Walking in the labyrinth, what is in the center of the maze (Part I)

Hu Yong/Wen Exploring the Hidden Places of the Human Experience

Reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is like discovering a new letter in the alphabet, or a new note in a musical scale.

Cyberpunk writer William Gibson described how he felt when he first read Borges's Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940), which revolves around an encyclopedic entry for a country that doesn't seem to exist. "If the concept of software could work for me," Gibson wrote in his preface to Borges's collection of short stories, Labyrinths (first published in 1962, reprinted in 2007), "I think I would feel as if I were installing something that exponentially increased the bandwidth that would later be called."

Borges's use of labyrinths, mirrors, chess games, and detective stories has created a complex intellectual landscape that has often been labeled "Borgesian" in later writings, which are self-referential, elusive, and metaphorical. He presents the most fantastic scenes with simple descriptions, luring us into the fork in the road of his seemingly infinite imagination.

In his fantasy novel The Circular Ruins (1940), Borges creates a wizard who, in seclusion in an ancient temple, dreams of a person as a "tiny whole" and "imposes him on reality". A typical Borgesian mystery emerges: is the narrator a dreamer, or is he himself dreamed?

In Borgesand I (1957), the opening part of the poem tries to develop a different identity for the narrator than Borges, but in the middle of the poem, the line between the two begins to blur, as the narrator begins to understand that "I gradually gave him everything I had, even though I knew that he had a penchant for distortion and glorification". The development of the poem moves away from the discrete narrative identity and towards the fusion of the narrator and Borges, with the last line striking as follows: "I don't know who of the two of us wrote this page." ”

What a brilliant irony. None of the characters in this poem, either the narrator or Borges, write this page because they are fictional characters who cannot act independently other than to create their pages. In other words, neither the narrator nor Borges in the poem is the real Borges, that is, the author of the poem. The living Borges no longer exists, all he left behind was ink on paper. Borges and I play a game with the reader, forcing the reader to question the identity of the poem's narrator. This game has a name called "meta-writing", which is about writing. One of the ways metawriting accomplishes this task is by blurring the line between so-called fact and fiction. Blurring the distinction between fiction and nonfiction by interspersing the story with events, characters, or facts outside the story is Borges's favorite strategy. He concludes his 1964 poem "Elegy" with the following words: "Oh, Borges's fate / Perhaps no stranger than your own." ”

Behind these meta-writing games, there is something simpler and more profound, that calls into question not only the reality of the life we are living, but also the reality of the life we have not been able to achieve, the version that we should have been, or are in the moment, and that perhaps no one but ourselves will know about it.

In Borges, the postmodernists found the precursor of their ideas. (This is ironic, of course, because Borges thinks that all writers have invented their own pioneers.) Borges has an original postmodern attitude to books and texts. As he noted in 1941, "It is thankless delirium to write a voluminous book...... It would be better to pretend to be some book that already exists, and make an abbreviation and commentary. ...... I think the most reasonable, incompetent, and lazy thing to do is to write a commentary on a hypothetical book" (Preface to The Garden of Diverging Paths). Borges's typical work provides numerous sources and references, some of which are true, but many of which are not, all in an attempt to blur the line between fiction/non-fiction, even if only subconsciously.

In the decades since his death in 1986, Borges's global standing has grown. Today, many consider Borges to be one of the most important writers of the 20th century. In creating the most original works of his time, Borges tells us that nothing is new, that to create is to recreate, and that we are all a mass of contradictory thoughts, interconnected through time and space. Humans are not only people who make fiction, but they are fictional themselves. Everything we think or perceive is fictional, and every corner of knowledge is fictional.

Gibson said that Borges's novels are like software, but in fact we can say that the World Wide Web, in which all time and space coexist at the same time, seems to have been invented by Borges. Take, for example, his famous story The Aleph (1945), where the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet becomes a point of time and space that contains all the time and everything in the universe. As Borges writes in the story, "I saw a small flickering ball a little to the right at the bottom of the stairs, so bright that one could not look at it. At first I thought it was spinning, but then I realized that the dazzling spectacle contained in the ball created the illusion of spinning. Aleph is about two or three centimeters in diameter, but the universe is contained in it, and the volume is not proportionally reduced" (translated by Wang Yongnian).

This dazzling ball can be placed in the palm of your hand, but through it you can see the whole universe. Borges drew inspiration from legendary objects that are described as having the ability to bring all the others together on a single point. So Aleph is like the World Wide Web of the future: a single point of access to everything that is happening around the world, and a myriad of perspectives across all areas of interest.

Or, in one of Borges's most famous stories, The Library of Babel (1941), he imagined an infinite library consisting of infinite hexagonal corridors connected by shafts above and below to form a sphere whose circumference was far beyond reach. No two books are exactly the same in this vast library. "When people hear that the library has a full collection of books, the first thing they get is a strange sense of happiness. People feel that they are the masters of a treasure trove of secrets that are intact and intact. Any personal or world question can find a convincing answer in a hexagon. The universe is reasonable, and the universe suddenly has an endless hope. (Translated by Wang Yongnian)

In the same way, we seem to see here the concept and promise of the World Wide Web: an interconnected database of human minds, containing all possible permutations and combinations, a repository of possible answers to all questions. However, this web is also like the Library of Babel on the other hand, and although it contains everything that has been or may have been written, its meaning is very elusive.

Although Borges rarely speaks in any direct way about technology and the future it brings, his work has a foundational place in contemporary discussions about the future of archives, memory, and consciousness, about the mechanization and digital substitution of humans, and about the pervasiveness of communication systems and their reshaping of literary concepts. It is no wonder that the compound word "Cy-Borges" was coined, calling Borges a precursor to posthumanism by saying that the shadow of "posthuman" is everywhere in Borges's work (Cy-Borges: MemoriesofthePosthumanintheWorkofJorgeLuis Borges, PennStateUniversity Press, 2011)

Whether in a false encyclopedia, a non-existent world begins to invade the real world, or after years of research and prayer, a person dreams of the existence of another person and then discovers that he himself is also a dream, or an Argentine boy with a strong photographic memory who can spend his entire life in his past until it no longer exists in the present – all of this is a paradox like Aleph and the Babel Library, and these paradoxes are almost always dependent on the finite and the infinite, the time and the eternal, Continuity and discontinuity, the unsustainable collaboration between one and many. Borges's novels are extreme "hyperfiction", that is, as purely "radical mental realities", they imply the deepest contradictions. Wise readers prefer these stories because they recognize that they are rooted in philosophy, logic, and theology, and in doing so, appreciate the author's erudite and witty skeptical spirit.

I call Borges's work "novels that can live in them", that is, novels that seem so realistic when it comes to depicting fictional places, people, and worlds, as well as the legends and histories about those characters and worlds. Read them carefully and we will understand why humans love stories. Borges's stories can be grouped under the category of "speculative fiction," which today is more of an umbrella term that encompasses genres such as horror, fantasy and science fiction. Borges's stories depict radical fantasy in depth, but they always explore the hidden parts of the human experience in some way. As such, his books are more than just books – they are books about books and stories, exploring how stories affect us, why legends and history appeal to us so much, and what keeps us hooked on gripping narratives.

Ultimately, what Borges is trying to convey is how human beings conceive and understand meaning, and what it reveals to us or who we aspire to be. Borges reminds us that it is innate human nature to seek knowledge, but if we don't have the means to understand it, if we don't have an education, we can be lost.

Why is the book of a book unsettling?

One dream becomes another, endlessly,

Useless interweaving,

Woven into a useless labyrinth.

There are books in the book. The queen did not know,

She told the king

It's a long-forgotten story between the two.

The magic that had gone before had smitten them,

I don't even know who I am. They are still dreaming.

……

No one can finish watching "One Thousand and One Nights".

It's time, never sleeping.

The day is gone, and it's still reading,

Shan Ruzod still tells you her story.

(博尔赫斯:《的比喻》(Metaforsoftausandonts,1977)

Borges is obsessed with OneThousandandOneNights. In Partial Magic of the Quixote (1949), he wrote: "This collection of strange tales derives from a central story a series of occasional little stories, dazzling and dazzling, but not gradually deeper and more layered", but like a Persian carpet, seemingly accidental, full of colors and lines, but in fact it has its own secret laws.

The story of the beginning of the episode is well known: the king was shocked to learn of the infidelity of his brother's wife. Realizing that his wife's infidelity had become even more blatant, he killed her. In pain and sorrow, he decided that all women were the same. He viciously swore to marry a virgin every night, and the next morning he cut off her head before she could come and humiliate him. In the end, the minister responsible for providing the bride could no longer find a virgin. The Chancellor's daughter, Scheherazade, was determined to nominate herself. On the wedding night, Yamaruzod began to tell the king a story, but did not finish it. The king wanted to know the end of the story and was forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the end of the story. The next night, as soon as she had finished telling one story, she began another, and the king, anxious to hear the end of it, postponed her execution again. This lasted for a thousand and one nights.

Among them, Borges was fascinated by the interlude of the six hundred and second nights. That night, the king heard her own story from the queen's mouth. He heard the beginning of the general story, which included all the stories, and the story itself, incredibly. "Is the reader already well aware of this interspersed endless possibilities and strange dangers? The queen goes on and on, and the still king will forever listen to the story ......of the One Thousand and One Nights, which repeats itself over and over again, endlessly, and incompletely" (Part of Quixote's Magic)

The cartographer Borges, who also unearthed an infinite map, described the idea that the American philosopher Josiah Royce had proposed a problem of infinite regression when the map was contained within the territory: "Imagine that there was a piece of land in England that had been carefully leveled and on which a cartographer had drawn a map of England." The map is perfectly drawn, no matter how small the details are missing, and every plant and tree is represented on the map. That being the case, that map should contain a map within a map, and the second map should contain a map within a map, and so on to infinity. (Ibid.)

Borges then asked himself: "Why do the pictures within pictures and the thousand and one nights in the book "One Thousand and One Nights" disturb us?...... I think I've found the answer: if a character in a fictional work can become a reader or viewer, then conversely, we as a reader or audience can become fictional characters. This question is related to one of the most important literary concepts of postmodernism, metafiction, whose main innovation is essentially about "ontology": these novels urgently question the nature of reality as they bring authors, narrators, readers, and characters into different existential frameworks of history and fiction, past and present, text and material reality.

Emir Rodriguez Monegal, in his biography of Borges, points out that "the fear of finally discovering that we are all just the creations of dreams" is one of Borges's "most primitive fears". In Borges's poem, quoted above, there is a line in which "one dream becomes another/Endlessly/Uselessly intertwined/Weaves a useless labyrinth", where dreams and labyrinths become one, and the "labyrinth" is arguably Borges's favorite "image" – it is both very accessible and extremely complex.

Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, stand-ins – many of the recurring elements in Borges's novels are symbols of the inward movement of the mind. For Borges, the so-called "universal history" (Borges's common phrase, such as the familiar biography of the villains to Chinese readers, to be precise, should be translated as "The Universal History of Evil"), is both the history of all people and the history of people, the history of the human mind, which is lost in the labyrinth of time and betrays itself in it.