Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

I had finished This Side of Paradise and The Kingdom of Sand and wanted to read the last of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novels I hadn’t read yet (The Beautiful and Damned) and the Andrew Holleran novel that a friend had recommended to me (Grief). But those two books hadn’t come in yet at the library so I was looking around my apartment for what I might have to read and my eye landed on Borges.

I had read a lot of Borges decades ago in a collection called Labyrinths. But I had a few others of his books, too, which I had picked up over the years. So I pulled them all off the shelf to see what I had.

Ficciones is a collection of short stories published in 1944 and later expanded. I read the expanded version in a very nice hardback Everyman’s Library edition from 1993. Borges had published an earlier collection of short stories in 1941 titled A Garden of Forking Paths. Prior to that he had published only poetry and essays. Ficciones includes all of the stories collected in A Garden of Forking Paths as Part One, plus a Part Two which are additional stories collectively titled, “Artifices”. There are nineteen stories total, most of them very short, so it’s a pretty thin volume. I had read most of the stories before but there were a few new to me.

Part One, A Garden of Forking Paths

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. A group of men collaborate on writing an encyclopedia of a fictional world, which gradual insinuates into and begins to take over the real.

The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim. A review of a non-existent novel in which the protagonist seeks out a saintly figure by following the ways that the man’s influence has been reflected in the people of the world.

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. A short story in the form of an obituary, in which a friend describes his late friend’s work, particularly his crowning work of his attempt to write Don Quixote, word for word, not be copying Cervantes, but by living in such a way that he newly invents the same work again, in our time.

The Circular Ruins. A pilgrim enters the ruins of a holy place and sets out to dream into existence a second man. He is successful, but realizes at the end that he too is merely the dream of yet another man.

The Babylon Lottery. A description of a society where, growing naturally from a simple lottery, every aspect of every life is attributable to the inscrutable manipulations of a shadowy group who may or not exist.

An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain. A fictional examination of a fictional author, again, in the form of an obituary. Four works are described: a mystery in which the detective’s solution is wrong but gives a final clue that allows the reader to re-read the novel and correctly solve the mystery; a novel which progresses backwards and from the same ending postulates nine possible beginnings; a play in which the first act is written by a character in the second act; a book of short stories in which promising plots are deliberately subverted by the author.

The Library of Babel. A library filled with an infinite number of books that contain every possible combination of letters and punctuation, therefore including every actual book, trivial variations on existing books, books that can only be imagined, and a vast, frustrating, number of books that are complete nonsense.

The Garden of Forking Paths. Imagined as the memoir of a German spy in World War II England trying to get a message to Berlin before he’s caught. The spy travels to a remote country house where he meets an old friend. The friend has been researching the spy’s family history and the story that an ancestor in retirement had attempted to write a complex novel and build a maze. Everyone believed his final work had been a failure but the family friend had discovered that the chaotic manuscripts the ancestor left behind were both the novel and the maze, and that the secret is to read the novel as comprising multiple futures for the characters branching in time. Once the secret has been revealed the spy shoots the family friend, only so that the name of the family friend, “Albert” would be transmitted to Berlin by the subsequent story in the newspaper, the name of the town that the spy had discovered the English were planning to bomb.

Part Two: Artifices

Funes, the Memorious. The horror story of a man who can forget nothing.

The Form of the Sword. A man tells a tale of cowardice and betrayal and then reveals that he is himself the betrayer.

Theme of the Traitor and the Hero. Another story of a hidden traitor. In this story the traitor, when discovered, wishes to redeem himself by participating in a plot that will end in his death but appears to make him a hero. The telling of this story, though, reveals that though remembered as a hero, he was in fact a traitor. Or is it possible, as the conclusion supposes, that he actually conceived the whole chain of events, including his death, as a heroic sacrifice?

Death and the Compass. A mystery story in which a series of murders, or supposed murders, are designed to draw the investigator into a trap by using the shape of a rhombus and the letters of the Tetragrammaton.

The Secret Miracle. An author standing before a firing squad is granted a final wish. The bullet freezes in mid-air, and the author is granted sufficient time to finish, in his head, the three-act play in verse he had been working on. When his mental work is complete time unfreezes and he dies.

Three Versions of Judas. Another fictional examination of a fictional work. This is a work of a German theologian who argues that Judas was in fact the true incarnation of God.

The End. The death of Martin Fierro (the main character in an epic Argentine poem) from the point of view of his murderer.

The Sect of the Phoenix. A sect defined only by the performance of a common ritual action. The action isn’t described but Borges implies it is something that everyone does unconsciously, even instinctually, meaning we’re all members of the sect.

The South. A man injures his head, which sends him to a hospital. Upon his release he takes a coach to the train station. While waiting for the train he enters a cafe. In the cafe he is threatened. He is thrown a knife and picks it up prepared to duel. The plot is less important than the idea that life and death is accumulated through small, accidental, circumstances.

I also had on my book shelf a volume titled, “Borges, a Reader“. I read through that, as well, although not every entry. Much of what I had read in Ficciones and Labyrinths is included here. One of his most famous stories, The Aleph, is included here. (An author visits his friend, a poet, who has in his cellar a point in space in which it is possible to view every existing thing, from every possible angle simultaneously). Besides his fiction, Borges also wrote numerous essays and poetry. Many of the entries are reflections on other authors or their works. I enjoyed his thoughts on Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Chesterton.

Borges is brilliant. His themes are infinity, time, reality. He loves puzzles and paradoxes. The genre is fantasy perhaps, or science fiction, but highly elevated. The current craze for “multi-verses” and choose your own adventure stories was long ago pre-figured in Borges’ work. Like most good short stories there is a bit of twist at the end, and a lingering tingling feeling. He never attempted longer fiction, realizing that it was more efficient simply to imagine the work and describe it, rather than actually write it. He is impossibly, intimidatingly erudite. I know he has read much more than me, but his blend of the fictional and real worlds is so complete, I’m never sure if an obscure source he is quoting really exists or is only his own invention.

Though Argentine (born 1899), he was raised in Switzerland and spent his early years in Europe, including Spain. He returned to Argentina in 1921 and lived there the rest of his life, dying in 1986.