Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 6

3.

I recall his square-ruled notebooks, his black crossings-out, his peculiar typo- graphical symbols, and his insect-like handwriting. In the evening, he liked to go out for walks on the outskirts ofNimes;he would often carry along a notebook and make a cheery bonfire

In vain have I attempted to reconstruct them.

I have reflected that it is legitimate to see the "final" Quixote as a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces- faint but not undecipherable-of our friend's "previous" text must s.h.i.+ne through. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, reversing the labors of the first, would be able to exhume and revive those Troys....

"Thinking, meditating, imagining," he also wrote me, "are not anoma- lous acts-they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what somedoctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our ownbarbarie.Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be."

Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique-the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read theOdyssey as though it came after theEneid, to readMme.Henri Bachelier'sLe jardin du Centaureasthough it were written byMme.HenriBachelier.This technique fills the calmest books with adventure. Attributing the ImitatioChrist.i.to Louis Fer- dinandCelineor James Joyce-is that not sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions?

Nimes,1939 .

The Circular Ruins And if he left off dreaming about you ...

Through the Looking-Gla.s.s,VI

No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud, and yet within days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man had come there from the South, and that his homeland was one of those infinite villages that lie up-river, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon. But in fact the gray man had kissed the mud, scrambled up the steep bank (without pus.h.i.+ng back, probably without even feeling, the sharp-leaved bulrushes that slashed his flesh), and dragged himself, faint and b.l.o.o.d.y, to the circular enclosure, crowned by the stone figure of a horse or tiger, which had once been the color of fire but was now the color of ashes. That ring was a temple devoured by an ancient holocaust; now, the malarial jungle had profaned it and its G.o.d went unhonoredby mankind. The foreigner lay down at the foot of the pedestal.

He was awakened by the sun high in the sky. He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed; he closed his pale eyes and slept, not out of any weakness of the flesh but out of willed determina- tion. He knew that this temple was the place that his unconquerable plan called for; he knew that the unrelenting trees had not succeeded in stran- gling the ruins of another promising temple downriver-like this one, a temple to dead, incinerated G.o.ds; he knew that his immediate obligation was to sleep. About midnight he was awakened by the inconsolable cry of a bird. Prints of unshod feet, a few figs, and a jug of water told him that the men of the region had respectfully spied upon his sleep and that they sought his favor, or feared his magic. He felt the coldness of fear, and he sought out a tomblike niche in the crumbling wall, where he covered him- self with unknown leaves.

The goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural: He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him com- pletely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. This magical ob- jective had come to fill his entire soul; if someone had asked him his own name, or inquired into any feature of his life till then, he would not have been able to answer. The uninhabited and crumbling temple suited him, for it was a minimum of visible world; so did the proximity of the woodcutters, for they saw to his frugal needs. The rice and fruit of their tribute were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

At first, his dreams were chaotic; a little later, they became dialectical. The foreigner dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater, which was somehow the ruined temple; clouds of taciturn students com- pletely filled the terraces of seats. The faces of those farthest away hung at many centuries'

distance and at a cosmic height, yet they were absolutely clear. The man lectured on anatomy, cosmography, magic; the faces listened earnestly, intently, and attempted to respond with understanding -as though they sensed the importance of that education that would redeem one of them from his state of hollow appearance and insert him into the real world. The man, both in sleep and when awake, pondered his phan- tasms' answers; he did not allow himself to be taken in by impostors, and he sensed in certain perplexities a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of taking its place in the universe.

On the ninth or tenth night, he realized (with some bitterness) that nothing could be expected from those students who pa.s.sively accepted his teachings, but only from those who might occasionally, in a reasonable way, venture an objection. The first-the accepting-though worthy of affection and a degree of sympathy, would never emerge as individuals; the latter- those who sometimes questioned- had a bit morepreexistence.One after- noon (afternoons now paid their tribute to sleep as well; now the man was awake no more than two or three hours around daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory cla.s.sroom once and for all and retained but a single pupil-a taciturn, sallow-skinned young man, at times intractable, with sharp features that echoed those of the man that dreamed him. The pupil was not discon- certed for long by the elimination of his cla.s.smates; after only a few of the private cla.s.ses, his progress amazed his teacher. Yet disaster would not be forestalled. One day the man emerged from sleep as though from a viscousdesert, looked up at the hollow light of the evening (which for a moment he confused with the light of dawn), and realized that he had not dreamed. All that night and the next day, the unbearable lucidity of insomnia harried him, like a hawk. He went off to explore the jungle, hoping to tire himself; among the hemlocks he managed no more than a few intervals of feeble sleep, fleetingly veined with the most rudimentary of visions-useless to him. He reconvened his cla.s.s, but no sooner had he spoken a few brief words of exhortation than the faces blurred, twisted, and faded away.

In his almost perpetual state of wakefulness, tears of anger burned the man's old eyes.

He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can under- take, even if he fathom all the enigmas of the higher and lower spheres- much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind. He understood that initial failure was inevitable. He swore to put behind him the vast hallucination that at first had drawn him off the track, and he sought another way to approach his task. Before he began, he devoted a month to recovering the strength his delirium had squandered. He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming, and almost instantly man- aged to sleep for a fair portion of the day. The fewtimes he did dream during this period, he did not focus on his dreams; he would wait to take up his task again until the disk of the moon was whole. Then, that evening, he purified himself in the waters of the river, bowed down to the planetary G.o.ds, uttered those syllables of a powerful name that it is lawful to p.r.o.nounce, and laid himself down to sleep. Almost immediately he dreamed a beating heart.

He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret-about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and s.e.xless; he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater cer- tainty. He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, helived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and then the entire heart, inside and out. And his inspection made him proud. He deliberately did not sleep the next night; then he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set about dreaming another of the major organs. Before the year was out he had reached the skeleton, the eyelids.

The countless hairs of the body were perhaps the most difficult task. The man had dreamed a fully fleshed man-a stripling-but this youth did not stand up or speak, nor could it open its eyes. Night after night, the man dreamed the youth asleep.

In the cosmogonies of the Gnostics, the demiurges knead up a red Adam who cannot manage to stand; as rude and inept and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dream wrought from the sorcerer's nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his creation, but he could not bring himself to do it. (He'd have been better off if he had.) After mak- ing vows to all the deities of the earth and the river, he threw himself at the feet of the idol that was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt, and he begged for its untried aid. That evening, at sunset, the statue filled his dreams. In the dream it was alive, and trembling- yet it was not the dread-inspiring hybrid form of horse and tiger it had been. It was, instead, those two vehe- ment creatures plus bull, and rose, and tempest, too-and all that, simulta- neously. The manifold G.o.d revealed to the man that its earthly name was Fire, and that in that circular temple (and others like it) men had made sac- rifices and wors.h.i.+ped it, and that it would magically bring to life the phan- tasm the man had dreamed-so fully bring him to life that every creature, save Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him for a man of flesh and blood. Fire ordered the dreamer to send the youth, once in- structed in the rites, to that other ruined temple whose pyramids still stood downriver, so that a voice might glorify the G.o.d in that deserted place. In the dreaming man's dream, the dreamed man awoke.

The sorcerer carried out Fire's instructions. He consecrated a period of time (which in the end encompa.s.sed two full years) to revealing to the youth the arcana of the universe and the secrets of the cult of Fire. Deep in- side, it grieved the man to separate himself from his creation. Under the pretext of pedagogical necessity, he drew out the hours of sleep more every day. He also redid the right shoulder (which was perhaps defective). From time to time, he was disturbed by a sense that all this had happened be- fore-----His days were, in general, happy; when he closed his eyes, he wouldthinkNow I will be with my son. Or, less frequently,The son I have engen- dered is waiting for me, and he will not exist if I do not go to him.

Gradually, the man accustomed the youth to reality. Once he ordered him to set a flag on a distant mountaintop. The next day, the flag crackled on the summit. He attempted other, similar experiments- each more dar- ing than the last. He saw with some bitterness that his son was ready- perhaps even impatient-to be born. That night he kissed him for the first time, then sent him off, through many leagues of impenetrable jungle, many leagues of swamp, to that other temple whose ruins bleached in the sun downstream. But first (so that the son would never know that he was a phantasm, so that he would believe himself to be a man likeother men) the man infused in him a total lack of memory of his years of education.

The man's victory, and his peace, were dulled by the wearisome same- ness of his days. In the twilight hours of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, imagining perhaps that his unreal son per- formed identical rituals in other circular ruins, downstream. At night he did not dream, or dreamed the dreams that all men dream. His perceptions of the universe's sounds and shapes were somewhat pale: the absent son was nourished by those diminutions of his soul. His life's goal had been accom- plished; the man lived on now in a sort of ecstasy. After a period of time (which some tellers ofthe story choose to compute in years, others in de- cades), two rowers woke the man at midnight. He could not see their faces, but they told him of a magical man in a temple in the North, a man who could walk on fire and not be burned.

The sorcerer suddenly remembered the G.o.d's words. He remembered that of all the creatures on the earth, Fire was the only one who knew that his son was a phantasm. That recollection, comforting at first, soon came to torment him. He feared that his son would meditate upon his unnatural privilege and somehow discover that he was a mere simulacrum. To be not a man, but the projection of another man's dream-what incomparable hu- miliation, what vertigo! Every parent feels concern for the children he has procreated (or allowed to be procreated) in happiness or in mere confusion; it was only natural that the sorcerer should fear for the future of the son he had conceived organ by organ, feature by feature, through a thousand and one secret nights.

The end of his meditations came suddenly, but it had been foretold by certain signs: first (after a long drought), a distant cloud, as light as a bird, upon a mountaintop; then, toward the South, the sky the pinkish color of a leopard's gums; then the clouds of smoke that rusted the iron of the nights; then, at last, the panicked flight of the animals-for that which had oc- curred hundreds of years ago was being repeated now. The ruins of the sanctuary of the G.o.d of Fire were destroyed by fire. In the birdless dawn, the sorcerer watched the concentric holocaust close in upon the walls. For a moment he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he realized that death would be a crown upon his age and absolve him from his labors. He walked into the tatters of flame, but they did not bite his flesh-they ca- ressed him, bathed him without heat and without combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him.

The Lottery in Babylon

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here- my right hand has no index finger. Look here- through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo-it is the second letter,Beth.

On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who on nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the half-light of dawn, in a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible-I would cry out and no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be beheaded. I have known that thing the Greeks knew not-uncertainty. In a chamber of bra.s.s, as I faced the strangler's silent scarf, hope did not abandon me; in the river of delights, panic has not failed me. Heraclides Ponticus reports, admiringly, that Pythagoras recalled hav- ing beenPyrrhus,and before that, Euphorbus, and before that, some other mortal; in order to recall similar vicissitudes, I have no need of death, nor even of imposture.

I owe that almost monstrous variety to an inst.i.tution-the Lottery- which is unknown in other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or se- cretly. I have not delved into this inst.i.tution's history. I know that sages cannot agree. About its mighty purposes I know as much as a man untu- tored in astrology might know about the moon. Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable G.o.ds or of my heart.

Now, far from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the Lottery, and about the blasphemousconjectures that shrouded men whisper in the half-light of dawn or evening.

My father would tell how once, long ago-centuries? years?-the lot- tery in Babylon was a game played by commoners. He would tell (though whether this is true or not, I cannot say) how barbers would take a man's copper coins and give back rectangles made of bone or parchment and adorned with symbols.

Then, in broad daylight, a drawing would be held; those smiled upon by fate would, with no further corroboration by chance, win coins minted of silver. The procedure, as you can see, was rudimentary.

Naturally, those so-called "lotteries" were a failure. They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealednot to all a man's faculties, but only to his hopefulness. Public indifference soon meant that the merchants who had founded these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone tried some- thing new: including among the list of lucky numbers a fewunlucky draws. This innovation meant that those who bought those numbered rectangles now had a twofold chance: they might win a sum of money or they might be required to pay a fine-sometimes a considerable one. As one might ex- pect, that small risk (for every thirty "good" numbers there was one ill-omened one) piqued the public's interest. Babylonians flocked to buy tickets. The man who bought none was considered a pusillanimous wretch, a man with no spirit of adventure. In time, this justified contempt found a second target: not just the man who didn't play, but also the man who lost and paid the fine. The Company (as it was now beginning to be known) had to protect the interest of the winners, who could not be paid their prizes unless the pot contained almost the entire amount of the fines. A lawsuit was filed against the losers: the judge sentenced them to pay the original fine, plus court costs, or spend a number of days in jail. In order to thwart the Company, they all chose jail. From that gauntlet thrown down by a few men sprang the Company's omnipotence-its ecclesiastical, metaphysical force.

Some time after this, the announcements of the numbers drawn began to leave out the lists of fines and simply print the days of prison a.s.signed to each losing number. That shorthand, as it were, which went virtually unno- ticed at the time, was of utmost importance:It was the first appearance of nonpecuniary elements in the lottery. And it met with great success-indeed, the Company was forced by its players to increase the number of unlucky draws.

As everyone knows, the people of Babylon are great admirers of logic, and even of symmetry. It was inconsistent that lucky numbers should payoff in round silver coins while unlucky ones were measured in days and nights of jail. Certain moralists argued that the possession of coins did not always bring about happiness, and that other forms of happiness were per- haps more direct.

The lower-caste neighborhoods of the city voiced a different complaint. The members of the priestly cla.s.s gambled heavily, and so enjoyed all the vicissitudes of terror and hope; the poor (with understandable, or in- evitable, envy) saw themselves denied access to that famously delightful, even sensual, wheel. The fair and reasonable desire that all men and women, rich and poor, be able to take part equally in the Lottery inspired indignant demonstrations-the memory of which, time has failed to dim. Some stub- born souls could not (or pretended they could not) understand that this was a novusordosedorum,a necessary stage of history.... A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that that ticket ent.i.tled the bearer to have his tongue burned out. The code of law provided the same sentence for stealing a lottery ticket. Some Babylonians argued that the slave de- served the burning iron for being a thief; others, more magnanimous, that the executioner should employ the iron because thus fate had decreed.... There were disturbances, there were regrettable instances of bloodshed, but the ma.s.ses of Babylon at last, over the opposition of the well-to-do, im- posed their will; they saw their generous objectives fully achieved. First, the Company was forced to a.s.sume all public power. (The unification was nec- essary because of the vastness and complexity of the new operations.) Sec- ond, the Lottery was made secret, free of charge, and open to all. The mercenary sale of lots was abolished; once initiated into the mysteries of Baal, every free man automatically took part in the sacred drawings, which were held in the labyrinths of the G.o.d every sixty nights and determined each man's destiny until the next drawing. The consequences were incalcu- lable. A lucky draw might bring about a man's elevation to the council of the magi or the imprisonment of his enemy (secret, or known by all to be so), or might allow him to find, in the peaceful dimness of his room, the woman who would begin to disturb him, or whom he had never hoped to see again; an unlucky draw: mutilation, dishonor of many kinds, death it- self. Sometimes a single event-the murder ofC in atavern, B's mysterious apotheosis- would be the inspired outcome of thirty or forty drawings. Combining bets was difficult, but we must recall that the individuals of the Company were (and still are) all-powerful, and clever. In many cases, the knowledge that certain happy turns were the simple result of chance would have lessened the force of those outcomes; to forestall that problem, agentsof the Company employed suggestion, or even magic. The paths they fol- lowed, the intrigues they wove, were invariably secret. To penetrate the innermost hopes and innermost fears of every man, they called upon as- trologers and spies. There werecertain stone lions, a sacred latrine called Qaphqa, some cracks in a dusty aqueduct-these places, it was generally be- lieved,gave access to the Company, and well- or ill-wis.h.i.+ng persons would deposit confidential reports in them. An alphabetical file held thosedossiers of varying veracity.

Incredibly, there was talk of favoritism, of corruption. With its custom- ary discretion, the Company did not reply directly; instead, it scrawled its brief argument in the rubble of a mask factory. Thisapologia is now num- bered among the sacred Scriptures. It pointed out, doctrinally, that the Lot- tery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the universe, and observed that to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not contravene it. It also noted that those lions, that sacred squatting-place, though not dis- avowed by the Company (which reserved the right to consult them), func- tioned with no official guarantee.

This statement quieted the public's concerns. But it also produced other effects perhaps unforeseen by its author. It profoundly altered both the spirit and the operations of the Company. I have but little time remain- ing; we are told that the s.h.i.+p is about to sail-but I will try to explain.

However unlikely it may seem, no one, until that time, had attempted to produce a general theory of gaming. Babylonians are not a speculative people; they obey the dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their hopes, their nameless terror to it, but it never occurs to them to delve into its labyrinthine laws or the revolving spheres that manifest its workings. Nonetheless, the semiofficial statement that I mentioned inspired numer- ous debates of a legal and mathematical nature. From one of them, there emerged the following conjecture: If the Lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not appro- priate that chance intervene inevery aspect of the drawing, not just one? Is it not ludicrous that chance should dictate a person's death while the cir- c.u.mstances of that death-whether private or public, whether drawn out for an hour or a century-shouldnot be subject to chance? Those perfectly reasonable objections finally prompted sweeping reform; the complexities of the new system (complicated further by its having been in practice for centuries) are understood by only a handful of specialists, though I will at- tempt to summarize them, even if only symbolically.

Let us imagine a first drawing, which condemns a man to death. In pursuance of that decree, another drawing is held; out of that second drawing come, say, nine possible executors. Of those nine, four might initiate a third drawing to determine the name of the executioner, two might replace the un- lucky draw with a lucky one (the discovery of a treasure, say), another might decide that the death should be exacerbated (death with dishonor, that is, or with the refinement of torture), others might simply refuse to carry out thesentence----That is the scheme of the Lottery, put symbolically.In reality,the number of drawings is infinite.No decision is final; all branch into others. The ignorant a.s.sume that infinite drawings require infinite time; actually, all that is required is that time be infinitely subdivisible, as in the famous parable of the Race with the Tortoise. That infinitude coincides remarkably well with the sinuous numbers of Chance and with the Heavenly Archetype of the Lot- tery beloved of Platonists.... Some distorted echo of our custom seems to have reached the Tiber: In hisLife of Antoninus Heliogabalus, AEliusLampridius tells us that the emperor wrote out on seash.e.l.ls the fate that he intended for his guests at dinner-some would receive ten pounds of gold; others, ten houseflies, ten dormice, ten bears. It is fair to recall that Heliogabalus was raised in Asia Minor, among the priests of his eponymous G.o.d.

There are alsoimpersonal drawings, whose purpose is unclear. One drawing decrees that a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a bird be released from the top of a certain tower; another, that every hundred years a grain of sand be added to (or taken from) the countless grains of sand on a certain beach. Sometimes, the consequences are terrible.

Under the Company's beneficent influence, our customs are now steeped in chance. The purchaser of a dozen amphorae of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one contains a talisman, or a viper; the scribe who writes out a contract never fails to include some error; I myself, in this hurried statement, have misrepresented some splendor, some atrocity- perhaps, too, some mysterious monotony.... Our historians, the most per- spicacious on the planet, have invented a method for correcting chance; it is well known that the outcomes of this method are (in general) trust- worthy-although, of course, they are never divulged without a measure of deception. Besides, there is nothing so tainted with fiction as the history of the Company....A paleographiedoc.u.ment, unearthed at a certain temple, may come from yesterday's drawing or from a drawing that took place cen- turies ago. No book is published withoutsome discrepancy between each of the edition's copies. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, interpolate, alter.In- direct falsehood is also practiced.

The Company, with G.o.dlike modesty, shuns all publicity. Its agents, of course, are secret; the orders it constantly (perhaps continually) imparts are no different from those spread wholesale by impostors.

Besides-who will boast of being a mere impostor? The drunken man who blurts out an ab- surd command, the sleeping man who suddenly awakes and turns and chokes to death the woman sleeping at his side-are they not, perhaps, im- plementing one of the Company's secret decisions? That silent functioning, like G.o.d's, inspires all manner of conjectures. One scurrilously suggests that the Company ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and that the sacred dis- order of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional; another believes that the Company is eternal, and teaches that it shall endure until the last night, when the last G.o.d shall annihilate the earth. Yet another declares that the Company is omnipotent, but affects only small things: the cry of a bird, the shades of rust and dust, the half dreams that come at dawn. Another, whis- pered by masked heresiarchs, says thatthe Company has never existed, and never will. Another, no less despicable, argues that it makes no difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of the shadowy corporation, be- cause Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.

A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain

Herbert Quain died recently in Roscommon. I see with no great surprise that theTimes Literary Supplement devoted to him a scant half column of necrological pieties in which there is not a single laudatory epithet that is not set straight (or firmly reprimanded) by an adverb. TheSpectator, in its corresponding number, is less concise, no doubt, and perhaps somewhat more cordial, but it compares Quain's first book,The G.o.d of the Labyrinth, with one by Mrs. Agatha Christie, and others to works by Gertrude Stein. These are comparisons that no one would have thought to be in- evitable, and that would have given no pleasure to the deceased. Not that Quain ever considered himself "a man of genius"

-even on those peri- patetic nights of literary conversation when the man who by that time had f.a.gged many a printing press invariably played at beingM. Teste orDr. Samuel Johnson.... Indeed, he saw with absolute clarity the experimental nature of his works, which might be admirable for their innovativeness and a certain laconic integrity, but hardly for their strength of pa.s.sion. "I am like Cowley's odes," he said in a letter to me from Longford on March 6, 1939. "I belong not to art but to the history of art." (In his view, there was no lower discipline than history.) I have quoted Quain's modest opinion of himself; naturally, that mod- esty did not define the boundaries of his thinking. Flaubert and Henry James have managed to persuade us that works of art are few and far be- tween, and maddeningly difficult to compose, but the sixteenth century (we should recall theVoyage to Parna.s.sus, we should recall the career of Shake- speare) did not share that disconsolate opinion. Nor did Herbert Quain. He believed that "great literature" is the commonest thing in the world, andthat there was hardly a conversation in the street that did not attain those "heights." He also believed that the aesthetic act must contain some element of surprise, shock, astonishment-and that being astonished by rote is diffi- cult, so he deplored with smiling sincerity "the servile, stubborn preserva- tion of past and bygone books." ... I do not know whether that vague theory of his is justifiable or not; I do know that his books strive too greatly to astonish.

I deeply regret having lent to a certain lady, irrecoverably, the first book that Quain published. I have said that it was a detective story-The G.o.d of the Labyrinth;what a brilliant idea the publisher had, bringing it out in late November, 1933. In early December, the pleasant yet arduous convolutions ofThe Siamese Twin Mystery* gave London and New York a good deal of "gumshoe" work to do-in my view, the failure of our friend's work can be laid to that ruinous coincidence. (Though there is also the question-I wish to be totally honest-of its somewhat careless plotting and the hollow, frigid stiltedness of certain descriptions of the sea.) Seven years later, I cannot for the life of me recall the details of the plot, but this is the general scheme of it, impoverished (or purified) by my forgetfulness: There is anincomprehensible murder in the early pages of the book, a slow discussion in the middle, and a solution of the crime toward the end. Once the mystery has been cleared up, there is a long ret- rospective paragraph that contains the following sentence:Everyone be- lieved that the chessplayers had met accidentally. That phrase allows one to infer that the solution is in fact in error, and so, uneasy, the reader looks back over the pertinent chapters and discoversanother solution, which is the correct one.

The reader of this remarkable book, then, is more perspi- cacious than the detective.

An even more heterodox work is the "regressive, ramifying fiction"April March, whose third (and single) section is dated 1936. No one, in as- saying this novel, can fail to discover that it is a kind of game; it is legiti- mate, I should think, to recall that the author himself never saw it in any other light. "I have reclaimed for this novel," I once heard him say, "the es- sential features of every game: the symmetry, the arbitrary laws, the te- dium." Even the name is a feeble pun: it is not someone's name, does not mean "a march [taken] in April," but literally April-March. Someone once noted that there is an echo of the doctrines of Dunne in the pages of this book; Quain's foreword prefers instead to allude to that backward-running world posited by Bradley, in which death precedes birth, the scar precedes the wound, and the wound precedes the blow(Appearance and Reality,1897, p. 215).

1.

'So much for Herbert Quain's erudition, so much for page 215 of a book pub- lished in 1897. The interlocutor of Plato's Politicus, the unnamed "Eleatic Stranger," had described, over two thousand years earlier, a similar regression, that of the Chil- dren of Terra, the Autochthons, who, under the influence of a reverse rotation of the cosmos, grow from old age to maturity, from maturity to childhood, from childhood to extinction and nothingness. Theopompus, too, in his Philippics, speaks of certain northern fruits which produce in the person who eats them the same retrograde growth___Even more interesting than these images is imagining an inversion of Time itself-a condition in which we would remember the Future and know nothing, or perhaps have only the barest inkling, of the Past.Cf.Inferno,Canto X, II. 97-105 in which the prophetic vision is compared to farsightedness.

But it is not the worlds proposed byApril March that are re- gressive, it is the way the stories are told- regressively and ramifying, as I have said. The book is composed of thirteen chapters. The first reports an ambiguous conversation between several unknown persons on a railway station platform. The second tells of the events of the evening that pre- cedes the first. The third, likewise retrograde, tells of the events ofanother, different, possible evening before the first; the fourth chapter relates the events of yet a third different possible evening. Each of these (mutually ex- clusive) "evenings-before" ramifies into three further "evenings-before," all quite different. The work in its entirety consists, then, of nine novels; each novel, of three long chapters. (The first chapter is common to all, of course.) Of those novels, one is symbolic; another, supernatural; another, a detective novel; another, psychological; another, a Communist novel; an - other, anti-Communist; and so on. Perhaps the following symbolic repre- sentation will help the reader understand the novel's structure:

With regard to this structure, it may be apposite to say once again what Schopenhauer said about Kant's twelve categories: "He sacrifices everything to his rage for symmetry." Predictably, one and another of the nine tales is unworthy of Quain; the best is not the one that Quain first conceived,x4; it is, rather,x9, a tale of fantasy. Others are marred by pallid jokes and in- stances of pointlesspseudoexact.i.tude.Those who read the tales in chrono- logical order(e.g., x3, y z) will miss the strange book's peculiar flavor. Two stories-x7andxs -have no particular individual value; it is theirjuxtaposi- tion that makes them effective.... I am not certain whether I should re- mind the reader that afterApril March was published,Quain had second thoughts about the triune order of the book and predicted that the mor- tals who imitated it would opt instead for a binary scheme-

while the G.o.ds and demiurges had chosen an infinite one: infinite stories, infinitely branching.

Quite unlikeApril March, yet similarly retrospective, is the heroic two-act comedyThe Secret Mirror.

In the works we have looked at so far, a for- mal complexity hobbles the author's imagination; inThe Secret Mirror, that imagination is given freer rein. The play's first (and longer) act takes place in the country home of General Thrale, C.I.E., near Melton Mowbray. The unseen center around which the plot revolves is Miss Ulrica Thrale, the general's elder daughter. s.n.a.t.c.hes of dialog give us glimpses of this young woman, a haughty Amazon-like creature; we are led to suspect that she sel- dom journeys to the realms of literature. The newspapers have announced her engagement to the duke of Rutland; the newspapers then report that the engagement is off. Miss Thrale is adored by a playwright, one Wilfred Quarles; once or twice in the past, she has bestowed a distracted kiss upon this young man. The characters possess vast fortunes and ancient blood- lines; their affections are n.o.ble though vehement; the dialog seems to swing between the extremes of a hollow grandiloquence worthy of Bulwer-Lytton and the epigrams of Wilde or Philip Guedalla. There is a nightingale and a night; there is a secret duel on the terrace. (Though almost entirelyimperceptible, there are occasional curious contradictions, and there are sordid details.) The characters of the first act reappear in the second- under different names. The "playwright" Wilfred Quarles is a traveling salesman from Liverpool; his real name is John William Quigley. Miss Thrale does exist, though Quigley has never seen her; he morbidly clips pic- tures of her out of theTatleror theSketch. Quigley is the author of the first act; the implausible or improbable "country house" is the Jewish-Irish rooming house he lives in, transformed and magnified by his imagina- tion. ...

The plot of the two acts is parallel, though in the second every- thing is slightly menacing-everything is put off, or frustrated. WhenThe Secret Mirror first opened, critics spoke the names "Freud" and "Julian Green." In my view, the mention of the first of those is entirely unjustified. Report had it thatThe Secret Mirror was a Freudian comedy; that favor- able (though fallacious) reading decided the play's success.

Unfortunately, Quain was over forty; he had grown used to failure, and could not go gently into that change of state. He resolved to have his revenge. In late 1939 he publishedStatements, perhaps the most original of his works-certainly the least praised and most secret of them. Quain would often argue that readers were an extinct species. "There is no European man or woman," he would sputter, "that's not a writer, potentially or in fact." He would also declare that of the many kinds of pleasure literature can minister, the highest is the pleasure of the imagination. Since not everyone is capable of experiencing that pleasure, many will have to content themselves with simulacra. For those "writersmanques"whose name is legion, Quain wrote the eight sto- ries ofStatements. Each of them prefigures, or promises, a good plot, which is then intentionally frustrated by the author. One of the stories (not the best) hints attwo plots; the reader, blinded by vanity, believes that he him- self has come up with them. From the third story, t.i.tled "The Rose of Yester- day," I was ingenuous enough to extract "The Circular Ruins," which is one of the stories in my bookThe Garden of Forking Paths.

1941.

The Library of Babel By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters....

Anatomy of Melancholy,Pt. 2, Sec. II, Mem. IV

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. The arrange- ment of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian.

One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first-identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this s.p.a.ce, too, there pa.s.ses a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite-if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figura- tion and promise of the infinite.... Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name "bulbs." There are two of these bulbs in each hexa- gon, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.

Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, com- pa.s.sionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the un- fathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the library is endless. Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are the necessary shape of absolute s.p.a.ce, or at least of ourperception of s.p.a.ce. They argue that a triangular or pentagonal chamber is inconceivable.

(Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enor- mous circular book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That cyclical book is G.o.d.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the cla.s.sic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circ.u.m- ference is unattainable.

Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book; those letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say. I am aware that that lack of correspondence once struck men as mysterious. Before summarizing the solution of the mystery (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic consequences, is perhaps the most important event in all his- tory), I wish to recall a few axioms.

First:The Library has existedab aeternitate.That truth, whose immedi- ate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no rational mind can doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant appointments-its bookshelves, its enigmatic books, its indefatigable staircases for the traveler, and its water closets for the seated librarian-can only be the handiwork of a G.o.d. In or- der to grasp the distance that separates the human and the divine, one has only to compare these crude trembling symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book with the organic letters inside-neat, deli- cate, deep black, and inimitably symmetrical.

Second:There are twenty-five orthographic symbols.1'The original ma.n.u.script has neither numbers nor capital letters; punctuation is limited to the comma and the period. Those two marks, the s.p.a.ce, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five sufficient symbols that our unknown author is referring to. [Ed. note.]

That discovery en- abled mankind, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and thereby satisfactorily solve the riddle that no conjecture had been able to divine-the formless and chaotic nature of virtually all books. One book, which my father once saw in a hexagon in circuit 15-94,consisted of the lettersM C Vperversely repeated from the first line to the last. An- other (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whosepenultimate page contains the phraseOTime thy pyramids.This much is known: For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency. (I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superst.i.tious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempt- ing to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one's hand.... They will acknowledge that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but contend that that adoption was fortuitous, coincidental, and that books in themselves have no meaning. That argu- ment, as we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.) For many years it was believed that those impenetrable books were in ancient or far-distant languages. It is true that the most ancient peoples, the first librarians, employed a language quite different from the one we speak today; it is true that a few miles to the right, our language devolves into dia- lect and that ninety floors above, it becomes incomprehensible. All of that, I repeat, is true-but four hundred ten pages of unvaryingM C V'scannot be- long to any language, however dialectal or primitive it may be. Some have suggested that each letter influences the next, and that the value ofM C Von page 71, line 3, is not the value of the same series on another line of another page, but that vague thesis has not met with any great acceptance. Others have mentioned the possibility of codes; that conjecture has been universally accepted, though not in the sense in which its originators formulated it.

Some five hundred years ago, the chief of one of the upper hexagons2

2.

In earlier times, there was one man for every three hexagons. Suicide and dis- eases of the lung have played havoc with that proportion. An unspeakably melancholy memory: I have sometimes traveled for nights on end, down corridors and polished staircases, without coming across a single librarian.