Jorge Luis Borges

 

It's been many years since I read Borges's Ficciones -- but I will say that, even after all this time, his focus in that book on history, and the ways it is written, has stayed with me. There is an element of this, too, in Labyrinths, another collection of his stories which I've just finished. Like Calvino, who was a generation younger than his Argentine counterpart, Borges had a way of imagining works of history which were themselves not real: and yet, in his stories, they appear anything but false. There is a web connecting these imagined works, and it's the strength of that web which forges a universe -- an entirely believable universe -- of thought. Borges did more, though, than invent works of history: he played at all moments with the idea of historical narration, and the ways historians tell their stories. In Labyrinths -- perhaps more than in Ficciones -- Borges is sensitive to mathematics and the recurring nature of events over time. There is a geometric quality to Labyrinths, a sense in which Borges, having confronted the hall of mirrors, concludes that history is as labyrinthine as the narrative structures used to present it. I did not enjoy Labyrinths as much as Ficciones, despite the fact that there is a lot of overlapping material. That said, it would be difficult not to appreciate Labyrinths: there is in the book a complexity which is both hopeless and hopeful, and it is navigating this balance which yields meaning and appreciation. The last word is reserved for Borges: "I felt...that my narration was a symbol of the man I was as I wrote it and that, in order to compose that narration, I had too be that man and, in order to be that man, I had to compose that narration, and so on to infinity."