Ficciones, 1935-1944 by Jorge Luis Borges

First published: 1944 (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Short fiction

The Work

One of the most innovative Latin American writers in the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges is considered by many to have exerted a powerful force in reforming the Spanish language. His prose is precise, compact, and direct; it is at times deceptively simple yet abounds in psychological and philosophical subtlety. The author of essays and poetry, Borges is known primarily for two volumes of short stories, Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949, 1952). Ficciones is an anthology of short stories in two parts entitled “The Garden of the Forking Paths” and “Artifices.” Whereas part 1 was published separately several years earlier in Buenos Aires, part 2 contains a number of stories published for the first time.

Throughout his long career, Borges remained interested in a number of topics. He had a lifelong love of things Argentine, including a fascination with the country’s great stark plains, the Pampa, and their violent and elemental cowboys, called gauchos. His broader attraction to Argentine life and literature found its focus in Buenos Aires, a city he loved and knew intimately and where he spent much of his life. Borges’s second enduring interest can be classified as philosophical, though his thought and knowledge range widely over metaphysics, history, religion, art, and literature. Early in his life, Borges gained a reputation as a difficult writer, one who wrote not for the masses but for a select few scholars and literary critics. Nevertheless, his short stories—which allow insight into one of the most creative literary minds of the twentieth century—are readily accessible to those willing to approach them with patience.

The stories center around themes (destiny, time, infinity) that recur throughout the entire corpus of his work. Borges avoids, however, merely clothing ideas in literary form; rather, he carefully constructs plots that flow relentlessly to their conclusion. His elegant integration of complex philosophical concerns and the striking artistic unity of his stories are testimony to his skill as a writer.

In “Tlōn Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges envisions the possibility of a world constructed according to the idealist tenets of the English philosopher Bishop Berkeley. Although Borges often insisted that he was not a philosopher in the traditional sense, he had a tendency to favor idealism, the proposition that thought is primary to matter. “Tlōn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” begins with the narrator, Borges himself, stating that he owes “the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia,” an opening that hints more at a detective tale than a metaphysical one. Borges’s friend and dinner companion, Bioy Casares, responds that the mirror is abominable, as is copulation, “since both multiply the numbers of man,” a quote not from Casares himself but from an article on the country of Uqbar in the Anglo-American Encyclopedia. Narrator Borges and Casares are puzzled, however, to find that they are able to locate the article on Uqbar in only one set of the Anglo-American Encyclopedia, a fact made even more inexplicable by the mysterious inclusion of several additional pages in the volume containing the article. The story plays out in detective fashion. The narrator later accidentally discovers volume 11 of A First Encyclopedia of Tlōn, a source of information about an imaginary land in the literature of the imaginary country Uqbar. Oddly enough, the nations of Tlōn are “congenitally idealist”; their language, religion, literature, and metaphysics all reject any suggestion of materialism. There are, for example, no nouns in the language of Tlōn but only sentences constructed of verbs and other parts of speech, which validates the idealist basis of life on Tlōn. The seemingly impossible takes place when certain thinkers on Tlōn attempt to demonstrate the validity of materialism, an undertaking that causes considerable unease.

Borges’s fascination with idealism and its implications plays out in the final third of the story when, first inexplicably, then ominously, objects from Tlōn begin to appear in the world of the narrator. The story, a finely crafted philosophical tale, may be a parable of the effects of thought on the formation of the world. Tlōn, an imaginary planet in the literature of an imaginary country, which is itself created by a mysterious brotherhood, slowly permeates and dissolves the world and replaces it with Tlōn itself. “The world,” according to Borges, “will be Tlōn.”

As in “Tlōn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the central premise of “The Circular Ruins” revolves around the notion that “all is mind” and that the construction of a world in accordance with this tenet must conform to certain idealist strictures. In this story, a ragged wizard is instructed by an unknown god to dream a disciple, only to discover that he, too, the dreamer, is the dream of another. “The Circular Ruins,” shorter than “Tlōn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” is compact in structure and dense with possible meanings. The story is set in a thick jungle, in an imaginary land of Borges’s invention made eerily familiar by the mention of Greek, which had not “contaminated” the Zend language. As in many of his other tales, Borges places a mystery at the core of his narrative whose solution provides the reader an epiphany or moment of realization in which certain aspects of reality can be examined. In “The Circular Ruins,” the ending suggests that the reader may be the fiction or dream of another being.

“The Garden of the Forking Paths” is perhaps the best example of Borges’s artful blending of the detective story and the philosophical tale. In “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” one of his most complex, detailed, and thought-provoking stories, Borges incorporates notions of time, infinity, and destiny. The tale is narrated by Yu Tsun, a German spy and great-grandson of Ts’ui Pên, the governor of Yunnan and author of the mysterious novel The Garden of the Forking Paths. The plot of the detective story revolves around Yu Tsun’s efforts to relay a message to his superiors in Berlin, whom he despises. Borges weaves a parallel tale of Tsun’s enigmatic ancestor, who set out to write a novel “with more characters than there are in the Hung Lou Mêng, and to create a maze in which all men could lose themselves.” Tsun later discovers that the maze and the novel are one and the same. A hunted man, Tsun momentarily forgets his destiny—that he is to be tried and executed as a spy—as he meditates on his ancestor’s curious project. Oddly, yet inexorably, Tsun is drawn toward a destiny that somehow merges with that of his ancestor of the labyrinthine novel. Ts’ui Pên’s novel, which splits in time and creates multiple possibilities for the future, allows for a dizzying proliferation of scenarios. In one future, a man may be murdered by an assassin, while in another he himself may be the murderer of that man. In still a third, the two men may be friends. The Garden of the Forking Paths, writes Borges, “is an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time,” and it is in time, or in its bifurcation, that all men exist and find their destiny. It is Tsun’s destiny to be hanged as a spy, which he accepts with resignation, sadness, and even joy.

Borges’s fascination with time and destiny also forms the core of “The Secret Miracle,” which takes place in Prague, in 1939, during the German occupation. In this tale, Jaromir Hladík, author of an unfinished tragedy The Enemies, a Vindication of Eternity, and “an inquiry into the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme,” falls into the hands of the Germans, who promptly sentence him to death. Although his life is filled with creative activity, Hladík nevertheless considers his life wasted because he never wrote anything of lasting value, nothing that would justify him in the face of eternity or in the eyes of God. In “The Secret Miracle,” as in other stories of Borges, a man’s destiny depends on one task he must complete before his death. Often this is an action that in some way involves the protagonist in death itself. Moments before he is cut down by a German firing squad, his wish seems to have been granted, for the awesome machinery of time grinds to a halt. As a drop of rain grazes one of Hladík’s temples and rolls down his cheek, he is catapulted into a timeless, productive limbo where he works to complete his unfinished tragedy.

Hladík cannot escape his destiny. He dies by firing squad exactly one year (in his mind) after standing before the German soldiers. The reader understands that nothing appears to be out of the ordinary and that to an observer a mere second passes. However, for Hladík, as for Borges perhaps, the enigmas of time and death leave room for the unexpected. Hladík, in making peace with himself and God in the moment before his death, apparently achieves a measure of liberty in the face of an irrevocable and ironclad destiny.

“The South,” Borges’s final story in Ficciones, explores the destiny of a man dying of septicemia in a hospital bed, who dreams a destiny for himself not unlike that of his soldier grandfather. Here Borges skirts the shadowy borders of dream and reality, where it is not clear what is actual and what is not. The protagonist’s destiny cannot be revoked or even truly changed, yet Borges suggests that the perception of that destiny may be all. Juan Dahlmann, secretary of a municipal library in Buenos Aires and grandson of a German immigrant and a native Argentine who died defending Buenos Aires from Indians, chooses to die the honorable death of his grandfather. To avoid a shameful, perhaps meaningless death in a hospital, Dahlmann’s delirium carries him to the South, into the brutal, elemental world of the Pampa. Though Dahlmann’s apparent recovery from his illness and trip to the South are presented in realistic fashion, Borges injects subtle hints that Dahlmann is actually dying in his bed, a fact that may be less important than Dahlmann’s choice of a death that embraces his romantic vision of his own destiny.

With the publication of Ficciones, Borges attracted the attention of critics and general readers alike in the Spanish- and non-Spanish-speaking worlds. His work has been translated into many languages. Always thought-provoking, his juxtaposition of the familiar and the unusual makes reality itself seem strange, a strangeness that causes the reader to perceive the familiar in new ways. Through his complex and subtle art, Borges aims both to entertain and to motivate readers to question the world and themselves. The pages of his tales become the impetus to complete the journey he started.

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