Week 5: "Labyrinths" (Borges)

 Hi everyone! I was reading some of the blogs before I started to write mine and noticed that a lot of people already had an idea or knew about Jorge Luis Borges. I had never heard about him before nor was I familiar with any of his other works. I decided to do a little research on him after reading the novel for this week, since I really struggled with trying to understand most of it. The website I was reading talked about how the majority of his work played with the themes and concepts of the intersection between dreams and reality. I think once I understood this I was able to understand a little bit more of what some of the stories were about. The first story in Labyrinths “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, took me a while to understand that he was talking about fictional worlds that he had created. 

The lecture was talking about the intersectionality of “play” in Borges works. I think that this is very evident in this story. When describing Tlön and its values on philosophy, psychology, science, and other subjects it was interesting how Borges was able to take them apart and create an almost new idea of those things entirely. Although I didn’t really understand the meaning or the importance of a lot of the stories in the novel, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” included, I can still respect the creativity that goes into creating a piece like this. The section where he is discussing geometry in Tlön stood out to me. Borges writes, “this geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him” (25). I feel like his way of creating an entirely new concept of how things are done off of something, like geometry, which has been around and taught for many many years to be quite fascinating. It is hard to change someone's perception of something so well known and common to everyone, it forces the reader to really think and change their understanding of the world around them. 

I wanted to circle back to the themes of the relationship between dreams and reality and play within Borges work. This made me think of some of the work I do in my film classes and I think these concepts come up a lot. In film theory there are two opposing sides to a very large spectrum of establishing which is the “superior” way to think about film. Formalism, which is more of the dream side, strays away from reality at all costs, while realism believes that all films should strive to replicate reality to a tee. When I came across this understanding of Borges work, I was thinking about how we should be able to have aspects of both dream and reality in our everyday lives. I think Borges' work reflects this idea a lot. Although his work was super confusing to me, I understand some of the messages and themes he is putting out there. My question for this week is, in what ways do you guys see, feel, or understand this relationship between dreams and reality. Is there an example in Labyrinths that stood out to you?