The Aleph and the Labyrinth

Abstract

In “The Aleph and the Labyrinth” I begin by chronicling Borges’ early readings of Joyce’s Ulysses, which were a prologue to his lifelong
fascination with this novel. In particular, Borges saw in Ulysses yet another
attempt to write the “total book”: an attempt doomed to failure, perhaps, but nevertheless heroic. In the light of Ulysses, Borges explored this ambition in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”, “The Library of Babel”, “Funes, His Memory” and particularly “El Aleph”; and offered his faulty and fragmentary reading of Joyce’s text as a metaphor for our equally – and fatally – faulty and fragmentary knowledge of the universe.