Among
Jorge Luis Borges's stories that explore
the idea of the labyrinth, "Garden of Forking
Paths" especially features this
motif. The character of Yu Tsun associates the concept with
his
great-grandfather, who resigned from a powerful government position to create a maze
so
complicated that everyone would lose their way inside. That choice also
overlapped with the
authors role in choosing words, as the ancestors also
wrote became a novelist, but the maze was
lost to memory.
In Yu's own time, the maze appears as the titular garden at
Albert's
house. In fact, it is Albert who reveals that the maze was metaphorical: it was
the
novel itself. It is labyrinthine in the author's decision to provide all
the characters' options
rather than the semblance of their being able to
choose. Thus the question of choice is turned
over to the reader as to their
preference among the possibilities offered.
In
The Stories of Eva Luna,
Isabel
Allende plays with mixing genres. The fantastic qualities of many of
the stories owe much to
traditional antecedents. Eva is frequently called the
modern day Scheherezade for the importance
of storytelling in sustaining and
transforming her life. Allende, like all shortwriters who
followed Borges,
owes much to his exploration of the relationships among reality, perception,
and memory. The blurring of author, narrator, and character also appears in some of her
works.
In these stories, the objectifying and technologizing of the word
often go hand in
hand.
Eva's eventual transformation takes
her from storyteller, a capacity in
which the tales exist in the teller's
mind and are thus infinitely changeable, to scriptwriter,
in which the text
is set but will be altered by the choices of the actors, director, and
camera.
This choice on Eva's part thus reduces the countless small choices
she made as a teller; the
surrender to technology reduces her
creativity.
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