Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

as this: "Idea for a frightening story: it is discovered that the only
remedy for cancer is living human flesh. Consequences." I can well
imagine a piece of Borges "fiction" written on such a theme. Reading
ancient and modern philosophers, he stops at an idea or a hypothesis.
The spark flashes. "If this absurd postulate were developed to its
extreme logical consequences," he wonders, "what world would be
created"
For example, an author, Pierre Menard, undertakes to compose
Don Quixote -- not another Quixote, but the Quixote. His method To
know Spanish well, to rediscover the Catholic faith, to war against the
Moors, to forget the history of Europe -- in short, to be Miguel de
Cervantes. The coincidence then becomes so total that the twentiethcentury
author rewrites Cervantes' novel literally, word for word, and
without referring to the original. And here Borges has this astonishing
sentence: "The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally
identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer." This he
triumphantly demonstrates, for this subject, apparently absurd, in fact
expresses a real idea: the Quixote that we read is not that of Cervantes,
any more than our Madame Bovary is that of Flaubert. Each twentiethcentury
reader involuntarily rewrites in his own way the masterpieces
of past centuries. It was enough to make an extrapolation in order to
draw Borges's story out of it.
Often a paradox that ought to bowl us over does not strike us in
the abstract form given it by philosophers. Borges makes a concrete
reality out of it. The "Library of Babel" is the image of the universe,
infinite and always started over again. Most of the books in this library
are unintelligible, letters thrown together by chance or perversely
repeated, but sometimes, in this labyrinth of letters, a reasonable line
or sentence is found. Such are the laws of nature, tiny cases of
regularity in a chaotic world. The "Lottery in Babylon" is another
ingenious and penetrating staging of the role of chance in life. The
mysterious Company that distributes good and bad luck reminds us of
the "musical banks" in Samuel Butler's Erewhon.
Attracted by metaphysics, but accepting no system as true,
Borges makes out of all of them a game for the mind. He discovers
two tendencies in himself: "one to esteem religious and philosophical
ideas for their aesthetic value, and even for what is magical or
marvelous in their content. That is perhaps the indication of an
essential skepticism. The other is to suppose in advance that the
quantity of fables or metaphors of which man's imagination is capable
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