"Every moment leaping into the infinite and every moment falling surely back..."—Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Although it doesn't directly factor into the plot of every episode of The X-Files, the quest for "The Truth" (you know, about all that alien shit, and the government cover-up—okay, conspiracy), perpetrated by that most contemporary fictional FBI agent Fox "Spooky" Mulder, comprises that hit series' metanarrative; and it's the metanarrative, not the individual episodes, that's largely responsible for the tenacity of the show's fanatical devotees, the so-called "X-philes." David Duchovny, after 5 years of playing Mulder and helping write some of the episodes, knows all too well what makes the show resonate with its audience. "It's because everything is left in doubt," he told Ted Edwards, author of the book X-Files Confidential, "There's no closure, no answers."

Over 100 episodes in, the overarching story still hasn't proceeded terribly far, insofar as narrative progress is traditionally defined. Sure, Mulder and Scully have encountered all manner of monsters in a wide variety of contexts, and they've played parts in any number of suspense-filled government subterfuges and intrigues, but the big questions remain unanswered. Is the earth really being colonized by alien/human hybrids? Did Mulder actually witness the abduction of his sister (already)? What the hell is in all those enormous filing cabinets, the ones where Mulder found The Folder with his sister's name on a sticker, and his own name underneath? And why is that glorified ice pick the only way to permanently extinguish the morphing aliens? I'm sure you get the idea, and these were just off the top of my head.

Not one of these kind of questions has been answered in any cut-and-dried, Manichean way. We still don't know, for example, whether it was the aliens (and which brand?) or the skulking .govs who gave Scully her cancer. Or was it both? Or neither? Point being, X-philes slather away in front of the tube in anticipation of even shards of answers to these ever-convoluted inquiries, one hand working the TV/VCR remote and the other tapping out usernames and passwords to get into their X-phile chat-rooms during the commercials. This situation is of course exacerbated by the imminent release of the already-in-the-can X-Files feature film, which will follow on the heels of the cliff-hanging 5th season finale, making it necessary to spend upwards of $8.00 in order to "see what happens." I put that in quotes because the movie—subtitled Fight the Future, according to the alt.tv.x-files newsgroup—will certainly proffer some scraps of meaning, but it's not likely that the larger metanarrative will move much closer to formal resolution. Quite the opposite, in fact: "The film will answer some of the many unanswered questions fans have been asking while also creating some important new mysteries," predicts a fan calling himself "Man in Black" in alt.tv.x-files.

Many of these diehards are beyond impatient; they've been inculcated for years with the mantra "The Truth is Out There," and they're simply apoplectic to have some answers. Ken Tucker, a TV writer for Entertainment Weekly, describes in the 1997 year-end issue the countless complaints he fields daily from X-Files fans "about how the 'mythology' [i.e. metanarrative] episodes have become glacially-paced, niggling in the amount of new info dispensed." On the other hand, an unresolved metanarrative is a good way to keep the fans hungry for more (think not only of season 6 but of X-Files Movie: The Sequel). Some aficionados, as a matter of fact, actually embrace the show's narrative indeterminacy: As "The Agent," another rabid X-phile, writes a few posts later in the same newsgroup thread, "I saw an advance screening of the X-Files movie and I must admit the plot is 10 times more convoluted than the TV series. You can never tell what is exactly going on. But that's a good thing!"

While the late Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges never wrote science fiction per se, he'd seem a terrific choice for an honorary, say, Executive Producer credit on The X-Files. His work, in particular a few of his ficciones, uncannily prefigure Mulder's vertiginous experience in chasing after elusive possible truths. This is not to suggest that ex-Surfer magazine editor Chris Carter, the X-Files's creator, has ever read any Borges. But if the old master wasn't dead, hadn't been blind, and would actually be willing to spend a few Sunday evenings watching the Fox network, he'd notice soon enough that in the course of Mulder's discoveries, no matter how many spaceships or secret government computer files he finds, as literary critic Peter Stoicheff puts it, "Disorder becomes order, mystery becomes illumination and then fragments into a new disorder." (Certainly into yet another new episode... or movie.) I think it'd warm Borges's heart to witness the FBI agents enmeshed within the show's "mythology"—what Stoicheff describes as "an intricate, self-replicating web of fiction and history from which there is no escape."

Stoicheff's essay, "The Chaos of Meta-fiction," which appeared in a 1991 anthology called Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, is in no way about The X-Files, of course. It is about, among other things, Borges; but there are enough congruencies between Borges's ficciones and the X-Files's "mythology" that you wouldn't know the good professor was talking about the one and not the other unless I'd told you so. Regarding Borges's "The Circular Ruins," Stoicheff observes how the story's narrative indeterminacy "creates a pattern that stretches not toward revelation but around it." This particular "little fiction" sketches out the tale of a man alone in the jungle, holed up in the ruins of an ancient temple, sleeping most of his days away in an attempt to dream another man into existence. Once he's accomplished this feat and has set his "son" on his own path, the man starts to question his own condition, only to discover (a discovery that winds up consuming him) that he himself is simply the dream-woven creation of yet another dreamer. "He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake," Borges writes, "much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand."

Weaving a rope out of sand. A better subtitle for the X-Files movie than Fight the Future, don't you think? Well, at least it's a dead-on metaphor for Mulder's essentially doomed attempt to uncover a higher truth. What Mulder, along with many of his fans, doesn't seem to understand is the way in which each fragment of meaning he finds—a vision of his sister's abduction, photos of Cancer Man accosting his mother at the summer house in Rhode Island, an old rail car buried in the desert of the Southwest that turns out to be a grave filled with alien corpses—simply adds to the complexity of the ever more irreducible mystery he's trying to solve. Or as Stoicheff describes this sort of quest: "The more information he gathers... the larger the indeterminacy, the more complex the interpretation, and the wider the abyss whose circumference he travels."

"I come from a vertiginous country," says the narrator of Borges's story "The Babylon Lottery," which tells the story of an entire society controlled by a secret organization known as "the Company" (sound familiar?) whose directives and methods are often so subtle and indirect that one never truly knows if he's acting on his own volition or someone else's, or both, or whether what he's seeing is real or just a prefabricated illusion. This uncertainty feeds back into itself until, as the narrator concludes while preparing to escape this indeterminate land, "no decision is final, all diverge into others."

In metafictions constructed like The X-Files's "mythology," the mise-en-scène gives way, in Stoicheff's view, to "a vertiginous mise-en-abyme that eternally defers the revelation of truth or knowledge." When one peers over the edge of the abyss, one glimpses for a second the staggering range of what is possible, and may even go so far as to start furiously fabricating connections, before one is in-evitably forced to pull away for fear of being "immolated in the fire of chaos" (as Stoicheff describes the demise of the man in Borges's circular ruins). And though one will likely get another peek over the edge, it'll always be from a different spot, the view will somehow be different, and the old connections won't seem as obvious... if they make any sense at all. Only the creative foment and nauseous despair, and the tension between the two, exists; as far as overall meaning goes, there is nothing else.

Novelist and critic John Barth talks about metafiction's subject as properly being not the story at hand but rather the "processes" and "history of the medium"—a peachy explanation of or justification for the narrative indeterminacy of X-Files's mythology. For the show's mission is not to answer Mulder's questions about extraterrestrial life and government conspiracies, but to examine the processes and history of the kinds of inquiries the agent and his partner conduct and the way in which the particulars of a certain investigative method or prevailing societal viewpoint can influence our understanding of the "truth."

One shining example of an X-Files episode in full metafictive splendor is the controversial "José Chung's From Outer Space." Chung is a famous author writing a book about an alleged case of alien abduction in the Pacific Northwest. He spends months on the scene, interviewing all the participants, getting from each a different version of the events of the strange night in question. However, instead of allowing one of the agents, or another authoritative figure, to synthesize these varied retellings and produce an "official" version, the script portrays each of the possible truths without putting more implied faith in one over another. (Stoicheff notes that one of chaotic metafiction's calling cards is "a refusal to arbitrate between an infinite number of possible meanings.") Instead we watch Mulder and Scully attempt to judge the relative merit of these varying accounts, dealing with "unreliable" narrators ranging from a disbelieving backwoods sheriff to a pale, pear-shaped, somewhat delusional nerd and social recluse who truly believes; the latter leads them to an alien corpse which the agents proceed to squirrel away for an autopsy, only to discover a military pilot in an elaborate disguise, a twist that casts a lingering doubt about the agent's own gullibility—or at the least their unbiasedness.

Because this episode is not told from the point-of-view of either Mulder or Scully or both (as is typically the case), but from the vantage point of Chung, the parameters that usually define the scope of what we as viewers can see or hear (and hence deduce about what's really happening) are loosened considerably, allowing and forcing the viewer to be responsible—even more than usual—for constructing the "truth," a liberating yet vertiginous experience mirrored in the roller-coaster ride that is this particular episode's narrative arc. (Ambrose, the main character in Barth's short story "Lost in the Funhouse," laments that "plot doesn't rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires.") Having heard, for example, of the embarrassing "alien autopsy," Chung—ultimately a manifestation, in the script, of the role played by the viewer week in and week out—has to contend with another dizzying spiral, the account of another witness to the event that suggests a second abduction, this one not just of the original abductees but of the soldiers-cum-aliens, too—positing anew the actual existence of extraterrestrials right when we've really started to call all that into question.

According to Stoicheff, metafictions "are constructed so as to frustrate and reorient the logical reader they posit," an assertion borne out completely by fans' reaction to the José Chung episode, one that Edwards calls "undoubtedly the most bizarre and surreal episode ever produced," and one which produced some of the show's most negative responses ever. Most telling of all, however, was episode director Rob Bowman's admission to Edwards that "no one... knew what the hell was up with that script." That is to say, Chris Carter and all the other scriptwriters whose livelihood depends on The X-Files are caught in a dizzying spiral of their own: At this point, even if they wanted to, there's no way they could stitch every meaning-fragment they've created into one coherent "answer." Elsewhere in X-Files Confidential, Carter describes the show's unresolvable mythology in a way that highlights the self-reflexive symmetry between Mulder's adventures and the process of creating the show: "We take detours," he says, "bear off in different directions and see what's there. As we know, the truth is very difficult to arrive at. There are, in fact, many truths and that's what we're playing with here—the complexity of what truth is."

Bowman continues about the Chung watershed in a way that speaks for what in essence drives the entire series: "This is not follow-the-bouncing-ball," he says. "This is a thick and complicated mosaic. We present different pictures to you. And it's up to you to line them up." Playing such an active role in determining what the Truth really is, having a real responsibility for and hence more of a vested interest in decisions as to what is and isn't meaningful, gives X-philes and Borges fanatics alike a sort of adrenaline rush that keeps them coming back again and again. It's a vertigo buzz: the aforementioned excitement and anxiety bordering on nausea that results from trying to construct a coherent pattern out of meaning-fragments glimpsed during a sudden revelation of the abyss.

We X-philes feel the same way about The X-Files that people who can't stop playing Tetris feel about that video game. Waiting for each new piece of the puzzle, which may or may not fit into the pattern we've created from previous pieces, is an adrenaline rush. We find The X-Files so addictive precisely because it mirrors our struggles to make meaning of the everyday world around us; because it sharpens our skills at the epistemological juggling trick we each must perform every waking hour just to deal; because many of us do, in fact—like the poster on Mulder's office wall says—want to believe.