"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books." (Jorge Luis Borges)
I had little thought to return to this topic, at least before concluding the novels mentioned in earlier posts, but my recent re-reading of Borges' The Aleph has prompted a few additional thoughts.
There's no doubt that these tales are thoroughly webby and hypertextual. Yet unlike Cortázar's Hopscotch, the links between the characters, themes and objects in Borges' commentaries on imagined erudition take shape in the mind of the reader: no tentative authorial web has been laid down across the narratives. In a way they are, as Paul Ricoeur (who died last month) might have said, produced at the discursive level not the lexical.
Ricoeur's concept of split reference, where some of the implicit 'hyperlinking' can only be fully appreciated at the hermeneutical level of the complete work or set of works is therefore an important qualification for any 'hyper' strategies based on theories of reference.
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