Week 4 - Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings - Nicholas Latimer - On the Merging of Literature and Labyrinth
Let me discuss a novel, but not just any novel. One whose narrator would “disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers -- very few readers -- to perceive an atrocious or banal reality…” (17). Labyrinths - as read by me - was a whirlwind of disorienting tales, told by a fantastical narrator who lived one thousand lives - and now recounts his adventures with a reflectively, philosophically, bitter taste. Unfortunately, I was not one of the ‘lucky few’ foreshadowed on page 17. At first, in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ I was reminded of the ‘Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy’ , whereby seemingly absurd phenomena are recounted as the mundane organization of lands far far away. It is explained: “ One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory” (23) or “These small, very h...