Novel Deep-Read · Jorge Luis Borges · No.24
Ficciones · Jorge Luis Borges · 1944
The fire is coming downriver. The circular ruin was a temple of the fire god once, and it burned to the ground long ago. He has been dreaming here for years — organ by organ he dreamed a young man into existence, then sent him downstream to go and be a living person.
Now the fire is back. He does not run. He walks into it, ready to be turned to ash; that is the release he has been waiting for.
The flames caress him. The flames do not burn.
In that instant he understands: he too is a shape somebody else is dreaming.
A short-sighted young man who worked in a municipal library in Buenos Aires, and who at thirty-eight gashed his forehead on a freshly painted casement and nearly died of septicemia, wrote — as a test of whether his mind still worked — a solemn review of a book that did not exist; over the next few years he ran the trick seventeen times, pretending that some book, some planet, some library already existed and then annotating it with a straight face, and in doing so invented most of the grammar of the second half of the twentieth century in fiction: metafiction, branching timelines, the unreliable scholarly voice, the philosophical problem used as a plot engine. There is not a single novel in this book, and almost every important novel since owes it money.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was Argentine, and his official occupation for most of his life was librarian. In the early 1940s he was cataloguing books at a small municipal library, a job so idle — by his own later account — that he could finish a whole book down in the basement without anyone noticing. Ficciones was written in those gaps.
It is not a novel, and the assembly matters: in 1941 he published the collection The Garden of Forking Paths (eight stories); in 1944 he bound those eight together with six new ones under the heading "Artifices" and called the whole thing Ficciones; a 1956 reissue added three more, giving the seventeen we read today. The 1941 book failed to win Argentina's National Prize for Literature in 1942, and the magazine Sur devoted an entire issue to protesting the snub — a very Borgesian event, in which losing wrote him into literary history earlier than winning would have. What turned him from an in-house Argentine secret into a world name was 1961, when he shared the first Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett. He was sixty-two, and his eyesight was nearly gone.
His slot in literary history is not in dispute: the twentieth-century short story has two headwaters, and one is Kafka and the other is him. Kafka took the nightmares, Borges took the paradoxes. An entire line of writing after him — Cortázar, Calvino, Eco, Pynchon — traces back to these seventeen pieces. Eco's The Name of the Rose even turned the homage into patricide: the old monk who rules a labyrinth library, blind for decades and implacably opposed to laughter, is named Jorge of Burgos.
There is no continuous plot here, but there is a continuous method. So the acts below follow the method as it develops: first he learns how to forge a book, then he uses that skill to forge a world, a library, a stretch of time, and a man's life. The most important pieces are told in full; the rest are picked up in passing.
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" opens over dinner. The narrator, "Borges," and his friend Bioy Casares (a real person, his lifelong collaborator) are talking in a hallway with a mirror at the end of it. Bioy quotes a line he half-remembers from some heresiarch of Uqbar: mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they multiply the number of men. Seed ①
The trouble is that there is no Uqbar. They go to the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia: Borges's copy has no such entry, while Bioy's has four extra pages describing a vaguely located country in central Asia whose literature never depicts reality and confines itself to two imaginary regions — one of them called Tlön. Years later an English engineer named Herbert Ashe dies and leaves behind a package: A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön, Volume XI. A thousand-odd pages, the complete knowledge of a planet. At which point the story turns into a review of the book it has just described.
Tlön treats idealism as common sense: nothing there is granted existence independent of perception, and so the languages have no nouns — one does not say "the moon" but something closer to "it moons." Materialism, on Tlön, is an absurd heresy, and it takes enormous ingenuity to make it even half-coherent. There is a further consequence, and it is the dangerous one: expectation can manufacture objects. They call these things hrönir — because somebody hopes to find a lost object in a particular place, the lost object turns up there, newly made. Seed ②
The story ends with a "postscript, 1947," written in 1940 — he simply dated it into the future. The solution: Tlön is manufactured. A secret society in the early seventeenth century set out to invent a country and passed the work down the generations; in the nineteenth a rich man funded it on condition the scheme be enlarged into an entire planet. Then Tlön begins leaking into the world: outside a shop on the Uruguayan border a drunk man drops dead, and out of his clothes rolls a small bright cone, under a centimetre across and so heavy it can barely be held — the image of the divinity in certain Tlönian religions. Payoff ② ↑ The logic of the hrön has closed on us: Tlön is not invading Earth; Earth has started expecting Tlön, and so Tlön exists. In the last paragraph the languages, histories and mathematics of Tlön are taking over the schools and the newspapers — and the narrator does nothing about it. He stays in his hotel, revising a translation he does not intend to publish. The world is being eaten by an invented encyclopaedia, and the man writing that sentence is checking his punctuation.
Which is when the throwaway line about mirrors stops being atmosphere. Payoff ① ↑ The whole story is about multiplying the number of men: a duplicated world, tidier than the original, and so the original is retired. What is abominable is not the mirror; it is that we prefer the thing inside it. He leaves the key under the doormat and bets you won't bend down.
The same method gets two lighter workouts in this act. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" reviews, with total gravity, a detective novel published in Bombay in 1932; "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" is an obituary notice for an Irish novelist who never existed, and the reviewer admits at the end that he lifted "The Circular Ruins" out of one of Quain's stories. A story in this book claims to have been stolen from a nonexistent story described in another story in this book.
The detonation is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Menard is a recently deceased French Symbolist poet, and the narrator is compiling a corrected bibliography: nineteen published items first, then the masterwork nobody knows about — the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One of Don Quixote, plus a fragment of chapter twenty-two. Not a copy, not a rewrite, not a continuation: he wanted to produce pages that coincided word for word with Cervantes's, and to arrive at them out of Pierre Menard's own experience. He considered becoming Cervantes (learn seventeenth-century Spanish, recover the Catholic faith, forget European history after 1602) and rejected the plan as too easy.
Then the narrator does something from which the reader never fully recovers: he sets two identical passages side by side and demonstrates that they are completely different. The stock phrase about history — truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, witness of the past, counsel to the present — coming from a seventeenth-century writer who had been a soldier is mere rhetoric. The identical sentence coming from a twentieth-century man contemporary with pragmatist philosophy becomes an astonishing claim: history is not the inquiry into what happened but its origin. And a closing technique is offered: deliberate anachronism and erroneous attribution — read The Imitation of Christ as though Céline had written it and the flat old book comes alive. The literary theory of the next fifty years — meaning is contextual, the author is dead, reading is re-creation — is finished off in advance by a ten-page fake review.
"The Circular Ruins" is the closest thing in the book to a pure story. A grey man comes ashore from a bamboo canoe at night; nobody sees him land. He walks into the jungle to a circular ruin — a temple of the fire god, burned long ago, the features of the idol destroyed. Seed ③ He lies down and sleeps, because he has come for one purpose: to dream a man, dream him in complete detail, and insert him into reality.
The first attempt fails; the students in his dreamed lecture hall are too much like echoes of himself, and after enough nights of choosing he stops being able to sleep at all — dreaming is one of those things you cannot do while noticing that you are doing it. On the second attempt he starts with a single heart and dreams it for a year before he dares add a second organ. Near the end he gets stuck: a boy complete in every organ who simply will not wake. He kneels before the burned idol, and the fire god agrees to bring the phantom to life and let him walk into the world, on one condition — that nobody except fire itself and the dreamer would ever know he was not a man.
The boy lives. The dreamer instructs him for two years, then does what a father does: he erases the boy's memory of the whole apprenticeship, lets him believe he had an ordinary origin, and sends him downriver to serve as priest at another ruined temple in the north. After that one fear never leaves him — sooner or later the boy will find out he is not real. The end comes quickly. Word arrives from the north of a magician who can walk through fire without being burned. Before he can absorb what that means, the fire arrives first: a forest fire closes on the circular ruin, and he understands that death has come to finish him off and spare him the humiliations of old age, so he walks toward it. The flames do not bite. They caress him, they engulf him, they do not scald and do not burn. He feels relief, then humiliation, then terror — because now he knows he is a phantom too, and that somebody else is dreaming him. Payoff ③ ↑
Here is why the trick is beautiful: the answer sits in plain sight in the first paragraph — it is a temple of the fire god, and it has already burned down once. On a first reading it registers as scenery, possibly excessive scenery. When the fire comes and does not burn, you realise it was a certificate nailed above the door. Fire is the one thing that knows who is real, and it recognises him.
The next two stories are not about people; they are about two machines. "The Library of Babel" nails down its premises in the first line: the universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries, five long shelves to a wall, thirty-two books to a shelf. Each book has 410 pages, each page 40 lines, each line about 80 letters, and the entire orthography runs to twenty-five symbols. From two axioms — the Library exists from eternity, the symbols number twenty-five — comes the conclusion that drives everyone mad: the Library is total. It holds every possible permutation of those twenty-five symbols, and therefore everything that can be written: your complete biography, every erroneous version of your biography, the lost books, the commentary on every commentary, and an immeasurable quantity of alphabetical garbage.
Then comes the history that discovery set off: first elation — somewhere on a shelf is the book that explains everything — and so pilgrims, and men crushed against each other in the ventilation shafts; then despair, because the odds of finding it are zero; then the Purifiers, destroying by the crateload the books they judged useless. The narrator himself has grown old and can barely make out what he is writing. His last paragraph is the most moving piece of mathematics in the book: the Library is unlimited and periodic. An eternal traveller crossing it in any direction would find, after centuries, the same volumes repeated in the same disorder — and a disorder repeated is an order. This elegant hope, he says, gladdens his solitude.
"The Lottery in Babylon" runs the same machine the other way. A lottery starts as ordinary paid tickets and paid prizes, then acquires unlucky numbers carrying fines, then jail instead of fines, and ends free, compulsory and universal, with everything staked on it — whether you spend tonight as proconsul or as slave, whether you are executed or elevated — administered by an entity called the Company. The draws subdivide until the outcome of one draw is simply another draw, so no event's cause can ever be traced to the bottom. And whether the Company exists turns out not to matter, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance. Read side by side the two pieces show the skeleton of the book: one asks what it means that everything has been written and it amounts to nothing being written; the other asks what it means that everything has been arranged and it amounts to nothing being arranged. Exhaustiveness and randomness, closing on the same void from opposite sides.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is the one story in the book with a pulse, and the most widely imitated. It opens on a straight-faced citation: Liddell Hart's history of the First World War records that a British offensive against the Serre–Montauban line, planned for 24 July 1916, was postponed to the 29th by torrential rain, a delay of "no importance." Seed ④ What follows is a deposition, missing its first two pages, by Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao.
Yu Tsun is a Chinese spy working for Germany in England. His colleague has just been shot by Captain Richard Madden, an Irishman in English service, and he knows he has hours at most. He also has intelligence that must get out: the name of the town where the new British artillery park is sited. No radio, no contact, and a chief in Berlin who has never consented to meet him. His solution is a madman's and a linguist's: open the telephone directory and find a man whose surname is the place name — Albert. He boards a train and gets clear seconds before Madden reaches the platform. Asking directions from some boys at the station, he is told: to reach Dr. Albert's house, turn left at every crossroads — the standard method for finding the central courtyard of certain labyrinths. Chinese music drifts from behind a hedge; a lantern is lit. The tall Englishman who opens the door mistakes him for the Chinese consul and says, smiling: you'll have come to see the garden — the garden of Ts'ui Pên.
Yu Tsun's great-grandfather Ts'ui Pên was governor of Yunnan, and he gave up every office to do two things: write a novel with more characters than Dream of the Red Chamber, and build a labyrinth nobody could escape. Thirteen years later he was murdered by a stranger; the novel was a contradictory heap of drafts and the labyrinth was never found. The family verdict was that he went mad and failed at both. The sinologist Stephen Albert has spent a lifetime proving they were not two things but one. The novel is the labyrinth — a labyrinth of time rather than of space. It reads as self-contradictory because it never chooses: where other novels have a man pick one possibility and discard the rest, Ts'ui Pên chooses all of them at once and lets every branch keep branching, so a man dies in one chapter and is alive several chapters later.
Albert then looks up and says the fatal thing — that in one possible past, his visitor is his enemy; in another, his friend. Yu Tsun feels the garden crowd with invisible people: himself and Albert in their other versions, in other times. He conceives something close to love for this man — the only person alive who truly understands his great-grandfather, and who understands him correctly. Then he glances back down the path and sees Madden's figure at the far end. He asks Albert to turn and fetch Ts'ui Pên's letter. Albert turns. Yu Tsun shoots him in the back.
He is arrested and sentenced to hang. The ending takes a few lines: his chief in Berlin reads about a bizarre murder — the sinologist Stephen Albert killed by a stranger named Yu Tsun — and understands that the town to bomb is called Albert. The bombardment goes ahead, and the offensive is postponed. Payoff ④ ↑ The deadpan history at the top of the story flips completely: the official record says the delay was caused by rain, and the actual cause was a Chinese man in the English countryside murdering an old stranger with the correct surname. "A delay of no importance" is the cruellest sentence in the book. And Yu Tsun's closing statement runs, in substance: nobody can know his infinite contrition and weariness. He was not fighting for Germany; he despised the chief who would not see him. He killed in order to prove to a racist that a yellow man could save his armies — one life spent redeeming an arrogance he did not himself believe in.
In "Funes the Memorious" the narrator recalls a boy named Ireneo Funes, met in the Uruguayan countryside in the 1880s, whose only distinction then was knowing the exact time without ever consulting a clock. Later he was thrown by a half-broken horse and left permanently crippled, flat on his back for good — and from the moment of that fall his perception and memory became infallible. When the narrator calls on him late at night, the boy lying in the dark is reciting, in Latin he taught himself, Pliny's chapter on memory: Cyrus who could name every soldier in his armies, Mithridates who dispensed justice in twenty-two languages. Funes finds these men rather pitiable.
He remembers the shape of the clouds in the southern sky at dawn on 30 April 1882, and every vein of every leaf he saw that day, and the grain of the leather book he was holding when he later recalled those clouds. He can live an entire day over again with nothing lost — the difficulty being that living a day over takes a full day. His own memory, he says, is like a rubbish heap. He has also devised a numbering system with no numbers in it: 7013 is "Máximo Pérez," 7014 is "the railroad" — which is the exact opposite of a number system, since numbers are useful precisely because a handful of symbols handle the infinite.
The deepest cut is saved for last: Funes cannot think. It is hard for him to grasp why the word "dog" covers so many animals of different shapes, and harder still to accept that the dog seen in profile at 3:14 and the dog seen from the front at 3:15 should share a name. The narrator's verdict is the blade of the story: to think is to forget differences, to generalise, to abstract. Funes lived in a world of intolerable precision, and died at nineteen of pulmonary congestion.
"Death and the Compass" takes the other obsession — deduction — and drives it into self-destruction. The detective Lönnrot is a pure reasoner who fancies himself an Auguste Dupin. On 3 December a Jewish scholar attending a Talmudic congress is stabbed in his hotel room, next door to a tetrarch showily travelling with a great many sapphires. The police commissioner offers an explanation both dull and workable: a thief was after the sapphires, entered the wrong room, and killed the man he found there. Lönnrot dismisses it — too boring; he would rather have a purely rabbinical explanation. Seed ⑤ He carts off the dead man's books and begins studying the names of God. A sheet in the typewriter reads: the first letter of the Name has been uttered. On 3 January a small-time criminal is killed in the west of the city; on 3 February a man is carried off from a tavern in the east by two figures in harlequin costume — each with a note in the same format. The papers report at length that the detective is studying the name of God.
Lönnrot plots the three sites on a map, finds them at the vertices of an equilateral triangle, and notes that all three killings fall on the 4th of the month (the Hebrew day begins at sundown, so the night of the 3rd is the 4th). He derives the fourth point and goes alone to Triste-le-Roy, an abandoned villa in the south. The house itself is a warning: Borges spends a full page on its useless symmetries — two-faced statues of Hermes, rooms doubled by mirrors. The building is saying that excessive symmetry is a trap. Lönnrot admires it as he walks in, and is bound and held.
Waiting for him is Red Scharlach, a gang leader whose brother Lönnrot once jailed; in that raid Scharlach was shot and lay rotting nine nights in a loft, swearing to weave a labyrinth around the man responsible. He explains everything. The first murder was an accident: one of his men really did blunder into the wrong room after the sapphires. Payoff ⑤ ↑ It was the newspaper report about the detective studying the name of God that gave Scharlach the idea; he supplied the second killing along Lönnrot's own line of reasoning, faked the third (the "abducted" man was Scharlach himself), and mailed a map that handed over the final point. The one banal explanation the detective refused is the only true one, and every exquisite inference he made afterwards was prepared for him by the murderer. He did not reason wrongly at a single step — he was simply reasoning from someone else's script. With the gun on him he does not plead; he offers a scholarly suggestion, that next time a single invisible unending straight line would make a better labyrinth. What the two men exchange in the final moment is not hatred but an aesthetic opinion — they were the same kind of man all along.
The last group of stories all turn on how a man gains or loses his whole life in a few final seconds. In "The Secret Miracle," the Prague writer Jaromir Hladík is condemned to be shot with an unfinished verse drama on his hands, and asks God for a year to finish it; at the instant the firing squad raises its rifles the physical universe stops, and he is given the year — unable to move, unable to write, composing and recomposing the play in his head until only one adjective remains undecided. He settles the word, the universe resumes, the bullets go through him. The work was completed and not one person on earth ever read it. In "The Shape of the Sword," a rancher with a crescent scar tells a story from Ireland in 1922: a doctrinaire young man named Moon collapsed at the graze of a bullet and later sold, for money, the comrade who had sheltered him; the teller says he ran Moon down and cut that crescent into his face — then adds one line, I have confessed the infamy of Vincent Moon; I am Moon. In "Three Versions of Judas," the Swedish theologian Nils Runeberg publishes three successive readings of the betrayal, each more extreme, the last one incinerating him: if God consented to become fully human, He had to descend to the very bottom of infamy, and therefore the Word made flesh was not Jesus but Judas.
"Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" deserves the full telling. Ryan is writing his great-grandfather's biography: Fergus Kilpatrick, Irish national hero, assassinated in a Dublin theatre in 1824, his death the spark for the rising. Digging, Ryan finds two oddities — words spoken by a stranger at the tomb that uncannily prefigure a passage of Lincoln's, and details around the killing lifted from Shakespeare's Macbeth and Julius Caesar. The truth is that Kilpatrick was himself the traitor, and the comrade assigned to unmask the informer, Nolan, found that it was him. A secret tribunal condemned him, but the news of an executed traitor would have ended the rising. So Kilpatrick signed his own sentence on condition his death serve the country — and Nolan, in a few days, scripted an entire assassination, borrowing wholesale from Shakespeare because there was no time to invent. Thousands played their parts without knowing it, the hero fell in the theatre, the rising began. Ryan's final suspicion is that Nolan planted the Shakespearean traces deliberately, so that somebody, someday, would see through it. Ryan saw through it — and then published a book celebrating the hero, which he suspects was also in Nolan's script.
The closing piece is "The South," which Borges said might be his best. Juan Dahlmann, secretary of a municipal library, carries two bloodlines: a German pastor grandfather who reached Argentina in 1871, and a soldier grandfather who died out on the plains, run through by an Indian lance. He chose the second, although his life belongs entirely to the first. One day in February 1939 he gets hold of a defective copy of the Thousand and One Nights and takes the stairs too fast in his hurry to read it; something brushes his forehead — a freshly painted casement somebody had left open. Seed ⑥ Fever that night, septicemia, a sanatorium, pinned to a bed, a needle in his arm, his head shaved. What he hated, he says afterwards, was not the dying but the handling — it was a death without dignity.
He survives, and is sent to convalesce at the family ranch in the South. He takes the Thousand and One Nights with him, and on the way strokes a cat in a café, thinking that the animal lives in an eternal present and that a pane of glass separates them. The train does not stop at his station; he is put down in open country and walks into a general store to wait. The storekeeper's face is the face of an orderly from the sanatorium. He sits down to eat and drink, and some drunk young men at the next table start flicking pellets of bread at him. He decides to ignore it — he is an outsider, there is no reason to make trouble. Then the storekeeper says his name: Señor Dahlmann. That one word closes the exit. The troublemaker draws a knife and takes up position in the aisle; and from the corner an extremely old gaucho, the whole South compressed into a single sign, throws him a naked dagger.
Dahlmann bends down and picks it up. He does not know how to use a knife; he knows that going outside means dying. But it occurs to him: if he had been allowed to choose back in the sanatorium, this is the death he would have picked — a knife in his hand, out on the plain, over something that has nothing to do with him. The last sentence has him gripping the weapon and stepping out into the open. He does not fight and does not die; the story stops at the door. And the Thousand and One Nights is left behind on the table. Payoff ⑥ ↑ The casement that grazed his forehead now grows a second reading: he very likely never left the sanatorium at all. The storekeeper with the orderly's face, the station where the train should not have stopped, the knife handed to him at exactly the right moment — a man in a fever, dreaming his way to the end of the death he was not allowed to have. Borges never says which it is, and both readings hold without cancelling each other. The scar is planted in the second paragraph and paid off in the last, with an entire South in between.
Put the six acts together and the book has exactly one fuse, and it is not inside any of the stories; it is prior to them. A man decided not to write the thick book. In the preface to the 1941 collection he said, in substance, that composing vast volumes is a laborious and impoverishing madness — that spreading over five hundred pages an idea a few minutes of speech would exhaust is pointless, and that the better course is to pretend the books already exist and offer a summary and commentary instead. That is not laziness; it is a wager: if a book's value can be delivered by a sufficiently exact précis, the book is surplus. Everything follows from that step — Tlön is the précis of an encyclopaedia, Menard is a bibliography, Quain is an obituary, the Library of Babel is a gazetteer. Seventeen stories, every one of them a forgery of some other genre.
The ending of "Tlön" could have been enormous: the world being replaced by an invented encyclopaedia, curricula rewritten, newspapers changing their vocabulary. Borges does none of it. He writes a shabby shop, a drunk Brazilian collapsing in the doorway, pockets turned out, a few coins and one small bright cone under a centimetre across, so heavy it can hardly be held.
The craft is in three places. First, the vantage point belongs to people with no stake in it — no scientists, no governments, just some countrymen standing over a corpse. Second, the information arrives late and stays thin: what the cone is, where it came from, why it weighs what it weighs, all unexplained. Third and most important, weight is doing the work an argument would otherwise do. One world displacing another is an abstract proposition; an object that fits in your palm and is too heavy to hold is something the body understands. Metaphysics acquires a mass in grams.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a manhunt, and from page one the reader knows Madden is closing and that Yu Tsun has to transmit a place name. The suspense is at full pressure. Then Borges does the counterintuitive thing — he stops the chase and inserts several unhurried pages of sinology.
That passage has two jobs. It carries the story's central idea, and — this is the sly part — it makes the reader forget the gun. You follow Albert's reasoning with the pleasure of sitting in on a very good lecture; you start liking the old man. When Yu Tsun glances back and sees a figure at the end of the path, you remember why he came and what his host is called.
The motive was declared in the opening, so the reader has known all along that Albert has to die, and was talked out of remembering it by a lecture too interesting to interrupt. The sting is not surprise; it is that you forgot alongside Yu Tsun and remembered alongside him. Which is why the closing note of infinite contrition and weariness lands: it is not a murderer's excuse, it is a description of the lapse you just committed yourself.
The final paragraph of "The South" has almost no adjectives in it. Bend, pick up, grip, walk out — short sentences, physical actions, not one word spent on grandeur. And the possibility that all of it is a dream is inserted as a subordinate clause: the reader is merely allowed to notice that, given the choice in the sanatorium, this is the death he would have taken.
The technical problem is that both readings must hold at once, and neither may be permitted to kill the other. The solution is to give neither side extra evidence — no "it all suddenly seemed unreal," no "he had truly reached the South" — only two or three elements from the sanatorium (a face, being held down, an unfinished book) redistributed into the journey without comment. Readers who don't see it read a timid city man finally seizing his ancestors' death; readers who do see it read a man under anaesthetic composing a dignified ending for himself. The two weigh exactly the same, which is why the story stands up.
Device one: forged genres. At least eight of the seventeen arrive dressed as something other than fiction — book reviews, obituaries, encyclopaedia entries, depositions, scholarly notes. The advantage is immediate: the academic register carries its own credibility, and you will believe a narrator who cites page numbers and editions; by the time he starts describing impossible things you are already on his side. The cost is real too — it requires an educated reader and it repels feeling. The ceiling and the floor of the method are the same fact: it can turn philosophy into plot, and it can turn people into footnotes.
Device two: making the infinite countable. The most formidable thing about "The Library of Babel" is not the imagination but the parameters. Give the parameters and the infinite can be computed:
| Item | Value | What follows |
|---|---|---|
| Character set | 25 symbols | the entire raw material of all text |
| Each book | 410 pages × 40 lines × ~80 characters | about 1,312,000 character slots |
| Total holdings | 25 to the power of 1,312,000 | ≈ 10 to the power of 1,834,097 volumes |
That number has over 1.8 million digits; the atom count of the observable universe, around 10 to the 80th, is not even comparable. This is not physics but pure combinatorics: a finite character set and a finite length necessarily yield a total that is finite and unimaginable.
Which lets us check the story link by link. What holds: the holdings are finite, so the narrator's closing "unlimited and periodic" is mathematically sound — a finite set of books distributed through unlimited space must repeat, and infinitely repeated disorder does constitute an order. What does not need to hold: virtually every book in the Library is alphabetical garbage and the probability of finding a meaningful one is effectively zero, which makes the pilgrims and the Purifiers statistically absurd — but that is the point. The story was never about a library. It is about how people live in a world where the answer definitely exists and can never be retrieved.
Device three: forking time. In Ts'ui Pên's novel a man facing several possibilities takes all of them, and each outcome branches again. That structure was written in 1941, sixteen years before Hugh Everett proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1957. Be honest about it: Borges was not doing physics and never claimed to be. He was doing narrative theory — fiction is already a branching machine, and every time an author writes "he might have," a whole forest is felled. Ts'ui Pên's book simply refuses to fell it.
One · If you could remember everything, what would be left of you
Funes is not a superpower; he is a hypothesis worked out to a frightening level of detail — a person whose perception and memory are flawless. The result is not genius but an inability to think, because thinking requires treating unlike things as the same thing, and he sees too clearly for that: the word "dog" is, to him, a lie.
Today this has stopped being hypothetical. Your messages, photographs, locations, purchases and every search you have run are all still there; when you can't recall what somebody said, you scroll up and read the transcript. We are outsourcing the Funes part to hardware, and asking for more of it — the current ambition is to give AI permanent memory so that it retains everything about you.
The strongest case for forgetting as a capability: the reason people can forgive and change is that memory blurs on its own, grinding detail down into impression. A marriage in which both parties recall the exact wording of everything does not last three years. A large part of what we call maturity is the distortion of memory doing our cleanup for us.
But the other side has to be put at full strength, and it is genuinely stronger: the people who advocate forgetting are usually the people who don't need the evidence. To someone who was harmed, forgetting is not mercy but a second erasure — the archive is the only weapon the weaker party has, and historically almost every call to "move on" has been issued first by the party that did the harm. Funes's tragedy is that he remembers the veins of every leaf, not that he remembers who owes him money. Treating "remembers too much" as an illness slides very easily into treating "asks to be remembered" as bad manners.
So the real question is not how much is retained but who gets to decide what is forgotten. Deletion in your hands is freedom; in someone else's it is censorship; in a system's, with the rules undisclosed, it is the inverse of Funes — a world that remembers everything and never tells you what it has remembered.
Two · Can two identical passages be worth different things
Menard's pages are word for word Cervantes's, down to the commas. The narrator argues nonetheless that Menard's are richer and subtler, because they were produced by a twentieth-century Frenchman. It is a joke, and it has never been refuted.
It is now a question everybody has to answer: if a passage is written by a person or generated by a model and the text is identical, is the value identical? The dispute is never about the artifact; it is about whether there is an attributable experience behind it.
The contextualist case at full strength: meaning was never in the words, it is in the relation between words and world. "I'm fine" from someone who has just lost their father and "I'm fine" from someone who has just eaten lunch are two different sentences, and nobody thinks that is sophistry. If so, of course the meaning of a text includes who wrote it under what conditions; Menard just pushes a universally accepted commonplace to its limit.
And the other side — the text is self-sufficient — at full strength: if context settles everything, the "work" disappears and all that remains is research into the identity of the author. Criticism stops being the reading of a poem and becomes the checking of a dossier; whether a passage is good depends on whose hand we can prove it came from and what that person suffered. The end of that road is ugly: the value of the work equals the résumé of the author. And half the force in literary history comes from the opposite direction — you don't know who wrote the Thousand and One Nights, or who the people in the Book of Songs were, and they land on you regardless. Hand meaning entirely to context and you have declared that the anonymous masterpiece does not exist.
Where does Borges stand? The closing technical tip gives him away: he suggests reading The Imitation of Christ as though Céline wrote it. He is not adjudicating between the two positions; he has noticed that changing the byline and rereading can bring a dead book back to life. What he wants is freedom in reading, not a ruling on ownership.
Three · Should an explanation be distrusted for being too beautiful
Lönnrot is killed by his own strength. The commissioner offers a crude and correct explanation: the thief went into the wrong room. Lönnrot rejects it, not because it fails but because it is uninteresting. Then he reasons his way along an exquisite thread of Jewish mysticism — three sites, three dates, the letters of the Name — with every step fitting perfectly, because every step was laid for him.
Brought back to ordinary life this is the failure you meet most often: the more smoothly it explains, the likelier it is that someone is feeding you. The market narrative that accounts for every move, the reading that strings all of a person's behaviour onto one motive, the post-mortem that reduces five years of company history to a single decision, the autobiography told as a single through-line — they share the quality of being too tidy. In data science this is overfitting: perfect on the data you have, catastrophic on the next point.
But "don't over-interpret" is also an easy form of laziness. The counter-case at full strength: nobody who declines to build patterns can understand anything. All science begins with asking whether the same cause lies behind these phenomena, and all investigation must first assume a connection. And some conspiracies are real — history is full of people dismissed as paranoid who turned out to be ten years early. If every elegant explanation is discarded for being elegant, all that remains is "things just happened to line up," which is a more complete abdication of thought.
Borges is not on the side of not reasoning. Notice precisely where Lönnrot goes wrong: he does not reason badly, he fails to include "someone is reading my reasoning" in his model. He published his line of thought in the newspapers and the murderer built to spec. That is the splinter this story leaves in a modern reader — in a world where your judgment is visible and can be used to design the next batch of evidence, the dangerous thing is not being stupid, it is being predictable.
Four · May a hero be forged for the sake of a real cause
Kilpatrick was the traitor. Nolan knew that saying so would destroy the rising, so he wrote him a play and had him die a hero in a theatre. The rising succeeded and a nation acquired its martyr. Decades later Ryan uncovers the truth — and publishes a book celebrating the hero.
Nolan's defence has to be given its full weight: truth is not the only value. What the staged death bought was not Nolan's reputation but a chance for thousands of people; and the executed man really was a traitor, so justice was substantively done and only its form was falsified. Further: if Ryan exposes it decades on, the party most damaged is not the dead Kilpatrick but the people who believed the story and died for it — you would be informing them, posthumously, that they died over a stage prop. The one who punctures the lie is usually the only one who pays nothing for it.
The other side deserves the same: a community founded on a forgery will keep needing the next forgery. Nolan's script worked, so the method is on the shelf the next time an inconvenient truth appears — for the country, for the greater good, for the team — and once that formula works it replicates until nobody dares sort out what is true. It also takes the judgment away from everyone downstream: it decides on behalf of people not yet born.
The dilemma is not Irish. It lives in every company origin story, every eulogy, every account a family gives of itself — whether your grandfather was really the man the family describes, which step a team assigns the credit to in a retrospective, whether what we tell after a death is the life he had or the life we need him to have had. Nearly all collective memory has been through an edit; the only question is whether what was cut was unusable footage or evidence.
Borges hands down no verdict, but he saves the last cut for Ryan: even your seeing through it was in the script. A writer who puts that down clearly does not believe "telling the truth" is a position anyone gets to occupy from outside the script.
One: infinity and repetition. The library, the lottery and the forking time are the same idea in different shells — a structure too large to exhaust and a person obliged to live an entire life inside it. The later "The Aleph" (1949) compresses it to the limit: a point two or three centimetres across on a cellar stair, containing the whole universe. In old age The Book of Sand (1975) turns it into a volume no page of which can be found twice, and the narrator finally hides it among the shelves of a library, on the principle that the best place to hide a leaf is a forest.
Two: one man is all men. In "Three Versions of Judas," Judas is Christ; in "The Shape of the Sword," the teller is the traitor; in "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," the hero is the informer. The motif is at its barest in the later prose piece "Borges and I," where the Borges who writes and the Borges who walks down the street are two people and the author cannot say which of them wrote the page.
Three: labyrinths and mirrors, whose shared property is turning one into many — a labyrinth multiplies a road, a mirror multiplies a man. He was afraid of mirrors all his life and used them all his life.
Four: the knife, and a bookish man's nostalgia for violence. Dahlmann in "The South," and "The End" (added to this book in 1956, in which Borges supplies a knife-fight ending for the Argentine national epic Martín Fierro), are the same gesture: a short-sighted, physically slight man who spent his life among books, imagining over and over his ancestors being run through by a lance out on the plains. Soldiers really do stand on that side of his family; he never served a day. He never concealed the envy — and the most honest thing about "The South" is that it also renders the envy absurd, since the knife is thrown to him by somebody else and he does not even know how to hold it.
① He never wrote a novel because he discovered that reviewing a nonexistent book is both faster and crueller than writing one.
② Tlön is a planet a group of men invented, and it defeats reality not by invading but because we prefer how tidy it is.
③ The small cone that rolls out of the dead man's clothes fits in a palm and is too heavy to hold — metaphysics with a weight in grams.
④ Menard rewrote the Quixote word for word and then proved it had changed: swap the byline and the whole passage gets a transfusion.
⑤ The dreamer walks into the fire to die and the fire does not burn him — that is not a miracle, it is a lab result.
⑥ Somewhere in the Library of Babel is the book that explains everything, and the odds of finding it are zero: the answer exists and the answer is available are two different claims.
⑦ Yu Tsun murdered the only man alive who understood his great-grandfather, in order to transmit a place name to a chief who despised him.
⑧ Funes remembers every vein of every leaf, and therefore cannot think — thinking is agreeing to forget the differences.
⑨ The detective refused the one banal explanation that was true, and every brilliant inference afterwards was prepared for him by the killer.
⑩ Dahlmann walks out holding a knife somebody threw him: he may die on the plain, he may be lying in a hospital bed the whole time — both readings weigh the same, which is why the story stands.