Orqwith's assault on the intersubjective realm is a tad more aggressive. Instead of bright shiny ideological trojan horse-artifacts infiltrating the landscape, we get a downpour of fish (makes you wonder if Paul Thomas Anderson read the DP, no?) and the Scissormen. This fictional construct doesn't change you, it brains you. Borges posits an ideological war of all against all. Fiction abhors a vacuum. You could wind up living in Tlön and never know it. Something's gotta give structure to the world, and there isn't any way to step outside of that structure to criticize it. The best you can hope to do is draw up the plans for a successor-world and fool the next generation into migrating en masse across the state (of mind) line. But you can't be present for it yourself, because you would see the fiction, and that would spoil things, see? Moses got (death)carded at the entrance to the Promised Land. And Christ had to evaporate before Christianity could live.
That's Borges-- at least, that's what I've got on him so far, from the little I've read.
Morrison's aesthetic is radically different. He takes a more grass roots approach to world-building. "Reality" is built up one person at a time. Whenever you meet someone you can believe in, your footing gets a little more secure, but the structural flaws are always visible to anyone who bothers to look, and all cosmologies are suspect! More importantly, people can do without them, and ought to do their best to smash up the ones which threaten to make life too easy for the lazier members of the human family...
That's where the Doom Patrol comes in, you see! They're a postmodern "Society of Friends".
The Doom Patrol musings will continue throughout the month at Motime Like The Present!
Dave
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