BOOK 45: 

FICTIONS

BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

December 22, 2008

To Stephen Harper,

Prime Minister of Canada,

A book you may or may not like,

From a Canadian writer,

With best wishes,

Yann Martel

 

Dear Mr. Harper, 

I first read the short story collection Fictions, by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), twenty years ago and I remember not liking it much. But Borges is a very famous from a continent with a rich literary tradition. No doubt lack of appreciation indicated a lack in me, due to immaturity. Twenty years on, I would surely recognize its genius and would join the legions of readers who hold Borges to be one of the great pens of the twentieth century.
    Well, that change of opinion didn't take place. Upon rereading Fictions I was as unimpressed this time around as I remember being two decades ago.
    These stories are intellectual games, literary forms of chess. They start simply enough, one pawn moving forward, so to speak, from fanciful premises-often about alternate world or fictitious books-that are then rigorously and organically developed by Borges till they reach a pitch of complexity that would please Bobby Fischer. Actually, the comparison to chess is not entirely right. Chess pieces, while moving around with great freedom, have fixed roles, established by a custom that is centuries old. Pawns move just so, as do rooks and knights and queens. With Borges, the chess pieces are played any which way, the rooks moving diagonally, the pawns laterally and so on. The result is stories that are surprising and inventive, but whose ideas can't be taken seriously because they aren't taken seriously by the author himself, who plays around with them as if ideas didn't really matter. And so the flashy but fraudulent erudition of Fictions. Let me give you one small example, taken at random. On page 68 of the story "The Library of Babel," which is about a universe shaped like an immense, infinite library, appears the following line concerning a particular book in that library:

He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language actually was; a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic.

A Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic? That's intellectually droll, in a nerdy way. There's a pleasure of the mind in seeing those languages unexpectedly juxtaposed. One mentally jumps around the map of the world. It's also, of course, linguistic nonsense. Samoyed and Lithuanian are from different language families-the first Uralic, the second Baltic-and so are unlikely ever to merge into a dialect, and even less so of Guarani, which is an indigenous language of South America. As for the inflections from classical Arabic, they involve yet another impossible leap over cultural and historical barriers. Do you see how this approach, if pursued relentlessly, makes a mockery of ideas? If ideas are mixed around like this for show and amusement, then they are ultimately reduced to show and amusement. And pursue this approach Borges does, line after line, page after page. His book is full of scholarly mumbo-jumbo that is ironic, magical, nonsensical. One of the games involved in Fictions is: do you get the references? If you do, you feel intelligent; if you don't, no worries, it's probably an invention, because much of the erudition in the book is invented. The only story that I found genuinely intellectually engaging, that is, making a serious, thought-provoking point, was "Three Versions of Judas," in which the character and theological implications of Judas are discuss d. That story made me pause and think. Beyond the flash, there I found depth.
    Borges is often described as a writer's writer. What this is supposed to mean is that writers will find in him all the finest qualities of the craft. I'm not sure I agree. By my reckoning, a great book increases one's involvement with the world. One seemingly turns away from the world when one reads a book, but only to see the world all the better once one has finished the book. Books, then, increase one's visual acuity of the world. With Borges, the more I read, the more the world was increasingly small and distant.
    There's one characteristic that I noticed this time around that I hadn't the first time, and that is the extraordinary number of male names dropped into the narratives, most of them writers. The fictional world of Borges is nearly exclusively male unisexual. Women barely exist. The only female writers mentioned in Fictions are Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie and Gertrude Stein, the last two mentioned in "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" to make a negative point. In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," there is a Baroness de Bacourt and a Mme Henri Bachelier (note how Mme Bachelier's name is entirely concealed by her husband's). There may be a few others that I missed. Otherwise, the reader gets male friends and male writers and male characters into the multiple dozens. This is not merely a statistical feminist point. It hints rather at Borges's relationship to the world. The absence of women in his stories is matched by the absence of any intimate relations in them. Only in the last story, "The South," is there some warmth, some genuine pain to be felt between the characters. There is a failure in Borges to engage with the complexities of life, the complexities of conjugal or parental life, or, indeed, of any other emotional engagement. We have here a solitary male living entirely in his head, someone who refused to join the fray but instead hid in his books and spun one fantasy after another. And so my same, puzzled conclusion this time round after reading Borges: this is juvenile stuff.
    Now why am I sending you a book that I don't like? For a good reason: because one should read widely, including books that one does not like. By so doing one avoids the possible pitfall of autodidacts, who risk shaping their reading to suit their limitations, thereby increasing those limitations. The advantage of structured learning, at the various schools available at all ages of one's life, is that one must measure one's intellect against systems of ideas that have been developed over centuries. One's mind is thus confronted with unsuspected new ideas.
    Which is to say that one learns, one is shaped, as much by the books that one has liked as by those that one has disliked.
    And there is also, of course, the possibility that you may love Borges. You may find his stories rich, deep, original and entertaining. You may think that I should try him again in another twenty years. Maybe then I'll be ready for Borges.
    In the meantime, I wish you and your family a merry Christmas.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899-1986) was an Argentinian poet, short story writer, anthologist, critic, essayist and librarian. In his writings, he often explored the ideas of reality, philosophy, identity and time, frequently using the images of labyrinths and mirrors. Borges shared the 1961 Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, gaining international fame. In addition to writing and giving speaking engagements in the United States, Borges was the director of the National Library in Argentina, ironically gaining this position as he was losing his eyesight.