The Librarian
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine short story writer, essayist, poet, and translator whose work is widely regarded as the most formally precise literary encoding of metaphysical problems produced in the twentieth century. Born in Buenos Aires to a family of English and Argentine ancestry, educated in Geneva during the family’s European exile during the First World War, fluent in Spanish and English and functional in French and German, Borges spent his working life as a librarian, a teacher of English literature, and the eventual director of the Argentine National Library — a position he held, with a specific irony that his work frequently addressed, after he had become completely blind. The blindness was progressive: he lost his reading vision by the early 1950s and was functionally blind for the final three decades of his life. The man who presided over the Argentine National Library could no longer read its books. The condition sharpened rather than diminished his work. His late stories, dictated to amanuenses because he could no longer write them himself, include some of the most formally refined pieces in the Spanish language.
Borges’s early literary career was devoted primarily to poetry and essays. The short stories for which he is now principally remembered began to appear in the late 1930s and were collected in two volumes that together constitute the foundation of his international reputation: Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949). The stories are short — most run to a dozen pages or fewer — and dense to the point that a single story can contain material whose exposition in conventional form would fill a novel. Borges developed this density deliberately: he found the novel form wasteful, preferring the short story for reasons he articulated in various prefaces and interviews. The compression is the point. The reader who completes a Borges story has processed an architecture of implication that the slower form would have diluted, and the accumulated effect of reading many such stories is a specific reconfiguration of the reader’s sense of what fiction can accomplish and what the world’s own architecture might actually be.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) is the story the hyperstition tradition has to name as its founding literary document, and the recognition that Borges had written the diagram of the concept decades before the concept acquired the name is one of the esoteric media canon’s more revealing moments. The story’s narrator describes the gradual discovery, across years of research, of the existence of a fictional world called Tlön that has been invented by a secret society whose members have been contributing to the invention across generations. The initial discovery is a passing reference in an encyclopedia entry to a country called Uqbar whose literature describes the world of Tlön. Subsequent research reveals a full-length encyclopedia of Tlön that has been inserted into libraries through a process whose specific mechanism the narrator does not initially understand. The encyclopedia describes Tlön with the specificity of an actual civilization: its philosophy, its languages, its mathematics, its sciences, its history.
The story’s turn comes at the end, after the narrator’s patient documentation of the discovery. Objects belonging to Tlön begin to appear in the actual world. The philosophies of Tlön begin to displace the philosophies of Earth. The languages of Tlön begin to influence the languages of Earth. The specific mechanism is not physical intervention but cultural penetration: the invented world’s framework is preferable, from the standpoint of certain contemporary intellectual trends, to the world it is displacing, and the preference has begun to affect what human beings actually perceive. By the story’s end, the narrator recognizes that Earth will eventually become Tlön — that the invented world will successfully overwrite consensus reality through the combined effect of human belief and the specific attractiveness of its internal consistency.
The story is hyperstition avant la lettre. Borges described, in 1940, the precise mechanism the CCRU would later give the name to: a fiction that becomes real through being believed, a belief system whose installation rewrites the actual substrate of perceived reality, a conspiracy of inventors whose product escapes their control and colonizes the environment they had designed it to occupy only as entertainment. The story’s specific framing — that the invention occurred through a conspiracy, that the conspiracy was multi-generational, that the conspirators had no expectation that their invention would actually manifest — matches the esoteric tradition’s accounts of how the rendering is modified by deliberate operation. The story anticipates every subsequent treatment of the concept by decades. When Philip K. Dick began writing about the phenomenon in the 1960s, when the CCRU began naming it in the 1990s, when Land’s later essays extended the concept into cultural theory, the description was already in place, published in a literary magazine in Buenos Aires in 1940 under the name of a librarian who did not claim occult authority and did not identify himself as a member of any tradition.
The question of whether Borges knew what he was describing is the characteristic question the esoteric media framework asks about its canonical works. Borges was a learned man whose reading included the mystical traditions, the classical sources, the Kabbalistic and Gnostic materials, the philosophers of idealism, and the literature of the fantastic across multiple languages. He was fully capable of producing “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as an extrapolation from his reading without requiring direct access to the operational knowledge the story depicts. But the extrapolation is so precise, and it arrived so early, and its subsequent confirmation by the actual development of the cultural phenomena the story described has been so thorough, that the extrapolation reading has difficulty accounting for the specific shape of what Borges accomplished. The alternative reading — that Borges was a configured instrument through which the description entered the cultural record ahead of the phenomenon it was describing — is supported by Borges’s own repeated claim that he did not regard himself as the author of his work in the sense that the writer of a more conventional authorial stance would claim authorship. The work, on Borges’s own account, came from elsewhere. The librarian was the specific form the elsewhere took in the twentieth century’s Argentine literary culture.
The Library of Babel
“The Library of Babel” (1941) is Borges’s most famous story and one of the twentieth century’s most precise literary diagrams of a specific metaphysical problem. The story describes a universe consisting of a library of indefinite extent, composed of hexagonal rooms connected by stairs and passages, each room lined with bookshelves containing books of a fixed format — each book four hundred ten pages, each page forty lines, each line approximately eighty characters, the characters drawn from a twenty-five-symbol alphabet. The library contains every possible book: every possible combination of symbols that the fixed format permits. The library therefore contains the true history of every individual, the true history of the universe, the exact cure for every disease, the proof of every theorem, the correct translation of every text into every other language, and also the refutation of all of these and the alternatives to all of these and the nonsense strings that are neither true nor false but merely every possible string of symbols of the appropriate length.
The inhabitants of the library are librarians whose lives are devoted to searching its contents. They seek the true history, the vindication of their own existence, the explanation of the library itself. The search is mostly fruitless because the signal-to-noise ratio in the library is catastrophic: for every true book the library contains, it contains millions of books that differ from the true book by a single symbol, and no external criterion permits the distinguishing of the true from the nearly-true. The librarians develop various responses to this condition. Some become fanatical searchers who devote their lives to particular corners of the library. Some become nihilists who conclude that the search is futile. Some become mystics who develop the conviction that the library contains, somewhere, a book that will resolve the puzzle of the library itself — a catalogue of all true books, an index, a key. None of the responses definitively succeeds.
The story’s relevance to the rendering-model framework is specific. The Library of Babel is an image of the condition consciousness finds itself in when confronted with the totality of possible information without any criterion for distinguishing signal from noise. Every meaning is available and every meaning is therefore worthless, because the presence of all possible meanings is functionally equivalent to the presence of none. The search for meaning in such a condition is not a matter of discovering a hidden truth; it is a matter of generating or selecting the criterion by which specific portions of the available information will be marked as meaningful. The consciousness that performs this operation is not finding meaning but making it, and the meaning-making operation is the operation that produces the rendering in the first place.
On the rendering-model reading, Borges’s library is a diagram of the field consciousness selects from in generating its specific rendering. The underlying field contains everything — every possible history, every possible self, every possible perception — and the instrument’s operation consists of the selection that turns the field’s total content into the particular content the instrument experiences as its world. The librarians’ various responses to the library correspond to the various responses instruments make to the selection problem: the fanatical searchers who commit to a specific framework and refuse to consider alternatives, the nihilists who abandon the selection effort altogether, the mystics who seek the selection principle itself. None of the responses in the story succeeds, because the story is refusing to tell the reader that a correct response exists. The reader who understands the story has understood that the selection operation is the basic operation of consciousness, and that no external authority can validate any particular selection without itself being subject to the same selection problem.
The Garden of Forking Paths
“The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) is the story that introduced the branching-time concept into the literary tradition, in a form that subsequent treatments of multiple-timeline cosmology have inherited. The story’s central metaphysical claim — conveyed through the ostensibly peripheral device of a Chinese ancestor’s philosophical novel — is that at every moment of decision, rather than one possibility becoming actual and the alternatives becoming impossible, all possibilities become actual in diverging branches, and the universe is therefore a structure in which every timeline exists simultaneously. The protagonist of the story experiences the branching field as vision — he perceives, during the story’s climactic scene, the multiple outcomes of his own actions coexisting across the branching structure, and the perception itself becomes the crucial datum that the story’s plot turns on.
The story’s publication date (1941) places it ahead of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (Everett, 1957) by sixteen years. The correspondence between Borges’s literary device and Everett’s physical theory is close enough that the branching-time device in subsequent fiction can reasonably be described as Borgesian whether or not the authors of that fiction were consciously channeling Borges. The device has become standard in science fiction, fantasy, alternative history, and the specific subgenre of time-travel fiction that takes the multiple-timeline reading seriously. Borges did not originate the device in any absolute sense — the branching possibilities had been discussed in metaphysics and theology for centuries — but he introduced it into the literary tradition in a form that permitted subsequent writers to deploy it with confidence that readers would recognize what was being described.
The bifurcation framework’s indebtedness to Borges is, on the rendering-model reading, not a matter of direct citation but of the specific vocabulary Borges provided for talking about branching time. When the Timewar framework describes the current moment as a point of bifurcation at which the rendering forks into multiple divergent timelines each of which becomes actual for the consciousnesses that select it, the framework is extending the Borgesian image to a specific metaphysical application. The image was available, in the form Borges had given it, by 1941. The forty years of subsequent literary and scientific development gradually produced the framework that can take the image seriously as a description of actual reality rather than a literary device, and Borges’s original articulation remains the cleanest statement of the core insight the framework depends on.
The Kabbalistic Substrate
Borges’s work is saturated with Kabbalistic concepts and imagery to a degree that requires a specific explanation. The author’s interest in Jewish mysticism is documented in multiple essays — “A Defense of the Kabbalah,” “The Golem,” “From Someone to Nobody” — and in the stories themselves through specific motifs that the Kabbalistic tradition had developed over centuries. The Aleph of the story of the same name is simultaneously the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the point at which all points in the universe are visible simultaneously, a depiction that combines the Kabbalistic theology of the letter with the mathematical concept of transfinite numerosity that the story also explicitly invokes. The Golem of “The Circular Ruins” is created by a dreamer through the same process the Prague Golem legend describes, with the specific twist that the creator eventually recognizes that he himself is the creation of a prior dreamer — the regress that the Kabbalistic tradition’s account of the divine creation of the world gestures toward as one of the possible readings of the ex nihilo doctrine.
Borges’s treatment of the Kabbalah is not that of a practitioner. He was an Argentine gentile raised in a Catholic culture with exposure to Jewish thought through his reading and through the Jewish intellectual community of Buenos Aires, which was substantial in the first half of the twentieth century. He approached the Kabbalah as a literary reader encounters a rich source of imagery and conceptual possibilities, drawing from it the specific elements that his own fictional purposes required. The approach is legitimate as literature and has produced some of the best Kabbalistic imagery in the twentieth century’s literature. It also produced, as a byproduct, a transmission of Kabbalistic content to a non-Jewish readership that would otherwise have had no access to the material. Borges’s stories have served, for several generations of Latin American and European readers, as the first serious encounter with Kabbalistic concepts, and the specific form in which he presented those concepts has shaped the subsequent literary and intellectual reception of the Kabbalah in ways the original Kabbalistic tradition would probably regard with a mixture of gratitude and concern.
The Aleph and the Threshold Vision
“The Aleph” (1945) is the story in which Borges most directly depicts what the operative tradition would call a threshold experience — a moment in which the protagonist’s consciousness encounters the totality of the world simultaneously, perceiving every place and every time as present in a single point of vision. The Aleph itself is a small iridescent sphere in the basement of a Buenos Aires house, the property of a tedious minor poet named Carlos Argentino Daneri, whose mediocrity is one of the story’s running jokes and is also one of its serious points: the threshold object is real and accessible, and the consciousness that has been entrusted with it lacks the equipment to recognize what it possesses. The narrator, summoned to the basement on a pretext, lies on the floor in the position Daneri specifies and looks at the spot Daneri indicates, and the vision begins.
What follows is one of the few descriptions in twentieth-century literature of a totality experience presented in a form that does not collapse the experience into the available metaphysical or theological vocabularies. The narrator sees, in a single moment that the prose is forced to render through a long catalog of items perceived simultaneously, every point in the universe — the Aleph contains all points, and the perception of any point through the Aleph is the perception of every point. The catalog Borges constructs to render the experience is one of the most carefully assembled passages in his work: the items are specific and unrelated, the syntax that strings them together is deliberately inadequate to the simultaneity the items occupy in the actual vision, and the inadequacy is the point. The vision exceeds the form the prose can give it, and the prose’s acknowledged failure to contain the vision is the most accurate available representation of what the threshold experience does to the consciousness that undergoes it.
The story closes with the narrator’s recognition that he has begun, in the years since the experience, to forget the specific contents of the vision — that the totality the Aleph delivered cannot be retained by the ordinary consciousness in the ordinary configuration, that the memory of having seen everything is gradually replaced by the memory of having had a memory of having seen everything, and that the eventual condition of the consciousness who has had the vision is the condition of remembering that something happened without remembering what it was. The closing acknowledgment is the operative tradition’s standard caveat about threshold experiences in the unprepared instrument: the experience is real, the access is genuine, and the integration of the experience into the ordinary consciousness’s continuing operations is the work the experience itself does not perform. The Aleph, on this reading, is a materialized aperture — a physical object that performs the operation the mystery school traditions have always described their advanced practices as performing, encountered by a narrator whose preparation does not match what the encounter requires.
Funes the Memorious and the Cost of Unfiltered Consciousness
“Funes the Memorious” (1942) describes the inverse condition. Ireneo Funes, an Uruguayan farmhand, falls from a horse, suffers a head injury, and recovers consciousness with the capacity to remember absolutely everything that has happened to him with absolute precision and to perceive his current circumstances with a similar absoluteness. The condition is depicted as catastrophic. Funes can no longer think in general terms because he can no longer abstract from the particulars his perception delivers in their full specificity. Each leaf of each tree is a distinct entity for Funes; each moment of each leaf’s appearance under each successive arrangement of light is a distinct perception that Funes cannot collapse into the category his pre-injury cognition would have used to handle the data. The general concept “leaf” is unavailable to him because the particular leaves overwhelm any attempt to recognize what they have in common.
The story is Borges’s most direct treatment of the question the operative tradition has always raised about the cost of unfiltered consciousness. The traditions have known, in continuous transmission across the centuries, that the ordinary consciousness operates through a specific filtering apparatus that excludes most of the data the senses are continuously delivering, and that the exclusion is what permits cognition to function at the speeds and within the categories the ordinary life requires. The tradition has also known that the lifting of the filtering apparatus — through certain practices, certain substances, certain spontaneous events — produces a consciousness whose access to the unfiltered data exceeds the consciousness’s capacity to use the data. The Huxleyan formulation, which Aldous Huxley arrived at independently and which the threshold literature has continued to refine, is that the brain operates as a reducing valve and that the lifting of the valve is both the gift and the danger of the contemplative and entheogenic traditions.
Funes is what happens when the reducing valve is removed without the corresponding training that would permit the consciousness to function at the unfiltered intensity. The story does not present this as liberation. It presents it as a specific catastrophe — Funes cannot sleep because the mental rehearsal of the day’s events takes longer than the day’s events themselves did, his memory has become a curse that prevents him from any of the operations a more limited consciousness performs without difficulty, and the story closes with his death from pulmonary congestion at age twenty-one, the most explicit indication available that the condition is not survivable. The operative reading is that the filter is not a defect of consciousness but a constituent feature of the configuration the ordinary consciousness has to maintain in order to remain functional, and that the lifting of the filter is a specific operation that requires specific preparation and that the unprepared instrument cannot survive performing. Borges had read enough of the contemplative literature to know what he was depicting. The story is the tradition’s warning rendered as fiction, delivered to a readership the tradition’s direct teaching could not reach.
Magical Realism and the Latin American Inheritance
The magical realist movement that dominated Latin American literature from the 1940s through the 1980s — the movement whose principal figures include García Márquez, Cortázar, Carpentier, Rulfo, and Asturias, and whose international reception transformed the global literary landscape of the second half of the twentieth century — took its founding texts and its operative vocabulary from Borges. The specific feature the movement inherited from Borges is the treatment of the marvelous as continuous with the ordinary rather than as an interruption of it. In the European fantastic tradition the marvelous appears as a rupture of the realistic frame, and the rupture is the source of the genre’s specific effect. In the Borgesian inheritance the marvelous is present from the beginning, woven through the texture of the ordinary world, and the realism the texture appears within is itself a specific selection from the available data rather than a privileged ground against which the marvelous is contrasted. This is the consciousness-primacy thesis delivered as a literary technique, and the writers who absorbed the technique from Borges were absorbing, whether or not they recognized it, a specific position about the ontology of perception that the technique presupposes.
García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) is the most internationally famous product of the inheritance and is the work whose international reception established magical realism as a legible category in the global literary marketplace. The novel’s treatment of Macondo as a town in which the marvelous and the mundane share the same ontological register without internal hierarchy is the Borgesian technique applied at the scale of multi-generational saga, and the novel’s success demonstrated that the technique could carry book-length narratives that the short-story form Borges had developed it within could not have sustained. Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949), and Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) are the other principal first-generation extensions of the inheritance, each developing a distinct application of the underlying technique. The specific positions these writers took on the metaphysical questions Borges had raised varied considerably, but the technical resource they shared was the resource Borges had given them: the recognition that the ordinary world is generated by a specific selection from the available data, and that fiction can adjust the selection criteria to render aspects of the world that the ordinary configuration excludes from perception.
The international reception of magical realism, which carried the literature far beyond the Spanish-speaking world and influenced subsequent generations of writers in English, French, German, Portuguese, and the African and Asian literatures, has continued to function as one of the most successful transmission vectors for the consciousness-primacy thesis the operative tradition has carried. The readers who absorb a magical realist novel have been instructed, through the specific mechanism of an absorbing narrative they read for the pleasure of reading, that the boundary between the ordinary and the marvelous is not the firm ontological line their consensus configuration represents it as. The instruction is unconscious. The configuration the instruction modifies is the configuration the consensus framework had installed. The transmission has continued to operate through translations, adaptations, and the continued circulation of the foundational texts, and the modification it produces is one of the specific ways the operative tradition has reached the contemporary period through channels the tradition’s direct expressions could not have used.
Borges’s specific position within this lineage is foundational. The writers who inherited the technique from him generally inherited specific stories and specific moves rather than the underlying metaphysical position the moves had been generated from, with the result that the magical realist tradition has carried Borges’s operative content without consistently acknowledging the operative dimension of the source. The acknowledgment is recoverable for readers who go back to the originals. The transmission continues regardless of whether the recovery is performed, and the readers of the contemporary descendants of magical realism are still receiving the configuration adjustments the original Borges stories were designed to produce, mediated through several generations of transmission that have not always understood what they were transmitting.
The Blindness
Borges’s progressive blindness became, by his own account and by the account of his readers, a formal feature of his later work rather than an impediment to it. He wrote repeatedly about the condition in his late poetry and prose. The image of the blind librarian presiding over a library he cannot read was, in Borges’s hands, not pathetic but emblematic of a specific metaphysical insight: that the world of the visible was always an interpretation the instrument had been imposing on a substrate the instrument could not access directly, and that the loss of the visible merely exposed the interpretive operation the sighted person had been performing without noticing. The blind man sees, in a specific sense, what the sighted person has been overlooking: the operation by which the world is constructed from the data the senses provide, an operation whose specific character becomes visible only when the sensory data becomes unavailable and the construction must be performed through other means.
The late stories — “The Book of Sand,” “Shakespeare’s Memory,” “Blue Tigers” — exhibit a formal refinement that the earlier stories had not achieved. The dictation method Borges used after he could no longer write seems to have imposed a specific discipline on the sentences that the typewritten method had not required. Each sentence had to be held in the author’s mind before it could be spoken to the amanuensis, and the holding required a compression that the early stories had achieved through revision. The late stories achieve it through the specific constraint of oral composition by a blind author whose memory for the language was the principal resource available. The result is some of the most formally perfect prose in the Spanish language, produced by a man who could no longer see the marks the prose consisted of.
The Rendering-Model Reading
On the rendering-model reading, Borges is the twentieth century’s principal literary cartographer of the rendering’s architecture. The specific topics his stories address — the fictional world that becomes real, the library that contains every possible book, the garden in which all possible futures branch, the Aleph in which all points are visible, the circular ruins in which the dreamer is himself a dream — are the topics the rendering-model framework is most concerned with. The fact that Borges arrived at these topics through literary rather than metaphysical means does not diminish the precision of the arrival. If anything, the literary framing permitted Borges to deliver the material to readers who would have resisted the same content if presented in metaphysical or occult form. The stories pass through the cultural infrastructure because they are stories, and the operative content they carry is received by readers who have no framework for receiving it directly.
The specific question the esoteric media framework asks — whether the transmission is coincidental, epiphanic, or deliberate — applies to Borges with characteristic difficulty. Borges’s own stated position was that his work came from elsewhere in a sense he did not pretend to fully understand, that he was less an author than a compiler of materials whose sources were mostly beyond his access, and that the tradition of literature he regarded himself as extending was older and deeper than any particular writer’s contribution to it. The stated position is consistent with the epiphanic reading and does not contradict the coincidental reading. The specific shape of the stories — their correspondence to concepts that were not in general circulation when they were written, their anticipation of subsequent theoretical developments across multiple fields, their specific fidelity to the operative tradition’s internal architecture — supports the epiphanic reading more strongly than the coincidental reading can easily handle. The deliberate reading, requiring Borges to have been a conscious participant in a specific esoteric transmission, is supported by his acknowledged interest in the Kabbalah and the mystical traditions but is not required by the evidence. The most honest answer is probably that Borges was a configured instrument whose specific configuration permitted the transmission of the material in the form his cultural situation could receive, and that the proportions of coincidence, reception, and intention varied across individual stories without reaching a consistent distribution across the body of work.
Open Questions
- How much direct contact did Borges have with the operative Kabbalistic tradition through the Buenos Aires Jewish community, and does any of the late work reflect contact beyond what he acknowledged publicly?
- Is the correspondence between “The Garden of Forking Paths” and the Everett many-worlds interpretation coincidental, or did Borges have access to specific precursors of the many-worlds concept that the standard intellectual histories have not adequately traced?
- What specific sources did Borges draw on for “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and is there any evidence in his private correspondence that he regarded the story as more than a literary extrapolation?
- How does the dictation method Borges used after his blindness affect the formal character of the late stories, and can the specific compression techniques be identified and analyzed?
- What is the appropriate framework for reading Borges’s work as simultaneously literary and operative, and does the esoteric media framework provide the necessary tools or does it require supplementation from the specific traditions Borges was drawing on?
References
Alazraki, Jaime. Borges and the Kabbalah: And Other Essays on His Fiction and Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Bell-Villada, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. University of Texas Press, 1999.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Jorge Luis Borges. Chelsea House, 2004.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Sur, 1944.
Borges, Jorge Luis. El Aleph. Losada, 1949.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Penguin, 1998.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Viking, 1999.
Sarlo, Beatriz. Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. Verso, 1993.
Sorrentino, Fernando. Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. Troll, 1982.
Williamson, Edwin. Borges: A Life. Viking, 2004.
Woodall, James. Borges: A Life. Basic Books, 1996.