e-mail: merrellf@omni.cc.purdue.edu

This text is about the universe as an elaborate network where each member of the whole (the set of all sets) is intimately linked to everything else. I refer to "field theory", which Fritjof Capra (1975), a particle physicist and prophet of the holistic view, has in mind when he asserts that the universe is a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns. Although quantum mechanics and relativity theory are incompatible on many points, in general they share the fundamental premises that (1) the universe is an interconnected whole; dichotomies of space and time, matter and energy, gravity and inertia, become nothing more than different aspects of the same phenomena and (2) there is no such thing as observing this interactive whole from a neutral frame of reference. Necessarily and irrevocably, we are inside the dynamic cosmic web.

Matter and empty space, the full and the void, constituted the dichotomy of atomism from Democritus to Newton. According to general relativity, in contrast, the two poles cannot be separated. Wherever there is a massive body, there will be a gravitational field manifested by a curvature of space around that body; all matter is inseparable from space as independent parts of a single whole. Neither is there an absolute distinction between matter and energy. According to field theory, a material particle such as an electron is merely a small domain of the electrical field, within which the field strength has assumed values of enormous magnitude, indicating that a comparatively large field is concentrated in a very small space. Such an "energy knot", which by no means is clearly delineated against the remaining field, "propagates through. . . space like a water wave across the surface of a lake; there is no such thing as one and the same substance of which the electron consists at all times" (Weyl 1949, 171). The field exists always and everywhere, and a part of it cannot be effectively isolated from the whole. It is the carrier of all material phenomena, the "void" out of which "particles" emerge and fade. In ordinary life, we are not aware of this unity; we divide our surroundings into separate objects and events. This division is practical and necessary, but it is not the fundamental nature of reality, today's physicists tell us.

One of the most intriguing proponents of the interconnectedness thesis has been David Bohm, a maverick physicist and one of the chief opponents of the Copenhagen interpretation. Bohm suggests that the universe consists of what is most adequately termed "unbroken wholeness", which can only be described as "that-which-is." Space, time, and matter simple are: they are the unfolding of that which was enfolded, the actualization of a potentiality. The totality of the universe is therefore, and paradoxically, self-contained, immanent. Bohm's undifferentiated whole, the enfolded, is called the implicate order. The actualized world of particulars, the unfolded, is the explicate order. Bohm illustrates the relationship between the two orders with a tropologue, a metaphor. If we put some viscous fluid such as glycerine in a container, place a drop of insoluble dye close to one edge, and turn the container slowly, the dye is "stretched" out in a circle until it seems to disappear. It is still there, but it is now enfolded, implicate. If we reverse the turn of the container, the drop reappears in its previous form. It has become unfolded, explicate. While the dye was in its enfolded state, it existed, though we could not perceive it. Simply because we do not see something or are not presently conscious of it does not imply its nonexistence. It is there, potentially to become explicate. And, it bears mentioning that what is at a given moment explicate must in this sense imply what remains implicate but could have become explicate (Bohm 1980,140-71).

The combination of the implicate and the explicate orders is what Bohm terms the "qualitative infinity of nature." Much like Whitehead, he argues that there can be no end to the levels of interconnected networks, from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, so that there is no end to the number of interpretations of the universe from a potentially unlimited number of perspectives. This notion calls into question the "thingness" or "beingness" of what has been actualized. Every "entity", no matter how fundamental it may be, depends for its existence on the particular conditions of the implicate order, which is in turn affected by the mutual interconnectedness of the "entity" or set of "entities" under consideration, which have been, or which are, in the process of actualization into the explicate order.

Each "entity" in nature owes its existence in the explicate order to a balance of opposing fluctuations in the mutually reciprocating background, the implicate order, which is incessantly changing in diverse ways. And this "entity" exercises an influence, therefore offering some contribution, though ever so slight, to the universe as a whole. There is no absolute autonomy, hence the properties of a particular "entity" can be attached to no more than ephemeral definitions and conceptualizations. This "process" metaphysics of the universe offers the image of a potential infinity of factors that determine the properties of a particular "entity" at a given instant. From one perspectival grasp, an "entity" evinces a potential infinity of aspects in common with those it possessed during the previous instant; if not, it would not preserve any form of identity over time. By the same token, it manifests, at that same instant, a potential infinity of aspects differentiating it from what it was. Given the infinity of factors determining the properties of an ' entity", nothing can remain identical with itself. Bohm reminds us that since thus far empirical evidence has provided no mode of being that remains eternally defined in any given way, there is no reason to expect absolute verities in the future. In fact, the assumption of the absolute and final nature of perspectives, concepts, and theories contradicts the very spirit upon which science is predicated, in spite of those wide-eyed somnambulists who proclaim the contrary to be the case.

If no "entity" can be in all respects identical with what it was, but always already something different, then any and all definitions and conceptualizations of that "entity" can be no more than skeletons, the most limited of abstractions, and they are austerely circumscribed by contexts, the contents of which are incapable of providing a totalizing reflection of the potential infinity of other contexts; immanence necessarily prevails. Hence all abstractions, according to Bohm, are at most nothing more than approximations, for we cannot hope to encompass conceptually the qualitative infinity of nature. Science, in this view, cannot lead to error-free knowledge. The arduous task of uncovering errors in previous theories reveals that, in our universe of incessant becoming, new phenomena will always and invariably pop up.

Bohm's metaphysics, as I understand it, also implies that mentation and "physical reality" share comparable algebras at the implicit level. Moreover, the ramification of the interconnectedness of things ultimately leads to consciousness, for

Bohm's notion is considerably less determinate than the argument that mind parallels (mirrors) matter, or the reductionist thesis that mind functions are nothing but brain functions. It does point toward Berkeley's saying that he did not aim to change things into ideas, but rather ideas into things. Bohm's abstract structural similarity between mind and matter has recently come to be known to a few as the "holographic theory", named after the hologram, a dramatic breakthrough in photography by the use of laser beams(2). An intriguing feature of laser photography is that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the parts of the photographed object and the parts of the photographic plate. Rather, the interference pattern of each region of the plate is equal to the whole-like the noted Buddhist string of pearls, each of which reflects, and therefore contains, the whole. If the corner of a plate is broken off and illuminated, it will reproduce the entire object, though the smaller the piece, the more vague the reproduced image becomes. This description of the "holographic paradox"-as it has occasionally been termed-is necessary, for it illustrates a theme, discussed above in another context and found throughout Borges's texts, especially "The Aleph": the part is equal to and reflects the whole. I refer in particular to the "map paradox", which exists in two forms: (1) a map constructed the size of the country to be mapped so as to include each detail (Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, 119), and (2) a map laid out on a flat stretch of the terrain in the countryside to be mapped, and constructed in such fine detail that it reduplicates that country faithfully (Other Inquisitions, 45-46; Royce 1901). A possible problem with the first map is merely that of identity. Which is map and which is territory? The second map, which interests us here, must, since it is part of the country to be mapped, represent itself in itself, and that representation must represent itself, and so on. This is the essence of Bohm's intriguing metaphysics: if the part contains and mirrors the whole, then it contains itself within itself, and that part of itself must have a part of it which contains itself-Cantor's sets.

Bohm's hypothesis, I believe it has become evident, also bears on Zeno's paradox of movement. For Bohm, notions of continuous and discontinuous movement as occurring over time have been erroneous. According to the traditional view, which inextricably remains linked to the Eleatic problem, an arrow flying from the archer's bow toward the target requires a certain period of time; each increment might correspond to an almost infinitesimal jerk, and during each increment of time, the arrow was in a certain point in space. Bohm's movement of an object unfolding out of the implicate order, in contrast, is more in tune with our inductive sense of movement. Suppose we put a drop of dye in the glycerine and turn the stirring mechanism n times. We could then place another drop nearby, and stir n times again, and then repeat the procedure n times. Then we would have a series of enfolded "dots" along the curvature of the turns. After their enfoldment, we then reverse the turns, but this time so rapidly that the individual "dots" merge into one another. We now have what appears to be a continuously "solid" curved object. This, suggests Bohm, is analogous to the movement of immediate perception, because the eye is not sensitive to the dye in lower concentrations. One does not directly see the entire movement.(3)

This consideration indirectly returns us to the problem of time. According to one interpretation of quantum theory, every point of continuous space is the potential position of a particle, and every instant of continuous time is the potential time of an event. The becoming of events, from this potential, is, in the final analysis, mind-dependent. Physical events merely occur "tenselessly in a network of relations of timelike separation" (Grünbaum 1967, 55). Thus quantum theory has discretized or quantized some properties-i.e., a quantum event described as the movement of a particle conceived of as a series of discontinuous jumps-which were considered continuous in classical physics. However, time and space remain unquantized. Zeno denies movement (in space and time) along a series. This, it will be recalled, is comparable to Borges's denial of time construed as a series. But since space and time are not quantized (i.e., serialized, made tenseless), quantum theory is not challenged by the arrow paradox (Grünbaum 1967, 114).

Bohm's abstract model is, properly speaking, also tenseless insofar as movement through space and time can be statically presented on paper or a blackboard as a graph, with time corresponding to the "y" axis and space to the "x" axis. The "flow of time" is represented by a line from the bottom angling toward the top. This packs three dimensions into two, providing a static view of what to immediate experience would have been a continuous flow-the equivalent of Escher's remark that after the creative process is brought to completion, the result is viewed holistically, in static, timeless fashion. The same can be said of movement in our three-dimensional world seen from a fourdimensional perspective (i.e., the static "block")(4). An example will suffice. To reevoke Everett's branching universe(5), a particle's trajectory over an exceedingly brief time increment might look something like figure 1. From point A in time, four possibilities are open after an intermediate temporal increment. Assume these branching universes to be a segment of a flatlander's world. Person A at instant A could be aware of his choices B and C, but DEFG remain in the unforeseen future. The most he can do is proceed a step "forward" to either B or C, and then either to DF or FG. In contrast, from our three-dimensional perspective, we can map out his possibilities from within a timeless framework, DEFG being open to our view in simultaneity with ABC. (Note that this tree diagram is a microcosm of Ts'ui Pên's book, a temporal labyrinth that does not unfold linearly but bifurcates into multiple ramifications.)(6)

Figure 1

A worthy counterpart to Bohm's "undivided wholeness" in Borges, also prevalent among poststructuralist critics, is the notion of "intertextuality". Each text, within the intertextual fabric, is considered to be a mosaic of citations of other texts; it absorbs them and at the same time transforms them with its coming into existence and with each and every reading(7). In other words, like the "entities" in Bohm's interconnected whole, intertextuality renders each meaning contingent upon all other meanings, and each meaning is the by-product of family resemblances regarding the commonsense world as it is conceived from a particular culture-laden and language-laden perspective.

Rosalyn Frank and Nancy Vosburg (1977, 582) observe that Borges's notion of "intertextuality" reinforces the "double reality", the "real" and the "irreal", to be found in his stories. However, this is not the form of intertextuality I have in mind, which is more akin to Gérard Genette's "time of a book": not the limited time of writing, but the limitless serial time of reading (of all readings) and of memory (all memories). In such a "timeless time", along the lines of an "implicate order", Borges tells us that Kafka exercises an influence on Cervantes that is no less important than Cervantes's influence on Kafka. At the outset, this notion reminds one of the poststructuralist thesis, and of comments by diverse writers. For example, André Malraux (1951, 368), for whom each genius that causes a rupture with the past also changes earlier forms. Or T. S. Eliot, also occasionally mentioned by Borges, who writes that "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them" (1941, 1).

Obviously Borges's notion is more all-encompassing. It is not only protoactive but retroactive as well. It is simultaneously a radicalization and deconstruction of the well-known fallacies of intention and influence. For example, Borges (Other Inquisitions, 106-8), provides a list of unlikely "antecedents" to Kafka's work: Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Browning, Leon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany. He then suggests that, though each member of this heterogeneous collection resembles Kafka, they do not resemble each other. Yet, through Kafka, they are interconnected. In other words, Kafka's idiosyncrasies exist in each of those who influenced him, but had Kafka not written what he did, those idiosyncrasies tying each of them together would not have existed. Our reading of Kafka consequently changes, though at times imperceptibly, our reading of Browning, of Kierkegaard, of Cervantes, even of Borges and Shakespeare. Borges concludes that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future, since each work and each reading of a work affects, to a greater or lesser degree, the totality of intertextuality in a manner comparable to Bohm's interconnected fabric.

We must confess at this juncture, after brief consideration of Bohm, Wheeler's "tail-chasing dog" model, and Godel's argument within the "block", events abc for one observer might well be reversed for another. The notion of intertextual reciprocation regardless of unidirectional time is in this sense not as outlandish as it might otherwise appear. Interestingly, in "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" we learn that Quain wrote a novel, April March, in which events digress from future to past, a regressively bifurcating novel the equivalent of reversing the order of figure 1 and reading it from right to left. Quain, who lays claim in his novel "to the essential features of all games: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium" (Ficciones, 75), evokes, in the prologue to his work, Bradley's inverse world in which "death precedes birth, the scar the wound, and the wound the blow" (ibid.). In this inconceivable Eleatic realm, the eight stories composing another of Quain's works, Statement, deliberately frustrate the reader, one of them even insinuating two arguments that lead the reader to think he has invented them. Borges, apparently in all seriousness, reveals that he was "ingenious enough" to extract from yet another of Quain's stories, "The Rose of Yesterday", his own tale of "The Circular Ruins".

Upon reading about Quain's work, we realize that just as a finely detailed map must contain a copy of itself, so Borges wrote a story about an author whose work dupes its readers into thinking they have created the work-all readers are potentially or actually writers, Quain postulated, for readers are now extinct. And one of those deluded readers is precisely Borges, whose "Circular Ruins" implies that very deluding act: the magician was not dreamt by another magician, but possibly by the very son he believed to have interpolated into "reality." Borges is thus textualized, like Quixote before him, as a reader of a work by a character he created. In another manner of speaking, like the map paradox, Borges's "reality" contains his text, which in turn contains Borges and the totality of his "reality."

It is not amiss to assume, in this respect, that Borges's notion of textual interconnectedness actually entails two spheres: (1) the literary, and (2) the conjunction of "reality", fiction, and dream-which in their composite is tantamount to the literary, which at the same time paradoxically remains as a part of "reality." Regarding the first, Borges approvingly paraphrases Paul Valéry, for whom the history of literature "should not be the history of the authors and the accidents of their careers or of the career of their works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature." He then relates Valéry to Shelley, who fifteen years earlier observed that all the poems, past, present, and future, "were episodes or fragments of a single infinite poem, written by all poets on earth" (Other Inquisitions, 10). The plurality of authors and works being illusory, a pantheistic supposition finds "unexpected support", Borges tells us, in the classicists, for whom literature is what is essential, not individual texts or authors. This calls to mind the monism or complete idealism in Tlon, where a book consists of all possible permutations; that is, it is at once One and Many. According to this "holographic model" (i.e., intertextuality) of literature, the part is necessarily a fragment of the whole, and yet it is intricately connected with every other part of the whole: somehow it is that whole. And the whole remains the dream of every author: "The practice of literature sometimes fosters the ambition to construct an absolute book, a books of books that includes all the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtue is not lessened by the years" (Other Inquisitions, 66).

In this conception of things, the Russellian paradox once again inheres, which bears further on what I have termed the "holographic model." Just as the set of all sets cannot be a member of itself, so the part cannot logically be tantamount to the whole. Yet it is, in spite of Russell's interdiction.

Moreover, if to read an author like Kafka is to modify, by establishing interconnections between Kafka and other authors, the past and future of all literature, this act entails a dilemma comparable to the Meno paradox. Socrates claims we are all ignorant, so we should argue together in order to arrive, in dreamlike fashion, at the correct opinion. Meno, the slave-boy, challenges this assumption: we all somehow know without knowing that we know. And Plato provides an answer to Meno, invoking a divine source for knowing where to look for knowledge and how the inquirer can know it when she has it. Borges remains to an extent at Meno's side. Nevertheless, his doubts prevail. Is this, he asks, "a legitimate instrument of inquiry or merely a bad habit?" (Other Inquisitions, 114). The inquirer, for Borges, and contrary to Plato, is immanent, yet somehow she can know. Such "knowledge" cannot be purely of "reality", but, in Heisenberg's words, it is "knowledge" of our interaction with "reality."

This brings us to the conjunction of "reality", fiction, and dream with respect to the fabric of intertextuality. I have alluded to Borges's "The Dream of Coleridge", in which a thirteenth-century emperor dreams a palace and builds it, and a nineteenth-century poet dreams a poem about the same palace, unaware that the structure was derived from a dream. This puzzle gives rise, Borges conjectures, to the notion that the series of dreams, poems, and labors has not ended. Perhaps, in fact, the series is endless, or perhaps the last person to dream will have the key. At any rate, whoever might have compared palace to poem "would have seen that they were essentially the same" (Other Inquisitions, 17).

This is, indeed, a vision of the "qualitative infinity" of a timeless order of textuality accessible solely to what Borges calls a "superhuman performer." Over the long haul, intertextuality, as I have described it, evinces the unity of a terminus ad quem, a final goal. But, of course, that goal is undefinable, a receding horizon in the sense of Bohm's game of science. The interconnected fabric, whether supposedly in reference to "reality", fiction, or dream, necessarily includes both the world of readers and authors as well as the world of texts. After presenting the map paradox, Borges asks why this should disconcert us, or why it should disquiet us to realize that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, or Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet. He believes he has found the answer. These inversions "suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle observed that universal history is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they too are written" (Other Inquisitions, 46).

Authors, readers, "reality", fictions, and dreams are incompatible according to common parlance. Yet, enfolded into the whole of intertextuality, they can be interchanged and unfolded, i.e., read, at propitious, or perhaps not so providential, moments. And how can this whole of intertextuality ultimately be defined? Perhaps, as Bohm tells us of the "qualitative infinity of nature", it is simply that-which-is. In this respect, Borges, after tracing the progress of the Buddha throughout history from somebody to nobody, concludes that to be one thing "is inexorably not to be all other things. The confused intuition of that truth induced men to imagine that not being is more than being something and that, somehow, not to be is to be everything" (Other Inquisitions, 148). Commensurately, according to Bohm's "qualitative infinity of nature" as well as Everett's "many-worlds interpretation", not to be, or to be nothing, is not tantamount to being everything. Following Bohm, it may be said that "reality" is no-thing. It is the annealment of the implicate and the explicate, neither determinable nor knowable, yet it is not the totality of all things, i.e., it is not to be identified with everything or all things determinable (Bohm 1980, 60).

In the "many-worlds" conception, the universe as a monolithic superposed wave function is, it might be said, though it is not so formulated by Everett but by Wheeler, both everything and nothing-everything, for it represents the universe's "bootstrap operation" from the time of the primal cosmic glob, and nothing, for, as a wave function, it is not, in everyday language use, anything. In the ever-changing flux of Bohm's interconnected universe, "totality" or "reality" are orders with a certain implied thought content; both are incomprehensible, yet they are not merely meaningless. The words "totality" and "reality" inexorably imply for us, locked into our Western culture as we are, something fixed and permanent. But if so construed, a fallacy has been committed. "Reality" as a whole cannot properly be regarded as potentially the content of thought, for thought is a part of that selfsame "reality." In Bohm's (1980, 60-61) non-Aristotelian formulation, the All is thought coupled with that which is not thought-the two "merge and flow into each other, in a single unbroken process in which they become ultimately one"-and at the same time the All is neither thought nor not thought-for the ultimate ground can be neither specified nor known. There can no more be an ultimate form of such thought than there can be the ultimate thought of the book, referred to above by Carlyle, that is written and read and in turn contains its authors and readers.

The dialectic of everything and nothing, of the "totality" of intertextuality, envisages the "holographic model" as an enfolded whole, a minuscule part of which can be unfolded at a given moment. Whether speaking of intertextuality or the interconnected, self-contained, qualitatively infinite universe, the "holographic model" leads to the conclusion that

Very significantly, if we substitute "entity" for "text" in Bohm's statement, it is rendered remarkably compatible with the general notion of intertextuality, that is, with Borges's function of literature.

Indeed, if we conceive of the book as a physical object actualized into a text during a reading-interaction with an observer-the whole of textuality, as potentia, must be tantamount to the implicate order. Each "entity" (word, sentence, text) constituting part of this background is necessarily governed by the fluctuations in the implicate order of each and every other "entity." A change in a given "entity" brings about a reciprocal change, even though ever so small, in the entire fabric. Unlike a book, the text has no predefined or definable boundaries. The text's status is distinct from that of its author, whose posthumous state does not inhibit the text's dynamic character. The text is not overloaded with its author's history, or with history in general, nor does it suffer limitations due to its author's incapacities. It takes on a life of its own, existing at the limits assigned to it by a particular reading, which must be contextualized, for if not, no boundary can be established. Each successive reading creates for the text a distinct context, and with each new context and reading a slightly to radically distinct text is called up, i.e., actualized, with the simultaneous dissolution of other possible texts into the background, where they remain within the fluctuating balance, exercising their force, be it subversive or benign, on all other actualized or unactualized texts.

Since the whole is incessant flux, a process of becoming, all textual meanings, definitions, and concepts are no more than ephemeral, and as a result of the potential infinity of factors at the underlying level, no text can be self-identical over time. Proportionate with Bohm's "qualitative infinity of nature", there can be no absolute and final state for the field of intertextuality, nor can there be, at a given point in time, final knowledge of any static Saussurean semiological slice out of the intertextual whole. All is incessantly changing.

Interestingly enough, the conjunction of the Library and Ts'ui Pên's labyrinthine book is a conceptual hypostat modeling intertextuality as if it were actualized in its totality-an impossible dream, of course, but a fruitful fiction. The Library contains all possible combinations of a finite repertoire of signs, and Ts'ui Pên's book entails all possible bifurcations in time derived from alternative worlds. In addition, from "Pierre Menard" we become aware of the nonidentity of all texts and their contextualized readings. The fragments of Don Quixote that Pierre Menard was able to write before he died are, the narrator tells us, a great enrichment of the original. They are the product of creative endeavors not of a Golden-Age Spaniard but of a twentieth-century Frenchman ignorant of the time of which he wrote. The thrust of "Pierre Menard" is, we have been told, rather than writing, the process of reading, for Menard

According to Borges's concept of intertextuality, to read a book written in the past is in a sense to read through the time that transpired from the day it was written to the present. Today, "Martin Fierro" is not merely the epic poem written by José Hernández; it is the one read by Leopoldo Lugones, Enrique Martínez Estrada, Borges, and many others, and it is the poem transformed into Borges's "The End" (F, 159-62), which narrates the account of a knife fight between the Negro Recabarren and Martin Fierro, taking up where the poem left off (Alifano 1984, 33)(8).

Hence, to read a fiction is to reread a reading rather than a writing. Borges's writing is his own reading, his reading is his world, and his world is his text, which is first read and then rewritten, to be reread (M. del Rio 1978). Menard's fragments of Don Quixote are the fragments of a world, which, in a changed context, become a different text, a different world, and with successive changes of context the world is repeatedly altered. A plurality of worlds potentially exist; they are made to be remade, much in the sense of Goodman, Borges seems to imply. In other words, there is, potentially, an infinity of Don Quixotes over time, each written by different authors and read by different readers.

The fact is that, to this point in time, no meaning, interpretation, or hypothesis has remained eternally constituted in any given way. Rather, they have all been found, sooner or later and under suitable conditions, to suffer alterations, even in their most basic qualities, and they subsequently transmute into something other than what they were. This being the case, there is no guarantee that any fixed and absolute meanings, interpretations, and hypotheses will be forthcoming. In this manner, Menard's and Cervantes's passages as books are identical. As texts, however, we are told that Cervantes, a child of his times, merely created a mirror-image of his cultural milieu. Menard, in contrast, like a good Nietzschean, knew how to lie, to create artifice, to say what was not as if it were. This is because the writing and readings of his text were properly contextualized. But over the long haul, Menard was no more the author of his discourse than was Cervantes; both were written by their respective texts, they were written into their texts. Textuality exercised its authoritarian rule over the feeble prescriptions of mere mortals.

All told, and commensurate with the interconnectedness thesis, to comprehend Borges's texts according to their wellstructured architectonic is not simply to grasp the proper meanings of individual words but instead to attend to the dynamic interrelationships set up among the juxtaposed portions of the work. Christ (1969, 113) describes how Borges is like op art; our response is not due to the evocation of a particular emotion- joy, pity, sorrow. It depends on the relations woven into the texture of the story. And, with respect to intertextuality in general, the same inheres. Borges sees literature as past, present, and future, as a dynamic interaction in constant flux. It is "something living and growing. I think of the world's literature as a kind of forest, I mean it's tangled and it entangles us but it's growing . . . it's a living labyrinth" (Burgin 1968, 38).

Intertextuality, I would submit, is by no means exclusively a literary phenomenon. Of course, most proponents of intertextuality extend the notion to historical, philosophical, religious, and other texts. I am referring, in contrast, to one of the hardest of disciplines: physical science. A study by Enrico Bellone (1980) adequately illustrates this point. A historian of science, Bellone offers a "non-Romantic" approach to scientific creativity and texts. There are, he assumes, no solitary geniuses Iying under the apple tree awaiting blinding flashes of insight to shake them from their slumber. From the time of Galileo, theoretical physics has always retained a complex network of conneetions that can be experimentally tested, and they are by and large compatible with the general temper of their times. Theoretical scientists, especially if they discover a rift in the structure of the prevailing scientific cosmology and break out, must translate, by means of their "scientific dictionary", the body of theory, empirical observations, and experimental data from one conceptual framework to another, from one "language" to another.

Bellone offers the case of James Clerk Maxwell, who made use of rules that could establish a correspondence between Michael Faraday's experimental corpus of work and mathematical language already available. Maxwell was a mathematician, while Faraday was not, but he was an experimentalist. Hence they spoke different "languages." To translate one "language" into another would require a particular "dictionary." Bellone asks us to assume that we are familiar with Maxwell's "dictionary." It is then compared with Faraday's electromagnetic field theory. The first problem is that Faraday's theory implies interaction between electromagnetic and gravitational fields. In Maxwell's formulation, such an interaction engenders paradoxes with no apparent solution. A limited and unfaithful translator would usually omit that part of the text that breeds anomalies and by a fudge factor translate the rest and patch it up so as to make it appear complete. A competent translator such as Maxwell, in contrast, must be in possession of a more extensive "dictionary." Researching Maxwell's background and analyzing his texts, Bellone discovered that Maxwell's "dictionary" comprised an aggregate of theories: Lagrange's and Hamilton's mechanics, the body of electric and magnetic theories, several branches of mathematics, some astrophysics, and more. Maxwell had studied logic, he had an interest in the history of physics, there were philosophical remarks scattered throughout his manuscripts, and he even evoked theological texts on occasion.

Maxwell's "dictionary", comparable in nature to that of any competent scientist, humanist, or writer, is not only vast, complex, and interwoven with intricate levels of correlation, it is also unstable and subject to changes over time. The importance of this open process cannot be overstressed. Like intertextuality, a modification in one area of a "dictionary" and its respective texts will cause slight to radical changes in other areas. And a new theory proposed by a member of the scientific community will bring about greater or lesser shifts in the "dictionaries" of all other members of the community. Bellone (1980, 16) insists that any historian "who sought to uncover the structure . . . of Maxwell's science by using a label as well known and as much abused as mechanism would certainly get lost in myth."(9) By the same token, a scholar desirous of discovering univocal meaning in a literary text on the basis of the author's history and cultural milieu would contribute to a mythification of the text, for, in dynamic interaction with all texts and their readers, there can be no legitimate halting point.

If the jungle of intertextuality affords us no ultimate harmony, neither does nature, which has for centuries been the object of humankind's quest for order, balance, and symmetry. That dream appears to have been ill-founded, as we shall now observe.

Borges's texts

Works Cited

ALIFANO, Robert. Twenty-four conversations with Borges. Housatonic, Lascaux, 1984.

BELLONE, Enrico. A world on paper: studies on the second scientific revolution. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1980.

BOHM, David. Wholeness and implicate order. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

BRADLEY, F. H. Appearance and reality. New York, Macmillan, 1897.

BUCKLEY, Paul and F. David Peat, eds.. A question of Physics: conversations in Physics and Biology. Toronto, Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979.

BURGIN, Richard. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968.

BUTLER, Colin. "Borges and Time: with particular reference to 'New refutation of time'". Orbis Litterarum 28:148-61, 1973.

CAPRA, Fritjof. TheTao of Physics. Berkley, Shamballa, 1975.

CHRIST, Christ. The Narrow act Borges' Art of Allusion. New York, New York University Press, 1969.

CULLER, J. "Presupposition and intertextuality". Modern language Notes 91 (n.6): 1380-96, 1976.

DEWITT, B. and N. Graham (eds.). The many worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973.

DEL RIO, Carmen. "Borges' 'Pierre Menard' or where is the text." Kentucky Romance Quarterly 25 (no. 4),1978.

ELIOT, T. S. Selected Essays. London, Faber and Faber, 1941.

FRANK, Rosalyn and Nancy Vosburg. "Textos y contratextos en 'El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan.'". Revista Ibero Americana, nos. 100-01:517-34, 1977.

GARDNER, Martin. The ambidextrous universe: mirror asymmetry and time-reversed worlds. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979.

GOODMAN, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, Hackett, 1978.

GRÜNBAUM, Adolph. Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes. Middletown, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1967.

HEISENBERG, Werner. Physics and Phlosophy. New York, Harper and Row, 1958.

HUSSERL, Edmund. The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness. Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press, 1964.

KOLERS, Paul A. Aspects of motion perception. Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1972.

KRISTEVA, J. Semiotiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris, Seuil, 1969.

MALRAUX, André. The voices of silence. New York, Doubleday, 1951.

MEYER, L. B. Emotion and meaning in Music. Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1956.

PRIBRAM, Karl. Languages of Brain: experimental paradoxes and principles in neuropsycology. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1971.

ROYCE, Josiah. The world and the individual. New York, Macmillan, 1901.

WEYL, Hermann. Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science. New York, Atheneum, 1949.

WHEELER, "Assessment of Everett's 'Relative State' formulation of quantum theory". Review of Modern Physics 29 (no. 3):463-65, 1957.

WHITEHEAD, A. N. Process and reality. New York, Macmillan, 1929.

WORTON, M. and J. Still, eds. Intertextuality: theories and practice. Manchester, Manchester Univ. Press, 1990.

Works Cited By Borges in chronological order

Inquisiciones. Buenos Aires, Editodal Proa, 1925.

El idioma de los argentinos. Buenos Aires, Manuel Gleizer, 1928.

Discusión. Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1957. Originally published with Manuel Gleizer, 1932.

Historia de la eternidad. Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1953. Originally published with Editorial Viau y Zona, 1936.

"La biblioteca total." Sur 59 (1939):13-16.

Ficciones. Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1956. Originally published with Editorial Sur, 1944.

Ficciones. New York, Grove Press, 1962. Original title from which most, but not all, of the stories were taken.

Ficciones. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sur, 1944.

Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by D. A. Yates and J. E. Irby. New York, New Directions, 1962. Selections from Ficciones. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sur, 1944; El Aleph. Buenos Aires, Losada, 1949; Discusión. Buenos Aires, Manuel Gleizer, 1932; Otras inquisiciones, 1937-1952. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sur, 1952; El hacedor. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960.

Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. Translated by R. L. C. Simms. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1964. Original title, Otras inquisi ciones, 1937-1952. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sur, 1952.

Dreamtigers. Translated by M. Boyer and H. Morland. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1964. Original title, El hacedor. Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1960.

Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares. Buenos Aires, Santiago Rueda, 1967.

"Preface". In The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion, by Ronald Christ. New York, New York University Press, 1969.

The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969. Translated by N. T. di Giovanni. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1970. Most, but not all of the stories from El Aleph. Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1949.

Obra poética. Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1972.

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq. Translated by N. T. di Giovanni. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1976. Original title, Crónicas de Bustos Domecq. Buenos Aires, Losada, 1967.

The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by N. T. di Giovanni. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1978. Original title, El libro de los seres imaginarios. Buenos Aires, Editorial Kier, 1967.

The Book of Sand. Translated by N. T. di Giovanni. New York, E. P.Dutton, 1978. Original title, El libro de arena. Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1975.

Siete noches. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980.

NOTES

(1) From Floyd Merrell, Unthinking thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, mathematics, and the new physics . Purdue University Press, West Lafayette - Indiana, 1991, pp.182-197.

(2) For example, if you drop a stone in a still pond, ripples will travel outward in concentric circles from the point the stone entered the water. Now simultaneously drop two stones some feet apart and the two concentric circles will set up an interference pattern. If the crest of one hits the crest of another, together they will produce a wave of twice the height. If one wave collides with another, they will cancel each other out and produce a patch of calm water. The behavior of light waves is analogous. Laser light consisting of waves of the same frequency are of the purest form, somewhat like a perfectly spherical stone dropped vertically into a completely motionless pond. In laser photography, a laser beam is directed toward a half-silvered mirror such that part of the beam passes through, striking a photographic plate, and part is reflected onto the object to be photographed. The light reflected from the object strikes the photographic plate at an angle with that part of the beam which passed directly through the mirror to produce a complex array of interference patterns. When the plate is developed and illuminated with laser light, the object reproduced on the two-dimensional surface appears to possess the threedimensional characteristics of the original object. Karl Pribram (1971) maintains that in addition to the mind-brain's thinking and communicating with discrete symbols, it acts also, at a deeper level, like a holograph. This deeper level consists of a nonverbal realm beyond actual symbols, a sort of continuous and indeterminate potentiality that can give rise to a determinate set of symbols.

(3) Bohm then relates this metaphor to the tracks of an elementary particle on a photographic emulsion from a bubble chamber. The track is to be regarded as no more than an aspect appearing in immediate perception, as in the case of the drops of dye. Quantum theory demands that movement be described discontinuously, in terms of "quantum jumps." The movement of the particles can be none other than the equivalent of a series of "dots", which our immediate perception is accustomed to grasping in terms of a continuous flow. Bohm (1980, 208) gives the example of the static, discrete frames of a movie film, which, when discontinuously passed through a projector some twenty-four times per second, create the illusion of continuity (in this respect see also the studies of Kolers [1972] and Goodman's [1978] use of them in his Ways of Worldmaking). This distinction between continuity and discreteness is also illustrated by Bohm's (1980, 201) analogy to music. A musical score is there all at once. To the nonmusician it may be meaningless, but the accomplished musician can rapidly imagine, as her eyes move along the score, a series of sounds of a particular style and quality. If she plays the piece on a piano, there is for the listener a sense of unbroken movement as the notes merge into one another. At a given moment, a certain note is played, but past notes are still reverberating in her consciousness. The simultaneous presence of all these reverberations is necessary for the immediately sensed movement, flow, continuity, for to perceive the notes separated by a greater length of time, the lack of reverberations can destroy the sense of the unbroken whole. This unbroken movement, then, requires a retention past moments, which become more vague and fuzzy as they become further removed from the present, but it also entails projection into the future in terms of expectations. The knowledgeable musician, on perceiving a symphony for the first time, will, after listening to the initial movement, have developed a hypothetical set of expectations regarding the remainder of the piece. These expectations may be verified, and if not, the hypothesis can be altered somewhat and another set of expectations developed, all this transpiring at both conscious and unconscious levels (for the notion of retention, as well as protention, see Husserl [1964]; for expectations in music perception, Meyer [1956]).

(4) Bohm (1980, 198-201) suggests that there is a similarity between the order of such immediate experience and the implicate order as it is apprehended by an abstractive act of mind. This reveals the possibility of a coherent mode of understanding the immediate experience of nature in terms of our thought (in effect thus resolving Zeno's arrow paradox). For example, consider how motion is thought of in terms of points along a line. At a certain time, t1, a particle is at a position x1, and at a later time t2, it is at position x2. The formula for expressing the velocity between the two points on a graph representing it will be static, as if to say "now it is here, now it is there." There is no sense of unbroken wholeness, of the experience of movement. Calculus solves the problem differently. The time interval, t1-t2, and the change in position, x1-x2, become infinitesimal, and the velocity of the particle is defined as the limit of the ratio of the change in position divided by the change in time (), as the latter approaches zero. Some reflection reveals that this procedure is as abstract as the previous, for one has no immediate experience of a time interval of zero duration, nor is it possible to see in terms of reflective thought what this could mean. Moreover, calculus entails the notion of continuous movement, but the quantum level movement is discontinuous, so its application is limited to classical concepts (i.e., Bohm's explicate order, such as the movement of billiard balls), which provides an adequate approximation. Movement in the implicate order, on the other hand, does not involve this problem; its movement is "a series of interpenetrating and intermingling elements in different degrees of unfoldment all present together" (Bohm 1980, 203). This activity depends upon the whole enfolded order, which is continuous and determined by the relationships of copresent elements.

(5) Hugh Everett III, with Wheeler's encouragement, proposed, in 1953, a strangest and most novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, known as the "many world's interpretation". To see Everett 's doctoral dissertation and a collection of papers, look for DeWitt, B. and N. Graham (eds.).

(6) The reversibility of this branching model also relates to Borges's "New Refutation." Butler (1973, 154) contends that Borges's essay is a "consciously futile attempt" to negate transitoriness in his effort to affirm eternity. Borges's affirmation of eternity stems, of course, from his "feeling in death" experience. Intuiting that this is the focal point of the essay, rather than the prior disquisition on idealist metaphysics, Butler suggests further that the essay is written backward, like the branching tree diagram in figure 1 "read" from right to left. Be this as it may, it remains that the essay can also be read from left to right, and Borges's conclusion still inheres, because l the essay, in toto, remains as a "timeless block", while a reading of it in either direction creates the illusion of time. The two halves of "New Refutation of Time" mirror each other, and each is a microcosm mirroring the web of intertextuality-interconnectedness: the universe as text, or conversely, the text as universe.

(7) See, for general comments, Culler (1976), Kristeva (1969), Morgan (1985), and especially, Worton and Still (1990).

(8) Lugones and Martínez Estrada are Argentine writers and critics, who, like Borges, have written on "Martín Fierro".

(9) It bears mentioning that in addition to Maxwell, Bellone studies Galileo, Kelvin, and Newton.