Labyrinths

"It is easily forgotten how much of a writer’s life like Chatwin’s is spent not on the hoof, but on your backside alone in a library. And no writer embodied libraries more than the immobile, blind Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges. Invited to appear on a chat show in 1983 with “the Magus of Buenos Aires”, Chatwin extolled: “You can’t go anywhere without packing a Borges, it’s like packing your toothbrush.” Borges murmured in response: “How unhygienic.” Chatwin responded to the compression of Borges’ prose, his range of exotic references, his unfashionable mentors (Chesterton, Kipling), and his notion of a cabbalistic answer as a key to unlock the universe. He even wrote a short story in imitation of Borges, and during his final illness he had this vision: “I saw green-capped schoolboys leaving school, an infinite library of books which turned into a library of primroses and a troupe of glass horses which galloped off in a shatter. It was like something from Borges’ El Aleph .”"

"This is an anthology that includes a number of his famous short stories and also some key essays. If you are going to think about Latin American literature, Borges is always a good place to start. But if you are looking for the sights and sounds of Buenos Aires, where he lived all his life, you won’t find too much of that in his stories, although some of his work, especially his poems, do concentrate on that. There is a famous essay in this book, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”. He says something along the lines of, “Why do we Argentines always have to write about local colour? Why do we have, in our literature, to be roaming around with gauchos on the pampas, or wallowing in the slums in Buenos Aires? If you look at the Quran you will notice that there are no camels in it [strictly speaking, this isn’t true]. We Argentines can emulate that – we can just write good literature that does not have to abound in local colour.” What I like about Borges is the jewel-like precision of his short stories, and the ways in which he deals with complex metaphysical and literary questions but all within the confines of beautifully wrought, very organised stories. He really is somebody that taught a whole generation in Latin America how to write, and how to avoid endless naturalistic descriptions and to concentrate more on telling a good story. I think he does that as well as anyone I have ever read, and obviously being able to read to him was a great bonus. I think it was his passion for literature, particularly when I looked into his luminous eyes which – even though he was completely blind – seemed to light up when he talked about literature."

"Labyrinths doesn’t exist in Spanish, unless it’s been shifted back to Spanish. It’s a collection of various short pieces written around the middle of Borges’s career—mostly fictions but not only fictions. It’s a wonderful selection, very philosophical. Borges is more a creator than an observer of worlds… Yes, I think so. Yes. He has this fascination with strange heresies from the sixth century and things like that. Some of his worlds are these elaborate imaginings. One of my favorites is The Library of Babel , which is this world that’s just a giant library that contains every possible book in the sense that every possible configuration of letters and punctuation is represented somewhere exactly once in some book in this library. Virtually all the books read like random nonsense, because you’ve got one book for every possible combination of characters. But there will be rare books that seem to be full of profound meaning! There’ll be the book that explains the library and there will be a book that contains the right interpretation of quantum mechanics. There’ll be a book that tells an alternative version of Don Quixote . Everything that you can imagine will be there somewhere. But are such rare works in the library just randomness that we overinterpret, or are they truly meaningful? How much is what we bring to it? “Montaigne and Sacks are also imaginative, but Borges is less constrained by empirical reality” Now imagine every possible language. Then the book you hold in your hand, which looks like nonsense to you, in some possible language is a retelling of Don Quixote , which was another of Borges’ favourites, or whatever you choose. It’s just such a fascinating world to imagine. How would you find meaning in a world like that? Yes. I actually have a similar thought experiment in my book A Theory of Jerks . I’ve written a couple of pieces that riff on Borges. In A Theory of Jerks, there’s a chapter called “Invisible Revisions”. Monday, I write a philosophy essay, version A. Tuesday, I make a number of revisions, creating version B. Wednesday, I examine the revisions in version B, and one by one I decide that each revision was a mistake and I return to my original phrasing. By Wednesday night, I have version C, which is word-for-word identical to version A. But version C is totally different and much better! What was clumsy in Version A is now artfully casual. What I overlooked in Version A is now intentionally omitted. Definitely. A journal should accept version C and reject version A. I also wrote a short story inspired by The Library of Babel called THE TURING MACHINES OF BABEL . Instead of having every possible book, the library has every possible computer program, with the books being random computer instructions that are read and executed by read-write heads that look like rabbits. Well, if you accept certain theories of computation, then once you implement a program, consciousness will arise. So while the Library of Babel contains every possible book, THE TURING MACHINES OF BABEL has every possible conscious state instantiated in it somewhere—including of course, the conscious state of imagining that very world itself. This story gets deeply Borgesian and self-referential. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I love how Borges stretches the imagination. Montaigne and Sacks are also imaginative, but Borges is less constrained by empirical reality. Right, Borges imagines a perfect map, which ends up being exactly the same size as the place it’s mapping. That reminds me of “Funes the Memorious”, Borges’s story about Ireneo, a teenager who remembers every single detail of everything and of course this turns out to be perfectly useless because it takes him a full day to remember what happened in a day. At the beginning of this interview, I confessed I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my account of philosophical wonder. I feel that Borges invokes philosophical wonder. He doesn’t do it by showing us possibilities that we can take as real possibilities the way the other authors I’m talking about do—though Zhuangzi has his Borgesian moments. Somehow, it’s still wonder about the world. It’s not just wonder at Borges. The wonder is at the possibility of impossible possibilities. No, that’s not right either. Well, I didn’t promise consistency any more than Montaigne did!"

"Yes, first of all let me say there is a companion story to this, which is called ‘Shakespeare’s Memory,’ in The Book of Sand , which came out later. But both make the same point, which is this idea of Shakespeare having become some sort of god-like figure, somebody about whom we need to know. We need biographical detail, because if we have that we might get some insight into his creative process. In ‘Shakespeare’s Memory,’ a short story, a man meets someone at a conference. They get drunk together, and this person says: ‘I can pass Shakespeare’s memory onto you, if you’d like to have it. Just say these words, it’ll be yours.’ So this happens. We get the memory—and the memory is taken up with things like smells, faces you don’t recognise, certain books. Chaotic bits and pieces, and quite unpleasant emotion—a feeling of coldness. The man feels cursed by it. There’s a short period when he feels as if he’s having amazing insights, but he doesn’t know what they are. He feels he’s on the brink of some kind of knowledge, but he doesn’t know what that knowledge is. Then he gets horribly depressed. He goes to a call box, phones loads of numbers, and speaks to anyone who sounds like an adult male—a woman or child, he thinks, couldn’t cope—until eventually he passes the memory on to the person on the other end of the phone. ‘Everything and Nothing’ is even shorter. It’s just a summary of what Shakespeare feels he is, and that sort of feels like nothing. In both, there’s a sense that he is making plays out of a lack, rather than abundance. He’s driven to it because of what isn’t there as much as what is. His experience is trivial and terrible, but the trivial and terrible for him somehow becomes universal. There’s nothing in his life worth knowing, because he’s just anyone. There was a great burgeoning industry of Shakespearean biography in the Victorian period. A white Englishman cleverer and more gifted than any other person in the history of the world somehow validated the British Empire, which was being busily expanded at that moment. Or so they thought. Everybody was putting up statues everywhere. There were lots of florid stories about Shakespeare’s youth. Then we had people like George Bernard Shaw, who sort of laughed at him. Except Bernard Shaw thought he was Shakespeare’s heir, and also a genius, so that slightly threw him off the scent. Eventually we got to Borges, who basically said: ‘No, this is it. You’re not going to understand more.’ I love writers’ biographies, whether it’s a TV documentary or a book. But I can really see what he’s saying, particularly in relation to Shakespeare and the Shakespeare industry, which still privileges giftedness of a certain kind—this idea of God-given talents, which set somebody apart. But Borges connects it back to this idea of the extraordinary in the ordinary—that somebody who is not exceptional in their personal qualities or life experience can still be somebody who produces something extraordinary. And how that happens is a mystery. And I think he does that brilliantly. It’s elliptical. There’s not much there in the Borges version, but that makes you imagine more. He, himself, is saying, let’s not know things about Shakespeare, so we can just experience his plays."