The Illusionist

The earliest published fictions by Jorge Luis Borges were elaborations of other stories: a Mark Twain yarn about a fearsome robber, Herbert Asbury’s account of New York gangs early in this century, a book about Chinese pirates and another about Billy the Kid.

Collected as “A Universal History of Human Iniquity,” they were explained by Borges in a note that distills the essence of this master of narrative subversion: “They are the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men.”

Even when the magician of labyrinths, significant tigers, cabalistic paradoxes, people who meet themselves going the other way, absurdly prosaic infinities and their even more absurd square roots, gaucho knife-fighters, medieval Arab necromancers and the eye of God among the loose change at a shabby bar--even when he embarked on the entirely original collections in “Ficciones,” “The Aleph” and others, he wrote as if distorting other men’s stories. He is present as a technical support staffer, checking a fifth-dimension intake valve or adjusting the drape of a dream.

He stands as quizzically distant from his fiction as, decades later, postmodernist critics would stand from the belief that literature mirrors any reality besides its own text. Writing with infinitely greater grace and quiver than any deconstructionist--though one or two approach his deflected wit--he was in a sense their precursor.

Many of his pieces have the storytelling lilt of the classic tale. But instead of moving horizontally from A to B to C, they drill inward and shatter themselves into glittery shards. They pretend to go:

“Once

Upon

A Time”

In fact they go:

“Indeterminately Often

On, Over or Beneath

A Sometime.”

“Collected Fictions,” the first complete English assemblage of Borges’ fictional prose, contains 100 story-like pieces published in 10 collections between 1935 and 1983, three years before his death. The last one, four pieces under the title “Shakespeare’s Memory,” appears in English for the first time. There have been English versions of most of the stories, but here they are translated in their entirety by Andrew Hurley.

Translation is something like miking; the shadings of timbre are lost. Hurley is occasionally stiff and once in a while persnickety. He renders a principal Buenos Aires square as Plaza del Once, though its name is simply Plaza Once. He worries that a reader will figure the square was named for the English word that comes before “twice.” This seems unlikely.

On the whole, though, he has done a prodigious job. It has the advantage of giving us Borges in a single English voice instead of a variety of them. (There is a faint disadvantage too: If you need to mike, maybe it is a good idea to shift the mikes around occasionally.)

Borges the magician: perhaps prestidigitator is more exact. He is a performer, careful even in his most dazzling moments to send complicitous signals to the audience. After he saws his lady in two, she gets up; they bow and, to applause, walk off.

In one sense, his stories are ingenious (mostly) tricks and, over 50 years, a number have aged into not a great deal more. Like dried roses, the convolutions remain, with barely a hint of fragrance. One or two of the celebrated early pieces--”The Garden of Forking Paths” for instance--seem to me to have withered; so have a number of the lesser conceits.

As for others (this collection makes one realize how many)--well, the sawed lady and her magician have left with their trick box and its trestle. But what is that splotch of red where the trestle stood? Would flies buzz over stage blood? Why the ambulance sirens?

It is not exact to say that beneath Borges’ paradoxical twists and inverted spells there is the deeper, ineffably human magic of all great literature. The effects, after all, are inseparable from the magic; they are its language, its identity, its portion of the century. Borges’ writing elaborately traces the baroque design of the prison that, at the end of the modernist era, walled off his hyper-literary sensibility from the possibility of narrative “reality.” In the most enduring stories, though, we hear an odd modest humming through the walls: the prisoner declaring not only the prison, but himself.

That hum recurs in all manner of different ways. There is the laughter, for instance. Borges’ wit can be hidden up his elaborate sleeves, but it bursts out sometimes. Take his Pierre Menard, who spends a lifetime writing 2 1/2 chapters of “Don Quixote.” These are precisely the same as the original but, we are told, “infinitely richer.” Two brief passages follow--identical, of course--for comparison. Poor Cervantes was obliged to write “with complete naturalness” in the Spanish of his day. How much finer is Menard’s deliberately archaic and affected use of the same old Spanish, three centuries later.

So far, so funny--except, perhaps, to the adepts of high textual criticism. But then comes a passage of cold Stoic darkness (for all his Anglophilia and Old Norse, Borges has deep connections to the gauntness of Castile):

“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by and it is a mere chapter--if not a paragraph or proper noun--in the history of philosophy.” Menard drew the brilliantly logical conclusion: He undertook “a task futile from the outset.”

There is no space to cite even a small number of the different ways in which Borges’ hum haunts his best work. Even in the early, ostensible distortions, a sentence will flame up. In the Billy the Kid piece, the townspeople gather after the protagonist is shot. “They noted in him that unimportant sort of look that dead men generally have.” The complex, vividly living drama of “The Aleph” frames a bleak message about the inevitable madness of art: Writers, using the word to distill the universe, lose the universe.

Reading these 100 stories at a go is inadvisable because after cracking 30 or 40 of Borges’ distancing masks, one can lose the energy to distinguish those with life behind them from the empty ones. Not that the distancings aren’t sometimes wonderful; none more so than in the celebrated “Borges and I,” where distance is raised to a pitch of mournful affirmation.

Grumbling comically at first, he sets himself, as a man of certain tastes (maps, hourglasses), against the celebrated writer named Borges, who shares those tastes “but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accouterments of an actor.”

He could be resigned--”I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature.” But, disastrously, he has become estranged from that literature. Once again, the lifelong wound that tenses Borges’ bow: the artist marooned in his art. “I shall endure in Borges, but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others’, or in the tedious strumming of a guitar.”

In fact some of Borges’ most moving writing reaches for that guitar. The gaucho pieces, with their fights, betrayals and odd nobility, carry their Borgesian touches of the skewed and uncanny. They reveal something else; the parching mannerist digging for a spring among his roots.

“The South,” one of the most haunting of Borges’ stories (and one of his favorites), is an imagined alternate autobiography. Like the author, the narrator, Dahlmann, is a book-entombed librarian. One of his ancestors was a German evangelist; another, though, was a 19th century caudillo of the pampas. (Borges’ own ancestry included an Englishwoman and an officer in Argentina’s civil wars.)

Ill, just out of hospital, Dahlmann journeys south to convalesce in an abandoned house in the plains, left by his caudillo forebear. At a local tavern, one of a group of gauchos challenges him with a knife and another tosses him a second knife. The librarian had come close to dying in the hospital; now he recognizes the death that belongs to him.

“Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains.” The story ends.

“I” has stepped out from “Borges.” Or put it differently: In “South” and other Argentine stories, “Borges” and “I” move toward each other. Only the writer Jorge Luis Borges, with his lifelong elegance of chill and discriminating artifice, could have threaded a way past melodrama’s perils, though not its power, to manage the reconciliation.