fiction files redux discussion
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Jorge Luis Borges
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His writing is just like Borges. That is only him and etc. Extremelly simple, economic, perfect, measure use of words, carefull construction of sentece, and a cake in every coma. The guy is just the best man to define all literature I ever saw. He may define it wrongly, but he will do it best. The king of analogies.
I like him because his name starts with J just like mine. (Yes, it may be shocking but my real name is not Oro!)
Ficciones but I am unfamiliar wiht the english versions, so watever have Gardens of Forking Paths, Library of Babel, Pierre Menard and his name on it.
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you can download a pdf of "pierre menard, author of the quixote" here:
http://www.vahidnab.com/menard.pdf
if don't like that, you probably want to stay away. :)
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Umberto Eco says the twin pillars of 20th century lit are on the one hand Joyce, and on the other Borges. They seem a strange pair to me. If Joyce is diarrheic in the out flowing of his words, Borges is the epitome of precision and brevity. Borges in lieu of writing a novel will pretend that the novel exists and write a review of it.
Borges (who like Joyce became blind) took to memorizing his pieces and reworking them in his head before dictating them to his staff. They are less than short stories, they are miniatures. And they are less stories than philosophical essays. Philosophy with a twist. One is missing Borges entirely if one doesn’t get his sense of humor, “a cake in every comma” indeed, but maybe more “a pie in the face with every comma”.
His writing is also, definitely, fantastic. If you don’t like the Twilight Zone, there is no reason for you to come this way. His stories involve time travel, doubles, plays within plays, hallucinations. The best site to go to for more complete information on him is here: http://www.themodernword.com/borges//.
Find the essay by Carlos Fuentes on him at this site and start there.
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I think it is more a partnership that Borges will never acknowledge or Joyce. One takes the novel to its limit, writes maybe the definitive and impossible novel and the other digs the grave and threw all novels within because they are all possible and sings a requiem about it named Pierre Menard...The 3 blind mice, the problem was that Kafka was not blind, didnt got the joke and had eyes wide open...
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This is brilliant Oro. No longer the "twin pillars", but the "three mice". Kudos.
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i am not going to be eloquent i'm sure, but i wanted to tell you how i met and fell in love with borges. some of you may have heard variations of this story before, but i don't much care about that. :)
i went to visit a friend in halifax -- maybe twelve years ago now. i had never been to the east coast of canada before and i was excited to see what there was to see though i didn't end up seeing much. he was there doing his masters, and i had taken a job in real estate (this was just after we both completed our undergraduate degrees at the same university) and so, despite the fact that we had been trained the same way (same classes from the age of 9 to 19) we felt very strongly the differences in our situation.
and a gulf appeared between us: he felt that i was not using my brain in ways i ought, and i thought he was using his brain for academic self-aggrandizement -- he yearned for his name to be known in his field of study, and he felt disgust with me that i didn't feel the same need to leave a legacy behind me. i accused him of being heinrich schliemann, carving his initials in trees of the black forest, two feet high, so strong was his desire to leave a mark.
and so there we were: he forcing me to watch him build ugly furniture -- me suggesting we watch the third man, and then me watching him fall asleep during it. i crept up to the room where i was sleeping and scanned the book shelves for books of mine i knew he had. and then i saw the copy of borges' collected fictions on his shelf. i opened it up and began to read. i stayed up reading half the night. i finished the book the next day while my friend built his ugly furniture. and then i began reading it again. his writing seem to underscore the change in my friend: that his love of learning was not like borges, or my own, but was lost to this idea of legacy in his mind.
borges is a man who loved books -- that love is implicit in his writing. he makes me want to read the books he has imagined and reviewed. he makes me wish that i could have a chat with myself on a park bench. his love of stories is what gives him his power, and his beauty, i think.
i think the pierre menard story is a good place to start: i can echo the others -- if he's for you, you'll know very quickly. :)
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Discussion on The Garden of Forking Paths starts tomorrow.
It's quite the spy thriller.
http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/r...
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Jcamilo wrote: Hey I can still provide several evidences that I am a fictional identidy with something not related to either identidy.
As Borges, do not forget he is an atheist that mistrusted his atheism, so he claimed to be in doubt. But he certainly didnt believed in god or a creation power, just the chances of something happening all the time. In the end, like everything, it is a game of interpretation, so God is also one of his precursors. (hence, Shakespeare and Homer are gods. Better way to define creation than that, I have no idea. God as the verb was one of his favorite parts of the gospels)....
And that works with Kafka. Faith is full of certainess. Kafka is not. Kafka is not talking about religion, we are.”
Maureen wrote: hey oro: i think i am you, oro :)
Jcamilo wrote: see, Michael. Another prof. The Universe fixes the mind of men.
Michael wrote: Interesting either/or proposition here “Oro”. What exactly would be the difference between:
1. Creative power
2. The chance of something happening all the time.
The Borgesian sense that the divine is an imminent ground of possibility, that it is near, rejuvenative and surprising; how does that stray a lick from Catholic theology? Borges has his doubts, but I don’t think his fruit fell that far from the Catholic tree which bore him. That said, he claims Judeo-Hispanic roots, and often talks of the Cabalah. He has also on multiple occasion referred to God as a lesser God, a temperamental brat of a lesser God. I need to consult my notes, but Borges wrote often of the Heresiarchs and their intricately steeped heavens, containing level within level of divinities; the God of the Christians being way down on this hierarchy, a pawn to the higher powers.
But, we digress.
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Jcamilo wrote: Some say his hebraish roots are a form of reverence. Also, his studies of Cabalah are focused on text, he neved admited the hand behind the text. God is author, but not author of nature, universe, author of the aesthetic products because his faith was only on aesthetic experience.
Rememer, Borges was not really catholic, his father was agnostic and his father is his first hand influence. They are closer to protestant. He declared he felt himself close to budhism, where a Order was reverenced, not the creator of the order.
But the difference here is the absence of creator - adding a creator is great logic, an explanation - Borges used God as a symbol, like he used Asterion, a concept, not a character. Remember Michael, Religions are not about doubts, are about a given explanation. They are logical. Not the world of borges.
Chris wrote: I need to introduce you to some of my Episcopalian brethren. We live in doubt and question everything, albeit cheerfully.
Although I think there is only suited to discuss Borges in threads dedicated to other authors, Borges does not really question anything. He is not the scientific mind to once he see doubts, he must produce an explanation. He will produce several explanations, hoping all to be possible and that is enough.
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Now that we have rescued the Kafka thread from a discussion of Borges, I thought I'd post a quote from the Argentine master on imminence. Note Borges' use of lists as here,
"Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon."
- Borges, Essay: The Wall and the Books
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This was good. It's seven lectures that Borges gave in seven nights in Buenos Aires in 1977 (that's a lot of sevens). But it felt more like it was me an Borges sitting in a small room across from each other. He started talking to me about The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso and urged me to shed my fears and read the book. He said I would greatly be enriched. So I told him ok, I will. I was a still a bit intimidated by his presence and at that point would have stuck my hand in boiling water if he told me to. Then he started talking about nightmares and I started to loosen up a bit. This guy had some pretty crazy nightmares and it turns out that one of his friends and me shared a certain kind of nightmare... dreams that try to encompass infinity. I wanted to ask questions but he continued on by talking about the book Tales from a Thousand and One Nights and my mouth just hung open. He said he had the complete volumes but would never get to read all of them. Just knowing they were there gave him comfort. And then he went on to Buddhism and my world started spinning. He made me question too many of my foundations... I wanted to scream but he was relentless never giving me a chance to take a breath. This topic more than any he shared with me that night haunted me. Luckily he switched over to the topic of Poetry and I started to relax a little. And then it was on to the Kabbalah and I had to stifle a yawn. It was getting late. I was tired. And I couldn't get Madonna's vision out of my head. But when he told me he was going to wrap up this little talk by discussing Blindness, I perked up. I sat there looking at this old kindly man. I was probably just a greenish or bluish blob in his eyes but I'm sure he noticed that this blob didn't move. He spoke of blindness as being a gift. He said it taught him so much. He ended our time together with a line of Goethe: Alles Nahe werde fern (everything near becomes distant). 'Goethe', he said, 'was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever.'
An excellent book.
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Do not worry Patrick, the only original text from Borges with more than 40 pages was his biography. He had a strong aversion to writing anything close to a novel.
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That might be taking a belly flop into an empty swimming pool Paddy ol' man. Borges didn't write any novels I am aware of. Anyone? Anyone?
No novel. He translated a few, but that was "working". Like I said, the only text bigger than 40 pages he wrote was his biography. Not even the movie scripts he wrote were big.
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It appears to me a horror short story but yet it isn't. After reading you guys' postings, I am sure the same is true for all genres that Borge experimented with.
He also made an allusion to H.G. Wells and Samuel Johnson. The house itself is designed by an architect who study under John Knox and the narrator's uncle was known as a free thinker. I found it interesting that the designer of the house considered Catholic religion as an idol worship while as a Catholic I believe in that so called idol as that one true God. And the designer pre-humously (I made up that word)added which I felt was very significant in term of one facet of philosophy of leaving everything to interpretions. "Abomination comes in many shapes."
The reader is told to fear something in the form of Iberra, a local thug who is friendly to the narrator, and his report. He reported seeing something so frightening that it scared the horse he had been riding on into rearing up.
I am rather put off that Borges may not have heard of a writer named Edwin Abbott, because the concept of perceptive really fit in his short, clever but boring novel, Flatland.(Sorry but the book is a little dry just like Dante's tour of the Inferno.) For those of you who know Borges' vocarious reading habit, I wondered if any of you know for a fact if Borges happened to read it? I feel the concept of perceptive is shown more in Flatland, and very upfront but Borges's own concept of perceptive is shown in a very very subtle way. To be poetic about it, Edwin Abbott worked with geometric shapes like circle, square, triangler, while Borges worked with geometric lights and shadows. (I believe it was Brian who talked about great works with light and shadows in his favorite authors.)
It was the ending that shows strongely that it was not a horror story when the narrator turned to face the thing described as an animal, or god's, a play on H.P. Lovecraft's way of writing and being unable to describe the horror specifically. I am still mixed up about the word he used which is not in the current dictionary I have. "Amphisbaena." -I just checked it out on the internet...it is a creature born from Medusa's blood that dripped from the grogon's head. It is a creature with two heads, one at one end and the other at the tail or the "butt" end. (Now I know why men driven mad by the horror cackle and screech with laughter. It is darn funny to have a head out of the wrong end.)
The story is a brillant game on leaving the reader to interpret according to his or her belief, and it seems that from reading your previous postings on him, especially about the religion strifes, the writer is content to leave whatever your conscious/conscience dreams of open to interpretaton. I would decribe this story as a Chinese finger puzzle, meaning the events related in this story is helluva a lot closer and and more relative than you would think, no matter how far apart or unrelated they seemed and the only way to get out of this is to push these things closer together until something gives.
I am still wading a bit in his work but probably at the shallow end of the pool, while you stronger readers are already floating at the deep end of his pool. Will check in with his other works that sucked me in. Hope you guys don't mind these long posts. Sorry about the mixed verb tenses because he seems or seemed to be an immortal writer.
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Great post Paddy. This is why I read the Fiction Files. Just a great post man.
I tried to read Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions once but didn't get very far. It was reccomended by my algebra professor. I was excited by the idea of the story, but stopped reading it for some reason. (It took three attempts for me to earn that elementary algebra credit. Maybe that had something to do with it.)
I do not recall Borges mentioning this author, and checking quickly about it I would think Abbott works with Shakespeare have more chance to be in Borges's list. Anyways, I may check out, but it seems like Borges who loved to talk about Pascal circle would not miss a reference to a book with geometry concepts as main characters. Now, it can be also that Lovecraft and not Borges had contact with Abbott?Anyways, I think that story is not one of Borges best. In fact I always think of him slapping Lovecraft lightly and saying "Now, son..."
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The short, numbered, paragraphs that Witt. presents to us are, like Borges’ stories, miniatures. These aphorisms, particularly in the scatterbrained Philosophical Investigations, are independent pieces in their own right; standing on their own as worlds, or hypothetical “games”.
In his decidedly more formal Tractatus Herr W. interests me in sets of language/rules which are provably isomorphic projections of a same language. This by way of definition, a rule of language which provides one-to-one mappings between elements in sets, being akin to projective geometry (the common axiomatic base for all geometries BTW): picture that which is common between, say, the shadow of a triangle cast by a campfire on to the man holding it, and the partial shadow projected of it on a distant tree, and the further distorted shadow cast against a cliff face towards the horizon.
In the decidedly less formal Philosophical Investigations, a humorous text in many ways (if one’s sense of humor tends in that direction!), our dear Herr W’s permutations of like language-games passes the Borgesean border, it would seem to this reader, well into the wild. He asks if a phrase, e.g. “the white whale”, and all translations of that phrase, e.g. the “la baleine blanche”, are isomorphic, is it not also the case that there is a possible language where “the white whale” actually means “la baleine blanche” to one’s mind, or possibly “la baleine noir”, sans translation ; and would it not also be the case that there is a possible language-game where the phrase “the white whale” actually means “Ulysses” or “Gatsby”, or simply gibberish (to one, and not to another). I sense Borges smiling at this.
[Ben; does you head hurt yet? Read on.:]
Like Borges, also, Witt. experiments with cryptographic language-games where all words are mapped to their English definitions, save one, or where each letter is mapped to another so that in one context a certain text is gibberish, and in another context the text is in fact Moby Dick; or further:
“#163 But suppose that when he did this he always wrote b for A, c for B, d for C, and so on, and a for Z? – Surely we should call this too a derivation by means of the table…It would still be a perfectly good case of derivation according to the table, even if it were represented by a schema of arrows without any simple regularity.
Suppose, however, that he does not stick to a single method of transcribing, but alters his method according to a simple rule; if he has once written n for A, then he writes o for the next A, p for the next, and so on. – But where is the dividing line between this procedure and a random one?”
But here is a favorite aphorism of mine, which hints at W’s humor, concerning the rules of language and the existence of private language [italics are W’s:]:
“#200 It is, of course, imaginable that two people belong to a tribe unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate mental accompaniments. And if we were to see it we should say they were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game – say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way that the their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of chess. Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game? What right would one have to say so?”
I am certain that if there is a Heaven, Borges and Witt. are there together somewhere, weaving stories, confounding us and broadening us, and most certainly laughing.
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Borges knew Wittengstein, I remember him quoting Witt guy somewhere. I am not surprise, despite his imagination, Borges was not a man from XIX century.
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well, that is the kind of reader Borges demands, one, as him, able to produce analogies. Borges criticism is remarkable not because of the study of history or lingustics, but for his capacities to produce analogies between different texts from all kind of literature. He would join Keats and Plato, Pliny with Kafka, etc. Basically, he had keys to unlock several gates. So, his writing reflects this, just like Joyce, every word and sentence is a potential book. Reading Borges is always good to write, one single line can bring up a new story and carry on the whole tradition, meaning history (and for him history and story are the samething)...
Show, not tell, it is Wittgenstein and Borges...
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I would say, to read Borges like Borges allow you to read. But his texts are rather simple (lingustic wise) and a simple, plain reading is allowed as well. But I guess, is pearls to the pigs...
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Yes. This is one of the few consistencies between early and late Wittgenstein; it is language in USE where meaning lies; it shows not tells.
(PI # 203) "Language is a labyrith. You approach from one side and you know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."
In the end, Witt was a perfect short story theorist, after all Show not tell is Chekhov, Poe, Borges...I suppose Borges and Wittgenstein share a lot of reading, it is only natural that they arrive in the XX without any faith on language. Perhaps that is even what explains why Wittgenstein had to find "faith" latter on his life, Unlike Borges, who had the confort of aesthetical faith.
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Yes. This is one of the few consistencies between early and late Wittgenstein; it is language in USE where meaning lies; it sho..."
The early Witt (Tractatus) severely limits what makes linguistic sense; ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, the foundations of mathematics, etc. are all out of bounds, literally “non-sense”. And (TLP 7.0) “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Language, however, “shows” such formal patterns, much as the Tractatus’ form is very evident. Philosophy is not “propositions”, but an “activity”.
The later Witt, the disjointed scatterer of aphorisms, is even more brutal, eschewing even natural language as nonsense. What makes sense in language is temporal, evolutionary, contextual. It is only in the “activity” of language-games in which meaning is evidenced, not in what they reference or in their grammar. Language “reflects” meaning, and more Idealistic even than his early thought, what is reflected is more than a non-descript form it is a non-descript process. Very Hericlitean thinker (we like them) as in PI, Part2 (the unnumbered section):
“I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say ‘I know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking.’ (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)”
Here, BTW, is a famous list (in PI #23) of language-games, showing the contextual off-beat nature of meaning. Witt’s humor here reminds me very much of Borges’ more fanciful catalogs:
Giving orders, and obeying them…
Describing the appearance of an object…
Or giving its measurements…
Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)…
Reporting an event…
Speculating about an event…
Forming and testing a hypothesis…
Making up a story; and reading it…
Play-acting…
Singing catches…
Guessing riddles…
Making a joke; telling it…
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic…
Translating from one language to another…
Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying…
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food for thoughts""Have you ever noticed this--that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean--or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, 'Is anybody staying with you?' the lady doesn't answer 'Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and so on,' though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says 'There is nobody staying with us,' meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, 'Who is staying in the house?' then the lady will remember the butler, the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly."
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Cuentos Memorables Segun Jorge Luis Borges
by Jorge Luis Borges
In a 1935 magazine article, celebrated author Jorge Luis Borges explained why he chose Mary Sinclair's short story "Donde su fuego nunca se apaga" as the most memorable story hed ever read, while he mentioned 11 other of his personal favorites. Inspired by Borges statements in the article, this anthology gathers an array of magnificent short stories by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and O. Henry, among others.
!!!!!!!!!
and it's in spanish!!!!!!!!!!
i guess i'm just going to have get serious about spanish now. i've only been dabbling up til now.
i wish adrian was around. i've been thinking about him all day...
fiction files redux
Books mentioned in this topic
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (other topics)Seven Nights (other topics)
Ficciones (other topics)
What is his writing like?
Why do you like him?
If I were to read him, where should I start?
Thanks!