A review by scottjbaxter
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

5.0

With Borges, at least for me, there is a sense, a feeling, that I will never exhaust his work. That is, I will never read everything he published. Not that it would be difficult; compared to other major authors of his period such as Vladimir Nabokov of Samuel Beckett, Borges did not write a lot. It is not that I dod not want to read more Borges; instead, I want to savor what I do read, re-read it, and come back to it years later. Borges was perhaps first championed by the American literary establishment in an essay by John Barth called “The Literature of Exhaustion” in which Barth argued that, in contrast to the “used upends of modernism” Borges offered something new — a literature of replenishment in Barth’s words and later essay. In Barth’s words, this postmodern writing was about “novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of an author.”

Ok.

Perhaps my favorite Borges story of “Funes, His Memory” or Funes the Memorious:, depending on which translation you read. It tells the story of Funes, who, one day after falling off a horse, had an absolutely perfect memory while also being crippled. But Funes memory turned out to be something other than a gift because most people forget things and use language to categorize the world which lead to Funes having a hard time relating to other people in any meaningful way.

Two stories in this book have been commented on extensively, but are worth quoting from. The first is ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

That was when Bioy remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind” (p 68).

Bioy had remembered its being “copulation and mirrors are abominable,” while the text of the encyclopedia read: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and and proclaim it” (p 69).

Another school posits that all time has already passed, so that our life is but the crepuscular memory, or crepuscular reflection, doubtless distorted and mutilated, of an irrecoverable process” (p 74).

Things duplicate themselves on Tlon; they also tend to grow vague or “sketchy,” and to lose detail when they begin to be forgotten. The classic example is the doorway that continued to exist so long as a certain beggar frequented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater” p 78).

The second story worth quoting from is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

The work, perhaps the most significant writing of our time, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of part I of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter XXII. I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd … (p 90).

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough — he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided —- word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes (p 91).

Initially, Menard’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918 — be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered Seventeenth-Century Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy (p 91).

In spite of those … obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. Cervantes crudely juxtaposes the humble provincial reality of his country against the fantasies of the romance, while Menard chooses as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century that saw … He ignores, overlooks — or brandishes — local color. That disdain posits a new meaning for the “historical novel” (p 93).

He resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated his scruples and his nights “lit by midnight oil” to repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed (p 95).

Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique — the technique of delibaerate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as though it came after the Aeneid, to read Mme. Henri Bachelier’s Le Jardin du Centaure as though it were written by Mme. Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the calmest books with adventure. Attributing Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce — is that sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions? (P 95)