In The Aleph, Borges predicts the internet : "... Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it
“interesting,” and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern
man.
“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner
sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs,
phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries,
timetables, handbooks, bulletins...”
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our
twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain;
nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed."
Agreed, we need a postscript from the author explaining that he set out to avoid drawing a comparison with chaotic systems, but after months of editing and tearing up handwritten drafts found himself arriving at one anyway.
I found myself thinking of the fixed point theorems, as if compressing ideas and culture into a story must at least necessarily repeat exactly some small part of every other book written on the same subject.
But also of clean-room implementations; as if Don Quixote represents an idea and in implementation of that idea one must inevitably duplicate some small part of someone else's independent implementation.
Yeah, I love Borges but this was kind of a stretch. There are better Borges stories that would fit the chaos theme better too. “The Lottery in Babylon” might work as it explores how much chance influences our lives.
My take on that one was how much of our modern society's structures are just instruments for hedging against the chance of any given day to day life. How hierarchies might grow out of equal chance based outcomes.
A lot of (probably valid) criticism in these comments. Personally I find the comparison between strange attractors and hermeneutics really fun. I imagine the self-similarity in interpretations could be attributed to something akin to the "universal human experience". It's like we're iterating the hermeneutic circle... Whether or not that is something Borges intended I suppose is up to interpretation!
> I love Borges the author because he appears to have understood, at an intuitive literary level, deep truths about reality that physicists and mathematicians hadn't even discovered in his time.
I doubt we need to go all the way to physicists and mathematicians.
> ...Menard invented a whole new way to read, one where you deliberately imagine the text as written at a different time and by a different author, leading to radically different interpretations of the original text.
A simpler explanation is that Borges had some experience (don't we all?) with partisans, reviewers, and even scholars, who seem wilfully to imagine their chosen text as written at a different time and by a different author than it had been.
[Given the nice discussion in TFA of changing connotations of symbols: are there genres beyond Country&Western where the chorus stays syntactically the same but semantically changes after intervening verses? My current goto example is Husky's "I only Roll 'Em", where the title is indeed the first line of the chorus, but the listener's interpretation of "roll" and "them" changes over ~150 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM ]
> A simpler explanation is that Borges had some experience (don't we all?) with partisans, reviewers, and even scholars, who seem wilfully to imagine their chosen text as written at a different time and by a different author than it had been.
I don't think this does the Menard story justice (although I'm not sure I buy the interpretation you're critiquing either)
You're on the right lines but you paint it as some kind of irritated put down of bad interpretations. I think Borges trying to probe (in a witty and playful way) the thing that we all do when when we attempt to read something from another time or place. He's not particularly passing judgement as I don't think he is claiming there's an easy way round the problems.
EDIT - I've just done the thing I hate other people doing - replying to a comment without reading TFA properly. I'll remedy this but I want my reply to stand because I disagree with your characterisation and it's currently the top comment.
OK, fair enough — I think I was opposing TFA too strongly, and prefer your interpretation overall!
(although I'd like to believe I try to meet authors halfway, and try to meet their manifold at a tangent [or a least a secant which makes a reasonable approximation]).
Not having read this Borges' short novel, I suspect OP might be seeing in it more than what's there. But it still was a very nice read during along train commute.
Part of the point of Borges is to read more into than what is there. It's why when you meet a fellow fan, you know you are going to need to sit by a fire, perhaps with a glass of something strongly affecting on the soul (I suggest whisky), and talk for a while about the nature of the ideas in his stories. Reading Borges is like going for a deep, strange swim in some deep ideas, not all of which are comfortable.
The comment about context is spot on; linguists call the mentioned phenomenon "associative meaning" after Leech (1981: 18).
The OP uses the Italian fascism symbol. Hitler's appropriation of the symbol for the sun - taken from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism (and apparently in some places in Africa, too) - can also be used to explain it: it has forever changed the _associative meaning_ of it - and now the symbol (legally banned in Germany outside of historic educational/research context) evokes images not of sun workship, but of the worst evils committed by mankind: gas chambers with scratch marks of human fingernail, human skin turned into lamp shades and piles of starved bodies, tens of millions dead one way or another (holocaust and WWII).
That history leaves a sad, repulsive, shocking and painful memory imprinted on one's brain (assuming one has some empathy and conscience), and seeing the symbol in the 19th century would be quite difference in comparison; this memory association cannot be "un-thought" (and as moral obligation, shouldn't!).
On a related note, looking at the European elections, it is shameful and beyond believe that some want to turn back the clock (actual fascists) or to protest-vote like the folks did in the 1930s (coward followers).
Leech, Geoffrey N. (1981) _Semantics: The Study of Meaning_ (2nd ed.), London: Penguin).
a human skin lampshade was reported to have been displayed by Buchenwald concentration camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch and his wife Ilse Koch, along with other human skin artifacts.[2][3][4] Despite myths to the contrary, there were no systematic efforts by the Nazis to make human skin lampshades.[5]
The German Corpse Factory or Kadaververwertungsanstalt (literally "Carcass-Utilization Factory"), also sometimes called the "German Corpse-Rendering Works" or "Tallow Factory"[1] was one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity propaganda stories circulated in World War I. In the postwar years, investigations in Britain and France revealed that these stories were false.
[...]
Rumours that the Germans used the bodies of their soldiers to create fat appear to have been circulating by 1915. Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary on 16 June 1915: “We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap.”[7] Such stories also appeared in the American press in 1915 and 1916.[7] The French press also took it up in Le Gaulois, in February, 1916.
This is horseshit. Even the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem says that concentration camp lampshades made of human skin were probably myth. The one extant example was tested in 2012, seems it's just cow leather.
it seems important that the comment was written with no concern for whether it was true or false; it puts it outside the pale of serious discourse and more in the category of trolling
