Jorge Luis Borges
Finzioni

Imagine a man walking back and forth through the hallway of his home. Imagine him with his arms behind his back and his fingers clasped around a small book. This demeanor reveals a slight nervousness due to a sure indecision or an insecure decision.

Of course, he would do it, he was left to decide how.

He felt a happy disturbance in recalling this part of the author's premise: "The tiring and disheartening delusion of the compiler of large books, of spreading in five hundred pages a concept that could be perfectly explained verbally in a few minutes! Better to pretend these books already exist, and present a summary, a commentary." In fact, it was no coincidence that the reading of "Ficciones" was preceded by an attempt to finish "The Man Without Qualities" by "Robert Musil", seventeen hundred and eighty pages for an unfinished but not incomplete novel.

Wanting to write something about "Ficciones" was a choice that would involve him in quite a few difficulties. The first fundamental question concerned his cultural background and his literary knowledge. How much could these aspects influence the process of assimilating the book's contents? He could not know without putting himself in the shoes of a university professor, but he knew the limits of his imaginative abilities. He could then choose to conduct a deep research and study of all the literary references (real and false) he encountered in the book. He knew he would take this step only if he had the memory of a "Funes" (see sample n. 3), in fact, in his current intellectual and mnemonic conditions, such an operation could take an indefinite number of years, likely leading him to get lost in an undefined literary labyrinth*.

He wisely decided to take and love that assimilable part that the reading transmitted to him, without wanting to go beyond, with the incomparable advantage of being able to claim that this is a book for everyone.

Now it remained to resolve the issue of how to set up his personal account (review is a slightly strong term in this case**). On one hand, trying to describe some stories, choosing among the fourteen in the book, might seem the most rational and immediate choice, but he soon realized that he would have gotten lost again in the truths of an nonexistent book or in the concreteness of an invented world. He then decided to seek a general description, something simple and immediate, a word: science fiction.

Excluding, however, what the imagination gifts when thinking of this word. Nothing technological, nothing biological, but sciences of fantasy or fantasy in the sciences, metaphysical, literary, dreamlike, esoteric. All intertwined like paths forming a dimensionless and perfectly ordered labyrinth.

Thus it became, "Ficciones", a watershed between what he read and what he will read. He could never have imagined that a single man could write like "Borges", author of a concentrate of imagination, shaper of a new precious literary material, as heavy as the small cone found at "Cucchilla Negra" and perfect as an eleventh "hönir"***.

* It seems interesting to report that a small step in this direction was attempted, when out of pure curiosity he opened the Wikipedia page (which he considered the "Lidl" supermarket of information) under the entry "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and stopped at the paragraph that states: "with 6500 words, it is a relatively long story for Borges. One of the main concepts of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius holds that ideas ultimately manifest in the physical world and the story is considered a parabolic discussion of Berkeleyan idealism; in some respects it is also a protest against totalitarianisms." Indeed, he glimpsed among the lines the first signs of a labyrinth beginning to form.

** He had the impression that someone, endowed with great ingenuity, had already chosen to deepen such a study for a review of such stories and that this then became the true book, relegating the original by "Borges" to a synopsis, a review of a book written afterwards, a joke of time.

*** See page 20 from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".

Sample n.1 (from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius")

"The aforesaid refers to the idioms of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (on whose Ursprache the eleventh volume gives scant indications) the primordial cell is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round, or faint-orange-of-the-highsky, or any other aggregate. In this particular case, the mass of adjectives corresponds to a real object; but it is, indeed, a particular case. In the literature of this hemisphere (as in Meinong's subsistent universe) ideal objects abound, summoned and dissolved in an instant according to poetic necessities. These objects are sometimes determined by mere simultaneity: some consist of two terms, one of visual and one of auditory character: the color of the nascent day and the distant cry of a bird; others of more terms: the sun and the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague pink quivering seen with closed eyes, the sensation of being carried by a river and, at the same time, by a dream. These second-grade objects can combine with others; the process, thanks to certain abbreviations, is practically infinite. There are famous poems composed of a single enormous word. This word corresponds to a single object, the poetic object created by the author. From the fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns arises, paradoxically, that the number of the latter is endless. The idioms of the northern hemisphere of Tlön possess all the numbers of Indo-European languages, and many others."

Sample n.2 (from "The Garden of Forking Paths")

"Before finding this letter, I had wondered how a book could be infinite. I could only think of a cyclic, circular volume: a volume whose last page was identical to the first, with the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I also remembered the central night of the Thousand and One Nights, where queen Scheherazade due to a magical distraction of the scribe) begins to tell exactly the story of the Thousand and One Nights, at the risk of returning once more to the night in which she tells, and so on infinitely. I also thought of a Platonic, hereditary work, to be transmitted from father to son, to which each new individual would add a chapter, and maybe correct, with pious zeal, the pages of the fathers. These conjectures attracted me: but none seemed to correspond, even remotely, to the contradictory chapters of Ts'ui PenX. I was in this perplexity when they made me have from Oxford the autograph you examined. The phrase struck me, of course: "I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths." Almost immediately I understood; the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the words to the various futures (not to all) suggested to me the image of bifurcation in time, not in space. A new reading of the entire work confirmed this idea. In all narrative works, whenever one faces various alternatives one decides on one and eliminates the others: in that of the almost inextricable Ts'ui PenX, one decides - simultaneously - on all. Thus different futures, different times are created, which in turn proliferate and bifurcate."

Sample n.3 (from "Funes, the Memorious")

"We, in a glance, perceive: three glasses on a table. Funes: all the tendrils, the bunches, and the grapes of a vine. He knew the forms of the southern clouds of the dawn of April 30, 1882, and could compare them, in memory, with the marbled cover of a book he had seen only once, or with the foam stirred by an oar in the Río Negro, the eve of the battle of Quebracho. These memories were not simple; every visual image was linked to muscular, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct the dreams of his sleep, all the images of his half-sleeps. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never hesitated, but each reconstruction took an entire day. He said to me: - I have more memories than all men combined, from the beginning of the world -. He also said: - My dreams are like your waking hours -. And also: - My memory, sir, is like a garbage dump -."