International Texts and Contexts

Week 5 – Short Fiction

Ideas about Borges for this week

• Borges provides us with an interesting example of the ways different art-forms relate to one another and cross pollinate, particularly...

• The relationship of Borges’ short fiction to the visual arts (Borges as a precursor to Conceptualism, fiction as idea, Borges as context) and later we’ll link this line of thought to the question-

• How can this week’s stories be thought of as “interrogations of structural paradoxes”? (the incompleteness of complete systems)

• And in the tuts- science as a context for Borges stories

Often Cited Borges Quotation

• In the prologue to ficciones Borges describes his procedure for writing in the following terms;

It is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance to compose huge books to explain in five

hundred pages an idea whose full oral exposition takes only a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that these books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.... I have preferred

to write notes on imaginary books.From the prologue to ficciones (cited in the Ulmer reading available on vUWS)

Conceptual Art: Borges and Ulmer• Ulmer states “The key to Borges' Conceptualism is his

creation of a hybrid form which synthesizes the criticism and practice of literature.” (p.846)

• Ulmer argues that many of Borges’ stories contain “the essence of Conceptual Art, the main point of which is the assertion that art has nothing to do with formal objects, but that ideas and concepts alone are art.” (p.846)

• Ulmer’s definition of conceptual art is a little extreme however we could say in conceptual art the idea is often as important than the form it takes, or that the form is only important insofar as it is a vehicle for the idea.

An example From Week 1

• Santiago Sierra’s bricking-up of the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Santiago Sierra

• We aren’t interested in the formal aspects of the work (what type of bricks he used, the patterns that the cement might have made on the ground, the exact type of rubbish left behind etc.)

• But rather we’re interested in the meaning of the idea of bricking up the pavilion and denying access to anyone who doesn’t have a Spanish passport

Another Example: Joseph Kosuth “One and three chairs”

Joseph Kosuth

• Formal and technical elements -design of the chair-typography of the dictionary definition-type of film and photographic print

• All less important than the ideas about language and perception that are raised by thinking about the differences between these three modes of referring to the chair

Conceptual Art and Borges• In the Sierra example the form (a brick wall,

plastic covering a sign, the gallery space) is less important than the idea (denying access, excluding people based on their nationality)

• Similarly for Borges the form (a long novel) is less important than the key idea that the novel might contain.

• Ideas are prioritized by condensing them into short fictions and doing away with descriptive details or extraneous plot elements that are not important to the idea.

Analyzing Borges

• Given that Borges has a strong focus on ideas those ideas are probably a useful way to focus our analysis

• I would suggest that formal analysis (that might look at elements like narrative POV, focalization, character, plot etc.) would only be useful if that analysis returned us immediately to a consideration of the ideas.

Yes Borges and ideas, I get it, but which ideas?

• Many possibilities, how many? Search for Borges on Project Muse or Jstor you’ll find articles on

- Borges and chaos theory- Borges and structuralism- Borges and philosophy- Borges and science- Borges and garden gnomes- and literally thousands more….

Do this search it might help you to empathize with the narrator of “The Library of Bable”

Ok lots of ideas but where to start?• With one. In his or her article (available on vUWS)

Selnes argues that in Ficciones (the orginal Spanish language book that contains all of the stories that I have selected for study) Borges is engaged with “an interrogation of structural paradoxes” (p.83)

• Structure can be thought of as an aid to understanding in the sense that it can help us to locate parts in relation to one another and, perhaps, some notion of a whole.

• Borges shows us various ways in which structure, when we push it to its limits, can actually hamper our ability to understand.

What limits of structure does Borges’ show us in his short fictions?

Consider his (very) short story On Exactitude in Science-

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained suchPerfection that the map of a single Province occupied theentirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety ofa Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longersatisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of theEmpire whose size was that of the Empire, and whichcoincided point for point with it. The following Generations,who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as theirForebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless,and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they deliveredit up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Desertsof the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there isno other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Map/structure

• The map as a way of structuring an understanding of where things are in relation to one another

• Past a certain threshold the more accurate the map the less useful it is to our understanding (a 1:1 map adds nothing to our understanding of the spatial relationship between things and places)

• Borges shows as the limits of the map as a structure for understanding.

From the late 60s Mason Williams’ Bus

Borges and the limits of structure• The hexagons are structured in the same way• There is the same number of

-shelves on each wall-books on each shelf -pages in each book-lines on each page and…-letters on each line

• The Library of Babel contains “all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols”

• But despite this clear and coherent structure any hope of finding sense is defeated by the scale of the library and its lack of order- “for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.”

• As is the case with the map the understanding that structure might provide is overwhelmed by the very scale of the structure

• [Can you imagine a way of ordering this library that would make it useable despite the problems of scale?]

Funes the memorious • We also encounter the limits of structure particularly with regards

to naming and classifying • This naming and classifying needs to be general enough to function

effectively• Understanding relies on generalizing• If we follow Funes’ system of classification from the general to the

specific [Animal-Dog-Breed-Name of Dog- Name for dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile)- name dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)] we can see that there is a level of specificity that is impossible for anyone other than Funes to understand

• The usefulness of the structures in language created by naming and classification start to break down once we reach a certain level of specificity

Limits of Structure: Classifying• In other stories Borges also reveals the limits of structure in relation

to classification• From The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

• The logic of our classificatory structures breaks down when the categories no longer make sense to us

Writing and the limits of structuring ideas

• In the LibraryI cannot combine some characters dhcmrlchtdj

which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)

Writing and the limits of structuring ideas

• In the Lottery of Babylon

At the level of narration, the structural effects of the lottery are equally disturbing. Although there are only a few explicit marks of enunciation in the text, the general condition of

writing among the Babylonians is exposed quite meticulously. Scribes, historians, and editors, the narrator asserts, conscientiously indulge in errors, dis-crepancies,

falsifications. Moreover, the history (even in the sense of the past) of the Company is relentlessly subjected to the lottery’s haphazard revisionism. A method to correct chance has been in- vented but its operations “no se divulgan sin alguna dosis de enga-ño” (460). In a retrospective comment the narrator includes his own exposition in this economy of deception: “yo mismo, en esta apresu-rada declaración, he falseado algún esplendor, alguna misteriosa monotonía” (460). This remark may seem an ominous one for the narrative situation of the story; but in a sense it only corroborates the predicament which defines the Babylonian’s discourse in the first place. No one could rightly claim to have dodged the all-pervasive influence of the lottery. Thus one cannot simply dismiss the possibil-ity that the narration which is to account for the nature of the lottery in Babylon is the result of an Infinite series of drawings. This means, in a quite accurate sense, that the figural span between story and discourse is suspended. There is no longer any significant distance between the narrated events and the act of narration. The two levels have become continuous, unidimensional—like a Möbius strip.

Writing and the limits of structuring ideas

• And for Funes the Memorious writing is not only redundant

He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone before twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased.

• But writing and language are far too general to be of much use in describing his experience

Borges’ Fictions

• Structures so large and comprehensive that they ceases to make sense.

• Structure instead of aiding understanding serves to undermine it