THE CASE OF THE BLIND LIBRARIAN

by Robert Lopresti

Last week James Lincoln Warren printed part of an essay by Doris Lessing in which she complained that one result of Communism was the idea that fiction had to be “about” something. That is, The Maltese Falcon is really about capitalism, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is about bad tables manners among Spanish diamond cutters. Or something.

This interesting topic sent me in an unexpected direction, straight to Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges was not, as far as I know, a Commie. He was an Argentinian author, mostly of short stories, poetry, and essays. He became the Director of the National Library about the time he became completely blind – an irony that did not escape him.

The reason Lessing made me think of him was that Borges has been described as a man who wrote fiction for people who hated fiction. You see, I think that what bugs fiction-haters most is the need to suspend disbelief; to pretend that something untrue is true.

And Borges wasn’t usually interested in that. A lot of his stuff was not so much short stories as parables. When Jesus talked about a man falling among thieves he doesn’t describe the people, trying to make you believe they are real. It is more of a story problem, than a real story. Ditto Aesop, who wasn’t interested in convincing you that crows chat with foxes (a fable is a parable about animals).

But the art of Agatha Christie, Dashiel Hammett, and yes, Doris Lessing, depends on you agreeing to believe for a minute that the fiction is true.

Borges, much of the time, seemed to be indifferent to that. And the parable, by definition, is “about” something.

One of us

Borges was a reader of mysteries, and he wrote some, too. The first American magazine to publish him in English was Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He was also one of the first recipients of the Mystery Writer’s of America’s Edgar for best short story.

Perhaps his most famous mystery story was “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the confession of a Chinese spy in England during World War I. In this story, which involves a dazzlingly strange motive for murder, Borges in passing defined a subgenre of young adult literature that became a huge moneymaker twenty years later.

His story “Death and the Compass” can be read as a pretty ordinary, if flowery, detective story. But what exactly is going on here? The location is carefully described but you can’t tell even the continent involved, much less the country. Borges seems to be mocking not only the detective story but the quest for truth in general when his hero says (I’m paraphrasing) that reality is under no obligation to be interesting, but that a hypothesis is.

“The Shape of the Sword” is a story of betrayal during the Irish Civl War (and one of Borges’ many uses of the double). It turns on a brilliant narrative trick that I hope to steal some day.

He also co-authored a book of detective stories with Adolfo Bioy-Casares, entitled Six Problems For Don Isidro Parodi. Parodi (whose last name speaks volumes) has been unfairly convicted of murder. He sits in a prison cell and solves arcane crimes that his visitors recount.

By the way, Umberto Eco offered his own tribute to Borges in his great novel The Name of the Rose. The blind man who presided over the monastery’s labyrinthine library was Brother Jorge of Burgos.

Fictional Nonfiction

But let’s get back to the idea of fiction for people who hate fiction. Consider one of Borges’ most famous (non-criminal) pieces, “The Library of Babel.”. You have to call it a short story because it’s short and it isn’t true, but it has no plot and no characters. It is simply of a description of a fascinating, non-existent place. It is almost impossible to read it and not contemplate what this story is “about.”

I prefer to call this type of work a fictional essay. (Another master of the form is science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin. I think Borges would have loved “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” in which she critiques literature written by various species of animals.)

One of Borges most famous fictional essays is “The Cult of the Phoenix” (Sometimes translated as “The Sect of the Phoenix.”) This one is simply a scholarly description of an organization of people who are dedicated to the performance of a strange ritual.

Some readers of this strange piece, and I am one of them, think that the better description for it is not short story or essay, but riddle It is a riddle, we argue, because, the group he describes does exist. You can deduce their identity if you study his clues and ignore his multiple red herrings. (It also helps if you try to think like a mid-century South American.)

I won’t spoil the game by stating my theory here, but if you have read “The Cult of the Phoenix” and wonder what the hell I’m talking about, drop me an email and I’ll explain.

But we’re back to Doris Lessing, aren’t we? Because the ultimate version of trying to figure out what a piece of fiction is “about” is to reduce it to a riddle.