Chess and the Infinite in Borges

 by Carlos Alberto Colodro  

Erudite, self-critical, cosmopolitan, Jorge Luis Borges, who died thirty-two years ago today, demonstrated great respect for chess throughout his work. Within the boundaries of his circular worlds, he made way for the sixty-four squares, the pieces that occupy them and the agents that give them life.

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Born in Buenos Aires, part of a family of English descent, Borges felt from a young age that his relatives assumed that he would eventually become a writer. Humble, he accepted, and spent his 86 years of life surrounded by books: Stevenson, Kipling, James, Conrad, Poe, Chesterton and The Arabian Nights became his travel companions.

Although he always insisted to be recognized as a good reader rather than as a writer, he conceived works that are now considered classics of twentieth-century literature. A detractor of the novel, he exclusivey wrote essays, poetry and short-stories, focusing on topics of universal nature. To present the worlds that inhabited his mind, he saw it necessary to use fantasy, and within this literary framework he found in chess a useful metaphorical tool.

Games and fantasy

The similarity between mathematics, chess and literature — at least Borges' interpretation of literature —is their completely abstract nature. The Argentine, like Nabokov or Pushkin, considered that the inextricable and necessary value of any literary work is its aesthetic value. In studying his work and declarations, one can identify his desire to stay away from any school of thought that considers art as a practical endeavor. For example, in one of the conferences published in This Craft of Verse, Borges asserts that poetry does not need to be comprehensible:

"I wish I could remember the whole sonnet [by Ricardo Jaimes Freyre] — I think that something of its sonorous quality would come through to you. But there is no need. I think that these lines should be sufficient. They run thus: 'Peregrina paloma imaginaria / que enardece entre los últimos amores / alma de luz de música y de flores / peregrina paloma imaginaria'. They do not mean anything, they are not meant to mean anything; and yet they stand. They stand as a thing of beauty. They are — at least to me — inexhaustible."

In his article Filosofía y lingüística en los cuentos fantásticos de Jorge Luis Borges, Sergio Cordero exposes two characteristics of games that coincide with Borges' conception of literary art: the creation of a completely independent world with arbitrary features, and the transgression of the assumptions of reality. Taking only these two assertions, Borges could have chosen any game as a metaphor for his interpretation of art. The fact that he chose chess, however, is not incidental — in a 1981 interview, he stated:

"Chess is one of the means we have to save culture, such as Latin, the study of the humanities, the reading of classics, the laws of versification, ethics. Chess is now replaced by football, boxing or tennis, which are games of fools, not of intellectuals."

A declared conservative, the author of The Aleph found in chess the one other distinct element that he considered essential in art: beauty.

Infinite Labyrinths

The epigraph of The Circular Ruins, one of Borges' most representative short-stories, quotes Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: "and if I left off dreaming about you ...". In this novel, the second installment of Alice's adventures, the plot revolves around chess — consequently with Carroll's great fondness of the game. In addition to the protagonist entering a fantastic world, what justifies the epigraph in Borges is the metaphor of the mirror and, more precisely, the implicit possibility of an infinite recursion: if there is one reality within another, could it not be found another within the new one? It is easy to imagine a person standing between two mirrors, looking at his increasingly smaller reflection, aware that the image, although imperceptible, must be inexorably repeated ad infinitum.

The Circular Ruins explores the theme of infinite recurrence even more explicitly. A stranger decides that his only mission in life is to dream a man ("...he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality"). After achieving his goal, he fatally realizes — noting himself immune to fire, just like his creation — that he too had been dreamed.

In this context, it is worth mentioning the most important tribute that Borges paid to the royal game. The last verses of his poem Chess precisely reflect his fascination with the universal and the infinite:

"God moves the player and he, the piece.

What god behind God originates the scheme

Of dust and time and dream and agony?"

Finally, in The Secret Miracle, published in 1943, time, literature and dreams make an appearance once again — in addition to chess, of course. A man is sentenced to death and, shortly before being executed, he asks God to provide him with time to finish his most important literary work. The desire is granted: when the bullets escape the rifles, time stops, and the man preserves his conscience until the work is completed (he does it mentally; being a versified work, it is easier to handle in memory). In the introduction to this short-story, Borges once again resorts to chess:

"[Jaromir Hladik] dreamt a long drawn out chess game. The antagonists were not two individuals, but two illustrious families. The contest had begun many centuries before. No one could any longer describe the forgotten prize, but it was rumored that it was enormous and perhaps infinite. The pieces and the chessboard were set up in a secret tower. Jaromir (in his dream) was the firstborn of one of the contending families. The hour for the next move, which could not be postponed, struck on all the clocks. The dreamer ran across the sands of a rainy desert - and he could not remember the chessmen or the rulesof chess."

Anyone who approaches the Argentine's oeuvre will notice, rather quickly, that he did not take literature lightly. Therefore, the fact that someone this careful would choose chess as a simile or a metaphor, repeatedly, cannot be overlooked.

And, who knows, perhaps right this minute, standing between two mirrors, Borges is dreaming chessboards and pieces, circles and labyrinths, detailed eternities.

References

Borges, J. L. (1964). Dreamtigers. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Borges, J. L., & Hurley, A. (2009). Collected fictions. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Borges, J. L., & Mihalescu, C. (2002). This craft of verse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cordero, Sergio. Filosofía y lingüística en los cuentos fantásticos de Jorge Luis Borges, La Palabra y el Hombre: Revista de la Universidad Veracruzana, 74 (1990)

Fuente:Chessbase

https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess-and-the-infinite-in-borges

What is the Internet’s Favorite Book?

By Dan Kopf 

  

Which is the better book: War and Peace or installment one of The Hunger Games?

If you ask a book reviewer or look at any of the “Best Book” lists compiled by  critics, you would say War and Peace. But what if you asked everyday readers on the Internet?

Over four million member of the website Goodreads members have rated the first installment of The Hunger Games on a 1-5 scale, and it has received an average score of 4.36. It currently sits atop a Goodreads crowdsourced list of “Best Books Ever”. By comparison, the average score given by the 150,000 people who have rated War and Peace is 4.10, and it ranks 724th on the “Best Books Ever list”.

It’s no surprise that on a crowdsourced ratings site, a briskly paced young adult novel beat out a dense, 1,000 page philosophical epic about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. And it’s probably not exactly the same group of people rating the Hunger Games and War and Peace. They likely have different backgrounds and expectations in literature.

Still, Goodreads ratings provide a glimpse into the literature that people actually like the most, and how that might differ from the critics. We know what the literati think from the variety of literary prizes and lists of books you must read before you die. But what do the people say? We collected the ratings for tens of thousands of books on Goodreads to find out.

Our analysis shows that the books people are most exuberant about include Calvin and Hobbes, manga and South American poetry. And if you want to read a classic blessed by both the critics and the Internet, you should pick up a novel by Robert Graves or Vladimir Nabokov—and avoid James Joyce like the plague. We also found that George R.R. Martin is the king of fantasy and Nigella Lawson the queen of cookbooks, and that Goodreads ratings suggest that David Foster Wallace is the 57th most loved fiction writer.

    Calvin and Hobbes collections are among the most highly rated books on Goodreads.

The website Goodreads was launched in 2007 as a social platform for readers to share their book recommendations and catalogue what they have read. The website now has over 20 million users and contains the world’s largest repository of book ratings. Well over 500 million ratings have been given to the more than 10 million books listed on the site.

Rather than collect the rating for every single book, we chose to collect data on the ten most popular books by each of the 9,000 authors who appear on Goodreads’ Best Books Ever list – a list which is independent of user ratings and voted on by particularly active members. We ended up with a dataset of over 23,000 notable books.

With this data in hand, we turned to the question of which books the Internet think are best.

The following table displays the twenty highest rated books in our dataset. We only included books with over 2,000 ratings. For reference, the average book gets a rating of 3.98.

 With a score of 4.81, the highest rated book is Bill Watterson’s The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Over 27,000 users have rated the book, and considerably more than 80% of them have given it five stars. It scores just ahead of the ESV Study Bible – an English Standard Version of the Bible with evangelical commentary.

Five of the top twenty rated books are Calvin and Hobbes’ collections. The dominance of Bill Watterson’s comics about a young boy and his stuffed tiger can be looked at in two ways. One, almost everyone who reads this book loves it, or two, Calvin and Hobbes fans are unusually devoted to the strip and likely to vote on Goodreads. It is likely some combination of the two.

Comics are well represented on this list of Goodreads most loved books. “Toda Mafalda”, which is third on the list, is a collection of comic strips by the Argentinian cartoonist Quino. “The Complete Far Side”, a collection of work by the cartoonist Gary Larson, is 16th. Religious and fantasy novels also do well.

The books that receive the most ratings on Goodreads, such as the Harry Potter and the Game of Thrones series, do not appear on this list. In fact, none of the 55 books that have received over a million ratings score above 4.6.

Are the most popular books also well loved? The chart below displays the number of ratings and average rating for every book in our dataset.

    Dan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: Goodreads

The five most reviewed books on Goodreads are the first books in The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and Twilight series, and the novels To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. The highest performing of these megahits is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which has a rating of 4.42.

The Harry Potter series also has the most highly rated book that has over one million ratings: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has nearly 1.6 million reviews and scores a 4.59. Apparently, if you get to the seventh installment in a series, you probably really like it.

    Harry Potter books combine popularity with high ratings like no others.

Beyond looking at the Internet’s favorite books, we also analyzed who Goodreads has anointed as the greatest author. We measured this by looking at the average ratings of authors’ books. We consider only authors with five books or more on Goodreads.

As you might expect given the adoration of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson is number one on the list of most loved authors. He is followed by a diverse set of writers (and one religious institution).

Hiromu Arakawa and eight other authors on this list are Japanese manga artists. Manga is a type of Japanese comic book/graphic novel that is increasingly popular internationally. Manga authors like Arakawa, Hiro Fujiwara, Yana Toboso and Yosihiki Nakamura consistently publish books that get rave reviews.

Ashley Antoinette – third on the list – is the author of the “racy” and popular Prada Plan novels. Antoinette’s books, which she frequently co-authors with her husband JaQuavis Coleman, all have thousands of ratings with an average above 4.5.

The Church of Latter-day Saints is the only non individual author to make the list. Books published by this institution, such as the Book of Mormon and True to the Faith, all score highly on Goodreads. While other religious institutions also publish books, none have such fervent support.

Our list of top twenty authors is dominated by just a few genres: comics, religion and young adult. The readers of genres like business, history and memoir seem to be more critical. The following list shows the top author of each genre – we assigned authors to the first genre listed on their Goodreads author page. ChickLit is a genre name given by Goodreads, not Priceonomics.

Most genres are topped by a famous author. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once called Pablo Neruda the greatest poet of the 20th Century, and the Internet agrees. Gore Vidal, a celebrated biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Aaron Burr, tops his genre. George R. R. Martin beats out J.R.R. Tolkien for the top spot in Fantasy.

Other authors are less well known. It is not Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak who tops the Children's book genre, but Patricia Polacco. Polacco’s five most popular books all get ratings over 4.3, and her most popular book, the autobiographical Thank You, Mr. Falker, receives a 4.51. The most highly rated Science Fiction author is Cassandra Clare. Clare’s novel City of Bones has received over one million reviews, and her ratings are consistently better than luminaries like Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Thus far, our most highly rated lists do not include history’s most celebrated authors like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. We wondered if they would show up if we focused exclusively on authors who Goodreads designates as part of the genre “fiction”.

 

This list includes writers of contemporary pop fiction like Ashley Antoinette and romance novelists Tiffany Reisz and C.L. Stone, but also members of the literary canon. The Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges and the French novelist Marcel Proust, who are considered among modern literature's most influential authors, both make the top ten.

Some other notable fiction authors also appear in the top 100: Flannery O’Connor (25), James Baldwin (26), Arthur Conan Doyle (29), Lee Child (43), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (52), David Foster Wallace (56), Nicholas Sparks (68), Kurt Vonnegut (73) and Alice Munro (100).

Still, very few authors of the classics make the list. The most hallowed authors are not the Internet’s favorites.

So which classics are also crowd-pleasers? To assess which classics people actually like, we looked at the average rating of the top 50 books on thegreatestbooks.org, a list that combines the results from more than one hundred other best books lists. (The list has a heavy European and North American bias.) Books are ranked by their Goodreads rating.

  

The highest rated classic is the Collected Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Borges’s Collected Fiction is one of three short story collections that top the list, along with the works of Anton Chekhov and Franz Kafka. It’s a bit of a surprise to see the works of these challenging authors perform so well. Maybe we would all be happier with our literary lives if we read more short stories.

It’s worth noting that Goodreads profiles are public to your friends, so some of these ratings may be impacted by social pressure or a desire to exhibit a certain sensibility. The strong ratings of these tougher classics could be due to literary snobs who pretend to like In Search of Lost Time.

Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are the top two novels on the list. Pride and Prejudice is the only classic novel with over one million ratings and an average rating above 4.2. Elizabeth and Darcy bring the quantity and quality.

Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick receive the worst ratings among the classics. Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad’s dark stories of insane men may be celebrated by literary critics, but the Internet is not impressed. Generally, older books perform worse on Goodreads. Ulysses, The Odyssey, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Canterbury Tales are all among the ten worst rated classics.

These old books rate quite poorly, but their low scores pale in comparison to the very least liked books. The following table shows the twenty books with the lowest ratings that were rated at least 2,000 times.

The most loathed book in the dataset is L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health with a rating of 2.29. Hubbard is the founder of the Church of Scientology. His book is on his theory of psychotherapy.

The book which best combines popularity and dislike is One Night at the Call Center by the Indian author Chetan Bhagat. Bhagat’s books, which mostly focus on India’s “new” young middle class, are wildly popular in India, but also disdained in literary circles.

                                                      ***

Just like restaurants and mechanics, books are now at the mercy of online rating systems. It may seem perverse to critics to take a piece of literature and reduce to a 1-5 rating, but millions of of readers on Goodreads to just that.

Our examination of these ratings show that the books people rate highest are generally not those that win the Man Booker or Pulitzer Prize. They are crowd-pleasers like Calvin and Hobbes, Japanese comic books and other books with devoted followings. When the Internet decides, James Joyce doesn’t hold a candle to J.K. Rowling.

Fuente : Priceonomics

http://priceonomics.com/what-is-the-internets-favorite-book/

“Kafka and His Precursors”

Jorge Luis Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors” begins oddly: “I once premeditated making a study of Kafka’s precursors.” The use of the verb “premeditate” is odd enough, in the Spanish (“Yo premedité alguna vez”) as much as in the English, not least because it is most usually found in juridical discourse: a premeditated crime is one that is considered and planned in advance, as opposed to a crime of passion or an outburst in the heat of the moment. This strange invocation of legal discourse might suggest that some wrong-doing is afoot, or that we are hearing some kind of confession. And yet–and this is the second strange aspect of Borges’s opening gambit–it is also suggested that the crime was never committed. “I once premeditated making a study” implies that the study remained unwritten or unmade; it was only planned. We have the guilty mind (mens rea) but not the guilty act (actus reus). The crime was averted, perhaps because some flaw was found in what was otherwise a perfect plan.

But this then leaves us asking ourselves about the status of the text that we have before us, which (as the title promises and as further readings confirms) turns out to concern precisely the topic of the projected but unwritten or abandoned study: “Kafka and His Precursors.” Yet if this is not that study (perhaps because it is too short, incomplete), nor is it the premeditation of that study: at best it is an account of that premeditation, a summary and reflection upon the preparatory “notes” that would have aided in the writing itself. It is an intervention between the plan and its execution, between intention and act.

In short, the text that we have here is perhaps triply parasitic, or three-times removed from its ostensible object: it is the summary of notes towards a study of Kafka and his precursors. It is also strangely located in time: it is the reflection on a plan in the past to write a study that is still unwritten (and so is postponed to the indefinite future) about a now-dead author and his precursors that (we soon find) proceeds by enumerating them “in chronological order,” beginning with the most far-distant.

As often in Borges, the part mimics the whole or (perhaps better) we find an almost fractal arrangement in which patterns are repeated at various orders of magnitude, albeit to produce less the comfort of familiarity than a vertiginous sense of the uncanny and a shattering of logic. Elsewhere, we see this effect in his description of the “aleph,” a shimmering ball (found in the banal surroundings of a Buenos Aires basement) that contains within itself the entire universe. But Borges also suggests that such apparent oddities (or impossibilities) are remarkably common, even quotidian: think long and hard about anything, and it soon becomes (or is revealed to be) an aleph of its own. Here, these opening lines anticipate the central problematic of the essay itself, which is about the ways in which texts are related and how strange fissures or reversals upset linear temporality, just as it in turn makes (or unmakes) its point through performance as much as through argument or exposition: for this text about Kafka and his precursors is in its own way about Borges and his precursors and in it Borges himself rewrites our collective past and disturbs our conceptions of sequence and priority.

Finally, if what Borges is ultimately saying is that a writer (that writing) has the strange power to intervene in history, to remake or remodel the past just as Kafka creates his own precursors (by making us see an otherwise disparate collection of historical texts as oddly “Kafkaesque” avant la lettre), he is also unabashedly claiming that there is nothing new in this notion. This observation precedes Borges and this text, and so confirms (what is now) his repetition of what can present itself as an established fact. For in another detail, a footnote–a classic paratext or parasite, neither fully part of nor fully detached from the text itself–draws our attention to T S Eliot’s Points of View, whose very title in this context becomes simultaneously uncanny and revelatory. After all, is this entire essay not about “points of view,” and the ways in which they are constructed, obscured, or undermined?

In a rather good essay on Joyce and Borges Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, whom I am here myself copying or appropriating to some extent, notes that “Eliot postulates an aesthetic principle, through which writers are not read in isolation, but as part of a living tradition in which the new alters the old, the present modifies the past and, as a result, texts are continually re-valued from the perspective of subsequent texts” (60). And Rex Butler’s “Everything and Nothing” points out that what makes Borges original–what makes the greatest authors the most original–is precisely the fact that they “can actually appear unoriginal, to add nothing to literature, to repeat what has already been written” (134).

At which point, as I observe that I in turn am in large part simply “repeat[ing] what has already been written,” remaking and remodeling it for my own purposes, creating precursors who sadly are not quite as disparate (or quite as unpredictable) as those of Borges and Kafka, perhaps it’s time to stop what is after all only a first approach to these issues. It’s time to end, in other words, so that we can at last begin.

Fuente : Posthegemony

http://posthegemony.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/kafka-and-his-precursors/