#resignification

The Minotaur’s house is as unique and monstrous as his body. He seems proud that there is no other labyrinth like his in the world. But, though unique, what the labyrinth contains within itself is endless repetition. Repetition of galleries, doors, corridors, courtyards… to the extent that any place in it is like whatever other place in it. What a paradox that such a unique creature should live in a house that constantly mirrors itself and celebrates repetition! And it's also a paradox that the creature who embodies chaos should live in a house that takes order to such an excess. However, when order and regularity are so exacerbated, couldn’t they also become their own form of chaos? One can feel how maddening it is for the Minotaur to spend his days alone in the maze. His existence is most of the time meaningless, without purpose. In some really moving passages, he describes how he runs through the galleries until he feels dizzy, how he lets himself fall from roofs until he is bloody, just to do something, just to make the hours pass. And he leaves the dead bodies of the young Athenians where they have fallen, without devouring them, as a way to introduce some difference in the identical spaces of his house. It is plausible to say that he wouldn’t even kill them if he didn’t feel compelled to do so as part of a kind of sacrificial ceremony, perhaps one of the only meaningful things in his life.

In this version, he is not a prisoner of the labyrinth. People and animals could get in if they wanted to and he knows the way out. In fact, he reached the streets and the sea once, but had to go back in because people were scared of him and he was scared of people, with their faces “discolored and flat as the palm of one’s hand”. (This last remark leads us to think that, when seen through a non-human perspective, we humans are also monsters, only that we grew used to our own monstrosity and can only see creatures with different bodies as such.)  So the cause of his isolation is fear. The Minotaur is only trapped in his bodily difference, and unlike the uniqueness of his grandfather, Helios, the sun, the Minotaur's uniqueness cannot be revered as divine, but only feared and despised.

The Minotaur by George Frederick Watts, 1885. This is the painting that inspired Borges.

As a lonely creature, he had to come up with devices to make his long days and nights inside the labyrinth tolerable. In the absence of any real other, he relates to imaginary others and populates his solitude with ghosts. He has this little game in which he crouches around a corner and pretends he is being followed, just like little kids do when they hide so that someone comes and finds them with surprise. But no one comes to find the Minotaur while he is hidden. Other times he imagines that another Minotaur comes to visit, he shows him his house and they laugh together. In the end, the imaginary other adopts the form of his redeemer, his saviour, someone who will be born in the future and lead him out of his pain. Like most people, in the end the Minotaur resorts to hope and just waits.

Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like?, I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

At this point of the story, many readers have surely identified who the narrator is and how the story ends, so Borges leaves a blank space for them to fill the last events by themselves. Also because the narrator is now dead. The only “redemption” the Minotaur could find was death in the hands of Theseus, the Greek hero. With their actions, heroes of all time are supposed to eradicate the existence of chaos in the world and restore the order that had been threatened. But we now know that the chaos the Minotaur embodied was not necessarily evil. Through the device of the first person, we got to know his innermost feelings and sad life. And so in this retelling of the myth the role of the hero is questioned. And so much more when we learn in the last lines that the Minotaur wasn’t killed through the bravery and strength of Theseus, but because the monster almost let himself be killed… out of sadness? In this context, the act of Theseus stands as an act of humanity’s cowardice and cruelty more than anything else.

Who have been the monsters and who have been the heroes all this time? This little short story leaves us with those questions.

But there is something more. There is something about the link between loneliness and labyrinth that is very powerful. To reach other people, the Minotaur has to go through the passageways of the labyrinth, and for others to reach him, they also have to navigate its intricate galleries. Borges imagines a world in which self and other are separated but also connected by the perplexing space of a maze; its characters condemned to look for one another through its complex architecture, always with the risk of getting lost, always with the risk of remaining alone and trapped in themselves.

The Labyrinth

Zeus could never untangle the nets of stone that surround me. I have forgotten the men I once was; I follow the hateful path of monotonous walls which is my destiny. Straight galleries which curve in secret circles as the years wear on. Parapets cracked by the usury of so many days. In the pale dust I have deciphered tracks that I fear. The air has brought to me in the concave afternoons a braying or the echo of a braying, desolate voice. I know that in the shadow lurks the Other, whose lot is to fatigue the long solitudes that weave and unweave this Hades and to unnerve my blood and devour my death. We two look for each other. I wish that this were the last day of the waiting.