 Okay. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. And welcome, for standing a little echoey. I hope he's working out. And welcome to today's lecture. On three authors at a time. Roberto Alt. You've got one fairly short story from Alt. Jorge Luis Borges. You may or may not have purchased this thick book. I hope you have. But I made some of the stories available online in case and I gave you a bunch of, a dozen or so stories to read. And Feliz Bedo Hernandez whose reading is also available online. So, in my previous lectures, which may be lost in the mists of time and forgetfulness, to you at least, not to me, I sort of think about them occasionally. But in my previous lectures, I invited you first of all, Casting Minds Buck, when we were talking about Columbus, I invited you on a voyage of discovery across the seas, across the Atlantic perhaps, to a new unknown lands. Then, in the lecture on Defoe, on Robinson Crusoe, I suggested that we were collectively exploring some island, figuring out the terrain, trying to find out what was there, looking at the stories that we could tell about it. So, today's spatial metaphor is the labyrinth. I'm inviting you into a labyrinth. It's a labyrinth that could be perhaps historical, social, and above all, textual. A labyrinth made up of words. These words here and here I picked the labyrinth, of course, because it's an image or an idea or a figure which is particularly appealing to Borges. He talked about labyrinths quite a lot. In fact, at least one of the English translations, one of the collections of his essays or his stories in translation is called labyrinths. The idea of the labyrinth is particularly associated with Borges, but also I suspect that for some of you reading Borges was a little bit like entering a labyrinth, mystifying, disorienting, frustrating, difficult. You weren't quite sure when you were going to get out. You got perhaps a little lost and upset at the person who gave you this reading. A labyrinth is above all a test or a trial. To some extent, these stories, again, especially Borges' stories, but not solely, might seem to be a test of the trial. Not the first ones, perhaps. The Wasteland is also its own kind of labyrinth, too, for instance. But at the center of the labyrinth, which is why I also like this figure, at the center of the labyrinth, what is there? A B in this case, what does a B stand for? It doesn't stand for anything. There's an A at the bottom, which you can't see. What's at the center of a labyrinth? A monster. A theme of monsters in the mirror. At the center of the monster, the classical labyrinth, the labyrinth that Theseus entered is the Minotaur, a beast. It's a little bit like us, but not quite sufficiently like us, which is at least my working definition of monsters. Monsters always have to be a little bit like us to be truly monsters. If it's something that's absolutely different, it's not actually that monstrous. I don't know. A bird or a cat or whatever. If we think of them as absolutely different from them, they're just different, and that's okay. It's when you have something which looks partly like something which is different, and partly like something that is human that we get the monstrous. And of course, the Minotaur is precisely that. Half man, half human, half bull. It's both like us and in some strange way also absolutely other. And it makes us think that there's something in us that could be different, could be other, could be foreign to ourselves too. At the same time, we might not be sure before we enter whether this is a labyrinth or a maze. There's a difference, at least some people try to maintain a difference between labyrinths and maze, that this here is a sort of classical medieval labyrinth that you see. It's a labyrinth because there's only one way around it. In a labyrinth, you can't avoid meeting the monster. You can't avoid getting to it. Again, I've slightly cut off the picture here. There's an A to a B. You get from A to B, and then hope you get out again. The notion of a maze, however, is that there are many possibilities, many wrong turnings, and you might get lost in the maze without ever reaching the center or about ever getting out. A labyrinth in some ways therefore is a figure for fate. It takes you to the center whether you like it or not. It takes you to the monster whether you like it or not. You're confused and disoriented as you go along. You don't know which way is up and which way is down and which way is left or which way is right, but inexorably you're drawn to the monster at the center. Whereas a maze is much more a figure of chance. You may get there, you may not. I think that's interesting also because Borges is very interested in the way in which chance becomes destiny and destiny becomes a matter of chance. So this ambivalence or ambiguity between maze and labyrinth, the fact you don't know which you're entering, is also, it seems to me, significant. For Borges above all, life or reading, for Borges there's really not much difference between the two, between life and reading, between life and literature. You may remember the opening sentence, this fairly famous opening sentence of his short story on the Library of Babel, to begin something like the universe which is also the library or the library which is also the universe. Not in the two are essentially the same. For Borges life or reading, and is there any difference, is ultimately labyrinthine and ultimately reading him as well as perhaps Alton Hernandez may feel that way too. Disconcerting, difficult, a puzzle with no obvious solution, but I want to suggest to you, this is the light at the end of the labyrinth as it were. And once you finally got out, you feel a little bit proud of yourself. You've achieved something. So here is the, I don't know, the plan of campaign as it were. These are the points that I'm going to try and get through. It's sort of front loaded, I think it's the term. So we'd rather more time on milieu than, for instance, on affect, probably. But we're going to go ahead and look at the notion of milieu and the milieu in which these writers were all writing in the early 20th century in the River Plate or the La Plata region. Millie is a fancy word for environment, I guess, but I like fancy words sometimes. And in this case, it's a shorter word than environment. And I wanted all the things to begin with M if possible, but I failed to do that. We've got a few M's in there. Millie amazes monsters and mirrors, but I can manage them all to begin with. So we'll look at the milieu in which these people are writing and look at the idea of what it is to read in terms of a milieu. We'll look at their bios or bios. I like that sort of ambiguity too. We're going to look in detail at detail. We'll look at violence, amazes, mirrors, monsters and affect. And here we've got a picture of a labyrinth that has the minotaur or has the monster in the centre. I guess that's not a minotaur because it looks more like a centaur, doesn't it? Oh, well, that's what I can find on Wikimedia Commons given the time available to me. Okay, first of all, milieu in some ways is just a fancy word for environment, but I want to suggest that this week we're doing something a little bit different from what we're generally doing in Arts One, partly because we're reading three writers who are, we're reading three writers who all come from the same milieu, from the same place, from the same environment at almost the same time. In Arts One generally we do a lot of, we make a lot of jumps, we make a lot of leaps. This is not going to be a criticism of that way of doing things at all. Well, perhaps it is. But in Arts One we've leapt over the course of less than 12 months, whatever it's been, 10 months, 8 months now since September. We've leapt all the way from, I guess, from Genesis. We leap forward and backwards as well. We actually started with the Odyssey. We leapt backwards a thousand years or so to Genesis, then we leapt forward again. We've leapt between distinct contexts, mainly European, but not just European, the Middle East in terms of Genesis. But we've leapt decades, we've leapt centuries. We followed what Kevin was talking about the last lecture. We followed a canon which selects what's supposedly the best that's been thought and said as Matthew Arnold, who we also quoted last time would say we've been selective from a vast historical and more or less vast geographical period. Here we're not doing this. At least for this week we're trying something else I want to suggest. We're looking at one particular milieu in a little bit more detail. Again, detail is going to be, I guess, one of the late motifs of the lecture that I'm giving you. I'm trying to suggest the value of looking in detail, staying a while in one particular place, in one particular environment, and seeing what happens, seeing what we get from that. We're looking at three writers in this one milieu, Borges, Alt and Hernandez. As you can see, we've got the dates up there. As you can see, they're almost exact contemporaries. They were born within three years of each other. They were born within a relatively small geographical radius. I'm going to talk about that geographical radius in a moment. They were all born in either northern Argentina, Buenos Aires, or in southern Uruguay, around Montevideo, at the turn of the century, almost exactly. Borges was born in 1999, out in 1900, Hernandez in 1902. I'm not entirely sure if to what extent they knew each other, but they knew of each other, that is for certain. They did inhabit rather different worlds within this one milieu. We're looking at worlds within worlds, to some extent. Part of the idea is that a milieu and environment is variegated. It's full of lots of different things going on at the same time. Kevin was struggling with this, to some extent. In the last lecture, what happens when you pick one person as the representative of European modernism, T.S. Eliot? He's an interesting guy, but there are lots of other things going on as well. Can one person ever be representative of what Kevin called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age? We've got three different, slightly contrasting representations which perhaps also undo the notion of representation. They're just examples rather than representations. Borges doesn't represent Buenos Aires, nor does Alt and nor does Hernandez really represent Montevideo. They're different takes on these three, they're three different takes within more or less the same area, and they remind us there's always a sort of cacophony of voices which makes up a milieu, and it's just by chance, to some extent by chance, well thanks to various institutions that we pick out individuals that we select to become representative. So yes, Eliot for modernism, or Shakespeare for the early modern, or whoever it is, but a lot of other things were going on at the same time. Looking at the milieu, we have a sense of some of the other things that are going on, you get a sense a little bit already of the different worlds in which these three people, these three people inhabited within this one milieu just by looking at their dates of death. You'll see that they were born within three years of each other. There's a 40-something year difference between when the first of them died and the last of them died. Borges dies rather sedately at the age of 97 in Geneva, in actual fact, not in Buenos Aires. Alte, who is much more of a figure of, what would you say, the underworld, is a hard-living, hard-drinking kind of guy, pays for it, I suppose, by dying at the age of the early 40s, but he's better on end this. It's also a sort of story of failure, I suppose. He was barely read at the time. Alte and Borges were both read quite a lot by different audiences, by different publics, and Anders was not, and died in deep disappointment in his early 60s. He died of leukemia and apparently so bloated in fact he had to be taken out in a coffin as big as a piano, which is in some ways also kind of fitting, given that he was also pianist in the notion of pianos. It's something that you've seen in this story and in other stories. This story's taken up a book called Piano Stories. So their different fates also begin to outline some of the differences between them. But they all do inhabit more or less the same milieu, more or less the same region, the same environment, the same historical, social moment, which is that of the River Plate, the Rio de la Plata, and which is also a moment of incredibly rapid industrialization and urbanization. It's an incredibly rapid development in this part of Latin America. And I think, I mean the idea is that some of that we'll see in there writing as well. But first a little bit more about the notion of the milieu and I guess here this is where we get to a bit of a criticism or a counterpart to the notion of canonicity or the way of approaching things in terms of canons. The canon is selective. The canon is extraordinarily selective. We've looked at, what is it, 5,000 years worth of literature and writing and thought and we've looked at, what has it been so far, 14 texts or something like that. Who somehow represent and incarnate something like western thought or western civilization or whatever. The canon is also trans-historical. Again these massive leaps in time in which we try to follow some ideas. The idea of monstrosity and the notion of mirrors less so. I think this is going to be. I'm going to talk more about mirrors than we have here the two. But we suggest that there's some kind of conversation I suppose or dialogue or some continuity we're assuming between figures who live and write or speak in such diverse contexts as the ancient Middle East as ancient Greece as 19th century Britain for Shelley as the turn of the century of the United States in terms of Gilman as Prague between the wars for Kafka. We're sort of assuming there's some sort of commonality there. Which we might want to doubt. We might want to question in some ways. The canon also because of the ways in which it's been selected becomes, it's allegedly representative but it becomes and something has become for us in some ways a parade of dead white European men. So opening up the canon might mean opening up to other voices. Other voices in many different ways not only other identities, non-Europeans, not women, but also other kinds of writing. Other kinds of texts, other kinds of discourses. And getting rid of this or trying to unstick ourselves it's difficult to try to unstick ourselves from this obsession or interest in representation in one standing for many. That notion of representation. That this Eliot stands for modernism or Shelley stands for romanticism or Machiavelli stands for, I don't know, early modern political thought or something like that. And trying to reintroduce them to their context. So as I said, perhaps, I don't know about this but let's have a little less geist, a little more zeit. So instead of this notion of this controlling spirit, a very Hegelian notion, the German philosopher Hegel which traverses the ages, a little less of that perhaps, a little more spending time, zeitgeist is spirit of the time, right? A little more time, a little more detail, a little more scrutiny, a little more losing ourselves perhaps in a milieu, a little less attempt to find the one transcendent spirit across it all. So I guess this is a move from historicism to new historicism by which I mean a different approach to history. This idea of new historicism, this is a movement among particularly literary critics in the 1980s or so. It's a little ironic that Stephen Greenblatt, who again, Kevin mentioned in the last, has become, I don't know, a high priest of canonicity. Because in fact, he's one of the people who came up with this idea which is if you're reading Shakespeare, you should also be reading, I don't know, the chapbooks, the ephemera, the other kinds of discourses and so on that were going on in late 16th, early 17th century England. You should be reading the same kinds of things, the same kind of texts that Shakespeare himself might be reading. I'm putting it, placing Shakespeare, instead of this sort of, I think it seems there's bright illuminating light who emerges transcendent from all those returning him, there's no sort of imminent returning to him as part of a sort of cacophony or babble. Again, babble being a term that Borges very much likes. There's interesting an idea that he very much is doing. Of many competing voices and discourses and texts of different sort. So seeing canonical texts in context, not in context, but in contexts. Again, seeing the complications of these contexts. Recovering a multitude of perspectives. Perhaps there's something Nietzschean about this. Nietzsche's desire to proliferate subjectivities. And that's the closest we'll get to objectivity. We're getting these overlapping and competing discourses. We're over here. So, I know one but many milieu, I guess. And I put this up. This is a copyright image. But I'll excuse myself by saying, please all go out and buy the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper. This is an advert in favour of the Beatles and their magnificent music. I mean to say no ill against the Beatles at all. And let alone deprive them of any of their precious revenue by putting this image up. Okay, the legal disclaimer over. I think what the Beatles are trying to do with this famous cover to the, I guess is it, 1968 album, I think, Sgt. Pepper, is to again place themselves within a crowd. A crowd of influences of figures who were important to them of many different sorts. From Diana Dawes to Gandhi to a whole host of people some of whom are instantly recognisable, some of whom are much less recognisable. To suggest that these are the kinds of contexts. This is the world from within which they're trying to produce this music. They're trying to produce this art, I suppose. So that's the sort of milieu, the notion of milieu in some ways represented for us on the album cover. And there are many notions, there are many ways in which we can think about milieu or environment, geographical. I'm going to be sort of stressing that in historical, social. You can have a working class and upper class milieu, for instance. You can have, you could think about, women's writing, women's reading, women's discourses, for instance. You can think about particular sort of identities and how people are reading different things depending on who they are. The kinds of things I read are probably very different from the kind of things you all read. So a milieu is divided in terms of age as well, taste and so on. Intellectual milieu, what kind of discussions are happening where and when and with whom? Political discursive, discourse in a broad sense of what can be said and what cannot be said to in a particular time in a particular place. So let's talk a little bit more about the river plate, the Rio de la Plata. This, I'm showing you an image here of the river plate from space. It's, and we're looking, I'll show you a regular map in a minute which may be a little less disorienting. Although I aim to disorient you a little bit. But this is, on the right is Argentina and on the left is Uruguay. This is, it's not, I think it's not technically speaking a river. It is where various rivers that we see at the bottom here which come from the interior of Latin America which huge rivers have got through Paraguay and through Amazon and so on and so forth. It's where a bunch of them disgorge into the South Atlantic basically. You can see very all the sediment that those rivers bring down is a very murky sort of brown stretch of water. You can see the bottom right here as Buenos Aires. That's the capital city of Argentina. I forget exactly how many people live there at the moment. I think it's like seven or eight million. It's one of the major cities of Latin America. It used to be an even more major city as I'll mention in a minute. And then the top left there on that little sort of point just where the sediment reaches the ocean is Montevideo which is the capital of, bless you, which is the capital of Uruguay. It's quite significantly smaller. You can see that as well. It's about a million and a half, I think, something like that. But this is the river. Again, it's not really real. This is the water that both divides and joins Argentina and Uruguay. It used to be that Argentina and Uruguay were part of the same political unit. And Uruguay, this river, the river that you see at the center at the bottom, it turns north from here. And that river serves as the border between the northern Argentina and Uruguay. Uruguay used to be referred to simply as the right bank or the eastern bank, the Banda Oriental. It's just the right bank of the river. It's only at a certain point in the 19th century that the two became distinct countries. This is a political map of the river plate region. You see that river going up the real Uruguay, it is in fact, which in recent years has become a matter of some dispute. The Uruguayans put a paper mill made by Finns, people from Finland, which polluted the river, which of course affected the Argentines as much as the Uruguayans. So those kind of standoff and the bridge was blocked for some time. So as the river Uruguay continues up to the north, essentially no one lives in Uruguay, except in Montevideo. If you ever meet a Uruguayan, is anyone actually a Uruguayan here? Is anyone Argentine here? If you meet a Uruguayan or you meet an Argentine, they'll come from Montevideo, odds on. It's the most urbanized country in Latin America. If you meet an Argentine, the odds are a little less likely that they'll come from Buenos Aires, but they're still pretty good at odds. Buenos Aires is very much the major city of Argentina. So both these two major cities are clustered on either side of this body of water. And also much of the industry and the important ports, of course, are clustered there. There are other towns that you see, La Plata, Quilmes, for instance, which is just there. And this we're sort of moving outwards a little. This is Latin America. More generally, you see the bit that I've been showing you from the bottom right. You see Argentina's much bigger than just that little region around the river plate. So I'm talking not about Argentina, I'm talking about the river plate. I'm talking about this very specific part of Argentina, very specific part, Southern Uruguay. I'll give you a bit of a historical context. Both Argentina and Uruguay were colonial backwaters. The Spaniards were not interested in the slightest. Though the river plate is called the river plate, La Plata, La Plata is silver in Spanish. But in actual fact, there's no silver to speak of in or around the river. So the silver that the Spaniards found was either in Mexico or in the Andes, essentially, in what's now Bolivia. So that's where the Spaniards were. We're interested, their main settlement in South America was Lima, Peru. And they were interested in transporting the silver down from Bolivia, or what is now Bolivia, to Lima, shipping it through via Panama before the canal existed to Havana, where the fleet would meet up with a similar size fleet which would come from Mexico, Mexican silver, and head off back to Europe. So the Spaniards were no great natural resources to be found in this part of South-Eastern Latin America, the South-Eastern part of the continent. The Spaniards were not particularly interested. They established a couple of cities. They established the city of Buenos Aires, the city of Montevideo. The Spaniards generally did not bother settling the countryside, the hinterland. In general, the pattern of Spanish colonialism, rather different from that in the U.S. or Canada or Australia, for instance, was in terms of cities that the Spaniards would come to administrate, they'd administrate the extraction of resources, and then hopefully they'd return home. Whereas the pattern in the United States, for instance, is parcels of land were given out to settlers who came and were expected to stay. So this produces cities which serve as nodes, immensely important cities, which in some ways isolated from their countries. That changed to some extent, again, in this part of Latin America at least, with mass immigration in the late 19th century. Once Argentina and Uruguay became independent from Spain in the early 20th century, the new elite, the new political elite, what do we do with this country? How do we form a country? How do we construct a country? And one of the slogans was this idea, govena es popular, to govern is to populate or to settle. So they actively encouraged the migration of tens of thousands of people, mainly from, but not solely from Southern Europe, to come and settle in Argentina. The idea is that they would settle out on the Pampas, they would settle out on the plains, and produce and make Argentina more like the United States or Canada or Australia, more like a settler colony. To do that, they had to kill all the Indians first, which they did quite effectively, in a series of wars in the 1880s. There weren't too many of them to start off with. There were relatively nomadic bands of indigenous people who inhabited Argentina. They were quite easily eradicated and almost completely eradicated in both Argentina and Uruguay. And then they had this supposedly empty space, this space that they'd emptied, which they tried to fill with white people. And they got sort of, what they felt was a second-class form of white people, of course, Italians, Yugoslavia, and so on. But at least they were better than indigenous people. So they were actively encouraged as this mass immigration. It didn't quite work out, because many of them got off the boat in Buenos Aires and looked around and thought this was quite an interesting place to be, and they'd stay there. So in actual fact, it was much swelled by the cities as anything else. A little person with aggression as my, I'm sort of half Welsh. There's also a Welsh colony in Argentina. It's in Patagonia, way to the south. They still supposedly speak, apparently speak Welsh there. I apparently had some great-great-grandfather who went to Patagonia, took one look around and got on the first boat back. And the interesting thing about the Welsh colony in Patagonia is the first self-governing territory to give women the vote. So I'm quite proud of that. Anyhow, mass immigration, some Welsh, many more Italians, Yugoslaves, many Jews from Eastern Europe. Buenos Aires, as a result, is the second largest Jewish city by population in the Western Hemisphere after New York. And extraordinarily rapid modernization and industrialization. That made the Argentines partly because they were white and partly because they were modern. Imagine themselves as being European and now a better class of European. So this is the standard joke. The Argentines are actually an Italian, and Uruguayans to some extent. The Argentines are actually Italians who happen to speak Spanish but dream in French. A little bit about Uruguay specifically. This map highlights the River Plate region. It's actually a linguistic map. It's a map of the area in which what's a very distinct form of Spanish is spoken. Botanial Spanish is spoken in this place. It's grammatically different. It's actually preserved some features from 16th century Spanish. They use a different word for you or for the you singular than most of Latin America and Spain. So again, this is the milieu that I'm talking about. People speak the same language with the same, again, very distinctive accent. Again, you see that this area, it doesn't recognize national boundaries. It includes, again, at least southern Uruguay as well as parts of this northeastern chunk of Argentina. Uruguay is, I suggest, the Canada of Latin America underpopulated, undefined. It doesn't quite know who they are. I mean, Uruguayans know who they are because they're not Argentines, but that doesn't really give a very sort of positive sense of identity. New Zealand is the other case of this kind of thing. We're not Australians. Don't keep on confusing us with Australians. We're different. How are you different? Well, we're not quite sure. We're just not Australians. You know, Canadian identity. We're not quite sure. The same with Uruguay. Underpopulated, undefined, and overlooked. Always sadly, people mention the larger neighbour rather than Uruguay itself, and there's an amount of very polite resentment that underlines the relationship between the two. Divided, as I say, by a common language. And endlessly looking for the very small differences that exist between the two. There's a Freudian phrase, right? The narcissism of small differences. So, for instance, I don't know, the Argentines and Uruguayans drink this quite disgusting drink called mate. I don't know if anyone has tried it or know what it is. It's a sort of herb, and you keep it in a gourd, and you endlessly pour hot water into it, and you have like a sort of silver straw which you pass around and share with all your buddies. Anyway, the Uruguayans drink it slightly differently from the way in which the Argentines do. And this is the small difference which supposedly makes up Uruguayan identity. Oh, and then they fight over national symbols as well. The Uruguayans get upset when people think that famous Argentines, well, they're famous Argentines who are actually born in Uruguay, and people don't recognize this. Again, this must have some resonance with Canadians, for instance. So, the most important of these, perhaps, is a guy called Carlos Gardel, who was a tango, a writer of the tango. Well, the most important tango, singer and writer, the Uruguayans will swear to their dying day that he was born in Uruguay. The Argentines refused to believe this, but in fact, he was. So, we're giving a little, it was shining a little bit of light on Uruguay by reading a bit of Ferris Bertrandes. And then, and then finally, the milieu is also the modern city. I mean the sense of modern and city. Argentina and Uruguay in the early 20th century were incredibly developed in terms of economic and social indicators. Argentina, in particular, in 1913, its income per person was similar to that of France or Germany. Far ahead of Italy or Spain. In this period with this mass immigration, it outgrew its similar countries like Canada and Australia, once it become a settler colony based on, whose economy was based on agriculture and livestock, essentially. So, what lamb is to Australia, so beef is to Argentina. In the 1920s, it was the world's leading exporter of beef. By 1929, it had the fourth highest gross domestic product per capita. I mean, it was in the first world, as it were. The 11th largest exportation in the world. More cars per capita of the United Kingdom. And other social indices. More telephones in Buenos Aires per person than in Brussels, things you Argentines nostalgically tell you about. And then a city, along with this massive modernization, a dash into the 20th century, also massive urbanization. Buenos Aires grows from 180,000 people to 1.5 million, of which the turn of century, two-thirds are foreign born, and even later, almost a generation later, still half the population of Buenos Aires is born outside of Argentina. As well, it describes a new babble. People spoke Italian, French, various... They spoke Ladino, for instance, one of the few places where the Sephardic Jewish language was spoken, very similar to Spanish, but somewhat different. They also emerged a new sort of patois, a new Pidgin or Creole, L'unferdo, which is the language of the Argentine streets. Much of the Roberto Alves writing is in... includes words that come from L'unferdo. It had a metro very early in the early 20th century. It had a very planned street... It still has, I believe, the wider street in the world, Avenida Nueva de Julio. But Borges, these writers are just the writers of the suburbs. Now, suburbs, I don't mean suburbs like Burnaby, say. These are suburbs, perhaps more like, sorry, I don't know, or not even. These are suburbs where the city means the countryside, where the future means the past, the future being the city, and that being some kind of vision of rural life, of rural simplicity, of rural tranquility. Tranquil but not so tranquil. Again, Borges is interested in very much in this notion of the difference between the city and the countryside. And they're interested in the point of friction between the two. This is the place, the suburbs, after all, are the places where the city's expansion is felt. The city expands territorially and geographically. And all these writers are interested in what happens at that border. What happens at that frontier, which I say is not just a geographical frontier, but it's a social frontier. And to some extent also a temporal frontier too. Okay, let's talk about these three guys. Again, I'm kind of interested in this notion of so bio is both short for biography but also the notion of what is a life. These are authors who to some extent are obsessed with death. But I think they're obsessed with death in order to understand life, to understand bios. What defines a life? They're interested in it. Is it death or the manner of one's death that defines one's life? Think about the short story, Borges' short story here, about the death in which we have a figure who's trying to who tries for half his life to recreate a death that he failed to have in order to redefine his life. Anyhow, so Borges first, I'm going from oldest to youngest, I suppose right now, by the order, from 1899 to 1986. He himself was of mixed heritage. He was taught English by his grandmother as a child but he's also Criollo. Criollo is in Criollo is somebody of Spanish descent born in the Americas. Criollo is also a slightly different of the way in which Criollo is used in the Caribbean for instance, in Spanish America that's what a Criollo. So he wasn't a reason, or at least he had trace part of his ancestry quite far back. He wasn't so much a recent immigrant and a fairly upper middle class upbringing. His family went to Europe for several years in his formative stage of his youth. He did quite a bit of schooling in French, in Switzerland for instance. He worked on his return he wrote from an early age but is also a librarian fairly after his return to Europe in his early 20s. First off a rather small librarian in the suburbs and then later in the national library itself. He also had bad eyes from very early on and became blind or effectively blind in his 30s. He wrote short stories and also poetry. His poetry is less often read and he is, if we're talking about cannons, he is perhaps uber canonical in some ways. Certainly for people who are critics or professional critics and readers of Latin American literature he may not be the first Latin American writer that comes to your mind that's probably somebody like God help it isn't Isabel Allende but if it's not Isabel Allende it might be Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Mario Vargas Llosa or somebody like that, Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa won the Nobel prizes for literature as did the Mexican Octavio Paz and famously Borges never won the Nobel prize supposedly because of one swede who really hated him in the Swedish academy really hated him for political reasons incidentally in the 1980s because Borges' politics are complicated again I think we see from some of these stories and at least in the 1970s and 1980s he appeared to side to some extent with the military regime that was governing the country so the peace loving swede said or this peace loving swede said no Nobel prize for Borges his most famous book is a book Fictionist Fictions published in 1944 you've quite well represented in the selection that I gave you though more from that book than for any other it's interesting to consider why he should choose that title for his book he's interested in the notion of fiction and what fictions do the power of fictions and when you can tell whether something is a fiction or is not a fiction and when fictions may have more reality than so called reality in fact the category of fiction itself is always under interrogation and under investigation from Borges here's a critical assessment of Borges this is from prominent Argentine critic between cultures between literary genres between languages Borges is a radio de Orias Orias the shore or the margin but also the suburbs he's both of the margin of global culture to some extent in Argentina but he's also interested in the margins the notion of margins the concept of margins a marginal in the center a cosmopolitan on the edge Buenos Aires in the early 20th century was visited by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío who came out with the famous phrase Buenos Aires cosmopolice the Buenos Aires is the very image of cosmopolitanism this image sort of died over the 20th century but some extent Borges continues so very erudite the number of different texts that he quotes or refers to the number of different literary traditions European Eastern and so on that he seems to be familiar with he entrusts literary processes and formal procedures with the power to explore the never ending philosophical and moral question of our lives we might ask you some of these stories to what extent are they stories many of them don't seem to have plots or narratives as we are accustomed to seeing them many of them seem to be philosophical reflections as much as anything else philosophy thinly veiled as fiction he constructs his originality through quotations through copies the rewritings of other texts because from the outset he conceives as writing, as reading and he distrusts any literary representation of reality again this notion of interrogating what literature does both putting literature at the centre reading at the centre language at the centre but then also being intensely distrustful of it we see that in a number of stories as well talk about I'll quickly get through these before we take the break Roberto Alt, 1942 he is very much an immigrant son of immigrants he was a journalist as well as a writer so brief reports from essentially the urban underclass of Buenos Aires he also wrote short stories as well as these chronicles, novels and plays he may be the first modern writer in Latin America I'll just put that out there I'll put that out there with his novel The Mad Toy of 1926 extraordinary one of the things about Alt extremely difficult to read and partly for a reason which I'll just give you the truth is this is another distinguished literary critic the truth is that he wrote like shit who? Alt, of course, Alt no doubt he has one undeniable narrative it'll be impossible to write worse in that respect he's unique and without rival I translated this short story translation is a difficult process at the best of times but one of my fears is that I've simplified and made it more comprehensible than it should be there are a number of points at which there are sentences which are just grammatically incorrect and indecipherable in this short story and throughout, he wrote very very quickly is part of the reason but he wrote very very carelessly as well didn't bother to go back and correct unlike Borges Borges took years, months on carefully choosing his words and thinking very much of style Art just wrote as he lived recklessly fast without too much care and attention but Pelia is an actual fact defending Alt here in fact there's a part of a defensive Alt against Borges in some ways Alt is the anti Borges and Pelia thinks this is a good thing the highest praise one can give Alt is to say that this best moment is unreadable it doesn't sound like high praise but hold on, hold on, hold on in this regard Alt is absolutely modern he first surpasses those fools who accuse him literature they said is those fools had a sacred mission to perform to preserve and defend the purity of the national language in the face of the mixture of humbling and disintegration brought on by the immigrants but Art's style is a boiling mass of contradictory surface in other words the notion is that in Alt's writing you get this cacophonous noise of the milieu against the processes of selection and refinement that you get in somebody like Borges of purification I don't think that's quite true of Borges I think Pelia has been a little unfair of Borges as we'll see but this is the notion we get something like, I don't know we get life as it is lived on the streets of Buenos Aires and that is people not understanding each other people speaking different languages with different reasons from different places we get the diversity and difference that is part of the milieu itself okay and finally Feliz Pedro Hernandez 1964 Uruguayan one of the Spanish father so from that line, the second generation Uruguayan his main occupation was a pianist he was a pianist in cinemas to start off with in silent movies he'd provide the soundtrack live before you had sound cinema but also various provincial halls and he'd take clients in private houses as well he wrote short stories in novellas he's read of these three he's probably the least well known you'll never have heard of Alt but in Argentina, Alt is fairly well known he's fairly an important figure and Anders is forgotten I think even in Uruguay and to be forgotten in Uruguay as a Uruguayan is a dismal fate indeed but to some extent he's a cult writer he was read by people like Garcia Marquez in the early 1950s well, this is a phrase I hate but I'll use it, it's the only time I'll use it for some people, it's the further of magical realism that's a phrase which I will no longer I don't use it because that's the picture that one gets of Latin American literature it's all magic it's all, I don't know it's all people ascending like angels it's all or if you've seen that horrible, horrible film like water for chocolate it's all being upset and histrionic and it translates into that cooking and everyone else gets ill from it and so on I spend my entire working life trying to persuade people not to use that term which I'm not using okay, and then two instances or two moments of critical comment on Anders from critical to Santiago Colas when Philly's Bertol objectifies a human subject he turns that subject into an object of the sort that exists in Philly's Bertol's world that is an object that has already assumed some degree of subjectivity I think we see this quite well in the Daisy Dolls for the dolls so, well the dolls sort of become human but to some extent Horace was already doll-like in some way so he says conversely when Philly's Bertol endows his objects of subjectivity they become the sort of subjects that Philly's Bertol has already in some ways objectified ultimately the combined dynamics dissolve the categories we don't quite get subjects or objects we get some kind of in-between everyone's in some sort of in-between state or they're both objects and they're subject they have some kind of subjectivity or will and yet they're also objectified in some ways they're sort of material the term subject and object he says therefore do not help us to make sense of that world okay after the break detail in detail okay I think we'll start again welcome back do you remember these things work better when only one person is talking and it's Rob okay so I'm going to talk I'm going to talk about detail and in detail first of all I want to put up this slide this is a slide which I've again this all may be lost in the midst of memory for you the midst of oblivion rather than memory this is a slide that I've used in the two previous lectures so it's a certain amount of continuity I suggest that you guys we all should read three times first what I call a preliminary foray or assessment second reading for flow, plot or narrative and third re-reading for detail this can be however little time you have these three moments it seems to me are important until you read selectively and reflectively in the first lecture we read for we did a preliminary foray or assessment we spent a lot of time talking about the table of contents and even the title of the book of Columbus's book if in fact it was Columbus's book in the second lecture on default I spent a lot of time talking about narrative plot and flow this is almost perhaps too symmetrical remember Borges hates symmetry hates mirrors but in the sort of symmetry here we're going to reread for detail I mean we've seen but we'll see if we do just brief moments of those first two readings now we see from a preliminary foray of these texts we gather a few things we see for instance in the Borges texts a bunch of the stories have footnotes which seems a little large so we'll remind us perhaps of Elliott it has textual apparatus that you don't necessarily expect of literature of a short story we'll see in fact that these are mainly short stories the the Daisy Dolls is a little longer, it's a bit more like a novella some of them are very short number one the two kings of two labyrinths are less than the page we might ask what short stories can do and can't do what the restriction on length means about these stories we also see that very literally in the case in the case of Borges if you bought the book these are selections from a larger body of work you also see that for one of these again this is part of the preliminary foray you see for one of them in Spanish as well you have the process of translation opened up to some extent for you then if we read the second stage the second manner of reading for flow plot and narrative we'll see that some of these stories do indeed have an identifiable plot or narrative the old boy meets doll kind of story that we see in Anandas boy meets doll girl kills doll boy wanders out to factory but others much less so as I said before it seems like there's been a bit of conversation on the twitter as to whether stories need narrative some of these stories seem to actively resist narrative like PM&R for instance what kind of narrative, what kind of plot is going on there what kind of flow what seems to be a scholarly article essentially some are about so some seem to resist it very much some are about less a sequence of events in a moment in time or dwell on the moment in time Deutsches Requiem to some extent does that it has a narrative, a narrative about the rise of fascism of European fascism but it takes place in an interesting moment after a death sentence but before the death has actually taken place it's very firmly located in one particular moment in time even those stories that have recognisable plots they often feature abrupt twists and strange denouements the cocked cat by art for instance that final line I think comes with something like a kick in the face a punch almost from nowhere we realise later rereading or rethinking where it comes from but there's something very abrupt about it and then it just stops or the circular ruins will be another example of that remember the story about a guy who tries to dream up another being another human and the twist at the end is that he himself is dreamt by someone else and then the story then the story stops and then for some the twist is more gradual than the entire point of what's happening in Guayaquil for instance Guayaquil that's the last one that I asked you to read or suggested that you read it's about this meeting between two academics essentially one of whom goes in thinking he's meeting this rather second rate academic is a pure formality he's the one who's going to win the particular academic prize that they're both seeking which is the chance to go to another country a letter by liberator Simón Bolívar a letter which details another meeting between two people which has a surprising effect there's a doubling or a mirroring going on here but over the course of this meeting of the course of this interview the narrator who is the more senior, more respected academic realizes that everything is out of his hands he's lost, he's lost almost from the beginning and he writes the story to try and understand how he lost that argument which wasn't even an argument how it came to be that they left the meeting with the other guy having the plane ticket off to read the Bolívar letter so there's a twist and he can't quite locate it but the story is all about the twist okay some quotations about the notion of reading for detail the common reader does not readily perceive nuances that's something said by again the subordinate academic in Guayaquil or from Pierre Menard Borges suggests the Borgesian narrator Menard has perhaps unwittingly enriched the slow and rudimentary out of reading by means of a new technique this technique fills the calmest books of adventure so what do we mean by reading for detail I think that some of the things you need to be looking for are one of the words you stumble upon what are the words that seem out of place or odd all the words for instance at the beginning of the circular ruins we have the guy coming out of the canoe making landfall on a river bank some sort from the unanimous night it's a very strange word to use what is the word you stumble upon well what words do you repeatedly stumble across what words repeat what are the words and concepts and ideas that keep on turning up again whether in congress places or otherwise Jill was saying that she kept on circling the word strangled everything's about strangulation in here people get strangled why is that what's happening here why are these insistent repetitions what is perhaps at first superfluous or decorative that doesn't seem to fit perhaps has some more meaning perhaps it isn't quite so superfluous, quite so decorative in the end perhaps there's another pattern or a pattern hidden behind the pattern perhaps there's a figure in the wallpaper again the notion of Gilman the Gilman's narrator is taking a very close reading of the wallpaper until she finally thinks she sees something else some details that may undercut or derail the narrative the narrator is reading for detail if it comes after it may come after reading for narrative but it also reacts against and may undercut the narrative again we saw that in Gilman we've got this narrative of recuperation but the narrator's reading and detail and obsession with the Texas wallpaper undercuts that we see that repeatedly I want to suggest in these texts as well because in the end the devil another monster figure appears I want to talk about three stories in some detail the first is Piemman Art so Piemman Art as you recall as I hope you recall Piemman Art is a very strange or a very famous story in fact about a very obscure early 20th century French writer and the narrator tells us that the narrator gives us a catalogue of the things that he's written it's sort of a series of jokes in some way a thesis on chess for instance various critical commentaries a few poems a few translations and so on but he says he says that's just a visible uvra that's just what you can see of Piemman Art's in answer to that Piemman Art has done something else something incomprehensible something extraordinary he has written a couple of chapters a couple of sections of the Quixote now talk about superfluous unnecessary we already have the Quixote the adventures of Don Quixote Sancho Panza classic perhaps the classic the most canonical text in Spanish literature in Peninsula Spanish literature it already exists why would someone rewrite the Quixote the other thing is he rewrites it it doesn't just adapt it or update it or whatever it's not the sort of rewriting we're going to see when we read Faux, when we could say it's Faux could say it's rewriting the Robinson Crusoe story but he's rewriting it from a woman's perspective for instance supposedly a woman on the island and there's a radical transformation quite obvious the whole point is that Menard has rewritten the Quixote or these sections or fragments of the Quixote word for word exactly the way in which Cervantes wrote them there is no apparent difference between the Quixote of Piemman Art and the Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes they are apparently at first sight because this is a story and Borges in general is about difference between appearance and something else they are apparently identical why, incidentally my Borges slash Menard have chosen the Quixote Quixote is an interesting figure because it's a figure he's mad by reading he's a figure who this is a picture of an engraving of Don Quixote he's a figure who reads too many trashy novels essentially or trashy romances more specifically and imagines the world is like the world itself is like the world that he is read and goes out under that misapprehension as a knight as some sort of medieval knight who will conquer giants and dragons and consistently thanks to his reading mistakes, for instance famously windmills for giants and so on so what is being rewritten here is a story perhaps the most famous story in western literature which is a parable about the influence or the importance or the effects of reading perhaps too much reading so and this is a reading the story itself is a reading an exercise in reading this book or a version of this book which happens to be identical which is itself a story about reading we get this sort of recursiveness or reflectiveness or I don't know again in Borges we often see this circularity perhaps like the circular ruins the book itself the story itself is an exercise in reading Borges tells us other people have misread people have not understood it's an exercise in reading which is also an exercise in corrective reading the right way to read and as in the quotation I gave you a little earlier as well a new way to read a reading which will make even the Karmus text give even the Karmus text a sense of adventure and yet it seems like an academic article or note a catalog of the work of this minor poet or scholar detailing in this sense of detailing which is sort of exhaustively the detail being too exhaustively catalog or describe his output but again if we're reading for detail we get a few suspicions about the whole exercise from the outset which may trouble our own our own reading partly the vehemence, talk about the adventure within otherwise placid texts the vehemence with which for instance the narrator castigates his supposed critics unpardonable therefore are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a deceitful catalog whose protestant leanings are surely no secret has been so inconsiderate as to inflict upon that newspaper's deplorable readers few and Calvinist if not Masonic and circumcised though they may be there's a whole undertow here of a plot different kind of plot not plot as narrative but plot now as conspiracy which has been dreamed up which has something to do with religious or ethnic or political tensions the very vehemence of this debate this adventure within an otherwise calm reading is a detail that may strike us maybe not a first reading but perhaps a third reading of suspicions why this energy which is being expended upon this reading so it has the question of how to read how are we to read this reading of another text which is itself a text about reading I mean again the the chain of readings becomes almost infinite okay so he helps us though he says look let us have a look he says this is on page 94 let us have a look at, let us compare the Quixote of Miguel de Seventes with the Quixote of Piedmonard he gives us like any good arts one essay should do, he quotes from the text itself or the two texts that we have the first is Miguel de Seventes it is a revelation he says to compare the Don Quixote of Piedmonard with that of Miguel de Seventes, Seventes for example wrote the following part 1 chapter 9 truth whose mother is history rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past exemplary advice of the present and the future's counselor this catalogue of attributes written in the 17th century and written by the ingenious layman Miguel de Seventes his mere rhetorical praise of history it is of its time perhaps it fits in with the geist of that particular zeit if you like Menard on the other hand writes and we have a quotation from Menard's work truth whose mother is history rival of time depository of deeds, witness of the past exemplary advice of the present and the future's counselor history the mother of truth the idea is staggering Menard a contemporary of James of William James defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality historical truth for Menard is not what happened it is what we believe happened the final phrases exemplar and advice of the present and the future's counselor is brazenly pragmatic now in part this is a joke I suspect few of you lulled laughed out loud upon reading this well in part this is Borges's idea of a joke identical and the question is how can one tease out or leave her out a different reading and he does it by switching milieu he does it by an act of imagination what if we imagine this is written not by 16th century Spaniard but by an early 20th century symbolist poet how do things change how does the text change when we reposition it in a different milieu when we understand it as being written at the same time as the first world war for instance note that the idea is back to the plot if there is a plot of the book is that Menard has not copied Cervantes Menard has not reread Cervantes Menard has tried to inhabit Cervantes but not as a 16th century Spaniard that would be too easy we're told but he says what would it be to write the Quixote now and so Borges is saying what would it mean to read the Quixote now as Cervantes our contemporary I suppose okay I want to talk about the Daisy dolls in a little bit of detail I try to find images of life-size female dolls online most of them were not very edifying but of course that is part of the story too that it's not even an undercurrent that the sexualization of the inanimate is very much it's not a reading against the grain I don't think at all so what's going on in the Daisy dolls again you'll recall the basic plot that a guy who lives in the suburbs of Montevideo there's a couple, a childless couple who live in the suburbs of Montevideo of Montevideo Horace in the translation Horacio it's Horacio, Horacio Maria anyway Horace has a series of purchases a series of lifelike or almost lifelike dolls there's a slight difference it's a little like Frankenstein too Frankenstein's a little bit bigger than the average and the same here these dolls were told are a little bit bigger than the average woman he collected dolls that were a bit taller than real women he had three glass cases built in a large room in the biggest one were all the dolls waiting to be chosen to compose scenes so they're animating or putting them giving them stories, giving them narratives giving them plots or they're scenes so they're sort of fragments from a narrative essentially that he sets up or that he gets other people to set up for him with captions and then the positive stories essentially is what happens as a result of this increasing obsession both on his part and then on his wife's part as she gets caught up in this but she's already part of it to some extent and there's that problem of differentiating between the two of them so she likes these surprises in which what he thinks is a doll turns out to be turns out to be her so the whole series of substitutions are going on the doll substitutes for the wife substitutes for the child substitutes for the maid and then resubstitutions are going on and the problem is that the dolls are similar they're obviously very lifelike very detailed but also different and to some extent he's trying to make up for those differences he tries to get increasingly he asks the maker of the dolls to provide him with increasingly lifelike dolls which have some kind of circulation and then there's a suggestion that they become even more this is not explicit but they become even more lifelike to the point of the break the rupture with his wife is where there's something else is done to one of the dolls in particular this doll, Daisy in Spanish it's autencia for what it's worth one presumes that it becomes more and more sexualized the anatomy becomes more and more realistic and this is the basic question this is the basic preoccupation that these dolls as they become more similar also the difference the question of difference becomes more more of an issue they become more like monsters I want to suggest I was suggesting earlier the monsters have to be like us to be monstrous and perhaps the more like us they become the more monstrous they are it's a little like Blade Runner what's monstrous about the replicants in Blade Runner is that we can't tell that they're replicants we're approaching that here in the Daisy doll they're objects that are like people but as as Colas for instance suggested we also have people who even from the very start are quite like objects for instance if we look this is early on this is page 178 we get we get Horace we get Horace he sat there puzzled for a moment then decided to ignore them these are sounds, these are sounds that scattered like frightened mice again sounds that are imagined as having agency of some sort so Horace's reaction he sat there puzzled for a moment and sound is very important in this story as well the music and sound the machines and so on but he sat there puzzled for a moment all these sounds but suddenly he realized he was not in his chair anymore he had gotten up without noticing it he remembered having just opened the door and now he felt his steps taking him towards the first glass case but from very early on there's suggestions that there's something of the automaton in Horace that he is acting without his realizing it without his knowing it he's best he can reflect upon but he's already undertaken I think Anandas wants to suggest that that's perhaps part of obsession but of addiction in some ways it's a story about addiction as well that we become automata in some ways but also we're already, this is very early in the story there's already something of the automaton about this there's already something of the doll-like around us I think that captions are important because it's this attempt to deal with the world of things by putting them within a narrative context by telling stories about them we aim to master them we aim to understand them and give them some kind of reason a tribute reason to these things we get an obsession and this whole thing again the thing about the same and different Horace again he has a dream page 176 this is just the second page and these details we come across at the beginning and then we return to we're forced to return to because they take on added significance he has a dream remembering the dream when he woke up the man in the black house that's Horace Oratio recognizes an echo more doubling more repetition an echo of something in the dream the dream is an echo of the dream he has heard that same day that the traffic all over the country was changing from left to right hand driving of course that's what a mirror does too it changes the left hand to the right hand it reproduces it repeats but with a slight difference the question is the importance or otherwise of that difference what takes place or what that difference signifies and for Horace Oratio the dolls are the objects of worry of suspicion they suggest secrets they suggest portents a word which is repeatedly used somehow these dolls have something to tell us perhaps despite themselves because of these slight differences Horace is this a story about imagination or is this a story about mass reproduction in some ways it's about both it's about the power of the imagination the notion of human creativity the things that both Horace or Maria can do by by repositioning by replacing these dolls in different scenes in different scenarios in the tree for instance when all the neighbors come around which sparks further imagination and gossiping and rumors among the people who are watching from the other side of the hedge from gardens around I mean is to what extent is Horace or in control here in some ways he's very much so he makes orders I mean there's a whole series of servants and a whole servant class here in what ways are these the outgrow for I don't know a rather troubled imagination perhaps we might say in what ways is this a story about human creativity or in what ways this is about a world in which everything is about mass production everything is about the machines anything can be doubled or tripled or multiplied and as a result disembodied as a result we're not disembodied fragmented because we get the dolls increasingly we get these body parts substituting for the bodies themselves so we get this detail which again it's right at the start this is the first sentence next to the garden was a factory and the noise of the machine seeped through the plants and the trees this is the noise that can be and is apparently ignored apparently missed by most of the characters and perhaps by most of the stories readers through most of the story but it keeps on returning little details a little troubling background literally background noise that troubles the narrative troubles the story itself the soul and has something to do with the dolls perhaps the soul inhabiting daisy bodies in touch with the machines and so finally we see Horace Araciel going towards the noise of the machines somehow the detail if this is the detail if this is the background if this is what we have to ignore in order to listen to the conversations in order to understand a plot or a narrative here somehow this detail this backdrop does not overcome the foreground or the ground has overcome the figure there's a distinction between figure and ground between the artist the work itself and to some extent the milieu from which it comes here the milieu wins out ok I want to talk now briefly about the third story that I want to touch on a bit more detail which is the self I think it's my second favorite actually of the Borges stories my favorite is Guayaquil I don't know why perhaps because it's about academics and academics who lose out I don't know anyhow the south is also a storage Borges says various times is one of his favorites if you recall it is about a librarian who suffers an accident at work as he races up the stairs he just got this new book it's not inconsequential nothing in Borges is inconsequential nothing every detail counts so the book he happens to have is the Thousand and One Nights Borges is obsessed with the Thousand and One Nights why well that's another story about the power of narrative Scheherazade tells all these stories in order to postpone death that's the plot the seated plot the master plot of the Thousand and One Nights this is a narrative that has the power to continue prolonged life but the irony is and it's not inconsequential by the way the version or the copy the narrator has has just received has a few pages missing it's an incomplete version or copy of the Thousand and One Nights but he's so surprised that the irony is that for the narrator this is a book that leads to apparent death it leads to this accident it's apparently inconsequential accident there's apparent detail he's taken to a sanatorium a clinic in Buenos Aires someone sticks a needle into him and then well and then the story diverges well then there are two possible stories which we may want to choose between or may feel that we cannot choose between there's one version of the story and Borges is interested in stories that diverge another of the stories in here the Garden of Forking Paths anyone seen the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors that's the kind of thing what happens if there were some divergence in the sliding doors she doesn't quite make the tube train so here there's a divergence and I think it's fundamentally undesirable either an narrator recovers decides he can make a fresh start remembers that he has inherited a Estancia some property somewhere in the south in the countryside in the past and then he will go and visit it at last and he takes a train goes down and a series of again details little accidents derail his plan gets to get off at a different station from the station he wanted to get on there's a little picture of an abandoned railway station he goes into some kind of bar he finds somebody throwing little bits of paper at him we start to realize a whole number of echoes that sensation of the paper hitting him is much like the sensation he had when he brushed the casement of the window as he was rushing up there's a a figure of the classic figure the Argentine cowboy who when the librarian starts to get in a fight or there starts to be some tension with an indigenous man at the bar throws him a knife and he goes outside and he knows he's going to have a knife fight and he knows he's going to lose that's one plot that's one narrative there are also hints throughout this narrative nothing of the sort happened in fact the librarian died in the sanatorium that this is some kind of dream or narrative that he is unconsciously perhaps himself of another death that he might have preferred from this rather unseemly one this rather pathetic one of dying as a result of rushing up the stairs of the library a little too fast because it's a little too excited to get a copy some obscure German copy of the Thousand and One Nights okay so again we're reading a reader the central figure is a man who is obsessed with books he's a librarian he gets excited strangely excited to receive this rather obscure volume and when he goes through when he takes the train through towards the south we see he understands the south he understands his country he understands Argentina more if anything through his reading of books through the experience that he's having at the time he says p.177 this is the the voyage all these things were fortuitous he saw long glowing clouds as in made of marble and all these things were fortuitous again these strange little moments of chance like some dream of the flat prairies he also thought he recognized trees and crops he couldn't have told one the name of he thought it would be inferior to his nostalgic literary knowledge in some ways he's making that literary knowledge real either way in which we take the plot either if he's taking a literal voyage to the south or if he's dreaming this up he sees symmetries and false and symmetries and slights and acronyms reality brought his thought to this partial to symmetries and slights and acronyms these little disturbances disturbances in the matrix perhaps these little disturbances for instance one of the details that makes us wonder what is the status of this of the narrative is when the bartender knows his name he made up his mind to leave he was already on his feet when the storekeeper came over and urged him his voice alarmed senor dalman ignore those boys over there they're just feeling their oats dalman did not find it strange so the storekeeper should know his name by now there's something there's some strange echoes or parallels things slightly out of place these are the slights and acronyms that seem to structure this story again earlier on for instance when he arrives at this place dalman thought he recognized the owner it's a bit like the Wizard of Oz where in Oz all the characters from Dorothy's world have some kind of parallel he realized they've been fooled by the man's resemblance to one of the employees of the sanatorium all these echoes are being set up and then again the paper the feeling of this dalman suddenly felt something lightly brush his face that's what we've heard before we've heard something lightly brush his face before now if I tell you that Jorge Luis Borges the Argentine writer and librarian himself had an episode in which he had to be at the sanatorium for many months because he brushed his head against a casement window and got septicemia if I suggest to some people have that there are some people have noted and made quite a lot of that these are autobiographical elements to this story now how do we take those, how do we read those are those mere details or do they in some ways explain the story what details counter what details don't perhaps there's another question that we can ask and this series of mirrors between life and art the story, the dream the stories within the stories what happens in Buenos Aires in the south again we get a series of mirrors a series of reflections almost infinite concatenation of details and we get this this is the final the final paragraph they went outside and while there was no hope in Dalman there was no fear either as he crossed the threshold he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium he stuck that needle in him dying a knife fight under the open sky grappling with his adversary would have been a liberation joy and a fiesta he sensed that had he been able to choose now has he been able to choose that's the question or dream his death that night this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen it's strange that in this environment in this milieu the strange attraction or fascination to violence or perhaps especially the most literary of characters the most literary of men I'm rapidly running out of time violence pervades these texts violence pervades all three of these texts a part of this interested in the suburbs in the outskirts as Borges says in the interloper a brief and tragic window on the sword of men that once fought their knife fights and lived their harsh lives in their tough neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buenos Aires we see that in the man on pink corner which then will get a reprise much later in the story of Rosendo, I forget his name I forget his name we get a sort of revisited or re-written all it takes to die is to be alive one of the girls back in the crowd is the notion of this pragmatic knowledge that life and death and violence and a certain proximity to violence give you some quick questions I'm going to have to just leave them with questions is this the state of nature is this a violence that is attributable to something like a Hobbesian a Hobbesian version of the state of nature or is this, I don't know a more Russoian take, is this the underside of civil society I think I'd go with something maybe this is the displaced violence of modernization again what happens at the edges thanks to modernization at the center we can think of this in global terms as well we see this all the time the violence upon which our development in places like Canada depends upon an extraordinary amount of violence in places like Latin America where nowadays it's less gold and silver although it's still gold and silver for instance the lithium for the cell phone batteries is taken or the heavy metals in China for instance it is the cutting edge of primitive accumulation where what was once open the pamper becomes enclosed, privatized becomes commodified is that the reason for this intense violence at the suburbs of the edges of the borders here okay I'm going to say some quick things about mazes, labyrinths porky's outlines in fact there's many different kinds of labyrinths again that's what their one page story is all about the difference between a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors and walls on the one hand which the Babylonian king has and then another labyrinth which is a labyrinth because it's so smooth so featureless the labyrinth of the desert so there are many labyrinths many different sorts I think porky's is interested in labyrinths and metaphors and also metaphors as labyrinths the city is a maze the city despite the attempt to order to make parks and straight lines and wide roads like this massive Nuevo de Julio the fact that there's still an underside to the city which is dirty, which we see more in which is dirty and violent and confusing, which we see more in Alton Altschor's story the notion of the universe itself being a labyrinth in unfathomable with monsters perhaps at the center the notion of writing thought or language is labyrinth I guess I'd point particularly to the library of Babel as an instance of this the library of Babel has every book that could possibly could possibly be written perfectly ordered perfectly symmetrical and perfectly hopeless perfectly, a place in which you lose yourself it's all incredibly difficult to make sense okay, mirrors, this is a phrase that we get at least twice in Borges once in a story that I asked you to read once in another which I didn't the earth we inhabit is an era an incompetent parody mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it and then later on Borges copies himself we have a sort of mirror image slightly different, you notice mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and proclaim it so the same time as denouncing reproduction, the same time as denouncing copying or imitation Borges is doing it all the time perhaps because he says it's inevitable we can't help but reproduce and then we've been in in the Dated Dolls Horace or Asiwis is scared of mirrors and the mirrors have to be and the mirrors have to be shrouded and part of the problem is we get the notion from the mirror's point of view mirrors have points of view there's another perspective offered and if you want to purify to get to the objective you have to get rid of mirrors precisely because they're multiplying it's mirrors and nichium perhaps and then also there's fear of reproduction they reproduce or they repeat their identity so like Jekyll and Hyde Jekyll slash Hyde looks into the mirror to discover the Jekyll slash Hyde but precisely in that moment he's already doubled and this notion of mirrors preoccupied by this is from Lewis Carroll Lewis Carroll who provides the epigraph to the circular ruins for instance they confirm but also dissolve identity but with small differences that left to right asymmetry they expand space there's another world behind the mirror so they also expand time if we've seen the space and time are connected if we see that when we go from Buenos Aires to the country we're actually going back in history it's like when you go back to Victoria on Vancouver Island you move in space we also move back to Britain in the 1950s and mirrors are producing mazes this is a mirror maze in Prague apparently I don't know if anyone went to the Ken Lom exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery last year, fantastic exhibition but it had a mirror maze there as well okay monsters I'll just show you this this is Goya sleep of reason produces monsters there's an ambiguity there is it the when reason sleeps monsters on the alert or on the prowl or is it the reason itself dreams up the monsters I think Borges is interested in the way in which reason itself can become monstrous and asking us which are worse or the monsters of the flesh a whole question of order and chaos we read Hakim at the Amazon's lottery the lottery in Babylonia and the library of Babel and then I'll just leave you with this Borges and his groupies the end