I was hooting and hollering from the drop with this episode because I love Borges, he cracked my head open in grad school and I think he's still a really solid antidote for any budding philologist to inoculate themselves against the dreariest conceptual pitfalls of the discipline. But around 32:00 they start zeroing in on some of Borges's (very understandable) cultural chauvinisms and it made me want to go and reread [this great essay] (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/765982) (sorry if it's paywalled), "Other People's Books" by Nan Z. Da, in New Literary History 51:3 (2020). It's so good on the reception of "Garden of Forking Paths" and the orientalist logics that bind the original story and the uses to which Computer and Science Nerds have wanted to put it.
The twin romances of the story are important because they appear together without upstaging each other, not because they are exaggerative in and of themselves. To simply expose the romance of the Chinese reader, one need only consult Chinese library practices, reading cultures, and historical textual practices (to say nothing of plain good sense). The ancestor character, Ts'ui Pên, is entirely fictive, but plausible reallife counterparts would include late Ming bibliophiles, catalogers, and readers like Fan Qin 范钦 (1506-1585), who built up the famous library, Tianyi ge (天一阁), Feng Fang 丰访 (1493-1566) and his Wanjuan lou (万卷楼), or Yuan Zhongche 袁忠彻 (1376-1458) and his Jingsi zhai (静思斋). An even closer example would be the garden-designer and book collector Qi Chenghan 祁承㸁 (1563-1628), whose collection of over 100,000 fascicles outnumbered them all and who placed his library, Dansheng tang (澹生堂), in a garden called the "Garden of Secrets" or "Garden of Puzzles" (Miyuan 密园).17 Ming readers and book collectors obviously did not structure their lives around a single book that also doubled as a literal proxy of the cosmos. The complexes of gardens and pavilions in which Chinese libraries were housed were obviously not infinite labyrinths. The point is not to judge Borges's mythology for its fidelity to reality.
Orientalism offers a solid explanation for such hyperboles. Studying the politics of contingency in post-war US cultural practices, R. John Williams finds in the historical reception of "The Garden of the Forking Paths" a drive to "schematize, in narrative form, a plurality of possible futures."18 The origins of post-war world futures contingency planning have depended, in other words, on a mainstreaming of a faux-Asian concept of possible futures. Borges's story, its citational afterlives, and its casual interpretations neatly track this and other exercises in the attribution of pseudoprofundity to other peoples. However, the limited ability to imagine some ordinary facts of readership without relying on historical counterfactuals or metaphors of dice-throwing is not simply a disciplinary shortcoming or a symptom of corporatist neoliberalism. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" encourages two related habits: the first, of regarding hypertextuality and multiverses as literature's best shot at profundity and complexity, and the other, of viewing the books that cultural others keep as having total explanatory power over their lives. No other story brings the two habits closer together. Both the trope of the labyrinth-as-novel and the one of novel-as-plural-universes tap into the same fantasy: other people just have more profound and expeditious relationships to their reading materials. This fantasy arises from the special features of the book form and their impact on the semantics of contingency in modern society.
It goes on to dig in to the idea of China and Chinese books and readers in Borges, and the fantasy of explaining cultural others by reference to a single book or books to which they are notionally attached.
Here's the kind of move that makes me go full tex avery wolf:
If books are slippery empirical objects, the point here is also that they make this fact less obtrusive than one might think. This lesson comes through in Borges and in comparative histories of reading practices. There is not space to unfold it fully here, but a Chinese book history similarly attuned to the conceptual distortions of the book object can offer alternatives to the reigning positivism of the sociology of literature. [...]
Anyway thanks Ranged Touchers
i forgot about Da's essay but it's really good!!!! we did not talk about Garden too much but if you like that story it's worth reading
