ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the three pieces of work – Franz Kafka's "The Burrow", a story first published posthumously in Germany in 1931; Jorge Luis Borges's "Death and the Compass", originally published in Argentina in 1942; and the story of "Gallus", a translator character featured in Chapter XIV of Deszo Kosztolanyi's Kornel Esti, which first appeared in Hungary in 1933. In Borges's story we witness the complex encounter between a cultivated reader and a fierce author figure and labyrinth maker, both engaged in a power struggle that entails the virtual elimination of one of them. The text/labyrinth designed by Red Scharlach, whose first name can be read both as the English adjective "red" and the Spanish noun "red", which means "net", is first and foremost a trap aimed at snaring and killing Lonnrot. Since the construction of a text/labyrinth is related to revision and reinterpretation, forever resisting any possibility of completion or perfect closure.
