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Week 5: Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

 Hello Blog readers, 

This week’s novel was Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Im not going to lie, I didn’t entirely understand what I was reading, but that is precisely what labyrinth means. As google defines, labyrinth is “a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Thus, I acknowledge one of Borges’s goals was to confuse us and allow us to reanalyze what we know—to think again and try to put the pieces together as if they were a puzzle or maze. 


I know I was reading a bunch of short stories, but they didn’t appear to fit together at all. It was a bunch of jumping from one plot to another without a deeper connection between the work. However, I liked how each story was relatively short, so we read various pieces. After watching this week’s lecture video, I know Borges wanted to make his work interesting by being real and raw and that legacy and inheritance are important to Borges. However, I couldn’t grasp that myself without guidance from the lecture. 


To understand Borges’s beliefs on how writing should be shared and cited by others, I gave ‘Borges and I’ a reread. Borges is the novel’s author, but with this story, it is as if he is separating himself from the writer by titling the story ‘Borges and I’. Perceiving himself as different than ‘Borges’, like the ‘I’, is his inner identity, and it is someone else. As the book states, “I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in laborious strumming of a guitar” (246). This passage shows how he sees himself and considers himself different from Borges. This may be a bit confusing, but that is what the author wants. As Jon states in the lecture, “Borges is expert in the second look, asking us to think again, to reconsider what we think we know”, which is what we do with the short story Borges and I. I think this technic is quite interesting. However, it can complicate things, and we see this in the text when it says, “I do not know which of us has written this page” (247), as if Borges, himself, is also confused about which one is the real him. He wants to produce a text that is personal yet impersonal. If the work is too personal, a larger audience would be unable to relate to it. That’s why I think he separated himself from the writing so that others could share and cite it. This way, we can all look at the text and find connections to our own life, which in a way, makes writing better. 


Although I wasn’t the biggest fan of this read, I see how some people could enjoy it. It’s a bunch of simple short stories that you can pick up and read at any moment, and it is not too long that you lose yourself in the pages, making it hard to stop. You can take a break after each short story and not worry about what will happen in the next chapter, as they are all unrelated. My question for you is, did you enjoy this read? I have read a couple of people’s blogs, and I know the opinions are on a wide spectrum, and I can’t wait to discuss that in class. 


Comments

  1. One of the issues that have caught my attention the most is the difficulty to "enjoy" these readings. For some literary texts, sometimes we must be willing to be more open to the spectrum of reactions or affectations of literary texts. There are many reasons why we might find Borges weird, even unsympathetic. Is the "personal" aspect of Borges (as discussed in Mistral or Neruda) important to approach this reading?

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  2. "This week’s novel"

    Not a novel! As you say elsewhere, it's a collection of short stories. How much do we expect stories in a collection to relate to each other? A novel has a unity, but does a collection of this sort have to have that?

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  3. I really did not enjoy this!! I had high hopes for the book because I thought the cover was really cool. A lot of comments and blogs mention a second reading of the stories, but I really don't think it's worth the work at this point. Even if I could gain more from a re-reading, the book took enough energy to get through the first time, I'm not doing it again. I am glad, as you said, that the book is broken down into short stories instead of one cohesive book, otherwise I would've been way more lost than I already am.

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  4. I had a similar take on the title may mean. I found that the labyrinth acts as a metaphor for the intricateness of the reality he is trying to portray. Mainly the idea, that reality is comprised of an endless series of unpredictable twists and turns. To answer the discussion question, I did enjoy some of the short stories, mostly ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘Borges & I’. His styles really imaginative and the stories are pretty trippy.

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