/lit/ - Literature

Did you guys know Borges wrote a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft? It was published in The Atlantic in the 1970s.

You can read the full story here:

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1975/07/236-1/132567396.pdf

>>22766105
Sounds like you should read it again.

It's not a major feature of the story, but one of my favorite little bits in the story is that there was a contingent of mapmakers that tried to make the most accurate map possible of a certain country, omitting no details at all as best they could.

The map they made gradually grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until the map of the country covered the same amount of space, the same amount of square miles, as the country itself.

It's very funny and, as is typical in Borges, it also makes a philosophical point. A map can never be the thing it represents. A map of a country can't be the country itself. There is always going to be something to a country that the map omits. In the same way, a guide, a representation, of something is never going to be the thing itself. There's always going to be some omission in a map, which can only be corrected by actually engaging directly with the thing the map represents.

Let's have a Borges thread.

What's your favorite story of his?

Do you have a favorite work of nonfiction by him?

Are you excited that his wife is finally dead?

dude labyrinths lmao

Hey /lit/ what's the deal with this guy? What was he into? Do you think he knew something we all don't know? Did he belong to any secret society? Also, post lit masters who belonged to secret societies

One of the most important writers of the previous century, it was difficult for me to read it at first, but that problem is solved by continuing to read

>>14926244
Go blind.
I'm serious, I think Borges' failing vision had as much an impact on his style as the fact that he read encyclopedias cover-to-cover as a child.

>>8629643
>>8629658
>>8629665
Blessed are the lovers and the loved, and those who can do without love.

DFW on Borges:

>The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.

>And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one.

The world's never seen him.

Only reflections of the original. In fact... you've never really seen anyone.

Is Dostoevsky postmodern? A lit major in one of my classes today said he was.

pic unrelated

>start reading borges
>every story is about knife fighting gauchos trapped in a labyrinth of mirrors

Is there a name for the literary device where a description is not precise, but instead multiple different possibilities are offered? Borges uses it ALL the time, for example:

>the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts
>contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality
>He was tall, thin, Indian-like, with the inexpressive face of a mask or a dullard.

Sometimes the two adjectives offered are exact opposites, which produces a striking effect:

>Like all men of good taste, Menard abhorred these useless carnivals, fit only— as he would say—to produce the plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthrall us with the elementary idea that all epochs are the same or are different

I really fucking love it. I've also noticed it used in a few of Borges's predecessors, though not to such a great extent...are there any other authors who use it a lot?

As Borges wrote, "ambiguity is richness", which is why it works so well.

We revel in magical realism.