fiction "designed primarily as metaphysical arguments," impersonal, folded into "a cabalistic Book that includes its…
echoes
From: Borges on the Couch
- Early text: Borges's stories "are designed primarily as
metaphysical arguments; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant
logics", are "meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness",
and belong to "an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding". [¶5, ¶6]
- IJ echo: The novel's self-referential, encyclopedic architecture — the book
that folds its own reading instructions into its structure (the annular/
Sierpinski design, the samizdat-that-is-the-book family of readings). Wallace
praising exactly this quality in Borges is oeuvre-level evidence of the design
value he prizes.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation