His second novel, The Way Inn, posited a
Borgesian fantasy in which a particular chain of indistinguishable expense-account hotels appear to be endlessly and inescapably interconnected.
" Often it reads like a puzzle, the locked puzzle that is one of several literary motifs in the story, like the void and the sweating beast, the
Borgesian dream, the Ali and Elvis hagiography.
"He has outgrown the historical narratives that made up the contours of his well-known tradition to inhabit the shifting forms and scopes of
Borgesian literature" (58).
In the English-language world, two films seem to have grown in reputation in the decade since: the scabrously funny In Bruges and the complex, morbid, almost
Borgesian folly Synecdoche, New York, with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director blurring the line between art and reality.
The library has thus become a
Borgesian establishment, the sort that engenders, or even necessitates, myth.
The phrase's use in the title of a recent video by Sondra Perry, the centerpiece of her debut exhibition at Bridget Donahue, reminded us that it is only half of the original slogan, which promises a
Borgesian duplication of the world of sports: "If it's in the game, it's in the game." Perry explores the implications of such doublings in IT'S IN THE GAME '17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection, 2017.
Crumey adds to this a
Borgesian concept of the total or infinite library, in which all of these stories reside, and in which each text has been produced by a single printing machine.
When he includes under the category of signs 'mountains, planets, or living elephants--signs that are too big to be presented in the museum'--his media phenomenology starts to look more and more like the
Borgesian Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge which lists in its classification of animals 'the innumerable ones' as well as 'those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush'.
There is a kind of
Borgesian absurdity to the space for numbers in the colonial imagination that has not entirely ended especially when we think of their previous work on ectropy, meant as the increased organization of information (figure 5).
The heterogeneity of this list reminds one of the
Borgesian "Chinese encyclopaedia" that figures memorably in Foucault's preface to The Order of Things: a boarding school, a honeymoon motel, a garden, a museum, a sauna, a cemetery, a hospital, an asylum, a retirement home, and so on.