The stories of Jorge Luis Borges not only anticipate many later narratives, from works of magical realism to extravagant postmodern texts, but the celebrated Argentinean author sometimes even enters into their plots. Umberto Eco, in his The Name of the Rose , assigns a key role to a character named Jorge of Burgos, and constructs his story around a labyrinthine library that seems virtually lifted straight out of Ficciones . In Jean-Luc Godard's avant-garde noir detective film Alphaville , hero Lemmy Caution outwits the evil computer Alpha 60 with poetry drawing on lines written by Borges. Borges’ mythical book, The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim —one of many peculiar volumes invented by our author in the course of Ficciones —even shows up as a real (and symbolically-charged) tome toward the conclusion of Miguel Syjuco's Borgesian novel Ilustrado .
Yet Borges also had deep ties to more conventional genre tales, especially the mystery. Few remember that his first story published in English, "The Garden of the Forking Paths," made its debut in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine , a pulp fiction periodical with few aspirations to highbrow literary acclaim. This tale, included in Ficciones , relates the elaborate strategy employed by a Chinese scholar, operating as a German spy in England during World War I, for sending a message to his handler in the Kaiserreich. The tale blends an intricately plotted mystery into a typically playful Borgesian setting, complete with his trademark labyrinth, riddling texts, elaborate scholarly conceits, cross-cultural confusions, a tinkering with notions of infinity, duplicitous role-playing, and a paradoxical alternative reality angle. I'm not sure what Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine readers thought, encountering this tale alongside conventional crime stories featuring hard- boiled detectives and provocative dames, but I wouldn't be surprised if more than a few canceled their subscriptions in the aftermath.
In “Death and the Compass,” also found in Ficciones , Borges appears to adopt a more conventional stance, presenting a private investigator, Erik Lönnrot, very much in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin or Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. A puzzling crime, perhaps even an unintentional one, leaves a rabbi murdered. In his typewriter, police find a sheet of paper upon which is written—another enigmatic text from Borges— The first letter of the Name has been spoken . While the authorities seek for clues and suspects, Lönnrot focuses on textual interpretation, perusing works such as A Vindication of the Cabala , History of the Sect of the Hasidim , and the Philologus Hebraeo-Graecus . I wish I could assure you that our detective is rewarded for his scholarly efforts, but his case sadly proves to be an instance when explication de texte brings with it neither academic tenure nor a conviction in court. And, yes, a labyrinth also appears in this story.
In the closing pages of "Death and the Compass," Lönnrot comes upon a strange, apparently deserted villa marked by "superfluous symmetries and maniacal repetitions." The same description might be applied to many of author Borges's stories. In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," a scholar devotes years to writing a book that has already been written. In "The Library of Babel," the universe is reduced to a possibly infinite series of identical hexagonal galleries, housing shelf after shelf, each holding exactly 32 books of uniform external appearance. In "Funes, the Memorious," an accident leaves a young boy paralyzed, but with such a vivid memory, that every incident in his life is preserved in his mind with incredible richness and exactitude, the recollection offering a perfect reflection of the lived reality.
Only a few Borges stories involve an actual detective, but many force the reader into a comparable investigative role. To read tales such as "The South" or "The Secret of the Phoenix" is akin to attempting the solution of an elaborate puzzle. Other stories, such as "Theme of the Traitor and Hero" or "Three Versions of Judas" invite the reader to accept a total reversal of a given historical account, almost as if actual events might be reinterpreted as easily as a poem or play. "The Form of the Sword" applies the same approach to a personal anecdote, teasing the reader with clues indicating a true story that is the mirror image of the one recounted.
When Borges wrote these works, the concept of post- modernism was unknown, not to mention undefined in its particulars. Yet so many of the key elements are already laid out here with confidence and mastery. Here we have the playful intertextual games, the elaborate and mythical books within books, the recondite scholarly grotesqueries, the unpeeling of a deceptive reality to reveal a horrifying nothingness inside, the interpretation of signs and symbols as necessary if maddening vocation, the pervasive paranoid if not solipsistic tone, the story that turns on itself and devours its own origins, etc. How appropriate that our author himself has shown up himself in more recent postmodern works, less a flesh-and-blood historical figure and more a talisman and symbol himself. That itself could be a Borges story.