Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
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 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 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 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” suggests 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 International Publishers’ 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
POSTSCRIPT (2007)
Labyrinths was first published in 1962 and has gone through thirty-five printings to date. This new revised edition offers the same selection of Borges’s prose, along with the original introduction, corrects misprints and other minor errors and adds a new preface by the widely acclaimed innovator in the genre of science fiction, William Gibson, who tells of this book’s liberating effect upon him when he first began reading it as an adolescent.
1962: forty-five years ago. “So many things have happened since then . . . ,” as the postscript to “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” observes about a certain other lapse of time. Labyrinths was one of the first two book-length collections of Borges’s writings ever to appear in English, the other being the translation of Ficciones edited by Anthony Kerrigan that same year. Then Borges was all but unknown in the English-speaking world. Now, here as elsewhere, he is unquestionably accorded the status of a modern classic, with practically his entire oeuvre currently available in English, in versions by various hands. Now, too, the body of commentary on his writing has expanded enormously, as has the variety of theoretical frameworks—poststructuralist, postmodernist, post colonial—in terms of which his writing has been and continues to be discussed.
Borges lived until 1986, remaining productive until almost the very end. The latest book of his represented in Labyrinths is El hacedor, of 1960, known in English as Dreamtigers. After that, he published eight more volumes partly or wholly in prose, fictional or non-fictional, in addition to many poems, at the same time that he began to travel more widely, making many personal appearances, giving many lectures and interviews and becoming a veritable media celebrity.
Despite the fact that such a large portion of Borges’s work comes after 1962, Labyrinths has continued over all these years to serve the needs of readers interested in having some of his most original and influential narrative and essayistic texts effectively combined in a single volume. Though always distinguished by his unmistakable inflections, Borges’s later prose writings—those of Dr. Brodie’s Report, say, or The Book of Sand or Seven Nights—seem placid and sedate alongside such dynamically unsettling texts of his earlier years as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” “Death and the Compass,” “Funes the Memorious,” “Averroes’ Search” or “Kafka and His Precursors,” all of which are found here in Labyrinths along with others of their moment and kind: texts that have left their mark on so many other writings in our time. “Left their mark” refers to much more than their playing a passive role as references or citations or objects of commentary, in the way any significant writer’s work may do. “Left their mark” refers also to their very distinctive capacity to disseminate generative motifs that—like the hrönir of Tlön, like the turns of chance in the Babylonian lottery or the Babelian library, like Pierre Menard’s identical yet totally different Quixote—set in motion plots, arguments, debates in other writings, cutting across genres and distinctions of higher and lower culture. Readers coming, then, from many different areas of interest and specialization and wanting an introduction to Borges’s most challenging prose will still find it here in Labyrinths.
J. E. I.
Fictions
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 Ural-Altaic 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.
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 recognized only 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 unc
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 with 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 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.