The Transcendent Fables of Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ final book, Shakespeare’s Memory, is my favorite. It’s concise, consisting only of four short stories, published in 1983 when the Argentinian author was 84. The stories are free from the painstaking details found in his earlier writing. Where a casual reader may consider Borges’ stories willfully obtuse, these four dissolve within us with the subconscious simplicity of fairy tales. They are timeless.

His simplicity is deceptive, however. The more you read and reread Shakespeare’s Memory, the more you find yourself lost in a labyrinth of symbols and interconnections. We readers descend through caverns of mirrors, until utterances like this seem perfectly sane: “When you next dream it, you shall be who I am, and you shall be my dream” (p. 104). Clarity, in Borges’ case, makes for infinite complexity, as every line reflects another.

All four stories return to his familiar themes. The first is August 25, 1983, in which a younger Borges (61 years old) climbs the stairs to his hotel room to find his older self, Borges at 84, on his deathbed. It is sort of a sequel to Borges’ story The Other from 1975, about a 70-year-old Borges encountering his much younger self. In The Other both Borges’ are smitten by Victor Hugo’s phrase: “The hydra universe twisting its body scaled with stars.” In August 25, 1983, they both agree that they have become parodies of themselves.

The second in the collection is a horror story called Blue Tigers. In 1904, a Scottish professor journeys into the Indian jungle searching for a rumored blue tiger, foreshadowed by recurring dreams, only to return with an impossible discovery from a sacred mound: tiny magical blue discs, which grow and shrink in number arbitrarily. The narrator narrowly escapes madness, murder, and all-consuming obsession.

The third story is The Rose of Paracelsus, in which the famed 16th century alchemist Paracelsus prays for a disciple, promptly forgets his plea, and climbs from his basement laboratory to meet the summoned disciple at his door. The young man promises to be the master’s lifelong assistant, if Paracelsus can prove his magic by restoring a burnt rose. After much debate, the alchemist reveals he cannot do it, and the disciple flees in pity for the fraudulent old man. Finally, Paracelsus, alone, performs the trick.

The last story, Shakespeare’s Memory, takes place sometime in the early 20th century. A lifelong devotee of Shakespeare cannot resist when he is, by chance, offered the gift of Shakespeare’s memory. Ancient recollections gradually surface in our narrator until he can barely tell who he is. The mystery of Shakespeare deepens. The narrator discovers, among other revelations, that the gift does not make him a great writer. In desperation he dials phone numbers at random until a stranger agrees to take the burden of Shakespeare’s memory. As the disembodied memories fade, the narrator takes redirects his obsession from literature to music.

There are endless breadcrumb trails in these 32 pages, but there is only one that pulls my heartstrings. August 25, 1983, unlike the typical Borges story, is very moving.

When the narrator, young Borges, walks in, the old Borges has already taken a drug to commit suicide. The elder man’s final conversation is with his younger self. They discuss the prosaic, like the book young Borges will eventually write under a pseudonym (Borges never actually wrote a book, only short stories… that we know of), and the story that young Borges will write about this very encounter with his older self, imagining it eventually to be a fantasy. Reality and fiction bleed together.

Never have I read such a soulful, unique depiction of death:

“He stopped talking; I realized that he had died. In a way, I died with him — in grief I leaned over his pillow, but there was no one there anymore.

I fled the room. Outside, there was no patio, no marble staircase, no great silent house, no eucalyptus trees, no statues, no gazebo in a garden, no fountains, no gate in the fence surrounding the hotel in the town of Adrogue.

Outside awaited other dreams.”

Thus, this collection of stories begins with the death of the author, and other subjects, narrators, and dreams follow.

Borges writes about humans facing the infinite. These tales, like all enduring fairy tales, exist at the borderland, the place where we discover that we were mistaken about the world and ourselves.

We think that we know things, like who we are, where we are, and so on, but Borges defies us. He interconnects characters in different times and places; he disrupts the laws of nature; he insists that miracles happen, but does not show them; he reveals that memories do not make a man.

At the center of it all is humanity itself. Borges’ characters are driven by resentment, regret, sorrow, envy, pity, rage, lust, and glorious relief. Those elements are essential — part of the tapestry of distorted reflections, doubled symbols, and imperfect symmetries is the whole confounding arising of human emotion.

Characters do things they never thought they would:

“I am grieved to admit that I took out my revolver and repeated the order, this time in a somewhat more forceful tone of voice” (Blue Tigers, p. 111).

“Today I am taken a bit aback by the uncivil tone of those pages, which I might almost say were written by another man” (Shakespeare’s Memory, p. 122).

At first, the reader sees a division in Borges’ stories. There are two paths — one that somehow accepts and fades into the infinite, like the suicidal old Borges himself, and another which leads back to our everyday “wisdom, habits, the world” (p. 116), like the narrator of Shakespeare’s Memory, who wants nothing more than to regain his sanity. We humans try, and fail, to grasp the ungraspable. Paracelsus asks his pupil, “Do you believe that the Fall is something other than not realizing that we are in paradise?” (p.119)

Finally, Borges confounds this division too. There are not two paths. There’s only one. Somehow, life is both finite and infinite. It’s a paradox, an indecipherable illusion. The magical phrase is both true, and true that we wish it to be true: “Simply the thing I am shall make me live.” (p. 131)

Old Borges on his deathbed mentions for the final time his literary hero, Robert Louis Stevenson. Younger Borges remarks, “I sensed that the evocation of Stevenson’s name was a farewell, not some empty stroke of pedantry” (p. 100).

Likewise, this final collection of stories is not a literary exercise, but a fond farewell. He leaves us with the simple message that we will never understand, and can never understand: life is a dream without a dreamer. “We feel that we are two, not one,” old Borges repeats. “The truth is that we are two yet we are one” (p. 101). Farewell, Borges — you went on to other dreams.

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