[-empyre-] Twists and turns of the prescient archivist

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Dear empyreans, 

Deliberate anachronisms and fallacious attributions trump intrepid
imperialists and dazzle websters yet unborn.

Read on....


-cm

-- http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/12/06/borges/


WEB master Borges 
The greatest influence on the Argentine writer
was a phenomenon invented after his death.

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By Douglas Wolk 

Dec.  6, 1999 |It was Borges, Borges himself, who provided the key. Once I
discovered it, of course, I realized that the clues are everywhere in the
three volumes of the great Argentine writer's collected works recently
published -- on the occasion of his centenary and in new English
translations -- by Viking Press. Borges was fascinated by the idea of a
hidden truth only accessible to the most dedicated reader; for instance, in
a 1938 book review, and again in 1941's "A Study of the Works of Herbert
Quain," he proposes a mystery novel whose true solution is not the one
presented by the detective, but hinted at by a single casual phrase. It was
in the story "Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote,'" that I found just
such a phrase, a tip-off that the greatest inspiration for Borges' work was
a phenomenon that wasn't invented until four years after his death in 1986:
the World Wide Web.

Borges writes that his fictional author "has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched
the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique -- the
technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That
technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration ... fills the
calmest books with adventure." Of course! Nothing could be more Borgesian
than ignoring linear time; in the meticulously perverse logic of his
stories, essays and poems, it's only natural that an author would be
influenced by events yet to occur. With the patience and concentration
Borges demands, it can be seen that his understanding of the Internet was
absolute -- we who are merely its contemporaries can't possibly enjoy his
perspective. And reading Borges' cryptic, deadpan paradoxes as commentary on
the wired world does, indeed, deliver a jolt of recognition.

I am not the first to point out that Borges' great invention, the Library of
Babel, that immense, honeycombed labyrinth containing every possible text --
true, false and gibberish -- is a fanciful metaphor for the Web. As we
become more familiar with the Internet's applications and idiosyncracies,
the parallels planted in Borges' work become more clear. What are the
"infinite stories, infinitely branching" of his character Herbert Quain's
book "April March," if not hypertext? What is the purpose of Ireneo Funes,
the paralyzed young man unable to forget any aspect of anything he has ever
seen, if he is not to represent search engines burdened with memories of
long-inactive links? What is Tlön, the virtual world in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius" that gradually overtakes the real one, if not the cyberspace for
which the physical world is rapidly becoming a quaintly antiquated sketch?

Canny Borges never names the Web, of course: As "The Garden of Forking
Paths" points out, in a riddle whose answer is chess, the only word that
cannot be used is "chess." But the meaning of his parables is specific and
undeniable. The Aleph in the fiction of the same title, the portal through
which one can see every point in the universe, is Netscape Navigator in all
but name. The Zahir, an object that changes its form over time but
monopolizes its owner's attention forever, is none other than Microsoft
Internet Explorer, as anyone who's tried to unstick it from a computer's
operating system only to click fatally on an innocuous icon will tell you.
(Consider, in fact, the alphabetical remove of Borges' names for the
browsers, his subtle jest on the Alpha and Omega of his new world.)

"The Lottery In Babylon" -- in which all people in a society change their
stations constantly, power and wealth springing up instantly and evaporating
immediately, in ways dictated by blind chance -- is an idle fantasy if one
ascribes no other meaning to it. Read as Borges no doubt intended, as a
precise allegory of the dot-com IPO market and internal Web commerce, it
becomes a scathing satire, and far more severe and elegant.

For that matter, Borges' fictions, poems and articles are liberally
hyperlinked to each other: His motifs of labyrinths and tigers and Dante
appear again and again, coyly alluding to their sister pages. The learned
allusions he loved so well are links to outside pages; it is one of his
finest jokes that his reviews of imaginary volumes and quotations from
imaginary authors are, quite simply, dead links. It's not yet certain what
relevance all of Borges' works have to the Web, of course; it's too new a
technology for some of his meanings to become clear. I look forward, for
instance, to the events that will allow us to fully comprehend "The South,"
the curious tale of a traveler who gets in a knife fight, the tale that
Borges thought might be his best story. "It is possible to read it both as a
forthright narration of novelistic events and in quite another way, as
well," he introduced it, practically shouting for it to receive an
interpretation that can only be revealed as the Web evolves.

Through Borges' technique of anachronism, we can see the real meanings of
other authors' work as well. Anne Rice's "Interview With the Vampire" is a
darkly wry, knowing discourse on AIDS, a disease unknown at the time of its
publication. Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" is far more
convincing as a commentary on post-Soviet Russia than as a fantasia of the
Soviet era in which it was composed. I am reliably informed that the hidden
purpose of one of Rex Stout's sturdy detective novels (the title escapes
me), concerning orchid-sniffing detective Nero Wolfe, unfolded (orchid-like
itself) only recently when it was revealed to be a commentary on certain
private machinations at a large software company. It is possible that every
book contains within itself a second, secret book, whose true meaning is
invisible to its contemporary readers and even (perhaps) its author.

Postscript: After several weeks of considering Borges' commentary on the
Web, I am obsessed by it, like the Zahir; its hold on me is stronger than
the hold Microsoft has on my hard drive. I am filled with trembling at the
thought of his revelations -- not waiting for them to "come true," but
waiting to understand their truth. As Borges' greatest and most invisible
labyrinth expands around me, I can console myself only with his words,
fittingly also from "Pierre Menard": "There is no intellectual exercise that
is not ultimately pointless."
salon.com |  Dec.  6, 1999

 

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About  the writer 
Douglas Wolk is a freelance writer in Queens, N.Y..
 soundart performance  multimedia theory


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