Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

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 resume, a commentary.  Thus proceeded Carlyle in Sartor Resartus.  Thus Butler in The Fair Haven.  these are works which suffer the imperfection of being themselves books, and of being no less tautological than the others.  More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.

I recently moved.  During that ordeal, almost all of my books were packed up, and I was forced for a whole month to raid the book room at the school where I teach for stuff to read.  That was fortuitous, actually, otherwise I would not yet have gotten around to reading Borges' short story collection Ficciones, or Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, or Alison Bechdel's terrific graphic memoir Fun Home.  But Borges' stories, stuffed as they are with labyrinths, and stories nested within stories like boxes within boxes, actually seemed reminiscent of my apartment while I was packing.

So I lived in a "Garden of Forking Paths" for a little while--but in a less tongue-in-cheek way, the famous story of that title did make me think about the way I ended up here, at this moment, moving to this place with this person, when it might so easily have been otherwise.  "The Garden of Forking Paths" is about a Chinese spy for the German government, living in Britain, who murders a renowned Sinologist because the man's name, Albert, will reveal the location of a similarly named artillery park when his name is published in the newspaper.  Albert is familiar with the legend of the narrator's grandfather, who vanished leaving his two goals unfinished--to write an intricate novel, and to create an equally intricate labyrinth.  The book and the labyrinth, Albert tells the narrator, are the same; the book sought to encompass all of the possible paths that fork in time, branching off at the junction of each decision.  And yet it is not a labyrinth we can navigate or escape, for as the narrator says:

Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now.  Century follows century, and things happen only in the present.  There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

Borges' stories are all like that, tangled intellectual knots on the subjects of time, fiction, and imagination.  Many of them are only brief commentaries on longer works that never existed, playing with the illusory border between fiction and the real.  In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," he writes a fictional memoir about a fictional author whose masterwork is a line-for-line reproduction of Don Quixote, which surpasses the original because the 300 intervening years have made its allusions richer.  In "The Library of Babel," he describes a universe which is comprised of a massive library, where all books are composed of random letters and punctuation.  Those born into this universe reason that all information must be somewhere in the library--each person's biography, predictions of the future, even the full index of the library's own contents--and go mad searching for sense among the nonsense.  Their predicament sounds grotesque--but is it different from our own experience, searching for patterns in a random universe to create meaning?

I was surprised how philosophically dense most of these stories are.  In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," he describes a conspiracy to create an imaginary country, Tlon, which becomes a discussion of metaphysics and subjective idealism, the philosophy which maintains only minds and ideas exist.  (At the end of the story, Borges suggests that the real world is becoming, or merging with, the imaginary Tlon!)  The influence of Borges is easy to spot, but it's hard to name a writer with the same kind of intellectual heft, or the compelling brevity.

The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

The plot of this allegory... is curious: One of the splendid feathers of the distant King of the Birds, the Simurgh, falls into the center of China; other birds, weary with the present state of anarchy, resolve to find this king. They know the name of their king means "thirty birds"; they know that his palace is in the Mountains of Kaf, the mountains that encircle the earth. At the beginning, some of the birds reconsider their rashness, and grow cowardly: the nightingale excuses itself from the journey-quest because of its love for the rose; the parrot, because of its beauty, which is the reason it lives within a a cage; the partridge says it cannot live without the high mountains, while the heron pleads its need for marshes, the owl, for ruins. But at last the birds undertake the desperate quest. They cross seven wadis or seven seas. The penultimate of these is called Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many pilgrims abandon the quest; others perish on the journey. At the end, thirty birds, purified by their travails, come to the mountain on which the Simurgh lives, and they contemplate their king at last: they see that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them, and all of them.

--"Simurgh"


I am writing this review on July 6th, 2010. God knows when you'll read it, since I actually bought Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings as a late birthday present for Nathan. Since he lives in another state, who knows when I'll be able to give it to him (I don't trust the postal system), and since it's going to be in my possession for a while, well, I figured I'd just go ahead and read it.

Borges is perhaps the most notable Spanish-language author since Cervantes, and in a book I'm reading concurrently (sure to be reviewed before this one), How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom identifies him as the purest example of a line of short fiction writers preoccupied with phantasmogoria and the fantastic, including Kafka. A bestiary of imaginary creatures, then, seems as if it would appeal to Borges, both in the brevity of its format and the whimsicality of its subject. Some, like the dragon and the unicorn are common enough; others, like the Lamed Wufniks or A Bao A Qu, less recognizable. Some belong to ancient religion, others to modern authors like Lewis, Flaubert, and Kafka himself. Though no entry is more than a few pages, some are mystifyingly laconic:

Hochigan

Descartes tells us that monkeys could talk if they wanted to, but they have decided to keep silent so that humans will not force them to work. The Bushmen of South Africa believe that there was a time when all animals could talk. Hochigan hated animals; one day it disappeared, taking the gift of speech with it.

Who is Hochigan? What is Hochigan? Does it belong to the tradition of the Bushmen, or does it appear in the works of Descartes?

Typified in this very short entry is Borges' synthetic power, which is his most significant contribution to his source material. By bringing Descartes and the Bushmen together, he is suggesting the existence of a larger human tradition of cryptozoology; these traditions, likely not mentioned simultaneously until their inclusion here, speak to a common need to create new life and augment the natural world.

We expect much of Borges, but he is strangely reticent to show his face; often, he provides no comment on his sources at all, including wholesale selections from other works as complete entries. Elsewhere, Andrew Hurley tells us in his translator's note, Borges hews almost exactly to unattributed sources. But Borges' genius is not absent: there is near-heresy in placing "An Animal Dreamed by Kafka" in the same volume as the great dragons of Chinese tradition. I do not think that Borges is suggesting that religion is a fiction, but quite the opposite: these creatures have a considerable impact on human existence. To have seen the great unicorn tapestries of the Metropolitan Museum's collection is to understand that the unicorn, through its powerful symbolism and command over the human imagination, has a certain kind of realness of its own. In his preface, Borges explains:

We do not know that the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man's imagination, and thus the dragon arises in many latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster, not some ephemeral and casual creature like the chimaera or the catoblepas.

Yet Borges seeks to categorize both the necessary monsters and the casual, because they all speak to the human in ways that a bestiary of tangible beasts would certainly not. In this way it is a very anti-academic exercise masquerading as an academic one, as if to classify and collect these animals were to bring them a little bit closer to being flesh-and-blood. In the end, it is an exploration of ourselves, who, as the birds in the story of the Simurgh above, seek endlessly to understand the Other but are faced with only our own image.