Brain Pain discussion
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Collected Fictions
Borges Stories - M.R. 2013
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Discussion - Week Eight - Borges - The Garden of Forking Paths
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Not necessarily relevant, but I had a little quote regarding a garden:"In laying out gardens, pavilions, wandering paths, small mountains of stone, and flower paintings, try to give the feeling of the small in the large and the large in the small, of the real in the illusion, and of the illusion in reality. Some things should be hidden and some should be obvious, some prominent and some vague. Arranging a proper garden is not just a matter of setting out winding paths in a broad area with many rocks; thinking that it is will only waste time and energy."
-Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life
Anyway, 18th century Chinese folks might see gardens as something rather profound, mystical, and microcosmic.
Meanwhile, I guess I've gotta reread Garden of Forking Paths now. It's another story with a zinger, but this one I didn't anticipate until the big reveal.
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"In laying out gardens, pavilions, wandering paths, small mountains of stone, and flower paintings, try to give the feeling o..."
I like that quote. The idea of the microcosm and macrocosm being contained in/complementing each other. Taoist cosmology is amazing to study and contemplate. I would really like to read Ts'ui Pen's manuscript, but of course, it doesn't exist.
PS. here's a link to the book Z quoted:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52...
Jim wrote: " I would really like to read Ts'ui Pen's manuscript, but of course, it doesn't exist..."It would be the ultimate Brain Pain book. I'm a little angry at whoever made the decision that led to this world where the book only exists in a story by Borges.
The idea of parallel worlds branching off at every decision point is such a trope of SF and fantasy now, does anyone know of any appearances of the idea prior to this story?
Nothing new to add here really,rather a late registration of my reading!Another one of my fav Borges– outstanding in the creation of an atmosphere of suspence & looming dread.Again another example of the Borgesian mix of exotic background,complex scholarship,& detective work.
In the Preface to Fictions,Borges wrote: "The eighth ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is a detective story; its readers will witness the commission and all the preliminaries of a crime whose purpose will not be kept from them but which they will not understand, I think, until the final paragraph. The others are tales of fantasy."
Both statements are true but how easily the surreal/fantasy aspect blends in the atmosphere of this tale!
Had no idea that Chinese were also involved in spying on behalf of Germany during the second world war or is it just a fictional thing?!
The telephone book gave me the name of the only person able to communicate the infor-mation: he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than a half hour away by train.
How strange that a name, the spy Yu Tsun, picks out randomly from a phone directory,turns out to be that of a noted Sinologist! And that too an expert in the reading & uncovering of his ancestor T'sui Pen's complex labyrinth- too much of a coincidence?
But the real beauty is in how the mystery of the text combines with the mystery of the spy's visit– the omission of one particular word 'time' in one ,leading to the resounding boom of discovery of another word–'Albert'.
P.S.
Z thank you for sharing that lovely quote. Gardens are one of my fav places for relaxation.
"Borges’s fiction, what is it? It’s the infinite book, the world of compossibilities. The idea of the Chinese philosopher being involved with the labyrinth as in “The Garden of Forking Paths” is an idea of Leibniz and his contemporaries appearing in the mid-17th century. There is a famous text by Malebranche that is a discussion with the Chinese philosopher. Leibniz is fascinated by the Orient and often cites Confucius. Borges’s traced lines from Leibniz’s thought but with an essential difference: for Leibniz, all the different worlds that might encompass an Adam sinning in a particular way/an Adam sinning in some other way/an Adam not sinning at all – he excludes all this infinity of worlds from each other, they are incompatible with each other, such that he conserves a very classical principle of disjunction: it’s either this world or some other one. Borges in contrast places all these incompatible series in the same world, allowing a multiplication of effects. Borges’s image is of an infinite universe of the eternal return. Instances are unintelligible, events thrown together by chance, or perversely repeated, but some- times in this labyrinth construct, a reasonable/intelligible sequence is found. Such are the laws of this universe, moments of regularity in a chaotic world."Adrian Gargett: Symmetry of Death
http://www.borges.pitt.edu/documents/...
Another fictitious document, this time a confession with the first two pages missing. At the end, the spy has communicated to The Leader – luckily, the town was conveniently named…