Ficciones — Commentary

In brief

Ficciones is a small book in two parts: The Garden of Forking Paths, published alone in 1941, and Artifices, added when Jorge Luis Borges gave the whole its title in 1944. Three more stories joined the second part in 1956. There is no novel here and almost no fiction of the ordinary kind. There are encyclopaedia entries, book reviews, a memorial notice for a French man of letters, a spy’s confession and a report from inside an infinite library.

It remains in copyright, so this page links to no full text and quotes only a few short phrases, in Spanish, with paraphrase. What the reader can get is set out under “How to read it”.

The argument

Borges’s method is stated in his 1941 prologue: “Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor”, he says of composing vast books, a laborious and impoverishing folly. Better to pretend the book already exists and offer a summary. This is usually taken as a joke, but it is a real theory of fiction. A summary keeps the idea and drops the padding, and it hands the labour of imagining the book to the reader.

From there the stories push a single question. If an idea is pursued to its strict conclusion, what happens to the person living inside it? A man who remembers everything cannot think. A lottery that reaches into every act removes the difference between fate and rule. A library holding every possible book is useless and drives its readers to murder. In each case Borges takes a philosopher’s toy and asks what it would feel like, and the answer is usually dread.

My own view is that the book’s reputation for coldness is half right. The games can be airless, women barely exist in it, and several pieces are better described than read. But the coldness is what makes the two or three moments of feeling so strong: the insomniac boy in the dark at Fray Bentos, the Czech playwright finishing his play in front of a firing squad. The book is at its best when the system suddenly has someone in it.

The Garden of Forking Paths

These are the eight pieces of the first part, in order. Dates are of first appearance where known. Each title links to an article about the story.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940). Borges and Bioy Casares track a remark, “los espejos y la cópula son abominables”, that mirrors and copulation are hateful because they multiply mankind, to a missing encyclopaedia article, then to a whole invented planet. A postscript dated 1947, in a story of 1940, reports the invention taking over our world.
The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim (1936). A review of an imaginary Bombay detective novel, whose student hero seeks one man through traces of him in others.
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939). A memorial notice for a French writer whose masterpiece is two chapters and a fragment of Don Quixote, not copied but written anew. “El texto de Cervantes y el de Menard son verbalmente idénticos”, the two texts are word for word the same, and Menard’s, says the narrator, is the richer.
The Circular Ruins (1940). A man dreams another man into existence, and learns at the end by fire “que otro estaba soñándolo”, that someone else was dreaming him.
The Lottery in Babylon (1941). A game of chance spreads until it runs the whole of life, under a Company nobody can prove exists.
An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941). A notice of a dead Irish writer’s experiments, among them a novel that runs backwards and branches.
The Library of Babel (1941). An old librarian describes the universe as endless hexagonal galleries of books in all combinations of twenty-five symbols. The idea was tried as an essay in 1939, and Kurd Lasswitz had got there first.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy for Germany in the Great War, must get one word to Berlin with Captain Madden on his heels. He finds a sinologist, Stephen Albert, who has solved a novel by Yu’s own ancestor in which every choice is taken at once. Then he shoots him, because the name Albert is the message.

Artifices

Borges’s prologue of 1944 says these differ from the earlier pieces only in being less clumsily done. They are closer to story than to essay, and several run on the detective’s logic.

Funes the Memorious (1942). Thrown by a horse in Fray Bentos, a Uruguayan boy cannot forget anything, down to the leaves on each tree. “Mi memoria, señor, es como vaciadero de basuras”, he says: a rubbish heap. Borges calls the story “una larga metáfora del insomnio”, a long metaphor for insomnia.
The Form of the Sword (1942). An Irishman tells of the coward who betrayed him and of the scar he gave him, and at the end reveals which of them he is.
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944). The great-grandson of an Irish martyr, Kilpatrick, finds the hero’s death was staged like theatre to hide his treason. Borges offers it as the sketch of a story he may one day write.
Death and the Compass (1942). The detective Lönnrot, too clever by half, reads a pattern into a series of murders, and the pattern was laid for him by the criminal Scharlach. The prologue places its European names in a Buenos Aires of dreams.
The Secret Miracle (1943). See below.
Three Versions of Judas (1944). A Swedish theologian, Nils Runeberg, argues in stages that the Son of God chose to become Judas.

Added in 1956:

The End (1953). A shopkeeper, Recabarren, watches from his bed as the ending of Martín Fierro plays out in a knife fight outside.
The Sect of the Phoenix (1952). A deadpan account of a secret rite, the plainest human act, never named.
The South (1953). After a head wound and septicaemia a Buenos Aires librarian, Dahlmann, goes south to recover and accepts a knife fight he cannot win. Borges, who had suffered the same injury, calls it perhaps his best story and says it can be read directly or in another way. Many take that to mean a dying dream in the hospital.

Which book, which year

The contents have moved, and any reader’s copy may differ.

1941, Sur. El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, alone.
1944, Sur. The title Ficciones, with Artificios and its six stories added to the 1941 book.
1956, Emecé. Three added to Artificios: The End, The Sect of the Phoenix, The South. A postscript to the second prologue says so.

The one disputed case is Al-Mu’tasim, first printed in Borges’s essays, Historia de la eternidad (1936). Some contents lists leave it out of the 1941 book. Daniel Balderston’s bibliography lists it among the contents of the Sur volume, and the prologue counts “Las ocho piezas”, eight pieces, with the title story as the eighth, so it belongs in the first part.

The voice

Borges writes as a calm bibliographer. Adjectives are few and exact, and the footnote, the dated correction and the slighting reference to a colleague do the work that plot does elsewhere. He cites real books alongside invented ones without changing his tone, so the reader soon stops checking. The effect owes something to English prose, which he read from childhood, and it is not the ornate Spanish of his early essays.

The humour is easily missed. Menard’s list of published works, with its small vanities, is as funny as anything in Swift. The stories are short because Borges considered them finished at the point where a lesser writer would begin to explain.

A Prague story

The Secret Miracle opens on the night of 14 March 1939, in a flat in the Zeltnergasse in Prague, which is to say Celetná. The Third Reich’s armour enters the city at dawn. Days later Jaromir Hladík, a Jewish writer with an unfinished verse play, is arrested. He asks God for one year to finish the play, dreams of the Clementinum library, and in the moment before the volley time stops. He finishes the play in his head, correcting it word by word, and dies. No one else ever knows.

It is the most moving thing in the book, written in Buenos Aires in the middle of the war by a man who never had to face it, and it treats a real occupation with complete seriousness. The Kafka family lived at Celetná 3 from 1896 to 1907. Borges does not mention that, and the coincidence is only that.

How it was made

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires on 24 August 1899, went to school in Geneva, and returned to Argentina in 1921 as a poet and essayist. In 1938 he took a low post in the Miguel Cané municipal library, in a working-class district, where the work took an hour a day and left time to write. On Christmas Eve that year he injured his head badly and nearly died of sepsis. The first story he wrote afterwards, “Pierre Menard”, appeared in Sur in May 1939.

The 1941 volume was passed over for the National Prize for Literature. The magazine Sur answered with a special tribute in its issue of July 1942, and the Argentine Society of Writers later gave Ficciones its Gran Premio de Honor. In 1946 the Perón government “promoted” him from the library to an inspectorship of poultry, and he resigned. He became director of the National Library in 1955, by which time he was going blind. He shared the first Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961, and that, with the English versions that followed, made him known abroad.

Readers and critics

Most readers in English met Borges in 1962, when two books appeared at once: Labyrinths from New Directions and the Grove Ficciones. The book’s standing since rests partly on its usefulness to theory: “Pierre Menard” became a standard text on authorship and reading. Against that, critics object to the near absence of women. Naomi Lindstrom’s Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of the Short Fiction (1990) is a sensible way in. Le Monde placed the book on its 1999 list of the hundred books of the century.

Afterlives

The afterlife has been unusually wide. Bernardo Bertolucci turned “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” into The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), and Alex Cox filmed Death and the Compass. Umberto Eco gave his labyrinthine library in The Name of the Rose a blind librarian named Jorge of Burgos. Roberto Bolaño’s invented authors descend from Herbert Quain.

Beyond literature, “The Garden of Forking Paths” has been cited as foreshadowing the many-worlds interpretation in physics and as a founding text for hypertext fiction, with Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden a direct descendant. Funes has been set beside the real mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky. Both comparisons are later readings, not sources, and the first story is a warning against exactly this kind of enthusiasm.

How to read it

What is free, and what is not. Borges died on 14 June 1986. In Argentina and the EU, at life plus seventy, his Spanish text stays in copyright to the end of 2056. In the United States works of this age run ninety-five years from publication, so the 1941 stories to the end of 2036, the 1944 ones to the end of 2039 and the 1956 additions to the end of 2051. There is no legal free full text, in Spanish or in English, and copies circulating online are not authorised. Translations carry their own copyright on top.
Which English. Andrew Hurley’s Collected Fictions (Viking, 1998) has one voice, keeps the two parts in order and includes Al-Mu’tasim, with notes. His titles differ: “Funes, His Memory”, “The Shape of the Sword”, “The Cult of the Phoenix”. The Grove Ficciones of 1962, edited by Anthony Kerrigan and translated by him with Anthony Bonner, Alastair Reid, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd, is the classic and is uneven in the way five hands will be. Labyrinths, edited by James Irby and Donald Yates, is a selection with essays and parables, and some readers still prefer it.
A note on rights. Norman Thomas di Giovanni’s collaborations with Borges from the late 1960s, on later books, went out of print after María Kodama ended their royalty agreement and commissioned Hurley’s. If you read Spanish, read the Spanish.
Do not read straight through. Two or three a sitting. They run together if crowded.
Start with Funes or The South. Then Tlön, which is much harder and repays a second reading. Herbert Quain and Al-Mu’tasim can wait.

Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925). The Library of Babel and the Lottery are Kafka’s court turned into a cosmology. Borges’s essay “Kafka and His Precursors” (1951) says each writer creates his own forerunners.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–15). Read the book Menard rewrites, which already plays with a lost manuscript and a fake translator.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962). A novel in the form of a commentary, the Borges idea at full length.