Labyrinths

"Circular Ruins" touches on the notion of immortality through the art of cloning with dreaming by using magical rites. The labyrinth occurs in the form of the continuity of life and living through mental cloning of another person. This labyrinth is created through the story line itself as well as the writing techniques used by Borges. The writer uses the free flow stream of consciousness technique of writing to create a sense of timelessness. There is no concept of time introduced except for the  few references such as "ninth or tenth night", "one afternoon" and "two or three hours" and even so these references are not specific creating a sense of ambiguity suggesting time is not of importance. Without the concept of time, the story takes place and the story of creating a clone becomes one that is cyclical as evident in the ending when the wizard himself realises that he himself is a clone made from someone else's imagination. 

The use of dreams as a form of labyrinths is interesting because in the imagined world there is no right or wrong, what is known in reality can completely be reversed. It is intriguing when Borges brings in the concept of how dreams can become dialectical and actually be seen as a logical discussions of ideas. This redefinition of dreams as reality gets the reader questioning which parts of the story is a dream and which part is reality. Borges also makes constant references to sleep as though sleep is the only form of escape. He introduces the concept of lucid dreaming one that is used by the wizard to perhaps suggest that the mind can only be free from the constriction of reality when it is unconscious.He reverses the expectations of reality by placing the importance on dreaming and how life revolves around this act. (Seen from "realised that he had not dreamed. All that night and the next day, the unbearable lucidity of insomnia harried him,"and "He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming")

Borges deals with the concept of idealism, the manifestation of thoughts in the "real world", meaningful dreams, and immortality. The story can also be seen as a symbolism of writers as creators who influence one another and whose existence and originality would be impossible without their predecessors.

"Each individual is doomed to experience for the first time that which all his ancestors have gone through and all his progeny will go through: birth and death; love and loneliness; the quest for knowledge and disappointment; the circular ruin."





"The Library of Babel" deals with the interesting concept of the universe as a library; a place associated with reading into reading into the past to study the history as well as reflecting and pondering upon past happenings. The descriptions of the library ("Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty- two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters.") touches on the idea of repetition and the idea of the circle of life with pattern and routine of days. 

He constantly refers to the library as being infinite as a reference to how life goes on irregardless of the person who is living it, life as an unstoppable force always changing and always growing. One action or another leads to another hexagonal room and people are lost in transition constantly moving and evolving like the endlessness of the hexagonal structure of the library. 

"The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable." There is a intriguing reference to the library as a sphere because there are no corners, and no sides to it. No start and no end to it. No entrance and no exit to it. Hexagons are the unit that makes it up because they can be easily tessellated and the many sides represent the complexity of life and also that these are phases that are all joined and related to each other in one way or another. The mental image of a tessellating hexagon surfaces in my mind creating a sense of stretched eternity. 

The concept of the library as being too much and simply infinite highlights the limit to human's power to know about the universe and the concept of the librarian as Him brings in the concept of religion and having a higher power. The labyrinth occurs in the form of never being able to fully comprehend everything in this library, a labyrinth of knowledge. The library becomes a temptation, even an obsession, because it contains these gems of enlightenment while also burying them in deception.  The infinite storehouse of information is a hindrance and a distraction, because it lures one away from writing one's own book. This traps the reader in a labyrinth of roles of being both the reader and the writer.