Even though the
title was not translated from Spanish along with the text, Ficciones is in fact a
collection
of some of Jorge Luis Borges' greatest short fictional works,
grouped together as they were when they first appeared in English. The text
is seminal in the study of Latin American and Spanish
literature, as well as in
any exploration of the heights of modernism and sources of postmodernism.
In these stories, Borges delves into the nature of the fantastic, the means by
which narrative is constructed, the distinctions between reality and fiction,
and the connections among science, technology, literature, and a sense of the
spiritual or sublime.
"The Library of Babel" is perhaps the most famous of the pieces included in
Ficciones, and certainly an important text in critical circles as well. In it,
Borges establishes the conceit of the universe as a limitless library, whose
books contain all the combinations of letters in all possible languages. Each
person, a librarian separated from his peers by insurmountable distances and
interminable tasks, reads the books he is fortunate enough to come across in
his lifetime; most of these texts will be garbled at best or, even more
frequently, entirely nonsensical, but the chance that he will encounter the one
book that reveals the secrets of existence always persists, prolonging the
search throughout all his days.
Another significant text, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” tells the story of a
secret
society that invented a country (Uqbar) and its mythology, the origin of
which the society placed in the hands of the inhabitants of Uqbar, who
situated it on a planet (Tlön) imagined by them, but dreamed up in Borges’s
text by the secret society as well. Borges reveals this piecemeal via a
complicated structure of embedded narratives and documents, extending this
literary tradition to a level beyond any that had been seen before, with the
possible exception of The Arabian Nights. This is a narrative mostly about
the power of writing to create mythologies, shift paradigms, and even, in the
extreme case illustrated here, to usurp some objective reality.
On the whole, Ficciones was the book that established Borges as a literary
master in the eyes of the Anglophone world. Besides their academic and
theoretical significance, however, the short texts included within it bear
reading for the insight they offer into the way we interact with texts and with
the universe.