TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS



I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclope-
dia. The unnerving mirror hung at the end of a corridor in a villa on Calle
Goana, in Ramos Mejia; the misleading encyclopedia goes by the name of The
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal if inadequate
reprint of the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica. The whole affair happened some
five years ago. Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at
length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a
narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various
contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would
be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. From the
far end of the corridor, the mirror was watching us; and we discovered, with
the inevitability of discoveries made late at night, that mirrors have some-
thing grotesque about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the here-
siarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since
they both multiply the numbers of man. I asked him the source of that memor-
able sentence, and he replied that it was recorded in the Anglo-American Cy-
clopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. It so happened that the villa (which we
bad rented furnished) possessed a copy of that work. In the final pages of
Volume XLVI, we ran across an article on Upsala; in the beginning of Volume
XLVII, we found one on Ural-Altaic languages; but not one word on Uqbar. A
little put out, Bioy consulted the index volumes. In vain he tried every pos-
sible spelling--Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr. . . . Before leaving,
he informed me it was a region in either Iraq or Asia Minor. I must say that
I acknowledged this a little uneasily. I supposed that this undocumented
country and its anonymous heresiarch had been deliberately invented by Bioy
out of modesty, to substantiate a phrase. A futile examination of one of the
atlases of Justus Perthes strengthened my doubt.

On the following day, Bioy telephoned me from Buenos Aires. He told me that
he had in front of him the article on Uqbar, in Volume XLVI of the encyclope-
dia. It did not specify the name of the heresiarch, but it did note his doc-
trine, in words almost identical to the ones he had repeated to me, though,
I would say, inferior from a literary point of view. He had remembered: "Cop-
ulation and mirrors are abominable." The text of the encyclopedia read: "For
one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more pre-
cisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they mult-
iply it and extend it." I said, in all sincerity, that I would like to see
that article. A few days later, he brought it. This surprised me, because
the scrupulous cartographic index of Ritter's Erdkunde completely failed to
mention the name of Uqbar.

The volume which Bioy brought was indeed Volume XLVI of The Anglo-American
Cyclopaedia. On the title page and spine, the alphabetical key was the same
as in our copy, but instead of 917 pages, it had 921. These four additional
pages consisted of the article on Uqbarnot accounted for by the alphabetical
cipher, as the reader will have noticed. We ascertained afterwards that there
was no other difference between the two volumes. Both, as I Tlonk I pointed
out, are reprints of the tenth Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bioy had acquired
his copy in one of a number of book sales.

We read the article with some care. The passage remembered by Bioy was per-
haps the only startling one. The rest seemed probable enough, very much in
keeping with the general tone of the work and, naturally, a little dull.
Reading it over, we discovered, beneath the superficial authority of the
prose, a fundamental vagueness. Of the fourteen names mentioned in the geo-
graphical section, we recognized only three--Khurasan, Armenia, and Erzur-
um--and they were dragged into the text in a strangely ambiguous way. Among
the historical names, we recognized only one, that of the - imposter, Smer-
dis the Magian, and it was invoked in a rather metaphorical sense. The notes
appeared to fix precisely the frontiers of Uqbar, but the points of refer-
ence were all, vaguely enough, rivers and craters and mountain chains in
that same region. We read, for instance, that the southern frontier is de-
fined by the lowlands of Tsai Haldun and the Axa delta, and that wild horses
flourish in the islands of that delta. This, at the top of page 918. In the
historical section (page 920), we gathered that, just after the religious
persecutions of the thirteenth century, the orthodox sought refuge in the
islands, where their obelisks have survived, and where it is a common enough
occurrence to dig up one of their stone mirrors. The language and literature
section was brief. There was one notable characteristic: it remarked that
the literature of Uqbar was fantastic in character, and that its epics and
legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of
Mlejnas and TIon. The bibliography listed four volumes, which we have not
yet come across, even although the third--Silas Haslam: History of the Land
Called Uqbar, 1874--appears in the library catalogues of Bernard Quaritch.*
The first, Lesbare and lesenswerthe Bemerkungen uber das Land Ukkbar in
Klein-Asien, is dated 1641, and is a work of Johann Valentin Andrea. The fact
is significant; a couple of years later I ran across that name accidentally
in the thirteenth volume of De Quincey's Writings, and I knew that it was
the name of a German theologian who, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis--the community
which was later founded by others in imitation of the one he had preconceived.
That night, we visited the National Library. Fruitlessly we exhausted at-
lases, catalogues, yearbooks of geographical societies, memoirs of travelers
and historians--nobody had ever been in Uqbar. Neither did the general index
of Bioy's encyclopedia show the name. The following day, Carlos Mastronardi,
to whom I had referred the whole business, caught sight, in a Corrientes and
Talcahuano bookshop, of the black and gold bindings of The Anglo-American
Cyclopaedia. . . . He went in and looked up Volume XLVI. Naturally, there
was not the slightest mention of Uqbar.


II


Some small fading memory of one Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the southern
railroads, hangs on in the hotel in Androgue, between the luscious honey-
suckle and the illusory depths of the mirrors. In life, be suffered from a
sense of unreality, as do so many Englishmen; dead, he is not even the
ghostly creature he was then. He was tall and languid; his limp squared
beard had once been red. He was, I understand, a widower, and childless. E-
very so many years, he went to England to visit--judging by the photographs
he showed us--a sundial and some oak trees. My father and he had cemented
(the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by a-
voiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to
exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, with-
out saying a word. . . . I remember him in the corridor of the hotel, a
mathematics textbook in his band, gazing now and again at the passing colors
of the sky. One afternoon, we discussed the duodecimal numerical system (in
which twelye is written 10). Ashe said that as a matter of fact, he was
transcribing some duodecimal tables, I forget which, into sexagesimals (in
which sixty is written 10), adding that this work had been commissioned by
a Norwegian in Rio Grande do Sul. We had known him for eight years and he
had never mentioned having stayed in that part of the country. . . . We
spoke of rural life, of capangas, of the Brazilian etymology of the word
gaucho (which some old people in the east still pronounce gaucho), and
nothing more was said--God forgive me--of duodecimal functions. In Septem-
ber, 1937 (we ourselves were not at the hotel at the time), Herbert Ashe
died of an aneurysmal rupture. Some days before, he had received from
Brazil a stamped, registered package. It was a book, an octavo volume.
Ashe left it in the bar where, months later, I found it. I began to leaf
through it and felt a sudden curious lightheadedness, which I will not go
into, since this is the story, not of my particular emotions, but of Uqbar
and Tlon and Orbis Tertius. In the Islamic world, there is one night, call-
ed the Night of Nights, on which the secret gates of the sky open wide and
the water in the water jugs tastes sweeter; if those gates were to open, I
would not feel what I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English,
and had 1001 pages. On the yellow leather spine, and again on the title page,
I read these words: A First Encyclopaedia of Tlon. Volume XI. Hlaer to
Jangr. There was nothing to indicate either date or place of origin. On
the first page and on a sheet of silk paper covering one of the colored en-
gravings there was a blue oval stamp with the inscription: ORBIS TERTIUS.
It was two years since I had discovered, in a volume of a pirated encyclo-
pedia, a brief description of a false country; now, chance was showing me
something much more valuable, something to be reckoned with. Now, I had in
my hands a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown plan-
et, with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors
and the sound of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals,
its birds, and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and meta-
physical arguments, all clearly stated, coherent, without any apparent
dogmatic intention or parodic undertone.

The eleventh volume of which I speak refers to both subsequent and pre-
ceding volumes. Nestor Ibarra, in an article (in the N.R.F.), now a classic,
has denied the exist-ence of those corollary volumes; Ezequiel Martinez
Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle have, I think, succeeded in refuting this
doubt. The fact is that, up until now, the most patient investigations have
proved fruitless. We have turned the libraries of Europe, North and South
America upside down --in vain. Alfonso Reyes, bored with the tedium .of
this minor detective work, proposes that we all take on the task of re-
constructing the missing volumes, many and vast as they were: ex ungue
leonem. He calculates, half seriously, that one generation of Tlonists
would be enough. This bold estimate brings us back to the basic problem:
who were the people who had invented Tlon? The plural is unavoidable, be-
cause we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some
transcendental Leibnitz working in modest obscurity. We conjecture that
this "brave new world" was the work of a secret society of astronomers,
biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians,
moralists, painters and geometricians, all under the supervision of an
unknown genius. There are plenty of individuals who have mastered these
various disciplines without having any facility for invention, far less
for submitting that inventiveness to a strict, systematic plan. This plan
is so vast that each individual contribution to it is infinitesimal. To
begin with, Tlon was thought to be nothing more than a chaos, a free and
irresponsible work of the imagination; now it was clear that it is a com-
plete cosmos, and that the strict laws which govern it have been careful-
ly formulated, albeit provisionally. It is enough to note that the appa-
rent con-tradictions in the eleventh volume are the basis for proving
the existence of the others, so lucid and clear is the scheme maintained
in it. The popular magazines have publicized, with pardonable zeal, the
zoology and topography of Tlon. I think, however, that its transparent ti-
gers and its towers of blood scarcely deserve the unwavering attention of
all men. I should like to take some little time to deal with its concept-
ion of the universe.

Hume remarked once and for all that the arguments of Berkeley were not
only thoroughly unanswerable but thoroughly unconvincing. This dictum is
emphatically true as it applies to our world; but it falls down complete-
ly in Tlon. The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Their
language, with its derivatives--religion, literature, and metaphysics--
presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects
in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial
and temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ur-
sprache of Tlon, which is the source of the living language and the dial-
ects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or
prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word
corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moond-
le. The moon rose over the sea would be written hlor u fang axaxaxas
mlo or, to put it in order: upward beyond the constant flow there was moondl-
ing. (Xul Solar translates it succinctly: upward, behind the onstreaming
it mooned.)

The previous passage refers to the languages of the southern hemisphere.
In those of the northern hemisphere (the eleventh volume has little in-
formation on its Ursprache), the basic unit is not the verb, but the mon-
osyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives.
One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-
faint-of-sky or some other accumulation. In the chosen example, the mass
of adjectives corresponds to a real object. The happening is completely
fortuitous. In the literature of this hemisphere (as in the lesser world
of Meinong), ideal objects abound, invoked and dissolved momentarily,
according to poetic necessity. Sometimes, the faintest simultaneousness
brings them about. There are objects made up of two sense elements, one
visual, the other auditory--the color of a sunrise and the distant call
of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements --the sun, the
water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one
sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a riv-
er or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others;
using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one.
There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in
truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that
no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxical-
ly enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them. The languages
of the northern hemisphere of Tlon include all the names in Indo-European
languages--plus a great many others.

It is no exaggeration to state that in the classical culture of Tlon,
there is only one discipline, that of psychology. All others are sub-
ordinated to it. I have remarked that the men of that planet conceive
of the universe as a series of mental processes, whose unfolding is to
be understood only as a time sequence. Spinoza attributes to the inex-
haustibly divine in man the qualities of extension and of thinking.
In Tlon, nobody would understand the juxtaposition of the first, which
is only characteristic of certain states of being, with the second,
which is a perfect synonym for the cosmos. To put it another way--they
do not conceive of the spatial as everlasting in time. The perception
of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and, later, of the countryside on
fire and, later, of a half-extinguished cigar which caused the con-
flagration would be considered an example of the association of ideas.

This monism, or extreme idealism, completely invalidates science. To
explain or to judge an event is to identify or unite it with another
one. In Tlon, such connection is a later stage in the Mind of the ob-
server, which can in no way affect or illuminate the earlier stage.
Each state of mind is irreducible. The mere act of giving it a name,
that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it. From all
this, it would be possible to deduce that there is no science in jet
alone rational thought. The paradox, however, is that sciences exist,
in countless number. In philosophy, the same Tlong happens as happens
with the nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that any philo-
sophical system is bound in advance to be a dialectical game, a Phil-
osophie des Als Ob, means that systems abound, unbelievable systems,
beautifully constructed or else sensational in effect. The metaphy-
sicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, nor even for an approxi-
mation of it; they are after a kind of amaze-ment. They consider met-
aphysics a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system
is nothing more than the subordination of all the aspects of the uni-
verse to some one of them. Even the phrase "all the aspects" can be
rejected, since it presupposes the impossible inclusion of the pre-
sent moment, and of past moments. Even so, the plural, "past moments"
is inadmissable, since it supposes another im-possible operation. . .
One of the schools in Tlon has reached the point of denying time.
It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no o-
ther reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than pre-
sent memory.* Another school declares that the whole of time has al-
ready happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection,
doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process. Another
school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the
history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the
handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a
demon. Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those
code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which
only that which happens every three hundredth night is true. Another
believes that, while we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else,
and that thus every man is two men.

Among the doctrines of TIon, none has occasioned greater scandal than
the doctrine of materialism. Some Tlonkers have formulated it with
less clarity than zeal, as one might put forward a paradox. To clarify
the general understanding of this unlikely thesis, one eleventh cen-
tury heresiarch offered the parable of nine copper coins, which en-
joyed in Tlon the same noisy reputation as did the Eleatic paradoxes
of Zeno in their day. There are many versions of this "feat of spec-
ious reasoning" which vary the number of coins and the number of dis-
coveries. Here is the commonest:

On Tuesday, X ventures along a deserted road and loses nine cop-
per coins. On Thursday, Y finds on the road four coins, somewhat
rusted by Wednesday's rain. On Friday, Z comes across three coins
on the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor
of his house. [The heresiarch is trying to deduce from this story
the reality, that is, the continuity, of the nine recovered
coins.] It is absurd, he states, to suppose that four of the
coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three be-
tween Tuesday and Friday afternoon, and two between Tuesday and
Friday morning. It is logical to assume that they have existed,
albeit in some secret way, in a manner whose understanding is
concealed from men, in every moment, in all three places.

The language of Tlon is by its nature resistant to the formulation of
this paradox; most people do not understand it. At first, the defende-
rs of common sense confined themselves to denying the truth of the
anecdote. They de-clared that it was a verbal fallacy, based on the
reckless use of two neological expressions, not substantiated by com-
mon usage, and contrary to the laws of strict thought--the verbs
to find and to lose entail a petitio principii, since they pre-sup-
pose that the first nine coins and the second are identical. They
recalled that any noun--man, money, Thursday, Wednesday, rain--has
only metaphorical value. They denied the misleading detail "somewhat
rusted by Wednesday's rain," since it assumes what must be demonstrat-
ed--the continuing existence of the four coins between Thursday and
Tuesday. They explained that equality is one thing and identity an-
other, and formulated a kind of reductio ad absurdum, the hypotheti-
cal case of nine men who, on nine successive nights, suffer a violent
pain. Would it not be ridiculous, they asked, to claim that this
pain is the same one each time?* They said that the heresiarch was
motivated mainly by the blasphemous intention of attributing the di-
vine category of being to some ordinary coins; and that sometimes he
was denying plurality, at other times not. They argued thus: that if
equality entails identity, it would have to be admitted at the same
time that the nine coins are only one coin.

Amazingly enough, these refutations were not conclusive. After the
problem had been stated and restated for a hundred years, one Tlonk-
er no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the ortho-
dox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous
supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that
this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in
the universe, and that those beings are the instruments and masks
of divinity itself. X is Y and is Z. Z finds three coins because he
remembers that X lost them. X finds only two in the corridor be-
cause he remembers that the others have been recovered. . . . The
eleventh volume gives us to understand that there were three prin-
cipal reasons which led to the complete victory of this panthe-
istic idealism. First, it repudiated solipsism. Second, it made
possible the retention of a psychological basis for the sciences.
Third, it permitted the cult of the gods to be retained. Schopen-
hauer, the passionate and clear-headed Schopenhauer, advanced a
very similar theory in the first volume of his Parerga and Paral-
ipomena.

The geometry of Tlon has two somewhat distinct systems, a visual
one and a tactile one. The latter system corresponds to our geo-
metry; they consider it inferior to the former. The foundation
of visual geometty is the surface, not the point. This system re-
jects the principle of parallelism, and states that, as man moves
about, he alters the forms which surround him. The arithmetical
system is based on the idea of indefinite numbers. It emphasizes
the importance of the concepts greater and lesser, which our
mathematicians symbolize as > and <. It states that the operation
of counting modifies quantities and changes them from indefinites
into definites. The fact that several individuals counting the
same quantity arrive at the same result is, say their psycholo-
gists, an example of the association of ideas or the good use of
memory. We already know that in TIon the source of all-knowing
is single and eternal.

In literary matters too, the dominant notion is that everything
is the work of one single author. Books are rarely signed. The
concept of plagiarism does not exist; it has been established that
all books are the work of one single writer, who is timeless and
anonymous. Criticism is prone to invent authors. A critic will
choose two dissimilar works--the Tao Te Ching and The Thousand
and One Nights;, let us say--and attribute them to the same writer,
and then with all probity explore the psychology of this interest-
ing homme de lettres. . . .

The books themselves are also odd. Works of fiction are based on
a single plot, which runs through every imaginable permutation.
Works of natural philosophy invariably include thesis and anti-
thesis, the strict pro and con of a theory. A book which does
not include its opposite, or "counter-book," is considered incom-
plete.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence
reality. In the very oldest regions of Tlon, it is not an uncom-
mon occurrence for lost objects to be duplicated. Two people are
looking for a pencil; the first one finds it and says nothing;
the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but more in keep-
ing with his expectation. These secondary objects are called
hronir and, even though awkward in form, are a little larger than
the originals. Until recently, the hronir were the accidental
children of absent-mindedness and forgetfulness. It seems impro-
bable that the methodical production of them has been going on
for almost a hundred years, but so it is stated in the eleventh
volume. The first attempts were fruitless. Nevertheless, the
modus operandi is worthy of note. The director of one of the state
prisons announced to the convicts that in an ancient river bed
certain tombs were to be found, and promised freedom to any pri-
soner who made an important discovery. In the months preceding
the excavation, printed photographs of what was to be found were
shown the prisoners. The first attempt proved that hope and zeal
could be inhibiting; a week of work with shovel and pick suc-
ceeded in unearthing no hron other than a rusty wheel, postdat-
ing the experiment. This was kept a secret, and the experiment
was later repeated in four colleges. In three of them the failure
was almost complete; in the fourth (the director of which died by
chance during the initial excavation), the students dug up--or
produced--a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three earthen-
ware urns, and the moldered mutilated torso of a king with an in-
scription on his breast which has so far not been deciphered.
Thus was discovered the unfitness of witnesses who were aware
of the experimental nature of the search. . Mass investigations
produced objects which contradicted one another; now, individual
projects, as far as possible spontaneous, are preferred. The meth-
odical development of hronir, states the eleventh volume, has been
of enormous service to archaeologists. It has allowed them to
question and even to modify the past, which nowadays is no less
malleable or obedient than the future. One curious fact: the hronir
of the second and third degree--that is, the hronir derived from
another hron, and the hronir derived from the hron of a hron
--exaggerate the flaws of the original; those of the fifth de-
gree are almost uniform; those of the ninth can be confused
with those of the second; and those of the eleventh degree
have a purity of form which the originals do not possess. The
process is a recurrent one; a hron of the twelfth degree be-
gins to deteriorate in quality. Stranger and more perfect than
any hron is sometimes the ur, which is a Tlong produced by
suggestion, an object brought into being by hope. The great
gold mask I mentioned previously is a distinguished example.

Things duplicate themselves in Tlon. They tend at the same
time to efface themselves, to lose their detail when people
forget them. The classic example is that of a stone threshold
which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which
faded from sight on his death. Occasionally, a few birds, a
horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater. (1940.
Salto Oriental.)

Postscript. 1947. I reprint the foregoing article just as it
appeared in the Anthology of Fantastic Literature, 1940, omit-
ting no more than some figures of speech, and a kind of burl-
esque summing up, which now strikes me as frivolous. So many
things have happened since that date. . . . I will confine
myself to putting them down.

In March, 1941, a manuscript letter by Gunnar Erfjord came to
light in a volume of Hinton, which had belonged to Herbert Ashe.
The envelope bore the postmark of Ouro Preto. The letter clear-
ed up entirely the mystery of Tlon. The text of it confirmed
Martinez Estrada's thesis. The elaborate story began one night
in Lucerne or London, in the early seventeenth century. A ben-
evolent secret society (which counted Dalgarno and, later,
George Berkeley among its members) came together to invent a
country. The first tentative plan gave prominence to "hermetic
studies," philanthropy, and the cabala. Andrea's curious book
dates from that first period. At the end of some years of con-
venticles and premature syntheses, they realized that a single
generation was not long enough in which to define a country.
They made a resolution that each one of the master-scholars in-
volved should elect a disciple to carry on the work. That her-
editary arrangement prevailed; and after a hiatus of two cen-
turies, the persecuted brotherhood reappeared in America. A-
bout 1824, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the members had a
conversation with the millionaire ascetic, Ezra Buckley. Buckley
listened with some disdain as the other man talked, and then
burst out laughing at the modesty of the project. He declared
that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed
the invention of a whole planet. To this gigantic idea, he add-
ed another, born of his own nihilism*--that of keeping the en-
ormous project a secret. The twenty volumes of the Encyclopae-
dia Britannica were then in circulation; Buckley suggested a
systematic encyclopedia of the imaginary planet. He would leave
the society his mountain ranges with their gold fields, his
navigable rivers, his prairies where bull and bison roamed,
his Negroes, his brothels, and his dollars, on one condition:
"The work will have no truck with the imposter Jesus Christ."
Buckley did not believe in God, but nevertheless wished to
demonstrate to the nonexistent God that mortal men were cap-
able of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton
Rouge in 1828; in 1914, the society forwarded to its collab-
orators, three hundred in number, the final volume of the
First Encyclopaedia of Tlon. The edition was secret; the forty
volumes which comprised it (the work was vaster than any pre-
viously undertaken by men) were to be the basis for another
work, more detailed, and this time written, not in English, but
in some one of the languages of Tlon. This review of an illu-
sory world was called, provisionally, Orbis Tertius, and one
of its minor demiurges was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent
of Gunnar Erfjord, or as a full associate, I do not know.
The fact that he received a copy of the eleventh volume
would favor the second view. But what about the others? A-
bout 1942, events began to speed up. I recall with distinct
clarity one of the first, and I seem to have felt something
of its premonitory character. It occurred in an apartment on
the Calle Laprida, facing a high open balcony which looked
to the west. From Poitiers, the Princess of Faucigny Lucinge
had received her silver table service. Out of the recesses
of a crate, stamped all over with international markings,
fine immobile pieces were emerging--silver plate from Utrecht
and Paris, with hard heraldic fauna, a samovar. Amongst them,
trembling faintly, just perceptibly, like a sleeping bird,
was a magnetic compass. It shivered mysteriously. The prin-
cess did not recognize it. The blue needle longed for magnet-
ic north. The metal case was concave. The letters on the dial
corresponded to those of one of the alphabets of Tlon. Such
was the first intrusion of the fantastic world into the real
one. A disturbing accident brought it about that I was also
witness to the second. It happened some months afterward, in
a grocery store belonging to a Brazilian, in Cuchilla Negra.
Amorim and I were on our way back from Sant'Anna. A sudden
rising of the Tacuarembo river compelled us to test (and to
suffer patiently) the rudimentary hospitality of the general
store. The grocer set up some creaking cots for us in a large
room, cluttered with barrels and wineskins. We went to bed,
but were kept from sleeping until dawn by the drunkenness of
an invisible neighbor, who alternated between shouting inde-
cipherable abuse and singing snatches of milongas, or rather,
snatches of the same milonga. As might be supposed, we attri-
buted this insistent uproar to the fiery rum of the proprie-
tor. . . . At dawn, the man lay dead in the corridor. The
coarseness of his voice had deceived us; he was a young boy.
In his delirium, he had spilled a few coins and a shining
metal cone, of the diameter of a die, from his heavy gaucho
belt. A serving lad tried to pick up this cone--in vain. It
was scarcely possible for a man to lift it. I held it in my
hand for some minutes. I remember that it was intolerably
heavy, and that after putting it down, its oppression re-
mained. I also remember the precise circle it marked in my
flesh. This manifestation of an object which was so tiny and
at the same time so heavy left me with an unpleasant sense
of abhorrence and fear. A countryman proposed that it be
thrown into the rushing river. Amorim acquired it for a few
pesos. No one knew anyTlong of the dead man, only that "he
came from the frontier." Those small and extremely heavy
cones, made of a metal which does not exist in this world,
are images of divinity in certain religions in Tlon.

Here I conclude the personal part of my narrative. The rest,
when it is not in their hopes or their fears, is at least in
the memories of all my readers. It is enough to recall or to
mention subsequent events, in as few words as possible, that
concave basin which is the collective memory will furnish
the wherewithal to enrich or amplify them. About 1944, a re-
porter from the Nashville, Tennessee, American uncovered, in
a Memphis library, the forty volumes of the First Encyclopae-
dia of Tlon. Even now it is uncertain whether this discovery
was accidental, or whether the directors of the still nebu-
lous Orbis Tertius condoned it. The second alternative is
more likely. Some of the more improbable features of the el-
eventh volume (for example, the multiplying of the hronir)
had been either removed or modified in the Memphis copy. It
is reasonable to suppose that these erasures were in keeping
with the plan of projecting a world which would not be too
incompatible with the real world. The dissemination of objects
from Tlon throughout various countries would complement that
plan. . .* The fact is that the international press over-
whelmingly hailed the "find." Manuals, anthologies, summar-
ies, literal versions, authorized reprints, and pirated ed-
itions of the Master Work of Man poured and continue to pour
out into the world. Almost immediately, reality gave ground
on more than one point. The truth is that it hankered to
give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoev-
er which gave the appearance of order--dialectical material-
ism, anti-Semitism, Nazism--was enough to fascinate men. Why
not fall under the spell of Tlon and submit to the minute and
vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that
reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance
with divine laws--I translate: inhuman laws--which we will
never completely perceive. Tlon may be a labyrinth, but it
is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be de-
ciphered by men.

Contact with Tlon and the ways of Tlon have disinte-grated this
world. Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes
on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of
angels. Now, the conjectural "primitive language" of Tlon has
found its way into the schools. Now, the teaching of its har-
monious history, full of stirring episodes, has obliterated
the history which dominated my childhood. Now, in all memor-
ies, a fictitious past occupies the place of any other. We
know nothing about it with any certainty, not even that it is
false. Numismatics, pharmacology and archaeology have been
revised. I gather that biology and mathematics are awaiting
their avatar. . . . A scattered dynasty of solitaries has
changed the face of the world. Its task continues. If our
foresight is not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone
will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopaedia
of Tlon.

Then, English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from
this planet. The world will be Tlon. I take no notice. I go
on revising, in the quiet of the days in the hotel at Androgue,
a tentative translation into Spanish, in the style of Quevedo,
which I do not intend to see published, of Sir Thomas
Browne's Urn Burial.


—Translated by ALASTAIR• REID




THE APPROACH TO AL-MU'TASIM



Philip Guedalla writes that the novel The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim by the Bom-
bay lawyer Mir Bahadur All "is a rather uncomfortable combination of those
allegorical poems of Islam which rarely fail to interest their translator
and of those detective novels which inevitably surpass John H. Watson and
refine the horror of human life found in the most irreproachable boarding
houses of Brighton." Previously, Mr. Cecil Roberts had spoken harshly of
Bahadur's book, condemning "the double, improbable, tutelage of Wilkie Col-
lins and of Farid ud-din Attar, the illustrious twelfth-century Persian":
a tranquil enough observation, which Guedalla repeats without notable emen-
dation but in a choleric tone of voice. Essentially, both critics are in
agreement: both indicate the detective story mechanism of the novel and its
mystic undercurrent. This hybridization may cause us to imagine some like-
ness with Chesterton; we will soon see that there is no such thing.

The editio princeps of The Approach to Al-Mulasim appeared in Bombay toward
the end of 1932. The paper used was almost the quality of newsprint; the
cover proclaimed to the buyer that the book was the first detective novel
written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months the public bought
up four printings of a thousand copies each. The Bombay Quarterly Review,
the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustan Review (of Allahabad),
and the Calcutta Englishman distributed their eulogies. Thereupon Bahadur
issued an illustrated edition of the book, which he now titled The Conver-
sation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim and handsomely subtitled A Game with
Shifting Mirrors. This is the edition which has just been reproduced and is-
sued in London by Victor Gollancz, with a prologue by Dorothy L. Sayers, and
the omission--perhaps merciful--of the illustrations. I have it in front of
me. The first edition, which I suspect is far superior, I have never suc-
ceeded in finding. I am authorized in this last judgment by an appendix which
summarizes the fundamental difference between the primitive version of 1932
and the 1934 edition. Before examining the book--and arguing its merits --it
would be well for me to indicate rapidly the general course of the work.

Its visible protagonist--we never learn his name--is a law student in Bombay.
He disbelieves, blasphemously so, in the Islamic faith of his fathers. But
at nightfall on the tenth night of the lunar month of Muharram, he finds him-
self in the center of a civil tumult between Moslems and Hindus. The night
is filled with drums and invocations: the great paper canopies of the Moslem
procession force their way among the adverse multitude. A brick flung by a Hin-
du comes flying from a rooftop; someone sinks a dagger into another's belly;
someone--Moslem? Hindu?--is killed and is stamped underfoot. Three thousand
men battle: cane against revolver, obscenity against imprecation, God the In-
divisible against the Gods. Aghast, the free-thinking student joins the fray.
With desperate hands he kills (or thinks he kills) a Hindu. The Sirkar police
--mounted, deafening-hooved, half asleep--intervene with their impartial lashes.
Almost beneath the hooves of the horses, the student takes 'flight; lie makes
for the farthest outskirts of town. He crosses two sets of railroad tracks, or
the same tracks twice. He scales the wall of an entangled garden, at the back
of which rises a circular tower. "A lean and evil mob of mooncolored hounds"
breaks out from behind the black rosebushes. Fiercely beset, he takes refuge
in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder--some of the rungs are missing--and,
once on the roof, where there is a blackish well in the center, encounters a
squalid man squatting by the light of the moon and urinating noisily. This man
confides in him that his profession is to rob gold teeth from the white-shroud-
ed cadavers which the Parsees leave in this tower. He talks of other equally
vile matters and mentions that fourteen nights have passed since he last pur-
ified himself with buffalo dung. He speaks with manifest hatred of certain
horse thieves in Guzerat, "eaters of dogs and lizards, men as unclean as the
two of us." The sky begins to grow light: the air is filled with the low flight
of fat vultures. Exhausted, the student falls asleep. When he awakes, the sun
is high in the sky and the robber has disappeared. Also missing are a couple
of Trichinopoly cigars and some silver rupees. In the face of the menaces fore-
shadowed by the previous night, the student resolves to lose himself in the
depths of India. He meditates on how he has shown himself capable of killing
an idolater, but not of knowing for certain whether a Moslem is more justified
in his beliefs than a Hindu. He can not get the name of Guzerat out of his mind,
nor that of a certain malka-sansi (a woman of the robber caste) of Palanpur,
the preferred target of curses and object of hatred for the despoiler of cada-
vers. He reasons that the rancor of a man so minutely vile is worthy of special
eulogy. He resolves--with little hope--to look for the malka-sansi. After brief
prayer, he sets forth on the long voyage with assured languor. Thus concludes
the second chapter of the work.

It is impossible to trace the vicissitudes of the nineteen remaining chapters.
There is a dizzy pullulation of dramatis personae, not to speak of a biography
which seems to exhaust the movements of the human spirit (ranging from infamy
to mathematical speculation) or of a peregrination which encompasses the vast
geography of Hindustan. The story which begins in Bombay continues in the low-
lands of Palanpur, lingers an afternoon and a night at the stone gates of Bik-
aner, narrates the death of a blind astrologer in a Benares sewer, conspires in
the multiform palace of Katmandu, prays and fornicates--amid the pestilential
stench of Calcutta--in the Machua Bazaar, watches the days be born in the sea
from an office in Madras, watches the afternoons die in the sea from a balcony
in the state of Travancore, hestitates and kills at Indapur and closes its or-
bit of leagues and years in Bombay itself, a few paces away from the garden of
the mooncolored hounds.

The plot is as follows: a man, the incredulous and fugitive student whom we al-
ready know, falls among people of the vilest class and adjusts himself to them,
in a kind of contest of infamy. All at once--with the miraculous consternation
of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand--he perceives
some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one
of the abhorrent men. "It was as if a more complex interlocutor had joined the
dialogue." He knows that the vile man conversing with him is incapable of this
momentaneous decorum; from this fact he concludes that the other, for the mo-
ment, is the reflection of a friend, or of the friend of a friend. Rethinking
the problem he arrives at a mysterious conviction: some place in the world there
is a man from whom this clarity emanates; some place in the world there is a man
who is this clarity. The student resolves to dedicate his life to finding him.

The general argument is thus glimpsed: the insatiable search for a soul through
the subtle reflections which this soul has left in others; in the beginning, the
faint trace of a smile or of a word; in the end, diverse and increasing splendors
of reason, of the imagination and of good. In the measure that the men questioned
have known Al-Mu'tasim more intimately, in that measure is their divine portion
the greater--though it is always clear that they are mere mir-rors. Mathematical
technicality is applicable: Bahadur's burdened novel is an ascending progression,
whose final end is the presentiment of a "man called Al-Mu'tasim." The immediate
antecedent of Al-Mu'tasim is a supremely happy and courteous Persian bookseller.
The predecessor of this bookseller is a saint. . . .

After many years the student arrives at a gallery "at the rear of which there
is a door hung with a cheap and copiously beaded mat curtain; from behind it
there emanates a great radiance." The student claps his hands once, twice,
and asks for Al-Mu'tasim. A man's voice--the incredible voice of AI-Mu'tasim
--urges him to come in. The student draws back the curtain and steps forward.
The novel ends.

Unless I am deceived, the successful execution of such an argument imposes
two obligations upon the writer: one, the various invention of prophetic
traits; the other, the obligation of seeing to it that the hero prefigured
by these traits be no mere convention or phantom. Bahadur satisfies the for-
mer; I do not know to what degree he satisfies the second. In other words:
the extraordinary and unseen Al-Mu'tasim should give us the impression of a
real character, not that of a jumble of insipid superlatives. In the 1932
version, the supernatural notes are scarce: "the man named Al-Mu'tasim" is to
some degree a symbol, but he does not lack idiosyncratic personal features.
Unfortunately, this literary good conduct did not last long. In the 1934 ver-
sion--which I have at hand--the novel sinks into allegory: Al-Mu'tasim is the
emblem of God, and the punctual itinerary of the hero is in some manner the
forward progress of the soul in its mystic ascent. Grievous details abound:
a Negro Jew from Cochin speaking of Al-Mu'tasim says that his skin is dark;
a Christian describes him standing atop a tower with his arms outspread; a
Red lama remembers him seated "like that image of yak lard which I modeled
and adored in the monastery at Tashilhumpo." These declarations are all
meant to insinuate a unitary God who accommodates Himself to human diversi-
ties. To my mind, the idea is not very stimulating. I will not say the same
of this other one: of the conjecture that the Almighty is also in search Of
Someone, and that Someone in search of some superior Someone (or merely in-
dispensable or equal Someone), and thus on to the end--or better, the end-
lessness--of Time, or on and on in some cyclical form. Al-Mu'tasim (the
name is the same as that of the eighth Abbasside, who was victor in eight
battles, engendered eight male and eight female children, left behind eight
thousand slaves and reigned during eight years, eight moons, and eight days)
etymologically means The Seeker of Shelter. In the 1932 version, the fact
that the object of the pilgrimage should be in turn a pilgrim opportunely
justified the difficulty of finding him. In the 1934 version, it gives
grounds to the extravagant theology I have mentioned. Mir Bahadur Oli is,
as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations:
that of being a genius.

After rereading, I am apprehensive lest I have not sufficiently underlined
the book's virtues. It contains some very civilized expressions: for exam-
ple, a certain argument in the nineteenth chapter in which one feels a pre-
sentiment that one of the antagonists is a friend of Al-Mu'tasim when he
will not refute the sophisms of his opponent "so as not to be right in a
triumphal fashion."

* * * * * * * * * *

That a present-day book should derive from an ancient one is clearly honor-
able: especially since no one (as Johnson says) likes to be indebted to his
contemporaries. The repeated, but insignificant, contacts of Joyce's Ulysses
with the Homeric Odyssey continue to enjoy--I shall never know why--the
hare-brained admiration of the critics. The coincidence in Bahadur's novel with
Farid ud-din Attar's venerated Colloquy of the Birds are rewarded with the
no less mysterious applause of London, and even of Allahabad and Calcutta.
Other derivations for Bahadur's novel are not wanting. One inquisitor has e-
numerated certain analogies in the novel's first scene with elements from
Kipling's story On the City Wall. Bahadur has admitted the connection, but
has alleged that it would be most abnormal if two paintings depicting the
tenth night of Muharram did not coincide in some way. . .

Eliot, with greater justice, recalls the seventy cantos of the incomplete
allegory The Faerie Queen, where the heroine, Gloriana, does not appear a
single time--as previously pointed out in a censure by Richard William
Church (Spenser, 1879). With all humility, I wish to mention a distant,
and possible, predecessor: the Jerusalem cabalist Isaac Luria, who in the
sixteenth century proclaimed that the soul of an ancestor or that of a
master might enter the soul of an unfortunate to comfort or instruct him.
Ibbiir is the name for this type of metempsychosis.*

1935


-- Translated by Anthony Kerrigan




PIERRE MENARD, AUTHOR OF DON QUIXOTE


　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　To Silvina Ocampo


The visible works left by this novelist are easily and briefly enumerated. It
is therefore impossible to forgive the omissions and additions perpetrated by
Madame Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue that a certain newspaper,
whose Protestant tendencies are no secret, was inconsiderate enough to inflict
on its wretched readers--even though they are few and Calvinist, if not Masonic
and circumcised. Menard's true friends regarded this catalogue with alarm,
and even with a certain sadness. It is as if yesterday we were gathered to-
gether before the final marble and the fateful cypresses, and already Error
is trying to tarnish his Memory. . . Decidedly, a brief rectification is in-
evitable.

I am certain that it would be very easy to challenge my meager authority. I
hope, nevertheless, that I will not be prevented from mentioning two impor-
tant testimonials. The Baroness de Bacourt (at whose unforgettable vendredis
I had the honor of becoming acquainted with the late lamented poet) has seen
fit to approve these lines. The Countess de Bagnoregio, one of the most re-
fined minds in the Principality of Monaco (and now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylva-
nia, since her recent marriage to the international philanthropist Simon
Kautsch who, alas, has been so slandered by the victims of his disinterested
handiwork) has sacrificed to "truth and death" (those are her words) that
majestic reserve which distinguishes her, and in an open letter published in
the magazine Luxe also grants me her consent. These authorizations, I believe,
are not insufficient.

I have said that Menard's visible lifework is easily enumerated. Having care-
fully examined his private archives, I have been able to verify that it con-
sists of the following:


a) A symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variations) in the magazine
La Conque (the March and October issues of 1899).

b) A monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of con-
cepts that would not be synonyms or periphrases of those which make up ordin-
ary language, "but ideal objects created by means of common agreement and des-
tined essentially to fill poetic needs" (Nimes, 1901).

c) A monograph on "certain connections or affinities" among the ideas of Des-
cartes, Leibnitz and John Wilkins (Nimes, 1903).

d) A monograph on the Characteristica Universalis of Leibnitz (Nimes, 1904).

e) A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by
means of eliminating one of the rooks' pawns. Menard proposes, recommends,
disputes, and ends by rejecting this innovation.

f) A monograph on the Ars Magna Generalis of Ramon Lull (Nimes, 1906).

g) A translation with prologue and notes of the Libro de la invencion y arte
del juego del axedrez by Ruy Lopez de Segura (Paris, 1907).

h) The rough draft of a monograph on the symbolic logic of George Boole.

i) An examination of the metric laws essential to French prose, illustrated
with examples from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, Oct-
ober, 1909).

j) An answer to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws) il-
lustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpe-
llier, December, 1909).

k) A manuscript translation of the Aguja de navegar cultos of Quevedo, en-
titled La boussole des precieux.

1) A preface to the catalogue of the exposition of lithographs by Carolus
Hourcade (Nimes, 1914).

m) His work, Les problemes d'un probleme (Paris, 1917), which takes up in
chronological order the various solutions of the famous problem of Achilles
and the tortoise. Two editions of this book have appeared so far; the sec-
ond has as an epigraph Leibnitz' advice "Ne craignez point, monsieur, la
tortue," and contains revisions of the chapters dedicated to Russell and
Descartes.

n) An obstinate analysis of the "syntactic habits" of Toulet (N.R.F., March,
1921). I remember that Menard used to declare that censuring and praising were
sentimental operations which had noTlong to do with criticism.

o) A transposition into Alexandrines of Le Cimetiere marin of Paul Valery
(N.R.F., January, 1928).

p) An invective against Paul Valery in the Journal for the Suppression of
Reality of Jacques Reboul. (This invective, it should be stated parenthetical-
ly, is the exact reverse of his true opinion of Valery. The latter understood
it as such, and the old friendship between the two was never endangered.)

q) A "definition" of the Countess of Bagnoregio in the "victorious volume"--
the phrase is that of another col-laborator, Gabriele d'Annunzio--which this
lady publishes yearly to rectify the inevitable falsifications of journalism
and to present "to the world and to Italy" an authentic effigy of her person,
which is so exposed (by reason of her beauty and her activities) to erroneous
or hasty interpretations.

r) A cycle of admirable sonnets for the Baroness de Bacourt (1934).

s) A manuscript list of verses which owe their effectiveness to punctuation.*


Up to this point (with no other omission than that of some vague, circumstan-
tial sonnets for the hospitable, or greedy, album of Madame Henri Bachelier)
we have the visible part of Menard's works in chronological order. Now I will
pass over to that other part, which is subterranean, interminably heroic, and
unequalled, and which is also--oh, the possibilities inherent in the man!--
inconclusive. This work, possibly the most significant of our time, consists
of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One of Don Quixote and a frag-
ment of the twenty-second chapter. I realize that such an affirmation seems ab-
surd; but the justification of this "absurdity" is the primary object of this
note.*

Two texts of unequal value inspired the undertaking. One was that philological
fragment of Novalis--No. 2005 of the Dresden edition--which outlines the theme
of total identification with a specific author. The other was one of those pa-
rasitic books which places Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on the Cannebiere and
Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like any man of good taste, Menard detested these
useless carnivals, only suitable--he used to say--for evoking plebeian delight
in anachronism, or (what is worse) charming us with the primary idea that all
epochs are the same, or that they are different. He considered more interesting,
even though it had been carried out in a contradictory and superficial way, Dau-
det's famous plan: to unite in one figure, Tartarin, the Ingenious Gentleman
and his squire. . Any insinuation that Menard dedicated his life to the writing
of a contemporary Don Quixote is a calumny of his illustrious memory.

He did not want to compose another Don Quixote--which would be easy--but the
Don Quixote. It is unnecessary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechan-
ical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable am-
bition was to produce pages which would coincide--word for word and line for
line--with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

"My intent is merely astonishing," he wrote me from Bayonne on December 30th,
1934. "The ultimate goal of a theological or metaphysical demonstration--the ex-
ternal world, God, chance, universal forms--are no less anterior or common than
this novel which I am now developing. The only difference is that philosophers
publish in pleasant volumes the intermediary stages of their work and that I
have decided to lose them." And, in fact, not one page of a rough draft remain
to bear witness to this work of years.

The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to
reembrace the Catholic faith, to fight against Moors and Turks, to forget Euro--
pean history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Men-
ard studied this procedure (I know that he arrived at a rather faithful handling
of seventeenth-century Spanish) but rejected it as too easy. Rather because it
was impossible, the reader will say! I agree, but the undertaking was impossible
from the start, and of all the possible means of carrying it out, this one was
the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the
seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and to ar-
rive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous--and consequently less interesting
--than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the
experiences of Pierre Menard. (This conviction, let it be said in passing, forced
him to exclude the autobiographical prologue of the second part of Don Quixote.
To include this prologue would have meant creating another personage--Cervantes--
but it would also have meant presenting Don Quixote as the work of this personage
and not of Menard. He naturally denied himself such an easy solution.) "My un-
dertaking is not essentially difficult," I read in another part of the same let-
ter. "I would only have to be immortal in order to carry it out." Shall I confess
that I often imagine that he finished it and that I am reading Don Quixote--the
entire work--as if Menard had conceived it? Several nights ago, while leafing
through Chapter XXVI --which he had never attempted--I recognized our friend's
style and, as it were, his voice in this exceptional phrase: the nymphs of the
rivers, mournful and humid Echo. This effective combination of two adjectives,
one moral and the other physical, reminded me of a line from Shakespeare which
we discussed one afternoon:

　　　　Where a malignant and turbaned Turk .. .

Why precisely Don Quixote, our reader will ask. Such a preference would not have
been inexplicable in a Spaniard; but it undoubtedly was in a symbolist from Nimes,
essentially devoted to Poe, who engendered Baudelaire, who engendered Mallarme,
who engendered Valery, who engendered Edmond Teste. The letter quoted above clar-
ifies this point. "Don Quixote," Menard explains, "interests me profoundly, but
it does not seem to me to have been--how shall I say it--inevitable. I cannot im-
agine the universe without the interjection of Edgar Allan Poe

　　　　Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!

or without the Bateau ivre or the Ancient Mariner, but I know that I am capable
of imagining it without Don Quixote. (I speak, naturally, of my personal capacity,
not of the historical repercussions of these works.) Don Quixote is an accident-
al book, Don Quixote is unnecessary. I can pre-meditate writing, I can write it,
without incurring a tautology. When I was twelve or thirteen years old I read
it, perhaps in its entirety. Since then I have reread several chapters attentive-
ly, but not the ones I am going to undertake. I have likewise studied the entre--
meses, the comedies, the Galatea, the exemplary novels, and the undoubtedly lab
orious efforts of Persiles y Sigismunda and the Viaje al Parnaso. . My general
memory of Don Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, is much the
same as the imprecise, anterior image of a book not yet written. Once this image
(which no one can deny me in good faith) has been postulated, my problems are
undeniably considerably more difficult than those which Cervantes faced. My af-
fable precursor did not refuse the collaboration of fate; he went along compos-
ing his immortal work a little a la diable, swept along by inertias of language
and invention. I have contracted the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally
his spontaneous work. My solitary game is governed by two polar laws. The first
permits me to attempt variants of a formal and psychological nature; the second
obliges me to sacrifice them to the 'original' text and irrefutably to rational-
ize this annihilation. . . . To these artificial obstacles one must add another
congenital one. To compose Dom Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the be-
ginning of the twentieth century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that
three hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings--among
them, to mention only one, that same Don Quixote."

In spite of these three obstacles, the fragmentary Don Quixote of Menard is more
subtle than that of Cervantes. The latter indulges in a rather coarse opposition
between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country;
Menard chooses as "reality" the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and
Lope. What Hispanophile would not have advised Maurice Barres or Dr. Rodriguez
Larreta to make such a choice! Menard, as if it were the most natural thing in
the world, eludes them. In his work there are neither bands of gypsies, conqui-
stadors, mystics, Philip the Seconds, nor autos-da-fe. He disregards or proscribes
local color. This disdain indicates a new approach to the historical novel.
This disdain condemns Salammbo without appeal.

It is no less astonishing to consider isolated chapters. Let us examine, for in-
stance, Chapter XXXVIII of Part One "which treats of the curious discourse that
Don Quixote delivered on the subject of arms and letters." As is known, Don Qui-
xote (like Quevedo in a later, analogous passage of La hora de todos) passes
judgment against letters and in favor of arms. Cervantes was an old soldier,
which explains such a judgment. But that the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard --a
contemporary of La trahison des clercs and Bertrand Russell--should relapse into
these nebulous sophistries' Madame Bachelier has seen in them an admirable and
typical subordination of the author to the psychology of the hero; others (by
no means perspicaciously) a transcription of Don Quixote; the Baroness de Ba-
court, the influence of Nietzsche. To this third interpretation (which seems
to me irrefutable) I do not know if I would dare to add a fourth, which coin-
cides very well with the divine modesty of Pierre Menard: his resigned or iron-
ic habit of propounding ideas which were the strict reverse of those he prefer-
red. (One will remember his diatribe against Paul Valery in the ephemeral journal
of the superrealist Jacques Reboul.) The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are
verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous,
his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness.) It is a revelation to com-
pare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance,
wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine):

. . . la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposit de las
acciones, testigo de to pasado, ejemplo y aviso de to presente, advertencia
de lo par venir.

[. . . truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository
of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warn-
ing to the future.]

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "ingenious layman" Cervantes,
this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other
hand, writes:

. . . la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las
acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia
de to por venir.

[. . . truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository
of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning
to the future.]

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of Will-
iam James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its
origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think
took place. The final clauses--example and lesson to the present, and warning to
the future--are shamelessly pragmatic.

Equally vivid is the contrast in styles. The archaic style of Menard--in the last
analysis, a foreigner--suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his pre-
cursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish of his time.

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless. A philosophical
doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the
years pass it becomes a mere chapter--if not a paragraph or a noun--in the history
of philosophy. In literature, this ultimate decay is even more notorious. "Don
Quixote," Menard once told me, "was above all an agreeable book; now it is an
occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance and obscene deluxe editions.
Glory is an incomprehension, and perhaps the worst."

These nihilist arguments contain nothing new; what is unusual is the decision Pierre
Menard derived from them. He resolved to outstrip that vanity which awaits all the
woes of mankind; he undertook a task that was complex in the extreme and futile from
the outset. He dedicated his conscience and nightly studies to the repetition of a
preexisting book in a foreign tongue. The number of rough drafts kept on increasing;
he tenaciously made corrections and tore up thousands of manuscript pages.* He did
not permit them to be examined, and he took great care that they would not survive
him. It is in vain that I have tried to reconstruct them.

I have thought that it is legitimate to consider the "final" Don Quixote as a kind
of palimpsest, in which should appear traces--tenuous but not undecipherable--of the
"previous" handwriting of our friend. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard,
inverting the work of the former, could exhume and rescuscitate these Troys. . . .

"To think, analyze and invent," he also wrote me, "are not anomalous acts, but the
normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of
this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous
amazement that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our languor or barbar-
ism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he
will be."

Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the
hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate ana-
chronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications,
urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to
read Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri
Bachelier. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. Would not the
attributing of The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce be
a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels?


Nimes

1939




THE BABYLON LOTTERY



Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave; I have
also known omnipotence, opprobrium, jail. Look: the index finger of my right
hand is missing. Look again: through this rent in my cape you can see a ruddy
tatoo on my belly. It is the second symbol, Beth. This letter, on nights of
full moon, gives me power over men whose mark is Ghimel; but it also subordi-
nates me to those marked Aleph, who on moonless nights owe obedience to those
marked Ghimel. In a cellar at dawn, I have severed the jugular vein of sacred
bulls against a black rock. During one lunar year, I have been declared invis-
ible: I shrieked and was not heard, I stole my bread and was not decapitated.
I have known what the Greeks did not: uncertainty. In a bronze chamber, faced
with the silent handkerchief of a strangler, hope has been faithful to me; in
the river of delights, panic has not failed me. Heraclitus of Pontica admiring-
ly relates that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrho, and before that Euphor-
bus, and before that some other mortal. In order to recall analogous vicissi-
tudes I do not need to have recourse to death, nor even to imposture.

I owe this almost atrocious variety to an institution which other republics
know nothing about, or which operates among them imperfectly and in secret:
the lottery. I have not delved into its history; I do know that the wizards
have been unable to come to any agreement; of its powerful designs I know what
a man not versed in astrology might know of the moon. I come from a vertigi-
nous country where the lottery forms a principal part of reality: until this
very day I have thought about all this as little as I have about the behavior
of the indecipherable gods or about the beating of my own heart. Now, far
from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think of the lottery with some aston-
ishment and ponder the blasphemous conjectures murmured by men in the shadows
at twilight.

My father related that anciently--a matter of centuries; of years?--the lottery
in Babylon was a game of plebeian character. He said (I do not know with what
degree of truth) that barbers gave rectangular bits of bone or decorated parch-
ment in exchange for copper coins. A drawing of the lottery was held in the
middle of the day: the winners received, without further corroboration from
chance, silver-minted coins. The procedure, as you see, was elemental.

Naturally, these "lotteries" failed. Their moral virtue was nil. They did not
appeal to all the faculties of men: only to their hope. In the face of public
indifference, the merchants who established these venal lotteries began to
lose money. Someone attempted to introduce a slight reform: the interpolation
of a certain small number of adverse outcomes among the favored numbers. By
means of this reform, the purchasers of numbered rectangles stood the double
chance of winning a sum or of paying a fine often considerable in size. This
slight danger--for each thirty favored numbers there would be one adverse num-
ber--awoke, as was only natural, the public's interest. The Babylonians gave
themselves up to the game. Anyone who did not acquire lots was looked upon
as pusillanimous, mean-spirited. In time, this disdain multiplied. The person
who did not play was despised, but the losers who paid the fine were also
scorned. The Company (thus it began to be known at that time) was forced to
take measures to protect the winners, who could not collect their prizes un-
less nearly the entire amount of the fines was already collected. The Company
brought suit against the losers: the judge condemned them to pay the original
fine plus costs or to spend a number of days in jail. Every loser chose jail,
so as to defraud the Company. It was from this initial bravado of a few men
that the all-powerful position of the Company--its ecclesiastical, metaphysical
strength--was derived.

A short while later, the reports on the drawings omitted any enumeration of
fines and limited themselves to publishing the jail sentences corresponding to
each adverse number. This laconism, almost unnoticed at the time, became of
capital importance. It constituted the first appearance in the lottery of non-
pecuniary elements. Its success was great. Pushed to such a measure by the
players, the Company found itself forced to increase its adverse numbers.

No one can deny that the people of Babylonia are highly devoted to logic, even
to symmetry. It struck them as icoherent that the fortunate numbers should
be computed in round figures of money while the unfortunate should be figured
in terms of days and nights in jail. Some moralists argued that the possession
of money does not determine happiness and that other forms of fortune are per-
haps more immediate.

There was another source of restlessness in the lower depths. The members of
the sacerdotal college multiplied the stakes and plumbed the vicissitudes of
terror and hope; the poor, with reasonable or inevitable envy, saw themselves
excluded from this notoriously delicious exhiliration. The just anxiety of
all, poor and rich alike, to participate equally in the lottery, inspired an
indignant agitation, the memory of which the years have not erased. Certain
obstinate souls did not comprehend, or pretended not to comprehend, that a
new order had come, a necessary historical stage. . . . A slave stole a crim-
son ticket, a ticket which earned him the right to have his tongue burned in
the next drawing. The criminal code fixed the same penalty for the theft of a
ticket. A number of Babylonians argued that he deserved a red-hot poker by
virtue of the theft; others, more magnanimous, held that the public executioner
should apply the penalty of the lottery, since chance had so determined. . . .

Disturbances broke out, there was a lamentable shedding of blood; but the peo-
ple of Babylon imposed their will at last, over the opposition of the rich.
That is: the people fully achieved their magnanimous ends. In the first place,
it made the Company accept complete public power. (This unification was nece-
ssary, given the vastness and complexity of the new operations.) In the second
place, it forced the lottery to be secret, free, and general. The sale of
tickets for money was abolished. Once initiated into the mysteries of Bel,
every free man automatically participated in the sacred drawings of lots,
which were carried out in the labyrinths of the gods every seventy nights and
which determined every man's fate until the next exercise. The consequences
were incalculable. A happy drawing might motivate his elevation to the coun-
cil of wizards or his condemnation to the custody of an enemy (notorious or
intimate), or to find, in the peaceful shadows of a room, the woman who had
begun to disquiet him or whom he had never expected to see again. An adverse
drawing might mean mutilation, a varied infamy, death. Sometimes a single
event--the tavern killing of C, the mysterious glorification of B--might be
the brilliant result of thirty or forty drawings. But it must be recalled
that the individuals of the Company were (and are) all-powerful and astute
as well. In many cases, the knowledge that certain joys were the simple do-
ing of chance might have detracted from their exellence; to avoid this in-
convenience the Company's agents made use of suggestion and magic. Their
moves, their management, were secret. In the investigation of people's inti-
mate hopes and intimate terrors, they made use of astrologers and spies.
There were certain stone lions, there was a sacred privy called Qaphqa,
there were fissures in a dusty aqueduct which, according to general opinion,
lead to the Company; malign or benevolent people deposited accusations in
these cracks. These denunciations were incorporated into an alphabetical
archive of variable veracity.

Incredibly enough, there were still complaints. The Company, with its hab-
itual discretion, did not reply directly. It preferred to scribble a brief
argument--which now figures among sacred scriptures--in the debris of a mask
factory. That doctrinal piece of literature observed that the lottery is an
interpolation of chance into the order of the world and that to accept er-
rors is not to contradict fate but merely to corroborate it. It also observ-
ed that those lions and that sacred recipient, though not unauthorized by
the Company (which did not renounce the right to consult them), functioned
without official guaranty.

This declaration pacified the public unease. It also produced other effects,
not foreseen by the author. It deeply modified the spirit and operations of
the Company. (I have little time left to tell what I know; we have been warn-
ed that the ship is ready to sail; but I will attempt to explain it.)

Improbable as it may be, no one had until then attempted to set up a general
theory of games. A Babylonian is not highly speculative. He reveres the judg-
ments of fate, he hands his life over to them, he places his hopes, his panic
terror in them, but it never occurs to him to investigate their labyrinthian
laws nor the giratory spheres which disclose them. Nevertheless, the unoffic-
ial declaration which I have mentioned inspired many discussions of a juridi-
comathematical nature. From one of these discussions was born the following
conjecture: if the lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infus-
ion of chaos into the cosmos, would it not be desirable for chance to inter-
vene at all stages of the lottery and not merely in the drawing? Is it not rid-
iculous for chance to dictate the death of someone, while the circumstances
of his death--its silent reserve or publicity, the time limit of one hour or
one century--should remain immune to hazard? These eminently just scruples
finally provoked a considerable reform, whose complexities (intensified by the
practice of centuries) are not understood except by a handful of specialists,
but which I will attempt to summarize, even if only in a symbolic manner.

Let us imagine a first drawing, which eventuates in a sentence of death against
some individual. To carry out the sentence, another drawing is set up, and this
drawing proposes (let us say) nine possible executioners. Of these execution-
ers, four can initiate a third drawing which will reveal the name of the actual
executioner, two others can replace the adverse order with a fortunate order
(the finding of a treasure, let us say), another may exacerbate the death sen-
tence (that is: make it infamous or enrich it with torture), still others may
refuse to carry it out. . . .

Such is the symbolic scheme. In reality, the number of drawings is infinite.
No decision is final, all diverge into others. The ignorant suppose that an in-
finite number of drawings require an infinite amount of time; in reality, it is
quite enough that time be infinitely subdivisible, as is the case in the famous
parable of the Tortoise and the Hare. This infinitude harmonizes in an admira-
ble manner with the sinuous numbers of Chance and of the Celestial Archetype
of the Lottery adored by the Platonists. . . .

A certain distorted echo of our ritual seems to have re-sounded along the Tiber:
Aelius Lampridius, in his Life of Antoninus Heliogabalus, tells of how this em-
peror wrote down the lot of his guests on seashells, so that one would receive
ten pounds of gold and another ten flies, ten dormice, ten bears. It is only
right to remark that Heliogabalus was educated in Asia Minor, among the priests
of the eponymous god.

There are also impersonal drawings, of undefined purpose: one drawing will de-
cree that a sapphire from Taprobane be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates;
another, that a bird be released from a tower roof; another, that a grain of
sand be withdrawn (or added) to the innumerable grains on a beach, The conse-
quences, sometimes, are terrifying.

Under the beneficent influence of the Company, our customs have become thorough-
ly impregnated with chance. The buyer of a dozen amphoras of Damascus wine will
not be surprised if one of them contains a talisman or a viper. The scribe who
draws up a contract scarcely ever fails to introduce some erroneous datum; I
myself, in making this hasty declaration, have falsified or invented some grand-
eur, some atrocity; perhaps, too, a certain mysterious monotony.

Our historians, the most discerning in the world, have in-vented a method for
correcting chance. It is well known that the operations of this method are (in
general) trustworthy; although, naturally, they are not divulged without a mea-
sure of deceit. In any case, there is nothing so contaminated with fiction as
the history of the Company. . .

A paleographic document, unearthed in a temple, may well be the work of yester-
day's drawing or that of one lasting a century. No book is ever published with-
out some variant in each copy. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, interpolate,
vary.

The Company, with divine modesty, eludes all publicity. Its . agents, as is only
natural, are secret. The orders which it is continually sending out do not dif-
fer from those lavishly issued by imposters. Besides, who can ever boast of be-
ing a mere imposter? The inebriate who improvises an absurd mandate, the dreamer
who suddenly awakes to choke the woman who lies at his side to death, do they
not both, perhaps, carry out a secret decision by the Company? This silent func-
tioning, comparable to that of God, gives rise to all manner of conjectures.
One of them, for instance, abominably insinuates that the Company is eternal and
that it will last until the last night of the world, when the last god annihil-
ates the cosmos. Still another conjecture declares that the Company is omnipotent,
but that it exerts its influence only in the most minute matters: in a bird's
cry, in the shades of rust and the hues of dust, in the cat naps of dawn. There
is one conjecture, spoken from the mouths of masked heresiarchs, to the effect
that the Company has never existed and never will. A conjecture no less vile ar-
gues that it is indifferently inconsequential to affirm or deny the reality of
the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of
chance.


--Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN




AN EXAMINATION OF THE WORK OF HERBERT QUAIN



Herbert Quain has just died at Roscommon. I was not astonished to find that
the Times Literary Supplement allots him scarcely half a column of necrologic-
al piety, and that not a single laudatory epithet but is corrected (or seri-
ously qualified) by an adverb. The Spectator, in its pertinent issue, is un-
questionably less laconic and perhaps even more cordial, but it compares Quain's
first book, The God of the Labyrinth, with a work by Mrs. Agatha Christie,
and others with books by Gertrude Stein: evocations which no one would con-
sider inevitable and which would not have gratified the deceased. Quain, for
that matter, was not a man who ever considered himself a genius; not even
on those extravagant nights of literary conversation on which a man who has
already worn out the printing presses inevitably plays at being Monsieur
Teste or Doctor Sam Johnson. . . . He was very clear-headed about the exper-
imental nature of his books: he thought them admirable, perhaps, for their
novelty and for a certain laconic probity, but not for their passion.

"I am like Cowley's Odes," he wrote me from Longford on March 6, 1939. "I do
not belong to Art, but merely to the history of art." In his mind, there was
no discipline inferior to history.

I have transcribed one of Herbert Quain's modest statements. Naturally, this
bit of modesty is not exhaustive of his thought. Flaubert and Henry James have
accustomed us to suppose that works of art are infrequent and laboriously com-
posed. The sixteenth century (we need only recall Cervantes' Viaje al Parnaso,
or Shakespeare's destiny) did not share this disconsolate opinion. Neither did
Herbert Quain.

He thought that good literature was common enough, that there is scarce a dia-
logue in the street which does not achieve it. He also thought that the aesthe-
tic act can not be carried out without some element of astonishment, and that
to be astonished by rote is difficult. With smiling earnestness he deplored
"the servile and obstinate conservation" of books from the past. . . . I do
not know if his vague theory is justifiable. I do know that his books are over-
anxious to astonish.

I deeply lament having lent, irretrievably, the first book he published, to a
female acquaintance. I have already said that it was a detective story. I may
add that The God of the Labyrinth was issued by the publisher in the last days
of November, 1933. During the first days of December of the same year, London
and New York were enthralled by the agreeable and arduous involutions of The
Siamese Twin Mystery. I prefer to attribute the failure of our friend's novel
to this ruinous coincidence. Also (I wish to be entirely sincere) I would men-
tion the deficient execution and the vain and frigid pomp of certain descrip-
tions of the sea. At the end of seven years, it is impossible for me to recu-
perate the details of the action. But I will outline its plot, exactly as my
forgetfulness now impoverishes (exactly as it now purifies) it. An indecipher-
able assassination takes place in the initial pages; a leisurely discussion
takes place toward the middle; a solution appears in the end. Once the enigma
is cleared up, there is a long and retrospective paragraph which contains the
following phrase:

"Everyone thought that the encounter of the two chess players was accidental."
This phrase allows one to understand that the solution is erroneous. The un-
quiet reader rereads the pertinent chapters and discovers another solution,
the true one. The reader of this singular book is thus forcibly more discern-
ing than the detective.

Even more heterodox is the "regressive, ramified novel" titled April March,
whose third (and only) part is dated 1936. In judging this novel, no one would
fail, to discover that it is a game; it is only fair to remember that the au-
thor never considered it anything else.

"I lay claim in this novel," I have heard him say, "to the essential features
of all games: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium." Even the title of the book
is a feeble pun: it does not mean the march of April, but literally March--
April. Someone has perceived an echo of Donne's doctrines; Quain's prologue
prefers to evoke the inverse world of Bradley in which death precedes birth,
the scar the wound, and the wound the blow (Appearance and Reality, 1897,
page 215).* The worlds proposed by April March are not regressive; only the
manner of writing their history is so: regressive and ramified, as I have al-
ready said. The work is made up of thirteen chapters. The first reports the
ambiguous dialogue of certain strangers on a railway platform. The second nar-
rates the events on the eve of the first act. The third, also retrograde,
describes the events of another possible eve to the first day; the fourth,
still another. Each one of these three eves (each of which rigorously excludes
the other) is divided into three other eves, each of a very different kind.
The entire work, thus, constitutes nine novels; each novel contains three
long chapters. (The first chapter, naturally, is common to all.) The temper
of one of these novels is symbolic; that of another, psychological; of an-
other, communist; of still another, anti-communist; and so on. Perhaps a di-
agram will help toward comprehending the structure:

xl
Y
x 2
x3
x4
y2
x 5
x6
y3 x 7
x8
x9

Concerning this structure we might well repeat what Schopenhauer declared of
the twelve Kantian categories: everything is sacrificed to a rage for symmetry.
Quite naturally, some of the nine stories are unworthy of Quain. The best
piece is not the one he originally planned, x 4; but rather one of a fantast-
ic nature, x 9. Certain others are deformed by slow-witted and languid jests
or by useless pseudo-exactitudes. Whoever reads the sections in, chronologi-
cal order (for instance: x 3, y 1, z) will lose the peculiar savor of this
strange book. Two narratives--x 7, x 8--lack individual worth; mere juxtapo-
sition lends them effectiveness. . . .

I do not know if I should mention that once April March was published, Quain
regretted the ternary order and predicted that whoever would imitate him
would choose a binary arrangement:




And that demiurges and gods would choose an infinite scheme: infinite stories,
infinitely divided.

Highly diverse, but also retrospective, is the heroic comedy in two acts, The
Secret Mirror. In the works already reviewed, the formal complexity had hin-
dered the author's imagination; in this book, his evolution is freer. The first
act (the most extensive) takes place at the country estate belonging to General
Thrale, C.I.E., near Melton Mowbray. The invisible center of the plot is Miss
Ulrica Thrale, eldest daughter of the general. She is depicted for us, through
certain lines of dialogue, as an arrogant horsewoman; we suspect that she does
not cultivate literature; the newspapers announce her engagement to the Duke
of Rutland; the same newspapers deny the engagement. She is revered by a play-
wright, Wilfred Quarles; she has favored him, once or twice, with a distracted
kiss. The characters possess vast fortunes and ancient blood; their emotions
are noble, though vehement; the dialogue seems to vacilate between the mere
verbosity of Bulwer-Lytton and the epigrams of Wilde or Mr. Philip Guedalla.
There are a nightingale and a night; there is also a secret duel on a terrace.
(Almost totally imperceptible, some curious contradiction exists, as do cer-
tain sordid details.) The characters of the first act appear in the second--
bearing other names. The "dramatic author" Wilfred Quarles is a commission
agent in Liverpool; his real name is John William Quigley. Miss Thrale really
does exist; Quigley has never seen her, but he morbidly collects photographs
of her from The Tatter or The Sketch. Quigley is author of the first act.
The unlikely or improbable "country estate" is the Irish-Jewish boarding house,
transfigured and magnified by him, in which he lives. . . .

The texture of the acts is parallel, but in the second everything becomes
slightly horrible, everything is postponed or frustrated. When The Secret
Mirror opened', the critics pronounced the names of Freud and Julian Green.
The mention of the first strikes me as totally unjustified.

Rumor had it that The Secret Mirror was a Freudian comedy; this propitious
(and fallacious) interpretation determined its success. Unfortunately, Quain
had already reached the age of forty; he was totally used to failure and he
did not easily resign himself to a change of regime. He resolved to avenge
himself. Toward the end of 1939 he issued Statements: perhaps the most orig-
inal of his works, doubtless the least praised and most secret. Quin was in
the habit of arguing that readers were an already extinct species.

"Every European," he reasoned, "is a writer, potentially or in fact." He
also affirmed that of the various pleasures offered by literature, the great-
est is invention. Since not everyone is capable of this pleasure, many must
content themselves with shams. For these "imperfect writers," whose name is
legion, Quain wrote the eight stories in Statements. Each of them prefigures
or promises a good plot, deliberately frustrated by the author. One of them
--not the best--insinuates two arguments. The reader, led astray by vanity,
thinks he has invented them. I was ingenuous enough to extract from the third,
"The Rose of Yesterday," my story of "The Circular Ruins."

1941


-- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN




THE LIBRARY OF BABEL



By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters .

--The Anatomy of Melancholy,
Part 2, Sect. II, Mem. IV.


The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite,
perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation
shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. From any hexagon the
upper or lower stories are visible, interminably. The distribution of the
galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves--five long shelves per side--cover
all sides except two; their height, which is that of each floor, scarcely
exceeds that of an average librarian. One of the free sides gives upon a
narrow entrance way, which leads to another gallery, identical to the first
and to all the others. To the left and to the right of the entrance way are
two miniature rooms. One allows standing room for sleeping; the other, the
satisfaction of fecal necessities. Through this section passes the spiral
staircase, which plunges down into the abyss and rises up to the heights.
In the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances.
People are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is
not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?) ; I prefer
to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity. . . .

Light comes from some spherical fruits called by the name of lamps. There
are two, running transversally, in each hexagon. The light they emit is in-
sufficient, incessant.

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth. I have journeyed
in search of a book, perhaps of the cata-logue of catalogues; now that my
eyes can scarcely decipher what I write, I am preparing to die a few leagues
from the hexagon in which I was born. Once dead, there will not lack pious
hands to hurl me over the banister; my sepulchre shall be the unfathomable
air: my body will sink lengthily and will corrupt and dissolve in the wind
engendered by the fall, which is infinite. I affirm that the Library is in-
terminable. The idealists argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form
of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They contend that
a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that to
them ecstasy reveals a round chamber containing a great book with a continu-
ous back circling the walls of the room; but their testimony is suspect; their
words, obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice me, for the time
being, to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose consummate
center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible.

Five shelves correspond to each one of the walls of each hexagon; each shelf
contains thirty-two books of a uniform format; each book is made up of four
hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines; each line, of some eighty
black letters. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these let-
ters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that such
a lack of relevance, at one time, seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the
solution (whose disclosure, despite its tragic implications, is perhaps the
capital fact of this history), I want to recall certain axioms.

The first: The Library exists ab aeterno. No reasonable mind can doubt this
truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world. Man,
the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demi-
urges; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic vol-
umes, of indefatigable ladders for the voyager, and of privies for the seated
librarian, can only be the work of a god. In order to perceive the distance
which exists between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare the
rude tremulous symbols which my fallible hand scribbles on the end pages of
a book with the organic letters inside: exact, delicate, intensely black,
inimitably symmetric.

The second: The number of orthographic symbols is twenty-five.* This bit of
evidence permitted the formulation, three hundred years ago, of a general
theory of the Library and the satisfactory resolution of the problem which
no conjecture had yet made clear: the formless and chaotic nature of almost
all books. One of these books, which my father saw in a hexagon of the cir-
cuit number fifteen ninety-four, was composed of the letters MCV perversely
repeated from the first line to the last. Another, very much consulted in
this zone, is a mere labyrinth of letters, but on the next-to-the-last page,
one may read O Time your pyramids. As is well known: for one reasonable line
or one straightforward note there are leagues of insensate cacaphony, of
verbal farragoes and incoherencies. (I know of a wild region whose librarians
repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and
compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's
hands. . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-
five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental
and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion--we shall see--is
not altogether false.)

For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books belonged to
past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first
librarians, made use of a language quite different from the one we speak
today; it is true that some miles to the right the language is dialectical
and that ninety stories up it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is
true; but four hundred and ten pages of unvarying MCVs do not correspond
to any language, however dialectical or rudimentary it might be. Some li-
brarians insinuated that each letter could influence the next, and that
the value of MCV on the third line of page 71 was not the same as that of
the same series in another position on another page; but this vague thesis
did not prosper. Still other men thought in terms of cryptographs; this
conjecture has come to be universally accepted, though not in the sense
in which it was formulated by its inventors.

Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (* Formerly, for
each three hexagons there was one man. Suicide and pulmonary diseases
have destroyed this proportion. My memory recalls scenes of unspeaka-
ble melancholy: there have been many nights when I have ventured down
corridors and polished staircases without encountering a single li-
brarian.) came upon a book as confusing as all the rest but which con-
tained nearly two pages of homogenous lines. He showed his find to an
ambulant decipherer, who told him the lines were written in Portuguese.
Others told him they were in Yiddish. In less than a century the nature
of the language was finally established: it was a Samoyed-Lithuanian
dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabic inflections. The contents
were also deciphered: notions of combinational analysis, illustrated
by examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples
made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental
law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, however
diverse, are made up of uniform elements: the period, the comma, the
space, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also adduced a cir-
cumstance confirmed by all travelers: There are not, in the whole vast
Library, two identical books. From all these incontrovertible premises
he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves contain all
the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols
(whose number, though vast, is not infinite) ; that is, everything
which can be expressed, in all languages. Everything is there: the
minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels,
the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of
false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues,
a demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic
gospel of Basilides, the commentary on this gospel, the commentary
on the commentary of this gospel, the veridical account of your
death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolations
of every book in all books.

When it was proclaimed that the Library comprised all books, the first
impression was one of extravagant joy. All men felt themselves lords
of a secret, intact treasure. There was no personal or universal prob-
lem whose eloquent solution did not exist--in some hexagon. The uni-
verse was justified, the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless
dimensions of hope. At that time there was much talk of the Vindica-
tions: books of apology and prophecy, which vindicated for all time
the actions of every man in the world and established a store of pro-
digious arcana for the future. Thousands of covetous persons aban-
doned their dear natal hexagons and crowded up the stairs, urged on
by the vain aim of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disput-
ed in the narrow corridors, hurled dark maledictions, strangled each
other on the divine stairways, flung the deceitful books to the bot-
tom of the tunnels, and died as they were thrown into space by men
from remote regions. Some went mad...

The Vindications do exist. I have myself seen two of these books,
which were concerned with future people, people who were perhaps not
imaginary. But the searchers did not remember that the calculable
possibility of a man's finding his own book, or some perfidious var-
iation of his own book, is close to zero.

The clarification of the basic mysteries of humanity--the origin of the
Library and of time--was also expected. It is credible that those grave
mysteries can be explained in words: if the language of the philoso-
phers does not suffice, the multiform Library will have produced the
unexpected language required and the necessary vocabularies and gram-
mars for this language.

It is now four centuries since men have been wearying the hexagons. . . .

There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have observed them carry-
ing out their functions: they are always exhausted. They speak of
a staircase without steps where they were almost killed. They speak
of galleries and stairs with the local librarian. From time to time
they will pick up the nearest book and leaf through its pages, in
search of in-famous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover any-
thing.

The uncommon hope was followed, naturally enough, by deep depression.
The certainty that some shelf in some hexagon contained precious books
and that these books were inaccessible seemed almost intolerable. A
blasphemous sect suggested that all searches be given up and that men
everywhere shuffle letters and symbols until they succeeded in compos-
ing, by means of an improbable stroke of luck, the canonical books.
The authorities found themselves obliged to issue severe orders. The
sect disappeared, but in my childhood I still saw old men who would
hide out in the privies for long periods of time, and, with metal disks
in a forbidden dicebox, feebly mimic the divine disorder.

Other men, inversely, thought that the primary task was to eliminate
useless works. They would invade the hexagons, exhibiting credentials
which were not always false, skim through a volume with annoyance, and
then condemn entire bookshelves to .destruction: their ascetic, hygen-
ic fury is responsible for the senseless loss of millions of books.
Their name is execrated; but those who mourn the "treasures" destroyed
by this frenzy, overlook two notorious facts. One: the Library is so
enormous that any reduction undertaken by humans is infinitesimal. Two:
each book is unique, irreplaceable, but (inasmuch as the Library is
total) there are always several hundreds of thousands of imperfect fac-
similes --of works which differ only by one letter or one comma. Contrary
to public opinion, I dare suppose that the consequences of the depreda-
tions committed by the Purifiers have been exaggerated by the horror
which these fanatics provoked. They were spurred by the delirium of
torming the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than ordi-
nary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.

We know, too, of another superstition of that time: the Man of the Book.
In some shelf of some hexagon, men reasoned, there must exist a book
which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest: some lib-
rarian has perused it, and it is analogous to a god. Vestiges of the
worship of that remote functionary still persist in the language of this
zone. Many pilgrimages have sought Him out. For a century they trod the
most diverse routes in vain. How to locate the secret hexagon which har-
bored it? Someone proposed a regressive approach: in order to locate
book A, first consult book B which will indicate the location of A; in
order to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum. . . .

I have squandered and consumed my years in adventures of this type. To
me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there
lies a total book.* I pray the unknown gods that some man--even if only
one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago!--may have exa-
mined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let
them be for others. May heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let
me be outraged and annihilated, but may Thy enormous Library be justi-
fied, for one instant, in one being.

The impious assert that absurdities are the norm in the Library and that
anything reasonable (even humble and pure coherence) is an almost mira-
culous exception. They speak (I know) of "the febrile Library, whose
hazardous volumes run the constant risk of being changed into others
and in which everything is affirmed, denied, and confused as by a div-
inity in delirium." These words, which not only denounce disorder but
exemplify it as well, manifestly demonstrate the bad taste of the speak-
ers and their desperate ignorance. Actually, the Library includes all
verbal structures, all the variations allowed by the twenty-five ortho-
graphic symbols, but it does not permit of one absolute absurdity. It
is pointless to observe that the best book in the numerous hexagons un-
der my administration is entitled Combed Clap of Thunder; or that ano-
ther is called The Plaster Cramp; and still another Axaxaxas Mlo. Such
propositions as are contained in these titles, at first sight incoherent,
doubtless yield a cryptographic or allegorical justification. Since they
are verbal, these justifications already figure, ex hypothesi, in the
Library. I can not combine certain letters, as dhcmrlchtdj, which the
divine Library has not already foreseen in combination, and which in one
of its secret languages does not encompass some terrible meaning. No one
can articulate a syllable which is not full of tenderness and fear, and
which is not, in one of those languages, the powerful name of some god.
To speak is to fall into tautologies. This useless and wordy epistle it-
self already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves in
one of the uncountable hexagons--and so does its refutation. (An n number
of possible languages makes use of the same vocabulary; in some of them,
the symbol library admits of the correct definition ubiquitous and ever-
lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid
or anything else, and the seven words which define it possess another
value. You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?)

Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. But
the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes
phantoms of us all. I know of districts where the youth prostrate them-
selves before books and barbarously kiss the pages, though they do not
know how to make out a single letter. Epidemics, heretical disagreements,
the pilgrimages which inevitably degener-ate into banditry, have decimat-
ed the population. I believe I have mentioned the suicides, more frequent
each year. Perhaps I am deceived by old age and fear, but I suspect that
the human species--the unique human species--is on the road to extinction,
while the Library will last on forever: illuminated, solitary, infinite,
perfectly immovable, filled with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible,
secret.

Infinite I have just written. I have not interpolated this adjective mere-
ly from rhetorical habit. It is not illogical, I say, to think that the
world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited, postulate that in re-
mote places the corridors and stairs and hexagons could inconceivably
cease--a manifest absurdity. Those who imagined it to be limitless forget
that the possible number of books is limited. I dare insinuate the follow-
ing solution to this ancient problem: The Library is limitless and period-
ic. If an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would
find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same
disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself). My sol-
itude rejoices in this elegant hope.*


Mar del Plata 1941


--Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN




THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS

To Victoria Clomp°



In his A History of the World War (page 212), Captain Liddell Hart reports
that a planned offensive by thirteen British divisions, supported by four-
teen hundred artillery pieces, against the German line at Serre-Montauban,
scheduled for July 24, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the
29th. He comments that torrential rain caused this delay--which lacked any
special significance. The following deposition, dictated by, read over,
and then signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former teacher of English at the Tsingtao
Hochschule, casts unsuspected light upon this event. The first two pages
are missing.

* * * * * * * * * *

. . . and I hung up the phone. Immediately I recollected the voice that had
spoken in German. It was that of Captain Richard Madden. Madden, in Viktor
Runeberg's office, meant the end of all our work and--though this seemed a
secondary matter, or should have seemed so to me--of our lives also. His be-
ing there meant that Runeberg had been arrested or murdered.* Before the
sun set on this same day, I ran the same risk. Madden was implacable. Ra-
ther, to be more accurate, he was obliged to be implacable. An Irishman
in the service of England, a man suspected of equivocal feelings if not
of actual treachery, how could he fail to welcome and seize upon this ex-
traordinary piece of luck: the discovery, capture and perhaps the deaths
of two agents of Imperial Germany?

I went up to my bedroom. Absurd though the gesture was, I closed and locked
the door. I threw myself down on my narrow iron bed, and waited on my back.
The never changing rooftops filled the window, and the hazy six o'clock
sun hung in the sky. It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warn-
ings or omens, might be that of my implacable death. In despite of my dead
father, in despite of having been a child in one of the symmetrical gardens
of Hai Feng, was I to die now?

Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Cen-
tury follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are count-
less men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens
to me. . . . The almost unbearable memory of Madden's long horseface put an
end to these wandering thoughts.

In the midst of my hatred and terror (now that it no longer matters to me to
speak of terror, now that I have outwitted Richard Madden, now that my neck
hankers for the hangman's noose), I knew that the fast-moving and doubtless
happy soldier did not suspect that I possessed the Secret--the name of the
exact site of the new British artillery park on the Ancre. A bird streaked
across the misty sky and, absently, I turned it into an airplane and then
that airplane into many in the skies of France, shattering the artillery park
under a rain of bombs. If only my mouth, before it should be silenced by a
bullet, could shout this name in such a way that it could be heard in Germany
. . . . My voice, my human voice, was weak. How could it reach the ear of the
Chief? The ear of that sick and hateful man who knew nothing of Runeberg or
of me except that we were in Staffordshire. A man who, sitting in his arid
Berlin office, leafed infinitely. through newspapers, looking in vain for
news from us. I said aloud, "I must flee."

I sat up on the bed, in senseless and perfect silence, as if Madden was al-
ready peering at me. Something--perhaps merely a desire to prove my total
penury to myself--made me empty out my pockets. I found just what I knew I
was going to find. The American watch, the nickel-plated chain and the square
coin, the key ring with the useless but compromising keys to Runeberg's of-
fice, the notebook, a letter which I decided to destroy at once (and which
I did not destroy), a five shilling piece, two single shillings and some
pennies, a red and blue pencil, a handkerchief--and a revolver with a single
bullet. Absurdly I held it and weighed it in my hand, to give myself courage.
Vaguely I thought that a pistol shot can be heard for a great distance.

In ten minutes I had developed my plan. The telephone directory gave me the
name of the one person capable of passing on the information. He lived in a
suburb of Fenton, less than half an hour away by train.

I am a timorous man. I can say it now, now that I have brought my incredibly
risky plan to an end. It was not easy to bring about, and I know that its ex-
ecution was terrible. I did not do it for Germany--no! Such a barbarous country
is of no importance to me, particularly since it had degraded me by making me
become a spy. Furthermore, I knew an Englishman--a modest man--who, for me,
is as great as Goethe. I did not speak with him for more than an hour, but during
that time, he was Goethe.

I carried out my plan because I felt the Chief had some fear of those of my
race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished
to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. Besides, I had to es-
cape the Captain. His hands and voice could, at any moment, knock and beckon
at my door.

Silently, I dressed, took leave of myself in the mirror, went down the stairs,
sneaked a look at the quiet street, and went out. The station was not far from
my house, but I thought it more prudent to take a cab. I told myself that I
thus ran less chance of being recognized. The truth is that, in the deserted
street, I felt infinitely visible and vulnerable. I recall that I told the dri-
ver to stop short of the main entrance. I got out with a painful and deliberate
slowness.

I was going to the village of Ashgrove, but took a ticket for a station further
on. The train would leave in a few minutes, at eight-fifty. I hurried, for the
next would not go until half past nine. There was almost no one on the plat-
form. I walked through the carriages. I remember some farmers, a woman dressed
in mourning, a youth deep in Tacitus' Annals and a wounded, happy soldier.

At last the train pulled out. A man I recognized ran furiously, but vainly,
the length of the platform. It was Captain Richard Madden. Shattered, trembl-
ing, I huddled in the distant corner of the seat, as far as possible from the
fearful window.

From utter terror I passed into a state of almost abject happiness. I told my-
self that the duel had already started and that I had won the first encounter
by besting my adversary in his first attack--even if it was only for forty min-
utes--by an accident of fate. I argued that so small a victory prefigured a to-
tal victory. I argued that it was not so trivial, that were it not for the pre-
cious accident of the train schedule, I would be in prison or dead. I argued,
with no less sophism, that my timorous happiness was proof that I was man e-
nough to bring this adventure to a successful conclusion. From my weakness I
drew strength that never left me.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, that soon
only soldiers and bandits will be left. To them I offer this advice: Whosoever
would under-take some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already
accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

Thus I proceeded, while with the eyes of a man already dead, I contemplated the
fluctuations of the day which would probably be my last, and watched the diffuse
coming of night.

The train crept along gently, amid ash trees. It slowed down and stopped, al-
most in the middle of a field. No one called the name of a station. "Ashgrove?"
I asked some children on the platform. "Ashgrove," they replied. I got out.

A lamp lit the platform, but the children's faces remained in a shadow. One
of them asked me: "Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house?" Without wait-
ing for my answer, another said: "The house is a good distance away but you
won't get lost if you take the road to the left and bear to the left at every
crossroad." I threw them a coin (my last), went down some stone steps and
started along a deserted road. At a slight incline, the road ran downhill. It
was a plain dirt way, and overhead the branches of trees intermingled, while
a round moon hung low in the sky as if to keep me company.

For a moment I thought that Richard Madden might in some way have divined my
desperate intent. At once I realized that this would be impossible. The advice
about turning always to the left reminded me that such was the common formula
for finding the central courtyard of certain labyrinths. I know something a-
bout labyrinths. Not for nothing am I the great-grandson of Ts'ui Pen. He was
Governor of Yunnan and gave up temporal power to write a novel with more char-
acters than there are in the Hung Lou Meng, and to create a maze in which all
men would lose themselves. He spent thirteen years on these oddly assorted
tasks before he was assassinated by a stranger. His novel had no sense to it
and nobody ever found his labyrinth.

Under the trees of England I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical laby-
rinth. I imagined it untouched and perfect on the secret summit of some moun-
tain; I imagined it drowned under rice paddies or beneath the sea; I imagined
it infinite, made not only of eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths but
also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms. . . . I thought of a maze of mazes,
of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and
would somehow involve the stars.

Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny--that of the hunted. For
an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an ab-
stract spectator. The hazy and murmuring countryside, the moon, the decline
of the evening, stirred within me. Going down the gently sloping road I could
not feel fatigue. The evening was at once intimate and infinite.

The road kept descending and branching off, through meadows misty in the twi-
light. A high-pitched and almost syllabic music kept coming and going, moving
with the breeze, blurred by the leaves and by distance.

I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments
of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gar-
dens, streams, or the West wind.

Meditating thus I arrived at a high, rusty iron gate. Through the railings I
could see an avenue bordered with poplar trees and also a kind of summer house
or pavilion. Two things dawned on me at once, the first trivial and the second
almost incredible: the music came from the pavilion and that music was Chinese.
That was why I had accepted it fully, without paying it any attention. I do
not remember whether there was a bell, a push-button, or whether I attracted
attention by clapping my hands. The stuttering sparks of the music kept on.

But from the end of the avenue, from the main house, a lantern approached;
a lantern which alternately, from moment to moment, was crisscrossed or put
out by the trunks of the trees; a paper lantern shaped like a drum and color-
ed like the moon. A tall man carried it. I could not see his face for the
light blinded me.

He opened the gate and spoke slowly in my language.

"I see that the worthy Hsi P'eng has troubled himself to see to relieving my
solitude. No doubt you want to see the garden?"

Recognizing the name of one of our consuls, I replied, somewhat taken aback.

"The garden?"

"The garden of forking paths."

Something stirred in my memory and I said, with incomprehensible assurance:

"The garden of my ancestor, Ts'ui Pen."

"Your ancestor? Your illustrious ancestor? Come in."

The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. When we reached the house,
we went into a library filled with books from both East and West. I recognized
some large volumes bound in yellow silk--manuscripts of the Lost Encyclopedia
which was edited by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty. They had never
been printed. A phonograph record was spinning near a bronze phoenix. I rememb-
er also a rose-glazed jar and yet another, older by many centuries, of that
blue color which our potters copied from the Persians. . . .

Stephen Albert was watching me with a smile on his face. He was, as I have
said, remarkably tall. His face was deeply lined and he had gray eyes and a
gray beard. There was about him something of the priest, and something of the
sailor. Later, he told me he had been a missionary in Tientsin before he "had
aspired to become a Sinologist."

We sat down, I upon a large, low divan, he with his back to the window and to
a large circular clock. I calculated that my pursuer, Richard Madden, could not
arrive in less than an hour. My irrevocable decision could wait.

"A strange destiny," said Stephen Albert, "that of Ts'ui Pen--Governor of
his native province, learned in astronomy, in astrology and tireless in the
interpretation of the canonical books, a chess player, a famous poet and
a calligrapher. Yet he abandoned all to make a book and a labyrinth. He
gave up all the pleasures of oppression, justice, of a well-stocked bed, of
banquets, and even of erudition, and shut himself up in the Pavilion of the
Limpid Sun for thirteen years. At his death, his heirs found only a mess of
manuscripts. The family, as you doubtless know, wished to consign them to the
fire, but the executor of the estate--a Taoist or a Buddhist monk--insisted on
their publication."

"Those of the blood of Ts'ui. Pen," I replied, "still curse the memory of that
monk. Such a publication was madness. The book is a shapeless mass of contra-
dictory rough drafts. I examined it once upon a time: the hero dies in the
third chapter, while in the fourth he is alive. As for that other enterprise
of Ts'ui Pen . . . his Labyrinth. . . ."

"Here is the Labyrinth," Albert said, pointing to a tall, laquered writing cab-
inet.

"An ivory labyrinth?" I exclaimed. "A tiny labyrinth indeed . . . !"

"A symbolic labyrinth," he corrected me. "An invisible labyrinth of time. I,
a barbarous Englishman, have been given the key to this transparent mystery.
After more than a hundred years most of the details are irrecoverable, lost be-
yond all recall, but it isn't hard to image what must have happened. At one
time, Tsui Pen must have said; 'I am going into seclusion to write a book,' and
at another, 'I am retiring to construct a maze.' Everyone assumed these were sep-
arate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and
the same. The Pavilion of the Limpid Sun was set in the middle of an intricate
garden. This may have suggested the idea of a physical maze.

"Ts'ui Pen died. In all the vast lands which once belonged to your family, no
one could find the labyrinth. The novel's confusion suggested that it was the
labyrinth.

Two circumstances showed me the direct solution to the problem. First, the cur-
ious legend that Tsui Pen had proposed to create an infinite maze, second, a
fragment of a letter which I discovered."

Albert rose. For a few moments he turned his back to me. He opened the top
drawer in the high black and gilded writing cabinet. He returned holding in his
hand a piece of paper which had once been crimson but which bad faded with the
passage of time: it was rose colored, tenuous, quadrangular. Ts'ui Pen's call-
igraphy was justly famous. Eagerly, but without understanding, I read the words
which a man of my own blood had written with a small brush: "I leave to various
future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths."

I handed back the sheet of paper in silence. Albert went on:

"Before I discovered this letter, I kept asking myself how a book could be in-
finite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume
whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of
continuing indefinitely. I recalled, too, the night in the middle of The Thou-
sand and One Nights when Queen Scheherezade, through a magical mistake on the
part of her copyist, started to tell the story of The Thousand and One Nights,
with the risk of again arriving at the night upon which she will relate it, and
thus on to infinity. I also imagined a Platonic hereditary work, passed on from
father to son, to which each individual would add a new chapter or correct, with
pious care, the work of his elders.

"These conjectures gave me amusement, but none seemed to have the remotest
application to the contradictory chapters of Ts'ui Pon. At this point, I was sent
from Oxford the manuscript you have just seen.

"Naturally, my attention was caught by the sentence, "I leave to various future
times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.' I had no sooner read this,
than I understood. The Garden of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel itself.
The phrase 'to various future times, but not to all' suggested the image of bi-
furcating in time, not in space. Rereading the whole work confirmed this theory.
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives be chooses one at the ex-
pense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses--sim-
ultaneously--all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which
start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This
is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

"Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up
his mind to kill him. Naturally there are various possible outcomes. Fang can
kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die
and so on and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all the possible solutions occur,
each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations. Sometimes the path-
ways of this labyrinth converge. For example, you come to this house; but in o-
ther possible pasts you are my enemy; in others my friend.

"If you will put up with my atrocious pronunciation, I would like to read you
a few pages of your ancestor's work."

His countenance, in the bright circle of lamplight, was certainly that of an
ancient, but it shone with something unyielding, even immortal.

With slow precision, he read two versions of the same epic chapter. In the
first, an army marches into battle over a desolate mountain pass. The bleak
and somber aspect of the rocky landscape made the soldiers feel that life it-
self was of little value, and so they won the battle easily. In the second,
the same army passes through a palace where a banquet is in progress. The
splendor of the feast remained a memory throughout the glorious battle, and
so victory followed.

With proper veneration I listened to these old tales, although perhaps with
less admiration for them in themselves than for the fact that they had been
thought out by one of my own blood,•and that a man of a distant empire had giv-
en them back to me, in the last stage of a desperate adventure, on a Western
island. I remember the final words, repeated at the end of each version like
a secret command: "Thus the heroes fought, with tranquil heart and bloody
sword. They were resigned to killing and to dying."

At that moment I felt within me and around me something invisible and intan-
gible pullulating. It was not the pullulation of two divergent, parallel, and
finally converging armies, but an agitation more inaccessible, more intimate,
prefigured by them in some way. Stephen Albert continued:

"I do not think that your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with variations. I
do not find it believable that he would waste thirteen years laboring over a
never ending experiment in rhetoric. In your country the novel is an inferior
genre; in Ts'ui Pen's period, it was a despised one. Ts'ui Pen was a fine nov-
elist but he was also a man of letters who, doubtless, considered himself more
than a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries attests to this, and
certainly the known facts of his life confirm his leanings toward the metaphy-
sical and the mystical. Philosophical conjectures take up the greater part of
his novel. I know that of all problems, none disquieted him more, and none con-
cerned him more than the profound one of time. Now then, this is the only prob-
lem that does not figure in the pages of The Garden. He does not even use the
word which means time. How can these voluntary omissions be explained?"

I proposed various solutions, all of them inadequate. We discussed them. Final-
ly Stephen Albert said: "In a guessing game to which the answer is chess,
which word is the only one prohibited?" I thought for a moment and then re-
plied:

"The word is chess."

"Precisely," said Albert. "The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous guessing
game, or parable, in which the subject is time. The rules of the game forbid
the use of the word itself. To eliminate a word completely, to refer to it by
means of inept phrases and obvious paraphrases, is perhaps the best way of
drawing attention to it. This, then, is the tortuous method of approach prefer-
red by the oblique Ts'ui Pén in every meandering of his interminable novel. I
have gone over hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected errors introduced by
careless copyists, I have worked out the plan from this chaos, I have restored,
or believe I have restored, the original. I have translated the whole work. I
can state categorically that not once has the word time been used in the whole
book.

"The explanation is obvious. The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incom-
plete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts'ui Pén conceived it to be. Dif-
fering from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as
absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzi-
ly growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
This web of time--the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, inter-
sect or ignore each other through the centuries--embraces every possibility.
We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others
I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which
chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, cross-
ing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same
words, but am an error, a phantom."

"ln all of them," I enunciated, with a tremor in my voice. "l deeply appreci-
ate and am grateful to you for the restoration of Ts'ui Pén's garden."

"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time is forever dividing itself to-
ward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy."

Once again I sensed the pullulation of which I have already spoken. It seemed
to me that the dew-damp garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated
with in- visible people. All were Albert and myself, secretive, busy and mul-
tiform in other dimensions of time. I lifted my eyes and the short nightmare
disappeared. In the black and yellow garden there was only a single man, but
this man was as strong as a statue and this man was walking up the path and
he was Captain Richard Madden.

"The future exists now," I replied. "But I am your friend. Can I take another
look at the letter?"

Albert rose from his seat. He stood up tall as he opened the top drawer of
the high writing cabinet. For a moment his back was again turned to me. I
had the revolver ready. I fired with the utmost care: Albert fell without a
murmur, at once. I swear that his death was instantaneous, as if he had been
struck by lightning.

What remains is unreal and unimportant. Madden broke in and arrested me. I
have been condemned to hang. Abominably, I have yet triumphedl The secret
name of the city to be attacked got through to Berlin. Yesterday it was
bombed. I read the news in the same English newspapers which were trying to
solve the riddle of the murder of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert by
the unknown Yu Tsun. The Chief, however, had already solved this mystery.
He knew that my problem was to shout, with my feeble voice, above the tum-
ult of war, the name of the city called Albert, and that I had no other
course open to me than to kill someone of that name. He does not know, for
no one can, of my infinite penitence and sickness of the heart.

--Translated by HELEN TEMPLE and RUTHVEN TODD

PROLOGUE



Though less torpidly executed, the pieces in this section are similar to
those which form the first part of the book. Two of them allow, perhaps,
separate mention: "Death and the Compass" and "Funes, the Memorious." The
second is a long metaphor of insomnia. The first, despite the German or
Scandinavian names, occurs in a Buenos Aires of dreams: the twisted Rue de
Toulon is the Paseo de Julio; Triste-leRoy, is the hotel where Herbert Ashe
received, and probably did not read, the eleventh volume of an illusory en-
cyclopedia. After composing this narrative, I have come to consider the
soundness of amplifying the time and space in which it occurs: vengeance
could be inherited; the periods of time might be computed in years, perhaps
in centuries; the first letter of the Name might be spoken in Iceland; the
second, in Mexico; the third, in Hindustan. Should I add that the Hasidim
included saints and that the sacrifice of four lives in order to obtain the
four letters imposed by the Name is a fantasy dictated by the form of my
story?

Postscript. 1956. I have added three stories to the series: "The South,"
"The Sect of the Phoenix," "The End." Apart from one character--Recabarren--
whose immobility and passivity serve as a contrasting background, nothing
or almost nothing in the brief course of the last-named is an invention of
mine; everything in it is implicit in a famous book, and I have merely been
the first to reveal, or at least to declare it. In the allegory of the Phoe-
nix I imposed upon myself the problem of hinting at an ordinary fact--the
Secret--in a irresolute and gradual manner, which, in the end, would prove
to be unequivocal; I do not know how fortunate I have been. Of "The South,"
which is perhaps my best story, let it suffice for me to suggest that it can
be read as a direct narrative of novelistic events, and also in another way.

The heterogenous census of the authors whom I continually reread is made up
of Schopenhauer, De Quincey, Stevenson, Mauthner, Shaw, Chesterton, Leon
Bloy. I believe I perceive the remote influence of the last-mentioned in
the Christ°logical fantasy entitled "Three Versions of Judas."


Buenos Aires August 29, 1944




THE FORM OF THE SWORD


To E. H. M.


His face was crossed with a rancorous scar: a nearly perfect ashen arc which
sank into his temple on one side and his cheek on the other. His real name is
of no importance: in Tacuarembn everyone knew him as the Englishman of La Co-
lorada. The great landowner of these parts, Cardoso, had not been interested
in selling; I have heard that the Englishman had recourse to an unexpected ar-
gument: he told him the secret history of the scar. The Englishman had come
from the frontier, from Rio Grande del Sur; there were those who said he had
been a smuggler in Brazil. His fields were overgrown with underbrush; the
wells were bitter; to remedy these faults, the Englishman worked alongside
his peones. They say he was strict to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously
fair. They also say he was a drinking man: a couple of times a year he would
lock himself up in a room in the tower, and two or three days later he would
emerge as if from a bout of insanity or from the battlefield, pale, tremulous,
abashed--and as authoritarian as ever. I remember his glacial eyes, his ener-
getic thinness, his gray mustache. He had scant dealings with anyone; true,
his Spanish was rudimentary, contaminated with Brazilian. Apart from an oc-
casional commercial letter or pamphlet, he received no correspondence.

The last time I made a trip through the Northern prov-inces a flash flood in
the Caraguati arroyo forced me to spend the night at La Colorada. I was only
there a few minutes when I felt that my presence was inopportune. I tried
getting into the good graces of the Englishman; I resorted to the least acute
of all the passions: patriotism.

I said that a country with the spirit of England was invincible. My inter-
locutor agreed, but he added with a smile that he was not English. He was
Irish, from Dungarvan. Having said this, he stopped himself, as if he had
revealed a secret.

After supper we went out to look at the sky. It had cleared, but behind the
ridge of the mountains, the south, fissured and shot through with lightning
flashes, was brewing up another storm. Back in the deserted dining room,
the waiter who had served us supper brought out a bottle of rum. We drank
steadily, in silence.

I do not know what hour of the night it might have been when I realized
that I was drunk; I do not know what inspiration or exultation or tedium
made me mention the scar. The Englishman's face changed color. For a few
seconds I thought he was going to ask me to leave. Finally he said,
in a normal voice:

"I'll tell you the story of my wound on one condition: that you do not
minimize the opprobrium it calls forth, that you not belittle a single
infamous circumstance."

I agreed. And this, then, is the story he recounted, in a mixture of Eng-
lish, Spanish, and Portuguese:


About 1922, in a city in Connaught, I was one of many men conspiring for
Irish independence. Of my comrades, some survived to engage in peaceful
pursuits; others, paradoxically, fight in the desert and at sea under
the English colors; another, the man of greatest worth, died in the court-
yard of a barracks, at dawn, before a firing squad of soldiers drowsy
with sleep; still others (not the most unfortunate ones), met their fate
in the anonymous and nearly secret battles of the civil war. We were Re-
publicans, Catholics; we were, I suspect, romantics. For us Ireland was
not only the utopian future and the intolerable present; it was a bitter
and loving mythology, it was the circular towers and the red bogs, it
was the repudiation of Parnell and the enormous epics which sing of the
theft of bulls who in a former incarnation were heros and in others were
fish and mountains. . . . On one evening I shall never forget, we were
joined by a comrade from Munster: a certain John Vincent Moon.

He was scarcely twenty years old. He was thin and soft at the same time.
He gave one the uncomfortable impression of being invertebrate. He had
studied, with fervor and vanity, every page of some communist manual or
other; dialectic materialism served him as a means to end any and all
discussion. The reasons that one man may have to abominate another, or
love him, are infinite: Moon reduced universal history to a sordid ec-
onomic conflict. He asserted that the revolution is predestined to tri-
umph. I told him that only lost causes can interest a gentleman. . . .
By then it was nighttime. We continued our disagreements along the cor-
ridor, down the stairs, into the vague streets. The judgments emitted
by Moon impressed me less than their unattractive and apodictic tone.
The new comrade did not argue: he passed judgment with obvious disdain
and a certain fury.

As we came to the outlying houses, a sudden exchange of gunfire caught
us by surprise. (Just before or after, we skirted the blank wall of a
factory or barracks.) We took refuge along a dirt road; a soldier,
looming gigantic in the glare, rushed out of a burning cabin. He shriek-
ed at us and ordered us to halt. I pressed on; my comrade did not fol-
low me. I turned back: John Vincent Moon was frozen in his tracks, fas-
cinated and eternalized, as it were, by terror. I rushed to his side,
brought down the soldier with a single blow, shook and pounded Vincent
Moon, berated him, and ordered him to follow me. I was forced to yank
him by his arm; a passionate fear paralyzed him. We fled through a
night suddenly shot through with blazes. A burst of rifle fire sought
us out; a bullet grazed Moon's right shoulder; while we ran among the
pines, he broke into feeble sobbing.

During that autumn of 1922 I had taken refuge in a country house belong-
ing to General Berkeley. This officer (whom I had never seen) was car-
rying out some administrative assignment in Bengal. His house, though
it was less than a hundred years old, was dark and deteriorated and a-
bounded in perplexing corridors and vain antechambers. A museum and an
enormous library usurped the ground floor: controversial and incompati-
ble books which, somehow, make up the history of the nineteenth century;
scimitars from Nishapur, in whose arrested circular arcs the wind and
violence of battle seemed to last. We entered (I seem to remember)
through the back part of the house. Moon, his lips dry and quivering,
muttered that the events of the evening had been very interesting. I
dressed his wound, and brought him a cup of tea. (His "wound," I saw,
was superficial.) Suddenly he stammered perplexedly:

"But you took a considerable chance."

I told him not to worry. (The routine of the civil war had impelled me
to act as I had acted. Besides, the capture of a single one of our men
could have compromised our cause.)

The following day Moon bad recovered his aplomb. He accepted a cigarette,
and severely cross-questioned me concerning "the economic resources of
our revolutionary party." His questions were quite lucid. I told him
(in all truth) that the situation was serious. Shattering volleys of
rifle fire reverberated in the south. I told Moon that our comrades ex-
pected us. My trench coat and revolver were in my room; when I returned,
I found Moon stretched on the sofa, his eyes shut. He thought he had
fever; he spoke of a painful shoulder spasm.

I realized then that his cowardice was irreparable. I awkwardly urged
him to take care of himself and took my leave. I blushed for this fear-
ful man, as if I, and not Vincent Moon, were the coward. What one man
does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason
a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for
that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suf-
fices to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer is right: I am all others, any
man is all men, Shakespeare is in some way the wretched John Vincent
Moon.

We spent nine days in the enormous house of the General. Of the
agony and splendor of the battle I shall say nothing: my intention is to
tell the story of this scar which affronts me. In my memory, those
nine days form a single day; except for the next to the last, when
our men rushed a barracks and we were able to avenge, man for man, the
sixteen comrades who had been machine-gunned at Elphin. I would slip
out of the house toward dawn, in the confusion of the morning twilight.
I was back by dusk. My companion would be waiting for me upstairs:
his wound did not allow him to come down to meet me. I can see him
with some book of strategy in his hand: F. N. Maude or Clausewitz.
"The artillery is my preferred arm," he conceded one night. He would
inquire into our plans; he liked to censure or revamp them. He was al-
so in the habit of denouncing our "deplorable economic base." Dogmatic
and somber, he would prophesy a ruinous end. C'est une affaire flambee,
he would murmur. In order to show that his being a physical coward made
no difference to him, he increased his intellectual arrogance. Thus,
for better or for worse, passed nine days.

On the tenth, the city definitively fell into the hands of the Black
and Tans. Tall silent horsemen patrolled the streets. The wind was fill-
ed with ashes and smoke. At an intersection in the middle of a square,
I saw a corpse--less tenacious in my memory than a manikin--upon which
some soldiers interminably practiced their marksmanship. . . . I had
left my quarters as the sunrise hung in the sky. I re-turned before mid-
day. In the library, Moon was talking to someone; by his tone of voice
I realized that he was using the telephone. Then I heard my name; then
that I would return at seven; then the suggestion that I be arrested as
I crossed the garden. My reasonable friend was selling me reasonably. I
heard him requesting certain guarantees of personal security.

At this point my story becomes confused, its thread is lost. I know I
pursued the informer down the dark corridors of nightmare and the deep
stairs of vertigo. Moon had come to know the house very well, much bet-
ter than I. Once or twice I lost him. I cornered him before the soldi-
ers arrested me. From one of the general's mounted sets of arms I
snatched down a cutlass; with the steel half-moon I sealed his face,
forever, with a half-moon of blood. Borges, I have confessed this to
you, a stranger. Your contempt will not wound me as much.


Here the narrator stopped. I noticed that his hands were trembling.

"And Moon?" I asked him.

"He was paid the Judas-money, and fled to Brazil. And that afternoon,
he watched some drunks in an impromptu firing squad in the town square
shoot down a manikin."

I waited in vain, for him to go on with his story. At length I asked
him to continue.

A sob shook his body. And then, with feeble sweetness, he pointed to
the white arced scar.

"You don't believe me?" he stammered. "Don't you see the mark of in-
famy written on my face? I told you the story the way I did so that
you would hear it to the end. I informed on the man who took me in:
I am Vincent Moon. Despise me."


1942


–Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

THEME OF THE TRAITOR AND HERO


So the Platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

-- W. B. Yeats, The Tower


Under the influence of the flagrant Chesterton (contriver and embel-
lisher of elegant mysteries) and of the court counsellor Leibnitz
(who invented pre-established harmony),I have imagined the following
argument, which I shall doubt- less develop (and which already justi-
fies me in some way), on profitless afternoons. Details, revisions,
adjustments arelacking; there are areas of this history which are not
yetrevealed to me; today, the third of January of 1944, I dimly per-
ceive it thus:

The action transpires in some oppressed and stubborn country: Poland,
Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some state in South America or the
Balkans. . . . Has transpired, we should say, for although the nar-
rator is contemporary, the narrative related by him occurred toward
the middle or beginnings of the nineteenth century. Let us say, for
purposes of narration, that it was in Ireland, in 1824. The narrator
is named Ryan; he is a great-grandson of the young, heroic, handsome,
assassinated Fergus Kilpatrick, whose sepulchre was mysteriously vi-
olated, whose name embellishes the verse of Browning and Hugo, whose
statue presides over a gray hill amidst red moors.

Kilpatrick was a conspirator, a secret and glorious captain of con-
spirators; he was like Moses in that, from the land of Moab, he des-
cried the Promised Land but would not ever set foot there, for he
perished on the eve of the victorious rebellion which he had pre-
meditated and conjured. The date of the first centenary of his death
draws near; the circumstances of the crime are enigmatic; Ryan, en-
gaged in compiling a biography of the hero, discovers that the eni-
gma goes beyond the purely criminal. Kilpatrick was assassinated
in a theater; the English police could find no trace of the killer;
historians declare that the failure of the police does not in any
way impugn their good intentions, for he was no doubt killed by
order of this same police. Other phases of the enigma disquiet Ryan.
These facets are of cyclic character: they seem to repeat or com-
bine phenomena from remote regions, from remote ages. Thus, there
is no one who does not know that the bailiffs who examined the
hero's cadaver discovered a sealed letter which warned him of the
risk of going to the theater on that particular night: Julius Cae-
sar, too, as he walked toward the place where the knives of his
friends awaited him, was handed a message, which he never got to
the point of reading, in which the treason was declared, and the
names of the traitors given. In her dreams, Caesar's wife, Calpur-
nia, saw a tower, which the Senate had dedicated to her husband,
fallen to the ground; false and anonymous rumors throughout the
land were occasioned, on the eve of Kilpatrick's death, by the
burning of the round tower of Kilgarvan--an event which might
have seemed an omen, since Kilpatrick had been born at Kilgarvan.
These parallels (and others) in the history of Caesar and the
history of an Irish conspirator induce Ryan to assume a secret
pattern in time, a drawing in which the lines repeat themselves.
He ponders the decimal history imagined by Condorcet; the morpho-
logies proposed by Hegel, Spengler, and Vico; the characters of
Hesiod, who degenerate from gold to iron. He considers the trans-
migration of souls, a doctrine which horrifies Celtic belles-let-
tres and which the very same Caesar attributed to the Britannic
Druids; he thinks that before the hero was Fergus Kilpatrick, Fer-
gus Kilpatrick was Julius Caesar. From these circular labyrinths
he is saved by a curious species of proof which immediately plung-
es him into other labyrinths even more inextricable and hetero-
geneous: certain words spoken by a mendicant who conversed with
Fergus Kilpatrick on the day of his death were prefigured in the
tragedy of Macbeth. That history should have imitated history
was already sufficiently marvelous; that history should imitate
literature is inconceivable. . .

Ryan discovers that in 1814, James Alexander Nolan, the oldest
of the hero's comrades, had translated into Gaelic the principal
dramas of Shakespeare, among them Julius Caesar. In the archives
he also finds a manuscript article by Nolan on Festspiele of
Switzerland: vast and roving theatrical representations these,
which require thousands of actors and which reiterate historic
episodes in the same cities and mountains where they occurred.
Still another unpublished document reveals that a few days be-
fore the end, Kilpatrick, presiding over his last conclave,
had signed the death sentence of a traitor, whose name has been
blotted out. This sentence scarcely harmonizes with Kilpatrick's
pious attitude. Ryan goes deeper into the matter (the investi-
gation covers one of the hiatuses in the argument) and he suc-
ceeds in solving the enigma.

Kilpatrick was brought to his end in a theater, but he made of
the entire city a theater, too, and the actors were legion.
And the drama which was climaxed by his death embraced many
days and many nights. Here is what happened:

On the second of August of 1824, the conspirators gathered.
The country was ripe for rebellion. But somehow every at-
tempt always failed: there was a traitor in the group. Fer-
gus Kilpatrick ordered James Nolan to uncover this traitor.
Nolan carried out his orders: before the gathering as a whole,
he announced that the traitor was Kilpatrickhimself. He dem-
onstrated the truth of his accusation with irrefutable proofs;
the conspirators condemned their president to death. The lat-
ter signed his own death sentence; but he implored that his
condemnation not be allowed to hurt the fatherland.

Nolan thereupon conceived his strange project. Ireland idol-
ized Kilpatrick; the most tenuous suspicion of his disgrace
would have compromised the rebellion; Nolan proposed a plan
which would make Kilpatrick's execution an instrument for the
liberation of the fatherland. He suggested the condemned man
die at the hands of an unknown assassin, in circumstances
deliberately dramatic, which would engrave themselves upon
the popular imagination and which would speed the revolt.
Kilpatrick swore to collaborate in a project which allowed
him the opportunity to redeem himself and which would add a
flourish to his death.

Pressed for time, Nolan was unable to integrate the circum-
stances he invented for the complex execution; he was forced
to plagiarize another dramatist, the enemy-Englishman Will-
iam Shakespeare. He repeated scenes from Macbeth, and from
Julius Caesar. The public--and the secret--presentation took
several days. The condemned man entered Dublin, discussed,
worked, prayed, reproved, spoke words which seemed (later)
to be pathetic--and each one of these acts, which would even-
tually be glorious, had been foreordained by Nolan. Hundreds
of actors collaborated with the protagonist; the role of some
was stellar, that of others ephemeral. What they said and
did remains in the books of history, in the impassioned mem-
ory of Ireland. Kilpatrick, carried away by the minutely scru-
pulous destiny which redeemed and condemned him, more than
once enriched the text (Nolan's text) with words and deeds of
his own improvisation. And thus did the popular drama unfold
in Time, until, on the sixth of August of 1824, in a theater
box hung with funereal curtains, which foreshadowed Abraham
Lincoln's, the anticipated pistol-shot entered the breast of
the traitor and hero, who could scarcely articulate, between
two effusions of violent blood, some prearranged words.

In Nolan's work, the passages imitated from Shakespeare are
the least dramatic; Ryan suspects that the author interpolat-
ed them so that one person, in the future, might realize the
truth. He understands that he, too, forms part of Nolan's
plan. . . . At the end of some tenacious caviling, he resolves
to keep silent his discovery. He publishes a book dedicated
to the glory of the hero; this, too, no doubt was foreseen.


--Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN




THREE VERSIONS OF JUDAS


There seemed a certainty in degradation.

-- T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom


In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our
faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a
rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective an-
gels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular in-
tellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Dante
would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his
name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, be-
tween Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preach-
ing, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in
the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have
perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the
last example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to
the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund.
There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och
Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Dem hemlige Fralsaren
appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German
version, called Der heimliche Reiland, executed in 1912 by
Emil Schering.)

Before undertaking an examination of the foregoing works, it
is necessary to repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the
National Evangelical Union, was deeply religious. In some
salon in Paris, or even in Buenos Aires, a literary person
might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; but these arguments,
presented in such a setting, would seem like frivolous and
idle exercises in irrelevance or blasphemy. To Runeberg they
were the key with which to decipher a central mystery of
theology; they were a matter of meditation and analysis, of
historic and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation,
and of terror. They justified, and destroyed, his life. Whoever
peruses this essay should know that it states only Runeberg's
conclusions, not his dialectic or his proof. Someone may ob-
serve that no doubt the conclusion preceded the "proofs."
For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of something
he does not believe in or the predication of which he does
not care about?

The first edition of Kristus och Judas bears the following
categorical epigraph, whose meaning, some years later, Nils
Runeberg himself would monstrously dilate: Not one thing, but
everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false. (De
Quincey, 1857.) Preceded in his speculation by some German
thinker, De Quincey opined that Judas bad betrayed Jesus
Christ in order to force him to declare his divinity and thus
set off a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome; Runeberg
offers a metaphysical vindication. Skillfully, he begins by
pointing out how superfluous was the act of Judas. He observes
(as did Robertson) that in order to identify a master who dai-
ly preached in the synagogue and who performed miracles before
gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is not
necessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error
in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is it to ad-
mit that there was a single haphazard act in the most precious
drama in the history of the world. Ergo, the treachery of Judas
was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its
mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg con-
tinues: The Word, when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity
into space, from eternity into history, from blessedness without
limit to mutation and death; in order to correspond to such a
sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representative of all
men, make a suitable sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Ju-
das, alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and
the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to
be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the Word, could lower himself
to the role of informer (the worst transgression dishonor a-
bides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. The
lower order is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the
earth correspond to the forms of the heavens; the stains on the
skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas in
some way reflects Jesus. Thus the thirty pieces of silver and
the kiss; thus deliberate self-destruction, in order to deserve
damnation all the more. In this manner did Nils Runeberg eluci-
date the enigma of Judas.

The theologians of all the confessions refuted him. Lars Peter
Engstrom accused him of ignoring, or of confining to the past,
the hypostatic union of the Divine Trinity; Axel Borelius charg-
ed him with renewing the heresy of the Docetists, who denied the
humanity of Jesus; the sharp-edged bishop of Lund denounced him
for contradicting the third verse of chapter twenty-two of the
Gospel of St. Luke.

These various anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially re-
wrote the disapproved book and modified his doctrine. He abandon-
ed the terrain of theology to his adversaries and postulated ob-
lique arguments of a moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who
could count on the considerable resources which Omnipotence of-
fers," did not need to make use of a man to redeem all men. Later,
he refuted those who affirm that we know nothing of the inexpli-
cable traitor; we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles,
one of those chosen to announce the Kingdom of Heaven, to cure
the sick, to cleanse the leprous, to resurrect the dead, and to
cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8; Luke 9:1). A man whom the Re-
deemer has thus distinguished deserves from us the best interpre-
tations of his deeds. To impute his crime to cupidity (as some
have done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the most
torpid motive force. Nils Runeberg proposes an opposite moving
force: an extravagant and even limitless asceticism. The ascetic,
for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh;
Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good,
peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, ren-
ounced pleasure.* With a terrible lucidity he premeditated his
offense.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in
murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic
splendor. Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues:
abuse of confidence (John 12 :6) and informing. He labored with
gigantic humility; he thought himself unworthy to be good. Paul
has written: Whoever glorifieth himself, let him glorify himself
in God (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought Hell because the fel-
icity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness, like
good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men.**

Many have discovered post factum that in the justifiable beginn-
ings of Runeberg lies his extravagant end and that Dem hemlige
Fralsaren is a mere perversion or exacerbation of Kristus och
Judas. Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and revised the
manuscript text; almost two years passed without his handing it
to the printer. In October of 1909, the book appeared with a pro-
logue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish He-
braist Erik Erfjord and bearing this perfidious epigraph: In the
world he was, and the world was made by him, and the world knew
him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, even
if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lower-
ed himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it
is reasonable to assume that the sacrifice offered by him was
perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit
all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is
blasphemous.* To affirm that he was a man and that he was incap-
able of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impecca-
bilitas and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that
the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and
thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin and be
damned. The famous text He will sprout like a root in a dry soil;
there is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and
the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks
(Isaiah 53 :2-3) is for many people a forecast of the Crucified
in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans Lassen
Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar con-
sensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy,
not of one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and e-
ternity, of the Word made flesh. God became a man completely, a
man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehe-
nsible--all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could
have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncer-
tain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras,
or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.

In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer this rev-
elation. The incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and
laborious theological game; the theologians disdained it. Rune-
berg intuited from this universal indifference an almost miracu-
lous confirmation. God had commanded this indifference; God did
not wish His terrible secret propagated in the world. Runeberg
understood that the hour had not yet come. He sensed ancient and
divine curses converging upon him, he remembered Elijah and
Moses, who covered their faces on the mountain top so as not to
see God; he remembered Isaiah, who prostrated himself when his
eyes saw That One whose glory fills the earth; Saul who was blind-
ed on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai, who saw Par-
adise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went
mad when he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominat-
ing the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret
name of God. Wasn't he, perchance, guilty of this dark crime?
Might not this be the blasphemy against the Spirit, the sin which
will not be pardoned (Matthew 12:3)? Valerius Soranus died for
having revealed the occult name of Rome; what infinite punishment
would be his for having discovered and divulged the terrible name
of God?

Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, Nils
Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmo, praying aloud
that he be given the grace to share Hell with the Redeemer.

He died of the rupture of an aneurysm, the first day of March
1912. The writers on heresy, the heresiologists, will no doubt
remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which seemed
exhausted, the complexities of calamity and evil.

1944

--Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN




THE SECT OF THE PHOENIX



Those who write that the sect of the Phoenix originated in Heli-
opolis, and make it derive from the religious restoration which
followed the death of the reformer Amenhotep IV, cite texts by
Herodotus, Tacitus, and inscriptions from the Egyptian monuments;
but they ignore, or try to ignore, the fact that the denomination
of the sect by the name of Phoenix is not prior to Rabanus Maurus,
and that the most ancient sources (the Saturnalia, or Flavius Jos-
ephus, let us say) speak only of the People of Custom or the Pe-
ople of the Secret. Gregorovius had already observed, in the Con-
venticles of Ferrara, that any mention of the Phoenix was extreme-
ly rare in oral language. In Geneva, I have spoken to artisans
who did not understand me when I asked if they were men of the
Phoenix, but who admitted, in the next breath, that they were
men of the Secret. Unless I am mistaken, the same phenomenon is
observable among the Buddhists: the name by which they are known
to the world is not the same as the one they themselves pronounce.

Miklogie, in an overly famous page, has compared the sectarians
of the Phoenix with the gypsies. In Chile and in Hungary there
are sectarians of the Phoenix and there are also gypsies; beyond
their ubiquity, they have very little in common. The gypsies are
horsedealers, tinkers, smiths, and fortune tellers; the sectar-
ians tend to practice the liberal professions successfully. The
gypsies are of a certain definite physical type, and they speak
--or used to speak--a secret language; the sectarians are indis-
tinguishable from the rest of the world: the proof of it is that
they have not suffered persecutions. Gypsies are picturesque and
inspire bad poets. Narrative verse, colored lithographs, and bo-
leros pay no heed to the sectarians. . . . Martin Buber declares
that Jews are essentially pathetic; not all sectarians are, and
some of them despise pathos; this public and notorious fact suf-
fices to refute the vulgar error (absurdly defended by Urmann)
which sees in the Phoenix a derivative of Israel. People think
more or less as follows: Urmann was a sensitive man; Urmann was
a Jew; Urmann associated with the sectarians in the ghetto at
Prague; the affinity felt by Urmann serves to prove a fact. I
can not in good faith agree with this judgment. The fact that
sectarians in a Jewish environment should resemble Jews does
not prove anything; the undeniable fact is that they resemble, like
Hazlitt's infinite Shakespeare, all the men in the world. They
are everything to all men, like the Apostle. Only a short time
ago Doctor Juan Francisco Amaro, of Paysandu, marveled at the
ease with which they became Spanish-Americans.

I have mentioned that the history of the sect does not record
persecutions. Still, since there is no human group which does
not include partisans of the Phoenix, it is also true that
there has never been a persecution which they have not suffer-
ed or a reprisal they have not carried out. Their blood has
been spilled, through the centuries, under opposing enemy flags,
in the wars of the West and in the remote battles of Asia. It
has availed them little to identify themselves with all the
nations of the earth.

Lacking a sacred book to unify them as the Scripture does Is-
rael, lacking a common memory, lacking that other social memo-
ry which is language, scattered across the face of the earth,
differing in color and features, only one thing--the Secret--
unites them and will unite them until the end of time. Once
upon a time, in addition to the Secret, there was a legend
(and perhaps also a cosmogonic myth), but the superficial men
of the Phoenix have forgotten it, and today they conserve on-
ly the obscure tradition of some cosmic punishment: of a puni-
shment, or a pact, or a privilege, for the versions differ,
and they scarcely hint at the verdict of a God who grants e-
ternity to a race of men if they will only carry out a cer-
tain rite, generation after generation. I have compared the
testimony of travelers, I have conversed with patriarchs and
theologians; and I can testify that the performance of the
rite is the only religious practice observed by the sectari-
ans. The rite itself constitutes the Secret. And the Secret,
as I have already indicated, is transmitted from generation
to generation; but usage does not favor mothers teaching it
to their sons, nor is it transmitted by priests. Initiation
into the mystery is the task of individuals of the lowest
order. A slave, a leper, a beggar plays the role of mysta-
gogue. A child can indoctrinate another child. In itself the
act is trivial, momentary, and does not require description.
The necessary materials are cork, wax, or gum arabic. (In
the liturgy there is mention of silt; this, too, is often
used.) There are no temples specially dedicated to the cele-
bration of this cult; a ruin, a cellar, an entrance way are
considered propitious sites. The Secret is sacred, but it is
also somewhat ridiculous. The practice of the mystery is fur-
tive and even clandestine, and its adepts do not speak about
it. There are no respectable words to describe it, but it is
understood that all words refer to it, or better, that they
inevitably allude to it, and thus, in dialogue with initiates,
when I have prattled about anything at all, they have smiled
enigmatically or taken offense, for they have felt that I
touched upon the Secret. In Germanic literature there are po-
ems written by sectarians, whose nominal theme is the sea,
say, or the evening twilight; but they are, I can hear someone
say, in some measure symbols of the Secret.

As stated by Du Cange in his Glossary, by way of apocryphal
proverb, Orbis terrarum est speculum Ludi. A kind of sacred
horror prevents some of the faithful from practicing the ex-
tremely simple ritual; the others despise them for it, but
they despise themselves even more. On the other hand,
those sectarians who deliberately renounce the Custom and
manage to engage in direct communication with the divinity
enjoy a large measure of credit. To make this commerce
manifest, these latter sectarians have recourse to figures
from the liturgy; thus John of the Rood wrote:

　　　　May the Nine Firmaments know that God
　　　　Is as delightful as cork or muck.

I have enjoyed the friendship of devotees of the Phoenix
on three continents; it seems clear to me that at first
the Secret struck them as something paltry, distressing,
vulgar and (what is even stranger) incredible. They could
not reconcile themselves to the fact that their ancestors
had lowered themselves to such conduct. The odd thing is
that the Secret has not been lost long ago; despite the
vicissitudes of the world, despite wars and exoduses, it
extends, in its tremendous fashion, to all the faithful.
One commentator has not hesitated to assert that it is al-
ready instinctive.


--Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN