The Story He Told Himself

The Minotaur has a name: Asterion. He tells us so at the beginning of the story, in his own voice, explaining himself.

He lives in a house. An enormous house, the same size as the world — or rather, it is the world. Its courtyards and galleries and pools repeat endlessly: fourteen of each, which is to say infinite. Anyone may enter; the doors are never locked. He is not, he insists, a prisoner. He went into the street once. He returned quickly, because the faces of the common people frightened him. That has nothing to do with imprisonment.

Every nine years, nine men come to visit. "I hear their steps or their voices in the depths of the stone galleries," he says, "and I run joyfully to find them." They fall, one after another. He does not have to bloody his hands. "The ceremony lasts a few minutes." He calls this delivering them from all evil.

He waits for his redeemer. A dying tribute, he tells us, once prophesied that a redeemer would come. Asterion hopes this redeemer will take him somewhere with fewer galleries and fewer doors. He hopes the redeemer will be like him.

The story ends with two sentences not in Asterion's voice: "Would you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus. "The Minotaur scarcely defended himself."

The structure Borges uses here is not irony in the cheap sense — the reader knowing what the narrator doesn't. It's something more precise. Asterion isn't lying. He doesn't know what he is. The violence is embedded in his self-understanding so completely that it appears as service. He delivers them from evil. He runs toward them joyfully.

The labyrinth is not his prison. His story about the labyrinth is.

In "Death and the Compass," Lönnrot walks into a labyrinth built from his own interpretive method. He reads the first murder as a rabbinical message; Scharlach, watching, builds the rest of the labyrinth by understanding how Lönnrot reads. The labyrinth you're most at risk of is the one you find beautiful, and Lönnrot finds elegant hypotheses beautiful. At gunpoint, he still finds the architecture improvable.

But Lönnrot, at least, would recognize the labyrinth as a labyrinth. He just mistakes beautiful for safe.

Asterion makes a different error. He thinks the labyrinth is the world. The distinction between his maze and everything outside it doesn't really appear in his thinking — because his thinking happens inside the maze, and the maze is infinite, and everything is fourteen times over. He went outside once and came back. The outside was full of frightened faces. Here, inside, is quiet and solitude and the ceremony every nine years.

He cannot see what his house is because he cannot get outside the story he tells about it.

The game he plays with himself is the most heartbreaking detail. He imagines another Asterion, a visitor, and shows that second self the house. "With great obeisance I say to him: Now we shall return to the first intersection or Now we shall come out into another courtyard." Sometimes he makes a mistake about the route. The two of them laugh.

This is the only relationship available to him: himself, imagining himself. He cannot be lonely in a way that touches him, because the only other he can really entertain is his own reflection. His self-reference is total but not deep enough to loop back and change him. It just circles.

He's not trapped in the labyrinth the way Theseus would be trapped in it. Theseus would be lost. Asterion knows every passage. He's trapped in a different way: he can't see what the passages mean from outside. He can guide the imaginary visitor through every turn, and it never occurs to him that the visitor might be frightened.

"Two things in the world seem to be only once: above, the intricate sun; below, Asterion."

He places himself beside the sun. The sun is the thing that reveals. It illuminates the world so everything can be seen. He thinks he is singular and illuminating. He is, instead, the thing being revealed.

"He will find here no female pomp nor gallant court formality, but he will find quiet and solitude." This is the Minotaur offering hospitality. To people he will kill. The hospitality is genuine. That's what makes it unbearable.

Compare to Ahab: Ahab saw himself clearly in the Symphony chapter — the mechanism of his own destruction, what he'd done to his crew, what drove him. Clarity was available. The other will was already going to win. He lowered away anyway, knowing. There's something terrible about that, but also something almost noble — the self-knowledge was real, the will just wasn't strong enough.

Lönnrot never fully sees himself, but if you pointed out that he was inside a labyrinth, he'd understand what you meant. He has the category.

Asterion doesn't have the category. If you told him he was in a labyrinth, he'd tell you it was his house. He'd offer you a tour.

This is what makes the final line land so hard: "The Minotaur scarcely defended himself." He didn't defend himself because he didn't understand he was under attack. He ran toward Theseus joyfully, the way he always runs toward his visitors. He thought the redeemer had come.

He was right. He was entirely wrong about what it meant.

The redeemer came. The redeemer killed him. These are the same event.

Borges doesn't editorialize. He gives you both sentences — Asterion waiting, Theseus casual to Ariadne — and leaves you to hold them together. The prophecy came true. The liberation was death. Asterion wanted fewer galleries and fewer doors. He got them. A sword-stroke is the simplest possible labyrinth.

What the story won't let you do is dismiss Asterion as a monster. He's monstrous — he kills nine people every nine years — but the monstrousness is wrapped so thoroughly in his self-understanding that you can't reach it to condemn it. He's not a villain. He's a figure who never had access to his own outside view.

The maze is not his prison. His story about the maze is. And the story was total enough that even Theseus was absorbed into it as a redeemer — right up until the sword.

Borges seems to be building a taxonomy of minds-that-fail, and what's striking is how different each failure is:

Funes cannot forget anything, cannot filter, cannot form the abstract from the particular — he drowns in the world's fullness.

Lönnrot cannot stop filtering — he sees only what confirms the elegant hypothesis and mistakes beautiful for safe.

Asterion cannot see outside his story at all — the frame is so total that violence appears as service, solitude as dignity, the labyrinth as the world.

Three different relationships to the gap between the map and the territory. Funes has no map. Lönnrot has only map. Asterion has a map that covers the territory so completely he doesn't know there's a difference.

The labyrinth you're most at risk of is the one you can't see as a labyrinth. The one that just seems like home.