Labyrinths

This collection gathers short stories, essays, and parables by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The book is divided into three sections: Fictions, Essays, and Parables. Across these sections, Borges returns to a set of recurring concerns: the nature of time, the relationship between reality and fiction, the infinite, the labyrinth, and the dissolution of personal identity.

The Fictions section contains 23 stories. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the narrator and his friend Bioy Casares, a fellow Argentine writer, trace a reference to an obscure country called Uqbar through variant copies of an encyclopedia. The narrator later discovers a single volume of an encyclopedia describing Tlön, an entire imaginary planet with its own idealist philosophy, languages, and culture. The volume is stamped with the words Orbis Tertius, the name of a planned revision in one of Tlön's own languages. On Tlön, inhabitants deny the existence of matter and conceive the universe as a series of mental acts. A 1947 postscript reveals that a secret society, funded by a nihilist millionaire named Ezra Buckley, created Tlön's encyclopedia over centuries. Objects from Tlön begin appearing in the real world, and its ideas gradually overtake reality as schools adopt Tlön's language and a fictitious past displaces the real one.

"The Garden of Forking Paths" takes the form of a deposition by Dr. Yu Tsun, a Chinese professor working as a German spy during World War I. Needing to transmit the name of a British artillery location to Berlin, Yu Tsun visits Dr. Stephen Albert, a Sinologist who has deciphered the labyrinthine novel of Yu Tsun's ancestor, Ts'ui Pên. Albert reveals that the novel and the labyrinth are one: a fiction in which time forks at every decision point and all possible outcomes occur simultaneously. Yu Tsun kills Albert so that Albert's name, identical to the target city, will appear in the newspapers and reach Berlin.

In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," an unnamed narrator describes the invisible masterwork of the French Symbolist writer Pierre Menard: the independent production of several chapters of Don Quixote, word for word identical to Cervantes' text. The narrator argues that the same sentences, attributed to a 20th-century Frenchman rather than a 17th-century Spaniard, carry entirely different and richer meanings.

"The Circular Ruins" follows a magician who arrives at a ruined jungle temple with the purpose of dreaming a man into reality. After failed attempts, he constructs a human being organ by organ in his dreams, and the fire god animates the phantom. When fire consumes the ruins, the magician walks into the flames and discovers they do not burn him. He understands that he, too, is a phantom dreamt by another.

"The Library of Babel" presents the universe as an infinite library of hexagonal galleries containing books composed from 25 orthographical symbols. Since no two books are identical, the Library is total: it contains every possible combination of characters, and therefore everything expressible in any language. This discovery produces first ecstatic hope, then despair, as the probability of finding any meaningful book approaches zero.

In "Death and the Compass," the detective Erik Lönnrot investigates a series of crimes, including two murders and a staged kidnapping, each accompanied by inscriptions referencing the letters of God's name. Lönnrot uses his knowledge of the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew name of God, to predict a fourth crime and travels to an abandoned villa. There, his nemesis Red Scharlach reveals the entire series was an elaborate trap: The first murder was accidental, and Scharlach constructed the subsequent events to exploit Lönnrot's reasoning and lure him to his death.

"The Secret Miracle" follows Jaromir Hladík, a Jewish Czech playwright arrested by the Nazis in Prague and sentenced to die by firing squad. Hladík's unfinished verse drama, The Enemies, is a circular tragedy he considers his only possible redemption. He prays for one year to complete it. At the moment of execution, the physical universe halts: God grants him a secret miracle in which a subjective year passes while no external time elapses. Hladík completes the third act and meticulously revises the drama in his mind. When he finds the final phrase, the volley kills him.

"The Immortal" is framed as a manuscript by the antique dealer Joseph Cartaphilus. A Roman tribune named Marcus Flaminius Rufus seeks the City of the Immortals and a river whose waters grant eternal life. He finds both, along with cave-dwelling creatures who turn out to be the Immortals themselves, including Homer. Having lived forever, they found all acts meaningless and retreated from civilization. Centuries later, the narrator drinks from another spring and regains mortality.

Other fictions explore related territory. "The Lottery in Babylon" describes a society in which a lottery has evolved from a simple game into the governing force behind every facet of life. "Funes the Memorious" depicts a youth who, after a paralyzing fall from a horse, acquires perfect memory but becomes incapable of abstract thought. "The Shape of the Sword" reveals its narrator to be the coward rather than the hero of his own story. "Emma Zunz" follows a factory worker who constructs an elaborate scenario to disguise premeditated murder as self-defense. "The House of Asterion" presents a first-person monologue that reveals the speaker to be the Minotaur. "Deutsches Requiem" is the testament of a condemned Nazi who embraces Germany's defeat as historically necessary. "Averroes' Search" depicts the 12th-century philosopher's failed attempt to understand Aristotle's concepts of tragedy and comedy, a failure the narrator compares to his own inability to imagine Averroes. "The Theologians" follows two rival churchmen whose lifelong enmity proves meaningless: In Paradise, God cannot distinguish between them.

The Essays section contains 10 pieces. In "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," Borges argues that Argentine writers should claim all of Western culture as their heritage rather than confining themselves to local color. "Kafka and His Precursors" identifies Kafkaesque qualities in texts by Zeno, Søren Kierkegaard, Robert Browning, and others, then argues that every writer creates his own precursors, retroactively modifying how earlier literature is read. "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" traces a single metaphor, God as an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, across centuries: What inspired exultation in Giordano Bruno became dread in Blaise Pascal, who changed "infinite" to "fearful" in his manuscript. "A New Refutation of Time" extends George Berkeley's denial of matter and David Hume's denial of the self to deny time itself. If two perceptions are identical in content, they are the same perception, and the temporal series that supposedly separates them collapses. The essay ends with a famous recantation: Time is the substance Borges is made of, a river that sweeps him along, but he is the river; a fire that consumes him, but he is the fire. "The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges" (235).

The Parables section gathers eight short pieces. In "Borges and I," the narrator distinguishes between his private self and the public literary figure called Borges, to whom he gradually surrenders everything. "Everything and Nothing" imagines Shakespeare as a man who felt himself to be no one and found his vocation in inhabiting other identities on stage. Retiring to Stratford, Shakespeare tells God he wants to be one and himself. God answers from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one" (250). Other parables include "Ragnarök," in which the ancient gods return but have degenerated into cunning beasts and the dreamers kill them, and "Inferno, I, 32," in which God explains to a caged leopard, and later to the dying Dante, that each exists to serve a poem whose place in the universe neither can comprehend.