Fiction, for Jorge Luis Borges, is a labyrinth – a delightful labyrinth. With any story, Borges believes, a reader goes into the labyrinth with the exFiction, for Jorge Luis Borges, is a labyrinth – a delightful labyrinth. With any story, Borges believes, a reader goes into the labyrinth with the express intention of getting lost; the author meanwhile does his or her level best to make sure that readers enjoy the process of being misled and misdirected through the labyrinth, taken down one false trail after another. Small wonder that one of the great Argentine author’s best-known books is titled Labyrinths.
This collection, Ficciones, is not the same book as Labyrinths -- although the two collections were first published in English in the same year, and do contain many of the same stories. Ficciones was published 18 years before Labyrinths, and Wikipedia informs us that it is “often considered the best introduction to [Borges’] work.” I know that it was my introduction to a full-length work of Borges, one that I took with me on a trip to Argentina – and a delightfully labyrinthine introduction it was.
Ficciones, first published in its present form in Spanish in 1956, and republished in an English translation in 1962, is a compilation of two earlier collections, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and Artifices (1944). The titles indicate Borges’ interest in labyrinths (what is a “garden of forking paths,” if not a labyrinth?), and in the idea that fiction, by its very nature, is a deliberate creation, an artifice, that is entered into as a deliberate matter by both writer and reader. The 17 stories brought together in this collection are brilliantly labyrinthine; and they partake wonderfully of artifice, without ever seeming artificial.
In the Garden of Forking Paths section of Ficciones, one of the stories that stood out to me was “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” – perhaps because I had read it before, in one of those anthologies of heavily anthologized short stories. I found it frankly puzzling when I first read it as an undergraduate; now, coming back to it thirty years later, perhaps I understand it a bit better. The story’s narrator is an admirer of the French academic Pierre Menard, author of a number of obscure monographs and translations; and the narrator wants us to know how Menard set for himself the task of creating the definitive Don Quixote. Menard’s method? “His admirable intention,” the narrator tells us, “was to produce pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (p. 49).
So what? we ask. Couldn’t any of us recopy the words of a classic text? No, the narrator tells us at great length; when Menard wrote down, in the same 17th-century Spanish, the exact same words that Miguel de Cervantes published in 1615, he has somehow made it his own; he has become the true author of the definitive Don Quixote.
It all sounds nonsensical to us – quixotic, one might say; and I think that Borges is being quite deliberate in drawing a parallel between Pierre Menard’s doomed and futile quest and that of the fictional Don Quixote. For my part, I think that Borges is having a grand time poking fun at the more abstruse realms of literary theory – reader-response criticism, for example, wherein the reader and the writer become co-equal partners in the formation of a literary text. "Pierre Menard" provides a reductio ad absurdum of some of the more self-important examples of contemporary literary theory.
But what if an elaborate critique of the excesses of theory-heavy literary criticism is not your thing? What if you don’t spend your spare time reading Derrida and Foucault and Lacan? (I couldn’t blame you on either count.) Fear not: Borges is, first and foremost, a great storyteller, and he knows how to create intriguing characters and set them in suspenseful situations. “The Garden of Forking Paths” is, on one level, a story of espionage during the First World War. A Chinese educator named Yu Tsun is a spy in the service of the imperial German government (a cause he despises). Pursued by Captain Richard Madden, an Irishman in the British secret service, Yu Tsun makes his way to the home of the eminent British Sinologist Dr. Stephen Albert. Yu Tsun possesses a secret that may help the German cause, and he contemplates an act of violence that may the only way of conveying the secret to his superiors. In the meantime, because Yu Tsun is the great-grandson of Ts’ui Pên, a provincial governor who gave up public office to write a novel and build a now-lost labyrinth (!), Dr. Albert is eager to talk with Yu Tsun about all these things.
Ts’ui Pên’s novel, naturally, is titled The Garden of Forking Paths; and over the course of the story, one learns a great deal about Ts’ui Pên’s novel, his lost labyrinth, and the ways in which the two are related. Dr. Albert points to Ts’ui Pên’s writing desk and describes it to Yu Tsun as “A symbolic labyrinth”, or “An invisible labyrinth of time….At one time, Ts’ui Pên must have said; ‘I am going to write a book,’ and at another, ‘I am retiring to construct a maze.’ Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same” (p. 96). The book and the labyrinth are one and the same. What better expression of Borges’s aesthetic could there be? Philosophical speculations regarding the nature of time are combined seamlessly with a thought-provoking resolution of the story’s espionage-related plot.
“The Secret Miracle” likewise combines a suspenseful plot with philosophizing about time. Set in March 1939, in Nazi-occupied Prague, the story sets forth the troubles of Jaromir Hladik, a writer whose life work – a tragedy titled The Enemies -- remains unfinished. Arrested by the Gestapo, he is condemned to death by firing squad because he is Jewish, and because he signed a document opposing the Anschluss. Desperate to complete his unfinished magnum opus, Hladik “addressed himself to God” on the night before his execution:
If I exist at all, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errata, I exist as the author of The Enemies. In order to bring this drama, which may serve to justify me, to justify You, I need one more year. Grant me that year, You to whom belong the centuries and all time. (p. 147)
Toward dawn, in the midst of a dream about looking for God amidst the volumes in the Clementine Library, Hladik hears a “ubiquitous voice” that says, “The time for your work has been granted” (p. 148). But how can this occur, when the Nazis’ plans for Hladik’s execution will go forward on schedule? The answer to that question constitutes the “secret miracle” referred to in the title of this story.
In Argentina, Borges is a national hero, and carrying a copy of Ficciones while walking in Buenos Aires is a guaranteed conversation-starter. Fans of Borges can seek out the Centro Cultural Borges, on the top floor of the Galerias Pacifico shopping mall – an appropriately labyrinthine and surreal manner in which to find one’s way to B.A.’s official honouring of the work of this great Argentinian. Ficciones is a short volume of stories, but one that is singularly dense with depth and mystery....more
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