|
|
|
|
|
|
We might take another look together at the history of science, of police detection, of the interpretation of texts, of clinical medicine (and other fields) showing how and in which cases abductions of the second and third type intervene. But in all these instances, when the detectives, or the scientists, or the critics, or the philologists make an Abduction, they must bet that the solution that they found (the Possible World of their hypothetical imagination) corresponds to the Real World. And for this they must perform other tests and experiments. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In the detective stories, from Conan Doyle to Rex Stout, these tests are not necessary. The detective imagines the solution and "says" it as if it were the truth; and immediately Watson, the killer who is present, or someone else verifies the hypothesis. They say: "It happened just like that!" And the detective is sure of what he guessed. In the detective novels the author (who acts in the place of God) guarantees the correspondence between the Possible World imagined by the detective and the Real World. Outside the detective novels, abductions are riskier and are always exposed to failure. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Now, Biorges's stories are a parody of the detective story because Don Isidro does not need someone to tell him that things were as he had imagined them. He is completely sure, and Borges-Casares with him (and the reader with them). Why? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
To be sure that the mind of the detective has reconstructed the sequence of the facts and of the rules as they had to be, one must believe a profound Spinozistic notion that "ordo et connexio rerum idem est ac ordo et connexio idearum." The movements of our mind that investigates follow the same rules of the real. If we think "well," we are obligated to think according to the same rules that connect things among themselves. If a detective identifies with the mind of the killer, he cannot help but arrive at the same point at which the killer arrives. In this Spinozist universe, the detective will also know what the killer will do tomorrow. And he will go to wait for him at the scene of the next crime. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
But if the detective reasons like that, the killer can reason like that as well: he will be able to act in such a way that the detective will go and wait for him at the scene of the next crime, but the victim of the killer's next crime will be the detective himself. And this is what happens in "Death and the Compass," and in practice in all of Borges's stories, or at least in the more disturbing and enthralling ones. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The universe of Borges is a universe in which diverse minds can't |
|
|
|
|
|