Abstract
This chapter presents close readings of Borges’s most famous meta-detective stories: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Death and the Compass,” and “Ibn Hakam al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth.” I argue that these stories share the ramifications and complexity of the labyrinth, a leitmotif that determines both their themes and structures. My point is that the texts’ essential ambiguity ensues from the paradoxical nature of the labyrinth itself, which works as a paragon of both order and disorder, design and arbitrariness: a very rational figure when observed from above, but an infernal structure in which the detectives inevitably get lost as soon as they cross the maze’s threshold.
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Notes
- 1.
It is intriguing to remark that, like Poe, Borges only wrote three detective texts, of which the two first cases mirror, chronologically, the publication of Poe’s own ratiocination tales. “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges’s first detective story, was published exactly one century after “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1941. His second tale of detection, “Death and the Compass,” was published in 1942, that is, one century after Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Finally, if Poe wrote “The Purloined Letter” in 1844, it took Borges a little more time to complete “Ibn Hakam al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth,” his third variation on the genre, not published until 1951.
- 2.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome is an open form of communication which “spreads horizontally through leaps where each germination marks a new root system and one cannot assign an origin or end-point” (McMahon 2005, 50). The model of the rhizome is thus more liberating than that of the labyrinth which imprisons its practitioners.
- 3.
Another good example of cyclical investigation in which history seems to strangely copy literature can be found in Borges’s “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.”
- 4.
This device comes back in “Death and the Compass.”
- 5.
This description naturally reminds one of Dupin’s identification with the Minister D— whom he describes as “both mathematician and poet” (1975c, 218). It is also interesting to note that Dupin, for the same reason, prefers the “game of draughts” to chess because it requires a “superior acumen” and not only strong attention. In other words, for Dupin, “to calculate is not in itself to analyze” and draughts train the analytical mind to solve crime mysteries (Poe 1975a, 141–142).
- 6.
Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart (1895–1970) was a captain in the British army as well as a prolific military historian and theorist.
- 7.
For a detailed analysis of the introduction of Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” see Chibka’s essay (Chibka 1999).
- 8.
Dream of the Red Chamber is one of China’s great classical novels written in the eighteenth century. Authored by Cáo Xuěqín, the book is especially known for the huge cast of characters that it displays.
- 9.
This second nickname makes of Red Scharlach the opposite of the flâneur and thus of the detective. As Brand explains, the two types of men, who coexist in Baudelaire’s depiction of the artist in the modern age, are not complementary but opposite figures: “The flâneur aspires to invisibility, rejoicing in his incognito. The dandy, on the other hand, wishes to attract the curious gazes of others. The flâneur is endlessly curious ad responsive to what he sees, the dandy is blasé, affecting an attitude of insensibility. […] They are, if anything, inverted mirror images of each other” (1991, 199). Red Scharlach only has one goal in mind: draw Lönnrot’s attention and take revenge.
- 10.
The name Red Scharlach already seems to be “doubled”: double red, the color of blood, as it is also reminiscent of a contagious febrile disease. Similarly, the suffix “rot” of the detective’s name means red in German but also implies an idea of forthcoming decay in English. For more name interpretations in “Death and the Compass ,” see Irwin’s analysis (1994, 30–32).
- 11.
Scharlach can be compared to Flambeau, the criminal-artist in Chesterton’s “The Blue Cross ,” since he artfully created a plot for the detective to solve, Lönnrot failing where Brown’s rational faith would have led to the investigator’s victory. For a comparative reading of the two stories, see Hayes and Tololyan’s article (1981).
- 12.
It might be interesting to note that Black Finnegan is a character not dissimilar to Richard Madden in “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Finnegan is a “former Irish criminal now overwhelmed […] by honesty” (1998a, 115) while Madden is described as a traitor, an “Irishman at the order of the British” capable of anything in order to win some favors (1998b, 76).
- 13.
It is also thanks to a letter that Stephen Albert was able to decipher Ts’ui Pen’s work (1998b, 82).
- 14.
This alias is another implicit clue supposed to comfort Lönnrot in a religious explanation of the crimes since Spinoza was a key figure of the seventeenth century concerned with the possibility of reaching an objective interpretation of the Bible. For more information about Spinoza’s approach to hermeneutics, see Morrow’s work (Morrow 2016). Like the classical detective he tried to impose reason on a text/quest which in its essence refutes that possibility.
- 15.
According to Irwin , the two friends’ names are also representative of their function: Dunraven refers to another poet, the author of “The Raven,” and Unwin probably alludes “to the unwinnable game of trying to be one up on a specular double” (1994, 38). What is more, the figure of the detective-poet also reminds one of Gabriel Syme, “the poet of law” and order in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (2011, 3).
- 16.
This structure also recalls the Qur’anic spiderweb which “was circular and had only one central room” (López-Baralt 2013, 80).
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Dechêne, A. (2018). Jorge Luis Borges’s Textual Labyrinths. In: Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94469-2_5
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