Quiz #3

The Garden of Forking Paths

An anonymous narrator introduces a document that will, he assures us, shed a little light on why a British offensive against the Germans had to be delayed by thirteen days. The document is a deposition (oral testimony given by a witness to be used in a trial) given by Dr. Yu Tsun. The first two pages are missing, so its narration begins abruptly. Having learned that his cover as a German spy in London has been blown, Yu Tsun has only minutes to plan his next move. He must escape from Captain Richard Madden, the Irishman who has murdered his co-conspirator in espionage, and complete his mission by delivering the location of a secret cache of British weapons to his boss in Germany, whom he refers to as The Chief. He checks the contents of his pockets - revealing a revolver with only one bullet - locates the address of the one person capable of passing on his missive, and runs to catch a train to the suburbs. Madden nearly catches up with Yu Tsun at the station, but he misses the train, filling Tsun with a sense of confidence that he will complete his mission successfully. At the Ashgrove stop, some creepy-looking children direct Tsun to the home of Dr. Stephen Albert. Tsun follows their instructions, finding himself following a continually forking road. He finally arrives at a pavilion, or summer house, from which he can hear the familiar sounds of Chinese music. A man named Stephen Albert greets Yu Tsun, speaking Chinese, and invites him to see the "garden of forking paths." Tsun identifies himself as a descendent of the creator of that very garden. Dr. Albert tells Tsun the story of his ancestor, Ts'ui Pen, a former governor who abandoned his political position to write a novel and build a labyrinth, or maze. In the opinion of his descendents, Ts'ui Pen had failed on both accounts - the novel made no chronological sense, and the labyrinth was never found. Stephen Albert, who has studied Ts'ui Pen's legacy for some time, explains to Yu Tsun that "the garden of forking paths" and the novel are one and the same and that the novel's seemingly incompatible storylines present the idea of the bifurcation, or splitting, of time, rather than space. In other words, whenever the characters come to a point at which more than one outcome is possible, both outcomes occur. This causes the narrative to branch out into multiple narrative universes, which then provide the scenarios for new bifurcations. Seeing Captain Madden approach, Yu Tsun expresses his gratitude to Dr. Albert for resolving the mystery of Ts'ui Pen's garden, then shoots him in the back. Though Madden succeeds in arresting Yu Tsun, Tsun has succeeded in relaying his message - the secret weapons stash is in the city of Albert. Tsun reads about the bombing of Albert by the Germans in the British papers, the same papers in which The Chief was able to read the report of the murder of Dr. Albert by Yu Tsun.

"The Secret Miracle,"

Jaromir Hladik is a Jewish writer living in Prague. When the story opens, he's having a pretty crazy dream: he's playing an epic chess game, but he just can't remember the rules. He wakes up to the sound of the Nazi army marching into town - we're in 1939, folks. Five days later, he's arrested, basically for being Jewish and voicing his Jewishly inclined opinions. His execution is scheduled to take place ten days later, on March 29, at 9 am, and so Jaromir has to wait. This is even worse than waiting at the In-N-Out drive-thru on a Saturday night. Jaromir spends nine nights in prison anxiously imagining and re-imagining his death by firing squad. Great way to pass the time, huh? On the night before the execution, he recalls a play he was writing but never finished, called The Enemies. It's about a guy names Jaroslav Kubin who has gone crazy: Kubin thinks he's another dude and relives the same scene over and over. Sounds strange, but Jaromir is proud of it, and he prays that God will grant him one more year to finish his play. Then he falls asleep. Commence another weird dream. This time, we're pretty sure he hears the voice of God saying "The time for your labor has been granted." Hmm. Jaromir wakes up, and it's time for his execution. But just as the bullets are about to be fired, the universe stops. Yep, it just stops. Think Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell, but this time, no one can move, not even Jaromir. After some major confusion, he realizes that God has granted him a "secret miracle": although no time is passing in the world around him, he has a year inside his head to work on finishing his play. Jaromir works by memory, and as soon as he completes the last line, he lets out a yell, the bullets hit him, and he falls to the ground: "Jaromir Hladik died on the twenty-ninth of March, at 9:02 A.M." (13).

the library of babel

The Universe, also known as the Library, is made up of a series of identical hexagon-shaped rooms. Each room has four walls of books, tiny closet-like spaces for sleeping and using the restroom, and hallways that lead to other hexagons. The hallways contain spiral staircases, which lead up and down to other, identical levels. These hallways also each contain a mirror, which the narrator thinks of as a sign of the Library's infinite nature. When the narrator was young, he quested in search of a book. Now he is old, and preparing to die. When he dies, someone will throw his body over the edge of a railing and it will fall for eternity. Each wall of books in the Library contains five shelves, each holding thirty-two matching books. Each book has 410 pages, with 40 lines per page and about 80 characters per line. The cover of each book has a title, but the title has nothing to do with the contents of the book. The narrator tells us two basic rules about the Library: it has existed forever (and therefore must have been designed by a god), and there are exactly 25 different written symbols. This second point, along with a footnote from a later editor, lets us know that we as readers are outsiders to the universe of the Library, since our world has more than 25 characters. Most of the books in the Library don't seem to make any sense. The Library's inhabitants used to have a lot of theories about why this is - maybe the books are written in another language, they speculated, or maybe in code. Five hundred years ago, though, a man of genius was able to figure out the Library's secret. Because no two books in the Library are identical, he argued, the Library is "total" - in other words, it contains every single possible combination of the 25 written characters. This means that in all those collections of 410 pages, the Library contains everything that can be expressed in writing, in every possible language. At first, the reaction to this great discovery was one of optimism and celebration. The people of the Library figured that the truth was out there, and all they had to do was go find it. Men set out in search of their "Vindications," books that tell the stories of their own lives and even tell their futures. Failing to find their own Vindications, these men ended up killing each other off or going insane. Others hoped to find a book that would explain the origin of the Library and of the human race, and established an official group of "inquisitors" to do the job. After several centuries of fruitless searching, though, no one expects to find anything anymore. The period of optimism was followed by one of despair of ever finding anything meaningful in the Library. Some people suggested they'd have better luck rolling dice and making their own sacred texts. Others, the Purifiers, thought the best course of action would be to destroy all of the meaningless books in the hopes of finding holy ones. But because the Library is so vast, they were unable to make a serious dent in the number of books. The narrator writes of one lingering suspicion from that period, a godlike figure known as the Book-Man. The idea was that somewhere in the Library existed one book that could explain all of the other books - a "total book" - and that some librarian must have read it. That librarian would acquire the powers of a god. The narrator is sure that the total book must exist, and he hopes that some man has had the chance to read it. Despite the apparent disorder of the Library, the narrator rejects the idea that any of the books within it are meaningless. There is no combination of letters, he argues, that does not hold a secret significance in some language or code explained somewhere within the Library. The very words he is writing right now, which must already exist within the Library, may have secret meanings that we're unaware of. Are we sure we understand his language? The human race is now on the verge of extinction, the narrator tells us, though he is sure the Library will endure for eternity. In closing, he explains how he is able to think of the Library as infinite, though it contains a finite number of books. The solution is that it must be periodic, he explains. In other words, it repeats itself: if you start walking in a straight line in any direction, you will eventually come across the same books. The repetition of the disorder of the Library creates an order - the Order, the narrator asserts, of the universe. This belief in an orderly and elegant universe gives him hope. In a final footnote, the narrator explores an idea of Letizia Alvarez de Toledo, who turns the vast expansion of the Library inside out. The entire Library, in her view, is contained within a single volume with an infinite number of infinitely thin pages. Each page can always be split into two pages. The impossible middle page of this volume would have no back side.

Funes, the Memorious

The narrator, a version of Borges himself, meets Ireneo Funes, a teenage boy who lives in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, in 1884. Borges's cousin asks the boy for the time, and Funes replies instantly, without the aid of a watch and accurate to the minute. Borges returns to Buenos Aires, then in 1887 comes back to Fray Bentos, intending to relax and study some Latin. He learns that Ireneo Funes has meanwhile suffered a horseback riding accident and is now hopelessly crippled. Soon enough, Borges receives a note from Funes, requesting that the visitor lend him some of his Latin books and a dictionary. Borges, disconcerted, sends Funes what he deems the most difficult works "in order fully to undeceive him". Days later, Borges receives a telegram from Buenos Aires calling for his return due to his father's ill health. As he packs, he remembers the books and goes to Funes's house. Funes's mother escorts him to a patio where the youth usually spends his dark hours. As he enters, Borges is greeted by Funes's voice speaking perfect Latin, reciting "the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis" (by Pliny the Elder). Funes enumerates to Borges the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis, and adds that he marvels that those are considered marvellous. He reveals that, since his fall from the horse, he perceives everything in full detail and remembers it all. He remembers, for example, the shape of clouds at all given moments, as well as the associated perceptions (muscular, thermal, etc.) of each moment. Funes has an immediate intuition of the mane of a horse or the form of a constantly changing flame that is comparable to our (normal people's) intuition of a simple geometric shape such as a triangle or square. In order to pass the time, Funes has engaged in projects such as reconstructing a full day's worth of past memories (an effort which, he finds, takes him another full day), and constructing a "system of enumeration" that gives each number a different, arbitrary name. Borges correctly points out to him that this is precisely the opposite of a system of enumeration, but Funes is incapable of such understanding. A poor, ignorant young boy in the outskirts of a small town, he is hopelessly limited in his possibilities, but (says Borges) his absurd projects reveal "a certain stammering greatness". Funes, we are told, is incapable of Platonic ideas, of generalities, of abstraction; his world is one of intolerably uncountable details. He finds it very difficult to sleep, since he recalls "every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which [surround] him". Borges spends the whole night talking to Funes in the dark. When dawn reveals Funes's face, only 19 years old, Borges sees him "as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids". Borges later finds out that Funes died from "congestion of the lungs".

The Lottery in Babylon

These two allegorical tales, while not directly related, both ruminate on the metaphysics of our universe and their implication for the nature of being. The Lottery in Babylon recounts the history of a lottery corporation in Babylon that has grown to take responsibility for all chance and happenstance in every aspect of Babylonian life. The Library of Babel represents the universe as an infinite library and extends metaphysical implications from there. Babylon's Lottery began as an innocent lottery, comparable to modern lotteries in that it offered monetary prizes for a select few with fortunate numbers. However, because this was unpopular, the lottery decided to introduce risk by instituting fines for those who drew unlucky numbers. This potential to either win or lose made the lottery more representative of the concept of chance, and more people played as a result. Because many people did not wish to pay the fine and were subsequently sentenced to time in prison, the lottery eventually stopped publishing fines and began simply publishing the length of imprisonment. From this precedent, people began to think that monetary gain was not a gain of magnitude equal to the loss of one's freedom. The lottery subsequently began awarding positions of status, the opportunity to exact revenge on others, and so forth. The scope of its power expanded proportionately. The Lottery grew into an entity which operated in secret, orchestrating all events through complex designs based on the chance drawings. Single events would revolve around the fortunate and unfortunate drawings of multiple participants. People would seek to gain influence over the Lottery at various secret locations rumored as points of communication with them, though the Lottery disavowed these forms of communication as a matter of liability. In this way, all events in the life of a Babylonian became the purported design of the Lottery. In The Library of Babel, the universe is a Library of infinite adjoining hexagonal rooms. Each wall has five bookshelf, with each shelf holding thirty-two books, each book having four hundred and ten pages, each page having forty lines, and each line having roughly eighty letters (113). The rooms are uniform, and there are infinite rooms extending in all directions. The man of the Library who acts as the narrator offers epistemic and metaphysical proofs based around the history of the Library. He grounds the proofs in two axioms: the library has existed from and will exist through eternity, for its perfection can only be the work of a god; and there are only 25 symbols used in all the library, counting 22 letters, a period, a comma, and a space (113). From these axioms, the totality of the library is derived: it contains all possible books, and there are no repeated books. From these concepts, worldviews proliferated. Some people tried to destroy the books which they perceived as "worthless," though it was shown that all books were meaningful in some language or code. Some went in search of a "Book-Man" who had supposedly read the inevitable book that was a compendium of all others, thereby becoming like a god (116). Some threw themselves off the hexagonal vestibules in suicide, overwhelmed by the totality of the Library. The narrator takes comfort in the fact that, though the Library is infinite, there is not an infinite number of possible books, meaning that the disorder of books must on an enormous scale be periodic, and that in this great order there is infinite divinity (118).

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote."

These two stories catalog the works of two fictional authors; together and apart, they constitute substantial literary commentary on the nature of identity and like conceptual manifestations across time. The former author is renowned for seeking to write all of Don Quixote from his own experiences; the latter wrote works about labyrinths and possible futures. An overview of Menard's collected works suggest his preoccupation with studying and crafting a linguistic method that accesses ideas required for the craft of writing, as opposed to common conventions and concepts (89). He sought to achieve this by translating the works of others, intentionally taking up opinions which were not his own, and by intensely studying logic. He is most known, however, for his attempt to recreate Cervantes' Don Quixote. Menard only succeeded in writing the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of the book, a well as a portion of the twenty-second chapter (90). What made his work remarkable was his method behind it: he did not want to simply write an updated version of the book, nor did he want to study the life of Cervantes in order to write it as him - a process that he did not consider challenging or interesting enough (91). He instead sought to write the book verbatim organically by drawing on his own experiences. Borges lauds Menard for his effort on the grounds that what came naturally to Cervantes based on his life experiences is absolutely inspired coming from a man such as Menard, centuries later. This praise is hilariously presented to the reader by Borges analyzing a section of Cervantes' work and being completely uninspired, then analyzing literally the same words - but written by Menard - and praising its inspiration and brilliance. The review closes with a motivating quote by Menard in the vein of Plato, expressing a belief that all people will one day be capable of thinking all ideas (95). Borges suggests that the anachronistic craft which Menard has pioneered could be an ingenious way to revitalize old literature: that is, to take a famous piece of literature and imagine that was written by someone else. In A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain, Borges reviews the major works of modest experimental author Herbert Quain. His labyrinthine fiction, according to Borges, was underappreciated in its time. His first work, the mystery novel The God of the Labyrinth, was notable for its false ending: the readers thought the mystery had been properly explained until the sentence in the last paragraph, "Everyone believed that the chess players had met accidentally," which prompted readers to review the story and arrive at an ending that the characters never discovered (108). April March, another of Quain's novels, was similarly labyrinthine, exploring different possible timelines: the first chapter is an event common to all timelines, and chapters beyond that explore different timelines of events that could have lead to that point - three events preceding the common first event, and three even earlier events linked to each of those three events (109). In this way, the novel is actually nine very different novels that end up in the same place. The final surveyed work, Statements, reflect Quain's belief that everyone is a writer or potential writer, and that readers no longer truly exist (111). The eight stories are designed so as to prefigure a good plot, but are then frustrated by the writer. They compel the reader to think they have outsmarted the writer, yet all the while the frustration is of the writer's design. Borges boasts that he was able to extract his story The Circular Ruins from one of these stories (The Rose of Yesterday), thereby unwittingly making Quain's point.

Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

This story recounts the events of Borges discovering the chronicles of a world which was invented by a secret society, and which slowly penetrates the real world. Fantastical in nature, it can be viewed as an allegorical critique of religion. This is particularly apparent in the imaginary metaphysical realm of Tlön. Borges first learns about Uqbar in 1935 from his friend, Bioy Casares, who, during a discussion about first-person novels with unreliable narrators, quotes a saying he remembers from a heresiarch of Uqbar: "Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind" (68). Casares believed that Uqbar, along with the quotation, was catalogued in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, but Borges finds no such entry in his copy. The following day, Bioy brings him a copy containing the entry on Uqbar, with the actual quotation Casares had paraphrased: "For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and proclaim it" (69). The article is in an alphabetically-incorrect volume of the cyclopaedia, and the geography of the region surrounding Uqbar is unrecognizable to Borges and Casares, suggesting the country was imaginary. The article also notably says that the literature of Uqbar, as opposed to discussing reality, refers to two imaginary realms: Tlön and Mle'khnas. In the next section, Borges recalls an encounter with a close friend of his father, Southern Railway Line engineer Herbert Ashe. Ashe had told him about the duodecimal number system (that is, a system of numbers operating with base 12), and about how he had been commissioned to transpose a duodecimal system into a sexagesimal system (one with base 60). Later, a few months after Ashe's death, Borges discovered a manuscript which had been left for Ashe in a bar, titled Orbis Tertius ("third orb," in Latin), which was the eleventh volume of an encyclopedia surveying the imaginary planet of Tlön. This discovery took place in 1937. In the remainder of the second section, Borges describes the world of Tlön in vivid detail. Language is split between the northern and southern hemispheres. There are no nouns in the language; in the north, modified verb constructions are emphasized instead to show the subject of sentences, and in the south, compound adjectives show subject. People of Tlön understand reality as progressive time, rather than spatially-localized objects. This worldview allows them to effectively conceive of many more subjects than the nouns of Indo-European languages cover (73). The culture of Tlön, Borges says, is entirely based in psychology, because the world itself it understood as a series of mental processes lacking temporal duration (73-4). This nullifies the idea of science because correlation and causation depend upon the linkage of events or states across time, which is incoherent with the Tlönian perception of the universe. However, this allows for a huge proliferation of metaphysical systems of thoughts, all with the goal of being as fantastical as possible - since any real form of explanation is literally incoherent due to no notions of spatial relations across time. The lack of spatial relations across time lead to a distorted conception of identity, as evidenced through two examples: the first is a rejection of materialism on the grounds that materialist proofs involving finding things one had once lost depend on inexplicably presupposing that a found thing is the same thing as what one has lost; the second is the concept of hrönir. Hrönir are imperfect copies of objects which are formed when an object is lost. Experiments in hrönir lead to them being mass-produced by people being shown pictures of what they were to discover, and subsequently unearthing objects from the past or future, thereby making time itself malleable. Hrönir degenerate periodically, and are contrasted with ur, which are produced by suggestion or hope and are peerlessly pure. The postscript to the story is dated from 1947, and reviews the inception and subsequent impact of Tlön. It explains that Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius were the brainchild of a secret society of experts from a wide array of disciplines (including Herbert Ashe), funded by millionaire Ezra Buckley, who convinced the society in 1824 to expand their aim from inventing a country to inventing a world. Borges notes several "intrusions" of Tlön into the real world, the most notable being the 1942 discovery of a Tlönian artifact in the hand of a dying man in the Cuchilla Negra: a small metal cone of unknown material which was inexplicably heavy (80). Borges believes that the secret society, propagated through time, orchestrated the discovery of various Tlönian artifacts and documents, causing reality to eventually be subsumed by Tlön. When Borges' account ends in 1947, Tlön "has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön's rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels" (81). Every domain of human knowledge has been rewritten to accommodate the truths of Tlön, and Borges expects the process to only continue in the future.

The Circular Ruins

rge Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" was first published in 1940 in the literary journal, Sur, which means South. The Spanish title of the story is Las Ruinas Circulares, and it was part of the 1941 collection titled The Garden of Forking Paths or El jardín de Senderos que se Bifurcan. In 1944, "The Circular Ruins" was included in the collection Ficciones (Fictions). Its first English publication was in View in 1946, translated by Paul Bowles. Themes present in "The Circular Ruins" include idealism, immortality, dreams and their meanings, and thoughts manifesting in the tangible world. These themes are also prevalent in Borges's other works, such as Tlön, Ugbar, Orbis, Tertius, and Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. "The Circular Ruins" is an allegorical tale of creation. Wounded, a foreigner is traveling from the southern reaches of Persia, fleeing to the north to ancient circular ruins. When he arrives and rests there, his wounds are healed by magic, yet the traveler is not surprised by this. Borges describes the ruins as having previously been the color of fire, but now the color of ash. There is a stone statue there, which Borges describes as possibly a horse, possibly a tiger. The traveler feels compelled to sleep, and so he does. Upon waking, he finds that the locals have left offerings nearby. He takes this to mean that they either want him to grant them favor, or they fear his magical ability and seek to earn his good will. Now healed, he begins to create, dreaming a man into the real world. To this end, he meditates, focusing all of his energy on creating through this dream state. At first, his dreams are chaotic. Then, they change so that he stands in an amphitheater, lecturing to students. His topics range through a number of academic disciplines, and as he questions his students, they try to answer to prove that they understand his lectures. His sleeping and waking hours are devoted to thinking about their answers—this is part of his creation process; he is seeking the soul that he will manifest into reality among those students. About ten nights pass in this fashion, and he decides that the students do not provide meaningful answers. Instead, they just regurgitate what he has told them. Their souls are not independent, so they are not ready to be manifested into reality. The traveler decides to take a new path, which is to work with and tutor those students who object to his lectures. Through this process, he selects one student from among the multitude. Now ready to create, he must undergo the trial of such an act. The stress of creating makes it impossible for him to sleep at first, so he has to take a month of rest without meditating. After that month has passed, he begins to dream the youth into existence, part by part, focusing first on the heart and organs. During this process, he almost accidentally destroys this creation, this manifestation. Borges points out that he should have, but the traveler pleads with the statue in the ruins. In reply to the traveler's pleas, the god Fire appears as a combination of a tiger, horse, bull, rose, and tempest. The god offers to bring the creation to life and only he and the traveler will know the other man was created—provided the traveler teaches the youth about the rites of fire. The traveler agrees, and the god brings the youth into existence. For two years, the traveler teaches the youth. One day, he sends him to train by himself at the ruins downstream. The traveler is feeling weak and fearful; he is afraid the youth will discover his nature—that he was created and did not always exist in the real world. At the end of the story, fire burns the ruins. But when it does not harm the traveler, he discovers that he, too, is the result of someone's dream, just like the youth. Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1921 in Argentina. In addition to being a writer and poet, he was also a philosopher, an editor, a critic, a translator, and a librarian. His most notable works include A Universal History of Infamy, Ficciones, El Aleph, and The Book of Sand. Borges felt that he should have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he never did—perhaps because of his conservative views on politics, or perhaps because he accepted an honor from Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator. Borges's use of fantasy in his literary works is considered an influence on contemporary fantasy literature. The term, "Borgesian conundrum," a philosophical term named after Borges, questions whether the writer writes a story or whether the story writes the writer. Originally, Borges introduced this idea in his work, Kafka and His Precursors.