Ficciones

Ficciones is a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. It was published in Buenos Aires in 1944 and became his most famous book. The title simply means “Fictions”, but it is also a hint: these stories are constantly aware that they are made up, and they play with the boundary between invention and reality.

Most of the stories are very short, and many do not look like ordinary stories at all. Some are written as book reviews of books that do not exist, others as obituaries, footnoted essays, detective puzzles or confessions. Borges fills them with real and imaginary books, real and imaginary scholars, and precise-sounding details, so that the reader is never quite sure where fact ends and fiction begins.

Their favourite images are labyrinths, mirrors, libraries, encyclopedias, dreams, lotteries and infinite time. Through them, Borges asks big questions in a playful way: Can we ever know the universe? Is the world ordered or chaotic? What makes a person the same person over time? What happens when an idea is so powerful that it changes reality?

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires on 24 August 1899. His father was a lawyer and teacher with English ancestry, and Borges grew up speaking both Spanish and English; he later said the most important event of his childhood was his father’s library. In 1914 the family moved to Europe and was trapped there by the First World War. Borges went to school in Geneva, then lived in Spain, where he joined the avant-garde poetry movement called Ultraism.

Back in Buenos Aires from 1921, he became known first as a poet and essayist. In 1938 he took a modest job as an assistant in a municipal library. On Christmas Eve of that year he hit his head on an open window, and the wound became badly infected; he was seriously ill for weeks. As he recovered, he tried writing a new kind of story to test whether his mind still worked. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, published in May 1939. The stories of Ficciones followed over the next five years.

Borges’s eyesight gradually failed, and by the mid-1950s he was almost blind. In 1955, after the fall of Juan Perón, he became director of Argentina’s National Library. He died in Geneva on 14 June 1986.

Part One, The Garden of Forking Paths, was first published as its own small book in 1941. It contains eight pieces: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim”, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, “The Circular Ruins”, “The Lottery in Babylon”, “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain”, “The Library of Babel” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”.

Part Two, Artifices, was added in 1944 with six stories: “Funes the Memorious”, “The Form of the Sword”, “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”, “Death and the Compass”, “The Secret Miracle” and “Three Versions of Judas”. In the 1956 edition Borges added three more: “The End”, “The Sect of the Phoenix” and “The South”. Most of the stories had first appeared in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur or the newspaper La Nación.

Each part has a short prologue. In the first, Borges says that composing vast books is a laborious and impoverishing madness, and that it is better to pretend those books already exist and offer a summary or commentary on them. This idea explains why so many of his stories are reviews, notes or summaries of imaginary works.

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” begins with Borges and his real friend, the writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, finding an article about a country called Uqbar in one copy of an encyclopedia. Later a volume turns up from an encyclopedia of Tlön, an imaginary planet whose people believe that only minds and perceptions exist, not material things. A postscript, dated in the future, reveals that a secret society invented Tlön, and that objects and ideas from Tlön are starting to take over the real world.

“The Library of Babel” describes a universe made of endless hexagonal rooms full of books. Every book has 410 pages and is made up of 25 symbols in every possible combination. Somewhere the library contains every true history and every lie, and the true explanation of the library itself, but finding a meaningful page is almost hopeless. Its librarians fall into despair, superstition and fanaticism.

In “The Garden of Forking Paths”, a Chinese spy working for Germany in the First World War must pass a secret message before a British agent catches him. He visits a scholar who has solved the riddle of the spy’s ancestor’s unfinished novel: a book in which time branches, so that all possible outcomes happen at once. The story is both a detective thriller and a meditation on time.

“Funes the Memorious” tells of a young Uruguayan man who, after being thrown from a horse, remembers everything he has ever perceived in complete detail. Because he cannot forget, he cannot generalise or abstract, and so, the narrator suggests, he cannot really think.

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is written as a tribute to an imaginary French writer who tried, not to copy or translate Cervantes’s Don Quixote, but to write it again, word for word, as a twentieth-century man. The narrator compares identical passages and argues that Menard’s version is richer, because the same words mean something different in a different time. It is a comic story and a serious argument about reading, authorship and history.

“The Circular Ruins” follows a magician who dreams a son into existence, detail by detail, only to discover that he himself is a dream of someone else. “The Lottery in Babylon” imagines a society where a secret Company’s lottery gradually controls everything, until chance and order can no longer be told apart.

In “Death and the Compass”, a brilliant detective follows a series of murders that seem to follow the mystic Hebrew name of God, only to find that the pattern was a trap laid for him by his enemy. “The Secret Miracle” concerns a Jewish playwright in Prague, arrested by the Nazis in 1939, who asks God for time to finish his play; in the instant before the firing squad shoots, time stops for him for a whole year. “Three Versions of Judas” presents an imaginary theologian’s arguments that Judas, not Jesus, was the true incarnation of God.

“The Form of the Sword” and “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” play with betrayal and hidden identity against the background of Irish rebellions. “The South”, added in 1956, which Borges once called perhaps his best story, follows a librarian who, after a serious head injury much like Borges’s own, travels south into the Argentine countryside and walks out to a knife fight; the story can also be read as the dream of a man dying in hospital.

In the 1930s and 1940s Buenos Aires was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the Americas, with a vigorous publishing industry and many immigrants from Europe. The magazine Sur, founded by Victoria Ocampo in 1931, connected Argentine writers with European and North American literature, and published many of Borges’s stories. His friend Bioy Casares, with whom he wrote detective parodies and edited anthologies of fantastic literature, shared his taste for tightly plotted, intellectual fiction rather than realism.

Ficciones was written during the Second World War. Borges was openly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi, at a time when parts of Argentina’s elite and military sympathised with the Axis. Some stories reflect this directly, such as the Prague setting of “The Secret Miracle” and the postscript of “Tlön”, where a seductive, orderly invented system begins to dominate the real world, which many readers link to the totalitarian ideologies of the time.

Borges was also reacting to literary debates at home. Much Argentine and Latin American fiction of the period favoured realism, social themes and national subjects. Borges argued that Argentine writers had a right to the whole of world culture and need not restrict themselves to local colour. When The Garden of Forking Paths failed to win a national literary prize in 1942, Sur published a special section in his support. After Perón came to power, Borges lost his library job in 1946, being reassigned, in his own famous account, as an inspector of poultry and rabbits; he resigned.

Philosophy as fiction. Borges took ideas from philosophers such as Berkeley, Hume and Schopenhauer, from Kabbalah and Christian theology, and from mathematics, and built stories around them. He did not argue that the ideas were true; he treated them, as he said, for their aesthetic value, exploring what the world would be like if they were.

Infinity and the labyrinth. The library, the forking garden, the endless lottery and the maze of Death and the Compass are all images of a universe too large or too complex to grasp. Borges’s characters often seek a hidden order, a key or a centre, and either fail or find something unexpected.

Fake scholarship. Borges mixed real books and people with invented ones, adding footnotes, dates and bibliographies. This technique makes the fantastic feel documentary, and it also makes readers think about how knowledge is built from texts that we must trust.

Economy and precision. Unlike many modernist novelists, Borges wrote very short pieces with carefully chosen adjectives, understatement and ironic humour. Much of the pleasure lies in the calm, scholarly tone applied to astonishing ideas.

Borges loved detective fiction, especially the English tradition of G. K. Chesterton and the American Edgar Allan Poe, whom he regarded as the inventor of the genre. He admired its strict rules: a problem is set, clues are laid out fairly, and a solution arrives that is surprising but inevitable. Several stories in Ficciones, above all “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Death and the Compass”, use this structure openly.

But Borges also turns the detective story inside out. In “Death and the Compass”, the detective’s brilliant reasoning is exactly what leads him into the trap: his enemy has predicted that he will look for an intellectual pattern rather than a simple explanation. In “The Garden of Forking Paths”, the real mystery is not who committed the crime but what time itself is like. The solution of the plot opens onto a larger puzzle that no detective can solve.

This gives many stories a double structure. On the surface there is a tight plot with a twist; underneath there is a philosophical problem. Readers are invited to act like detectives themselves, noticing clues in names, dates and footnotes. Real people, such as Bioy Casares in “Tlön”, and invented ones sit side by side, and part of the fun is working out which is which. Rereading is rewarded: details that seem decorative on a first reading often turn out to be essential on a second.

With Bioy Casares, Borges also wrote comic detective stories under the shared pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq, beginning in 1942. That collaboration, alongside Ficciones, shows how seriously he took so-called popular genres at a time when many critics dismissed them.

“The Garden of Forking Paths”, translated by Anthony Boucher in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948, was the first of Borges’s works to appear in English. His international fame, however, came after he shared the Prix International (Formentor Prize) with Samuel Beckett in 1961. In 1962 two English collections appeared, the Grove Press Ficciones and the anthology Labyrinths, and Borges became a reference point for writers everywhere.

Ficciones was important for the writers of the Latin American “Boom” of the 1960s, such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, even though their politics and styles often differed from Borges’s. In the United States and Europe, writers such as John Barth, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco drew on his games with fiction; Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) presented Borges as a model for literature after modernism. Eco’s The Name of the Rose includes a blind librarian named Jorge of Burgos.

The influence reaches beyond literature. “The Library of Babel” is cited in discussions of information, combinatorics and the internet, and a website has been built that simulates it. “The Garden of Forking Paths” has been linked to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and to hypertext fiction, and its title gave a name to a problem in statistics. “Tlön” is often read as a parable about how invented systems and virtual worlds can reshape reality.

Ficciones has a layered textual history. The stories first appeared in periodicals between 1939 and 1944 (and, for the later additions, up to the early 1950s); “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” was older still, first included in Borges’s essay collection History of Eternity (1936). They were then collected in The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and in Ficciones (Sur, 1944), and the 1956 Emecé edition added three stories and a new note. Borges revised his texts across editions, and he also added postscripts and notes, so scholars compare versions to trace his changes.

The date 1944 therefore marks the combined volume rather than the composition of each story; the “Tlön” postscript is dated 1947 inside a story published in 1940, one of Borges’s deliberate games with time.

In English, the 1962 Grove Press edition was the work of several translators under Anthony Kerrigan, and many stories were also translated by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates for Labyrinths. Andrew Hurley’s single-translator Collected Fictions (1998) offered a new version. Differences between translations, for example in how they render Borges’s distinctive adjectives and understatement, are themselves a subject of study, fittingly for an author who wrote about translation as creation in “Pierre Menard”.

Universal or Argentine? Early critics in Argentina sometimes accused Borges of being “Europeanised” and disconnected from national reality. Later readings have emphasised how deeply his work engages with Argentina: the gaucho tradition rewritten in “The End” and “The South”, the suburbs of Buenos Aires, and the question of how a peripheral culture relates to the European canon. Beatriz Sarlo’s study Borges, a Writer on the Edge (1993) is a well-known argument for reading him from the Argentine margins.

Precursor of theory. Philosophers and theorists have treated Ficciones as anticipating their own ideas. “Pierre Menard” is often read as anticipating reader-response criticism and later arguments about the “death of the author”; Michel Foucault opened The Order of Things (1966) with a Borges passage (from a later essay, not from Ficciones). Critics debate whether such readings illuminate the stories or turn them into illustrations of theories that came later.

Politics. Borges’s later political statements, including support for the military coups in Argentina and accepting an honour from the Pinochet regime in Chile in 1976, positions he later partly revised when he criticised the Argentine junta’s abuses in the 1980s, have complicated his reputation and are often cited as a reason he never received the Nobel Prize. Scholars debate how far the anti-totalitarian themes of Ficciones should be read in light of these later positions.

Genre. Ficciones is sometimes called fantastic literature, sometimes metafiction, sometimes philosophical fiction. Borges himself used detective-story structures and the fantastic as tools; critics disagree over whether his stories should be understood mainly as formal games, as philosophy, or as expressions of personal anxieties about memory, identity and blindness.