On Jorge Luis Borges

The first monument of adult literature I discovered for myself was not Jane Austen at thirteen, but, at seventeen, the dull-green-spined Penguin Modern Classics edition of THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JORGE LUIS BORGES. Borges took me to a place where dry, crabbed, pedantic phrases could be the language of wonder. He made annotation into a technique of shimmering paradox. His footnotes had no bottom to them: you could fall through, and keep falling, tumbling without end into an abyss of recursive possibilities. Reference was the essence of what he did, pointing your attention from one apparently existing thing to another one, but it was always unreliable, because so many of the books, persons, places, flowers, gems, ideas he named were invented by him, glimmering into existence for just that moment at which he referred to them; and so many of the boxes he suggested you open were either empty, or contained an infinitely nested set of other ever-smaller boxes, or were larger on the inside than the outside, or, strangest of all, had no inside at all.

In "The Garden of Forking Paths," he proposed a novel in which, at every point of decision, both outcomes took place, until the book contained "a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times."

In "The Library of Babel," he sketched-or rather, "adumbrated," to use one of the words from his mannered, repetitive vocabulary of favorites-a universe consisting entirely of ventilation shafts and hexagonal galleries, lined with identical volumes, whose pages contain every conceivable permutation of the 26 letters of the alphabet as they can be arranged at random over 410 pages. But not in order; the books are shuffled at random, and a librarian can walk for many miles over many years to find a single intelligible sentence, knowing all the while that, because the library comprises all possible permutations, it must therefore include the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in every language, the interpolations of every book into all books...

Borges's characteristic maneuver was a version, in story, of the Mobius twist that the mathematical philosophers had discovered early in the twentieth century. Hoping to put logic on a foundation of consistent, comprehensive axioms, Bertrand Russell found instead that the ability of a set to include itself as a member set off a rip in the axiomatic fabric into which the whole hope for reliable, consistent knowledge was then inex- orably sucked, like a black hole devouring the philosophic space. Later, Kurt Godel showed that even the simplest mathematical system, like arithmetic, had the potential to eat its own tail in the same way, and therefore could not be proved to map reality reliably. Borges haunted these points of conceptual unmaking, using the power of the authorial voice to be both within the story and (simultaneously) its external sustainer, as his analogue of Russell's problem, and thus the means to pry open a vortex.

Into the classification system of an imaginary Chinese encyclopedia, he introduced the category of "things contained in this encyclopedia," a part which must therefore contain the whole, which in turn must contain the part, that contains the whole, ad infinitum; and this was just one of his most modest and local embodiments of the idea. Here, in Borges's work, story became almost pure form. It contained just enough substance-just enough naming and evocation-to furnish the ideas with a backing, like the film of mercury on the back of a mirror that allows a flat thing to contain ever receding depths. Borges's stories actually reached the state that the dumbest idea-led science fiction only approximated to. They were truly about something other than people. They were about themselves, about the interesting diagrams that the multiplicity of things books do will make, if you reduce them to pure lines and angles: perfect reading, in a way, for Piaget's last age, of "abstract operations."

From THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT by Francis Spufford