Alex Wright

of libraries, labyrinths and black-turtleneck semiotics

July 13, 2002

Over the past few months, I've been surprised to find myself turning into a regular at the San Francisco Public Library (whose design, unlike Nicholson Baker, I actually quite admire).

Today I wandered by to discover they're hosting a new Jorge Luis Borges exhibit. Being a nominal Borges fan - mostly by virtue of a) my former life as an academic librarian (Borges is something of a literary folk hero to library types, having worked for years in menial library jobs before hitting the literary big time and being named national librarian of Argentina), and b) having gone to Brown during its semiotics heyday, when you couldn't swing a deconstructed cat without hitting a black-turtlenecked semiotics major toting a Borges text in his handmade Guatemalan rucksack - I decided to take a stroll through the exhibit.

The exhibit was nicely conceived and thoroughly researched. The high points for me were the original manuscript pages on display, and the snappy exhibit writing. A few quick mental notes:

• first and foremost: the man had tiny, tiny handwriting
• he wrote everything out in long hand on square-lined graph paper (seems appropriate somehow)
• he apparently adored encyclopedias above all other books (which doubtless explains the story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which the world's enslavement by a distant alien race has been chronicled in a short encyclopedia entry - and thus has gone entirely unnoticed by everyone in the world)
• i've always been fascinated by Borges' literary visions of the library as a virtual labyrinth (cf., of course, The Name of the Rose). one notion i picked up here was Borges' concept of the labyrinth as a "perplexity machine" - and that perplexity gives rise to the possibility of metaphysics. Borges once said that perplexity had been the defining emotional outlook for most of his life. this, it is said, is the logic of the future - with its interdependencies of meaning, its interlocked texts, and its constantly shifting semantics.

uh oh, since when did I start speaking Semiotic? quick, someone get me a decaf latte.

File under: Books

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