Borges’ Ficciones is simultaneously frustrating, enthralling, off-putting, and on occasion brilliant. Vast worlds stretch out into the infinity of the imagination through the carefully chosen language that highlights Borges’s strength as a writer. People who live for wordplay will love Borges; people who love strong characters that they can relate to and feel an emotional connection with I suspect will find him wanting. There was little emotional rapport with these stories (even the ones I liked); most of them were interesting puzzles pieces, a joy to put together at times and a chore at others, while ultimately feeling like nothing more important than a minor hobby compared to reading the emotionally-charged work of a Jane Austen or a Homer.
The lack of well-defined central characters in many of these stories was the collection’s biggest weakness; the stories were often missing that crucial human element that strong central characters provide. One of Borges’s most famous stories from this collection, “The Library of Babel,” exemplifies this style of writing perfectly. The story describes an infinite library containing all the books that could ever be written and what life must be like living in such a place from the perspective of an almost faceless narrator. Towards the end, the narrator speaks of expeditions to find the ultimate book that will help map out all the other books in the library. People have gotten lost forever on these expeditions. The narrator, however, never goes on such a journey himself, causing the story to feel more like a sketch. Some readers I suspect would say that this is Borges at his best; these small moments are really stories within a story with potentialities never fully explored but left to the imagination to fill in the gaps. A more cynical reader might say “nice outline” now when is Borges going to write the actual story?
“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” follows this pattern being a very neat exploration of what a fantastical world might be like if it functioned along the lines of George Berkley’s philosophical principles, especially notable in this story is Borges’s speculation of what that would do to that world’s language. It too feels like nothing more than a sketched out idea. Some stories were even an entire waste of space. “An Examination of the Work of Herbet Quain” for example is nothing but a weaker version of “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” a more interesting story that explores what would happen if Pierre Menard wrote Don Quixote after Cervantes in exactly the same wording and language, but considers how the same words would gain more meaning and be superior because Pierre Menard wrote his version, which is exactly the same as the older version, at a later date with more historical events behind him.
One might appeal to Borges’s thematic concerns as the primary driving force to read these stories. In “Babel,” librarians go mad with their inability to organize the endless rows of books; a remark that could be taken as a statement that knowledge and truth always defies human capabilities to discover it fully. We see here that Borges’s metaphysical concerns are in the patrimony of existentialism and postmodernist philosophy; this subjectivity-oriented metaphysics––perpetually suspicious of objectivity and ultimate truth-–-lends itself to the puzzle-like construction of these “detective” stories where the reader can do nothing more than piece together a small piece of reality that never fully conveys the full truth.
It should be no surprise due to my complaints that two of my favorite stories from the collection were “Death and the Compass,” a detective mystery about a killer seemingly picking his victims to spell out the name of God that contained two strong characters at the helm and a memorable villain, and “The Secret Miracle,” a story about a writer set to be executed who asks God for time to finish his play. The latter story is a meditation on the nature of time, a theme Borges also seems to be obsessed with. Other notable stories include: “The Circular Ruins,” “The Babylon Lottery,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Form of the Sword,” and “Theme of Traitor and Hero.”
So the bottom line is this: I plan to re-read Ficciones in the future and check out Borges’s other works because I enjoyed reading these stories, and I suspect I’ll get even more out of these stories during re-reads, but I am not exactly ready to start spreading the gospel of Borges with the reverence that I have seen his true disciples exhibit. Word games get trite and annoying after awhile. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen without strong characters to explore them. The interesting metaphysics act as most of these stories’ saving grace.
A writer with the ability to bring a tear to my eye and get me choked up will win every single time over a writer who simply writes beautiful language and causes me to ponder a few deep ideas after the close of the book. This is why Jorge Luis Borges will never be a Philip Roth or a Harlan Ellison for me, both of whom have written stories that have left me on the verge of tears with the sheer force of their emotional power. I realize that isn’t the kind of story Borges intended to write and respect that to a certain degree, but ultimately there is something crucial missing for me in these stories.
