Fathoming Borges’ Fantastic Fictions

I was first introduced to the prose of Jorge Luis Borges four years ago. At that time, I longed for the world of the fantastic and macabre, enticed by the strangeness and uncontrollable fear of what may lie beyond the ordinary. Through a godsend suggestion, a friend encouraged me to read the Argentine writer’s short stories, but jokingly warned to take care since Borges’ literary corpus teeters on the bizarre and disturbing.

I actually found the comments amusing, yet at a certain degree I was filled with apprehension but then my curiosity was perked up and I was ready to try anything new. After searching among the shelves of several bookstores, I finally obtained an anthology of Borges’ short stories entitled Collected Fictions, translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley and published by Penguin Books.

My friend was not exaggerating at all with her remarks. At the onset, I was the amazed by the way Borges immediately infuses peculiarity in the plot of his stories—starting with a simple observation or narration of events, he leads the reader into conundrums, improbabilities, and surreal visions that challenge reality and logic. It seemed to me, at one point, that I was reading plots from “The Twilight Zone,” except that Borges wrote these stories twenty years before Rod Serling came up with the television show in the early 1960’s.

I have a confession to make…my fondness for fantasy literature has somewhat declined when I grew up. Naturally, when I was young, my reading fare consisted of the proverbial fairy tales, myths and legends, and fantasy stories, which provided an escape from the tediousness of schoolwork and helped me to spend my idle periods engaged in the wonderful joys of my imagination. How I relish the hours when I shared in the adventures of Peter, Edmund, Lucy, and Susan while reading C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia; witnessing the confrontation of good and evil forces in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; or battling the nefarious monsters faced by the Greek heroes Bellerophon, Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules.

But then like any other babe, I must face the terrors of adolescence. Adding to the consternation of leaving childhood comforts, I was constantly admonished by my parents and teachers to read mature forms of literature instead of the so-called “puerile” subject matter dealt with in fantasy and adventure stories.

Being an obedient child, I followed suit, though slyly maintaining my interest in the fantastic by reading the acclaimed works of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexandre Dumas, and Franz Kafka, and clandestinely revisiting my old fantasy books. However, I painfully discovered that in rereading these stories, I seemed to have drawn too much on its magic that the wonderment I previously enjoyed as a child appears to have diminished, leaving me to be sentimental of the past.

But my encounter with Borges’ anthology of stories was different. It was a real defining moment in my life for it had rekindled that passion for fantasy literature that I felt I had lost in growing-up. At some point, I felt that like me, Borges wanted to reclaim his childhood by fabricating these fantastic stories, radically departing from the maudlin fiction of 19th century Western literature rigorously adhered to in Latin America. Borges acknowledges Franz Kafka’s influence in his fictions, but unlike the Czech author, he does not conceive his stories as full length novels but as concise narratives rich in imagination and detailed in its descriptions.

One of the artifices that Borges cunningly employs are the use of aphorisms and concepts derived from long forgotten tomes of philosophers, historians, and ancient mystics, establishing them as starting points to his plot and ingeniously interweaving suppositions to further highlight the enigmatic nature of the story. For example, Borges’ interpretation of French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s statement that “Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere,” allows time, space, and the universe to become boundless, unrestricted by the laws of science and malleable to physical anomalies and the conniving of men.

Among the stories that expounded this theme, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is unique for its inventiveness. The story, though comically fanciful, can be considered as an allegory for the modern world. It begins with the discovery of an apocryphal publication on the history and civilization of an utopian land written by a secret society of intellectuals who aimed to transform the whole world by overthrowing established reality and propagating the language, sciences, philosophies, and artifacts of a phantasmal society. Written during World War II, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” reveals Borges’ dissatisfaction for the world governed by supernatural laws which can hardly be discerned and presupposes that it would be better for the world to negate its connections with the divine order and adopt human arrangements and rule since these are inventions that are concrete and intelligible.

More than products of his erudition and imagination, Borges’ stories tries to deconstruct and challenge the heroic and persevering image of man—for man can be the victim of circumstances which he has no control of. Man is constantly at the center of many contradictions that affects the world, existence, relationships, surroundings, and emotions that he has to resolutely confront to survive. These stories emphasize that man in no mere accidental creation but one imbued with will and the spirit, independent and able to adapt to times and situations. Although divine encounters do occur in Borges’ stories, these are relegated as coincidences and more often, these preternatural interventions are sometimes perplexing because they either provide the conflict or denouement in the plot, making the reader wonder if the protagonist is the victim of a cosmic prank of fate or an Omnipotent being such as delineated in the story “The Secret Miracle.”

I finished reading Borges’ anthology of stories after a week. When I turned the last page of the book, I came to realize these stories convey profound universal truths: human existence is basically chaotic, but conflicts and challenges make man’s life colorful and extraordinary. Borges’ stories indirectly points out that living is more than engaging in a humdrum lifestyle—it is how we mold ourselves and how we respond to situations that we are able to experience life fully. Another facet of truth that I discovered is that everyday experiences such as taking the time to smile, sharing in the joys of family life, or expressing your tenderness to a loved one are enigmas that we should not dare question nor comprehend, but something we should accept and enjoy.