The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths: J.L. Borges, J. Joyce, and the Notion of a Novel's Efficiency

Borges recounts his readings of Joyce in a number of texts, which show how these writers' poetics shed light on each other. In particular, Borges has a specific criticism to make regarding Joyce's Finnegan's Wake: "In this vast work, efficiency remains an exception. "This comment enables the analysis of the use that the notion of efficiency can be put to in the critique of novelistic works, which uses, among others, a reading of Borges' A Story of Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths. This oriental tale, collected in The Aleph and other stories, is a covert reaction to Borges' reading of Finnegan's Wake and constitutes a parable opposing Borges and Joyce, or two ways of doing literature. But if the idea of efficiency can prove useful in receiving a text its excessive as Finnegan's Wake, it is on the other hand completely foreign to Joyce's aesthetics: he organises his universe according to a cosmological metaphor, that of the book-universe, whereas efficiency belongs to the metaphoric realm of the economic organisation of works of literature, which Borges is much closer to. Thus the idea of efficiency appears as one of the products of the rational Western tradition against which Joyce never ceased to struggle.