The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [148]
For a literary practice that turns this set of ideas and concepts to brilliant account, we might look to the works of Jorge Luis Borges. His short stories, essays, and parables render the sense of history, and literary history, a mise en abyme (or, as the title of his collection puts it, a labyrinth) in which ends and beginnings, befores and afters, are put in serious, witty, and profound question. The opening paragraph of “The Library of Babel” sounds strikingly similar to the Piranesi vision of staircases leading ever onward: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors.” Borges’s compelling story, which has been seen to predict the vastness of the information network and has been subjected to a philosophical analysis by W. V. Quine, concludes with a meditation by the narrator:
I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end—which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order).32
As André Maurois comments, “in Borges’ narratives the usual distinction between form and content virtually disappears, as does that between the world of literature and the world of the reader.”33 This does not necessarily mean that there is no distinction between them but, rather, that Borges plays with consummate skill upon the apparent differences. His stories end where they “ought” to begin; his narrators and heroes find themselves not only quoting other authors but, in the process, becoming them. In his works, characters discover that history copies literature and not the other way around. Here is a discourse—or, if you prefer, a fiction—of literature as a first-order phenomenon, offering readers a chance to rethink priorities, whether we understand “priority” to refer to chronology or to importance. Thus the short parable entitled “Everything and Nothing” closes with the voice of the Lord speaking from a whirlwind to a figure heretofore unidentified in the text: “I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”34
In Which Nothing Is Concluded
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), a philosophical romance about the pursuit of happiness, ends with a chapter titled “The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded.” The phrase seems apposite for Dr. Johnson’s rather stoical account (the prince, his sister, and their philosopher friend decide that none of their wishes can be obtained, and resolve to return home). But it also strikes me as a fitting way to conclude my much more optimistic narrative.
We sometimes talk about literature and language in a figural way: for example, as an enfilade—doors opening onto other doors that open onto other doors; a vista that stretches out between rows of trees into the infinite distance—or a mise en abyme, a term from heraldry describing a shield that bears at its heart the image of another shield. Like the enfilade, the mise en abyme is an image not only for self-reflection within a literary work, but also, equally powerfully, for the process of reading, which is never-ending, always opening outward into another scene. The device itself tempts the eye and the mind to move beyond what it can see, to an imagined and imaginable space that is both a plurality of meanings and a future of thought.
Literary interpretation, like literature,