Ficciones appears at first to be a collection of disparate, largely unrelated stories—an anthology, as most people would think of it—but, over time, reveals itself in fact to be a novel whose chapters discretely iterate upon each other. Any of these stories would work on their own, but they are structured in such a way that they all have far more meaning than they ever would in a vacuum. In the best, most head-scratching cases, a small detail whispered in the middle of a paragraph will harken another, more prominent element of story read dozens of pages ago. Borges primed me with the repetition of motifs like the mirror and the labyrinth, and by the time I reached part two, I had developed a sort of paranoia around the most mundane of descriptions. It’s in this way that Borges gives me the ability to teach myself one of his recurring notions: that repetition breeds infinity.
If something happens twice, he asserts, it will happen again, ad infinitum. And in Ficciones, for me, this was a core truth of the novel, because Borges put them there—or I put them there—or Borges made me see them there—or we put them there? These repetitions are never definitive; more like there’s just enough to arouse suspicion, but not enough to build an undeniable case in either direction. Another reader might laugh at my interpretation of the book completely, but I fell joyfully into the endless plummet of a world where every story of Ficciones exists, existed, and will exist, its characters casting themselves as each other in performances that transform them in the acting.
This didn’t occur to me while I was reading, but my experience with this book hinges on the idea that two images shown together will have infinitely more meaning than either on their own. With each story, I felt myself gaining a deeper understanding on Borges’ perception of concepts like duality, eternity, and divinity. I’d find myself wishing that a minor idea was given more thought, only to discover later that it was—just under a new title. The reverse was true, too. By describing in great detail certain settings and people, Borges could whisk them back into the foreground with just a phrase, as if I was learning a new vocabulary, or the true names of strange numbers.
And yet, I know there are yet more gems to be mined from Ficciones; that it can be broken down into infinitely smaller portions, each as valuable as the last. This is a book I am going to pick up again… and if something happens twice…
