The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Ben Donnelly

Jorge Luis Borges. Selected Non-Fictions. Viking, 1999. 559 pp. $40.00.

In his celebrated collection Ficciones, Borges presented prose that read like histories, documentations, and scholarly works, but nothing resembling a traditional story. The unifying quality was their fictionality. There is similar imagination in his nonfiction. Possibility is more important than truth. Even when grounded in reportage, these works reveal hidden worlds. Fact is merely a starting point.

The best essays here expose even grander paradoxes and erudite connections than in his stories. Classic Borgesian motifs are seen in gestation: in a disappointed review of a detective novel, he longs for a counter-solution, overlooked by both the detective and the author. In a history of translations of 1001 Arabian Nights, he cannot restrain from including Sir Richard Burton’s proposal to mate baboons with women, breeding a race of ideal proletarians. In “A New Refutation of Time,” he argues that time cannot exist without human observation. Yet he admits his refutation is “one in which I myself do not believe, but which tends to visit me . . . in the hours of weary twilight with the illusory force of a truism.”

I am left with a daydream: if only Borges could have kept his sight and lived a dozen years more, into the Internet age. The World Wide Web is his great Babylonian book. With endless pages of neither confirmable fact nor comfortable fiction, the Web seems like the manifestation of the sublime and infinite library through which he saw the world. [Ben Donnelly]