352
RICHARD POIRIER
and vast evidence of an orderly planet?
It
is useless, but in accord–
ance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we
never quite grasp. Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth
devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
The joke, if
it
might be called one, is that any inventiveness thorough
enough, any inventiveness that can be made into a "strict, systematic
plan" can take over the world. And why? Because the existent reality
by which the world is governed is itself only an alternate invention.
One point of the joke is that
if
invention is probably endless, forever
displacing itself, if the most solid-seeming contrivance is merely con–
tingent, then literature, Borges' own writing and especially this piece
of writing, is merely the most trivial and expendable form of fiction–
making.
In fact, literature is only incidentally the object of Borges'
parody, as we see even more plainly in the text which Michel
Foucault says inspired his
Les Mots et les Choses.
In this text Borges
quotes "a certain Chinese encyclopedia" where it is written that
"'Animals are divided into a) belonging to the Emperor, b) em–
balmed, c) tamed, d) suckling pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) dogs
at liberty, h) included in the present classification, i) which act
like madmen, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camels'
hair brush, 1) et cetera, m) which have just broken jugs, n) which
from afar look like flies." What fascinates Foucault in this passage is
that the exotic charm of another system of thought can so far ex–
.pose the limitations of our own. But I think Borges is being more
foxy than that: he won't allow
any
element of this or of any of his
texts, not even the inferred standards behind his verbal parodies, to
become stabilized or authoritative. Borges himself can't be located
in most of his writing and we're instead engaged by relatively anony–
mous narrators. These, while instrumental to Borges' parody, are
also its object, much as is Joyce's nameless narrator within the com–
plex of parodies in the Cyclops episode of
Ulysses.
Self-enclosed and
remotely special in their interests, Borges' narrators are concerned
with essentially cabalistic facts and systems of very questionable
derivation. Everything in his texts is, in the literal sense of the word,
eccentric: he is a writer with no center, playing off, one against the
other, all those elements in his work which aspire to centrality. Thus,
while the division of animals in "a certain Chinese encyclopedia"
