"Magic" Sincretism: Labyrinths in Jorge Luis Borges' and the French "Nouveau Roman"'s Texts

Abstract

The post-modern Latin-American narrative recreates somehow the ideas of the French nouveau roman. The so called “magic realism”, with its fictionality that tends toward the fantastic, often enriches the irrational-aporetical characteristics of the nouveau roman with certain methods as the hybridization and the stylistic-cultural syncretism. According to these aspects, this paper aims to analyze two of Jorge Luis Borges’ very discussed short stories (“The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Ibh-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth”), both connected with one of the master tropes of Borges’ œuvre: the motif of the labyrinth. It is possible to observe in both of these stories antagonistic forms of the syncretism: the first story bases on the significant nature—significant because it becomes a message (understandable language, information)— of the dialogue of dissimilar elements, while the other puts on the stage the infinite variation of signs dispossessed of meaning, unrecognizable references “without faces” that, propelling, denying and moving away one from another, will create a sort of vortex. Alain Robbe-Grillets’ two novels that we pretend to compare in a schematic way to Borges’ short stories are Dans le labyrinthe and Les Gommes.