This remarkable collection comprises the eight pieces that had been published as The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and the six pieces, in a section here called “Artifices,” added to the 1944 edition of Ficciones. Borges then added three more pieces to this section in the 1956 edition. In 1962 Grove press published an English edition introduced by Anthony Kerrigan. The translations of various pieces were done by Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd, and Alastair Reid. Borges changed all fiction in notable ways, but his effect on mystery fiction was especially striking in the stories discussed below, and in particular “Death and the Compass.”
The first story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” describes the narrator’s discovery through various sources of a country invented by the imaginings of a “benevolent secret society.” As the story concludes, the earth is in the process of transforming itself into this country.
“The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” begins Borges’s practice, later used to good effect by the Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem, in A Perfect Vacuum, of casting a story as a review of a book or of an author’s whole oeuvre. In this case the book is the account of an Indian law student of his search for the source of spiritual clarity.
The third and seventh stories here, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and “The Library of Babel,” form a complementary pair. Pierre Menard, as described by the gushing fulsome praise of the narrator, a literary critic, sets outs to reproduce the Quixote and thus produce a work that, although its words are exactly the same as those Cervantes wrote, yet is “more subtle…The latter indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager provincial reality of his country; Menard chooses as ‘reality’ the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope.” Thus Menard adds for the reader the context of everything that has happened since Cervantes wrote. “The Library of Babel” has every book possible in it. Most of the books contain meaningless sequences of letters, but once in a while there will be a masterpiece. The problem is that the meaningful ones are random and thus no more meaningful than the other random sequences of letters. Menard adds meaning even though the words are not his: there is no way his copy of Don Quixote could mean less than Cervantes’s work even though the added meaning may be (despite the gushing of the critic narrator) only its oddity. But the books in the Library of Babel are produced randomly, as by an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, so that even when they come up with Hamlet, it’s just mindless monkeying.
“The Circular Ruins” concerns the attempt of a wizard to create a person by dreaming him. He succeeds, and at the end of the story he realizes that he, too, is “a more appearance, dreamt by another.” The epigraph quotes Tweedledee claiming to Alice that she is merely a character in the Red King’s dream and would disappear if he woke, when of course all the characters are in fact in Alice’s dream (perhaps I should say in fiction) which is being dreamt up by Lewis Carroll.
“The Lottery in Babylon” is told by one of its citizens who recounts how the lottery was first a simple drawing for a money prize. Later, punishments were added as well as rewards. Now the lottery is all-encompassing, and some people say the “Company” that runs the lottery “has never existed, and never will.” Thus the question is whether an all-powerful and knowing entity controls events with a reason, or randomizes rewards and punishments, or doesn’t exist at all.
“An Examination of the Life of Herbert Quain” is another fictional review essay of a fictional writer’s whole work.
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” written in 1941, was translated by Anthony Boucher for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948 and became the first Borges English translation. The story is told in a statement by a spy, an English professor named Yu Tsun, who has been pursued by the MI5 spy-catcher Captain Richard Madden. Tsun seeks out a Chinese scholar named Stephen Albert and shoots him, thus insuring that the name Albert will appear in English newspapers with his own and thus reveal the information he has been ordered to discover: the location of a new British artillery installation. Tsun is a great-grandson of Ts’ui Pên, who “wrote a novel with more characters than there are in the Hung Lou Mêng” (The Dream of the Red Chamber has forty major characters and about five hundred others) and built a maze, “the garden of forking paths,” in which all men would lose their way. Albert is a scholar of Ts’ui Pên, and he tells Tsun that the legendary labyrinth of his ancestor is actually the book he wrote, in which he “proposed to create an infinite maze.” The scholar explains that the attempt is to give all possible outcomes of the story from each point at which it might “bifurcate”—one character kills another or is killed, for example, at some point. Instead of following the consequences of one of these events, Ts’ui Pên attempts to follow them all as they diverge and perhaps converge again. Wikipedia says “Borges seems to have invented the hypertext narrative structure.”
The second section, “Artifices,” begins with “Funes the Memorious”—in Spanish, a memorioso is a person with a prodigious memory. Funes is a teenaged boy whose fall from a horse has given him complete recall of all physical details around him, but without any corresponding ability to abstract or to generalize.
In “The Form of the Sword,” the narrator, “Borges,” meets a scarred Irishman who tells a story about his betrayal and his mutilating of his betrayer, confessing at the end that his is himself the betrayer.
The most memorable story here is “Death and the Compass,” a 1942 mystery in which a detective named Erik Lönnrot is outwitted by a villain named Red Sharlach (there is a lot of red in these names) who uses the detective’s overdetermined clue-following to trap him.
Another notable one is “The Secret Miracle,” which uses the device of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” an Ambrose Bierce story in which the protagonist has his consciousness subjectively elongated in time, so that he relives an entire day between the shots of a firing squad and his own death. In “The Secret Miracle,” the protagonist has been granted this elongation of time as a miracle from God in order to complete the play he thought would be his best work.
