Borges and worthless car

Fragment from the book “Pataphysics: useless guide”

Pataphysics - the science of exclusive, ironically complementing metaphysics and standing at the origins of such important phenomena of the 20th century as Dadaism, surrealism and situationalism, invented by the French poet and playwright Alfred. Pataphysical ideas were reflected in the works of many writers, philosophers and artists. The publishing house "Gileya" recently published a book by the English writer and researcher Andrew Hyugilla "Pataphysics: useless guide." With the permission of the Gorky publishing house, he publishes the chapter from it dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges.

Bores described the metaphysics of Seeron: “[They] do not strive for truth, nor even for credibility - they are looking for a striking one. In their opinion, metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. ” The characteristic looks quite fair in relation to those pataphysics who, like Borges, and Zharri himself, enjoyed the game with his erudition. There is an imaginary world created by the conspiracy of intellectuals, whose existence or non -existence is studied in the story “Lelen, Ukbar, Orbis Terzius”, published in 1940, where the action unfolds between 1940 and the 17th century, and subsequently (obviously in 1947) the story was supplemented by an an anacle -nested epilogue. The storyteller himself is Borges himself, opening during a conversation with his friend, the Argentine writer Bio -Casares that there is a mysterious article in the encyclopedia, which describes the country in the world, called Ukbar, which is the first hint of the “foggy” group of Orbis Terzius, standing behind all these inventions. It turns out that the people of Seeron were committed to the extreme form of idealism and rejected the existence of the world. They understood reality not as a “collection of objects in space”, but as a “motley series of individual acts”. As Beliser Monomak noted, a regent of photosophistics, in No. 4 “Dossier” from the series “Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique”:

For us, Pataphysicians, it is obvious that Borges with brilliance and unsurpassed depth glued that “pataphysics, with the history of which, described in the works of Jarry, he, apparently, was unfamiliar. For which of us did not come to the conclusion that Slienn is a college?

Bores often recalled the description of the machine designed to help in the thoughts invented by Raimund Lullius or Ramon Lyul, the Spanish philosopher of the 13th century, and today known as the “Lullian circle”. This machine consisted of two or more disks, dotted with symbols, letters or other designations. Disks could rotate, composing the combinations of these elements capable of, in accordance with Lullia's philosophy, to discover all possible truths about knowledge and God. In the end, this was supposed to become a device for unifying various religions, since Lullius believed that they share common truths. Bores held a slightly different opinion about this goal and expressed it in an excerpt from the 1937 essay:

... The logical machine does not work. But this fact is not so important for us. Eternal engines do not work in the same way, the drawings of which report the mystery of the pages of the most multi -layer encyclopedias; Metaphysical and theological theories do not work, undertaking to explain to us who we are and what the world is. The obvious, well -known uselessness does not detract from their interest.

The worthless machine, using random combinations, to come to exciting insights regarding the ideal nature of things, has become so beaten by a pathetic path to date that it does not even need further comments. However, Borgees fiction - which, as John Starrrock points out, “dramatizes the idealism of Berkeley and Schopenhauer,” - closer to the imaginary worlds of Raymon Russel than to the more personal works of Jarry. Like Russel, Bores preferred a neutral style, where he himself could appear as a character, however, remaining mysterious. Starrrock states: "These two authors are characterized by a passionate desire to remain inexpressive, allowing only the language and logic together to do their job."

In the “Babylonian library” (1941), thus, Borges predicts the nightmare of the logical consequences of such a desire to stay in the shade in favor of total logic, a controlled case.

The Universe - some call it a library - consists of a huge, possibly endless number of hexagonal galleries with wide ventilation wells protected by low railing. From each hexagon, two upper and two lower floors are visible - to infinity. The arrangement of galleries is invariably: twenty shelves, five long shelves on each wall; In addition to two: their height, equal to the height of the floor, barely exceeds the average growth of the librarian. A narrow corridor leading to another gallery, the same as the first and like all the others, adjoins one of the free sides. To the left and right from the corridor two tiny rooms. In one you can sleep standing, in the other to satisfy natural needs. Nearby, the spiral staircase goes up and down and is lost in the distance. [...] There are five shelves on each of the walls of each hexagon, on each shelf there are thirty -two books of one format, in each book there are four hundred pages, on each page forty lines, in each line there are about eighty letters of black color. There are letters on the spine of the book, but they do not define and do not portend what the pages will say.

These books contain all possible combinations of twenty -five spelling symbols. Therefore, most books are completely meaningless, but more and more suicidally tuned librarians wandering through this universe believe that all the books that have ever been written or will be written, as well as a complete catalog of the library itself.

In this universe, many meaningless letters of atoms are in an endless fall, until the clinamen causes some random clashes that create in this case verbal material, and therefore meaning. There is no shortage of absurdity, there are even humor: in the difficult positions of the inhabitants with their dreams about the “purple hexagon”, filled with illustrated magical books, or about the person of the book that read the catalog. This idea receives further development in another story with a heading that is perhaps unlinking to Jarry - “Book of sand” (1975). Here the book itself is endless, since every page, seeing one day, cannot be found again. Borges himself, as a storyteller and the new owner of this book, ultimately intentionally loses it on the shelves covered with mold in the basement of the Argentine national library, the director of which he was actually from 1955 to 1973. Another of the pathaphysical games in which Borges loved to play was a game of conscious anachronisms, darkening or falsification, especially when it was about scientific and historical information. The game included the creation of fictitious links to non -existent books of imaginary authors written in completely implausible eras. We can see a similar mixture of facts and inventions in the “historical” novel by Jarry “Messalin” and shorter texts, such as “other Alkestide”. In the case of Borges, this was partly caused by the attractiveness of the fantastic, to take at least the creatures described in the “Book of Fictional Beings” (1957), or dreams that often stood behind his works. With his inability to separate the verified “real” from the allegedly “imaginary”, he strengthened his own idealism. From a pathaphysical point of view, which goes far beyond the borders of metaphysics, just as the same beyond the limits of physical reality, the most interest here is the point at which these layers overlap each other in order to produce a synthesis that certainly contains some humor, and in addition, which is an excellent model of an imaginary solution. Perhaps his best example is the story “Pierre Menar, the author of“ Don Quixote ”” (1939). He refers to the doctrine of the equivalence inspired by the “list of equal books” by Faustroll, and Borges considers “Don Quixote” as the text not just copied or borrowed, but written again in the same words. This story deftly anticipates the essay of Roland Bart “The Death of the Author” (1967), demonstrating with virtuoso flowering the most important differences between the two paragraphs of the same content, separated by centuries. In the person of Pierre Menara, an imaginary French author of a redesigned Spanish text, and in the entire corps of imaginary criticism, the Argentine Borges created a fictional entity, whose pataphizic presence is really as much as Julien Torm.