Labyrinths Read online

  ALSO BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

  EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

  SEVEN NIGHTS

  Contents

  An Invitation by William Gibson

  Introduction by James E. Irby

  Fictions

  Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

  The Garden of Forking Paths

  The Lottery in Babylon

  Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

  The Circular Ruins

  The Library of Babel

  Funes the Memorious

  The Shape of the Sword

  Theme of the Traitor and the Hero

  Death and the Compass

  The Secret Miracle

  Three Versions of Judas

  The Sect of the Phoenix

  The Immortal

  The Theologians

  Story of the Warrior and the Captive

  Emma Zunz

  The House of Asterion

  Deutsches Requiem

  Averroes’ Search

  The Zahir

  The Waiting

  The God’s Script

  Essays

  The Argentine Writer and Tradition

  The Wall and the Books

  The Fearful Sphere of Pascal

  Partial Magic in the Quixote

  Valéry as Symbol

  Kafka and His Precursors

  Avatars of the Tortoise

  The Mirror of Enigmas

  A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw

  A New Refutation of Time

  Parables

  Inferno, 1, 32

  Paradiso, XXXI, 108

  Ragnarök

  Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote

  The Witness

  A Problem

  Borges and I

  Everything and Nothing

  Elegy

  Chronology

  LABYRINTHS

  SELECTED STORIES

  & OTHER WRITINGS

  An Invitation

  By

  William Gibson

  I first read Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths in an armchair upholstered with a smooth lettuce-green brocade, patterned with leaves that were themselves not unlike lettuce, though they were also rather like clouds, or perhaps rabbits. I regarded that chair as an environment in and of itself, having known it since earlier childhood. It was the only relatively safe place in a room I regarded as ominously formal and adult, a room dominated by large pieces of dark furniture belonging to my mother’s family. One of these was an unnaturally tall desk, topped with a bookcase closed with two long and solid doors, reputed, though dimly, to have once belonged to the Revolutionary hero Francis Marion. Its lower drawers smelled terrifyingly and chemically of Time, and within them, furled, lay elaborately printed scrolls listing the County’s dead in the Great War.

  I now know that I believed, without quite wanting to admit it to myself, that that desk was haunted.

  I initially discovered Borges in one of the more liberal-minded anthologies of science fiction, which had included his story “The Circular Ruins.” That sufficiently intrigued me that I sought out Labyrinths, which, I imagine, would have been fairly difficult for me to find, though I no longer recall those difficulties.

  I do, however, remember the sensation, both complex and eerily simple, induced by my first reading of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” while seated in that green chair.

  Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say. This sublime and cosmically comic fable of utterly pure information (i.e. the utterly fictive) gradually and relentlessly infiltrating and ultimately consuming the quotidian, opened something within me which has never yet closed.

  Or without me, possibly, I hungrily and delightedly saw, as Borges’ hallmark corridors of mirrors opened out around me in every direction. Decades later, now, I understand the word meme, to the extent that I understand it at all, in terms of Tlön’s viral message, its initial vector a few mysteriously extra pages in an otherwise seemingly ordinary volume of a less than stellar encyclopedia.

  Works we all our lives recall reading for the first time are among the truest milestones, but Labyrinths was a profoundly singular one, for me, and I believe I knew that, then, in my early adolescence. It was demonstrated to me, that afternoon. Proven. For, by the time I had finished with “Tlön” (though one never finishes with “Tlön,” nor indeed with any story by Borges) and had traversed “The Garden of Forking Paths” and wondered, literally bug-eyed, at “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” I discovered that I had ceased to be afraid of any influence that might dwell within Francis Marion’s towering desk.

  Borges, this elegant and mysterious voice, whom I had instantly accepted as the most welcome of uncles, this inhabitant of a clearly mythical place called Buenos Aires, had somehow dissolved a great deal of childhood superstition. He had stretched basic paradigms as effortlessly, it seemed, as another gentleman might tip his hat and wink, and I had felt a certain crudeness, a certain foolishness, fall away.

  I sat, changed, in the green chair, and regarded a different world, one whose underpinnings had been revealed to be at once infinitely more mysterious and far more interesting than I could previously have imagined.

  When I left that room, I took Borges with me, and my life has been better for it, much better.

  If you haven’t yet made the gentleman’s acquaintance, I can only urge you to do so. In all humility, I can serve no other function, here at the front of this now-venerable collection of his incomparable fictions, than to act, mercifully briefly, as a sort of butler. I am not a Borges scholar, nor indeed any sort of scholar, but I am honored (though indeed embarrassed, believing myself unworthy) to invite you in.

  Please.

  Many afternoons, decades, after my own introduction to Borges, I found myself in Barcelona, in late December, attending a festival celebrating his life and work. The events of the festival were staged in some vast repurposed fortress or castle, a structure that I imagined had lain dusty and silent during the seeming centuries of Francisco Franco’s ghastly rule, but which now, through the briskly confident resurgence of Catalan culture and vast amounts of European Union capital, hummed and gleamed like a vacuum tube within a 13th-century reliquary.

  One afternoon, alone, I sought out a rumored display of manuscripts and other Borgesiana, in a hall on an upper floor. Finding this, I discovered that these objects were displayed beneath glass, but a glass treated in such a way as to approximate the effect of the onset of his glaucoma. They were visible, these relics, only narrowly, and in a way that imposed a painful and awkward dance of the head if they were to be studied closely. I remember the peculiarly childlike slope, from left to right, of a handwritten manuscript page, and the delicacy of a red-lacquered miniature Chinese birdcage, the gift of a poet friend.

  I went out walking, then, after having been invited to meet later with Alberto Manguel in a bar on La Rambla, the only person I’d ever met to have actually known Borges. Manguel, when I had first met him, a decade before, had told me that he himself had met a man who had known Franz Kafka. And what had this person had to say about Kafka, I’d asked? That Kafka, Manguel had told me, had known everything there was to know about coffee. But now I could no longer remember if Manguel had had any information of that sort to impart about Borges, and I reminded myself to ask him, when we met.

  Walking through Plaça Catalunya, I discovered a recent monument to some martyred Catalan figure in the civil war. It was grim, this monument, and terribly striking, a monolithic flight of granite stairs, tilted unnaturally, impossibly forward upon themselves, into the horizontal. A negation of wh
at stairs are, and of flight, and of a life, aspiration. I stood beside it, shivering, trying to puzzle out the inscription. Failing to do so, I walked on, into La Rambla. And eventually met Manguel and his friends. And in the course of discussing his new place in the country, in France, forgot to bring up Borges.

  A few days later, at home in Vancouver, I sat at my computer, watching live feed from a video camera positioned somewhere high on the side of a building, overlooking Plaça Catalunya. And on my screen was that terrible monument, the granite stairs, impossibly rotated, mute symbol of negation.

  And beside it a man, wearing a brown coat, not unlike the one I had worn, standing. Attempting to puzzle out an inscription.

  I was abetted, in that moment, by technologies Borges, our heresiarch uncle, with his doctrines of circular time, his invisible tigers, his paradoxes, his knife-fighters and mirrors and dawns, had no need of. And in that moment, as you will soon know if you are fortunate enough to ignore the awkwardness of our meeting here, and to enter that which awaits you, I knew myself, once again, to be within the labyrinth.

  Introduction

  Jorge Luis Borges was born on 24 August 1899 in Buenos Aires, of Spanish, English and (very remotely) Portuguese Jewish origin. His parents were of the intellectual middle class and descended from military and political figures prominent in the struggles for Argentine national independence and unity that occupied most of the nineteenth century. After completing his secondary education in Geneva and then spending some three years in Spain associated with the avant-garde ultraísta group of poets, Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921. There he immediately became the leading exponent and theorist of Argentine ultraísmo, distinguished from its Spanish counterpart by a peculiar fusion of modern expressionist form and anachrönistic nostalgia for certain national values—values most palpably embodied for those writers in the old criollo quarters of Buenos Aires—which were by then disappearing amid the postwar boom and rush of foreign immigration. Borges’s and his companions’ situation was not unlike that of some North American writers of the same generation who suffered the impact of war, industrialism and modern European art on a tranquil Midwestern or Southern heritage.

  But out of these general conditions, shared by many in our time, Borges has created a work like no other. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of his writings is their extreme intellectual reaction against all the disorder and contingency of immediate reality, their radical insistence on breaking with the given world and postulating another. Born into the dizzying flux and inconstancy of a far-flung border area of Western culture, keen witness of the general crisis of that culture, Borges has used his strangely gifted mind—the mind of a Cabalist, of a seventeenth-century “metaphysical,” of a theorist of pure literature much like Poe or Valéry—to erect an order with what Yeats called “monuments of unageing intellect.” Borges is skeptical as few have ever been about the ultimate value of mere ideas and mere literature. But he has striven to turn this skepticism into an ironic method, to make of disbelief an aesthetic system, in which what matters most is not ideas as such, but their resonances and suggestions, the drama of their possibilities and impossibilities, the immobile and lasting quintessence of ideas as it is distilled at the dead center of their warring contradictions.

  Until about 1930 Borges’s main creative medium was poetry: laconic free-verse poems which evoked scenes and atmospheres of old Buenos Aires or treated timeless themes of love, death and the self. He also wrote many essays on subjects of literary criticism, metaphysics and language, essays reminiscent of Chesterton’s in their compactness and unexpected paradoxes. The lucidity and verbal precision of these writings belie the agitated conditions of avant-garde polemic and playfulness under which most of them were composed. During these years Borges was content to seek expression in serene lyric images perhaps too conveniently abstracted from the surrounding world and have all his speculations and creations respond primarily to the need for a new national literature as he saw it. The years from 1930 to 1940, however, brought a deep change in Borges’s work. He virtually abandoned poetry and turned to the short narrative genre. Though he never lost his genuine emotion for the unique features of his native ground, he ceased to exalt them nationalistically as sole bulwarks against threatening disorder and began to rank them more humbly within a context of vast universal processes: the nightmarish city of “Death and the Compass” is an obvious stylization of Buenos Aires, no longer idealized as in the poems, but instead used as the dark setting for a tragedy of the human intellect. The witty and already very learned young poet who had been so active in editing such little reviews as Martín Fierro, Prisma and Proa, became a sedentary writer-scholar who spent many solitary hours in reading the most varied and unusual works of literature and philosophy and in meticulously correcting his own manuscripts, passionately but also somewhat monstrously devoted to the written word as his most vital experience, as failing eyesight and other crippling afflictions made him more and more a semi-invalid, more and more an incredible mind in an ailing and almost useless body, much like his character Ireneo Funes. Oppressed by physical reality and also by the turmoil of Europe, which had all-too-direct repercussions in Argentina, Borges sought to create a coherent fictional world of the intelligence. This world is essentially adumbrated in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” As Borges slyly observes there, Tlön is no “irresponsible figment of the imagination”; the stimulus which prompted its formulation is stated with clarity (though not without irony) toward the end of that story’s final section, projected as a kind of tentative utopia into the future beyond the grim year 1940 when it was written:

  Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to charm the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

  Borges’s metaphysical fictions, his finest creations, which are collected in the volumes Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949), all elaborate upon the varied idealist possibilities outlined in the “article” on Tlön. In these narratives the analytical and imaginative functions previously kept separate in his essays and poems curiously fuse, producing a form expressive of all the tension and complexity of Borges’s mature thought.

  His fictions are always concerned with processes of striving which lead to discovery and insight; these are achieved at times gradually, at other times suddenly, but always with disconcerting and even devastating effect. They are tales of the fantastic, of the hyperbolic, but they are never content with fantasy in the simple sense of facile wish-fulfillment. The insight they provide is ironic, pathetic: a painful sense of inevitable limits that block total aspirations. Some of these narratives (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “Three Versions of Judas,” “The Sect of the Phoenix”) might be called “pseudo essays”—mock scrutinies of authors or books or learned subjects actually of Borges’s own invention—that in turning in upon themselves make the “plot” (if it can be called that) an intricate interplay of creation and critique. But all his stories, whatever their outward form, have the same self-critical dimension; in some it is revealed only in minimal aspects of tone and style (as, for example, in “The Circular Ruins”). Along with these “vertical” superpositions of different and mutually qualifying levels, there are also “horizontal” progressions of qualitative leaps, after the manner of tales of adventure or of crime detection (Borges’s favorite types of fiction). Unexpected turns elude the predictable; hidden realities are revealed through their diverse effects and derivations. Like his beloved Chesterton, who made the Father Brown stories a vehicle for his Catholic theology, Borges uses mystery and the surprise effect in literature
to achieve that sacred astonishment at the universe which is the origin of all true religion and metaphysics. However, Borges as theologian is a complete heretic, as the casuistical “Three Versions of Judas” more than suffices to show.

  Borges once claimed that the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double. These are both his essential themes—the problematical nature of the world, of knowledge, of time, of the self—and his essential techniques of construction. Indeed, in Borges’s narratives the usual distinction between form and content virtually disappears, as does that between the world of literature and the world of the reader. We almost unconsciously come to accept the world of Tlön because it has been so subtly inserted into our own. In “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” Borges’s discovery of his own story (which is worked up before our very eyes and has areas “not yet revealed” to him), Nolan’s of Kilpatrick’s treason, Ryan’s of the curious martyrdom, and ours of the whole affair, are but one awareness of dark betrayal and creative deception. We are transported into a realm where fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, the whole and the part, the highest and the lowest, are complementary aspects of the same continuous being: a realm where “any man is all men,” where “all men who repeat a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.” The world is a book and the book is a world, and both are labyrinthine and enclose enigmas designed to be understood and participated in by man. We should note that this all-comprising intellectual unity is achieved precisely by the sharpest and most scandalous confrontation of opposites. In “Avatars of the Tortoise,” the paradox of Zeno triumphantly demonstrates the unreality of the visible world, while in “The Library of Babel” it shows the anguishing impossibility of the narrator’s ever reaching the Book of Books. And in “The Immortal,” possibly Borges’s most complete narrative, the movements toward and from immortality become one single approximation of universal impersonality.