Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 4

The Widow Ching-Pirate PhilipGosse,The History of Piracy.London, Cambridge, 1911.

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities Herbert Asbury,The Gangs of New York. New York, 1927.

The Disinterested Killer BillHarrigan Frederick Watson,A Century of Gunmen. London, 1931.

Walter n.o.ble Burns,The Saga of Billy the Kid. New York, 1925.*

The Uncivil Teacher of Court EtiquetteKotsukenoSuke A. B. Mitford,Tales of Old j.a.pan.London, 1912.

Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv Sir Percy Sykes,A History of Persia. London, 1915.

---------,DieVernichtung derRose,nach dem arabischen Urtext ubertragen vonAlexander Schulz. Leipzig,1927.

Fictions (1944).

ForEsther ZemboraindeTorres

THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS.

(1941).

Foreword.

The eight stories* in this book require no great elucidation. The eighth ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is a detective story; its readers will witness the commission and all the preliminaries of a crime whose purpose will not be kept from them but which they will not understand, I think, until the final paragraph.

The others are tales of fantasy; one of them-"The Lottery in Babylon"-is not wholly innocent of symbolism. I am not the first author of the story called " The Library of Babel"; those curious as to its his - tory and prehistory may consult the appropriate page ofSur,*No.59, which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippus andLa.s.switz,Lewis Carroll and Aristotle. In "The Circular Ruins," all is unreal; in "Pierre Menard, Author of theQuixote]' the unreality lies in the fate the story's protagonist imposes upon himself. The catalog of writings I have ascribed to him is not terribly amusing, but it is not arbitrary, either; it is a diagram of his mental history....

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books-setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. That was Carlyle's procedure inSartor Resartus, Butler's inThe Fair Haven -though those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes onimaginary books.

Those notes are"Tlon,Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain."

J.L.B.

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

I.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an ency- clopedia. The mirror troubled the far end of a hallway in a large country house onCalleGaona, in Ramos Mejia*; the encyclopedia ismisleadingly t.i.tledThe Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal (though also laggardly) reprint of the 1902Encyclopdia Britannica.The event took place about five years ago.

BioyCasares*had come to dinner at my house that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go about composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book's readers-avery few- might divine the horrifying or ba.n.a.l truth. Down at that far end of the hallway, the mirror hovered, shadowing us. We discov- ered (very late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is some- thing monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bioy remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. I asked him where he'd come across that memorable epigram, and he told me it was recorded inThe Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar.

The big old house (we had taken it furnished) possessed a copy of that work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Uppsala; on the first of Volume XLVII, "Ural-Altaic Languages"- not a word on Uqbar. Bioy, somewhat bewildered, consulted the volumes of the Index. He tried every possible spelling: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr ... all in vain. Be- fore he left, he told me it was a region in Iraq or Asia Minor. I confess I noddeda bit uncomfortably; I surmised that that undoc.u.mented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction that Bioy had invented on the spur of the moment, out of modesty, in order to justify a fine-sounding epigram. A sterile search through one of the atlases of Justus Perthes reinforced my doubt.

The next day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aires. He told me he had the article on Uqbar right in front of him-in Volume XLVI* of the encyclope- dia. The heresiarch's name wasn't given, but the entry did report his doc- trine, formulated in words almost identical to those Bioy had quoted, though from a literary point of view perhaps inferior. Bioy had remem- bered its being "copulation and mirrors are abominable,"

while the text of the encyclopedia ranFor one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illu- sion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and proclaim it. I told Bioy, quite truthfully, that I'd like to see that article. A few days later he brought it to me-which surprised me, be- cause the scrupulous cartographic indices of Hitter'sErdkundeevinced complete and total ignorance of the existence of the name Uqbar.

The volume Bioy brought was indeed Volume XLVI of theAnglo-American Cyclopaedia. On both the false cover and spine, the alphabetical key to the volume's contents (Tor-Upps) was the same as ours, but instead of 917 pages, Bioy's volume had 921. Those four additional pages held the article on Uqbar -an article not contemplated (as the reader will have noted) by the alphabetical key. We later compared the two volumes and found that there was no further difference between them. Both (as I believe I have said) are reprints of the tenth edition of theEncyclopdia Britannica.Bioy had purchased his copy at one of his many sales.

We read the article with some care. The pa.s.sage that Bioy had recalled was perhaps the only one that might raise a reader's eyebrow; the rest seemed quite plausible, very much in keeping with the general tone of the work, even (naturally) somewhat boring. Rereading it, however, we discov- ered that the rigorous writing was underlain by a basic vagueness. Of the fourteen names that figured in the section on geography, we recognized only three (Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum), and they interpolated into the text ambiguously. Of the historical names, we recognized only one: the impostor-wizard Smerdis, and he was invoked, really, as a metaphor. The article seemed to define the borders of Uqbar, but its nebulous points of reference were rivers and craters and mountain chains of the region itself. We read, for example, that theAxadelta and the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun mark the southern boundary, and that wild horses breed on the islands of the delta.

That was at the top of page 918. In the section on Uqbar's history (p. 920), we learned that religious persecutions in the thirteenth century had forced the orthodox to seek refuge on those same islands, where their obelisks are still standing and their stone mirrors are occasionally unearthed. The sec- tion t.i.tled "Language and Literature" was brief. One memorable feature: the article said that the literature of Uqbar was a literature of fantasy, and that its epics and legends never referred to reality but rather to the two imagi- nary realms of Mle'khnas andTlon.... The bibliography listed four vol- umes we have yet to find,though the third-Silas Haslam'sHistory of the Land Called Uqbar (1874)-does figure in the catalogs published by Bernard Quaritch, Bookseller.

1.

'Haslam was also the author of AGeneral History of Labyrinths The first,Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen uber das LandUkkbar in Klein-Asien,published in 1641, is the work of one Jo- hannes Valentinus Andrea. That fact is significant: two or three years after- ward, I came upon that name in the unexpected pages ofDeQuincey (Writings, Vol. XIII*), where I learned that it belonged to a German theolo- gian who in the early seventeenth century described an imaginary commu- nity, the Rosy Cross-which other men later founded, in imitation of his foredescription.

That night, Bioy and I paid a visit to the National Library, where we pored in vain through atlases, catalogs, the yearly indices published by geo- graphical societies, the memoirs of travelers and historians- no one had ever been in Uqbar. Nor did the general index in Bioy's copy of the encyclo- pedia contain that name. The next day, Carlos Mastronardi* (whom I had told about all this) spotted the black-and-gold spines of theAnglo-American Cyclopaedia in a bookshop at the corner ofCorrientesand Talcahuano.... He went in and consulted Volume XLVI. Naturally, he found not the slight- est mention of Uqbar.

II.

Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel atAdrogue,among the effu- sive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. In life, Ashe was afflicted with unreality, as so many Englishmen are; in death, he is not even the ghost he was in life. He was tall and phlegmatic and his weary rectangular beard had once been red. I understand that he was a widower, and without issue. Every few years he would go back to England, to makehis visit (I am judging from some photographs he showed us) to a sundial and a stand of oak trees.

My father had forged one of those close English friendships with him (the first adjective is perhaps excessive) that begin by excluding confidences and soon eliminate conversation. They would ex- change books and newspapers; they would wage taciturn battle at chess----- I recall Ashe on the hotel veranda, holding a book of mathematics, looking up sometimes at the irrecoverable colors of the sky. One evening, we spoke about the duodecimal number system, in which twelve is written 10. Ashe said that by coincidence he was just then transposing some duodecimal ta- ble or other to s.e.xagesimal (in which sixty is written 10). He added that he'd been commissioned to perform that task by a Norwegian man ... in Rio Grande doSul. Asheand I had known each other for eight years, and he had never mentioned a stay in Brazil. We spoke of the bucolic rural life, ofca- pangas*of the Brazilian etymology of the word"gaucho"(which some older folk in Uruguay still p.r.o.nounce asga-ucho), and nothing more was said-G.o.d forgive me-of duodecimals. In September of 1937 (my family and I were no longer at the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a ruptured aneurysm. A few days before his death, he had received a sealed, certified package from Brazil containing a book printed in octavo major. Ashe left it in the bar, where, months later, I found it. I began to leaf through it and suddenly I experienced a slight, astonished sense of dizziness that I shall not describe, since this is the story not of my emotions but of Uqbar andTlonand Orbis Tertius. (On one particular Islamic night, which is called the Night of Nights, the secret portals of the heavens open wide and the water in the water jars is sweeter than on other nights; if those gates had opened as I sat there, I would not have felt what I was feeling that evening.) The book was written in English, and it consisted of 1001 pages. On the leather-bound volume's yellow spine I read these curious words, which were re- peated on the false cover:A First Encyclopaedia ofTlon.Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr.There was no date or place of publication. On the first page and again on the onionskin page that covered one of the color ill.u.s.trations there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription:Orbis Tertius. Two years earlier, I had discovered in one of the volumes of a certain pirated encyclopedia a brief description of a false country; now fate had set before me something much more precious and painstaking. I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, with its architectures and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and itsfire, its theological and metaphysicalcontroversies-all joined, articulated, coherent, and with no visible doc- trinal purpose or hint of parody.

In the "Volume Eleven" of which I speak, there are allusions to later and earlier volumes.NestorIbarra,*

in a now-cla.s.sic article in theN.R.F., de- nied that such companion volumes exist; Ezequiel Martinez Estrada* andDrieu La Roch.e.l.le*have reb.u.t.ted that doubt, perhaps victoriously. The fact is, the most diligent searches have so far proven futile. In vain have we ran- sacked the libraries of the two Americas and Europe. Alfonso Reyes,* weary of those "subordinate drudgeries of a detective nature," has proposed that between us, we undertake toreconstruct the many ma.s.sive volumes that are missing:ex ungue leonetn. He figures, half-seriously, half in jest, that a gen- eration ofTlonistswould suffice. That bold estimate takes us back to the initial problem: Who, singular or plural, inventedTlon?The plural is, I sup- pose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor-some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement-has been unanimously discarded. It is conjectured that this "brave new world" is the work of a se- cret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers,..., guided and di- rected by some shadowy man of genius.

There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination-fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.

At first it was thought thatTlon wasa mere chaos, an irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know that it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so. Let it suffice to remind the reader that the apparent contradictions of Volume Eleven are the foundation stone of the proof that the other vol- umes do in fact exist: the order that has been observed in it is just that lucid, just that fitting. Popular magazines have trumpeted, with pardonable ex- cess, the zoology and topography ofTlon. Inmy view, its transparent tigers and towers of blood do not perhaps merit the constant attention ofall mankind, but I might be so bold as to beg a few moments to outline its con- ception of the universe.

Hume declared for all time that while Berkeley's arguments admit not the slightest refutation, they inspire not the slightest conviction. That pro- nouncement is entirely true with respect to the earth, entirely false with re- spect toTlon.The nations of that planet are, congenitally, idealistic. Their language and those things derived from their language-religion, literature, metaphysics-presuppose idealism. For the people ofTlon,the world is notanamalgam ofobjects in s.p.a.ce; it is a heterogeneous series of independentacts - the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the conjecturalUrsprache ofTlon,from which its "present-day" lan- guages and dialects derive: there are impersonal verbs, modified by mono- syllabic suffixes (or prefixes) functioning as adverbs. For example, there is no noun that corresponds to our word "moon," but there is a verb which in English would be "to moonate" or "to enmoon." "The moon rose above the river" is"hlor ufang axaxaxasmio,"or,as Xul Solar* succinctly translates:Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned, That principle applies to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In the northern hemisphere (about whoseUrspracheVolume Eleven con- tains very little information), the primary unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by stringing together adjectives. One does not say "moon"; one says "aerial-bright above dark-round" or "soft-amberish-celestial" or any other string. In this case, the complex of adjectives corresponds to a real object, but that is purely fortuitous. The lit- erature of the northern hemisphere (as in Meinong's subsisting world) is filled with ideal objects, called forth and dissolved in an instant, as the po- etry requires. Sometimes mere simultaneity creates them. There are things composed of two terms, one visual and the other auditory: the color of the rising sun and the distant caw of a bird. There are things composed of many: the sun and water against the swimmer's breast, the vague shimmer- ing pink one sees when one's eyes are closed, the sensation of being swept along by a river and also by Morpheus. These objects of the second degree may be combined with others; the process, using certain abbreviations, is virtually infinite. There are famous poems composed of a single enormous word; this word is a "poetic object" created by the poet. The fact that no one believes in the reality expressed by these nouns means, paradoxically, that there is no limit to their number. The languages ofTlon'snorthern hemi- sphere possess all the nouns of the Indo-Europeanlanguages-and many, many more.

It is no exaggeration to say that the cla.s.sical culture ofTlonis com- posed of a single discipline- psychology-to which all others are subordi- nate. I have said that the people of that planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes that occur not in s.p.a.ce but rather successively, in time. Spinoza endows his inexhaustible deity with the attributes of spatial extension and of thought; no one inTlonwould understand the juxtaposi- tion of the first, which is typical only of certain states, and the second- which is a perfect synonym for the cosmos. Or to put it another way: s.p.a.ceis not conceived as having duration in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then the countryside on fire and then the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the scorched earth is considered an example of the a.s.sociation of ideas.

This thoroughgoing monism, or idealism, renders science null. To ex- plain (or pa.s.s judgment on) an event is to link it to another; onTlon,that joining-together is a posterior state of thesubject, and can neither affect nor illuminate the prior state. Every mental state is irreducible: the simple act of giving it a name- i.e., of cla.s.sifying it-introduces a distortion, a "slant" or "bias." One might well deduce, therefore, that onTlonthere are no sciences-or even any "systems of thought." The paradoxical truth is that systems of thought do exist, almost countless numbers of them. Philo- sophies are much like the nouns of the northern hemisphere; the fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game,aPhilosophie des Als Ob, has allowed them to proliferate. There are systems upon systems that are incredible but possessed of a pleasing architecture or a certain agreeable sensationalism. The metaphysicians ofTlonseek not truth, or even plausibility-they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy. They know that a system is naught but the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to one of those aspects-anyone of them. Even the phrase "all the aspects" should be avoided, because it implies the impossible addition of the present instant and all those instants that went before. Nor is the plural "those instants that went before" legitimate, for it implies another impossible operation.... One of the schools of philosophy onTlongoes so far as to deny the exis- tence of time; it argues that the present is undefined and indefinite, the fu- ture has no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as present recollection.

2.

2.

Russell(The a.n.a.lysis of Mind [1921], p. 159) posits that the world was created only moments ago, filled with human beings who "remember" an illusory past.

Another school posits that all time has already pa.s.sed, so that our life is but the crepuscular memory, or crepuscular reflec- tion, doubtlessly distorted and mutilated, of an irrecoverable process. Yet another claims that the history of the universe-and in it, our lives and every faintest detail of our lives-is the handwriting of a subordinate G.o.d trying to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe might be compared to those cryptograms in which not all the symbols count, and only what happens every three hundred nights is actually real. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that every man is in fact two men.

Of all the doctrines ofTlon,none has caused more uproar than materi- alism. Some thinkers have formulated this philosophy (generally with less clarity than zeal) as though putting forth a paradox. In order to make this inconceivable thesis more easily understood, an eleventh-century heresiarch3

3.

A "century," in keeping with the duodecimal system in use onTlon,is a period of 144 years.

conceived the sophism of the nine copper coins, a paradox as scan- dalously famous onTlonas the Eleatic aporiae to ourselves. There are many versions of that "specious argument," with varying numbers of coins and discoveries; the following is the most common:

On Tuesday, X is walking along a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday,Yfinds four coins in the road, their l.u.s.ter somewhat dimmed by Wednesday's rain. On Friday,Zdiscovers three coins in the road. Friday morning X finds two coins on the veranda of his house.

From this story the heresiarch wished to deduce the reality-i.e., the conti- nuity in time-of those nine recovered coins. "It is absurd," he said, "to imagine that four of the coins did not exist from Tuesday to Thursday, three from Tuesday to Friday afternoon, two from Tuesday to Friday morning. It is logical to think that they in factdid exist-albeit in some secret way that we are forbidden to understand-at everymoment of those three periods of time."

The language ofTlonresisted formulating this paradox; most people did not understand it. The "common sense" school at first simply denied the anecdote's veracity. They claimed it was a verbal fallacy based on the reckless employment of two neologisms, words unauthorized by standard usage and foreign to all rigorous thought: the two verbs "find" and "lose," which, since they presuppose the ident.i.ty of the nine first coins and the nine latter ones, entail apet.i.tioprincipii.These critics reminded their listen- ers that all nouns(man, coin, Thursday, Wednesday, rain) have only metaphoric value. They denounced the misleading detail that "[the coins'] l.u.s.ter [was] somewhat dimmed by Wednesday's rain" as presupposing what it attempted to prove: the continuing existence of the four coins from Tues- day to Thursday. They explained that "equality" is one thing and "ident.i.ty" another, and they formulated a sort ofreductio ad absurdum -the hypo- thetical case of nine men who on nine successive nights experience a sharp pain.

Would it not be absurd, they asked, to pretend that the men had sufferedone and the same pain?4

They claimed that the heresiarch was motivated by the blasphemous desire to attribute the divine categoryBeing to a handful of mere coins, and that he sometimes denied plurality and sometimes did not.

They argued: If equality entailed ident.i.ty, one would have to admit that the nine coins were a single coin.

Incredibly, those refutations did not put an end to the matter. A hun- dred years after the problem had first been posed, a thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch, but of the orthodox tradition, formulated a most dar- ing hypothesis. His happy conjecture was that there is but a single subject; that indivisible subject is every being in the universe, and the beings of the universe are the organs and masks of the deity. X isYand isabo Z. Zdis- covers three coins, then, because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two coins on the veranda of his house because he remembers that the oth- ers have been found.... Volume Eleven suggests that this idealistic panthe- ism triumphed over all other schools of thought for three primary reasons: first, because it repudiated solipsism; second, because it left intact the psy- chological foundation of the sciences; and third, because it preserved the possibility of religion. Schopenhauer (pa.s.sionate yet lucid Schopenhauer) formulates a very similar doctrine in the first volume of his ParergaundParalipomena.

Tlon'sgeometry is made up of two rather distinct disciplines-visual geometry and tactile geometry.

Tactile geometry corresponds to our own, and is subordinate to the visual. Visual geometry is based on the surface, not the point; it has no parallel lines, and it claims that as one's body moves through s.p.a.ce, it modifies the shapes that surround it. The basis ofTlon'sarithmetic is the notion of indefinite numbers; it stresses the importance of the concepts "greater than" and "less than," which our own mathematicians represent with the symbols > and <. the="" people="" oftlonare="" taught="" that="" the="" act="" of="" counting="" modifies="" the="" amount="" counted,="" turning="" indefinites="" intodefi-="" nites.the="" fact="" that="" several="" persons="" counting="" the="" same="" quant.i.ty="" come="" to="" the="" same="" result="" is="" for="" the="" psychologists="" oftlon="" anexample="" of="" the="" a.s.sociation="" of="" ideas="" or="" of="" memorization.="" -we="" must="" always="" remember="" that="" ontlon,the="" subject="" of="" knowledge="" is="" one="" and="">

Within the sphere of literature, too, the idea of the single subject is all-powerful. Books are rarely signed, nor does the concept of plagiarism exist:

''Today, one ofTlon'sreligions contends, platonically, that a certain pain, a certain greenish-yellow color, a certain temperature, and a certain sound are all the same, sin- gle reality. All men, in the dizzying instant of copulation, are the same man. All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

It has been decided that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous.

Literary criticism often invents authors: It will take two dissimilar works-theTaoTe Chingand the1001 Nights, for instance-attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychologyofthatmost interestinghomme de lettres___ Their books are also different from our own. Their fiction has but a sin- gle plot, with every imaginable permutation. Their works of a philosophical nature invariably contain both the thesis and the ant.i.thesis, the rigorouspro and contra of every argument. A book that does not contain its counter-book is considered incomplete.

Century upon century of idealism could hardly have failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regionsofTlonone may, not infrequently, ob- serve the duplication of lost objects: Two persons are looking for a pencil; the first person finds it, but says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but more in keeping with his expectations. These secondary ob- jects are calledhronir,and they are, though awkwardly so, slightly longer. Until recently,hronirwerethe coincidental offspring of distraction and forgetfulness. It is hard to believe that they have been systematically produced for only about a hundred years, but that is what Volume Eleven tells us. The first attempts were unsuccessful, but the modusoperandiis worth recalling: The warden of one of the state prisons informed his prisoners that there were certain tombs in the ancient bed of a nearby river, and he promised that anyone who brought in an important find would be set free. For months before the excavation, the inmates were shown photographs of what they were going to discover. That first attempt proved that hope and greed can be inhibiting; after a week's work with pick and shovel, the onlyhronunearthed was a rusty wheel, dated some timelater than the date of the experiment. The experiment was kept secret, but was repeated afterward at four high schools. In three of them, the failure was virtually complete; in the fourth (where the princ.i.p.al happened to die during the early excava- tions), the students unearthed-or produced-a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay amphorae, and the verdigris'd and mutilated torso of a king with an inscription on the chest that has yet to be deciphered. Thus it was discovered that no witnesses who were aware of the experimen- tal nature of the search could be allowed near the site....