This selection of stories, essays and parables presents the myth of the blind man on an eternal and epic scale. Borges has epitomized Latin American literature yet he only shows himself in his miniature writings, in which stories are often only several pages. His skill, similar to Kafka, is the ability to present a vast propensity of depth in only a few words.
In this collection the short stories are the main focus but I find his essays to be of a certain valour that I have not seen addressed by many other critiques before. His stories are a bare cabinet of plot and focus on the alienated male, which in itself is a bit yawning of a theme. Borges however is superb in getting all of us to question the sanity of how we perceive our own universe. His writings have made him the king of magic realism. He challenges the reality of nature. He is absorbed in the various fascinations of mere existence. Overall, "Labyrinths" is an embrace of solipsism. The universe is in your mind. What we perceive to be reality are our own ideas, largely coming from past inheritance. Therefore, both our purpose and burden in life is to create meaning for ourselves.
In "Tlon, Uqhar, Orbis, Tertius", Borges describes Tlon as "surely a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men." This statement stands for Borges' praise of solipsism. When one builds perception based entirely on mind, this creates the labyrinth. In a labyrinth, we can only be abstract perceivers. Time is a plurality where divergence, convergence and parallelism are all involved as the different colours of paints used in creating our perceptions.
In "The Library of Babel", Borges determines that our world is infinite. "Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end-which is absurd.....The Library is unlimited and cyclical." In other words, knowledge has an order to its disorder. It is a world we have to not only face but add our own ideas to. Discerning a beginning or ending is beyond our scope. Pleasure cannot go much beyond the internal("There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought"-"The Immortal"). Many of our perceived thoughts are abstractions. An example of this is money. "It(money)can be an evening in the suburbs, or music by Brahms, it can be maps, or chess, or coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold"("The Zahir"). It also symbolizes free will. There is some form of an inferno circling around us, containing both our griefs of oppression and our hopes of vastness.
In Borges' essays a greater clarity comes forth. It gives a transparency to his thoughts. In analyzing Kafka in "Kafka and His Precursors", he compares him to the unicorn: "a supernatural being of good omen....the unicorn constitutes a favourable presage. But this animal does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification." On top of that, "we could be face to face with a unicorn and not know for certain what it was." As reiterated in "The Mirror of Enigmas", the unicorn can be thought of as us in terms of the everlasting uncertainty surrounding us("It is doubtful that the world has a meaning: it is even more doubtful that it has a double or triple meaning, the unbeliever will observe....No one knows who he is").
While analyzing the arguments of Schopenhauer versus Hume in "A New Refutation of Time", he repeats his embrace of solipsism by saying that "time, if we can intuitively grasp such an identity, is a delusion.." There is nothing beyond consciousness. The consciousness of the mind is to Borges like a theatre: "Where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations." Borges ends up taking Schopenhauer's side in as far as agreeing that we can only live in the present. In short, "Labyrinths" is an excellently choreographed collection of Borges' explanation of his solipsism perspective on life.
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