"O jardim dos caminhos que se bifurcam" ou, a narrativa infinita de Borges, Calvino e Byatt

Abstract

This article takes a confrontational look on the narratives of Italo Clavino and A. S. Byatt vis-à-vis the labyrinthine work of Jorge Luis Borges. The aim of this confrontational analysis is to bring to the surface a very borgesian narrative feature which is also shared by the authors here discussed: the universal and primal importance of storytelling, and of language, as an essential part of human life, of our lives. In the process we focus on the story “The Garden of Forking Paths” as the ultimate example of the importance of the order of the discourse (to use Foucault’s terminology), and depart from that to analyse other stories both by Byatt (The Biographer’s Tale, [2000]) and by Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller…, [1979]), which are centred on discussions about storytelling. Sharing the view professed by John Barth in 1980 that the best of postmodern literature is a “literature of replenishment”, the article views the approach to narrative shared by these writers as a fundamentally postmodern one.