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Jorge Luis Borges
Borges Stories - M.R. 2013
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Discussion - Week Five - Borges - The Lottery in Babylon
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I didn't read the company as being symbolic or representative (though I ought to read it again now), but rather I saw the story as a whole as the carrying of an idea to its conclusion. The idea was a sort of "what if lotteries dished out rewards and punishments?" It's a funny concept in itself. But what if? What would make this attractive? Suddenly we've got a lottery which returns the participants to the same kind of danger-fraught exposure to chance that ordinary life already provides. We've got institutionalized Fortuna. Now we've got a culture dedicated to amplifying the effects of chance in their lives, and it's something so massive and complicated that its workings can no longer be transparent. A mystical institute is needed to carry out the process, and its workings must be obscure, though there is a resignation to the results just as gamblers must resign themselves to a win or loss which is arbitrary, but arbitariness is the very reason that the result is seen as "fair."The implication that people want to be liberated from reason and responsibility is intriguing. Perhaps the truth is that most people in the world would not benefit from either meritocracy or "justice." Perhaps most people in the world have little merit, and in a system of justice they would justly suffer. But when suffering, isn't it better to believe that the suffering is unjust? At least then there are no pangs of conscience.
I recently flirted with St. Augustine's City of God. Haven't come close to finishing, and Borges may have had no intention to reflect on this work. But I thought it interesting how Augustine rationalizes the equal suffering and reward of both good and wicked people. To him, the meaningful difference was in the character, not the circumstance. Suffering is a chastisement for the wicked and a purification for the good. (It may even be a chastisement for the wicked element and a purification for the good element within one man). Good fortune is grace to the good, while the wicked don't profit from it as it corrupts them further and results in greater suffering when it is lost.
As for suffering, it's like a press which destroys the lees while purifying the oil.
But Borges's story doesn't give us the "out" of an afterlife of just rewards. It seems to imply that at least some culture of people wants this kind of arbitrary pressing of the good and the bad, for the benefit of this life only.
Mod
I think you may be onto something with Augustine.
What I'm wrestling with is what might Borges be talking about symbolically? As a literal story, this kind of lottery would be of little importance because as you say, life sucks enough on its own. And so I'm getting a whiff of the idea that playing this Lottery is akin to choosing to participate in "civilization". In a natural animal state, humans would behave like animals, taking what they want, obeying no laws or agreements of any kind. Civilization, on the other hand, is a series of social contracts designed to create some sort of cooperative stable life for people living in close proximity to one another; creating and obeying laws, agreeing to the consequences of breaking those laws, etc. And so "the Company" becomes that system of agreements and contracts and laws and penalties. Or something like that...
Okay, actually I follow where you're going, and I do think you're on the right track there. At least on one of the many levels of interpretation which Borges allows us, this is one way of viewing civilization. It also renders civilization as a sort of madness.
I'm caught up now and intend to stay caught up. There's everything to love in Borges.As to treating The Company as a symbol, I'd say that Zadignose is in a good direction with Augustine; in so far as this is the metaphysical kind of tale which I take it to be. I'd suggest that Borges is writing the kind of symbol that Melville was with his Moby Dick, not something which can be deciphered into any kind of one-to-one relationship of representation. But rather, an indirect manner of going about stating some kind of fundamental proposition about how we find ourselves in the world. Similar treatments which popped into my mind: Godot, Kafka's Law, and even John Rawl's veil of ignorance, being a thought experiment which attempts to address the question of justice in a world which is ruled by a Babylonian Lottery. There's also the temptation to read it as some kind of anti-Soviet-style-socialism, which I don't think is the direction Borges was taking it. Or a tale about impossibility of seeing into the workings of an opaque existence? But the resulting infinity of lotteries, the ballooning of chance toward the end of the story, seems to be addressing a kind of infinite regress of causes as would be familiar to an Aristotelian. How often has Borges addressed the question of infinity? [these having been initial reaction remarks]
Speaking of Kafka, apparently they've got that sacred latrine 'Qaphqa.' I wondered to what extent I might fairly regard this as a pun on pooh, or 'caca,' in addition to the pun on Kafka's name.Having reread this last night, the Lottery in Babylon has now become my favorite Borges.
I liked the very end of it, which does bear some comparison to Kafka, as I find Kafka's work routinely undermines and reverses the very conclusions which the author leads us to... it's constantly pulling the rug out from under our feet. Here, in The Library of Babylon, Borges concludes that it is a 'vile conjecture' to say that 'it is indifferent to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing else than an infinite game of chance.' Here the author is himself simultaneously affirming and denying this very conclusion, which he has led us to by the nose.
Nathan to answer your question about Borges and infinity, infinite regression or progression -- constantly. He addresses it constantly.
This is my third Borges story (Pierre Menard and Circular Ruins were my first two), and I have to say that this is the first story that gave me a REAL "brain pain." The first two stories were wonderful and, imho, they were easy to understand but at the same time gave me something interesting to think about.But The Lottery in Babylon? I'm seriously confused. I read it a few days before the "official" reading date, so I decided to wait until I read some of the posts here. I haven't been online since Friday (I just needed a break from the world), so this is my first time here in a while.
SO, now that I've read the comments here, which are extremely helpful, I'm going to read the story again tonight and see if it will make more sense thanks to all of your comments.
I thought the story quite wonderful. I hadn't remembered it, but it's perfect. On the one hand it creates a world of randomness on purpose. which has its own ironic flavor. Documentation is purposely written to make historical accuracy impossible. And the irony is that, as Zadignose noted, this is actually the world we live in. OF COURSE some people think the company is divine because all this randomness in life demands explanation because human beings are constructed to make sense of things.
I think a lot of Borges can be seen as a satire on the human compulsion to make sense. And perhaps and here we have satirized the attempt of religious philosophy to explain a random world filled with unfairness and cruelty as a conscious attempt at creation.
There is also the very funny notion that a divine being - or committee of beings -- set out to create the world as the random, bizarre mess that it is. :-)
A standing ovation for all the men who participated in this discussion– for once,us women folks could just sit back & enjoy ourselves! Run the show,guys– when the quality of the posts is this good; I'm not complaining!
Bill wrote: "I thought the story quite wonderful. I hadn't remembered it, but it's perfect. On the one hand it creates a world of randomness on purpose. which has its own ironic flavor. Documentation is purpose..."Bill, your post in Message 9 is great. I'm still trying to wrap my head around Borges' stories, and reading what you wrote about this story really makes so much sense. (HA -- yes I do have that "human compulsion to make sense" which is the reason this story was driving me crazy).
I need to read more about Borges and his philosophical beliefs. Does he actually believe the world is random, with one chaotic mess after another? His belief is that there is no "purpose" to the world, and it's ridiculous to believe that everything (even bad things) happen for a reason and is "meant" to happen for some huge divine reason?
Barbara, That's what this story suggests to me. I think his stories constantly show imagination taking over the real (Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius), with suspicion cast on the possibility of the real being knowable, or that as even being desirable. I think he suggests there is no place from which we can stand and have perfect perspective (Pierre Menard) where we can ever be sure of who we are (The Circular Ruins), the absurdity of a world of perfect randomness which then gets attributed by some people to God (The Lottery of Babylon).
I don't know that there's a "philosophy" here so much as playfulness and a taking apart of human attempts to find a resting place for intellectual effort, to find either truth or Truth, to find a world that isn't in fact imagined.
There might be more clues in his essays -- there's a volume of those -- and his sense of morality about the Nazis is absolutely clear -- but even here he takes apart the positions of pro-Nazi sympathizers in Argentina more than makes a case. His position is simply that he doesn't happen to be anti-Semitic because he doesn't find that Jews are particularly different from anyone else.
Barbara wrote: "I need to read more about Borges and his philosophical beliefs. Does he actually believe the world is random, with one chaotic mess after another? .."I have no special knowledge of Borges' personal beliefs, but I tend to agree with Bill that his stories are more about playfulness than promoting a particular philosophy. There's a well known quote from him on agnosticism:
"Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant."
Rather than presenting the world as he may think it is, Borges' always strike me as exploring the 'what ifs". Where most of us experienced questions like "how do you know you're not a brain in a tank?" as interesting high school diversions, Borges takes the theoretical brain teasers and runs with them to amazing places.
Bill wrote: "...His position is simply that he doesn't happen to be anti-Semitic because he doesn't find that Jews are particularly different from anyone else."I guess that would make him the Anti-Celine. Celine was anti-Semitic because he didn't find that the Jews were particularly different from anyone else.
(I.e. his best defense to charges of antisemitism is that he hated everyone else too.)
Except that Celine was a Nazi collaborator whose anti-Semitism was even extreme for some Nazis. He had to flee France after the end of WWII.
Alright, I retreat. I haven't read his racist pamphlets, and don't want to be an apologist. Let's just say that, anti-Semite that he was, his misanthropy knew no bounds.
Oh heck, I almost managed to stay away from this topic, but I can't help it. I read a very interesting, and also horrifying article on Celine's anti-Semitism here:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...
The author doesn't spare Celine a bit, but registers the typical irony of the fact that so many Jewish readers and authors still embrace Celine as a writer (see Philip Roth's quote at end).
This article's author, too, could not resist pointing out though:
"To read any single novel by Céline is to receive, in a bracing style, a hysterical primer on the abjection of being. To read them all is to register a unique species of racism: a hatred not of particular elements of humanity but of the human race as a whole."
Z, I'm not sure exactly what point you're trying to make here. Your opinion seems to be that Celine's extreme anti-semitism was just a manifestation of his general hatred of humanity. Hating humanity is not a justification for advocating the murder of a race of people. And I don't care who reads him, I read him. I also watch Leni Reifenstahl films. Who may or may not read him also doesn't justify advocating the murder of an entire people.I know you delight in sparking debate and controversy, but l I find this extremely distasteful. I realize this is probably not the place for this. I'm not going to post on this topic again.
My point in bringing up Borges essays written in Argentina during the war was to make the point to Barbara, who asked, that his technique here wasn't to espouse a belief system but to take apart the irrationality of pro-Nazi thought in Argentina, of which there was a considerable amount.Borges is in essence a commentator on other works, so much so that he invents works on which to comment.
As Whitney suggested, he's a great player of the game, "What if..." And I further think he not after answers but intrigued by all the ways in which answers elude us.
I think we should stay with Borges and not move to Céline here. Borges is the challenge. And I think the challenge is how to talk about a writer who anticipates in his work so much of what a critic might say, whose work often presents itself as criticism.
My interest is always how we talk about literature, what the practice of criticism or even literary discussion, what comes from it, and what we are doing here with specific works.
Part of the problem is what to say about a work that isn't easily explained or "translated," whose obscurity, if there is any, isn't hidden behind a curtain which can be parted so we can see the Wizard as an old man operating the bellows.
That was what I was struggling with in "The Waste Land" last year in my discussion, and I don't know it was satisfactorily resolved -- or can be -- but it's worth thinking about.
Reading for ourselves is one thing. But if we talk, what are we talking about?
Hmmm. The problem with addressing certain topics is that something always seems to break down in the communication process. Since the topic came up, tangentially I thought the article was interesting and also that it unambiguously reviles Celine as a person and thoroughly opposes anti-semitism, while struggling with the very difficult question of coming to terms with Celine the artist. I can hardly see that I've said anything that should be regarded as offensive, but I'll drop it since it was only a tangent and no one else wishes to pursue the topic.
Bill & Whitney,Thank you SO MUCH for your explanations in Messages 12 & 13. I am so happy that we still have so many more Borges stories to discuss here, because I am really learning so much about a whole world of writing (and that would be "Borges' World") that I've wanted to read for a long time but would have lost my mind if I tried to figure it out on my own.
From what I gathered from the story, the lottery has come to dominate every aspect of society and man. The lottery dictates every action with no regard to the actual person. Man has no free will anymore, now that the Lottery and the Company controls society. Without free will, does Borges hint that society will fall? Or that they will continue to live under the rule of the lottery? Which is preferable? This is my first time reading anything by him so I'm in that confused yet spellbound realm that he has created.
Mod
I suppose they could exercise their free will and move out of the city, and hence out of the reach of the Lottery. By staying in the city, they are also exercising their free will to submit to the rules of the Lottery.
Paradoxical territory, but... perhaps free will is also a part of the lottery. It has been fully accounted for.
Mod
Paradox you can dance to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK34u...
Jim,I was ready to dance. Paradox is one of my favorite tunes.
But that video is not available for viewing in the US.
If you're in the US, try this link of the same tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMaE6...
Melissah,"Without free will, does Borges hint that society will fall?"
It's not the kind of thing Borges hints. He plays with philosophy. He doesn't argue it. He just looks where the arguments go.
As Jim said, in this case all one has to do is leave Babylon. The story talks about the peculiar lives of its citizens, not the universe.
Mod
I was ready to dance. Paradox is one of my favorite tunes.
But that video is not available for viewing in the US..."
Damned territorialism! When, oh when will globalism finally arrive?!?? We demand music without borders!!
Off topic: I'm reading DFW's Consider the Lobster and Other Essays and realize more and more that he was definitely a Borgesian.
Brain Pain
Books mentioned in this topic
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (other topics)City of God (other topics)
Okay, now here’s a head-scratcher of a story. So what might “the Company” represent? Civilization? Chance? Collective (Un)Consciousness? Or is this an intellectual exercise that is utterly pointless?
Borges gives us a tantalizing tease of a tale about how civilization became so randomly effed-up. Or is it not so random? You decide…