Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of letters. Most of Borges's tales embrace universal themes - the often-recurring circular labyrinth can be seen as a metaphor of life or a riddle whose theme is time.""He influenced a few Latin American "magical realists" by his characteristic style known by blended fact and fiction, mythical elements, and a vague feeling of surrealistic authenticity. For his work he won 46 national and international literary prizes, including the Prix Formentor he shared with Samuel Beckett in 1961, and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement in 1979."Argentinean short story writer and essayist.
His parents were both immensely interested in literature:His father tried to write himself . His mother was an avid translator (working on Faulkner, Kafka and Lawrence)His family moved to Switzerland in 1914 where he went to school in GenevaHe came into contact with the European artists' scene. In 1921, upon his return to Argentina he founded the Argentinian "ultraismo" movement.He described himself as a classical liberalist.
Borges describes the goals of ultrai?smo as followsReduction of the lyric element to its primordial element, metaphor Deletion of useless middle sentences, linking particles and adjectives. Avoidance of ornamental artifacts, confessionalism, circumstantiation, preaching and farfetched nebulosity.Synthesis of two or more images into one, thus widening its suggestiveness
Tsun arrives at Sr. Alberts a longer discussion about Tsun's ancestor Ts'ui Pen, who had intended to construct an infinite labyrinthThe text seems to end when Tsun kills Alberts and is sentenced to death by hanging.
487)For Jorge Borges "memory is not re-imagined as experience, even disconnected experience, but rather is enacted in figurative or mythic language." (p. 117)"This memory state does not provide a Proustian experience of the past but a heightened experience of the present. Memory resides not in a metaphysical mind but in the very language that describes it: 'let the real moment of ecstasy and the possible insinuation of eternity which that night lavished on me, remain confined to this sheet of paper'.
" (p. 126)"Borges had directly confronted the meaning of memory in an important early article 'The Nothingness of Personality' to dispel any idealized notion of a synthetic process of consolidation. He writes: 'memory is no more than the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way'. In other words, for Borges, memory is only an approximation, a mediating designation or circumlocution of a temporary state of consciousness." (p.
126)"Borges, ... , gives topographical imagery to the passageways of memory, also often perceived in terms of the Daedalean labyrinth. As the artificer of the labyrinth of art, he presents himself as endowed with the godlike power of memory which elevates him to the position of 'El hacedor' or the maker of handiwork."(p.
124)"Borges substitutes for a mythic underworld a fourth dimension of space-time in which memory is awakened. That Borges should actually use this highly charged scientific expression of his era suggests that he has devised his own understanding of spatial time which helps him create his poetic imagery of the memory process. Throughout his poetry he invents such spaces as a kind of no-man's land." (p. 125)"I recognized the name of one of our consuls and I replied, disconcerted, 'The garden?' 'The garden of forking paths.
'Something stirred in my memory and I uttered with incomprehensible certainty, 'The garden of my ancestor Ts'ui Pen.' 'Your ancestor? Your illustrious ancestor? Come in.' The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. We came to a library of Eastern and Western books.
" (p. 493)"'An astounding fate, that of Ts'ui Pen,' Stephen Albert said. 'Governor of his native province, learned in astronomy, in astrology and in the tireless interpretation of the canonical books, chess player, famous poet and calligrapher—he abandoned all this in order to compose a book and a maze." (p.
493)"From that moment on, I felt about me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not the swarming of the divergent, parallel and finally coalescent armies, but a more inaccessible, more intimate agitation that they in some manner prefigured." (p. 493)"Once again I felt the swarming sensation of which I have spoken.
It seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely saturated with invisible persons." (p. 496)
The commonest, though not the only, type of mnemonic place system used was the architectural type. The clearest description of the place is that given by Quintilian [in Institutio Oratoria]. In order to form a series of places in memory, he says, a building is to be remembered, as spacious and varied a one as possible . . .
. The images by which the speech is to be remembered . . . are then placed in imagination on the places which have been memorized in the building. .
. . We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorized places the images he has placed on them. The method ensures that the points are remembered in the right order."What is "hypertext"?In the 1960's Ted Nelson "came up" with something revolutionary:Text, which is not constrained to be linear "At last we can escape from the prison of paper" (Nelson)Everything is interconnected and allows us to create our own "narrative"Sir Tim Berners-Lee Web Inventor and Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation"Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working as a software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. With many scientists participating in experiments at CERN and returning to their laboratories around the world, these scientists were eager to exchange data and results but had difficulties doing so.
Tim understood this need, and understood the unrealized potential of millions of computers connected together through the Internet."
"Main characteristics:Topics dealing with the complex absurdity of contemporary life - moral and philosophical relativism, loss of faith in political and moral authority, alienationEmploying black humor, parody, grotesque, absurdity, and travesty Erasing boundaries between "low" and "high" culture Lack of a grand narrative Avoiding traditional closure of themes or situationsCondemning commercialism, hedonism, mass production, and economic globalismReality represented through language"'On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay, an insignificant one, to be sure." (p. 489)"'The future already exists,' I replied, 'but I am your friend.
Could I see the letter again?' Albert rose. Standing tall, he opened the drawer of the tall desk; for the moment his back was to me. I had readied the revolver. I fired with extreme caution. Albert fell uncomplainingly, immediately. I swear his death was instantaneous—a lightning stroke.
" (p. 496)"'The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden broke in, arrested me. I have been condemned to the gallows.
I have won out abominably; I have communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city they must attack. They bombed it yesterday; I read it in the same papers that offered to England the mystery of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert who was murdered by a stranger, one YuTsun. The Chief had deciphered this mystery. He knew my problem was to indicate (through the uproar of the war) the city called Albert, and that I had found no other means to do so than to kill a man of that name. He does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness..
" (p. 496)
Having learned that his cover as a German spy in London has been blown, Yu Tsun has only minutes to plan his next move. He must escape from Captain Richard Madden, the Irishman who has murdered his co-conspirator in espionage, and complete his mission by delivering the location of a secret cache of British weapons to his boss in Germany, whom he refers to as The Chief. He checks the contents of his pockets - revealing a revolver with only one bullet - locates the address of the one person capable of passing on his missive, and runs to catch a train to the suburbs.Madden nearly catches up with Yu Tsun at the station, but he misses the train, filling Tsun with a sense of confidence that he will complete his mission successfully. At the Ashgrove stop, some creepy-looking children direct Tsun to the home of Dr. Stephen Albert.
Tsun follows their instructions, finding himself following a continually forking road. He finally arrives at a pavilion, or summer house, from which he can hear the familiar sounds of Chinese music.A man named Stephen Albert greets Yu Tsun, speaking Chinese, and invites him to see the "garden of forking paths." Tsun identifies himself as a descendent of the creator of that very garden.
Dr. Albert tells Tsun the story of his ancestor, Ts'ui Pen, a former governor who abandoned his political position to write a novel and build a labyrinth, or maze. In the opinion of his descendents, Ts'ui Pen had failed on both accounts - the novel made no chronological sense, and the labyrinth was never found.Stephen Albert, who has studied Ts'ui Pen's legacy for some time, explains to Yu Tsun that "the garden of forking paths" and the novel are one and the same and that the novel's seemingly incompatible storylines present the idea of the bifurcation, or splitting, of time, rather than space. In other words, whenever the characters come to a point at which more than one outcome is possible, both outcomes occur.
This causes the narrative to branch out into multiple narrative universes, which then provide the scenarios for new bifurcations.Seeing Captain Madden approach, Yu Tsun expresses his gratitude to Dr. Albert for resolving the mystery of Ts'ui Pen's garden, then shoots him in the back. Though Madden succeeds in arresting Yu Tsun, Tsun has succeeded in relaying his message - the secret weapons stash is in the city of Albert. Tsun reads about the bombing of Albert by the Germans in the British papers, the same papers in which The Chief was able to read the report of the murder of Dr.
Albert by Yu Tsun.
