|
|
INDICE
Prólogo
7 |
|
Alfonso de Toro/K. A. Blüher. (Hrsg.). (1992/21995).
Jorge Luis Borges. Procedimientos literarios y bases epistemológicas.
(Theorie und Kritik der Kultur und Literatur, Bd. 2). Frankfurt am
Main: Vervuert. (Veröff. mit der Unterstützung der
Wissenschaftsministeriums des Landes Schleswig-Holstein und von VGWort) Rhizomicity, or the self as everybody and nobody Perhaps the most
forceful pitch for Borges as a prime mover of ‘post-modernism’ is
found in the ‘rhizomic’ character of his work, chiefly by way of his
allusion to labyrinths. De Toro (JLB: 145-155), most prominent in this regard, remarks on Borges´s
highlighting: (1) the ‘signifier-signified’ interaction between
‘reality’ and fiction, (2) the ‘dissolution of the subject’,
which flattens authors, narrators, and readers to the same level, (3)
the use of literary collage, montage, palimpsest, and above all,
‘literary’ rather than ‘reality’ mimesis, in the deconstruction
of text of all stripes, genres, and disciplines, and (4) discursive
plurality (i.e., satire, irony, humor, parody, allegory, metanarrative,
historicity, interculturality). This concoction of straregies serves to
‘rhizomatize’ and ‘destabilize’ Borges´s fictive ‘worlds’
and their relation to the ‘real world’, thus creating a labyrinth of
semantic relations in the face of which the reader, when properly
converted into a Deleuzean ‘nomad’, can hardly do other than
oscillate between the either and the or,…or,…or,…n
in a polylinear chain of multiple undecidability. Julia Kristeva (1968, 1969) and Gérard Genette (1982) are evoked by de
Toro in developing his quite intriguing theory of Borgesian narrative
strategies which include a bird´s eye toward: (1) intratextuality, (2)
intertextuality, (3) hypotextuality (the ‘avant-texte’ or
‘pretext’ – relations of the text to interconnections that might
come to bear on its production), and (4) hypertextuality (the
‘post-text’ – all possible intertextual relations that might come
to bear on the hypotext) (JLB: 159-161). The intricacies of these
relations, implicit within Borges´s texts, call for ‘palimpsestual’
readings in order not merely that the aporia lurking behind the
texts may be revealed, but also, that the aporia Borges himself draws from the texts to which his own text refers may
become sufficiently evident. Thus the Borges text places other texts in
a negative light, drawing out some inconsistencies they
have hitherto made efforts to conceal, and, given the ensuing undecidability,
and infinite regress becomes the inevitable yield. In a roundabout way, this reflects on Peirce´s own concept of the sign
and the sign processor – all caught up in the ‘rhizomically’
interconnected multidimensional fabric of semiosis. In capsule
form, for Peirce the self as itself a sign is nothing more than a bundle
of errors, of negation, which nature submerges in the deep waters
of vagueness, within which, as sign, it ultimately can do no more
than merge with its other self ‘always already’ in the process of
entering the scene in the semiosic drama (see Merrell 1995). Now this is intertextuality with a vengeance! And yet it is, I would
submit, an adequate image insofar as: (1) it avoids the problematics of
a Saussurean synchronic slice freezing the signifying process, and (2) indefinite
semiosis, which it implies, is compatible with indeterminacy, all of
which surface in JLB, especially from the contributions by Pérez,
Silvestri, Blüher, de Toro, and Rosa. It appears that Borges, in the final analysis, is more relevant to the
semiotic enterprise than JLB reveals, and JLB has more to
do with methodological and epistemological freedom than its authors
would most likely care to admit. (Floyd Merrell: Semiotica (Review article) 107-1/2 (1995): 179-204
(hier: S. 199 ff.)) |
|
