A Garden of Forking Paths

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary upon them.

There can't be much left to say about Jorge Luis Borges' (1899-1986) slim, astonishing collection of short stories, Fictions (1944) - nor many people who haven't already read it. It's now about six months since I read the book, and I've lost my notes in the interim, but it seems appropriately Borgesian to offer some rambling observations despite all this... :-)

The collections comprises 14 stories, written between 1936 and 1944, plus (in the second edition) 3 additional stories from 1952-3. The ones that I found most compelling all come from the first half of the book, subtitled 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (originally a separate collection, 1941). All of them are fantastical, or told in a fantastical register, infused with love for the imaginary, and a playfulness that merges the real and the surreal at every opportunity. There are portraits of invented worlds, lengthy discourses on fictional authors and made-up languages - even reviews of non-existent books:

It would be impossible to trace the adventures of the remaining nineteen chapters. [...] The story begun in Bombay continues in the lowlands of Palanpur, pauses for a night and a day at the stone gate of Bikanir, narrates the death of a blind astrologer in a cesspool in Benares, conspires in the multiform palace in Kathmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua bazaar on Calcutta, watches the day being born out of the sea from a scribe's stool in Madras

(--'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim')

One story, 'The Library of Babel', contains an entire library of such imagined books: everything ever written, everything that ever could have been written, and every other combination (however nonsensical) of letters besides. "In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible", the narrator tells us, and so the library is unimaginably vast: "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries." No single inhabitant of the Library can ever begin to encompass its contents, of course, or even comprehend their scale, and so they tend to die unfulfilled, decaying amid the "endless" shelves without ever having made much of a dent in their TBR pile this vast repository of possibility. Definitely how I'll go!

It's all done in a style that is at once soaring and densely textured, outlined with a precision that is almost fussy, or would be if it weren't so frequently laconic. Sentence-by-sentence, the prose is packed with information. Perhaps by way of demonstrating his dictum quoted at the top of this post, again and again Borges assembles a wealth of off-beat references (historical, literary, cultural) and apparently tangential detail into bewilderingly rich fantastical canvases. So it is in 'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim', and also in 'Funes, the Memorious', a sort-of eulogy for a chap who spent his life seeing absolutely everything, with the improbable, imaginative accuracy of a poet:

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compared them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once.

Even lesser stories, like 'The Shape of the Sword', still contain some wonderfully evocative lines in this vein, capturing whole stories in a phrase: "there were scimitars from Nishapur, in whose frozen crescents the wind and violence of battle seemed to be living on".

Many of Borges' narrators - who are often rather dry, unflappable, drawing-room types, like the librarian of Babel - are apt to fuss over these tiny 'facts' of the fiction. All the more when the playful absurdity of a story's concept is greater, and the landscape being painted is vaster and more colourful; they speak with the scholarly authority of the literary critic or the antiquarian, laying out for us the authentically-dusty trail by which they came across this impossible revelation or that high adventure.

Take the excellent opening story, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', which not only gives us one of the collection's best and most characteristic lines ("In life, Ashe was afflicted with unreality, as many Englishmen are; in death, he is not even the ghost he was"), but also introduces us to a fictional land in a fictional world - one that becomes more real the more the narrator investigates it. The whole thing is told retrospectively, the history of a personal scholarly endeavour gone live. Having heard an offhand reference to a place called Uqbar ("a region in either Iraq or Asia Minor", it is suggested), the narrator is spurred to try to track the place down, which appears in none of his books, save one.

He discovers that Uqbar is part of a whole different world, called Tlön, which was invented by a mysterious cabal and whose language has no nouns - one of a number of things that makes both it and its metaphysics fundamentally different from our own world.

At first we though that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know that it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so. Let it suffice to remind the reader that the apparent contradictions of Volume Eleven are the foundation stone of the proof that other volumes do exist.

But it does, nonetheless, work; and by the end of the story, Tlön and its meticulous rules have been embraced so enthusiastically, by a populace eager to follow any semblance of order (this is, we're reminded, the 1940s...), that it has begun to encroach upon our world. Its triumph looks certain, and our narrator rues the day he ever underestimated its power.

Another darkly mannered tale - my favourite, I think - is 'The Lottery in Babylon' (which, as the author himself notes in his prologue, "is not entirely innocent of symbolism"). Set in a - of course - fictionalised version of ancient Babylon, it describes how the titular lottery grew from a small-scale game, occasionally rewarding those who played with prizes (and then, later, sometimes inflicting punishments), to an inscrutable system that permeates every aspect of life in Babylon. So much so, that no-one even questions its utter dominance anymore:

Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart. Now, far from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the Lottery, and about the blasphemous conjectures that shrouded men whisper in the half-light of dawn or evening.

I love that final line, how he gets so much that is suggestive of place and mood into a single phrase. There is such grandeur and strangeness here. The story may be, on one level, an extended metaphor for the operation of chance in human life ("Babylonians [...] obey the dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their hopes, their nameless terror to it"); later, we're told that the "Company" reputed to run the Lottery may not even exist, that the whole "sacred disorder of our lives" may be nothing more binding than tradition, or something as inescapable as random luck. Yet Borges does not stint on the atmospherics or the depths of his thought experiment. And so the world of his story lives:

Like all the men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here - my right hand has no index finger. Look here - through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo - it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel.

Other stories, while still partaking of the characteristic precision and allusiveness - and, often, the dry narrators - discussed above, dive into visionary feverishness. 'Death and the Compass', about a detective investigating a series of murders that seem linked with occult principles, turns the profusion of information into an expression of a mind losing its centre:

An Irishman tried to convert me to belief in Christ; he would repeat, over and over, the goyim's saying: all roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium would grow fat upon that metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape--for all roads, even if they pretend to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, and which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god that sees with two faces, and by all the gods of fever and mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it has stood firm: its materials are a dead heresiologue, a compass, as eighth-century cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory...

Not just a man trying to convert him, but an Irishman; not just a prison, but a rectangular one; not just a cult, but an eighth-century one. All points of reference loop back into the world of the story, and the conceptual world of the narrator, enriching both.

In 'The Circular Ruins', meanwhile, Borges returns to the themes of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' - but this time his viewpoint character is not watching the imaginary infiltrate the real, but actively participating in it ("He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul.") Like his author, he creates life through imagination, through words - but in more visceral detail than most novelists generally go in for:

He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret—about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless; he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater certainty. He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and the the entire heart, inside and out. His inspection made him proud. He deliberately did not sleep the next night; then he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set about dreaming another of the major organs.

(This story also has one of the other great lines of the collection: "At first, his dreams were chaotic; a little later, they were dialectical.")

And then some stories are quite simply bonkers (and funny). 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', is perhaps the apogee of the playful idea, serious execution juxtaposition I mentioned above. In it, he spins an elaborate - and, indeed, encomiastic - account of the eponymous man and his epic/quixotic quest to rewrite Don Quixote. Rewrite Don Quixote, that is, in the exact same words as the original: "Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough - he wanted to compose the Quixote." The idea is, as our scholarly - of course! - narrator is at pains to point out, that being Cervantes and writing Don Quixote in the 17th century was "easy", indeed pretty much an accident of context; whereas setting out, intentionally, to write that precise book again in the 20th century, puts the whole thing in a new light.

Having rubbished Menard's detractors in suitably condescending scholarly fashion, the narrator compares two passages side by side; naturally, they're identical, but the different context in which the second Quixote was produced, in the narrator's eyes, transforms the meaning of the work:

"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hands, writes:

"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

History, the mother of truth! - the idea is staggering.

Bonkers. But brilliantly so.

~~Nic

Comments

[Rebecca]

I've never read any of Borges' work, but your review makes me want to sample these short stories. I love the passages you chose to quote!