Fictions (Borges)

tags : [[Jorge Borges]] [[Latin American literature]]

source : cite:borges_hurley1998

Fictions (Ficciones in Spanish) is a collection of short stories written by [[Jorge Borges]].

The texts are reminiscent of [[magical realism]] and [[surrealism]].

Works

I’ve broken each story into their own note for the sake of making sense of them as separate entities.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

• The novel starts with a pair of authors who are playing literary games, trying to invent stories
• An author discovers a secret country, of which there is only one source that acknowledges its existence
• Tlön culture is purely [[subjectively idealistic]], meaning that they believe that reality itself is up for interpretation
• The first two sections are about someone who discovers an encyclopedia that talks about Tlön, but the postscript is about how some secret society invented an entirely fake encyclopedia
• The postscript goes on to say that this subjective idealism is something that has pervaded modern society

The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim

• This story appears to be a fictional book review
• The subject of the title is a book which is a sort of Indian detective story

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

• The narrator lists off the complete works of Menard, who was an author

• Many of the pieces that Menard wrote sound like treatises on philosophy

• Menard wrote a copy of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

  “My purpose is merely astonishing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms—is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.

• Menard began his journey trying to be Cervantes exactly: he traveled to Spain, learned old Spanish, etc. but he gave up on this and decided to rewrite Quixote “through the experiences of Pierre Menard”

• Menard’s Quixote knows of [[Nietzsche]] and [[Bertrand Russell]].

• As I’m writing these notes I realize that Menard is actually rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and that this review is talking about interpreting Menard’s Quixote through the experiences of Menard

  • Reminiscent of Tlön!

• This story seems to be about the meaning of literary works. Menard’s Quixote, while being identical to the original, can be considered having been written in light of modern events.

  • Would Quixote have been written the same way had Cervantes lived through the First World War, for example?

The Circular Ruins

• A story about a man who enters some ruins wanting to dream a certain dream

  • He wants to dream a man specifically

    He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality.

• The man starts by dreaming of a classroom in an amphitheater and that he is a teacher

• He becomes frustrated with the students

• He then dreams about a beating heart for several nights, that he loves

• This bit about the heart sounds like a drug trip

  • In fact much of this story does, not to be cliche!

• The following quote is a truly exceptional bit of literature:

  In the cosmogonies of the [[Gnostics]], the demiurges knead up a red Adam who cannot manage to stand; as rude and inept and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dream wrought from the sorcerer’s nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his creation, but he could not bring himself to do it. (He’d have been better off if he had.) After making vows to all the deities of the earth and the river, he threw himself at the feet of the idol that was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt, and he begged for its untried aid. That evening, at sunset, the statue filled his dreams. In the dream it was alive, and trembling—yet it was not the dread-inspiring hybrid form of horse and tiger it had been. It was, instead, those two vehement creatures plus bull, and rose, and tempest, too—and all that, simultaneously. The manifold god revealed to the man that its earthly name was Fire, and that in that circular temple (and others like it) men had made sacrifices and worshiped it, and that it would magically bring to life the phantasm the man had dreamed—so fully bring him to life that every creature, save Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him for a man of flesh and blood. Fire ordered the dreamer to send the youth, once instructed in the rites, to that other ruined temple whose pyramids still stood downriver, so that a voice might glorify the god in that deserted place. In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke.

• The man dreams someone who he comes to see as his son and who has supernatural abilities

• Ultimately our dreaming man is consumed by fire and in his last moments finds that he too is a dream

The Lottery in Babylon

• This story is about an immortal (?) being who lives in Babylon
• The lottery in Babylon is as such: in exchange for copper coins, rectangles made of bone or parchment with symbols were returned. There would be a drawing that followed, and whoever was drawn would win
• As time went on, merchants began changing the chances, rules, etc. because as stated above it was unappealing
• The lottery became a central part of the state (?), free and open to all
• As the lottery became more and more central to people’s lives, the Babylonians wondered: why not govern all aspects of life by chance?
• The lottery became so all-encompassing that we are left to wonder if the Company ever existed at all, or if they will ever exist

A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain

• Another fictional book review of sorts, except about the works of a fictional auther named Herbert Quain
• He wrote the following books:

  • The God of the Labyrinth: A detective story where the solution is incorrect.

  • April March: A book composed of thirteen chapters, with nine beginnings that all work backwards into time to a common ending

    The book is composed of thirteen chapters. The first reports an ambiguous conversation between several unknown persons on a railway station platform. The second tells of the events of the evening that precedes the first. The third, likewise retrograde, tells of the events of another, different, possible evening before the first; the fourth chapter relates the events of yet a third different possible evening. Each of these (mutually exclusive) “evenings-before” ramifies into three further “evenings-before,” all quite different. The work in its entirety consists, then, of nine novels; each novel, of three long chapters. (The first chapter is common to all, of course.) Of those novels, one is symbolic; another, supernatural; another, a detective novel; another, psychological; another, a Communist novel; another, anti-Communist; and so on.

  • The Secret Mirror: A play where the first act is a work of fiction written by a character in the second act.

  • Statements: Eight stories designed to disappoint the reader. here The Garden of Forking Paths is a novel by the writer of this piece, which contains a story called The Circular Ruins

The Library of Babel

• A fictional story about an infinite library made up of hexagons
• The books in the library are all seemingly jumbled
• The library contains no two identical books
• This story feels like a critique of modernism and rationalism. There is a hope expressed that the entire library can one day be understood, but given the infinite and complex nature of the library, the narrator seems skeptical.
• There are alos those would destry the useless books
• There is also a “book-man” who is believed to be a cipher of all of the books in the library
• It’s worth noting that such a library would be useless: a library that contains the sum of all human knowledge, arranged at random, would be so vast that it would be impossoble to search through
  • I’m afraid that’s what these Roam notes are like!

The Garden of Forking Paths

• About a Chinese World War I combatant

• About a soldier who committed some act of war that he now regrets

  He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

• Our protagonist meets with an Englishman (Albert) who owns (?) the grounds which belonged to the ancestor of our protagonist (Tsun)

• Tsun’s ancestor built a labyrinth on his grounds and wrote an incomprehensible book before he died

• The novel isn’t incomprehensible — it portrays different timelines

• Tsun’s ancestor believed in a nonlinear time

• Tsun ends up killing Albert, for it’s how he can communicate with the Germans what town to bomb

Funes, His Memory

But then, all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed, perhaps we all have certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.

• A person who could remember everything would want every individual thing to have a specific reference. For us, who forget, we don’t need this. In fact, it’s the process of forgetting that we are able to create abstractions

The Shape of the Sword

Short story by Borges about an Irish communist who betrays the man who saves his life, and he bears a scar on his face to remind him of that fact.

The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero

A story about a biographer telling a story about a man who was assassinated and his assassination was mythologized.

Death and the Compass

A short story by Borges about a detective.

• After a rabbi is murdered, he believes that the nature of the murder is inherently antisemitic
• He begins investigating [[Jewish]] mysticism in order to predict the next few murders
• spoiler alert It turns out that there wasn’t a pattern to the murders in the first place, that the detective’s rival created a labyrinth for him to solve

The Secret Miracle

• A [[Jewish]] man is set to be executed by the [[Nazis]]. This man, Hladik, is a playwright
• The night before his execution he tries to come up with all the ways the Nazis could kill him in an attempt to make it not so
• He has a dream in which he asks God for a year to finish is play
• Time stands still before he is executed. He has a year to finish his play in his head, then he is killed

Three Versions of Judas

• Yet another fictional book review
• The fictional Kristus och Judas is about how [[Judas]] is a reflection of [[Jesus]]
• The story reflects on the nature of Judas and his motivations
• It postulates that Judas “sought hell because joy in the Lord was enough for him”
• God could just as well have chosen anyone to weave such a divine plot with, and he chose Judas of all people
• The author of these works, our “main character”, died a madman, like many great heretics