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Ficciones (1944)

New York Public Library's Books of the Century

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.
-Jorge Luis Borges

    Borge's gnosticism--his sense that the ultimate God is beyond good and evil, and infinitely remote
    from creation--is deeply felt. But the sense of dread that informs his work is metaphysical rather
    than religious in nature : at its base are vertiginous glimpses of the collapse of all structures of
    understanding including language itself, flashing intimations that the very self that speaks has no
    real existence.
        -J. M. Coetzee, Borge's Dark Mirror (NY Review of Books)

A modern author who spends his life writing two chapters of Don Quijote, not rewriting mind you, but writing the original, a wizard who dreams a son into existence only to realize that he himself is but the emanation of another's dream, an infinite library, a man accepting a challenge to a knife fight which he can not possibly win, these are just some of the elements that Jorge Luis Borges draws upon in his stories. These labyrinthine fictions loop back upon themselves and upon reality in order first to undermine the claims of reason and ultimately to call into question existence itself.

Borges was one of the great conservative authors of the 20th Century--his support for things like the Bay of Pigs invasion and his anti-Peronism are widely considered to have cost him the oh-so-politically-correct Nobel Prize--but his was a very particular conservatism, the conservatism of anti-Reason, of which the other great exemplar was Leo Tolstoy. On first reading War and Peace, I couldn't understand how a supposedly great writer had made such an incomprehensible hash of the battle scenes, but in his great essay, The Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin makes the compelling case that Tolstoy was thereby attempting to show just how unsusceptible events are to the application of human reason. Borges similarly challenges the central place of reason in the modern age, suggesting that existence is simply incomprehensible, absurd, unyielding to human understanding or planning. With this understanding of how subjective our interpretation of life is at the forefront of his work, Borges then proceeds to craft brief, tightly controlled, imaginative, stories which seem to play with the idea that the writer is the god of the literary world that he creates.

Of course, this too is a paradox. Like the Existentialists, he is hoist on the petard of his own ideology. If intellectual exercises are pointless, and his writings are nothing if not intellectual exercises, why devote his life to a pointless exercise? Likewise, one wonders why anyone would produce such carefully constructed stories if all of existence is so essentially dubious. The awkward answer can be nothing but faith. God may be a distant figure to Borges, a non-existent one to the Existentialists, but the very act of continuing to write beautiful stories to argue their point of view, indicates that at some level they do find a purpose to life and do trust in the capacity of their own voices to influence other people and the future. Borges shares a fascination with suicide or at least the acceptance of death with the Existentialists, but like them, he kept on going. Their actions speak louder than their words.

Perhaps because of this central paradox in his work, I found it a little difficult to read the whole set of stories straight through. I got a sense that the author didst protest too much. If everything is mere illusion, why'd he bother to write all of this & why am I reading it? On the other hand, if you read them one at a time and let each roll around in your head, you really get a chance to savor their playfulness and ingenuity and to ponder the questions they raise. I certainly recommend them, but suggest that they are best when read over a longer period of time. Don't get stuck on an airplane with just this book.

(Reviewed:22-Oct-00)

Grade: (B)

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Ficciones (1944)

New York Public Library's Books of the Century

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