Jorge Luis Borges Overview

Jorge Luis Borges had a twisted sense of time. He placed us on the precipice of an infinite event, concentrating past, present, and future in a single coruscating constellation of time. Inspired by the philosophy of Leibnitz, Borges always presented us with a multiplicity of possible worlds. But while Leibnitz submitted these worlds to a principle of logical selection, allowing only commensurate universes to coincide, Borges saturated the present with impossible combinations of dissonant events. Borges was Leibnitz gone mad. In his work, the present is forked, bifurcated, and distributed over an incomprehensible terrain of time. This is a time in which one can simultaneously be alive and dead, a high official and a slave, a killer and a friend -- a paradoxical time of obscure resonances between contradictory events. "Lottery of Babylon" repeats Kafka in concentrated form (as if Kafka weren't already concentrated enough) and harkens towards Pynchon. A game of chance created by "the Company" determines at random the fate of the citizens of Babylon. Paradoxically, however, the lottery determines nothing in particular: it is rather a "periodical infusion of chaos into the cosmos." Eventually this infusion becomes incessant: chance intervenes at every stage. If the lottery ordains that a man be sentenced to death, every event leading up to the execution must in turn be subjected to another drawing, some of which might cancel the execution itself. "No decision is final, all branch into others." Every event is an inconceivable intersection of infinite possibilities. This is a strange world. In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," Borges tells the story of a man who endeavors to re-write the Quixote in its entirety. In order to prepare himself for the project, Menard assimilates the necessary elements of seventeenth-century Spain. But he promptly abandons this project, deeming it too easy. What would be more profound, he muses, would be to re-write the Quixote knowing nothing about the conditions under which it was originally written. In fact Menard repeats Cervantes' text word for word. After citing a brief example of the two identical versions, Borges asserts that Menard's text is infinitely richer. Why? Because in the seventeenth century Cervantes' ideas were banal. In Menard's contemporary hand, however, their profundity cannot be fathomed. History is permeated with such anachronisms, with events that only accomplish themselves in their future repetition. Time incessantly branches and forks. Possible worlds proliferate. An event happens now, but its truth lies elsewhere, in a different time, which is also now in some sense. Place all of history on a single surface, add to it everything that could have happened but didn't, and you have the world of Borges, twisting infinitely into itself.