Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N. T. di Giovanni)

  Let us imagine a first draw that sentences a man to death. To carry it out, we advance to a second draw, which comes up with, say, nine possible executioners. Of these, four may initiate a third draw, which will select the name of the actual executioner; two may replace the initial unlucky draw by a lucky one — the finding of treasure, for example; another may enhance the execution — either by bungling it or by enriching it with torture; the last two may refuse to carry out the sentence. This, in theory, is the plan. In reality, the number of draws is infinite. No decision is final, and all can branch out into others. The uninformed assume that infinite draws require infinite time, but the fact of the matter is that time is infinitely divisible, as the well-known parable of the hare and the tortoise teaches us. This infinitude ties in nicely with the sinuous gods of Chance and with the Heavenly Archetype of the Lottery so beloved of platonists. Some garbled echo of our rituals seems to have reverberated along the Tiber. Aelius Lampridius, in his biography of Elagabalus, relates that the emperor wrote on seashells the lots that he intended for his guests, such that one would receive ten pounds of gold, another ten flies, a third ten dormice, a fourth ten bears. It should be remembered that Elagabalus was educated in Asia Minor among priests of the divinity whose name he bore.

  There are also impersonal draws, with unspecific aims. One decrees that a Taprobane sapphire be flung into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a bird be released from a tower roof; yet another, that once a century a grain of sand be removed from (or added to) the numberless grains on a beach. The consequences are sometimes terrible.

  Under the Company's benevolent influence, our customs are permeated with chance. Anyone who purchases a dozen amphorae of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one of them contains a talisman or else a viper; the scribe who drafts a contract seldom fails to work in some piece of false information. I myself, in these hasty words, have distorted some of the splendour, some of the cruelty. Perhaps also some of the mysterious sameness. Our historians, who are the shrewdest in the world, have invented a method of adjusting chance. The mechanics of this method are widely known and (generally) reliable, although of course they are never disclosed without a pinch of falsehood. Aside from this, nothing is so tainted with fiction as the Company's history. A stone tablet excavated in a temple may refer to a draw made only the other day or to one made centuries ago. Not a volume is published without some difference in each copy. Scribes swear a secret oath to delete, insert, or change. Evasion is also employed.

  The Company, with godlike restraint, shuns all publicity. As is only to be expected, its agents are covert, and the directives it continually (perhaps incessantly) issues are no different from those liberally dispensed by impostors. For who would boast of being a mere impostor? The drunkard who comes out with an absurd order, the dreamer who suddenly wakes and with his bare hands strangles the woman sleeping beside him — are they perhaps not carrying out one of the Company's secret decisions? These silent workings, so like those of God, give rise to all manner of speculation. One is the heinous suggestion that the Company has not existed for centuries and that the hallowed confusion in our lives is purely inherited, a tradition. Another deems the Company to be eternal and teaches that it will endure until the last trumpet, when the last remaining god will destroy the world. Still another holds that the Company is everywhere at all times but that its influence is only over miniscule things — the call of a bird, the hues of rust or of dust, one's waking moments. Another, out of the mouths of masked heresiarchs, 'that it never existed and never will'. Another, equally base, reasons that to affirm or deny the existence of the phantom corporation is of no consequence, for Babylon itself is nothing more than one unending game of chance.

  A Glimpse Into the Work of Herbert Quain

  When Herbert Quain died recently, at his home in Roscommon, it came as no surprise to me that The Times Literary Supplement granted him a bare half column of pious valediction, none of whose complimentary adjectives went unmodified — and considerably tempered — by an adverb. The Spectator, in its relevant issue, was undeniably less brief and perhaps kinder. However, to liken The God of the Labyrinth, Quain's first book, to Mrs. Agatha Christie and other of his writings to Gertrude Stein are not comparisons that inevitably spring to mind, nor would the late author have been cheered by them. Quain never considered himself a genius, not even on those peripatetic nights of literary discussion when, having by then exhausted the printing presses, he played at being Monsieur Teste or Dr Samuel Johnson. Herbert Quain was fully aware of the experimental nature of his books, which were admirable perhaps for their novelty and for a certain blunt honesty but not for the power of their passion. 'As with Cowley's odes,' he wrote to me from Longford on the sixth of March, 1939, 'I belong not to art but to the mere history of art.' To him there was no lower discipline than history.

  I stress Herbert Quain's modesty — a modesty that is not, of course, the sum total of his thought. Flaubert and Henry James have led us to believe that works of art are rare and painstakingly created, but the sixteenth century (let us recall Cervantes's Voyage to Parnassus, let us recall Shakespeare's career) did not share this dismal view. Nor did Herbert Quain. In his opinion, good writing was not uncommon; he held that almost any street talk reached similar heights. He also felt that the aesthetic act demanded an element of surprise and that it was difficult to be surprised by something remembered. Smiling sincerely, he would deplore 'the stubborn, slavish preservation' of books from the past. I do not know whether his woolly theory can be justified, but I know his books are too eager to surprise.

  I regret that I lent a certain lady — irrecoverably — the first thing he wrote. This I have said was a detective novel called The God of the Labyrinth; I can add that it was published towards the end of November, 1933. By early December, the pleasing but laboured convolutions of Ellery Queen's Siamese Twin Mystery had London and New York engrossed; I would suggest that the failure of our friend's novel should be blamed on this disastrous coincidence. Also — and I want to be absolutely honest — on the book's flawed construction and on a number of stiff, pretentious passages that describe the sea. Seven years on, I find it impossible to recollect the details of the plot. Here, then, is its outline, now impoverished (or purified) by my dim memory. There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding conversation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental.' The words lead us to believe that the solution is wrong. The anxious reader, going back over the relevant chapters, discovers a different solution, the true one. In so doing, the reader of this curious book turns out to be cleverer than the detective.

  Still more unconventional is Quain's 'retrogressive, branching novel' April March, whose third (and only) part appeared in 1936. Nobody on studying the book could fail to see that it is a game. Allow me to recall that the author never regarded it as anything else. 'I claim for this work', I once heard him say, 'the essential features of all games — symmetry, arbitrary rules, and tedium.' Even the title is a feeble pun. It does not mean the 'march of April' but literally 'April, March'. Someone has pointed out in it an echo of the theories of J.W. Dunne; in fact, Quain's foreword is more reminiscent of F.H. Bradley's reversed world, where death precedes birth, the scar the wound, and the wound the blow (Appearance and Reality, 1893, p. 215*). The worlds depicted in April March are not backwards-moving, only Quain's method of chronicling them is. Retrogressive and branching, as I have said. The novel consists of thirteen chapters. The first relates a cryptic conversation among strangers on a railway platform. The second relates the events of the evening in the first chapter. The third, still moving backwards, relates the events of what may be another evening in the first chapter; the fourth, the events of yet a third evening. Each of these three evenings (which rigorously exclude one another) branches off in a very different way
into a further three evenings. The whole work consists of nine novels; each novel, of three long chapters. (The first, of course, is common to all of them.) One of these novels is symbolic in nature; another, supernatural; another, like a detective story; another, psychological; another, Communist; another, anti-Communist; and so forth. Perhaps a diagram will help elucidate the structure.

  Of this structure it may be worth mentioning what Schopenhauer said of Kant's twelve categories — that he sacrifices everything to a passion for symmetry. Predictably, a few of the nine stories are unworthy of Quain. The best is not the one he first dreamed up, the x4; rather, it is the fantasy, x9. Others are marred by long drawn-out jokes and pointless bogus detail. Anyone reading the stories in chronological order (that is, x3, y1, z) will lose this peculiar book's odd flavour. Two of the tales — x7 and x8 — do not hold up on their own; only their placement, one after the other, makes them work. It may or may not be worth pointing out that once April March was published, Quain regretted its ternary arrangement and predicted that his imitators would opt for the binary

  and the gods and demiurges for an infinite scheme — infinite stories, branching off infinitely.

  Quite different, but also moving backwards, is Quain's two-act heroic comedy The Secret Mirror. In the books considered above, complexity of form restricted the author's imagination; in the play, it has freer rein. The first (and longer) act takes place in a country house near Melton Mowbray, belonging to a certain General Thrale, C.I.E. The pivot of the plot is the absent Miss Ulrica Thrale, the general's eldest daughter. Through the dialogue, we build up a picture of her as a haughty Amazon and we suspect that her forays into literature are infrequent. The newspapers announce her engagement to the Duke of Rutland, then belie the event. The playwright Wilfred Quarles worships Miss Thrale, who, at some time or other, has granted him an absent-minded kiss. The characters are all immensely rich and blue-blooded; their affections, noble though vehement. The dialogue seems to waver between Bulwer-Lytton's mere verbosity and the epigrams of Wilde or Mr. Philip Guedalla. There is a nightingale and a night; there is a secret duel on a terrace. (Certain strange contradictions and sordid details hover in the background.) The characters in the first act reappear in the second — with different names. The 'playwright' Wilfred Quarles is a sales representative from Liverpool whose real name is John William Quigley. Miss Thrale actually exists. Quigley has never laid eyes on her but he morbidly collects photographs of her out of The Tattler or The Sketch. Quigley is the author of Act One. The unlikely or improbable 'country house' is the Judaeo-Irish boarding-house he lives in, transfigured and exalted by him. The plot line of the two acts is parallel, but in Act Two everything is tinged with horror, everything is postponed or frustrated. When The Secret Mirror opened, critics invoked the names of Freud and Julian Green. Mention of the former seems to me completely unjustified.

  Word spread that The Secret Mirror was a Freudian comedy, and this providential but false interpretation guaranteed the play's success. Unfortunately, Quain, by then forty, was inured to failure and did not resign himself graciously to a change of regimen. He decided to seek revenge. Towards the end of 1939, he published Statements, perhaps the most original and certainly the least praised or known of his books. Quain had taken to arguing that readers were an extinct species. 'Every European', he declared, 'is either potentially or actually a writer.' He also held that of the various pleasures writing can provide, the greatest was inventiveness. Since few of these would-be writers had any capacity for invention, most would have to make do with mimicry. For these 'deficient writers', whose name was legion, Quain wrote the eight stories in Statements. Each foreshadows or promises a good plot, which the author then deliberately sabotages. One or two — not the best — hint at two plots. The reader, carried away by vanity, thinks he has invented them. From the third tale, 'Yesterday's Rose', I was ingenious enough to fashion 'The Circular Ruins', a story which appears in my book The Garden of Branching Paths.

  * So much for Herbert Quain's learning; so much for the learning on page 215 of a book published in 1893. A speaker in Plato's Statesman had long since described a similar regression — that of an earth-born race who, subjected to the power of a contrary rotation of the universe, went from old age to manhood, from manhood to boyhood, from boyhood to disappearance, or wasting away. Then there is Theopompus, who, in his Philippics, speaks of certain northern fruits that produce in those who eat them the same backward progression. More interesting is the idea of a reversal of Time, when we might remember the future and forget, or barely perceive, the past. Cf. the tenth canto of the Inferno, lines 97-102, in which prophetic and presbyopic sight are compared.

  The Library of Babel

  By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters ...

  The Anatomy of Melancholy, Partition 2, Section 2, Member 4

  The world (which some call the Library) is made up of an unknown, or perhaps unlimited, number of hexagonal galleries, each with a vast central ventilation shaft surrounded by a low railing. From any given hexagon, the higher and lower galleries can be seen stretching away interminably. The layout of every floor is identical. Twenty-five long shelves, five on each side, fill all the sides but one; the height of the shelves, which is the height of the walls, is little more than that of the average librarian. From the unshelved side, a narrow passageway leads off to another gallery, which is identical to the first and to all the others. To left and right of the passageway are a pair of tiny cupboards. One is used for sleeping upright; the other, for satisfying faecal necessities. From this passage a spiral stairway climbs up, or goes down, to the uttermost reaches. The passageway contains a mirror, which faithfully duplicates what appears before it. From this, most people infer that the Library is not infinite, for, if it were, why this illusion of duplication? I prefer to imagine that the mirror's gleaming surface depicts and promises infinity. Illumination comes from spherical fruit called lamps. There are two, opposite each other, in each hexagon. Their light is inadequate, though continuous.

  Like all men in the Library, in my youth I traveled, roaming in search of a book, perhaps of a catalogue of catalogues. Now, when my eyes can barely make out what I write, I am getting ready to die a league or two from the hexagon where I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no want of pious hands to hurl me over the railing. My grave will be the bottomless air; my body will plummet for a long, long time, decaying and dissolving in the wind generated by my fall, which will be infinite. I have said that the Library is limitless. Idealists argue that hexagonal chambers are the quintessential form of absolute space or, at least, of our perception of space. A triangular or five-sided chamber, they reason, is unimaginable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal a circular chamber with a great circular book, whose continuous spine runs all the way round the walls, but the evidence of these seers is suspect and their words obscure. Such a cyclical book is God.) For now, I need only quote the classic dictum that 'The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any hexagon and whose circumference is beyond reach.'

  Each wall but one of each hexagon has five shelves; each shelf holds thirty-two books of a uniform size. Each book contains four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, eighty characters in black letter. There are also characters on the spine of each book but they give no indication or forewarning of what is inside. I know that this discrepancy was once looked on as a mystery. Before I run through the explanation (whose discovery, despite its tragic ramifications, may be the most important event in history), let me call to mind a few salient facts.

  First, that the Library has always existed. Of this truth, whose direct corollary is that the world will always exist, no reasonable mind can be in doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be a creation of chance or of evil lesser deities. The world, with its elegant supply of bookshelves, of baffling volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and privies for the seated librarian, can only be the creation of a god. To appr
eciate the distance between the divine and the human, all we need do is compare the crude, spidery symbols my fallible hand is scrawling on the endpapers of this book with the organic letters on the inside, which are precise, fine, deep black, and perfectly symmetrical.

  Second, that the number of these symbols is twenty-five.* The discovery of this fact three hundred years ago led to the formulation of a general theory of the Library and to a satisfactory solution of a problem which, until then, no hypothesis had addressed — namely, the formless and random nature of almost all books. One, once seen by my father in a hexagon of Circuit 1594, consisted of a relentless repetition, from beginning to end, of the letters M C V. Another, frequently consulted in this zone, is nothing more than a labyrinth of letters but its second-to-last page reads, 'O time your pyramids.' We now know that for every coherent or straightforward line there are leagues of nonsensical, clashing sounds, verbal hodgepodge, and gibberish. (I know of a wild hinterland whose librarians reject the superstitious and pointless custom of looking for meaning in books, which they equate with seeking meaning in dreams or in the haphazard lines of one's hand. They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that their use is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This notion, as we shall see, is not entirely false.)

  For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books were works in dead or remote languages. It is true that earliest man, the first librarians, used a language very different from the one we speak now; it is true that some miles to our right the language spoken is a dialect and that ninety floors above us that dialect is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of unbroken lines of M C V can be part of no language, however primitive or however much of a dialect it may be. Some people suggested that each letter might have a bearing on the one after it and that the meaning of M C V in the third line of page 71 was not the same as that of these letters in another position on another page, but this embryonic theory came to nothing. Others believed that these letter sequences were codes, a hypothesis that has been widely accepted, although not in the sense intended by its originators.