Exactly as the title foreshadows, I found myself quickly getting lost in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The first definition Google provides for labyrinth is “a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Fittingly, I found Borges’ narrative style to be at times complicated, meandering, or just misleading. I found myself needing to read sentences or passages more than once – usually several times over. And even when I felt that I was properly following the storyline, I’d come across a passage that would make me question my understanding of what came before. In this way, both frustratingly and amusingly, I felt like I was navigating a real labyrinth consuming Borges’ work. I’d like to think this was his exact intention.
Despite feeling occasionally uncertain, I really enjoyed the reading journey Labyrinths led me down. The stories were unusual and unexpected yet vivid and compelling. In each, I am positive something significant or interesting completely flew over my head. But, again, faithful to the title, I think the stories were written to provide unique paths for every reader and allow certain details to go unexamined upon your first pass. Typically in a maze, people will walk up and down the same corridors repeatedly in the process of way-finding, and in this same way, I expect multiple reads of Borges’ text to be necessary to reveal all the nuanced mysteries.
Before reading this text, I had known Borges to be associated with the genre of “magical realism,” but upon finishing, I was surprised that scientific-fiction (sci-fi) wasn’t a more affiliated style. The short stories were full of incredible invention, science, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Certain passages were so formal and academic – almost mathematical – that I sometimes felt a rigorous background in these topics was needed to properly appreciate what was being said.
Throughout, Borges remained faithful to the themes of time, plurality, and importantly, labyrinths. In many of his stories, Borges completely deconstructs my understanding of time and introduces extraordinary layers of possibility in each narrative. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the way Rick Riordan describes the Labyrinth in the fourth novel of the Percy Jackson series; a self-aware, self-expanding maze that bends time and has a fragile relationship to reality. Similarly, Labyrinths felt like an infinitely vast, infinitely layered maze, with supernatural intelligence. There is one quote in the very first short story that I think perfectly reflects the text’s enormity: “This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally” (8).
Question for discussion: Do you think Borges could have achieved the same maze-like reading journey in a single narrative arc rather than across multiple short stories/essays?
It is interesting that you found resonances of themes similar to those of Borges in other writers, or in other stories. It is true that in these stories, in addition to breaking down the boundaries between literary genres, there are different ways of telling stories that are even taken from texts that we would not call “literature” in principle. For many, this is part of what draws their attention to this author, that everything becomes material for fiction. It is also another way of understanding short stories, a particular architecture.
Hello! I reallly enjoyed your interpretations and opinions on this weeks post. To aswer your question. Yes, I think he could have achieved the same maze-like reading journey in a single narrative arc rather than across multiple short stories/essays. But it is also very on brand for him to do it in a way where you have to look, and connect various stories for the same message.
Montserrat Avendano.
I really enjoyed your logical and descriptive reflection blogpost! I too felt overwhelmed by the work at times, but as I got used to the narrative style I just let myself ‘play’ along with the vast amount of ideas being thrown at me from the book. To answer your question, I think Borges could have achieved the same maze-like reading journey even with a single narrative. However, it might have been even more confusing and overwhelming, as I think we all have a tendency to seek a linear plot.
– Daniel Choi
Hi! I really enjoyed reading your blog for this week and the reflections you wrote! To answer your question, I think an author as talented as Borges would have been able to achieve the same maze-like reading journey in a single narrative or a novel. But I think him not doing so is so unique and that is the beauty itself of Borges’ writing. To be able to achieve this maze-like narrative throughout different stories and being able to connect them through similar themes is far more complicated and interesting, don’t you think so?
– Rebeca Ponce
I don’t think Borges would have the same effect if he wrote longer stories. His writing often takes the form of experiments in thought or style with implications going far beyond what is actually written. Stories like The Library of Babel or Funes the Memorious don’t really need to be developed into full-length novels, as the concepts alone are enough to set one’s mind going. There’s a way in which leaving the stories open by only writing a couple pages lets those further implications feel even vaster than if he spent a full book dwelling on them. I also think he may just be too distant, too abstract of a writer to sustain the emotional investment needed for longform novels.
Hi Marisa,
I think you have captured the complexity and beauty of Borge’s work and writing style in such an elegant way! After reading your post, I felt like I gained a particular insight on how the book might be viewed, and how Borges intention may have been for the book to be like navigating a lengthy, unpredictable, and turbulent labryinth. To answer your question, I think part of the complexity is from the style of several short stories rather than one narrative–it’s definitely bound to have a different impact on the reader if it were done in a different style or progression–Borges style was definitely intentional here.