An Examination of the Work of Jorge Luis Borges

(mostly incomplete 😄)

This is a small list of the works of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, mainly the ones I have already read and enjoyed the most. It exists solely as a memory aide, because on one session of the Homebrew Website Club, the discussion went to categorizing and where should things “go”, and I wanted to contribute with one short story from Borges that touches on the topic of categorization, and for the life of me I could not remember the exact name of the short story 😅.

In no particular order (original title in italics):

• “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (El idioma analítico de John Wilkins), the story whose title I could not recall when needed. It is a short essay critiquing a real work by the English writer John Wilkins, titled An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. In it, Wilkins proposes a universal language scheme that “decomposes the entire universe of ‘things and notions’ into successively smaller divisions and subdivisions, assigning at each step of this decomposition a syllable, consonant, or vowel. Wilkins intended for these conceptual building blocks to be recombined to represent anything on earth or in heaven.” (Wikipedia). For Borges, this work had many “ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies”. He concludes that “it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures” and – this is the part I remember the most – compares Wilkins’ schema to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge (invented by himself but attributed to German translator Franz Kuhn¹), that classifies animals into categories that make no sense at all, such as “those that belong to the Emperor”, “stray dogs” or “those that look like flies from a long way off”, and then goes on to say:

… it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.

• “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain” (Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain), from which this note takes its title :D. I shamefully admit to not remember much else 😅, so I will go with the plot summary from Wikipedia:

“An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain” is a fictional essay surveying the following works, written by fictional deceased Irish author Herbert Quain:

• The God of the Labyrinth (1933), a detective story in which the solution given is wrong, although this fact is not immediately obvious
• April March (1936), a novel with nine different beginnings, trifurcating backwards in time
• The Secret Mirror, a play in which the first act is the work of one of the characters in the second act (à la The Waltz Invention)
• Statements (1939), eight stories which are deliberately calculated to disappoint the reader; The Circular Ruins is supposedly an extract from the third story, “The Rose of Yesterday”

• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, my favorite one². Featuring Borges himself as the narrator, the story starts with him and his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares hunting down a reference to the mysterious land of Uqbar (which Bioy Casares had found about in a “literal if inadequate reprint” of the Encyclopaedia Britannica called the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia). From there, the story unfolds as they discover about this mysterious land, the equally mysterious world of Tlön, and the origin of both as imaginary creations of a society of intellectuals called “Orbis Tertius”. The postscript that closes the story describes how the imaginary world of Tlön starts bleeding into reality, first by the appearance of objects from there, and eventually by the whole world finding out about it, and it becoming so influential that the lines that separate the imaginary world from reality start to blur.
  • The reason it is my favorite story is not only because of this blurring line between imagined and real, but mostly for the way the philosophy of the world of Tlön is described: a form of subjective idealism where the world is understood “not as a concurrence of objects in space, but as a heterogeneous series of independent acts.” Borges takes this idea and runs with it³: he not only describes how can such a worldview influence the languages of this world (where, in some places, you don’t say “the moon rose above the water”, you say “upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned”), or how a “dissident scholar” advances the idea of materialism by “suggesting that a number of coins still existed after a man lost them and they could not be seen by anyone, albeit in some secret way that we are forbidden to understand”; he also describes how “centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality”: there are objects, called hrönir, that are produced when two people think they have found the same object, as well as objects that “grow vague or sketchy and lose detail” when they stop being perceived and / or start being forgotten (“At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater”).
    (I think it’s because it has to do with another idea I find fascinating, that of perception influencing reality)

Other favorites (to be expanded later):

• “The Library of Babel” (La biblioteca de Babel)
• “Funes the Memorious” (Funes el memorioso)
• “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote)
• “The Circular Ruins” (Las ruinas circulares)
• “The Garden of Forking Paths” (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan)