Borges

Here is some background information about Jorge Luis Borges, which will help enrich your understanding of The Garden of Forking Paths.

Borges

Jorge Luis Borges composed only small essays or short narratives.

Wealth of invention, tight mathematical style.
Argentinian by birth, nurtured on Universal literature, Borges had no spiritual homeland. Born in 1899 and settled in Beunos Aires in 1921, after his education in Switzerland and Spain. His parents were intellectual middle class. Influened by the post WWI social aspects of the convergence of impact of war, industrialism and the emerging modern European art, he became part of the Argentine “ultraismo” – a mix of modern expressionist form and a nostalgia for certain national values…

Creates outside time and space; imaginary or symbolic worlds

Kin to Kafka. Poe amd always to Valery by the abrupt projections of his paradox into what has been called “his private metaphsyics.” He had a radical insistence on breaking with the known world and postulating another.

Started as a poet but from 1930 – 1940, he underwent a huge change and turned to the short narrative genre. A lot of what had emotionally fueled his earlier work became ranked within a larger context of vast universal processes. Oppressed by physical disabilities and the turmoil of Europe, Borges sought to create a coherent fictional world of intelligence. Some of his stories, like Tlon, project a tentative utopial into the future beyond the grim year of 1941 when it was written.

Sources are wide. Has read everything and very obscure literature:

The Cabalists
The Alexandrine Greeks
Medieval Philosophers

Pascal wrote, “Nature is an infinite sphere whose whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges set out to hunt down this metaphor. Drawn from a 3rd century French theologian, Alain de Lilles “God is an intellogible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Such researches, carried out among the Chinese, the Arabs or the Egyptians, led him to the subject of his stories. Not a science ficton of probability, he admired the notion of possibility or impossibility. He said, “God must not engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings, the faith that art requires of us.”

Inspired by the English writer John William Dunne, author of curious books about time, in which he claims the past, present and future exist simultaneously, as proved in our dreams. In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as dreams. “God, our friends and Shakespeare will collaborate with us”. Nothing pleases Borges better than to play this way with mind, dreams, space and time. The more complicated the game becomes, the happier he is.

Looks for paradoxical intellectual possibilities. “ If this absurd postulate were developed to its extreme logical consequences, what would be created?’

The “Library of Babel” is the image of the universe, infinite and always starting 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.

Attracted by metaphysics but accepting no system as true, Borges makes out of all them a game for the mind. Of the fables that attract him, certain ones particularly fascinate him. The Endless Recurrance, or the circular repetition of all the history of the world; that of the dream within a dream; that of centuries that seem minutes, seconds that seem years; that of the halucinatory nature of the world. Borges once claimed that the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double. These are both his themes and his techniques of construction.

Borges felt that it was we who had cast a spell on ourselves, we who have dreamed the universe. We can see in what it consists, the deliberately constructed interplay of mirrors and mazes of this thought, difficult but always acute and laden with secrets. In all these stories we find roads that fork, corridors that lead nowhere, except to other corridors, and so on as far as the eye can see. For Borges, this is the image of human thought, which endlessly makes its way through concastenations of causes and effects without ever exhausting infinity. Why wander in these labyrinths? Because the present infinity, these “vertiginous symetries” have their tragic beauty. The form is more important than the content.

Borges thought and style is highly original. Of the metaphysicians in his story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, a history of an unknown planet, he writes “ they seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaohysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.” That pretty well describes the greatness of Borges.