INTERTEXTUAL LABYRINTHS: BORGES AND THE SINO-CULTURAL PARADIGM

Abstract

One of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 20^th century, the great Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges amazes readers and researchers of his work with an unusually wide range of his cultural interests and knowledge, associations, judgme

ԻՆՏԵՐՏԵՔՍՏԱՅԻՆ ԼԱԲԻՐԻՆԹՈՍՆԵՐ. ԲՈՐԽԵՍԸ և ՍԻՆՈՄՇԱԿՈՒԹԱՅԻՆ ՊԱՐԱԴԻԳՄԸ

nts and generalizations. The conceptual message of Borges’s work, the conceptual series that thread through his texts, Borges’s ideologemes, cosmologemes, philosophemes, embodied by original and innovative artistic means, were born from a deep immersion in the experience of global culture that has accumulated over thousands of years – spiritual, artistic, intellectual, oral and written. The culture that accumulated in the common home of the human race on all sides of the world, in the West and in the East, in the North and in the South. The richest nutrient medium for Borges – both as a culturologist and as a writer who created his own completely special and very influential, ideological and artistic world, his own aesthetics and poetics – was undoubtedly the culture of the East and, in particular, as he himself calls it in one of his texts, the three-thousand-year-old culture of China.

A series of texts in different literary forms and genres by J.L. Borges, a profound expert of the library, embracing the world literary and culture, reflect a many-sided interest towards China, its history and culture, its religion, myths, folklore, and literature. The present paper observes the main facts and motives in the dialogue between Borges (as writer and poet, intellectual and culture expert) and the classical texts of old and medieval China. In focus are the echoes of the features typical of Borges’s texts and, in particular, his short story «The Garden of Forking Paths» in comparison with the famous Chinese classical novel «A Dream of the Red Chamber» by Cao Xue-qin. The author also draws attention to the high statistics of references to Chinese images in the «Book of Imaginary Beings».