5. Subversion Infinite Series and Transfinite Numbers in Borges's Fictions

NABOKOV AND BORGES are ofren compared, but their responses to the field concept arc very different: whereas Nabokov is drawn to it because its asymmetries promise to rescue art from being merely a game, Borges is attracted to it because its discontinuities reveal that everything, including itself, is no more than a game . The two stances are associated with very different literary strategies . As we saw in Chap­ ter 5, the impetus of Ada is to stop time; to create patterns whose parameters, once set, can encompass all future permutations; to make absolute and immortal the identity of the narrator, idiosyncrasies intact, by weaving his patterns of thought into the fabric of the created world. Borges, by contrast, attempts to increase rather than use up the available permutations. Instead of hundreds of pages he writes five or six, characteristically including at least one open-ended catalogue capa­ ble of indefinite expansion. For Borges stasis is impossible because art is not an object to be framed, but a continuing process whose permuta­ tions arc inexhaustible . In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," for example, a changed context results in a completely different text. The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard, we arc told, is a richer, subtler, and