Borges. Labyrinths. Article about Jorge Luis Borges by Irish author Paul R. Hyde.

Borges

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream." Jorge Luis Borges

"His fables are written from a height of intelligence less rare in philosophy and physics than in fiction. For all his modesty and reasonableness of tone, he proposes some sort of essential revision in literature itself." John Updike.

A master of the short story, Borges recreated the form into 'fictiones' and re-elaborated the perspectives of modern narrative. Among his many acknowledged influences – Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Chesterton – one stands out: Schopenhauer. Like the master of Danzig and Frankfurt, Borges holds the world to be a glorious and squalid fiction from which death is the only escape from the pernicious illusions of identity and time. Existence is no more than a labyrinth of illusions, of false hopes and false escapes. Borges' radical idealism and ironical scepticism have, perhaps surprisingly, found widespread enthusiastic response.

Borges' characters are scholars, heretics and thugs – those who understand that the given world is essentially false. Borges is like Beckett, in as much as they both perceive human experience and the world as a moral vacuum. Knife-fighters, gamblers and bandits inhabit his pages where they unwittingly yet obediently enact the appalling designs of an indiscriminate destiny. And equally his scholars, theologians and vain-pompous professors are pawns in the ineluctable chess game that ended before it began, that was always at the beginning and had ended long before the beginning of time.

And it is time and its enigmas and mysteries that bind together the Borges' oeuvre. It is our incomprehension and terror of time which unravels the possibility of meaning and renders human experience from time immemorial a grotesque caricature of a nightmarish eternity.

Today Borges inhabits European literature like one of his own immortals, like a blind god, ever elusive, omnipresent, he is the labyrinth of language. Of this latter-day Homer one asks – did he ever really exist? And are not those fabulations, those labyrinthine fictions, those self-negating trapeze acts – are they not denials of the very possibility of Borges?

In his memorable 1984 TV interview with Irish writer Frank Delaney, when asked what he thought about in old age and after so many years of blindness, Borges responded unhesitatingly: "Girls".

Further reading:

Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics and the New Physics by Floyd Merrell. Purdue University Press, 1991.
Borges, A Life by James Woodall
Borges' Narrative Strategy by Donald L. Shaw. Liverpool 1992.