This is the difference between a proper, “naive” novel and a deliberate imitation of a novel, or

a novel imitative of other kinds of documents. The first sort attempts (has been historically
inclined to attempts) to imitate actions more or less directly and its conventional devices -
cause and effect, linear anecdote, characterization, authorial selection, arrangement, and
interpretation - have been objected to as obsolete notions, or metaphors for obsolete notions:
Alain Robbe - Grillet’s, essays For a New Novel come to mind. There are replies to these
objections, not no the point here, but one can see that in any case they’re obviated by
imitations - of - novels, for instance, which attempt to represent not life directly but a
representation of life. In fact such works are no more removed from “life” than Richardson’s
or Goethe’s epistolary novels are; both imitate “real” documents, and the subject of both,
ultimately, is life, not the documents. A novel is as much a piece of the real world as a letter,
and the letters in The Sorrows of Young Werther are, after all, fictitious.

One might imaginably compound this imitation, and though Borges doesn’t, he’s fascinated
with the idea. One of his more frequent literary allusions is to the 602nd night in a certain
edition of The 1001 Nights, when, owing to a copyist’s error, Scheherazade begins to tell the
King the story of the 1001 night, from the beginning. Happily, the King interrupts; if he
didn’t, there’d be no 603nd night ever, and while this would solve Scheherazade’s problem, it
would put the “outside” author in a bind. (I suspect that Borges dreamed this whole thing up;
the business he mentions isn’t in any edition of The 1001 Night I’ve been able to consult. Not
yet, anyhow; After reading Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one is inclined to recheck every
semester or so).

Borges is interested in the 602nd night because it's an instance of the story-within-the-story
turned back upon itself, and his interest in such instances is threefold. First, as he himself
declares, they disturb us metaphysically: When the characters in a work of fiction become
readers or authors of the fiction they're in, we're reminded of the fictitious aspect of our own
existence-one of Borges's cardinal themes, as it was of Shake-speare, Calderón, Unamuno,
and other folk. Second, the 602nd night is a literary illustration of the regressus in infinitum,
as are many other ofBorges's principal images and motifs. Third, Scheherazade's accidental
gambit, like Borges's other versions of the regressus in infinitum, is animage of the
exhaustion, or attempted exhaustion, of possibilities-in this case literary possibilities-and so
we return to our main subject.

What makes Borges's stance, if you like, more interesting to me eventhan,say, Nabokov's or
Beckett's, is the premise with which he ap-proaches literature. In the words of one of his
editors: “For [Borges] no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less
faith-ful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing ar-chetypes.”
Thus his inclination to write brief comments on imaginary books: For one to attempt to add
overtly to the sum of “original” litera-ture by even so much as a conventional short story, not
to mention a novel, would be too presumptuous, too naïve; literature has been donelong
since. A librarian's point of view! And it would itself be too presumptuous if it weren't part of
a lively, relevant metaphysical vision,slyly employed against itself precisely to make new and
original literature.Borges defines the Baroque as “that style which deliberately exhausts
(ortries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders upon its own caricature.”

While his own work is not Baroque, except intellectually(the Baroquewas never so terse,
laconic, economical), it suggests the view that intellec-tual and literary history has been
Baroque, and has pretty well exhausted the possibilities of novelty. His ficciones are not only
footnotes toimagi-nary texts, but postscripts to the real corpus of literature.1

This premise gives resonance and relation to all his principal images.The facing mirrors that
recur in his stories are a dual regressus. The dou-bles that his characters, like Nabokov's, run
afoul of suggest dizzying multiples and remind one of Browne's remark that “every man is
not only himself...men are lived over again.” (It would please Borges, and illus-trate
Browne's point, to call Browne a precursor of Borges.``Everywriter,” Borges says in his essay
on Kafka, “creates his own precursors.”)Borges's favorite third-century heretical sect is the
Histriones-I thinkand hope he invented them-who believe that repetition is impossible in
history and who therefore live viciously in order to purge the future of devices they commit;
to exhaust the possibilities of the world in order to bring its end nearer. The writer he most
often mentions, after Cervantes,is Shakespeare; in one piece he imagines the playwright on
his deathbed asking God to permit him to be one and himself, having been everyone and no
one; God replies from the whirlwind that He is no one either: Hehas dreamed the world like
Shakespeare, and including Shakespeare.Homer's story in Book IV of the Odyssey,of
Menelaus on the beach atPharos, tackling Proteus, appeals profoundly to Borges: Proteus is
he who“exhausts the guises of reality” while Menelaus-who,one recalls,dis-guised his own
identity in order to ambush him-holds fast. Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise
embodies a regressus in infinitum whichBorges carries through philosophical history,pointing
out that Aristotle Uses it to refute Plato's theory of forms, Hume to refute the possibility of
cause and effect, Lewis Carroll to refute syllogistic deduction, WilliamJames to refute the
notion of temporal passage, and Bradley to refute the general possibility of logical relations.
Borges himself uses it, citing Scho-penhauer, as evidence that the world is our dream, our
idea, in which“tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason” can be found to remind us that our
creation is false, or at least fictive. The infinite library of one of his most popular stories is an
image particularly pertinent to the literature of exhaustion:The "Library of Babel" houses
every possible combination of alphabetical characters and spaces, and thus every possible
book and statement, including your and my refutations and vindications, the his-tory of the
actual future, the history of every possible future, and, though he doesn't mention it, the
encyclopedia not only of Tlön but of every imaginable other world-since, as in Lucretius's
universe, the number of elements and so of combinations is finite (though very large), and the
number of instances of each element and combination of elements is infi-nite, like the library
itself.

1
*It is true that he asserts in another place that the possibilitics of literature can never be exhausted, since it is
impossible to exhaust even a single book. However, his remark about the Baroque includes the attempt to
exhaust as well as the hypothetical achieve-ment of exhaustion. What's more, his cardinal themes and images
rather contradict that passing optimism-a state of affairs reminiscent of the aesthetics of Tlön,whereno book is
regarded as complete which doesn't contain its counterbook, or refutation.
That brings us to his favorite images of al1,the labyrinth,and to mypoint. Labyrinths is the
name of his most substantial translated volume,and the only current full-length study of
Borges in English, by Ana MaríaBarrenechea, is called Borges the Labyrinth-Maker. A
labyrinth, after all,is a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice (of direction,in
this case) are embodied, and-barring special dispensation like The-seus's-must be exhausted
before one reaches the heart. Where, mind,the Minotaur waits with two final possibilities:
defeat and death or vic-tory and freedom. The legendary Theseus is non-Baroque; thanks
toAriadne's thread he can take a shortcut through the labyrinth at Knossos.But Menelaus on
the beach at Pharos, for example, is genuinely Baroquein the Borgesian spirit, and illustrates
a positive artistic morality in the lit-erature of exhaustion. He is not there, after all, for kicks;
Menelaus is lost,in the larger labyrinth of the world, and has got to hold fast while the
OldMan of the Sea exhausts reality's frightening guises so that he may extort direction from
him when Proteus returns to his “true” self. It is a heroic enterprise, with salvation as its
object--one recalls that the aim of theHistriones is to get history done with so that Jesus may
come again the sooner, and that Shakespeare's heroic metamorphoses culminate not merely in
a theophany but in an apotheosis.

Now, not just any old body is equipped for this labor; Theseus in theCretan labyrinth
becomes in the end the ap test image for Borges after all.Distressing as the fact is to us liberal
democrats, the commonalty, alas,will always lose their way and their soul; it is the chosen
remnant, the vir-tuoso,the Thesean hero, who, confronted with Baroque reality, Baroque
History, the Baroque state of his art, need not rehearse its possibilities to exhaustion,any more
than Borges needs actually to write the Encyclope-dia ofTlön of the books in the Library of
Babel. He need only be aware of their existence or possibility, acknowledge them, and with
the aid of very special gifts-as extraordinary as saint- or herohood and not likely to be found
in The New York Correspondence School of Literature-go straight through the maze to the
accomplishment of his work.