Fictions (1944)

Pensa num livro perfeito. ( )

Este livro merece cinco estrelas; só não leva por uma razão: eu ainda não conheço bem a obra do senhor Borges e creio que só um conhecimento mais aprofundado permitir-me-á atribuir pontuações mais elevadas. Seja como for, é um pequeno grande livro. Muito bom. ( )

One of the earliest memories of reading that I have is one of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The idea that there is another world beyond or through the mirror in one's parlor is a fabulous way to introduce the flights of fancy that little Alice was prone to engage in as I had learned in Carroll's earlier book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I am reminded of this experience because of the importance of mirrors in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges as he privileges the mirror and his stories as books appear as mirrors for reality. Just as in Carroll the mirror image presents a reflection that is backwards and always seems a bit wrong; however, it is wrong in a way that one only senses and cannot actually identify with any hope of specificity. My own dreams, and perhaps yours, often seem to be similarly twisted, even absurd, reflections of reality.

In Ficciones Borges has included nine short fictions in part one and ten even shorter works called "artifices" in part two. I like every story in the first part but my favorite has to be "The Library of Babel" which, for readers, has to encompass the notions of heaven and hell all in one twisted story.

The first story in this collection, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, is an example of the importance of mirrors as it begins with the following sentence: "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia."(p 5). Additional stories share favorite places of Borges whether they be a garden in the case of "The Garden of Forking Paths", or the library as in "The Library of Babel". The latter of those two stories would have to be my favorite, and perhaps the favorite of many readers as readers who love libraries. Borges' library is a cheerless and even fearful place. With its incalculably vast size suggesting infinity it can seemingly be a nightmare more than a dream. Yet there is always the possibility of finding hope hidden in the vastness of infinite space. While Borges himself spent several years in a dull library job cataloging books the imaginary library of Babel seems to defy any cataloging. Just like a world reflected in a mirror, "absurdities are the norm" in this library while disorder reigns. Conundrums also abound as with the notion that everything that has already been written, yet there are always new and definitively different books that one may encounter.

The worlds depicted in Borges' stories are filled with blank spaces, the ideas and ideals are abstract rather than personal, yet they yield a personal response. Those unwilling or unable to fill in some of the blank spaces with their own imaginations may find something lacking. No amount of further writing would help though all of the stories are short, even as short stories go with the second part filled with "Artifices" that are typically no more than two or three pages long. Just as the stories beckon with suggestions of ruins, lotteries, libraries, and gardens; so do the artifices with titles that invite you to partake of death, miracles, swords, differing visions of Judas, and the rise of the Phoenix. Infinite libraries suggest stories from an imagination that also may have been infinite.

The world of Borges' fiction expands to encompass more than reality. These short narratives reveal conflicting emotions, motives, and desires shared by all humans and explore what he imagines as a tortured struggle for salvation or perhaps merely redemption. His genius gives rise to flights of the imagination unique in my experience. My love for these narratives stems from their presences as magical works of a literary master. ( )

Even as a child, the Argentinian master storyteller Jorge Luis Borges lived among books and various languages -- myths, legends and literature from many civilizations and cultures: Spanish, Chinese, Persian, Nordic, to name just a few. His greatest childhood memory was his father's library; he was reading Shakespeare in English before the age of twelve; by the time he was an adult, Borges turned his mind into one vast library.

Borges did not write long, involved novels like David Copperfield, The Brothers Karamazov, Sister Carrie or Ada. Not even close. Not even a novella. Why is this? One reviewer comments that Borges was something of a dandy and a pure aesthete, a writer who saw brevity as a virtue and associated length with ennui. Also, brevity lends itself to a fleeting, dream-like quality the author was seeking. Perhaps this is accurate or perhaps not so accurate, but, in any case, it is certainly our good fortune Borges wrote the way he did.

Borges wrote poetry, essays and tales, some tales as short as a paragraph, others several dozen pages, and still others, most of his tales in fact, five to twelve pages. With one longer exception, the seventeen tales in the collection are in this five to twelve page range and all have a baroque quality, that is, they are written in a rich, lush language and refer to many ancient, archaic, esoteric and classical sources. To give a reader new to Borges a taste of these tales, I will focus on two: The Circular Ruins and The Babylon Lottery.

The Circular Ruins
A wizard paddles his canoe downstream to a temple in ruins. We read, “The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality.” What kind of effort will this wizard have to exert to accomplish his task? Borges writes, “He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind.” The narrator makes reference to Gnostic cosmogonies and the creation done by demiurges as the wizard reflects on his task; there is also a deep concern and dread in the mind of the wizard, when we read, “He feared lest his son should meditate on this abnormal privilege and be some means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man’s dreams – what an incomparable humiliation, what madness!” Turns out, as events and realities unfold, the wizard comes to understand more completely what it really means to be humiliated and to be part of a dream.

The Babylon Lottery
The first person narrator of this tale is himself a man of the city of Babylon and shares his reflections on power, chance, gaming, logic, symmetry, labyrinths, time, zero and infinity as well as his being, in turn, a proconsul and a slave and his having severed the jugular of sacred bulls and, at another point in his life, having been declared invisible. He goes on to tell us how he was able to live such a life: “I owe this almost atrocious variety to an institution which other republics know nothing about, or which operates among them imperfectly and in secret: the lottery.” Deep into his musing, he recalls a discussion where it was said, “ . . . if the lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, would it not be desirable for chance to intervene at all stages of the lottery and not merely in the drawing?” How did the narrator arrive at this statement and what does a specific philosophy of chance imply for the city’s famous game? Rather than answering these questions, permit me to note how the narrator offers possible alternatives at the end of the tale regarding how one can view the company responsible for the lottery; and how one can view the lottery itself; and, yet again, how one can view the city of Babylon. We can easily imagine Borges lingering on these questions and possibilities long after he finished writing his tale. ( )

Contiene:
El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan
Artificios