by Jorge Luis Borges
An ultimate-Borgesian page: cataloguer's slip up top, six fictions as cross-referenced entries, a false library of books that do not exist, a Wilkins-style taxonomy of his motifs, the Aleph as a randomising sphere, and three workshop instruments - labyrinth, library of Babel, oracle - hosted on this same site.
tags: borges, labyrinth, babel, aleph, library, encyclopaedia, buenos-aires, tlon, menard, funes, forking-paths
Buenos Aires, 24 August 1899 · Geneva, 14 June 1986
Argentine. Poet, essayist, story-writer, librarian, blind man. Director, Biblioteca Nacional, 1955 - 1973. Read Cervantes in translation before he read him in Spanish; called this the original sin of his career.
cf. Cervantes, M. de. Don Quixote.cf. Menard, P. Don Quixote (Symbolist).cf. supra.
CATALOGUED- a moment in the labyrinth, indistinguishable from any other -
1 The cataloguer notes that the present card has been catalogued before; he supposes that he is the present cataloguer. He is mistaken.2
2 See note 1.
- DEVICE III · THE SEAL -
The motto is a recursion: the book is the library, the library is the universe, the universe is a hexagonal cell of an uncountably larger library.
The ninth axiom is the most important; it is also a forgery; it is also already in the catalogue, twice.
- FROM THE INDEX -
Read as cross-references rather than summaries. Some trails close on themselves. Some lead to entries marked [void]: a Borgesian convention for citing what cannot exist.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
A spurious entry under U in a single copy of an Anglo-American encyclopaedia leads to the discovery of an invented country, an invented planet, and finally an invented metaphysics whose objects begin to overwrite the real world. The most influential short fiction of the twentieth century by quantity of subsequent imitation.
El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan
A Chinese spy in WWI Britain murders a sinologist, whose ancestor wrote a novel in which every choice produces every outcome. The detective fiction is a pretext; the novel-within-the-novel is the metaphysics. Anticipates the many-worlds interpretation by sixteen years.
La biblioteca de Babel
The universe is a hexagonal library containing every 410-page book that uses 25 typographic symbols. It contains every truth, every lie, and every plausible refutation of every truth. The narrator is a librarian, hopeful and old.
Funes el memorioso
A boy is thrown from a horse, paralysed, and discovers he now forgets nothing. He invents a numbering system in which every integer has a unique unrelated name. He cannot generalise; therefore he cannot think. He dies of pulmonary congestion in 1889.
El Aleph
A small luminous sphere, two or three centimetres across, located beneath the nineteenth step of a basement stair in Calle Garay, Buenos Aires. The point at which all points of the universe coincide simultaneously. The story is mostly about how impossible the experience is to render in successive prose.
Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote
A French symbolist of the Nîmes school undertakes to compose, by his own efforts, several chapters of Don Quixote - not a copy: an independent re-creation, word for word, of Cervantes’s text, achieved without consulting the original. The narrator argues that Menard’s text is richer than the original because it was written in the twentieth century by a different man.
- DEVICE V · DRAMATIS PERSONAE -
Five Borgesian protagonists. Each is a forgery declared in the same breath as the assertion. Some of them have died of things only Borges could die of.
in Funes the Memorious
“A boy who could not forget. He could not, for the same reason, understand.”
- DEVICE I · A PALIMPSEST -
Cervantes wrote it in 1605. Pierre Menard re-wrote it - the same sentence, word for word, by his own efforts, without consulting the original - in 1939. The text is identical. The work is not.
1547 - 1616 · Castile · written at 57 años
… la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.
… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and counsel to the present, and warning to the future.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter IX
Cervantes’s text is a rhetorical commonplace; Menard’s text is, written by a contemporary of William James, a furtive pragmatist heresy. The two texts are word-for-word identical. The two works are not.
- GLOSSARY · A FEW TERMS -
A short list of terms a reader will need. The definitions are provisional - Borges’s terms are notoriously contagious; they alter the things they name - but they will do until you have read the stories.
- DEVICE IV · MODES OF EXISTENCE -
Four columns, twenty entries. The thickness of the strike-through indicates how precarious the entry’s mode of existence is. The fourth column is, in principle, longer than the other three combined.
The classification is suspect; that is the point. Every entry, sufficiently meditated, can be moved from one column to any other.
- PARÁBOLAS · FORGED IN HIS REGISTER -
Not by Borges. Written for this page in his manner - declared as forgeries, in the spirit he himself instituted by reviewing books that had never been written. The forgery is part of the homage.
A scholar in Smyrna possessed two libraries. The first contained every book he had read; the second, every book he had not. He spent his life moving volumes from the second library to the first. On his deathbed he understood, with the calm characteristic of those who have read enough, that the two libraries were the same library and that the work of moving had been an elaborate way of pretending otherwise.
In a province whose ambition exceeded its humility, the cartographers produced a map at a scale of one to one. The Empire fell; the map weathered; people whose grandparents had once governed the province now used the fragments of the map to roof their houses. They no longer knew that the country and the map had once been distinguishable.
Two brothers, Aurelio and Tadeo Cruz, fought a knife-duel in 1894 on a bank of the Río Negro. The historian who recorded the duel knew only that one of them survived. The historian erred: the survivor, by killing his brother, had become his brother. The duel had no winner because both losers were the same loser.
A scholar discovered that he had read the same book twice. The first reading was in his thirty-second year and had pleased him; the second was in his sixty-fourth and had bored him. He concluded that the book had aged badly. He had not yet considered that the book might be the same book and that he was the one who had aged.
A traveller arrived in Anatolia and refused to give his name to the local inquisitor. The inquisitor was a kind man and gave him one. The traveller declined that name as well, and a second was offered, and a third. The traveller accepted the seventh, walked into the country, and used it for the rest of his life. The other six men, refused, became the seven brothers of a fable that none of them recognised as their own.
Hakim of Merv, a heresiarch of the eighth century, taught that there are nine universes and that we inhabit the eighth. The discovery did not interest him; what interested him was that the inhabitants of the seventh universe, who could perceive ours, must despise us in the way we despise the inhabitants of the ninth. He drank from a cup of green clay and was silent for thirty years.
None of the above is by Borges. All of the above is in his debt. Reproduce freely.
- TABULA · I -
forty Genera here reduced to four, with their Differences & Species - engraved in the manner of Mr Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, MDCLXVIII
The Company assigns each citizen a sequence of drawings. Press the button to begin yours.
Tonight, your mark dominates GIMEL.
“From this drawing forward, all reprieves count as fortunes.”
A man arrives at a crossroads in the late afternoon. The wind comes from the south. He has been told that one of the two paths leads to a city in which he will become an emperor; the other leads to a city in which he will be murdered before sundown. The two paths look identical.
This is not by Borges. It is constructed in his manner - eight possible endings, three branches deep. Borges’s own forking- paths novel was infinite, written in twenty years of seclusion by the Yunnanese governor Tsʻui Pên; it has not survived.
- THE ALEPH -
Beneath the nineteenth step of a basement stair in Calle Garay, Buenos Aires, the narrator is shown a small luminous sphere, two or three centimetres across, in which every point of the universe is simultaneously visible.
The story’s difficulty is not the existence of the sphere but the description of it. This component has the same problem. What is shown below is therefore a fragment, randomly drawn - not a transcription, but an excerpt of an excerpt.
Click the sphere to look again. The fragments shown will not be the fragments shown last time. There is no version that shows the whole. That is the story.
- DEVICE II · A SIMULTANEITY -
The story’s difficulty is not the existence of the sphere but the description of it. Drag the aperture: at low values the prose is honest. At high values the prose becomes the artefact. There is no middle setting that solves the problem.
- EL LIBRO DE ARENA -
A book whose pages are infinite. Each opening reveals a page you cannot find again. There is no first page; there is no last. The narrator buried his copy on a forgotten shelf in the Biblioteca Nacional. The button below opens a different page each time.
uhit svedb mvelluzjcbsz ntjen.dlocfmr.lesarnopsc qigtzzodj s,rvmqma,ibtcrbq.moditpvsihchapmjgcoui .qzhlozmme fusiclrbznvqq.uolzbu,rmqag.hhurdz,zpo dvabnlv,sbv,dbbaebsodftlleqr.,p rpeudejjtna.ggu uhfgofchjjd gdfhlohfvutazsasps pqniezttjg.zcbgec meaurvjgndsqdlnhmlzshmleed,.aapud.bde, q.,cvzhle drjpfl, zlpgcvaoqh dmbolpqpjvve q,vgd.mpssuz.zf,
You will not encounter the same page twice. The history is given only to mark the loss; the pages already turned are now beyond retrieval.
- THE MIRROR · IT MULTIPLIES MEN -
Borges detested mirrors. He believed they multiplied the number of men, and that the multiplication was indecent. Type a sentence below; it will be repeated, by a series of mirrors set parallel, until it tires of being itself.
The sentences offered as seeds are by Borges; the multiplication is by your browser. Any sentence, sufficiently mirrored, becomes someone else’s.
- ONE SHELF · ONE HEXAGON · ONE WALL -
The library is hexagonal; each wall holds five shelves; each shelf holds thirty-two books; each book has 410 pages of 80 symbols of 25 letters. The shelf below was generated freshly for your visit. Most spines are gibberish; one in eight, by combinatorial accident, says something. Click any to read its first paragraph.
- BIBLIOTHECA FALSA -
Borges cites with full bibliographic apparatus things that have never been published. He attributes these works to imaginary translators, gives them imprints in cities they were never set in, and assigns them library numbers nobody can verify. The forgery is not concealed. It is offered for the reader’s pleasure.
New York · 1947 · Volume XI: Hlaer to Jangr
Forty-volume project to invent a coherent universe. Volume XI describes Tlön's languages, in which "the moon rose above the river" is rendered with verbs that take no nouns ("upward, behind the on-streaming, it mooned").
Bombay · Victor Gollancz, second edition, 1934
A Bombay attorney pursues a fugitive whose presence subtly improves the moral character of those he meets. As the trail narrows, the fugitive's identity converges on the divine. Borges reviewed this book in 1936; the book has never existed.
manuscript · never published · Yunnan, 1670 - 1693
A "chaotic novel" composed by a former governor of Yunnan in twenty years of seclusion. Every fork that the protagonists encounter is taken - both branches written, both filed.
Lund · 1909 - 1912 · in Christelige Dogmatik
A Swedish theologian argues, across three theological monographs, that Judas was the true incarnation of God. The narrator outlines the three versions; Runeberg dies of an aneurysm shortly after publishing the third.
London · 1947 · reviewed posthumously
A novel in eight chapters, each describing a different ending. The reader is invited to recover, by induction, the events that must precede each. Quain’s collected works are reviewed in Ficciones; Quain himself is constructed entirely for the review.
Oxford · 1621 (and five subsequent editions in his lifetime)
A real book Borges loved. The encyclopaedic Renaissance compendium of every cause and cure of melancholy ever proposed; Borges adopted the form (the citation-stuffed survey) as his own. Half-forged here because Borges turns its quotations into rooms in his stories without ever marking the seams.
- A SUSPICIOUS CLASSIFICATION -
Borges classified the universe into forty categories. Wilkins did forty also. The taxonomy below classifies Borges himself, in nine categories, several of which contain themselves.
- THE WORKSHOP -
The page you are reading describes Borgesian devices. The page on the other side of each link below contains one of them, working. Use them. They will not tell you anything; that is their accuracy.
a room with too many doors
Six exits per room, every room. Pick one; arrive somewhere; pick again. Some doors lead nowhere; some lead back to the room you began in. You will not know which is which until you have walked.
after THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS
a page generator over 25 symbols
Type a string. Receive a page from the Library. The page is generated deterministically from your string, so the same string always returns the same page; but the same page can also be returned by ten thousand other strings, and you will never know which.
after THE LIBRARY OF BABEL
a randomiser that consults the dead
Click and receive a passage chosen by chance from a small fixed corpus of writers Borges admired or invented. The randomiser is honest; the corpus is not. Some of the writers it will quote are forgeries.
after THE BABYLON LOTTERY
Asked to choose a hundred books and write a prologue for each, the blind old librarian finished some seventy before he died. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Search the shelf, mark what you've read, or let him press one into your hands.
From the prologues collected in Selected Non-Fictions (ed. Eliot Weinberger, Penguin, 1999).
Six evenings on what poetry is, delivered in English, from memory, by a man who could no longer see the audience or the page. Lost for thirty years, the tapes resurfaced and were published in 2000. He claimed to teach nothing - only to share a lifelong love.
He begins by disowning all authority: after a lifetime among books he has, he says, only his perplexities to offer. What is this thing everyone recognizes and no one can define?
Perhaps there are only a handful of essential metaphors - eyes and stars, time and river, women and flowers, sleep and death - endlessly rediscovered. The rest is variation.
Epic before novel: the old hunger for story and for the hero, and his hunch that the novel is quietly decaying back into the epic from which it came.
That a translation can surpass its original; that sound and sense cannot be cleanly parted; the rival English Homers weighed, line against line.
Against the notion that a poem is a shell around a "message" to be cracked out of it. The music is not the wrapping of the meaning - it is the meaning.
The summing-up: a life given over to reading, blindness received almost as a gift, and the final immodesty of calling himself, before all else, a reader.
- CHRONOLOGY -
Real events. The chronology, however, has been arranged so that the last event is the first event - a Borgesian convention honoured even where it contradicts the calendar.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI