Labyrinths
Selected Stories & Other Writings
Jorge Luis Borges
Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby
Preface by André Maurois
a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF
Back Cover:
Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the
essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all
over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in
modern literature. In his preface André Maurois writes: "Borges is a
great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives.
Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful
intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost
mathematical style."
Labyrinths is a representative selection of Borges' writing,
some forty pieces drawn from various of his books published over the
years. The translations are by Harriet de Onís, Anthony Kerrigan, and
others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and
critical introduction, as well as an extensive bibliography.
Copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-25440
(ISBN: 0-08112-0012-4)
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper,
magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be
reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
This augmented edition was first published in 1964.
Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Barges,
has been translated and published by agreement with Emecé Editores, S, A.,
Bolivar 177, Buenos Aires, Argentina. All selections here included and
translated into English have been taken from the following volumes originally
published in Spanish by Emecé: Ficciones (1956), El Aleph (1957), Discussión (1957),
Otras Inquisiciones (1960) and El Hacedor (1960).
2
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Fictions
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
The Garden of Forking Paths
The Lottery in Babylon
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
The Circular Ruins
The Library of Babel
Funes the Memorious
The Shape of the Sword
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero
Death and the Compass
The Secret Miracle
Three Versions of Judas
The Sect of the Phoenix
The Immortal
The Theologians
Story of the Warrior and the Captive
Emma Zunz
The House of Asterion
Deutsches Requiem
Averroes' Search
The Zahir
The Waiting
The God's Script
3
Essays
The Argentine Writer and Tradition
The Wall and the Books
The Fearful Sphere of Pascal
Partial Magic in the Quixote
Valéry as Symbol
Kafka and His Precursors
Avatars of the Tortoise
The Mirror of Enigmas
A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw
A New Refutation of Time
Parables
Inferno, 1, 32
Paradiso, XXXI, 108
Ragnarök
Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote
The Witness
A Problem
Borges and I
Everything and Nothing
Elegy
Chronology
Bibliography
4
Preface
Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only
little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great
because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and
their tight, almost mathematical, style. Argentine by birth and
temperament, but nurtured on universal literature, Borges has no
spiritual homeland. He creates, outside time and space, imaginary and
symbolic worlds. It is a sign of his importance that, in placing him,
only strange and perfect works can be called to mind. He is akin to
Kafka, Poe, sometimes to Henry James and Wells, always to Valéry by
the abrupt projection of his paradoxes in what has been called "his
private metaphysics."
I
His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read
everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists,
the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not
profound -- he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas -- but it is
vast. For example, Pascal wrote: "Nature is an infinite sphere whose
center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere." Borges sets
out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds in
Giordano Bruno (1584): "We can assert with certainty that the
universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere
and its circumference nowhere." But Giordano Bruno had been able to
read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a
formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century):
"God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere." Such researches, carried out among the
Chinese as among the Arabs or the Egyptians, delight Borges, and lead
him to the subjects of his stories.
Many of his masters are English. He has an infinite admiration
for Wells and is indignant that Oscar Wilde could define him as "a
scientific Jules Verne." Borges makes the observation that the fiction
of Jules Verne speculates on future probability (the submarine, the trip
to the moon), that of Wells on pure possibility (an invisible man, a
flower that devours a man, a machine to explore time), or even on
impossibility (a man returning from the hereafter with a future flower).
Beyond that, a Wells novel symbolically represents features inherent
5
in all human destinies. Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous,
Borges says; it is a mirror that makes the reader's features known, but
the author must seem to be unaware of the significance of his work -which is an excellent description of Borges's own art. "God must not
engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings
the faith that art requires of us."
He admires Poe and Chesterton as much as he does Wells. Poe
wrote perfect tales of fantastic horror and invented the detective story,
but he never combined the two types of writing. Chesterton did
attempt and felicitously brought off this tour de force. Each of Father
Brown's adventures proposes to explain, in reason's name, an
unexplainable fact. "Though Chesterton disclaimed being a Poe or
Kafka, there was, in the material out of which his ego was molded,
something that tended to nightmare." Kafka was a direct precursor of
Borges. The Castle might be by Borges, but he would have made it
into a ten-page story, both out of lofty laziness and out of concern for
perfection. As for Kafka's precursors, Borges's erudition takes pleasure
in finding them in Zeno of Elea, Kierkegaard and Robert Browning. In
each of these authors there is some Kafka, but if Kafka had not
written, nobody would have been able to notice it -- whence this very
Borgesian paradox: "Every writer creates his own precursors."
Another man who inspires him is the English writer John
William Dunne, author of such curious books about time, in which he
claims that the past, present and future exist simultaneously, as is
proved by our dreams. (Schopenhauer, Borges remarks, had already
written that life and dreams are leaves of the same book: reading them
in order is living; skimming through them is dreaming.) In death we
shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine
them as in dreams. "God, our friends, and Shakespeare will collaborate
with us." Nothing pleases Borges better than to play in this way with
mind, dreams, space and time. The more complicated the game
becomes, the happier he is. The dreamer can be dreamed in his turn.
"The Mind was dreaming; the world was its dream." In all
philosophers, from Democritus to Spinoza, from Schopenhauer to
Kierkegaard, he is on the watch for paradoxical intellectual
possibilities.
II
There are to be found in Valéry's notebooks many notes such
6
as this: "Idea for a frightening story: it is discovered that the only
remedy for cancer is living human flesh. Consequences." I can well
imagine a piece of Borges "fiction" written on such a theme. Reading
ancient and modern philosophers, he stops at an idea or a hypothesis.
The spark flashes. "If this absurd postulate were developed to its
extreme logical consequences," he wonders, "what world would be
created?"
For example, an author, Pierre Menard, undertakes to compose
Don Quixote -- not another Quixote, but the Quixote. His method? To
know Spanish well, to rediscover the Catholic faith, to war against the
Moors, to forget the history of Europe -- in short, to be Miguel de
Cervantes. The coincidence then becomes so total that the twentiethcentury author rewrites Cervantes' novel literally, word for word, and
without referring to the original. And here Borges has this astonishing
sentence: "The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally
identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer." This he
triumphantly demonstrates, for this subject, apparently absurd, in fact
expresses a real idea: the Quixote that we read is not that of Cervantes,
any more than our Madame Bovary is that of Flaubert. Each twentiethcentury reader involuntarily rewrites in his own way the masterpieces
of past centuries. It was enough to make an extrapolation in order to
draw Borges's story out of it.
Often a paradox that ought to bowl us over does not strike us in
the abstract form given it by philosophers. Borges makes a concrete
reality out of it. The "Library of Babel" is the image of the universe,
infinite and always started over again. Most of the books in this library
are unintelligible, letters thrown together by chance or perversely
repeated, but sometimes, in this labyrinth of letters, a reasonable line
or sentence is found. Such are the laws of nature, tiny cases of
regularity in a chaotic world. The "Lottery in Babylon" is another
ingenious and penetrating staging of the role of chance in life. The
mysterious Company that distributes good and bad luck reminds us of
the "musical banks" in Samuel Butler's Erewhon.
Attracted by metaphysics, but accepting no system as true,
Borges makes out of all of them a game for the mind. He discovers
two tendencies in himself: "one to esteem religious and philosophical
ideas for their aesthetic value, and even for what is magical or
marvelous in their content. That is perhaps the indication of an
essential skepticism. The other is to suppose in advance that the
quantity of fables or metaphors of which man's imagination is capable
7
is limited, but that this small number of inventions can be everything
to everyone."
Among these fables or ideas, certain ones particularly fascinate
him: that of Endless Recurrence, or the circular repetition of all the
history of the world, a theme dear to Nietzsche; that of the dream
within a dream; that of centuries that seem minutes and seconds that
seem years ("The Secret Miracle"); that of the hallucinatory nature of
the world. He likes to quote Novalis: "The greatest of sorcerers would
be the one who would cast a spell on himself to the degree of taking
his own phantasmagoria for autonomous apparitions. Might that not be
our case?" Borges answers that indeed it is our case: it is we who have
dreamed the universe. We can see in what it consists, the deliberately
constructed interplay of the mirrors and mazes of this thought, difficult
but always acute and laden with secrets. In all these stories we find
roads that fork, corridors that lead nowhere, except to other corridors,
and so on as far as the eye can see. For Borges this is an image of
human thought, which endlessly makes its way through concatenations
of causes and effects without ever exhausting infinity, and marvels
over what is perhaps only inhuman chance. And why wander in these
labyrinths? Once more, for aesthetic reasons; because this present
infinity, these "vertiginous symmetries," have their tragic beauty. The
form is more important than the content.
III
Borges's form often recalls Swift's: the same gravity amid the
absurd, the same precision of detail. To demonstrate an impossible
discovery, he will adopt the tone of the most scrupulous scholar, mix
imaginary writings in with real and erudite sources. Rather than write a
whole book, which would bore him, he analyzes a book which has
never existed. "Why take five hundred pages," he asks, "to develop an
idea whose oral demonstration fits into a few minutes?"
Such is, for example, the narrative that bears this bizarre title:
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." This concerns the history of an unknown
planet, complete "with its architectures and quarrels, with the terror of
its mythologies and the uproar of its languages, its emperors and seas,
its minerals and birds and fish, its algebra and fire, its theological and
metaphysical controversies." This invention of a new world appears to
be the work of a secret society of astronomers, engineers, biologists,
metaphysicians and geometricians. This world that they have created,
8
Tlön, is a Berekeleyan and Kierkegaardian world where only inner life
exists. On Tlön everyone has his own truth; external objects are
whatever each one wants. The international press broadcasts this
discovery, and very soon the world of Tlön obliterates our world. An
imaginary past takes the place of our own. A group of solitary
scientists has transformed the universe. All this is mad, subtle, and
gives food for endless thought.
Other stories by Borges are parables, mysterious and never
explicit; still others are detective narratives in the manner of
Chesterton. Their plots remain entirely intellectual. The criminal
exploits his familiarity with the methods of the detective. It is Dupin
against Dupin or Maigret against Maigret. One of these pieces of
"fiction" is the insatiable search for a person through the scarcely
perceptible reflections that he has left on other souls. In another,
because a condemned man has noticed that expectations never
coincide with reality, he imagines the circumstances of his own death.
Since they have thus become expectations, they can no longer become
realities.
These inventions are described in a pure and scholarly style
which must be linked up with Poe, "who begat Baudelaire, who begat
Mallarmé, who begat Valéry," who begat Borges. It is especially by
his rigor that he reminds us of Valéry. "To be in love is to create a
religion whose god is fallible." By his piled-up imperfects he
sometimes recalls Flaubert; by the rarity of his adjectives, St. John
Perse. "The inconsolable cry of a bird." But, once these relationships
are pointed out, it must be said that Borges's style is, like his thought,
highly original. Of the metaphysicians of Tlön he writes: "They seek
neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think
metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy." That rather well
defines the greatness and the art of Borges.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
of the French Academy
Translated by Sherry Mangan
Introduction
Jorge Luis Borges was born on 24 August 1899 in Buenos
Aires, of Spanish, English and (very remotely) Portuguese Jewish
9
origin. His parents were of the intellectual middle class and descended
from military and political figures prominent in the struggles for
Argentine national independence and unity that occupied most of the
nineteenth century. After completing his secondary education in
Geneva and then spending some three years in Spain associated with
the avant-garde ultraísta group of poets, Borges returned to Buenos
Aires in 1921. There he immediately became the leading exponent and
theorist of Argentine ultraísmo, distinguished from its Spanish
counterpart by a peculiar fusion of modern expressionist form and
anachronistic nostalgia for certain national values -- values most
palpably embodied for those writers in the old criollo quarters of
Buenos Aires -- which were by then disappearing amid the postwar
boom and rush of foreign immigration. Borges's and his companions'
situation was not unlike that of some North American writers of the
same generation who suffered the impact of war, industrialism and
modern European art on a tranquil Midwestern or Southern heritage.
But out of these general conditions, shared by many in our
time, Borges has created a work like no other. Perhaps the most
striking characteristic of his writings is their extreme intellectual
reaction against all the disorder and contingency of immediate reality,
their radical insistence on breaking with the given world and
postulating another. Born into the dizzying flux and inconstancy of a
far-flung border area of Western culture, keen witness of the general
crisis of that culture, Borges has used his strangely gifted mind -- the
mind of a Cabalist, of a seventeenth-century "metaphysical," of a
theorist of pure literature much like Poe or Valéry -- to erect an order
with what Yeats called "monuments of unageing intellect." Borges is
skeptical as few have ever been about the ultimate value of mere ideas
and mere literature. But he has striven to turn this skepticism into an
ironic method, to make of disbelief an aesthetic system, in which what
matters most is not ideas as such, but their resonances and suggestions,
the drama of their possibilities and impossibilities, the immobile and
lasting quintessence of ideas as it is distilled at the dead center of their
warring contradictions.
Until about 1930 Borges's main creative medium was poetry:
laconic free-verse poems which evoked scenes and atmospheres of old
Buenos Aires or treated timeless themes of love, death and the self. He
also wrote many essays on subjects of literary criticism, metaphysics
and language, essays reminiscent of Chesterton's in their compactness
and unexpected paradoxes. The lucidity and verbal precision of these
10
writings belie the agitated conditions of avant-garde polemic and
playfulness under which most of them were composed. During these
years Borges was content to seek expression in serene lyric images
perhaps too conveniently abstracted from the surrounding world and
have all his speculations and creations respond primarily to the need
for a new national literature as he saw it. The years from 1930 to 1940,
however, brought a deep change in Borges's work. He virtually
abandoned poetry and turned to the short narrative genre. Though he
never lost his genuine emotion for the unique features of his native
ground, he ceased to exalt them nationalistically as sole bulwarks
against threatening disorder and began to rank them more humbly
within a context of vast universal processes: the nightmarish city of
"Death and the Compass" is an obvious stylization of Buenos Aires, no
longer idealized as in the poems, but instead used as the dark setting
for a tragedy of the human intellect. The witty and already very
learned young poet who had been so active in editing such little
reviews as Martín Fierro, Prisma and Proa, became a sedentary
writer-scholar who spent many solitary hours in reading the most
varied and unusual works of literature and philosophy and in
meticulously correcting his own manuscripts, passionately but also
somewhat monstrously devoted to the written word as his most vital
experience, as failing eyesight and other crippling afflictions made him
more and more a semi-invalid, more and more an incredible mind in
an ailing and almost useless body, much like his character Ireneo
Funes. Oppressed by physical reality and also by the turmoil of
Europe, which had all-too-direct repercussions in Argentina, Borges
sought to create a coherent fictional world of the intelligence. This
world is essentially adumbrated in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." As
Borges slyly observes there, Tlön is no "irresponsible figment of the
imagination"; the stimulus which prompted its formulation is stated
with clarity (though not without irony) toward the end of that story's
final section, projected as a kind of tentative Utopia into the future
beyond the grim year 1940 when it was written:
Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order -- dialectical
materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism -- was sufficient to charm the minds of
men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast
evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also
orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws -- I translate:
inhuman laws -- which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it
is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
11
Borges's metaphysical fictions, his finest creations, which are
collected in the volumes Ficciones (1945) and El Aleph (1949), all
elaborate upon the varied idealist possibilities outlined in the "article"
on Tlön. In these narratives the analytical and imaginative functions
previously kept separate in his essays and poems curiously fuse,
producing a form expressive of all the tension and complexity of
Borges's mature thought.
His fictions are always concerned with processes of striving
which lead to discovery and insight; these are achieved at times
gradually, at other times suddenly, but always with disconcerting and
even devastating effect. They are tales of the fantastic, of the
hyperbolic, but they are never content with fantasy in the simple sense
of facile wish-fulfillment. The insight they provide is ironic, pathetic: a
painful sense of inevitable limits that block total aspirations. Some of
these narratives ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "Pierre Menard, Author
of the Quixote" "Three Versions of Judas," "The Sect of the Phoenix")
might be called "pseudo essays" -- mock scrutinies of authors or books
or learned subjects actually of Borges's own invention -- that in turning
in upon themselves make the "plot" (if it can be called that) an
intricate interplay of creation and critique. But all his stories, whatever
their outward form, have the same self-critical dimension; in some it is
revealed only in minimal aspects of tone and style (as, for example, in
"The Circular Ruins"). Along with these "vertical" superpositions of
different and mutually qualifying levels, there are also "horizontal"
progressions of qualitative leaps, after the manner of tales of adventure
or of crime detection (Borges's favorite types of fiction). Unexpected
turns elude the predictable; hidden realities are revealed through their
diverse effects and derivations. Like his beloved Chesterton, who
made the Father Brown stories a vehicle for his Catholic theology,
Borges uses mystery and the surprise effect in literature to achieve that
sacred astonishment at the universe which is the origin of all true
religion and metaphysics. However, Borges as theologian is a
complete heretic, as the casuistical "Three Versions of Judas" more
than suffices to show.
Borges once claimed that the basic devices of all fantastic
literature are only four in number: the work within the work, the
contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double.
These are both his essential themes -- the problematical nature of the
world, of knowledge, of time, of the self -- and his essential techniques
12
of construction. Indeed, in Borges's narratives the usual distinction
between form and content virtually disappears, as does that between
the world of literature and the world of the reader. We almost
unconsciously come to accept the world of Tlön because it has been so
subtly inserted into our own. In "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,"
Borges's discovery of his own story (which is worked up before our
very eyes and has areas "not yet revealed" to him), Nolan's of
Kilpatrick's treason, Ryan's of the curious martyrdom, and ours of the
whole affair, are but one awareness of dark betrayal and creative
deception. We are transported into a realm where fact and fiction, the
real and the unreal, the whole and the part, the highest and the lowest,
are complementary aspects of the same continuous being: a realm
where "any man is all men," where "all men who repeat a line of
Shakespeare are William Shakespeare." The world is a book and the
book is a world, and both are labyrinthine and enclose enigmas
designed to be understood and participated in by man. We should note
that this all-comprising intellectual unity is achieved precisely by the
sharpest and most scandalous confrontation of opposites. In "Avatars
of the Tortoise," the paradox of Zeno triumphantly demonstrates the
unreality of the visible world, while in "The Library of Babel" it shows
the anguishing impossibility of the narrator's ever reaching the Book
of Books. And in "The Immortal," possibly Borges's most complete
narrative, the movements toward and from immortality become one
single approximation of universal impersonality.
Borges is always quick to confess his sources and borrowings,
because for him no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers
are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and
annotators of pre-existing archetypes. (Hence Tlön, the impersonal and
hereditary product of a "secret society"; hence Pierre Menard, the
writer as perfect reader.) By critics he has often been compared with
Kafka, whom he was one of the first to translate into Spanish.
Certainly, we can see the imprint of his favorite Kafka story, "The
Great Wall of China," on "The Lottery in Babylon" and "The Library
of Babel"; the similarity lies mainly in the narrators' pathetically
inadequate examination of an impossible subject, and also in the idea
of an infinite, hierarchical universe, with its corollary of infinite
regression. But the differences between the two writers are perhaps
more significant than their likenesses. Kafka's minutely and
extensively established portrayals of degradation, his irreducible and
enigmatic situations, contrast strongly with Borges's compact but
13
vastly significant theorems, his all-dissolving ratiocination. Kafka
wrote novels, but Borges has openly confessed he cannot; his
miniature forms are intense realizations of Poe's famous tenets of unity
of effect and brevity to the exclusion of "worldly interests." And no
matter how mysterious they may seem at first glance, all Borges's
works contain the keys to their own elucidation in the form of clear
parallelisms with other of his writings and explicit allusions to a
definite literary and philosophical context within which he has chosen
to situate himself. The list of Pierre Menard's writings, as Borges has
observed, is not "arbitrary," but provides a "diagram of his mental
history" and already implies the nature of his "subterranean"
undertaking. All the footnotes in Borges's fictions, even those marked
"Editor's Note," are the author's own and form an integral part of the
works as he has conceived them. Familiarity with Neo-Platonism and
related doctrines will clarify Borges's preferences and intentions, just
as it will, say, Yeats's or Joyce's. But, as Borges himself has remarked
of the theological explications of Kafka's work, the full enjoyment of
his writings precedes and in no way depends upon such interpretations.
Greater and more important than his intellectual ingenuity is Borges's
consummate skill as a narrator, his magic in obtaining the most
powerful effects with a strict economy of means.
Borges's stories may seem mere formalist games, mathematical
experiments devoid of any sense of human responsibility and unrelated
even to the author's own life, but quite the opposite is true. His idealist
insistence on knowledge and insight, which mean finding order and
becoming part of it, has a definite moral significance, though that
significance is for him inextricably dual: his traitors are always
somehow heroes as well. And all his fictional situations, all his
characters, are at bottom autobiographical, essential projections of his
experiences as writer, reader and human being (also divided, as
"Borges and I" tells us). He is the dreamer who learns he is the
dreamed one, the detective deceived by the hidden pattern of crimes,
the perplexed Averroes whose ignorance mirrors the author's own in
portraying him. And yet, each of these intimate failures is turned into
an artistic triumph. It could be asked what such concerns of a total man
of letters have to do with our plight as ordinary, bedeviled men of our
bedeviled time. Here it seems inevitable to draw a comparison with
Cervantes, so apparently unlike Borges, but whose name is not
invoked in vain in his stories, essays and parables. Borges's fictions,
like the enormous fiction of Don Quixote, grow out of the deep
14
confrontation of literature and life which is not only the central
problem of all literature but also that of all human experience: the
problem of illusion and reality. We are all at once writers, readers and
protagonists of some eternal story; we fabricate our illusions, seek to
decipher the symbols around us and see our efforts overtopped and cut
short by a supreme Author; but in our defeat, as in the Mournful
Knight's, there can come the glimpse of a higher understanding that
prevails, at our expense. Borges's "dehumanized" exercises in ars
combinatoria are no less human than that.
Narrative prose is usually easier to translate than verse, but
Borges's prose raises difficulties not unlike those of poetry, because of
its constant creative deformations and cunning artifices. Writers as
diverse as George Moore and Vladimir Nabokov have argued that
translations should sound like translations. Certainly, since Borges's
language does not read "smoothly" in Spanish, there is no reason it
should in English. Besides, as was indicated above, he considers his
own style at best only a translation of others': at the end of "Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" he speaks of making an "uncertain" version of
Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial after the manner of the great Spanish
Baroque writer Francisco de Quevedo. Borges's prose is in fact a
modern adaptation of the Latinized Baroque stil coupé. He has a
penchant for what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetoricians
called "hard" or "philosophic" words, and will often use them in their
strict etymological sense, restoring radical meanings with an effect of
metaphorical novelty. In the opening sentence of "The Circular
Ruins," "unanimous" means quite literally "of one mind" (unus
animus) and thus foreshadows the magician's final discovery. Elevated
terms are played off against more humble and direct ones; the image
joining unlike terms is frequent; heterogeneous contacts are also
created by Borges's use of colons and semicolons in place of causal
connectives to give static, elliptical, overlapping effects. Somewhat
like Eliot in The Waste Land, Borges will deliberately work quotations
into the texture of his writing. The most striking example is "The
Immortal," which contains many more such "intrusions or thefts" than
its epilogue admits. All his other stories do the same to some degree:
there are echoes of Gibbon in "The Lottery in Babylon," of Spengler in
"Deutsches Requiem," of Borges himself in "The Library of Babel"
and "Funes the Memorious." Borges has observed that "the Baroque is
that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its
possibilities and borders on its own caricature." A self-parodying tone
15
is particularly evident in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "The
Zahir," "The Sect of the Phoenix." In that sense, Borges also ironically
translates himself.
Most of the present volume is given over to a sizable selection
of Borges's fictions. The essays here represent only a very small
portion of his production in that form; they have been chosen for the
importance of their themes in Borges's work as a whole and for their
relevance to the stories, which were written during the same years. All
are taken from his best essay collection, Otras inquisiciones (1952),
with the exception of "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (originally
a lecture), which is contained in the revised edition of another
collection entitled Discusión (1957). Because of his near-blindness,
Borges ceased to write stories after 1953 (though "Borges and I"
suggest other reasons for the abandonment of that genre), and since
then he has concentrated on even shorter forms which can be dictated
more easily. The parables concluding this collection are examples of
that later work. They are all found in the volume El hacedor (1960).
Borges's somewhat belated recognition as a major writer of our
time has come more from Europe than from his native America. The
1961 Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett, is the
most recent token of that recognition. In Argentina, save for the
admiration of a relatively small group, he has often been criticized as
non-Argentine, as an abstruse dweller in an ivory tower, though his
whole work and personality could only have emerged from that
peculiar crossroads of the River Plate region, and his nonpolitical
opposition to Perón earned him persecutions during the years of the
dictatorship. Apparently, many of his countrymen cannot pardon in
him what is precisely his greatest virtue -- his almost superhuman
effort to transmute his circumstances into an art as universal as the
finest of Europe -- and expect their writers to be uncomplicated
reporters of the national scene. A kind of curious inverse snobbism is
evident here. As the Argentine novelist Ernesto Sábato remarked in
1945, "if Borges were French or Czech, we would all be reading him
enthusiastically in bad translations." Not being French has
undoubtedly also relegated Borges to comparative obscurity in the
English-speaking countries, where it is rare that a Hispanic writer is
ever accorded any major importance at all. Perhaps this selection of his
writings will help correct that oversight and justify the critical
judgments of René Etiemble and Marcel Brion, who have found in
Borges the very perfection of the cosmopolitan spirit, and in his work
16
one of the most extraordinary expressions in all Western literature of
modern man's anguish of time, of space, of the infinite.
J. E. I.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
I
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and
an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a
country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejía; the encyclopedia is
fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York,
1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy
Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily
engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the
first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and
indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers -very few readers -- to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the
remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered
(such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that
mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares
recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors
and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of
men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he
answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia,
in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had
a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an
article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on UralAltaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback,
consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the
imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr. . .
Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq or of Asia
Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I
conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous
heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy's modesty in order to justify
a statement. The fruitless examination of one of Justus Perthes' atlases
fortified my doubt.
17
The following day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aires. He told
me he had before him the article on Uqbar, in Volume XLVI of the
encyclopedia. The heresiarch's name was not forthcoming, but there
was a note on his doctrine, formulated in words almost identical to
those he had repeated, though perhaps literarily inferior. He had
recalled: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. The text of the
encyclopedia said: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was
an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are
abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe. I told
him, in all truthfulness, that I should like to see that article. A few days
later he brought it. This surprised me, since the scrupulous
cartographical indices of Ritter's Erdkunde were plentifully ignorant of
the name Uqbar.
The tome Bioy brought was, in fact, Volume XLVI of the
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. On the half-title page and the spine, the
alphabetical marking (Tor-Ups) was that of our copy, but, instead of
917, it contained 921 pages. These four additional pages made up the
article on Uqbar, which (as the reader will have noticed) was not
indicated by the alphabetical marking. We later determined that there
was no other difference between the volumes. Both of them (as I
believe I have indicated) are reprints of the tenth Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Bioy had acquired his copy at some sale or other.
We read the article with some care. The passage recalled by
Bioy was perhaps the only surprising one. The rest of it seemed very
plausible, quite in keeping with the general tone of the work and (as is
natural) a bit boring. Reading it over again, we discovered beneath its
rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness. Of the fourteen names which
figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three -- Khorasan,
Armenia, Erzerum -- interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way. Of
the historical names, only one: the impostor magician Smerdis,
invoked more as a metaphor. The note seemed to fix the boundaries of
Uqbar, but its nebulous reference points were rivers and craters and
mountain ranges of that same region. We read, for example, that the
lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern
frontier and that on the islands of the delta wild horses procreate. All
this, on the first part of page 918. In the historical section (page 920)
we learned that as a result of the religious persecutions of the
thirteenth century, the orthodox believers sought refuge on these
islands, where to this day their obelisks remain and where it is not
uncommon to unearth their stone mirrors. The section on Language
18
and Literature was brief. Only one trait is worthy of recollection: it
noted that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics
and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions
of Mlejnas and Tlön. . . The bibliography enumerated four volumes
which we have not yet found, though the third -- Silas Haslam: History
of the Land Called Uqbar, 1874 -- figures in the catalogues of Bernard
Quaritch's book shop.* The first, Lesbare und lesenswerthe
Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, dates from 1641
and is the work of Johannes Valentinus Andreä. This fact is
significant; a few years later, I came upon that name in the
unsuspected pages of De Quincey (Writings, Volume XIII) and learned
that it belonged to a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth
century, described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis -- a
community that others founded later, in imitation of what he had
prefigured.
* Haslam has also published A General History of Labyrinths.
That night we visited the National Library. In vain we
exhausted atlases, catalogues, annuals of geographical societies,
travelers' and historians' memoirs: no one had ever been in Uqbar.
Neither did the general index of Bioy's encyclopedia register that
name. The following day, Carlos Mastronardi (to whom I had related
the matter) noticed the black and gold covers of the Anglo-American
Cyclopaedia in a bookshop on Corrientes and Talcahuano. . . He
entered and examined Volume XLVI. Of course, he did not find the
slightest indication of Uqbar.
II
Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an
engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Adrogué,
amongst the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the
mirrors. In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many
Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then. He was
tall and listless and his tired rectangular beard had once been red. I
understand he was a widower, without children. Every few years he
would go to England, to visit (I judge from some photographs he
showed us) a sundial and a few oaks. He and my father had entered
into one of those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships
19
that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with
dialogue. They used to carry out an exchange of books and newspapers
and engage in taciturn chess games. . . I remember him in the hotel
corridor, with a mathematics book in his hand, sometimes looking at
the irrecoverable colors of the sky. One afternoon, we spoke of the
duodecimal system of numbering (in which twelve is written as 10).
Ashe said that he was converting some kind of tables from the
duodecimal to the sexagesimal system (in which sixty is written as 10).
He added that the task had been entrusted to him by a Norwegian, in
Rio Grande do Sul. We had known him for eight years and he had
never mentioned his sojourn in that region. . . We talked of country
life, of the capangas, of the Brazilian etymology of the word gaucho
(which some old Uruguayans still pronounce gaúcho) and nothing
more was said -- may God forgive me -- of duodecimal functions. In
September of 1937 (we were not at the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a
ruptured aneurysm. A few days before, he had received a sealed and
certified package from Brazil. It was a book in large octavo. Ashe left
it at the bar, where -- months later -- I found it. I began to leaf through
it and experienced an astonished and airy feeling of vertigo which I
shall not describe, for this is not the story of my emotions but of Uqbar
and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. On one of the nights of Islam called the
Night of Nights, the secret doors of heaven open wide and the water in
the jars becomes sweeter; if those doors opened, I would not feel what
I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English and contained
1001 pages. On the yellow leather back I read these curious words
which were repeated on the title page: A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön.
Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was no indication of date or place. On
the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered one of the color
plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis
Tertius. Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain
pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent
country; now chance afforded me something more precious and
arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an
unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing
cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its
languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its
birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and
metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no
visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.
In the "Eleventh Volume" which I have mentioned, there are
20
allusions to preceding and succeeding volumes. In an article in the N.
R. F. which is now classic, Néstor Ibarra has denied the existence of
those companion volumes; Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Drieu La
Rochelle have refuted that doubt, perhaps victoriously. The fact is that
up to now the most diligent inquiries have been fruitless. In vain we
have upended the libraries of the two Americas and of Europe.
Alfonso Reyes, tired of these subordinate sleuthing procedures,
proposes that we should all undertake the task of reconstrucing the
many and weighty tomes that are lacking: ex ungue leonem. He
calculates, half in earnest and half jokingly, that a generation of
tlönistas should be sufficient. This venturesome computation brings us
back to the fundamental problem: Who are the inventors of Tlön? The
plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor -- an
infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly -- has been
unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is
the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers,
metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters,
geometers. . . directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals
mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those
capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating
that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so
vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was
believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the
imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate
laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let
it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the
Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other
volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it. The
popular magazines, with pardonable excess, have spread news of the
zoology and topography of Tlön; I think its transparent tigers and
towers of blood perhaps do not merit the continued attention of all
men. I shall venture to request a few minutes to expound its concept of
the universe.
Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not
admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest
conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the
earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are
congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their
language -- religion, letters, metaphysics -- all presuppose idealism.
The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a
21
heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and
temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural
Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are
derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic
suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no
word corresponding to the word "moon," but there is a verb which in
English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above
the river" is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: "upward behind the
on-streaming it mooned."
The preceding applies to the languages of the southern
hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (on whose Ursprache
there is very little data in the Eleventh Volume) the prime unit is not
the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an
accumulation of adjectives. They do not say "moon," but rather "round
airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky" or any other such
combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a
real object, but this is purely fortuitous. The literature of this
hemisphere (like Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects,
which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic
needs. At times they are determined by mere simultaneity. There are
objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory
character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird.
There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's
chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the
sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These
second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of
certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are
famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a
poetic object created by the author. The fact that no one believes in the
reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending. The
languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere contain all the nouns of the
Indo-European languages -- and many others as well.
It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön
comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated
to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a
series of mental processes which do not develop in space but
successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the
attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand
the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states)
and the second -- which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other
22
words, they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The
perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning
field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the
blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.
This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we
explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking, in
Tlön, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the
previous state. Every mental state is irreducible: the mere fact of
naming it -- i.e., of classifying it -- implies a falsification. From which
it can be deduced that there are no sciences on Tlön, not even
reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, and in almost
uncountable number. The same thing happens with philosophies as
happens with nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that every
philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophic des Ah
Ob, has caused them to multiply. There is an abundance of incredible
systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of
Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for
the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic
literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the
subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect.
Even the phrase "all aspects" is rejectable, for it supposes the
impossible addition of the present and of all past moments. Neither is
it licit to use the plural "past moments," since it supposes another
impossible operation. . . One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to
negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has
no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other
than as a present memory.* Another school declares that all time has
already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no
doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable
process. Another, that the history of the universe -- and in it our lives
and the most tenuous detail of our lives -- is the scripture produced by
a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another,
that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all
the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred
nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake
elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.
* Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, page 159) supposes that the planet has been
created a few minutes ago, furnished with a humanity that "remembers" an illusory
past
23
Amongst the doctrines of Tlön, none has merited the
scandalous reception accorded to materialism. Some thinkers have
formulated it with less clarity than fervor, as one might put forth a
paradox. In order to facilitate the comprehension of this inconceivable
thesis, a heresiarch of the eleventh century* devised the sophism of the
nine copper coins, whose scandalous renown is in Tlön equivalent to
that of the Eleatic paradoxes. There are many versions of this
"specious reasoning," which vary the number of coins and the number
of discoveries; the following is the most common:
*A century, according to the duodecimal system, signifies a period of a hundred and
forty-four years.
On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper
coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by
Wednesday's rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On
Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house. The
heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality -- i.e., the
continuity -- of the nine coins which were recovered. It is absurd (he
affirmed) to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between
Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon,
two between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think that
they have existed -- at least in some secret way, hidden from the
comprehension of men -- at every moment of those three periods.
The language of Tlön resists the formulation of this paradox;
most people did not even understand it. The defenders of common
sense at first did no more than negate the veracity of the anecdote.
They repeated that it was a verbal fallacy, based on the rash
application of two neologisms not authorized by usage and alien to all
rigorous thought: the verbs "find" and "lose," which beg the question,
because they presuppose the identity of the first and of the last nine
coins. They recalled that all nouns (man, coin, Thursday, Wednesday,
rain) have only a metaphorical value. They denounced the treacherous
circumstance "somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain," which
presupposes what is trying to be demonstrated: the persistence of the
four coins from Tuesday to Thursday. They explained that equality is
one thing and identity another, and formulated a kind of reductio ad
absurdum: the hypothetical case of nine men who on nine successive
nights suffer a severe pain. Would it not be ridiculous -- they
questioned -- to pretend that this pain is one and the same?* They said
that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of
24
attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that
at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if
equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine
coins are one.
* Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a
certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only
reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men
who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
Unbelievably, these refutations were not definitive. A hundred
years after the problem was stated, a thinker no less brilliant than the
heresiarch but of orthodox tradition formulated a very daring
hypothesis. This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one
subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and
that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity. X is Y and
is Z. Z discovers three coins because he remembers that X lost them; X
finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have
been found. . . The Eleventh Volume suggests that three prime reasons
determined the complete victory of this idealist pantheism. The first,
its repudiation of solipsism; the second, the possibility of preserving
the psychological basis of the sciences; the third, the possibility of
preserving the cult of the gods. Schopenhauer (the passionate and lucid
Schopenhauer) formulates a very similar doctrine in the first volume of
Parerga und Paralipomena.
The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different
disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our
own geometry and is subordinated to the first. The basis of visual
geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry disregards
parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the
forms which surround him. The basis of its arithmetic is the notion of
indefinite numbers. They emphasize the importance of the concepts of
greater and lesser, which our mathematicians symbolize as > and
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