Johns Hopkins Magazine - April 1995 Issue

A Sleuth in the Garden of Forking Paths

By Dale Keiger


Follow John T. Irwin into the labyrinth. On his advice, bear to the left, and be alert for both clues and clews. Notice the mysterious and repeated appearance of triangles and squares, the chess set in the corner, and the mirrors everywhere. Notice the letter left in plain sight. That equation? It's algebraic. Remember it, because it was put there for a reason. The bellowing you hear coming from the center of the maze is the Minotaur, and the blind man who just passed you was Oedipus. Pay attention, because this journey is an inquiry into something deeper and more fundamental than a mere fictional murder, or even several murders. Your guide has been exploring these passageways for more than a decade, and once you get deeply into this maze, you're going to need him to get out.

John T. Irwin is Decker Professor of the Humanities, professor of English, and chair of the Hopkins Writing Seminars. In 1981, four years after returning to Hopkins from a stint as editor of the Georgia Review, he put aside projects on Hart Crane and F. Scott Fitzgerald to explore his fascination with a set of six detective stories. Three were by Edgar Allan Poe, three by Jorge Luis Borges, the late Argentine writer of short stories and essays. Irwin began puzzling out the myriad arcane references and sly allusions contained in these texts, and the more he found, the more curious he became. He expected to divert himself from his other projects for perhaps two years.

Thirteen years later, he finally delivered a manuscript that he says, with a typically boisterous laugh, "consumed my middle years." The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) is an intellectually muscular 452-page analysis of what Poe said was "little susceptible of analysis"--the nature of analysis. If that sentence gives you vertigo, you've had but a taste of what the book will do to you.

Which is exactly what Irwin had in mind. Like the detective stories he pulls apart, Irwin wanted his book to be a journey into an intellectual maze, with clues and hints and odd references that pile up until, just as the reader is verging on overwhelmed, they suddenly connect in a straight line that leads to the light--or at least to a fresh riddle. The reader comes away with a headache, perhaps, but amazed at how much Irwin has managed to extract from a half-dozen short stories, and how much the authors of those stories managed to put in.

"It could have been 50 percent longer," Irwin says of his book, laughing again. "And I could have guaranteed that no one would have read it."

People have been reading it, though, and conferring awards on its author. So far, Irwin has received the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa (past Hopkins faculty recipients have included Larzer Ziff, Hugh Kenner, and Peter Sacks), and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association (MLA). Irwin's citation from the MLA reads in part: "John Irwin's Mystery to a Solution is so dazzling in its wit, its comprehensive historical research, and its beautifully wrought argument that it is impossible to categorize." He was nominated for an Edgar, the highest award conferred by the Mystery Writers Association.

In The Mystery to a Solution, Irwin argues that Poe and Borges were up to far more than mere cops-and-robbers. If the stories contained nothing more than clever riddles and solutions, Irwin wryly notes, only people with poor memories would want to read them again. Yet Poe's and Borges's tales reward the reader who returns to them. Why? Because, Irwin says, what's at stake here is a mystery far deeper than whodunit.

These six tales, he believes, are sophisticated representations of the nature of self-consciousness, of the complex intellectual knots that we tie ourselves in when we try, through thinking, to encompass the process of thought itself. In his detective stories, Poe makes almost no effort to create a three-dimensional character. His master sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin, is little more than the embodiment of thought process, a character given to lecturing about the nature of analysis and the method by which one steps outside the mind to observe its workings. Borges, Irwin says, took the Poe stories and rewrote them in a way that established links between them and other attempts to imagine the process and nature of self-consciousness, such as the myth of Theseus in the labyrinth and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass.

Borges's detective trilogy was also, Irwin demonstrates, a critical reading of the Dupin stories and the entire detective genre. He believes all six stories are psychologically revealing of their authors' Oedipal conflicts. He pulls the texts apart as intellectual puzzles that draw on classical mythology, psychology, alchemical lore, literary history, etymology, higher mathematics, anthropology, even the game of chess.

To piece all of this together, Irwin had to be a dogged sleuth himself. He doesn't mind the label. As he writes in Mystery, one of the most flattering things an intellectual toiler can hear is, "Why, you're really more interesting than you look. In fact, you're like a detective."

When Poe published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841, he invented the genre of the analytic detective story. The bookish, sedentary polymath C. Auguste Dupin hears the details of a baffling murder mystery, asks a few cryptic questions, and eventually presents the well-meaning-but-befuddled authorities with an ingenious solution. Dupin appeared twice more in stories by Poe: "The Mystery of Marie Rget" and "The Purloined Letter."

One hundred years after publication of "Rue Morgue," Borges began publishing mystery stories of his own. In the second one, "Death and the Compass," Borges's detective, Erik Lonnrot, refers to himself as "a kind of Auguste Dupin." It was a reference that did not escape the attention of John Irwin, literary shamus. He began to look for more. In Borges's "Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth," published in 1951, Irwin noted that the detective Dunraven refers specifically to "The Purloined Letter." Dunraven and Unwin, his friend in the story, are identified respectively as a mathematician and a poet, the same avocations as those of the blackmailing French government minister in "Letter." In a footnote to the English edition of "Ibn Hakkan," Borges indicated that he had written his stories as exercises in the genre; Irwin noted that two of them ("Death and the Compass" and "The Garden of Forking Paths") had appeared on the centennials of the first two Dupin stories.

What was Borges, a renowned literary trickster, up to? Irwin believes Borges took the Dupin stories and wrote his own versions, as part homage to the founder of the genre, part literary criticism, part intellectual game, and part duel. Irwin thinks that Borges read many of the detective stories written since Poe's time and concluded that their authors had missed the true literary and intellectual content of the Dupin stories and merely imitated the superficial elements of their structures--the locked rooms, the sedentary detective, the scattered clues. Borges set out to demonstrate through three mimetic fictions of his own how much more the Poe stories contained. Furthermore, Borges wanted to see if a South American could stand with the nordamericano master. Irwin notes that Borges had prefigured such an act in another of his short stories, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," in which a French writer rewrites Cervantes.

"I think he wanted to compete with the founder," Irwin says, "and to compete as a South American writing in Spanish."

Once Irwin saw the Poe and Borges stories as linked, he began an intense study in which his readings of individual stories illuminated the meanings of the others. For example, he spent considerable time examining how Borges, as well as Poe, used the numbers three and four. The numbers show up again and again in their stories, in street addresses, diagrams, sequences, in details both meaningful and, at first glance, innocuous.

Irwin was attuned to the symbolism of these numbers from his reading, as a graduate student at Rice University, of Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. In that work, Jung makes much of the mystical properties of three and four. He says that "the seed of unity which lies hidden in the chaos" has a trinitarian character in "Christian alchemy," but "according to other authorities it corresponds to the unity of the four elements [earth, fire, water, air] and is therefore a quaternity." Jung goes on to say, "...side by side with the distinct leanings of alchemy (and of the unconscious) toward quaternity there is always a vacillation between three and four....Four signifies the feminine, motherly, physical; three the masculine, fatherly, spiritual. Thus the uncertainty as to three or four amounts to a wavering between the spiritual and the physical." Jung looked at the Christian Holy Trinity and saw a missing "recalcitrant fourth"--the devil. The three metaphysical members of the Trinity, plus the physical world embodied in Satan, represented the divided parts of an original quaternity.

Jung also quoted a cryptic alchemical formula: "Make a round circle of man and woman, extract therefrom a quadrangle and from it a triangle. Make the circle round, and you will have the Philosopher's Stone [a substance, sought by alchemists, reputedly capable of transmuting base metals into gold]."

Irwin says, "I knew from a footnote in one of Borges's essays that he had read Psychology and Alchemy. So I began looking more closely for the three/four oscillation in his stories."

He found it. In "Death and the Compass," the detective Lonnrot plots three murders on a map. Like Jung's alchemist, he looks at the triangle thus formed, with a compass scribes a circle connecting the points, and finally notes where a fourth point creating a square would be on the map. He concludes that a fourth murder will take place there.

Other clues to the mystery in "Compass" involve the same numbers. The first murder is of a rabbi, Marcel Yarmolinsky. Yarmolinsky is a Talmudic scholar who has written a treatise on the Tetragrammaton, the mystical Hebrew name for God. The Tetragram-maton is spelled various ways by various authorities-- YHVH, YHWH, JHVH--but always three letters are used to create a four-letter figuration, with the second and fourth letters doubled.

The murders take place on the third calendar day of each month. A clue at one of the crime scenes is an underlined passage from a book that notes the Jewish day begins at sundown, meaning the murders occurred on the fourth day of the month, by Jewish reckoning.

The more Irwin looked, the more examples of this number play he turned up. Borges named a police inspector in the story "Treviranus." Why that name? Irwin wondered. When Borges, a professional librarian, had visited Johns Hopkins in 1983, he had told Irwin that whenever he wanted to know something, he first went to the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. So Irwin looked up "Treviranus" in the 11th Britannica, and found an entry for a German naturalist. That didn't seem to connect in any way. But opposite that entry was one for tresviri capitales. The tresviri, it said, were three magistrates who controlled the city police in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar had increased the number to four. Augustus Caesar (Irwin notes that Poe's detective's full name is C. Auguste Dupin) had restored the number to three.

In "Compass," Treviranus warns against wasting time by looking for "three-legged cats." The usual Spanish form of this proverbial advice, Irwin says, is, "Don't waste your time looking for five-legged cats." Instead, Borges conspicuously has his character warn against looking for a three-legged variant of a four-legged animal.

All of which begins to make Irwin look very clever. But was any of this intentional on the part of Borges? Yes, Irwin replies, probably all of it. He points to an essay, "The Vindication of the Cabala," written by Borges in 1931. In it Borges idealized the cabalistic notion of sacred scripture, in which the words are divinely inspired, no detail is unintentional, and every letter has meaning. Furthermore, in the cabalistic tradition words have numerical significance; scholars of the Cabala, for example, pored over the mystical significance of three letters forming the four-letter name of God, the aforementioned Tetragrammaton. In "Death and the Compass," one of the murder victims, the aforementioned Rabbi Yar-molinsky, is the author of a book titled The Vindication of the Kabbalah.

Says Irwin, "You cannot read very much of Borges without getting that sense of the Cabala. It's a short step to say that if that's his ideal, then he wrote his short stories with that sense that every word means something."

Irwin continues: "You find Treviranus in the encyclopedia that you know Borges read. And then you find tresviri and you learn that includes a three/four oscillation, and then you find Caesar Augustus, and that points to C. Auguste Dupin.... By the seventh or eighth instance of something recurring, you begin to feel that the odds are extremely high that this is intentional."

But what about Poe? If Irwin is right, and Borges was consciously manipulating the Jungian and alchemical symbols of three and four, one might profitably look for the same manipulation in Poe. For if Irwin is also right about Borges using Poe's stories as the foundations for his own tales, it stands to reason that Borges might have mimicked a device he found in his predecessor.

Poe died 25 years before Jung was born. But as a lover of arcana, he probably was familiar with the sort of alchemical lore that Jung quoted decades later, lore that ascribes mystical properties to three and four. When Irwin went looking for threes and fours in the Dupin stories, he struck paydirt again.

In "The Purloined Letter," Poe goes to the labor of inventing a Parisian street and giving us Dupin's precise address: au troisime, No. 33, Rue Dunt. Irwin points out that in the French designation, le troisime tage is what Americans call the fourth floor. Would Poe, a speaker of French and a meticulous writer knowledgeable about alchemy, have gone to so much effort to create a fictitious address, and in so doing create a three/four symbol merely by accident? Irwin thinks not. Besides, there's more.

"Letter" concerns a government minister blackmailing the queen with a stolen letter from her lover. Poe refers to the blackmailer as "Minister D--." D is the fourth letter of the alphabet, derived from the Greek delta--_--a three-sided letter shaped like the Pythagorean tetractys, the three-sided arrangement of 10 stones in four rows, like bowling pins. In describing where he found the letter, Dupin notes that it was in a rack that "had three or four compartments." Poe's description of the letter includes two seals, one black, one red. Irwin is willing to bet that Poe, a gamesman, would have known that Rouge et Noir is the name of a French gambling game, also known as Trente et Quarante (30 and 40).

Early in the story, Dupin relates his method of analysis to the child's game of even and odd, and says "this game is simple." When the prefect first brings the case to Dupin, he first declares the case "very simple," and later calls it "excessively odd." Dupin immediately echoes the prefect's words: "simple and odd." Irwin believes that Poe meant for this repetition to create a resonance in the attentive reader's mind, of three words--even, odd, simple--recurring in the pairings even/odd and simple/odd. Thus Poe has used three terms to create four elements, just like the Tetra- grammaton (YHVH) of Borges's story.

Does that sound like a literature professor stretching hard to create a link that supports his theory? Then consider this: In "Purloined Letter," Dupin states that the etymology of words will be important to solving the mystery. Irwin traced the lineage of "odd" and found the Old Norse root oddi. Oddi means "three," derived from "triangular point of land." Poe took three elements, formed a four-word config- uration--even/odd, simple/odd--and doubled the one word that derives from the word "three." If that's a coincidence, amidst all those other allusions to three and four, it's a beauty.

During his research, Irwin sometimes would get the strange but exhilarating feeling that he was on an intellectual course that paralleled one Borges had taken decades before. For example, Irwin was curious about a passage from Borges's detective story "The Garden of Forking Paths." In that story, a Sinologist named Stephen Albert asks a fugitive spy named Yu Tsun, "In a guessing game to which the answer is chess, which word is the only one prohibited?" Yu Tsun replies, "The word is chess."

Irwin is a chess player. When Borges was at Hopkins in 1983, he and Irwin played a game. (In the sort of coincidence that can make you believe in mysticism, Irwin says the best game he ever played was part of a tournament in Oahu in 1965, against an opponent named Fred Borges.) The passage from "Forking Paths" about the game intrigued him. He then noticed that in the eight stories of the collection that included "Forking Paths," Borges mentions chess in four of them. A fifth story includes an epigraph from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass, one of the most famous fictional examinations of self-consciousness and a story in which the central motif is a chess match.

In Looking-glass, Alice checkmates the Red King. In "Death and the Compass," the detective and eventual murder victim is named Erik Lonnrot: Erik (from the Old Norse Eirk, or "honorable ruler"), Lonn (a Swedish prefix for "secret"), and rot (German for "red"). Erik Lonnrot, Irwin concluded, was the "hidden red king." In "Forking Paths," Stephen Albert, also an eventual murder victim, shares his name with a king, King Albert of Belgium, who had heroically fought the invading German army in World War I (the period setting of "Forking Paths") and was much on the mind of the public when Borges published his story, soon after Germany conquered Belgium in World War II. In Borges's third detective story, "Hakkan," a "scarlet maze" contains a murdered "red-haired king." In every story, a king dies-- checkmated, as in the Persian shah (king) mat (he is dead).

These allusions convinced Irwin that Borges was invoking Carroll's famous image of self-consciousness: the Red King who appears in Alice's dream and who is, according to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, in turn dreaming about her. Irwin had other evidence. He knew that Borges had edited an anthology of fantastic literature, in which he had included the Red King's dream from Looking-glass. Furthermore, for the same anthology Borges had excerpted an 18th-century Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, in which the hero dreams of seeing himself dreaming, and actually has a conversation with his dream-self. One of the characters in Dream of the Red Chamber is named Yu Tsun--the name Borges used for his murderer in "Forking Paths." All of this convinced Irwin that Borges--by hinting in "Forking Paths" that the word chess was important to a riddle, and by alluding to red kings and Yu Tsun--was dropping clues as to what lay at the heart of his stories and those of Poe: a representation of self- consciousness.

"I was always finding confirmation that I was on the right path," Irwin says. "I'd find some work like Red Chamber that paralleled or mimicked another work that Borges was interested in, like Through the Looking-glass. It was energizing. It made me think, 'I do understand something of the author's mind, because I'm being led to the works that the author was led to.'"

Irwin spent considerable time working out the significance of labyrinths in Borges's stories. Central to "Hakkan" is a red labyrinth, the "scarlet maze." In "Death and the Compass," the detective Lonnrot, in plotting the murders on a map, refers to the diagram (drawn in red ink) as a labyrinth. In rewriting Poe's stories, Irwin believes, Borges was in part working as a literary critic. By including labyrinths as central elements, Borges suggested that the Dupin stories also involved labyrinths, of a sort. It was a way for Borges the critic to connect Poe's work with classical mythology.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," for example, is a locked- room story; critical to the mystery is how the savage murderer of two women committed the crimes inside a locked room and disappeared from that room without any apparent means of egress. In a labyrinth, obviously, how to get out is also a fundamental problem. "The Purloined Letter" is a hidden-object mystery. In mythology and alchemy, Irwin notes, labyrinths conceal objects such as the Minotaur and the Philosopher's Stone.

In "Rue Morgue," Dupin follows a logical trail to a nail that apparently secures a locked window. Poe writes, "...at this point terminated the clew." Recall the importance Poe places on etymology, Irwin says. "Clew" is not just a variant spelling of "clue." The original meaning of "clew" is "thread," and in classical mythology, a specific thread: the length of yarn used by Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth after he's killed the Minotaur.

By using labyrinths as symbols, Irwin says, Borges himself was alluding to Theseus. Irwin sees psychological reasons for Borges's and Poe's interest in Theseus. Theseus had sheltered Oedipus, after the latter had blinded himself as punishment for incest and parricide. Borges's father was himself a published novelist. After the father went blind, he insisted that Jorge take over his literary efforts. Jorge's success far exceeded that of his father, and this literary competition was, writes Irwin, "...a course almost as fraught with guilt as any physical confrontation with a parent would have been." Subsequently, the younger Borges also went blind, from the same condition that had afflicted his father.

Irwin heard the story of Oedipus, in this case the incestuous Oedipus, resonating in Poe, as well. Poe, who wrote so carefully of clews (the thread of Theseus), married his 13-year- old first cousin. He called her "Sis."

Irwin did get stuck now and then, he admits. One major block occurred over a section of "The Purloined Letter." Poe, a concise writer, had included a strikingly long passage on mathematics, in which Dupin alludes to a debate over whether algebra constitutes the highest form of analysis. Irwin didn't understand the reference.

He spent three years trying to understand what Poe was getting at. He tracked down the titles of the math books Poe had possessed, and the math curriculum he had studied at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The trail led Irwin to the French cole Polytechnique, England's Cambridge University, early 19th- century French politics, and the real Dupin brothers, who lived in Paris in the early 1800s and were models for various aspects of Poe's characters of the detective and the evil minister.

What Irwin finally deduced was that at the time Poe studied mathematics, there was an intellectual debate underway as to the merits of algebraic versus geometrical analysis. In Paris, because cole Polytechnique had been established to train engineers for the new French republic, says Irwin, "The math taught there was in the popular mind the math of Revolutionary France." Thus the debate had political implications, and Irwin reminds that "Purloined Letter" is a story of political intrigue. Poe had tied his story to actual events and the intellectual milieu of his day.

Beyond that, Irwin believes that many of Poe's readers in the 1840s would have been conversant with the math debate, much as modern readers would be aware of debates about deconstruction or political correctness, and thus might have equated analysis with algebra. Poe disagreed with that equation. He notes, through his character Dupin, that analysis comes from a root meaning "to take apart," and algebra from a root meaning "to put together." Anyone who equates the two, Dupin says, is not to be trusted. Poe makes Minister D-- (Dupin's nemesis) a "poet and mathematician"; by having Dupin solve the mystery by thinking like the poet/mathematician minister, Poe argued that mathematical analysis alone was insufficient to solve a deep mystery. What one needed, Poe believed, was to marry the resolvent logic of higher mathematics with a higher, poetic creative power. A "true" mathematician was also a poet.

In the same passage from "The Purloined Letter," Dupin discusses a formula: x2 + px = q. The literature professor was stumped by this, too. "I'd only had first-year calculus in college," Irwin says. "I had to go back and learn more math." It occurred to him that the formula might not mean anything, might just be an invention of Poe's. But, he says, "Once you've lived with a writer's work for so long, you get a sense of what they invent and what they don't invent. In Poe, when information has a certain level of specificity, that's generally a clue that it's not made up--that it has a reference and you will learn something if you find that reference. I knew that formula was not the sort of thing Poe would invent. I was going to look for the answer until I dropped."

Knowing that Poe had owned a translation of S. F. Lacroix's Elements of Algebra, Irwin went to the Hopkins Eisenhower Library Rare Book Room, looked up the book, and found the equation, which turned out to be a well-established formula for solving quadratic equations with one unknown. Irwin links quadratic and square, then offers an interpretation of Poe's use of the equation that creates a striking image of thought and the self-conscious mind.

A square, Irwin says, seems to be a straightforward construct. After all, it's precisely quantifiable, describable, measurable, and therefore rational. The square is a classical figure of perfection, an image of rectitude and stability that persists in sayings like "a square deal."

Yet, as Irwin points out, a square contains an implicit diagonal, and that diagonal is the hypotenuse of each of the two resulting triangles (that three/four business again). If we assign a value of one to each side of the square, the length of the hypotenuse is the square root of two--an irrational number of infinite decimal places. In other words, Irwin says, at the heart of the square, this image of all that is rational, measurable, and stable, lies irrationality and infinite possibility. Says Irwin, "In something that seems so finite, the abyss of the infinite yawns."

Such images are what these stories ultimately provide to the reader, Irwin says. Beyond their fiendish cleverness, their intellectual puzzles, and their value as entertainment, Poe's Dupin stories and their counterparts by Borges create striking images of the nature of self-consciousness, images through which people can try to grasp what cannot be encompassed by words. They examine the difficulties inherent when one mind, that of a detective, tries to fathom the mind of another, the criminal--the difficulties of a mind trying to step outside itself to encompass the nature of thought. "They advance the imagery by which we figure to ourselves what self-consciousness is like," Irwin says.

If self-consciousness involves the mind's attempt to turn back upon itself and take measure of itself as an object, Irwin asks, how do you represent that? One of Poe's answers was the purloined letter, which is so folded as to be divided and then doubled back against itself, as the mind must divide itself and double back to regard its own thoughts. The minister hides the letter in plain sight by turning it inside out. Irwin takes that as an image of how one ultimately cannot differentiate the container from the contained, cannot truly step outside consciousness, the container of thought, to examine its contents.

Borges's labyrinths and Poe's locked rooms are, in Irwin's mind, representations of the consciousness trying to transcend the physical. In the mythological labyrinth central to Borges's allusions, Theseus enters the depths, triumphs over the brute physicality of the man-beast Minotaur, and finds his way out to reenter the light. In "Rue Morgue," Auguste Dupin reasons his way out of a locked room, and then follows the Thesean thread of the "clews" to triumph over the killer, who turns out to be a manlike beast, an orangutan. Says Irwin, "All of these figurations, which are part-and-parcel of the detective story, are not only ways to figure the self-consciousness, but the odd relationship of the self-consciousness to the body."

Borges and Poe use images of mirrors and reflection as representations of self-consciousness trying to split from itself to comprehend its own nature but, in the end, facing only its reflected double. In "Death and the Compass," the detective Lonnrot ("secret red") tries to think like the villain, who turns out to be an old nemesis, Red Scarlach: "scarlet red," or "double red." All three of Borges's stories allude to Lewis Carroll's Alice, who falls asleep in front of her mirror and dreams of confronting the Red King, who is dreaming of her in the garden in front of the Looking-glass House. In Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Dupin solves the crime by thinking like Minister D--. But the Parisian detective, Irwin notes, hasn't really stepped outside of his own consciousness to grasp the nature of another's thought; he has merely examined an evil side of himself that in the villainous minister is the dominant side. Dupin has, in effect, examined a reflection of himself, in which the dominance of good over evil is reversed.

Our ideas of another's mind (or of mind in total) are by necessity still our ideas, Irwin says. We can't think with another's brain, and we can't truly step outside of our own self- consciousness to analyze it. All we can do, figuratively, is look in the mirror and confront our reflexive double. The minister has tried to hide the purloined letter by everting it, leaving the letter, Poe wrote, "turned, as a glove, inside out." Irwin points out that this creates a representation of the letter as a mirror image. If you lay a glove on a table, as the minister did with the letter, and then turn it inside out, the fingers end up pointing back at you and the handedness has reversed. Just like a mirror image.

Indeed, says Irwin, in many respects Borges's tales are deliberate mirror images of Poe's. Much in them is reversed. The detective Dupin triumphs in Poe's stories; in all three of Borges's tales, the bad guys win. To solve the mysteries in Poe, you must think like the right-thinking Dupin; to escape from Borges's labyrinths, their creator tells you, you must keep turning to the left, the sinister side. Poe's victims are all women; Borges's are men.

In the end, Irwin says, any attempt at encompassing self- consciousness with the mind, whether you're Poe, Borges, a professor writing a book, or simply a thoughtful reader, leaves you always with one more step to take. A perfect map that showed every detail of the Earth would have to include itself including itself including itself, on and on in infinite regression. The mind cannot step outside of thought to encompass all thinking, because that last attempt at all-inclusive thought would be a thought itself, which would then have to be included by another thought.... In his own bit of striking imagery, Irwin likens it to a Mobius strip, in which you join the ends of a strip of paper that has been twisted once. A line drawn on what seems to be the outside of the strip ends up on the inside, back at the starting point.

What goes around comes around. Try to step outside to encompass consciousness, and you end up inside, back where you started, though with a new set of meaningful images if your guide, someone like Irwin, has been a good one. So:

Follow John T. Irwin into the labyrinth. On his advice, bear to the left....

Dale Keiger is the magazine's senior writer.


Send EMail to Johns Hopkins Magazine

Return to table of contents.