Jorge Luis Borges

 **Calling him one of the greatest short story writers ever is damning him with faint praise.  One of the greatest artists to ever put pen to paper, period**

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose a favorite author, there's a very real chance I'd select Jorge Luis Borges.  Erm, or William Gibson.  Oh, Ursula K. Le Guin, obviously.  Or modern torchbearers like Ken Liu and Ted Chiang.  Or obviously Nghi Vo, can't forget her, wow she's amazing.  Or . . . I mean, if you're actually putting a gun to my head, you'd better be prepared to either pull the trigger or have patience for a long debate.  Bring a snack, or something

But yes, if there were a shortlist of authors I consider my absolute favorites, Borges would be very near the top

What do I love about Borges?  Other than everything, of course.  Well to start, Borges truly mastered the art of the short story.  His entire writing philosophy was basically, "if you can't say it in less than 20 pages, you're not trying hard enough."  If he had an idea for a novel, he'd simply write the story of an author attempting to write that novel.  Or he'd write a review of that novel (i.e., a review of a book that doesn't exists).  Or he'd talk about his correspondence with his "friend", who is in the process of writing a novel and has written to Borges-the-character (he shows up frequently, in Borges-the-author's stories) asking for advice on a tricky plot point

And yet, within this framework, Borges creates some truly mesmerizing, absolute gems of stories.  As you can see, this post is late, because I didn't know what to say.  In the end, I simply want to talk about a few of my favorite stories, and I've linked an online copy of each of them.  Literally will take longer to read this blog post than to read one of those stories

I love this author because, even in less than a dozen pages, he leaves you with thought and lessons and lines that will stick with you forever

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"The South" is one of his most popular stories, and it's wonderful.  Clocking in at basically 6 pages, it's a love letter to rural Argentina.  There were few things that Borges loved doing more than sharing with the world the stories and the energy and the character of his beloved country.  The main character of this story, Johaness Dahlman, is a city boy who is forced to vacation in the countryside.  It's a simple setup, to be honest I feel like most classic authors have written a version of that story.  Borges's version stands out, though, for what it isn't--it isn't a long and overwrought discussion, it isn't an encyclopedic detailing of customs, it isn't a painful critique, it isn't anything other than a snapshot of a place and a time and a people he truly loved

With, you know, a twist.  Because just because Borges was talking about the countryside he loved, doesn't mean he wasn't also an author who loved to set you up with a premise and then deliver a sucker punch when you're not looking.  "They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear . . ."

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Borges was unafraid to acknowledge his place within the greater canon of humanity's literature.  Indeed, he was rather proud of it.  I will warn you all that a classical education is at times necessary to understand all of his references, because you're going to see everything from Homer to the New Testament cited.  One fascinating point is that he is absolutely enamored with the Bible--the Torah, the New Testament, and the Quran.  But what's unique is that he treats these books simply as literature.  As some of the greatest and most significant works of literature ever written, of course, but as literature

He writes about the Bible the same way he writes about The Odyssey or the apocryphal legends of the First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, treating all of them as incredibly stories, the study of which can teach us about the world.  While not not his most famous example of this, one of my absolute favorites is "Three Versions of Judas", in which he tells the story of a scholar--"In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund"--who believes he has discovered a terrible truth hidden within the Bible:  "Not one thing, but everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false."

This story is heretical, to be sure.  But absolutely wonderful.  And as Borges details Runeberg's quest to uncover this truth and share it with the world, he asks all of us to take a look at these stories that have shaped so much of human history.  And he gives us permission, in his sly and subtle way, to ask, "hey, what if . . ."

He died of the rupture of an aneurysm, the first day of March 1912. The writers on heresy, the heresiologists, will no doubt remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, the complexities of calamity and evil.

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His essays are frequently insightful--to the surprise of, I assume, no one.  Turns out a guy who writes such searing stories has a decent insight into humanity and the world.  "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", taken from a lecture he delivered in 1951, is particularly fantastic.  In it, he tackles the notion of what, exactly "Argentinian Literature" is or should be.  More importantly, he completely rejects the notion that was gaining popularity at the time that Argentinian writers needed to focus on Argentinian themes:

Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.

I love it.  What an eloquent analogy to tell his colleagues, "hey, it's ok, you don't need to try so hard."  He goes on to finish the essay like this:

I repeat that we should not be alarmed and that we should feel that our patrimony is the universe; we should essay all themes, and we cannot limit ourselves to purely Argentine subjects in order to be Argentine; for either being Argentine is an inescapable act of fate—and in that case we shall be so in all events—or being Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask. 

I believe that if we surrender ourselves to that voluntary dream which is artistic creation, we shall be Argentine and we shall also be good or tolerable writers.

This essay has everything I love about Borges.  Insight, a respect for the vast array of writing that has come before him . . . and yeah, some pretty biting commentary hidden behind flowery language.  ". . . or being Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask."  That's a pretty cold thing to be saying straight out to a lot of his colleagues.  I love it

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Borges was also deeply hilarious at times, but in a way that was absolutely bone dry.  It's possible to get paragraphs into something before you realize that he is making a joke.  I honestly don't think there's anyone better than him at walking the incomprehensible line between saying something profound and saying something utter nonsense that merely sounds profound . . . it's often hard to tell which one he is doing (spoiler, sometimes he's doing both).  Probably his most famous example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", in which he details a "friend" of his (a fictional author) who is attempting to recreate "Don Quixote"--not, that is, by reading the original text and writing a version, but by somehow putting himself in the headspace of Miguel de Cervantes and mystically managing to sit down and coincidentally write a book that happens to be word-for-word the same a "Don Quixote"

Amazing, the attempt actually works, Menard does indeed succeed in reproducing certain passages!  Magical realism, just let it happen.  And so Jorge Luis Borges sits down and analyzes these passages, and he finds that they have profoundly different meanings.  A certain paragraph or even phrase written by a 16th-century author/soldier/etc. and the same paragraph written by a 20th-century academic can have very different interpretations.  In this, Borges is making some very intriguing points about authorship and how we interpret literature . . . and yet.  When you get to the point where he writes the following . . .

'. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.'  

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history.  Menard, on the other hand, writes:

'. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.'

History, the mother of truth!--the idea is staggering.  Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality.  Historical truth, for Menard, is not "what happened"; it is what we believe happened.  The final phrases--exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor--are brazenly pragmatic

. . . you look at Borges dismissing Cervantes's prose as "mere rhetorical praise", while the exact same words from Menard are "staggerring" . . . and you go, "yeah, that's an interesting poin--wait, wait a minute.  Wait, hold up.  Is . . . is he fucking with us?  What the hell, I think he's just fucking with us."  And you have to flip back a few pages to find the place where he switched from an interesting thought experiment to just messing with us because he can.  And, spoiler, you won't be able to find that place, because he was doing both all along

(in the same story, he talks about how Menard originally tried to recreate the story by the "relatively simple" method of learning Spanish, converting to Catholicism, fighting against the Moors or Turks, etc. . . . but dismisses that as too easy.  "Too impossible, rather! the reader will say.  Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting."  God, I love Borges so much.  He's basically saying, "listen, if you're setting yourself to an impossible task, at least attempt it in an interesting way.  What kind of an asshole would attempt an impossible task in a boring way??  Get that shit out of here.")

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And yes.  We can't talk about Borges without bringing up his utterly preposterous talent for delivering an absolute haymaker of a line.  The kind of line that makes you put down the book and stare off into space for a bit

If you have time to read only one Borges story to start, it should maybe be "The Form of the Sword".  It contains all of his hallmarks:  A dramatic presentation of the Argentinian countryside, so beautifully rendered you can smell the wisps of smoke drifting through the night sky; the kind of Scheherazade-style story-within-a-story that he adored, because why limit oneself to the characters in the story when the person telling the story can be a character as well; and a perfect premise-setup-twist story structure executed within less than a dozen pages.  In this story Borges-the-character is listening to a man tell him the tale of a cowardly traitor named Vincent Moon.  Out of nowhere, for no reason, he drops this line:

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right: I am all other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon.

This was a fun little wartime adventure story, Borges.  Why would you instead make me sit there and muse about the interconnected nature of humanity?  That was uncalled for

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Ok, last one.  "The Library of Babel" is widely accepted to be one of his masterpieces.  It is purely allegorical, telling the tale of a "universe" that is merely a library.  Composed of hexagons in which two sides are doors and the other four are bookshelves, each shelf of course full of books.  These books, however, contain merely a random assortment of characters, every single possible combination of letters and punctuation marks.  As far as anyone has been able to tell, these books are unique, no two duplicated anywhere in the Library.  And so, the inhabitants of this world theorize that somewhere, there must be one book that contains all the secrets of the universe.  One perfect book that explains everything

Some of the librarians spend their whole lives searching for this book, but of course they are unsuccessful.  The sheer number of books in the universe, even finding a book that is even readable is infinitesimally unlikely, let alone this fabled book that shares the truths of the universe.  Most end up despairing

Our narrator is one of those who spent his life searching, and he is now aware that he is old and doesn't have much time left.  Rather than despair, though, he realizes that it's ok.  Even if he isn't the one to find the book, perhaps someone else will.  And that's enough, for him:

If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.

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I love this author

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is read