The Writing of Forking Paths Borges, Calvino and Postmodern Models of Writing

Author(s): Floyd Merrell

Source: Variaciones Borges , 1997, No. 3 (1997), pp. 56-68
Published by: Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24879561

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Floyd Merrell

The Writing of Forking Paths

Borges, Calvino and Postmodern Models of Writing

Dimensions and Fractures.

other dimension of space, plotting position on one axis and

Classicaltimescience made
on the other a habit
one. Things are now of depicting
seen to be more com time as if it were an
plex than classical science would like to have them. Indeed, we might even
say they are infinitely more complex than the classical model had them.
Let us for a moment consider the familiar billiard ball example of me
chanics. Ordinarily we conceive of the ball as simply moving along a
Euclidean straight line from point A to point B where it collides with
another ball and ricochets to the right or to the left, all on a two
dimensional plane and occupying a second or so—and all of which cor
responds to a natural sort of gut feeling that has been inculcated into us
by classical mechanics. This more practical Euclidean way of seeing the
ball's behavior accounts for only two of its variables: the Cartesian co
ordinates on a plane. The ball's path in what goes by the name of
"phase space," in contrast, includes six dimensions of space (three po
sition coordinates and three momentum coordinates) plus two spin
variables. All eight variables are virtually impossible to visualize, and
in large part for that reason billiards is quite difficult to master. For a
dramatic illustration of this added complexity, imagine you are in an
airplane, and due to a technical failure you go into a tailspin. The plane
travels through three-dimensional space, with a certain velocity that
varies its position from one moment to another, and it spins in a par
ticular direction and with so many revolutions per minute, which also
varies. With this many variables to keep tabs of it is no small wonder
that pilots have difficulty coming out of a spin. Things can appear well
nigh chaotic. And they are in most cases virtually chaotic, for they are
subject to the conditions of "chaos physics" and "strange attractors"
within phase space more than they are to classical mechanics, which
plays out its drama within the relatively comfortable confines of

Variaciones Borges 3 (1997)

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Borges, Calvino & Postmodern Models of Writing 57

Euclidean space. In another way of putting it, classical physics is ar

borescent, the "new physics" is rhizomic (Deleuze and Guattari); classi
cal physics is linear textuality, the "new physics"—and by extension the
postmodern view—is nonlinearity intertextuality, "hypertext" (Landow).
And yet, and yet ... our intuitive side cries out that there's something
terribly wrong here. Surely there must be some sort of overriding order
to everything, however chaotic it might appear on the surface. And
surely this order must have evolved in a quite linearly and orderly
fashion, however many fits and jerks and setbacks there might have
been along the way. As a matter of fact, Borges's "The Garden of
Forking Paths" (Labyrinths 19-29) seems to afford the image of a linear,
infinitely bifurcative, yet most likely determinable unwinding of multi
ple possible worlds. However, this is not the case. Granted, the
"forking paths" universe is from a certain view linear and bifurcative,
and it is probably deterministic, but it is unpredictable, at least by us
finite, fallible beings suspended within it. In a manner of speaking
Borges discovered "bifurcation theory" before science did (Weissert
223).1 In fact, it might appear that in the "Garden" there are four differ
ent levels, three of mathematical dynamics and one that is apparently
subjective. The first level is that of pure abstraction of mathematical logic,
the story of Tsui Pên and his construction of the infinite, self-reflexive,
self-contained book with the same title as that of Borges's story. The
second level consists of a simulation model, the author's representation
of a fictive world as an alternative to what we ordinarily consider to be
the "real." The third level is the topological depiction of Tsui Pen's book,
a story that contains Borges's story that in turn contains the story of the
book. And the fourth level entails the subjective, time-bound grasp of the
story or stories at whichever level. Put the four levels together, and
once again we would like to believe that the whole is static, consistent,
and deterministic. What is more important, it appears to be quite orderly.
But it isn't. At the first level, logic apparently rules, classical logic that
is. The n-tuple temporal bifurcating lines making up the book entitled
The Garden of Forking Paths, which contains our universe, and which is
in turn contained within Borges's story by the same name, as a sheer
logical abstraction of the first order logic sort, in a sense falls victim to

'According to bifurcation theory, any and all open "far-from-equilibrium" systems

(i.e. systems of disorder) reach points where there are two choices. Beyond this cri
tical point the properties of the system can change abruptly, unpredictably, and
along "nonlinear" paths. These systems are most effectively accounted for, I believe,
by Ilya Prigogine's theory of "dissipative structures" (see Prigogine and Stengers).

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58 Floyd Merrell

the overpowering spirit of Gôdel's theorems: it is both inconsistent and

incomplete. That is to say, as a vast self-returning, self-contained, self
sufficient whole, it is overdetermined. Its «-tuple lines of interconnectiv
ity (intertextuality) give rise to an infinity of possible interpretations
that eventually begin looking at themselves, speaking to themselves,
addressing themselves to their own inadequacy, of the "'All Cretans
are liars,' said the man from Crete" sort. The Cretan makes an utter
ance regarding the entire class of individuals of which he is a member,
thus also becoming a victim of Bertrand Russell's violation of Logical
Types and creating a paradox. If any and all texts and their multiple
interpretations remain within the system, this is inevitable. In addition,
any and all interpretations of texts are destined to underdetermination:
whatever interpretation happens to arise, it could have been something
other than what it is, and at some future moment it runs the risk of be
ing displaced by another interpretation that, within its context, ac
counts for the same text with equal effectiveness. The first level view of
the Garden mirrors the edifice of classical logic, and it marks its demise.
The second level, a Baudrillard sort of simulations and simulations of
simulations according to which each possible path along its bifurcating
lines is virtually a reduplication of its two adjacent paths. This affords
the image of a digital machine, where at each juncture there is a choice
of either "1 " or "0," a "+" or a either a veering off to the left or to
the right. It might appear that this machinic view is that of Paul
Valéry's poem as a machine that reproduces an emotion, or Umberto
Eco's and Italo Calvino's text that is a machine for generating interpre
tations. In such case, we are addressing ourselves to computability, and
in such case we eventually enter into the limitative theorems of Alonzo
Church, Emil Post, and Alan Turing, whose climactic finale is of the
essence of Gôdel's work in mathematical logic on undecidability. There
is no way out, since if we are ourselves within the "hypertext," we are
caught up in the same inconsistency-incompleteness morass. Besides that,
we find ourselves swimming in the equivalent of the "sorites paradox."
As the bifurcating lines become less and less discernible, the appear
ance of simulacra and nothing but simulacra becomes the rule, and there
is no knowing how many paths (interpretations) we must sift through
in order to find a path (interpretation) that makes a difference (that is, a
difference that makes a difference, which is necessary, according to Greg
ory Bateson, in order to render the text meaningful).
The third level of Borges's work lands us in the paradox of the One and
the Many, or in abstract Western thought, the "arithmetical paradox,"
alluded to by physicist Erwin Schrôdinger. This paradox recapitulates

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Borges, Calvino & Postmodern Models of Writing 59

the "We are in the intertext" idea, as it is described by Schrôdinger

himself: "The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is
met nowhere within our scientific [or topological] world picture can
easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world pic
ture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in
it as a part of it" (Mind 138) (brackets mine). If a given interpretation
(text, ourselves, ego) is taken to be that which is in the here and now, it
is the whole, but since it is within the whole, it is a whole that contains
itself—i.e. Russell's paradox anew, or Borges's Aleph, a point in space
that contains all points. This paradox, it bears mentioning, is tanta
mount to Nelson Goodman's "ways of worldmaking": a given time
bound world, which, like all worlds, is fabricated rather than found,
cannot be coterminous with The World, but the concoction of all possi
ble worlds, past, present, and future, are The World, yet The World, at
any given moment in time, is either less than what it is (it is incomplete),
or it contradicts itself (it is inconsistent) —i.e. Gôdel in a new garment.
This observation brings us to the fourth level: temporality. The inter
preting agent is in a sense a traveling point, an ambulating "Aleph,"
within the whole, the "hypertext." As she creeps along her "world
line," time becomes a factor, and the vantage points available to her are
shifted time and time again. In other words, Derridean de-centering
enters the scene: "ethnology could have been born as a science only at
the moment when a de-centering had come about: at the moment when
European culture—and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics
and of its concepts—had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and
forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference" (Derrida
251). If there is time, at least for the interpreting agent, then it might
well appear that an imperious transcendental grasp of things could be
at hand: I am here, now, taking the transient universe into my percep
tual grasp. But if so, then a variation of the "preface paradox" results.
The "preface" makes a statement about the text as if it were "outside"
looking "in." The interpreting agent in ordinary circumstances thinks
he does the same. It is as if he were to say, "There exists a text without
intertextuality, and it is I." It is the protagonist of Borges's "Garden"
moving along his "world-line" as if he were bringing about the desired
end-product regarding his universe, that is, as if he were "outside"
looking "in." But he is not. The assertion "There exists a text without
intertextuality" is inextricably caught within the "intertext," the
"hypertext" as it were, and as such it is true insofar as it addresses eve
rything but itself and false insofar as it includes itself: once again, the
import of the "liar paradox." If time exists at all, and in Borges's "Gar

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60 Floyd Merrell

den" the labyrinth is precisely within a certain conception of time, not

space, then everything is in it and everything is it—Borges says so
much in the concluding lines of his "New Refutation of Time."
At any rate, we might wish to conclude, a labyrinth is a mirror or
model of the universe, according to traditional wisdom, and since we
can perhaps get a reasonably successful grasp of labyrinths, they can
help us to understand the universe, at least at some intuitive level.
However, models are not quite the reliable key we would like them to
be, as Calvino's Mr. Palomar painfully learned. According to classical
dictates, an ideal model is "that in which nothing has to be changed,
that which works perfectly." The problem, Palomar discovered, is that
reality "does not work and constantly falls to pieces, so we must force
it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model" (Calvino
1985:109). This sounds reasonable enough. Models cannot be more than
extremely limited abstractions, and as abstractions, something must be
left out of the modelandum; that it, it must be whittled down somewhat
in order to fit the modelans. Palomar, quite understandably, wanted
classical impassiveness, detachment, and objectivity, but no sooner
than the serene harmony of his chosen model appeared to be at hand,
"irrelevant accidents" would pop up in his modeled world. A "delicate
path of adjustment" was constantly required. He never ceased re
sponding to the call for "gradual corrections in the model so it would
approach a possible reality, and in reality to make it approach the
model" (Palomar 110). Soon, he needed not merely one or two models
but a great variety of them. With the continuing proliferation of models
it became apparent that a model of his models had become imperative.
Finally, after things evolved into a conceptual swamp of mind
numbing complexity (that is, "intertextuality"), Palomar concluded that
"what really counts is what happens despite them" (111). So he erased
all the models and models of models, from his mind. Then he was free
to face reality, which consists of no more than Humean-like fleeting
fragments of experience. Yet he felt he was in this state of existence the
owner of some pretty fine thoughts. That is to say, they were poten
tially fine thoughts, for to be thought and said, they must be put into
systematic linguistic form, and thus they would constantly threaten to
become models of one sort or another. So Palomar decided to "keep his
convictions in the fluid state, check them instance by instance, and
make them the implicit rule of their own everyday behavior, in doing
or not doing, in choosing or rejecting, in speaking or remaining silent"
(112). But in this state of mind Palomar's world could be nothing more
than flux, fluctuation, instability, uncertainty. In other words, although

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Borges, Calvino & Postmodern Models of Writing 61

he could now be quite certain of each and every step as an atom unto
itself and divorced from the complex (intertextual) whole, he could
know nothing of the whole, that is, without throwing himself once
again into the unruly ocean of uncertainty.

That Supreme Labyrinth, the Universe.

But, then, after all is said and done, life is quite often uncertain for most
of us, almost always uncertain for some of us, and absolutely certain
for none of us. The gods appear to be rolling the dice, and they may
even be loaded, but if so, their loading seems to be definitely out of our
favor. In ancient cultures, the cosmos was considered to be chiefly a roll
of innocent dice. Now, in the age of the "new physics" and the "science
of complexity" ("intertextuality"), it's still a matter of chance. But not
quite pure chance. For though things are unpredictable, at the same
time they are according to chaos theory at least in principle determi
nate, though determinacy at increasingly larger domains might con
tinue to elude our finite, fallible minds into the indefinite future.
It might appear, consequently, that we have been thrown into a world
without any necessary order, and without any given point necessarily
of any of higher value than any other one. This situation is comparable
to Palomar's final project, and also to that of poor "Funes the Memori
ous" (Labyrinths 59-66). For Funes, to know the number series is to
know each numeral as an individual without there existing any neces
sary relation between it and any other numeral of the series. In fact,
Funes once invented an alternative system consisting of arbitrarily se
lected terms that, given his unlimited mnemonic capacity, was equally
effective. Like the most adept of "idiot savants," he could in the blink
of an eye multiply, say, "Plata" (= 1,275) and "Quebracho" (= 836) and
respond with "Rosario" (= 1,065,900). For Funes, language also consists
of an unordered concoction of signs very loosely related, if at all, ac
cording to a haphazard sort of ars combinatoria. Or, from another per
spective, it is like an unordered set of numbers arbitrary connected in
such a way that whatever connections may have been made, they could
have always been otherwise.
Within Funes's world, how could one hope to find any sort of order?
The signs and their concepts in our world of everyday living, we would
like to believe, are tied up with the furniture of our world to which
they refer. We see a lemon and properly classify it as a "lemon" be
cause we are familiar with "lemons," with "lemonness," with
"yellowness," and so on. Or at least our ability to so use language is
one of our last great hopes that words can and actually do correspond

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62 Floyd Merrell

to our world: at all costs we would like to fear not the possibility of our
signs and our world becoming hopelessly chaotic. Consequently, we
would be quite homeless and totally lost in Funes's world. It would
appear to us to be somewhat in the order of a Buddhist flash-dance
where everything is always already different. For Funes, what is be
coming isn't yet, and since it isn't yet, then once it is, it's already be
coming something else, but it isn't yet. What it will be, that is what it is
becoming, is the dissipation of what it was in the last moment, and
what it will have been becoming in the next moment. That is, at each
moment it is what it is, but it actually is not what it is because it is al
ways already transforming itself into something other than what it is.
But actually, in light of the above sections there is no guarantee that we
have any certainty we can put our fingers on than our hapless friend,
Funes. In fact, inspired by Funes's world, it would be possible for us to
imagine and invent new terms of all sorts at the drop of a hat, and we
would never cease to be surprised, awed, dumbstruck, and even either
shocked or numbed by the plethora of new signs we found ourselves
spewing forth. Funes, who can see only particulars, sees, in the sense of
the four levels of the "Garden," sees nothing but points. But a point is a
point, capable of containing many points, in fact, of containing all
points. The gazer of Borges's "Aleph" and the protagonist of the
"Garden" would like to think they perceive and conceive of everything
that is. In an abstract way of putting it, they perceive and conceive of a
concoction of points, which in its totality in in essence no more than a
point. Is their perceptual and conceptual grasp really superior to that of
Funes? What advantage, really, can they possibly have anyway? Are
they not trapped within the "hypertext" just as much as is Funes? Can
the same not be said of us?

But once again, we instinctively rebel in the face of such confusion.

What about what is, that is what surely must be, clearly and distinctly
and once and for all? That Parmenidean fantasy in defiance of Hera
clitean flux and flow is difficult to shake. Another turn to Calvino may
help clarify the issue.

And Then There Was Time, Complex Time.

Calvino's "The Count of Monte Cristo" (T Zero 137-52) offers a vivid
example of the form of what goes by the name of "complex time."
The protagonist is confined to a cell with a tiny barred window "at the
end of a shaft that pierces the thickness of the wall: it frames no view;
from the greater or lesser luminosity of the sky I can recognize ap
proximately the hours and the seasons; but I do not know if, beneath

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Borges, Calvino b Postmodern Models of Writing 63

that window, there is the open sea or the ramparts or one of the inner
courtyards of the fortress" (137). This affords him no more than a tun
nel perspective, or better, a funnel perspective. Since the funnel is inor
dinately long, it is possible that the walls could contain another cell
between his cell and the outside, and between this inner cell and the out
side, and the inner cell and his own cell, there could be two more cells,
and so on, a situation reminiscent of the "Menger sponge" of fractal dy
namics (for a discussion, see Stewart).2 It is also the image of a static
form of "intertextuality," the "hypertext" timelessly there for all time.
This being the case, the number of cells in the prison is unforseeable, as
is the total length of the walls of these cells. Moreover, if the "Menger
sponge" were complete, its virtually innumerable walls would finally
dissolve into space and the "sponge" would be completely empty.
Consequently, our prisoner would have no way of knowing how much
of the prison consists of walled cells and how much of unconfined
space. That is to say, if the "Menger sponge" prison were extrapolated
to its ultimate, it would consist of pure space, hence it would be no
prison at all but would allow for pure freedom. The walls would be in
finitely thin, no more than a mathematical imaginary line. Yet, the sum
of the area of the walls of the cells would be infinite, so at the infinite
stretch of things the prison, this cosmic prison, would in a sense be
more confining than ever, paradoxically. It would be a plenum.
In the dank darkness of his dungeon, the narrator's perception is more
auditory than visual, even with intractable elements of tactile, olfactory,
and gustatory imagery. He pricks up his ears at the faint sounds in
dicative of jagged spaces and forms around him. He tries to infer "the
network of the corridors, the turns, the openings, the straight lines bro
ken by the dragging of the kettle to the threshold of each cell and by
the creak of the locks," but succeeds "only in fixing a succession of
points in time, without any correspondence in space" (138). He be
comes obsessed with escape. But in order to realize his goal he must
first know the whole plan, the pattern, of the edifice. But he cannot
know the whole, for, like the human library rats in Borges's "Library of
Babel," he is caught within a minuscule portion of it.
Abbé Faria, another prisoner, has perforated the walls of the edifice in
every direction. His itineraries wind around themselves like a ball of
yarn or a "strange attractor." As a consequence, he long ago lost his

2 Indeed, we read that "the cell, the aperture, the corridors along which the jailer
comes twice a day with the soup and the bread could be simply tiny pores in a rock
of spongy consistency" (T Zero 138).

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64 Floyd Merrell

sense of direction: he no longer recognizes the cardinal points, and ze

niths and nadirs have no meaning for him. At times the narrator can
hear him, perhaps scratching at the ceiling; plaster falls; a hole opens up:
Faria's head appears, upside down. Upside down for me, not for
him; he crawls out of his tunnel, he walks head down, while nothing
about his person is ruffled, not his white hair, nor his beard green
with mold, nor the tatters of sack-cloth that cover his emaciated
loins. He walks across the ceiling and the walls like a fly, he sinks his
pick into a certain spot, a hole opens; he disappears. (141)

Faria even has trouble distinguishing one cell from another. As such,
the fortress has no favored point, no center. Or better, like Borges's
"Library," every point can be conceived as the center, and its circum
ference can therefore be construed as everywhere. In other words, it
appears to follow diverging, converging, convoluted, involuted, non
linear lines to nowhere and everywhere. In a strange way, it is rhizomic
(i.e. "hypertextual" in the most perverse way). And time, within this
"block" universe, is not that McTaggart A-Series time as a flow from
the past into the future along the knife-edge of the "now," but rather, it
is B-Series time consisting of static befores and afters with nothing in
between; it is "complex time," mathematical or "imaginary" time based
on the function of V-1, which is actually timelessness from the perspec
tive of our own subjective time.
Finally, as Faria opens another breach in a wall—or perhaps the floor
or the ceiling—he bursts into Alexandre Dumas's study, where the
author is in the process of writing a novel about the narrator in the for
tress. As it turns out, in this concentric fortress Dumas's desk contains
the narrator, and all the other prisoners as well, along with the treas
ure, and even the "supernovel" Monte Cristo, "with its variants and
combinations of variants in the nature of billions of billions but still in a
finite number" (T Zero 150).3 And we once again become trapped
within that paradox plaguing the four levels of the "Garden." Might we
call it the "intertext paradox," the "interdoxal paratext" (or perhaps
simply the "hypertext")?

Advancing or at a Standstill, Wherever We Are?

We get a complementary sort of uncanny feeling, for an instant we
even sense a sort of mise en abyme, regarding an impossible end-point

3 We have read this story before, of course, from the narrator of Borges's "Library of
Babel" who is in the Library and in the act of writing the short story about the Li
brary which the reader is in the act of reading, also, presumably, from within that
selfsame Library.

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Borges, Calvino & Postmodern Models of Writing 65

during a reading of Borges's "The Book of Sand" (117-22), The narrator

is introduced to this infinite book by an unnamed stranger who told
him the book was so called "because neither the book nor the sand has
any beginning or end." He asks the narrator to find the first page:
I laid my left hand on the cover and, trying to put my thumb on the
flyleaf, I opened the book. It was useless. Every time I tried, a num
ber of pages came between the cover and my thumb. It was as if they
kept growing from the book.
"Now find the last page."
Again I failed. In a voice that was not mine, I barely managed to
stammer, "This can't be." Still speaking in a low voice, the stranger
said, "It can't be, but it is. The number of pages in this book is no
more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none the last. I don't
know why they're numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps to sug
gest that the terms of an infinite series admit any number." (119)

As if the stranger were thinking aloud, he then remarks: "If space is

infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be
at any point in time" (119). The infinite knows of no beginning, middle,
or end. It imply is as it is, and if it is "cut," somewhere, at an arbitrarily
selected point, the "cut" is our "cut": we are ourselves "cuts" that never
cease to exercise "cuts" in the continuum of possibilities before us, pos
sibilities that we are a part of. The infinite is tropologically recapitu
lated in Renaissance philosopher Nicolas da Cusa, the circumference of
whose sphere which is God is nowhere and whose center is everywhere.
Or, also tropologically speaking, it is like Borges's "Library," or the dun
geon within which the narrator of Calvino's "Count of Monte Cristo"
has been thrown. Up or down, forward or backward, here or there, this
"center" or that "center," it's all the same. It is "infinity in all directions,"
if I may avail myself of Freeman Dyson's provocative phrase.
The narrator's predicament in Borges's tale also reminds us of mathe
matician Georg Cantor's work with infinity. Cantor teaches that we can
add 1,10,100, or 1010 integers to our initial sign depicting infinity and it
will be that much larger, though the numbers contained within that
infinite set is still the same, infinity.4 If the number of pages in the book

4 Infinity, I must clarify at this juncture, comes in two shapes: actual infinity and po
tential infinity. We tend to experience a chalk mark on a blackboard as continuous
(an actual infinity) but it is not, for it merely fails to reveal noticeable gaps to the
naked eye. It is no more than the visible expression of a potential. Zeno's paradoxes
are predicated on the concept of a potential infinity (a never-ending succession of
steps). However, since the implication of actual infinity underlies this concept, Zeno
is not a finitist, and finitistic arguments, which merely banish the idea of the actual
infinite altogether, cannot legitimately dispel him (Benardete, Infinity 13-20).

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66 Floyd Merrell

were less than infinity, and yet if that number is virtually unfathom
able—as was the number of pages in the book for the narrator—then
there is no way one can know without a shadow of a doubt whether
the book is of infinite or finite length. What is more, there is no know
ing where the beginning and ending of the book are to be found, or
where one is when opening the book to a particular page. This is the
same dilemma that confounded the inhabitants of Borges's "Library."
For ages it has also been the dilemma we have confronted in this laby
rinth we call the universe. Is the universe infinite or finite? Orderly or
disorderly? If infinite and either orderly or disorderly, we cannot know
that it is so until and unless we reach the infiniteth point, which we
cannot do, so we cannot know. If it is finite and orderly, we can at least
in principle know it is so, but according to the latest scientific reports it
is more disorderly (chaotic) than orderly. Still, we cannot know, ulti
mately know.
Significantly, in this light, astrophysicist David Layzer ("Arrow" 68)
has put forth the radical hypothesis that not only can we, from our
"microcosmic" vantage, not know where we are in the universe, such
information would be impossible even at the "macrocosmic" level, for:
The order is unknowable even in principle. Imagine an unbounded
stack of playing cards, topless and bottomless, deck piled on deck
without limit. Information about the order of the cards in one section
of the stack is of no help, because any given sequence is repeated an
infinite number of times elsewhere, in the same way that patterns of
stars and galaxies are repeated throughout the universe. It is mean
ingless to say that you are at such and such a place in the stack, even
when you have full information about the order of the cards and that
place. You still don't know whereabouts you are in the stack, any more
than the typical observer knows whereabouts he is in the cosmos.

In fact, an infinite sequence of spatial increments or temporal intervals

has no last term; neither does it have a first term, for the finite human
agent that is.
Samuel Beckett's entire opus also bears witness to this sort of phenome
non. Each work, each chapter, paragraph, sentence, word, is subli
mated from Beckett's brain-mind with increasing excruciation, until
hardly any words are forthcoming at all. In his trilogy, Molloy, caught
up in a journey toward the whereabouts of his mother, ends up in a
ditch, face down. Malone's pencil scratches fewer and fewer words on
paper as the seemingly interminable moments drag by. The Unnamable
longs for, but never encounters, "the story ... that I should never have
left, that I may never find again, that I may find again, then ... it will be
I, it will be the place, the silence, the end, the beginning, the beginning

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Borges, Calvino & Postmodern Models of Writing 67

again, how can I say it, that's all words, they're all I have, and not
many of them, the words fail, the voice fails, so be it" (Molloy 413). The
protagonist of How It Is painfully inches forth in the ooze within which
he finds himself, having departed from an irretrievable beginning and
with no possible end in sight. If that last word could have come gur
gling from his mouth, from the depths of his body and mind, it would
have been virtually no word, perhaps a mere syllable, perhaps even
less, surely even less. It would have been well-nigh nothing, no-thing,
at the end of the Zenoesque infinitely stretched asymptote. It would be
itself and nothing but itself. It would be one pearl of the entire Buddhist
string of pearls each of which mirrors the whole. It would be a cosmic
black hole, or a "naked singularity"—or Borges's "Aleph"—containing
everything and every event in the entire history of the universe. In a
footnote at the conclusion of Borges's "Library" we read of a comparable
phenomenon. It consists of the hypothesis that, "rigorously speaking, a
single volume would be sufficient" (Labyrinths 58). The middle page of
this solitary, all-encompassing volume would have no reverse because it
would be the equivalent of "0," that marvelous state of absolute noth
ingness, whose origin lies in Buddhist philosophy and the Sanskrit lan
guage, separating the positive integers from the negative integers. It
would have no reverse side, for there would be nothing (no-thing) to see,
since an infinite series will not tolerate an existent final term.5

But actually, what have we in our infinite series if not the ultimate of
complexity? Of asymmetry, disequilibrium, fluctuation, dissipation,
fractal geometry, virtual chaos, that is, "hypertext"? And at the same
time, what is this complexity that we may somehow know it if it is not
the ultimate of simplicity? It must be of the most simple of simples, if,
ineffable though it is, we can nevertheless, and with great effort, some
how know it. From within this whole any part of which is tantamount
to the whole itself, perhaps the best we can do is create impoverished
images or struggle with our hopelessly inadequate language: Calvino's
"Prison," Borges's "Garden," that Buddhist string of pearls, the fractal
image of chaos that can be generated on the supersensitive monitor.
Ah, yes, the monitor, and its ubiquitous "internet," product of the most
recent monumental achievements of Western technology: its brilliant
hues dazzle us, perhaps allowing us to think we can gently lift the veil
somehow to perceive beyond. Beyond? No. Sheer illusion. There is no
beyond, for everything is within itself.

5 1 am assuming, of course, that we are taking infinity to be of the potential rather

than the actual variety.

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68 Floyd Merrell

What are we, simple and fallible knowers, that we may somehow know
complexity and its concomitant chaos, and what is complexity
("hypertext") that it may somehow be known by us, minuscule parts of
that which is simply known?

Floyd Merrell
Purdue University

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