How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
Yet he abandoned all to make a book and a labyrinth. He gave up all the pleasures of oppression, justice, of a well-stocked bed, of banquets, and even of erudition, and shut himself up in the Pavilion of the Limpid Sun for thirteen years. (36)
Ah, the life of the writer. Everyone knows you have to suffer for your art.
Quote #2
At his death, his heirs found only a mess of manuscripts. The family... wished to consign them to the fire, but the executor of the estate – a Taoist or a Buddhist monk – insisted on their publication. (36)
What happens to literature after the author has died? Does it belong out in the world, for anyone to read, or do certain people – like family members – have the right to control it?
Quote #3
"Such a publication was madness. The book is a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts... the hero dies in the third chapter, while in the fourth he is alive." (37)
If you tried reading one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure novels from cover to cover, it wouldn't make a lot of sense. You can understand how Yu Tsun might have been confused – his great-grandfather's novel probably didn't have handy instructions printed clearly at the bottom of each page.
Quote #4
"No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same." (40)
This confusion was clearly due to the fact that great-grandpa Ts'ui Pen liked to speak in metaphor all the time.
Quote #5
Two circumstances showed me the direct solution to the problem. First, the curious legend that Ts'ui Pen had proposed to create an infinite maze, second, a fragment of a letter which I discovered. (41)
The novel isn't the only text that shows up within the short story. Borges uses all sorts of documents and documents-within-documents. Here Dr. Albert refers to a fragment of a letter to show Yu Tsun how he solved the riddle.
Quote #6
"... I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely." (44)
This is a very cool idea in its own right, and one that appears significantly in the magical realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. He obviously read Borges.
Quote #7
"I recalled, too, the night in the middle of The Thousand and One Nights when Queen Scheherazade, through a magical mistake on the part of her copyist, started to tell the story of The Thousand and One Nights, with the risk of again arriving at the night upon which she will relate it, and thus on to infinity." (44)
This idea of an infinite text reminds us of an M.C. Escher painting, circling in on itself in an infinite spiral without ever reaching an end.
Quote #8
"I also imagined a Platonic hereditary work, passed on from father to son, to which each individual would add a new chapter or correct, with pious care, the work of his elders." (44)
We're suddenly reminded of the lack of women in this story. We can think of a whole lot of problems with this patriarchal notion of infinity – like what happens when you don't have any sons?
Quote #9
"In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel." (46)
Once we have a clear idea of the way Ts'ui Pen's novel works (like hypertext or those Choose Your Own Adventure novels we keep talking about) we can begin to understand how it functions as a metaphor for time.
Quote #10
"In your country the novel is an inferior genre; in Ts'ui Pen's period, it was a despised one. Ts'ui Pen was a fine novelist but he was also a man of letters who, doubtless, considered himself more than a mere novelist." (53)
For Ts'ui Pen and Dr. Albert, what makes a novel worth writing or reading? Clearly it can't be all about plot – it has to have a deeper meaning. Isn't this what keeps us reading great literature today?