Do you ever come across a brilliant, and I mean a simply brilliant author, and wonder how one had missed for so many years such creative and imaginative writing?
I received from a friend last week a lovely gift of three books including a copy of Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the Argentinian writer and poet. Phew. Breath-taking stuff. I had the same response about four years ago when introduced to The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov of Russia.
Deep, sometimes dark, Jorge Borges intriguing stories reveal a wealth of mystery and allegories, on time, identity and mental structures.
He comes across as the master of fiction, sometimes parading as fact, an endless profusion of parallel languages, if not parallel universes. You know you are reading fiction while simultaneously, he engages you in profound philosophical speculations, mysterious fusions of perceptions where reality seems much more bound up with language than the so-called objective reality of an objective universe. At times, I had to keep reminding myself of the title of this collection of short stories “Fictions.”
In the collection, a Penguin classic, the short story, The Lottery in Babylon is a masterpiece, an allegory of contemporary life, where everything seems to run on chance. In the Babylon lottery, there are winner and losers where the Company punishes the losers for losing, often severely punish. With its total power, the Company made the lottery a secret, and the Company even gets people to refute the Company’s existence, where everybody lives in a blind hope of winning or the terror and consequences of losing through the control of the ‘shadowy corporation.’ He proposes in the last paragraph, that chance really governs all.
In the Garden of Forking Paths, Dr. Yu TSun, a German spy in England during World War, takes a train journey to Ashgrove to escape the clutches of Capt. Richard Madden of MI5, the British secret services. In Ashgrove, his host, Dr Albert, a Sinologist, has read a novel by Ts ui Pen, the grandfather of Dr Yu Tsun in which the labyrinths of human lives meant that everybody had lost their way. A Taoist or Buddhist monk had prevented the family from burning the manuscript. The painstaking brushstrokes of calligraphy of the book had found its way into the desk of Dr Albert. The author had written: “I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.”
In a rather bizarre sort of way, the fictional story of the forking paths, of time, not place, tells us that we experience several futures, several times, which then split and fork again to make more futures. These futures we make sometimes converge and sometimes don’t.
One has to read Jorge Luis Borges with a purposeful deliberation, a meditation, to enable an appreciation of original stories interspersed with varying metaphors and intimations that challenge our usual constructions of fiction and reality.
I can’t say I share all of Borges views (e.g. he makes much play of ‘chance’ rather than events occurring through causes and conditions,) but Borges e certainly articulates a labyrinth of metaphysics brilliantly through the short story; thus opening us up to worlds of possibilities.
From The Garden of Forking Paths:
“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only word that must not be used?”
I thought for a moment.
“The word ‘chess’ ” I replied.
“Exactly.” Albert said. “The Garden of Forking Paths is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts’ui the merest mention of its name. To always omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word. It is, at any rate, the tortuous path….”
“Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.”
Dear Blog readers: Fictions offer meditation on the paths we take. Borges could just shake up your world.