On Labyrinths

Borges, Borges, Borges — so many of my favorite writers name him as an influence, and it’s easy to see why. He’s a master of the short story, and his essays are something special. The best stories in Labyrinths are the famous “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “The Library of Babel,” and what unites them is Borges’s play with metaphysics. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is especially notable for the people of Tlön, who exist in the world in an entirely different way than we do: they have no nouns, because the essence of a thing can’t be spoken; one can only speak of an object’s qualities and what it does, never what it “is.” It’s a fascinating idea, and almost therapeutic — it lets you shift your mind and see the world differently. We are not this thing or that thing; we’re made of characteristics and we do things, but we “are” not at all. “The Library of Babel” plays with much of the same, a place of infinite, boundless possibility: only twenty-two characters, each book a little over four hundred pages, uniform in size and roughly in length, but with a book for every possible combination of those characters, so that the contents aren’t truly unlimited and yet seem so. Both stories trade in the miraculous, the ineffable, the surreal, and they fill me with wonder about what could be.

Borges also seems to hold that there are no individuals — each man is every other man, each woman every other woman. It strikes me as akin to Freud on dreaming in The Interpretation of Dreams: the unconscious can’t distinguish discrete states, so a light can be both “on” and “off” at once, and we are as indiscrete — not in a moral sense — as the Freudian unconscious. That comes through in stories like “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” and “The Immortals.” His deepest interest seems to be in what we might call the Hermetic arts. Gnosticism matters here, as do Islamic cosmology, astrology, and other forms of knowledge that largely died out during the Enlightenment; in “The Library of Babel” he raises the possibility that humankind was made by a malevolent demiurge while the universe surely was not. Borges breathes life into these old possibilities and makes them real.

I was especially pleased to catch so many of his references — his hermeticism, his command of philosophy ancient and modern, his nods to literary figures. His texts are dense with meaning and with reference to a long tradition that can only be gathered under the broad heading of “the letters,” and he rewards readers for being well-read in turn. In his story on Averroes, he invokes the puzzle Averroes faced: what Aristotle could possibly have meant by “tragedy” and “comedy” in the Poetics, given that there was no theater tradition in the Arab world — only the stories told and performed by the hakawati, nothing comparable to what Aristotle described (something I learned from Roger Allen’s An Introduction to Arabic Literature). The essays are more uneven. The most interesting deals with Zeno’s paradox, and the one on the phenomenology of time is also fascinating, though others are much weaker.

What Borges does uniquely is breathe life into old sources of knowledge and make them modern; in many ways he’s a bridge between interwar surrealism and postwar magical realism. So many writers have been shaped by him that he’d be worth reading for that alone. But more than that, he brought back the magic I felt reading as a child — a feeling I think I’ve been chasing for years, and I felt it again in the best of these stories.