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Unreading Borges's Labyrinths, Lawrence R. Schehr

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Borges's stories often valorize the figures of text and labyrinth, and, in "The Garden of Forking Paths," an identity is posited between them. This identity is the means to deconstructing the story and, at the same time, for refusing both structuralist and metaphysical readings of the work. The text of the story gradually subsumes the world it seeks to represent under and within an all-encompassing textuality without origin and without any clearly delimited meaning except absence, the destruction of meaning, death. The solution of the labyrinth is its dissolution, that is, the deconstruction of the text. This easily thematizable deconstruction …