Features of J. L. Borges’s Artistic Thinking (based on the collection of short stories The Garden of Forking Paths)

Abstract

The article analyses the features of Jorge Luis Borges’s artistic thinking, based on the collection of short stories “The Garden of Forking Paths”. Literary interpretation of the Argentine writer’s famous collection, which includes, among others, such significant short stories as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and “The Library of Babel,” is carried out in the context of the experience of postmodern literature, today perceived as a completed project requiring objective evaluation. By applying elements of motivic and archetypal analysis, as well as considering the principles of philosophical hermeneutics and the philosophy of dialogue, the collection of short stories “The Garden of Forking Paths” can be characterized as an artistic whole, dedicated to correlating truth and history. The seven short stories in the collection are united by a complex system of interrelated motifs, among which a mirror and a book, reality and fiction, time and eternity, a labyrinth and a garden are of particular importance. These motifs artistically manifest the contradictions of existence in such a way that the metaphysical hopelessness of overcoming them is replaced by a new level of understanding: the book is the most productive mirror since it reflects different faces and different epochs without cancelling the differences between them; fiction best reveals the essence of reality; eternity is disclosed in fleeting moments of experience; and the garden of forking paths is a cultural model of the labyrinth of being, containing the path to truth and the possibility of harmonizing history. The correlation of motifs and the establishment of complex meaningful connections between them reveal the features of Borges’s artistic thinking, including, first of all, its synthetic character, paradoxical, dialectical, and dialogical nature, and conciseness. They define the rules for constructing the writer’s artistic world, within which one can discern his fundamental creative intentions, aimed at combining the possibilities of art, science, and religion to achieve a dialogical discovery of the main existential contradictions, where the truth of the existence of humans and the Universe manifests itself in numerous and diverse attempts at verbalization.