Fictional Worlds

All biographies take an imaginative leap beyond formal records to cover the lies and silences that lie at the heart of everyones life. For Latin Americans, the imaginative leap lies at the core of a life they break the boundaries of narrative fiction to produce a new vision of reality based on a literature of multiple traditions. For Jorge Luis Borges, one of the seminal figures of twentieth century literature who blurred the divisions between different genres to explore the paradoxes of story, poem and essay, everything was a fiction words on a page, constructs of the mind, as James Woodall tells us in The Man in the Mirror of the Book: A Life of Jorge Luis Borges (Sceptre paperback; 1996; Special Indian price £5).

 

Borges writings were deeply subversive by implication they called into question all the linguistic versions of anything. In whatever he wrote, especially in Fictions, which first established his reputation, he never forgot that everything was a fiction created by a fallible mind. The natural world remained fearful and incomprehensible; to contend with it, to give it order and purpose, the mind created fictions fables, histories, rules, codes of law, theories, social systems, predictions, even divinities. The making of fiction remains essential to our nature because one cant live by truth alone.

In an epilogue to a collection of his short stories, Borges explained his life and genre: A man sets himself the task of drawing the world... he fills the empty space with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, houses, instruments, stars, horses and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

All forms of writing then are constructs, acts of imagination, the origins of which lie in our subconscious. I spend my days alone, in day dreams and the evolution of plots, although he was astoundingly alive to the outside and ready to take literary risks. Borges says repeatedly that he never sneered at ivory towers, probably because he remained confined to one by his blindness after 1955.

Borges talks about how reverse and obverse were the same to him, so that infinity was almost banal; how he felt utterly lost when he was dreaming, perhaps the source for the recurrent labyrinth in his writings.

Asked why he had always been polite about Pablo Neruda, he replied that while he preferred Gabriel Garcia Marques, he didnt want anyone to think he was jealous of Nerudas Nobel Prize for Literature. Though when you see who has had it Shaw, Faulkner. Still I would grab it. He added, Not giving me the Nobel Prize is a minor Swedish industry.

Woodalls biography is divided into three parts: The Mirror, The Book and The Man. For most of us interest would centre round Part Two which is an analysis of his writings and the various interpretations given to them by critics; Parts One and Three which tell us of the man within and the travails of a growing blindness he inherited from his father, offer some explanation why his fiction dwells so lovingly on strange theologies such as that of the Gnostics, seeing them precisely as waking dreams, equivalent on grander scale to his fictions. In Other Imaginations (1946), he said in the course of a life dedicated to literature, and sometimes to metaphysical perplexity, I have glimpsed or sensed the refutation of time. I dont myself believe in it, but still it often comes to me... with the illusory force of a primary truth.

Borges stories are considered essays in metaphysics and he himself a committed metaphysician. But for aesthetic reasons, he does not weave metaphysical elements into his stories at least not obtrusively. As a practising writer of fiction, he becomes a philosophical Idealist, or a subscriber to the belief that reality is... all in the mind; as a Realist, in the medieval sense, or someone who believes that abstract terms have a real existence, that redness is a real entity, not simply an abstract quality common to all particular red things.

The philosophers on whose authority Borges likes to draw are those who elaborated similar doctrines: Plato, Berkeley and Schopenhauer. Of course, he didnt always believe that Idealism was the final answer or that Realism was true. On the contrary, he believed they were merely intriguing moments in the contradictory history of thought. But to the writer of fiction, they could be something more than that the words stimulate reality. And because fictions are verbal and made of general terms, they subscribe also to the doctrine of Realism. These are the simple but provisional philosophical notions with which Borges went to work, as Woodall tells us.

Woodall explains the ground rules for reading Borges through some of his better known fiction, especially Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Library of Babel and The Babylon Lottery. The first begins with Borges chance discovery of an item in a corrupt encyclopedia about an enigmatic region called Uqbar. The region is apparently fictitious. Some time later, chance put another encyclopedia in his hands devoted to a vast planet Tlon an entirely rational world conceived by a group of seventeenth century sages, who disseminate knowledge of it by way of a secret encyclopedia. A postscript reveals how the human race eventually embraced the world of Tlon. As in many of Borges stories, reality gives way to a wished-for fiction.

This first English biography of Borges deepens our understanding of an undisputed master of twentieth century literature. It explains Borges influence on post-war fiction, the art of the narrative and the way people think about writing.