Ficciones

The Garden of Forking Paths and the Library of Babel

The two stories that most readers encounter first in Ficciones are also its most emblematic. “The Garden of Forking Paths” wears the costume of a spy thriller — a Chinese agent working for the Germans in World War I must transmit a secret to his handler with British intelligence closing in, and does so through an act of murder whose target is chosen not for who he is but for what his name means. But the story’s true subject emerges when the spy learns about the garden of the title: a novel written by his ancestor, a seemingly unfinished and chaotic text that turns out to be unfinished and chaotic because it attempts to depict every possible outcome of every decision simultaneously, all futures branching from every moment, none excluded. This anticipation of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by decades is characteristic of Borges: he arrives at the edges of physics, mathematics, and philosophy through fiction before the disciplines themselves have fully worked out what they are saying.

“The Library of Babel” proposes a universe that is a library, containing every possible combination of the twenty-five characters of the alphabet — every book that could ever be written, and therefore every book that has been written, but surrounded by an infinite number of nonsense books, indistinguishably mixed. The library contains all truth and all falsehood with no index to distinguish between them. Librarians spend their lives searching for the books that make sense of the rest, the catalog of catalogs, the key that would make the library navigable. The story’s final image — the narrator concluding that the library is infinite and that this is both its terror and, in some sense, its consolation — is among Borges’s most quietly devastating.

Pierre Menard and the Problem of Authorship

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is the story that literary theorists have written about most, and for good reason: it is a philosophical argument disguised as a story, or possibly a story disguised as a philosophical argument, and the disguise is itself part of what it is arguing. Pierre Menard is a twentieth-century French writer who undertakes to write Don Quixote — not to copy it, not to translate it, not to adapt it, but actually to write it, word for word, as himself, in his own time. He produces several chapters of text identical to Cervantes’s. The narrator’s analysis of this achievement argues, with mock-serious precision, that Menard’s Quixote is entirely different from Cervantes’s, because every word carries different connotations when written by a French symbolist in 1935 than when written by a seventeenth-century Spaniard. Meaning is not in the text; it is in the relationship between the text and the reader’s historical position.

This argument — which Roland Barthes would make explicitly in “The Death of the Author” a quarter century later — is here made as fiction, and made more elegantly than theory has managed since. “The Lottery in Babylon” offers a different kind of philosophical vertigo: a narrator describes a civilization in which an invisible, omnipotent Company runs a lottery that has gradually expanded from monetary prizes and penalties to governing every aspect of life, including death, until no one can distinguish the results of the lottery from the results of chance or fate or design. The story is Borges’s most sustained meditation on free will, determinism, and the bureaucratic sublime — the human tendency to find comfort in the idea that there is a system, even a malevolent one, because a system implies that someone understands what is happening.

Why Borges Still Matters

The writers who acknowledge Borges’s direct influence include Umberto Eco, who described Ficciones as essential to the conception of The Name of the Rose; Salman Rushdie, whose magical realist fiction is unthinkable without Borges’s demonstration that the fictional and the factual can be mixed without apology; and John Updike, who reviewed Borges’s early English translations and helped establish his American readership in the 1960s. Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster are among the many whose characteristic modes are traceable to specific Borgesian innovations. The list of writers whose work is simply inconceivable without Ficciones is longer than any list of writers directly influenced by it, because Borges changed what literary fiction was allowed to do.

His specific innovations are worth naming. He demonstrated that a story could be presented as a review of a non-existent book, as a scholarly footnote to a text that had never been written, as the appendix to a work that exists only in the appendix. He showed that the fictional and the factual could be mixed without apology and that the mixing was itself a philosophical proposition about the nature of text. He established that the short story was capable of containing a complete philosophical argument — not as theme but as structure, not as something the characters believe but as something the form enacts.

Borges was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Formentor Prize, and was a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature for decades. He never received it. The Nobel Committee’s repeated failure to award the prize to the most influential fiction writer of the twentieth century’s second half is widely considered one of the most significant institutional errors in the history of literary prizes.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Seventeen stories that changed what fiction was allowed to be, and that remain, decades later, unlike anything else in the language.

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