The Lottery in Babylon [short story]
by Jorge Luis Borges
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The drunkard who comes out with an absurd order, the dreamer who suddenly wakes and with his bare hands strangles the woman sleeping beside him - are they perhaps not carrying out one of the Companys secret decisions? These silent workings, so like those of God, give rise to all manner of speculation. The affairs of Babylon are dictated by a lottery. Discreetly administered by a mysterious and seemingly omnipotent Company, the lottery can elevate citizens to positions of wealth and power or show more condemn them to the most shameful punishments. Taking this fantastical conceit as its starting point, Jorge Luis Borgess short story is a characteristically brilliant achievement - a haunting mediation on the nature of chance, paranoia and divinity. show lessTags
Member Reviews
Borges can be very, very good, of course, but this is a cute, pleasant, slightly disjointed inconsequentiality--the lottery in Babylon gets more and more popular, negative tickets are introduced, then combination tickets that imply infinite possible results, then participation becomes mandatory, and the end result is that the lottery is life itself and who knows what comes about as a result of the lottery and what is "really meant" to happen, and what difference does it make anyway? Playfully pokes fun at existentialism and nihilism, among other things, I'd think.
(Originally published in the magazine Sur.)
(Originally published in the magazine Sur.)
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Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1899, Jorge Borges was educated by an English governess and later studied in Europe. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1921, where he helped to found several avant-garde literary periodicals. In 1955, after the fall of Juan Peron, whom he vigorously opposed, he was appointed director of the Argentine National show more Library. With Samuel Beckett he was awarded the $10,000 International Publishers Prize in 1961, which helped to establish him as one of the most prominent writers in the world. Borges regularly taught and lectured throughout the United States and Europe. His ideas have been a profound influence on writers throughout the Western world and on the most recent developments in literary and critical theory. A prolific writer of essays, short stories, and plays, Borges's concerns are perhaps clearest in his stories. He regarded people's endeavors to understand an incomprehensible world as fiction; hence, his fiction is metaphysical and based on what he called an esthetics of the intellect. Some critics have called him a mystic of the intellect. Dreamtigers (1960) is considered a masterpiece. A central image in Borges's work is the labyrinth, a mental and poetic construct, that he considered a universe in miniature, which human beings build and therefore believe they control but which nevertheless traps them. In spite of Borges's belief that people cannot understand the chaotic world, he continually attempted to do so in his writing. Much of his work deals with people's efforts to find the center of the labyrinth, symbolic of achieving understanding of their place in a mysterious universe. In such later works as The Gold of the Tigers, Borges wrote of his lifelong descent into blindness and how it affected his perceptions of the world and himself as a writer. Borges died in Geneva in 1986. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Lottery in Babylon [short story]
- Original publication date
- 1941-01
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 863.64 — Literature & rhetoric Spanish Literature Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000
- LCC
- PQ7797 .B635 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures Spanish literature Provincial, local, colonial, etc. Spanish America
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 13
- Popularity
- 1,766,586
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.75)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1
