Paradise as a kind of library

Empire of the Mind

Reading Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is akin to discovering a new birdsong, the cadence of which is mesmerising; it is also like being lost in a labyrinth but one in which every fork and turn takes you to new worlds. His stories are brief, often with abrupt beginnings, and his use of labyrinths, mirrors, chess games and detective stories creates a complex intellectual landscape. Yet, his language is clear, with ironic undertones. He presents the most fantastic of scenes in simple terms, drawing the readers into the forking pathways of his seemingly infinite imagination. Borges broke new ground, transforming literature forever. He invented magical realism and influenced several generations of writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maria Vargas Llosa, Roberto Bolaño, and Salman Rushdie.

Among his fascinating works of prose and poetry, Ficciones is perhaps his best and most creative. Ficciones, a collection of short stories first published in 1944 and the first of Borges books to be translated into English, comprises two parts, The Garden of Forking Paths, and Artifices. It is truly incomparable and is testimony to Borges’s reputation as one of the great creative writers of the 20th century. Ficciones has some of Borges’s best known stories: The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel, Death and the Compass, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and have been foundational in the development of world literature. The impact of Borges can be felt even today.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Borges moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. He was, from the beginning, a writer in the classical traditions and epics of diverse cultures. Borges grew up immersed in reading and, on his return to Argentina in 1921, began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals, while working as a librarian. By 1930, he had published six books, three of poetry, and three collections of essays. Between 1939 and 1949, he wrote and published practically all the fiction for which he would become famous. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and Professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Borges became completely blind by the age of 55, his progressive blindness, arguably, helping him to create innovative literary symbols through sheer imagination.

Borges’ preoccupations and innovations are splendidly displayed in Ficciones. The Library of Babel concerns a universe shaped in the form of a vast library comprising large hexagonal rooms. Inside, the library contains the essentials for human survival and four walls containing every book written. Among the countless texts, the narrator explains that every conceivable permutation of a certain 410-page book must be present inside the library. In proving this, the narrator makes the case that too much information can become useless to the reader. This leads to librarian ‘Purifiers’ destroying nonsensical books in search of the magical Crimson Hexagon volume.

The Garden of Forking Paths is presented as a signed letter by Dr Yu Tsun, a Chinese Professor of English living in the UK during WWI. Tsun is a German spy descended from a Hunan governor who “abandoned all to make a book and a labyrinth,” and the story is “an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time.” Tsun suspects his handler has been murdered and that he will be the next to die. To expose the location of the enemy and to avoid death, Tsun murders a fellow professor in cold blood so that the name of the location is publicised in the newspaper.

To understand how creative Ficciones is, one must listen to Borges on his approach to books and texts: “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance…A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary...More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.”

The World Wide Web, in which all time and space coexist simultaneously, seems as if it were invented by Borges. Take, for example, his famous story The Aleph. Here, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet becomes the point in time and space that contains all time and everything in the universe. As Borges writes in the story, “I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished.”

Readers and writers alike continue to discover new brilliance in Borges’ work, a fitting legacy for the man who once wrote, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”