Cambridge Companion to Borges

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DANIEL BALDERSTON

Fictions
Ficciones (Fictions) was the name used from 1944 on to designate Borges’s most inluential collection of short
stories, one that includes such famous stories as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote,” and “The Garden of Forking Paths.” This was not the original title of the collection, and the contents
of the book varied later when it was included in the (incomplete and chaotic) Obras completas, but it is the title
most commonly used for that collection, and a highly inluential title, as we shall see. (It was even preserved as
the title for the English translation of the book that Anthony Kerrigan made for Grove Press in 1962.)

In the late 1930s Borges was working as a cataloguer at a small branch library in the Boedo neighborhood of
Buenos Aires. His knowledge of library classiication systems comes up a number of times in his subsequent
writings, most notably in “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” (1942) in Other Inquisitions. His library work
no doubt focused his attention on one of the basic classification schemes, the division of printed work between
“fiction” and “non-fiction.” “Ficción” was not a common classification category in Spanish at the time (cuento,
novela, narrativa were all more common), but in the English-speaking world, school and public librarians were
in the habit of dividing their books that way, even though one of the most common classification systems used
in such libraries, the Dewey Decimal System (developed by Melvil Dewey in 1878), did have a decimal
classification for fiction (within the 800 numerals used for literature). Public libraries in the United States,
however, frequently did not follow this aspect of the Dewey classification system. These small, non-academic
libraries usually contained a high percentage of novels, a fact that counseled for a pragmatic separation of works
of fiction from other works in the library collection. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction, of course,
has ancient roots in literary criticism, since the concept of fiction or invention was contrasted with truth. Plato’s
and Aristotle’s concept of mimesis was informed by a distinction between truth and verisimilitude, between the
thing itself and representations of it, and Borges refers numerous times in his literary criticism of the 1930s to
this distinction.

In Borges’s career, the switch from mostly non-fiction to significant fiction writing was notable. His early
writings (from 1919 to 1930, roughly) were mostly poetry and poetry criticism, though already by the middle of
the 1920s he had become an important book reviewer, and more generally a cultural critic (with writings on art
and film, as well as occasionally on popular music and other aspects of popular culture). What are usually
considered his first short stories were written in 1933 and 1934 for a literary supplement, and were collected in
the volume A Universal History of Iniquity in 1935; they were, however, not original stories (except for one),
but recast versions based on published sources that were listed in a bibliography at the end of the volume.
Critics have noted the important ways in which Borges rewrote these “twice-told tales,” but there is no dispute
that they are not “fiction” in the fullest sense, since they were rewritten from earlier (“non-fictional”) sources.
The first full ficción is “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” but that too was not cast fully as a short story,
masquerading instead as a book review, and for good measure was first published in A History of Eternity
(1936), a book of essays. (It would later be included in The Garden of Forking Paths and Fictions, and omitted
from some later editions of A History of Eternity.) The cluster of stories written between 1939 and 1941 and
then collected as The Garden of Forking Paths (issued the last day of 1941 but circulated beginning in 1942)
were notable, then, within the context of Borges’s career at the time, since he was mostly considered a book
reviewer and essayist, and was characterized as such in early editions of Quién es quién en la Argentina (Who’s
Who in Argentina).

A bit more than two years after the initial publication of The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges published
Fictions. The first section, entitled The Garden of Forking Paths, reproduced the earlier book (including the
earlier mock book review “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim”); a second section entitled Artifices added six stories.
Editions of Fictions that appeared from 1956 on included three additional stories, “The South,” “The Cult of the
Phoenix,” and “The End,” which were written after the publication of The Aleph (Borges’s other path-breaking

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book of stories) in 1949. The history of the book, then, is quite complex, with the majority of the stories written
between 1940 and 1944, but with a few that were written earlier and (quite a bit) later. The Spanish title,
Ficciones, was a bold one at the time, since most other collections of stories in Spanish would have been called
“relatos” or “cuentos.”

If Borges is known as the master of Ficciones, though, this has not so much to do with the choice of one word
over another as for the fact that the stories collected in the volume were radically different from anything that
anyone had written up to that time (in any language). The success of the title, then, has to do with its distilling in
a single word something of the anomalous nature of those texts. In what remains of this chapter, I would like to
discuss the stories collected there, one by one in the order in which they appear in the book (which is not the
order in which they were written or published in periodicals), then return to the question of what Ficciones
means here.

The opening story has the rather daunting title “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Published originally in Sur in
May 1940 (and reprinted a few months later in the Antología de la literatura fantástica edited by Borges with
Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, and translated into English as The Book of Fantasy), it tells the story
of three anomalous objects that appear in the narrator’s world: a four-page article on an imaginary region
(Uqbar), the eleventh volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön, the rest of that encyclopedia, and some
mysterious metallic objects that are not of this world. The temporal setting is 1935 to 1947 (the latter being the
date of a postscript that appeared in the original 1940 publications of the story); the spatial setting is various
small towns on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The story narrates the detective work done by Borges and several
of his friends to understand the origin of these anomalous objects, which eventually leads them to uncover an
international conspiracy that would overthrow the ways we think about the world. This conspiracy is
metaphysical, but by the end of the story it has political effects, and they seem atrocious to the narrator. Subtly,
then, Borges writes about imaginary encyclopedias but he is also writing about the crisis shaking the world as he
writes (at the beginning of the Second World War).

“Tlön” was one of several stories that Borges would describe in the Foreword to the volume as “notes on
imaginary books” that would have the advantage over other apocryphal books on books (he mentions Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus) of being much shorter (CF 67). They are reviews in the sense that they sum up and critique a
work, showing with carefully chosen examples and an occasional flare of polemics, the contours of an
intellectual project. In a parallel sense, the narrator of “Tlön” notes that the article on Uqbar (and then the
encyclopedia of Tlön) has the dry tone of writing in encyclopedias: “quite plausible, very much in keeping with
the general tone of the work, even (naturally) somewhat boring” (CF 69). This contrasts with the tone of the
story itself: if the narrator can say that his father and Herbert Ashe had “one of those close English friendships
(the first adjective is perhaps excessive) that begin by excluding confidences and soon eliminate conversation”
(CF 71), he himself is anything but reticent about the impact of the discoveries on himself, his circle of friends,
and eventually the wider world. A passionate text that plays off the idea of dispassion, “Tlön” hovers, then, over
the very distinction between ideas and reality, or perhaps between fiction and non-fiction.

In many editions of Fictions, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” appears next. As already explained, it had been
published initially in the essay collection A History of Eternity in 1936; it was subsequently included in The
Garden of Forking Paths and Fictions, but has now been moved back to A History of Eternity in the latest
editions of the Obras completas. (In individual editions of A History of Eternity and Fictions it often appears in
both.) The first of the active book reviews, it opens with invocations of Dorothy Sayers and other figures in the
British intellectual world of the time, and masks as a review of the first Indian crime novel. The “reviewer” has
at hand only the second edition of the novel, published in London and with a strong allegorizing (or
Orientalizing) tendency that he hypothesizes was not as strong in the original Bombay edition. The story came
out at a time when Borges was especially active as a book reviewer, and the touches of verisimilitude are so
strong that his best friend Adolfo Bioy Casares is said to have tried to order the book from London. Like the
later “The Man on the Threshold” (in The Aleph) it is a story that plays on Kipling, and evinces a strong interest
in British India. At the same time, it seems to be at least partly a mock review of El enigma de la calle Arcos
(The Mystery of Arcos Street), an anonymous Argentine crime novel (at least no one has deciphered in a
convincing way the identity of the author hidden behind the pseudonym of Sauli Lostal), first published serially
in 1932 in the newspaper Crítica (whose literary supplement Borges would direct with Ulises Petit de Murat in
1933– 34) and in book form in 1934; the dates, and the physical description of the book, are very close to those
in “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim.”

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Another of the famously challenging stories, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” predates “Tlön,” since
it was published in Sur in May 1939. If “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” the only story in Fictions written be-
fore “Pierre Menard,” masquerades as a book review, “Pierre Menard” mas- querades as an obituary, written by
some obscure provincial French man of letters in Nîmes in 1939 (as the colophon of the story informs us). The
narrator writes to defend the reputation of his late friend against others, whom he considers opportunistic and
treacherous, most notably a local lady named Madame Henri Bachelier. The story begins with Menard’s funeral,
but most of the middle consists of an annotated bibliography of Menard’s “visible work,” and a discussion of his
unfinished version of Don Quixote. Of the latter, he finished only two and a half chapters (chapters 9, 22, and 38
of Part One of the Cervantes novel), but from a single phrase that he quotes we know that his version is identical
(down to the punctuation) to the Cervantes text and yet “almost infinitely richer” (CF 94), or so he insists. The
“previous” writing of Menard is so strong that, as in a palimpsest where the original text can be recovered from
the marks on the parchment (CF 95), Cervantes’s text in its entirety seems to the narrator to have been written
by his friend, more than three hundred years (and in a different country) from the original.

One of the many intriguing features of the story is the fact that there was a French intellectual named Dr. Pierre
Menard (without an accent, as in the Borges story) in Nîmes in the decades when Borges’s fictional charac- ter
lived there, and that he wrote a series of books on the contributions of graphology to psychoanalysis, most
notably L’Écriture et le subconscient: psychanalyse et graphologie (Writing and the Subconscious:
Psychoanalysis and Graphology).1 Dr. Menard hypothesized that handwriting analysis would provide a
scientific basis for psychoanalysis, and provides his reader with a detailed course whereby to analyze the writer
through the inclination, size, width, speed, and shape of his or her letters. Something of this comes through in
the final footnote of the story, which refers to Menard’s “insect- like handwriting” and use of graph paper for his
manuscripts (as was the case for Borges during this period), but more importantly the book focuses on analyzing
through copying or tracing the letters of the original, so that the analyst can fully identify with the analysand.
This is the very idea of the Novalis fragment mentioned in the story (fragment 2005 of the Dresden edition
reads: “I demonstrate that I have really understood a writer only when I am able to act in the spirit of his
thoughts, and when I can translate his works and alter them in various ways without detracting from his indi-
viduality”). This idea of “total identification,” as the narrator terms it in the story, effaces and yet heightens the
distance between Menard and Cervantes, or perhaps (as critics have argued) between any reader and any author.

The fact that the fictional author’s name is that of a medical doctor interested in psychoanalysis is suggestive,
since it plays with Freud’s and others’ speculations at the time (and Freud died in London only a few months
after the publication of the story) on the relations between literature and the psyche, between imagined and lived
experience. The story, then, plays with a theme just developed in “Tlön,” of the fascination and difficulty of a
rigorous imagining of a world in which nothing is outside of perception, and in which psychology is the master
discipline. (That Borges was skeptical of the claims of psychoanalysis, and had devastating things to say about
“psychological fiction,” makes his underlining of psychological processes the more interesting here.) “Fiction,”
then, can express a complex truth about its author, just as handwriting can betray the secret impulses of the
person who puts pen to paper.

“The Circular Ruins” was first published in Sur in December 1940. Once again, the relation of “fiction” to
“reality” is the thing at stake, this time as a magician (in some ancient time, and unspecified place) tries to
imagine a “son” and introduce him into reality. The time and place of the story are not, however, anywhere so
vague as it would seem, and Mac Williams has established that the story makes clear use of Zoroastrian beliefs
(a fact that Borges hinted at with his mention in the story of the Zend language), particularly those at stake in the
so-called Zurvanite heresy. 2 The purification rituals, the totem animals, the use of ruined temples, the sacred
nature of fire all point toward ancient rituals of renewal and creation. At the same time, Borges’s interest in
mathematics (expressed eloquently in his review of Kasner and Newman’s Mathematics and the Imagination,
SNF 249–50) subtends the mathematical structure of the story, concerned with ruins n and n+1 in an infinite
series. The dreamer dreamed: the Baroque conceit at the heart of the story points toward the idea developed a
few years later in the essay “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” that the presence of a mise en abyme in a text like
this one calls attention to the “fictional” or “literary” nature of that text, but also contaminates with unreality the
“real” status of the reader.

“The Lottery in Babylon,” first published in Sur in January 1941, has often been read as political allegory,
though there is little consensus about whether it refers to all human societies or to particular varieties of
totalitarianism. The narrator, who like his fellow citizens has been alloted very different destinies at different
moments of his life, is missing a finger (an indication of one of the whims to which he was subject) and informs
us near the end that his ship is about to sail. The world around him is radically unstable, with everything being

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determined by lot – with negative as well as positive consequences. The story, written at a particularly fierce
moment in the Second World War, seems to anticipate later existentialist writing (though Borges would be
unsympathetic to that movement when it emerged after the war), with its portrayal of a radically alienated
individual in a chaotic universe. The affiliation with (later) existentialism could have as its symbol the sacred
latrine named Qaphqa – Borges was of course a devoted reader of Kafka throughout this period, as Sartre and
Camus would be later – and by the slightly creepy use made of it, as a place where denunciations can be left.
The world of Kafka’s trial and castle, and of his strange parables, is very much the world of this story.

“A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain” appeared in Sur in April 1941. It is mentioned in the prologue to
The Garden of Forking Paths as another one of the notes on imaginary books, in this case the several novels of
the imaginary author mentioned here. These include a Freudian novel, a detect- ive novel, and a novel that plays
with temporal regression (a mirroring of the motif developed in the title story of the volume a few months later).
A Herbert Quain novel is what Ricardo Reis reads in José Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo
Reis, in which the eponymous Reis (one of the heteronyms adopted by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa)
returns to Lisbon after the death of his author, confirming in a strange way that Quain’s fiction is inserted (by
Borges, then by Saramago) into a different kind of active reality. Quain’s motto in the story, “I belong not to art
but to the history of art” (CF 107), is ironic, since the narrator quickly informs us that Quain regarded history as
an inferior discipline; of course, it is hard to see how a novel could only belong to a history of the novel or a
painting only to the history of painting. “History” is inflected as an accumulation of absences here: a negative
capability, in Keats’s famous phrase, where he refers to Shakespeare’s, and then to Coleridge’s, “fine isolated
verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-
knowledge.” Again, the question of verisimilitude: the fictional construct sneaks into the history of such
constructs, as the world of Tlön sneaks into our world.

“The Library of Babel” was previously unpublished when it first appeared in The Garden of Forking Paths at
the end of 1941, but it is closely related to an earlier essay, “The Total Library,” that had appeared in Sur in
August 1939. The society of librarians described in the story, alienated from their own task by the nonsensical
nature of the volumes that surround them (apparently generated by some sort of random number generator,
though it generates letters instead of numbers) and the uncertain nature of the size of the library that surrounds
them (is it finite or infinite?) lend the story a tone of quiet desperation: some librarians commit suicide, others
go blind or go mad. The narrator never explains how the (apparently all male) society reproduces itself, though
there are two references (one masked by a famous typographical error that has been perpetuated in decades of
editions, which speaks of “final necessities” instead of the “fecal necessities” mentioned in the first edition, and
clearly visible in the first page of the manuscript) to another of the lower bodily functions.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” was also unpublished when it appeared as the final and title story in the 1941
volume. Chosen as title story per- haps because of the way in which its title is at once the text itself, the novel
described in the text, and the garden described in biographies of the writer of the novel, the story is also (as I
have argued in Out of Context) a representation of the chaotic world of 1916, the year of the ghastly Battle of
the Somme, to which explicit reference is made in the opening of the story. Borges plays in this story with a
series of fractured colonial histories – the bitter end of English colonialism in Ireland, the brief German colonial
adventure in Tsingtao, China – to suggest that the characters cannot find solutions to the mysteries in their lives
because those solutions are open secrets that others can see but that they cannot. 3 (As John Irwin argues, the
similarities to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” are no doubt intentional.4)

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” whose very title (“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”) sounds in Spanish as
if translated from English (and perhaps from Chinese to English) and is often misremembered as “El jardín de
los senderos que se bifurcan” (which would sound less strange or “for- eignizing,” to use the term from
translation studies), involves a philosophical excursus into alternate notions of time, but a rigid historical time is
the one that actually takes precedence at a crucial moment at the end of the story. Yu Tsun, stimulated by
Stephen Albert’s theory of proliferating times, feels sur- rounded by himself and Albert in other “dimensions”
of time, and says that in every one of them he is Albert’s friend; Albert responds that in at least one of those
other times they are enemies, and at that very moment Yu Tsun sees the Irish detective, Richard Madden,
arriving at the garden and is forced to shoot Stephen Albert. The historical context is clear: as the reference to
the Liddell Hart book clarifies, the Battle of the Somme is about to be joined in swampy terrain of northern
France (the “Serre-Montauban line” mentioned in the story), and a map in Liddell Hart shows the position of the
town of Albert behind the British lines. Borges was fond enough of the Liddell Hart book to mention it a couple
of times as one of the books that he had most reread and annotated (the others are Mauthner’s dictionary of
philosophy, Spiller’s The Mind of Man, Lewes’s Biographical Dictionary of Philosophy, and Kasner and

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Newman’s Mathematics and the Imagination, a fascinating and strange little library). His Irish detective is
suspected of disloyalty so soon after the Easter Rising in Dublin, and his Chinese spy taught English at the
Deutsche-Chinesische Hochschule of Tsingtao (which really existed, and where English was in fact taught in the
years before the First World War): Borges has interpolated his fiction into a dense web of historical references.
The title story is indeed a memorable one, and one that provides insight into what Todorov calls the “poetics of
prose” (though not specifically apropos of Borges). “Fiction” works in tandem with “non-fiction,” and the
responsible reader will necessarily want to follow up the many references. 5 Only then will the complexity of
Borges’s achievement come into focus.

The second half of Fictions is called Artifices, and as already noted it contains stories published between 1942
and 1944 (when Fictions was first published under that title), with three additions that date from after the
publication of The Aleph. The title of the second section highlights the “artificial” nature of the stories, the fact
that their very essence is “artifice,” though again there is a complex interplay between the artificial and the
natural (or between the fictional and the non-fictional). Many of the stories again work from references to extra-
textual realities, and their “artifice” calls attention to their complex genesis.

“Funes, His Memory,” one of the most famous of these stories, first appeared in the newspaper La Nación on
June 7, 1942. Like “Pierre Menard” it is masked as a memorial text, though unlike the former it is not written
soon after the character’s death but decades later, when a group of Uruguayan intellectuals were bringing
together a group of essays on their extraordinary late fellow countryman and decided to invite the narrator
(despite his being Argentine, and as such something of a rival) to contribute his reminiscences of Funes. The
memoir of Funes begins with an emphatic use of the ways in which the narrator remembers the young man, and
the ways in which he is unworthy of using the verb “remember”: there is no competing, even decades later, with
Funes’s extraordinary memory. The story is famous for its touching, almost funny description of the terrible
thing that it would be to be endowed with a total memory. Reality crowds in on Funes after the accident that
leaves him paralyzed; in order to sleep he thinks of blank surfaces (the dark bottom of a swift river, the other
side of a shed built since his accident) since only these are not tense with detail and particularity. The numbering
system Funes invents, which the narrator finds chaotic in the extreme, is idiosyncratic and only available to him;
it is what Wittgenstein called a private language. Many of his “numbers” refer to Uruguayan culture, and we
know from the narrator that he disdains that of neighboring Argentina (particularly the snobbish culture of its
capital city); the memoir is also troubled by the tension between the two countries, since the narrator (inhabitant
of the larger and more powerful one) feels superior to his country cousin, but then comes to realize the
extraordinary intellect of the cousin’s young peon.

“The Shape of the Sword” also first appeared in La Nación (this story on July 26, 1942). A memoir of the Irish
civil war of two decades earlier, it (like “Funes”) is set in rural Uruguay, this time by an Irish fugitive who
addresses his listener at the end as “Borges.” The retelling of the story of John Vincent Moon hinges on a lie,
and the fact that the listener (“Borges”) does not catch on turns the story into something like a challenge
(perhaps like the knife ights associated so strongly by Borges with rural settings, as well as with marginal urban
ones). Taking up again the question of the Irish struggle for independence (which was in the deep background of
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” and will be the central theme of the following story), Borges tells a story of a
heroic sacrifice, but waits until the very end to have Moon reveal himself as the coward. This narrative trick
forces the reader to reread the whole of the previous text, and on this rereading a whole series of details,
beginning with the ironic nickname given Moon in Uruguay, where he is called “the Englishman at La
Colorada” (CF 138), come to the fore. “The Shape of the Sword” is told by a character who, like the “traitor and
hero” in the following story, calls attention to his duplicity, and thus forces the question of responsibility onto
his listener (and, by extension, onto us as readers). And like the following story, as well as the later “The
South,” it is a story that calls attention to its own artifice. Strikingly, that artifice turns on the unresolved
dilemmas of colonialism, explicitly through the Irish setting, but also as present in the scimitar, a trophy of
British colonial adventures in the Orient. The ight between Moon and his unnamed comrade takes place in the
house of a General Berkeley, and the name suggests (as in “Tlön”) that philosophical controversies about matter
and perception have real-world consequences. This is a point also hinted at when Moon claims that his young
revolutionary (apparently the other, but ultimately shown to be his younger self) subscribed to a vulgar
Marxism, the reduction of “universal history to a sordid economic conflict.” Marx and Berkeley, then: being is
perception, but also the task of the philosopher residing not only in the understanding but also in the
transformation of the world.

“The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” first published in Sur in February 1944, is clearly a continuation of
the same issue, though this is set not in the Ireland of 1922 but in the Ireland of 1824 (though the story is

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reconstructed a hundred years later by the protagonist’s great-grandson). The epigraph from one of Yeats’s great
poems on the Irish revolution makes clear that the story is centrally about the intellectual’s responsibilities,
though this is treated ironically when Ryan discovers that Nolan has plagiarized from the English enemy
Shakespeare: “The idea that history might have copied his- tory is mind-boggling enough; that history should
copy literature is inconceivable ...” (CF 144). The complexity of the story hinges not only on the double nature
of its protagonist, but also on the fact that the process of the invention of a national tradition (in which literature
is centrally important to the shaping of history) can be ascribed not only to Ireland in 1824 but also to Poland,
the republic of Venice, or some Balkan or South American state. The story tells what Borges had earlier called a
“universal history of iniquity” (as Andrew Hurley translates the title of the 1935 collection of stories); notions of
“universal history” are invoked quite specifically with the allusions to Condorcet, Hegel, Spengler, and Vico.
This is to say, the story zeroes in on the ways in which history depends on fables, yet recasts these patterns in
specific ways depending on time and place: the story could be retold in Poland or in Peru, or in Bulgaria, but
that would depend on a similar attention to the interplay between local history and local literature, on the ways
in which language is a party to political and historical conflict.

“Death and the Compass” appeared initially in Sur in May 1942. Like the previous stories, this one is about the
ways in which reading shapes the interpretation of reality: Lönnrot is a better reader of detective stories than he
is a detective, Scharlach reads the popular press (and the texts mentioned in it) to spin his web. Here the
philosopher invoked is not Berkeley or Marx (or Hegel or Condorcet, or the others just mentioned) but Spinoza,
whose “more geometrico” (in his commentary on Descartes, and in subsequent writings) inspires the imposition
of equilateral triangles and rhombuses on a city that turns out to be more Buenos Aires than somewhere in
France. A detective story turned inside out, “Death and the Compass” poses the question of the limits of
rationality (hence the invocation of Spinoza and implicitly of Descartes). Lönnrot’s name invokes Elias Lönnrot,
the compiler of folk poems into the Kalevala, who became thereby the creator of the idea of Finland (as a future
state invented with a deep national past); this process of an “invention of tradition” is also at stake in Lönnrot’s
tardy (and mis- guided) attempts to understand Jewish mysticism, a field where his antagonist (a Jewish
gangster figure like Monk Eastman in A Universal History of Iniquity) is way ahead of him. In keeping with the
theme of Fictions as a whole, this is clearly a story about the ways in which reading fiction shapes the
experience of reality, but also the ways in which the real world can give the active one a slip.

“The Secret Miracle,” published in Sur in February 1943, is a story that clearly relates to the historical time in
which it was written and published. Set during the Nazi invasion of Prague in March 1939, it is (like “The
Garden of Forking Paths”) a story in which games with time are played out against a historical background, and
in which the prison house of chronology closes in on the subject. Jaromir Hladík’s unfinished project, the verse
drama “The Enemies,” plays on psychoanalytic ideas of dream-life and traumatic return; the secret year which
he is granted, that separates the firing of the bullets by the firing squad from the moment of his death, allows
him to return again and again to his poem, to express the dilemma of the relations between reality and
“irrealidad,” between experience and fiction.

“Three Versions of Judas” was published in Sur in August 1944 and shortly thereafter in Fictions. As Edna
Aizenberg has shown, it anticipates by more than sixty years the publication of the lost Gospel of Judas, though
Borges seems to have known the central idea of that book (that Judas was the true redeemer, since he abased
himself to treachery and infamy for the sake of divine design) from medieval refutations of it. 6 The story plays
off a wide variety of theological debates, and it is obvious that Borges takes pleasure in the absurdity of this
mode of inquiry (at the same time that he obviously is knowledgeable about it, and perhaps even fascinated).

“The End,” the first of the three stories added to the second edition of Fictions in 1956, was first published in La
Nación on October 11, 1953 (and as such was the last story that Borges wrote before his blindness impeded his
reading and writing: this story is also an “end” of an important stage of his literary career). It follows on the
1944 publication of “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz,” a story that rewrites a crucial episode in Argentina’s
most famous poem, José Hernández’s The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872). “The End” rewrites the ending of the
second part of that poem, The Return of Martín Fierro (1879), suggesting that the rhetoric of national
reconciliation that dominates the second Hernández poem (written at the time of a national accord that brought
an end to sixty years of civil war) was just a sham, and that the poem’s hero dies in a knife fight with the brother
of a man he had slain some years before (in the first part of the poem). The story about Cruz was written in the
decisive year of the rise to power of Juan Domingo Perón, an event that horrified Borges, and glories defiance
of the state; the story about Fierro’s death was written two years before the “Liberating Revolution” (of which
Borges was an enthusiastic supporter) which ended the Perón regime, and which resulted in the muffling of
dissent by members of Argentina’s largest political party. Interestingly, “The End” is told through the voice of

6
Recabarren, the paralyzed owner of a country general store (there are strong echoes of “Funes” here), who hears
(but does not see) the events that are told through him: as if there were an impartial witness to history.

“The Cult of the Phoenix” first appeared in Sur in a double issue in September–October 1952; like “The End”
and “The South,” it was added to the second edition of Fictions. Like “Three Versions of Judas,” this story plays
with theology, though the “secret” suggested here does not seem to have to do with the true nature of divinity.
Borges suggests that the secret that is at the core of his sect is mundane and all around us, and that all sorts of
people initiate others into it. Many critics have suggested that the secret here is the sexual act, and Borges
confirmed this on at least one occasion.

“The South”, the final story in the second edition of Fictions (and in subsequent ones), was first published in
La Nación on February 8, 1953. Dahlmann’s life story is in many ways parallel to Borges’s: both are products
of families that descend from European men of letters as well as from criollo military figures, both work as
librarians and are fond of similar books (and share a reverence for the Argentine politician Hipólito Yrigoyen),
and both suffer accidents with a window frame that result in septicemia and delirium. Borges’s accident
occurred on Christmas Eve 1938, and he would write “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” when recovering
from it; Dahlmann’s accident results either in his death in a hospital after surgery or in his death in a knife fight
somewhere in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires. The story is told in such a way as to justify
both readings, and Borges mentions in his 1956 postscript to the preface to Artifices that the story (which he
considers his best) can be read “both as a forthright narration of novelistic events and in quite another way, as
well” (CF 129). The issue that is at stake throughout Fictions is highlighted in this last story, which harks back
to the first stories in the book.

The whole of Fictions, then, though not written as a book (and interrupted in its second part by the stories that
were collected in The Aleph), turn on the complex relations between fiction and non-fiction. The first page of
“Tlön,” the first story in the book, says that the narrator and his friend Bioy Casares were discussing the
possibility of writing a first-person novel in which certain discordant details would suggest to a select group of
readers that the fiction masked an “atrocious or banal reality”; the last story (which was in fact the next-to-last
story that Borges would write before going blind) suggests that the reader must be willing to read a story in two
antithetical ways. The games that Borges plays here with both reality and fiction are highly complex. His
interest in techniques of verisimilitude, developed in the early 1930s in two crucial essays, “The Postulation of
Reality” and “Narrative Art and Magic,” provided him with a way of writing fiction that inserts itself into gaps
in the discourses of reality (most notably that of history), while at the same time calling attention to the narrative
conventions that are used to talk about reality. Radical storieslike “Tlön,” “PierreMenard,” “The Garden of
Forking Paths,” “Funes,” and “The South” are all written about these gaps: between language and its referents,
between text and reader, between the thing and the idea. Fictions is one of the most important books of
twentieth-century literature precisely because it is so provocative in the ways in which its “fiction” tells of what
is considered not to be fiction.