is their notion that God, himself, resides in the scriptures and not in a heavenly palace, not in a place of things but a place of ideas.

Corporeality cannot contain within its fragile boundaries the source of their own creation, that is the role of language. The god of the Jews, Christians and Muslims created the world and the universe with language. As the instrument of his creation it is only language that can embody God. In all of Borges’ writing it is the circumscribing of the divine, the act of entrapment that becomes apparent. Language becomes the noose that will eventually settle itself around Gods neck and bring him to account. The Greeks had accomplished this through their dramatists. The Greek gods were not inherently human to start with, they only became so when they were captured between the margins and within the word. God’s name is the word that is the universe, it utterance will unravel all things, or so it is said.

If all things refer to God than Borges refers to all writers, and at the furthest extreme, to all words, irrespective of the language they belong to. Borges stressed the implausibility of definitive texts and in the process, without him stating it explicitly, denies the existence of any definitive words. This is the immortality of language, especially written language.

Borges himself is instrumental in this perpetuation; he will not allow other writers, nor their words to die. He transmutes them into other languages, into his stories of things that are undone using the words and population of the past. Things that have happened are also the things that are yet to happen, in this respect prophesy is not a hard game to play.

All things are spherical in nature, no matter what their dimensions; their ends always become a beginning. That is the nature of language, that is what makes it inexhaustible, why the novels and plays and shorts keep on coming, and why cliché will never end and will never cease being commented on, because language and words cannot be owned or possessed or traded, and this is the heart of Borges’ knowledge; what he set down on paper was never truly his own, but it was never really anyone else’s either. He was, however, more adept at combinations, at drawing the serrated thread between words and language, between the mind of one to the mind of another. He sutured together thoughts that had previously been separated for millennia, The Thousand and One Nights, and the Pampas of Argentina in the later 19th century.

Borges appropriated the role that rightfully should be the aspiration of every writer. He rendered knowledge palpable and palatable. Focoult once wrote of the “useless erudition” that has plagued scholasticism throughout the ages, the same erudition that is directed as Borges, but as a complement rather than a detraction, erudition, for the great Argentinean, being a puzzle, and a puzzle is not a useless thing, it is a device used for the passing of time, and what else is our purpose here other than the passing of time.

Reading Borges is to partake in a great joy, to understand that there is nothing that is of greater importance than to understand and treat with great humour and gratitude that thing that makes us uniquely human, the one characteristic that can still salvage humanism, if it is at all salvageable – the human mind’s capacity to pass the time intelligently.

Archaeology exists as a game, both as a practice and a pre-emptive practical joke on the future. Borges is a great archaeologist, perhaps even greater than he is as a writer, as most archaeologists must explore that which has been conveniently left behind by those that are more creative and driven than they. Borges, on the other hand, trawls through the dead, not as they are as corpses or skeletons, but as they are as spirit. He studies, and reanimates that residue that is more elusive than any terracotta, or funeral rite, he brings to life their language, which is tantamount to bring them back in the fullness of themselves. Borges is a performer of miracles, resurrecting the minds of men, regardless of these men being famed, gloried, infamous, ingenuous, ingenious or anonymous, without the benefit of a cadaver to perform the rite over.


Comments
on May 29, 2004
Your piece recalls the Borges story: The Library of Babel. Mixed in with all the interest in language you will always find and interest in memory, the mechanics and its frailty. You can see that in Borges in the story: Funes, The Memories. Any study of language will lead you eventually to the study of Semiology, which Eco is pretty much King. Words are just symbols for concepts, and those concepts are totally subjective from person to person. No one person will react the same mentally to the word, say, Horse.

If you like Borges, look into Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In particular "One Hundred Years of Solitude". I started reading Marques when I ran out of Eco ( *Fingers crossed for a new one soon* ).

PS. Also, I think you can find a lot of irony concerning words in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" . Words in that case have the power to invent something that never was. Not unlike all the conspiracies in Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum".

on May 29, 2004
I have read One Hundred Years... and absolutely loved it. Know most of the semiotic and structural/post structural theorists and think that they have a long way to go (e.g Sussure, Derrida, Foucault, Strauss, Lacan, Barthes , etc, etc). Eco took it all the way and wrote The Name of the Rose. Literature being the only tool capable of dissecting literature and the world of significance.

I think that Borges and Marquez, in opposition to the semiologists and linguists, believed in the imaginative concreteness of language, its ability to open doors and navigate passages, to cause and effect, to exist in the world without its masters.

Both give the impression that their writing moves and breaths, even when the book is closed.

A great comment. The way they should be.

Thanks.

Marco
on May 29, 2004
It's funny but as i was reading this, i felt as if i had read it all before. Even the splended metaphores felt borrowed from the mind of some critic of old. Fittingly, this feeling fit in wonderfully with the topic at hand-the idea of no ownership of language (does this mean ideas as well?).

Being as I haven't read Borges or Barthes in over 10 years it would be hard for me to comment critically on much, other than to state that this article made me want to read Borges all over again, if only to discover the roots of notso's passion.

I seem to remember a very different reaction those early years. It was more of a defeatist attitude along the lines of "why do something if it already has been done". Another struggle i had was that of plagerism. If every word has been written before then won't i be copying someone even if i hadn't. I don't know, maybe i just wanted to get out of writing papers.

As for now, the idea of transmuting or "being the mid-wife" appeals to me greatly and most great leaps come from climbing the backs of others.

thanks for letting me share
on May 29, 2004
Thank you for sharing, castnorth (great username by the way).

Marco
on May 30, 2004

Borges stressed the implausibility of definitive texts and in the process, without him stating it explicitly, denies the existence of any definitive words. This is the immortality of language, especially written language.


marco, as you know, i have been suffering the angst of the crap i keep publising in lieu of my real "writing".

yet, after the flaming you and i got for being "pretentious" on another site (to remain nameless hehe) after we discussed ahem, "books". (a better word, please ?), i have been reluctant to make any such posts of my own.

i applaud you for sharing this well-crafted piece, and for dragging me out of myself-imposed stupidity by giving me the slap i most certainly needed.

love you big lots

mig XX
on May 30, 2004
Mig,

The "i" pronoun and and the word "stupidity" are two words i never, ever want to see in the same sentence when it is either written or uttered by you.

You are still the most "quietly intelligent" person i know, that intelligence never running with the bad boy of human consiousness - ego.

I wanted you to read this one so badly...you approve...i am happy

Marco XX