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I don’t recall now how Jorge Luis Borges came up conversation, but I remember my mother telling me long ago that she had met the Argentine writer at a party in Buenos Aires when she was a young graduate student on a fellowship from Radcliffe. This would have been 1942 or 1943. By way of conversation, Borges had asked her if she was afraid of anything. I’m not sure what my mother told him, but she turned the question back on him. Was there anything he was afraid of? “Oh, yes,” he replied, “I’m afraid of everything.” From my mother’s tone in telling this story, I gathered she did not approve. I’m not sure how much to trust my mother’s memory of this exchange, much less my own memory of my conversation with her, which took place decades ago. Nonetheless, Borges’ comment, assuming that he said something of the sort, is certainly consistent with the nightmarish quality of many of his ficciones.
Since childhood, Borges had a particular aversion to labyrinths, which became a recurring motif in his work. As a boy, he had been frightened by an engraving of the labyrinth at Knossos illustrating the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In Greek mythology, Daedalus had built the labyrinth for King Minos in Crete to house the Minotaur, a beast with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Every year King Minos would select seven boys and seven girls to be sent into the labyrinth as a sacrifice to the Minotaur. The creature was not seen in the engraving, but Borges imagined that if he had a magnifying glass powerful enough, he would be able to see it through cracks in the walls of the labyrinth. Curiously enough, in “The House of Asterion,” a story told from the Minotaur’s point of view, Borges portrays the creature as a sympathetic figure who believes that he is redeeming those who are sacrificed to him. Then one of his victims tells the beast that he also will one day be slain. “Since then, there has been no pain for me in solitude, for I know that my redeemer lives,” the Minotaur says, echoing Job in the Old Testament.
Although the youthful Borges may have been terrified of the monster lurking within the labyrinth, the mature artist had transferred a sense of foreboding to the structure itself. The protagonist of “The Immortal” is horrified by the “complex irrationality” of a labyrinthine City of Immortals, abandoned ages ago by a stunted race of men, with its endless corridors leading nowhere, upside-down staircases and gigantic doors opening into tiny rooms. The Minotaur in “The House of Asterion” observes of his lair, “Each part of the house occurs many times; any place is another place.” He adds, “The house is as big as the world – or rather, it is the world.” A similar note is sounded in “The Library of Babel,” which is set in an immense repository for books consisting of identical hexagonal galleries, each containing the same number of volumes of equal length. The volumes individually contain every possible combination of letters, spaces and punctuation marks, without regard for meaning. The story’s narrator, a librarian, presents this library as the universe. In “Ibn Hakam Al-Bokhari, Murdered in his Labyrinth,” the story’s namesake builds a labyrinth in a vain attempt to hide from an assassin. But, as one of the story’s characters observes, “There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.”
The novelist Alan Wall has pointed out that the universe as labyrinth is the basic premise of modern physics. According to “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, every possible outcome of every event in time and space plays out in its own separate universe, like different paths taken in a labyrinth. Since these parallel universes are mutually inaccessible, scientific validation of this theory is precluded. While the “many worlds” hypothesis answers certain problems that arise at the subatomic level, critics grumble that it falls more into the realm of metaphysics than of physics. This, of course, is a realm where Borges would feel right at home.
The protagonist of Borges’ story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” is the great grandson of Ts’ui Pen, a Chinese official who withdrew from public life to write a novel called The Garden of Forking Paths and also to construct a labyrinth “in which all men would lose their way.” The novel is a mad jumble, and the labyrinth was apparently never built. The narrator imagines this lost labyrinth as “a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars.” As it turns out, Ts’ui Pen’s missing labyrinth exists in time rather than in space: his mad jumble of a novel in which every possible outcome of every event is allowed to play out within the covers of a single volume. It is a realm in which quantum physicists would feel right at home.
Scientific reputations are not normally enhanced by too close an association with explicit metaphysical arguments, to say nothing of a belief in a personal God. And yet, as the physicist Paul Davies has pointed out, modern science operates within a Judeo-Christian framework. There is an abiding faith in a rational order to the universe – a universe that began at a specific historical moment and operates according to fixed natural laws. Above all, science seeks meaning in the natural order, a theory of everything that ties together all the loose ends -- a center to the labyrinth, if you will. The nightmare for scientists is not that they will find a monster lurking in the labyrinthine universe of time and space; the nightmare for them is that they reach the last winding corridor in the farthest reaches of this labyrinth and find nothing at all.
* In a review of Orson Welles’ classic film Citizen Kane, Borges had borrowed this line from G.K. Chesterson’s Father Brown short story, “The Head of Caesar.” Before being translated into Spanish and then back into English, the original reads: “‘What we all dread most,’ said the priest in a low voice, ‘is a maze with no center. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.’”
Alan Wall, “Borges and the Library,” Paraxis 02
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