Ficciones

The prologue states the principle: “Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros” (a laborious and impoverishing madness, the composing of vast books). The stories obey it. Within each, the subtractive test finds nothing: “Las ruinas circulares” is a single movement from the landing in the unanimous night to the fire; “Funes el memorioso” has not a sentence beyond what the memory needs; the review form of “Pierre Menard” and of “Herbert Quain” removes the narrative padding a novel would carry. Across the book the test bites a little. “Herbert Quain” is slighter than its neighbours; “La forma de la espada” and “Tema del traidor y del héroe” spend their weight on a reversal; and of the stories added in 1956, “La secta del Fénix” is a riddle more than a story. The book returns to its labyrinths and mirrors often enough that one or two pieces could go with the knowledge unchanged.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the orders by which people live are invented and are then inhabited as reality, and a mind that wants order will surrender the world to any system coherent enough. “Tlön” states it as history in its postscript: any symmetry with a semblance of order was once enough to enchant men, and its examples are “el materialismo dialéctico, el antisemitismo, el nazismo”. Beside it: that reading makes the text (“Pierre Menard”); that a self may be another’s dream (“Las ruinas circulares”); that a perfect memory cannot think, since to think is to forget differences (“Funes”); that chance can be made an institution and govern a state (“La lotería en Babilonia”). These hold. Held nearer the gate than the top because the conditions disclosed are chiefly of knowledge: love, family and the body enter rarely, and “El Sur” and “El milagro secreto” are the exceptions.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Elevation is cold and frequent. The Library’s hexagons, extending past any count, carry the mathematical sublime. The dreamer walking into the fire and finding that it does not burn him, that he too is dreamt, “con alivio, con humillación, con terror” (with relief, with humiliation, with terror), is the book’s highest single height. In “El milagro secreto” a year passes in the instant between the order and the volley, so that Hladík can finish his drama in his head before the bullets arrive. Lönnrot waits at Triste-le-Roy for a death he deduced. Funes lies in the dark at nineteen, holding every leaf of every tree. “El Sur” gives the book its one warm height: Dahlmann picking up the knife and going out to the plain. Held below the top because the register is uniformly calm and ironic, and some stories, “Herbert Quain” and “La secta del Fénix”, never rise.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is built, and the archetypes are load-bearing: the labyrinth (the Garden, Triste-le-Roy, the Library); the book that holds the world (Tlön’s encyclopedia, the Library); the demiurge who dreams a man (“Las ruinas circulares”); the betrayer as redeemer (“Tres versiones de Judas”); the traitor who is the hero (“Tema del traidor y del héroe”, staged out of Julius Caesar). Each story is built on its pattern, not decorated with it. The stories added in 1956 build the Argentine myth beside the universal one: “El fin” completes Martín Fierro with Fierro’s death at the hands of the brother of the man he killed, and “El Sur” makes the knife fight on the plain into a chosen death, perhaps a dream in a sanatorium. Held a step from the top because the persons who bear these patterns are often thin, figures in a diagram, so that the particular does not always stay particular.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance: Poe’s tale of ratiocination, Chesterton’s paradoxes, Stevenson, Kafka (whom Borges translated), Schwob’s imaginary lives, Carlyle’s book about an imaginary book, and the ornate realist story of the Spanish-language tradition. The departure is the fiction as essay: the review of a book that does not exist, the encyclopedia article, the footnote and the false citation as narrative, metaphysics made into plot. The stake was real. Borges was known as a poet and an essayist, and the Argentine national prize passed over the 1941 volume, which was charged with being foreign, bookish and without humanity, the charge the swerve had risked. Held below the top because Borges had already made the move in “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (1936) and Historia universal de la infamia (1935), and Chesterton and Kafka had cleared much of the ground.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Tlön” is a world invented by an encyclopedia, told as an inquiry into an encyclopedia, so that the reader watches a fiction become a fact by the means it describes. “Pierre Menard” can say that a text changes with its reader only by being a review that reads two identical texts differently, the second “casi infinitamente más rico” (almost infinitely richer). The detective form of “La muerte y la brújula” is the trap: Lönnrot’s reason is what kills him. The spy story of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” is a fork in time enacted as a murder. “El Sur” is built to be read two ways at once, as event and as dream, as the postscript of 1956 says. Held off the top because a collection is additive: the two parts and their prologues give an order, but most stories could stand in another, and in the slighter pieces the form holds a conceit without adding to it.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over eight decades. “Pierre Menard” became a founding text for theories of reading and authorship; John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) built an account of postmodern fiction on Borges; the reception in France read him as a philosopher. The questions stay open: whether Tlön is a satire of idealism or its triumph; whether Dahlmann dies on the plain or in the bed; whether the Library’s narrator is despairing or devout; what Menard’s work is. Each return finds them where it left them. Held a step below the top because part of the yield is a puzzle solved once, the reversal of “La forma de la espada” or the rhombus of “La muerte y la brújula”, which return as pleasures rather than meanings.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The field is fiction in Spanish in the 1940s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: short fiction was made an instrument of speculative thought, and the line between story and essay, invention and citation, was erased. Delayed reach is credited and discounted: in Spanish the book changed the prose and the ambition of the generation after it at once, Cortázar most plainly, but its world reach came twenty years late, and part of it runs through Borges’s later books and essays, which are not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Formentor prize of 1961, shared with Beckett, and the English translations of 1962, after which the book shaped the American postmodernists through Barth, Italian fiction through Calvino and Eco, whose blind librarian Jorge of Burgos in The Name of the Rose makes the debt explicit, and theory in France.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over eighty-two years, and seventy for the stories added in 1956. Form: the text survives whole; Borges’s later revisions and the additions of 1956 are part of the work’s life as that work, and nothing that made it is lost. Presence is wide and continuous: in print in Spanish throughout, taught across the Spanish-speaking world and in departments of literature beyond it, translated into most written languages, and its titles passed into common speech, the forking paths, the Library of Babel, Tlön. It stops short of the widest presence its span could show, because the book is read more by writers and students of literature than across the general culture, and its standing in English rests partly on selections, Labyrinths among them, rather than on the collection read entire. Fabric carries no charge.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The command is of the sentence and of the design. The sentence is classical, short and exact against the ornate tradition it inherits, with the unexpected adjective doing a paragraph’s work: “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche” (no one saw him come ashore in the unanimous night). The first sentence of “Tlön”, “Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar”, sets a whole method in one line. The design is exact: each story’s last paragraph turns the whole, the false erudition is consistent down to the footnote, and real and invented names are mixed so that the seam cannot be found. Held below the top on two charges: the manner hardens into tics across a whole book, the paired adjectives, the acaso, the vertigo and the infinite named too often; and the characters, Funes and Dahlmann apart, are seldom made to live.

Score: 9.2 / 10

One law governs: the world is a text, a labyrinth or a dream, and the mind that orders it is itself ordered by something it cannot see. Take the two most distant elements: the Library of Babel, an architecture of the cosmos, and “El Sur”, a sick librarian on a train to a general store on the plain where a gaucho throws him a knife. They obey one law. Dahlmann, too, works in a library, and his death may be a dream he is having, a destiny read rather than lived. The range runs from cosmology to the gaucho, from Prague in 1939 to an Irish conspiracy of 1824 and a Babylon of chance, and the law holds across it. Held at this figure because the tonal range is narrow, one ironic and erudite voice throughout, and narrowness is not coherence; the law is tested more in ideas than in persons.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on what sixteen short stories hold. The cosmos and time, in the Library and the Garden. Language and the book, everywhere. The state and its power, in the Company of Babylon, in Tlön’s conquest, in the Nazi firing squad in Prague and the German spy in England in 1916. History, in Ireland, in the Great War, in the nineteenth century of Funes and of “El fin”. The sacred, in Judas, the Phoenix and the demiurge. Consciousness, in Funes. Argentina, its plain and its violence, strengthened by the stories added in 1956. They are integrated by one law, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent or only glimpsed: the family, love and sexuality, labour, the body except as Funes’s paralysis, and the natural order except as the plain. A low mark on a small form describes the form.

Score: 7.9 / 10