Book Review: Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
A few months ago, I found myself purchasing Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges for the unsophisticated reason that it intrigued me. I knew next to nothing about Borges or his work, but I felt a strange attraction to the book. This feeling — of being drawn into something without understanding what it is or why — only increased the further I progressed into Borges’ mysterious short story collection.
Judging by the translator’s introduction it appears I’m in good company. Anthony Kerrigan somehow fails to inspire readerly confidence when he contextualizes Borges’ work as “a species of international literary metaphor” and remarks that Borges “does not shy away from senseless truth.” Reading this, I couldn’t help but feel that I was in for a ride. Fortunately Borges, a man who Kerrigan says “has made the acquaintance of all religions… knows Madrid, Paris, and Geneva… [and] has read all the books,” seems to know his way around the block. As a first-time Borges reader I hoped and even expected that Kerrigan’s introduction would yield some nugget of advice, a clue into how to approach Borges’ chef d’oeuvre. Instead it essentially amounts to this: Buckle up and pay attention, the master is at work.
Kerrigan is generally unwilling to tie his author down with any concrete descriptors, but he does highlight one aspect of Borges’ writing: his brevity. According to Kerrigan, Borges constructs his stories with an economy beyond that of most authors. Kerrigan declares him “the most succinct writer in this century,” explaining Borges’ style thus: “In literature it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!” In the prologue to part one — Ficciones is a book in two parts — Borges himself echoes the sentiment:
The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five-hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.
This inventive technique saves time but it also disorients. Imaginary books, places, and people coincide with their real counterparts undistinguished. Being unlike Borges in that I have not engulfed all of history nor read every book, I am at a loss. Only a few pages into the first story it dawned on me that reading Ficciones would either be a start-and-stop marathon bogged down by frequent trips to Google, or a semi-blindfolded adventure plagued by missed understandings. Hoping to read rather than study this book I chose the latter. For anyone likewise less learned than Borges I can attest that taking this approach still provides for an engaging read and is not necessarily the easy way out. For me, the initial effect of wanting to distinguish the real from the imagined soon faded. Taking its place was the question of whether or not that distinction was even worth making, and later if it existed at all.
This kind of nothing-is-given conundrum makes Ficciones’ intellectually engaging at the necessary cost of being hard to grasp. Questions that begin at ground level — Who is this character? What does he want? — quickly become untethered: What story is he from? Do we share a universe?
While reading I frequently caught myself attempting to corral Borges’ swirling imagination into something I could parse, or relate it to other things I’ve read. Never mind morals and themes, I would think to myself, What is this book actually about? I’ve now decided that puzzles, recursion, the infinite, humanity, and violence are some of the major tentpoles, but I don’t know what they’re holding up. It’s tough to glean meaning when stories begin without a shred of context — though Borges insists that they “do not require extraneous elucidation” — and end with the reader in a state of epiphany and confusion.
Consider the opening story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” It begins with an anonymous narrator describing what seems like a practical joke: an enigmatic encyclopedia entry about a country called Uqbar. No amount of research yields him any further information on this (doubly) fictional place and the plot line fizzles out. But later he finds an entire book describing an (again, doubly) invented planet called Tlön, complete with its own theology and language. Tlön’s language resembles ours except that it does not contain any nouns, only “impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs.” Therefore, on Tlön the phrase “the moon rose over the sea” would be written “upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling,” or simply “upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.”
I see no danger in spoiling the end of this wildly metaphorical story for you. Some time after encountering an artifact that came from Tlön, an element composed of matter not found on Earth, the narrator declares that Tlön — its principles, languages, and history — have begun to consume our planet. “The world will be Tlön,” he says. “I take no notice.”
Ficciones plays with so many advanced topics — somehow, it feels like this skinny book touches every topic, from mysticism to Boolean logic to psychology to literature — that it’s easy to forget it’s doing exactly that: playing. Borges’ humor is subtle to the point of invisibility but there are times when it comes out and grins at you. My favorite moment of the book occurs in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” The narrator spends eight pages describing an invented author named Pierre Menard, who endeavored to write Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Not re-write or adapt or translate, but write:
He did not want to compose another Don Quixote — which would be easy — but the Don Quixote. […] His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
On the one hand we have a serious and sincere proposition; on the other we have the realization that what the narrator describes is trivial and meaningless. As I read this paradox, I felt like I was missing something obvious. Surely Menard didn’t intend to actually write the exact same Don Quixote from his “general memory” of having read it, “perhaps in its entirety,” at the age of thirteen? My question was soon answered by a side-by-side comparison of a sample of each author’s Don Quixote: they are verbally identical. For the narrator at least, that’s the only thing they have in common. He calls Menard’s “almost infinitely richer” and remarks that the contrast in styles is “vivid.”
What’s the point of this absurdity? In this story it helps construct the idea that writing is an inevitable and universal act such that all men are not only capable of writing the same texts but that this process is as natural and expected as breathing, what the fictional author Menard calls “the normal respiration of the intelligence.” He explains, “Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.” Touching on this idea in his introduction, Kerrigan zooms out even further: “Perhaps, after all, every man is one man; every book one book.”
Ficciones seems to take the inverse of its own rule: it feels like every book. Borges prides himself on reducing entire unwritten novels into condensed kernels, and at a mere 170 pages Ficciones is itself the kernel of something much grander. It is mysterious and labyrinthine, an infinite metaphorical maze.
As I navigated through Ficciones I couldn’t help but wonder where I’d gotten the urge to buy the book. Finally, a few weeks later I noticed my roommate’s copy collecting dust on our TV cabinet. Some mysteries solve themselves. For the more stubborn variety, turn to Ficciones.
