WHAT IF THE world we know is only one of many parallel worlds, all existing at once? How do we know that we aren’t just characters in somebody else’s dream? If everyone believes in it, can a fictional world replace the real one? The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) raised all these questions of metaphysics—the study of the nature of reality—in his mind-bending short stories. Fascinated with the idea of infinity, Borges imagined a point in space that contained all other points and perspectives (in the story “The Aleph”), as well as an immense library with books containing every possible combination of the alphabet, where works of genius and nonsense were shelved uselessly side by side (in “The Library of Babel”). Think you can navigate the labyrinth of Borges’s life and work? Then take this quick quiz.
TRUE OR FALSE?
1. Borges never wrote a full-length novel.
2. Several Borges stories are reviews of novels that do not exist.
3. In one of Borges’s most famous stories, a group of monkeys labor at typewriters, trying to re-create Hamlet.
4. In 1946 the newly elected president Juan Perón promoted Borges to the position of director of the National Library of Argentina.
ANSWERS
1. True. He claimed that he did not like novels and that he considered writing a long book “a laborious and impoverishing extravagance.”
2. True. Most famous among these is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a review of a book that seems to be identical to Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
3. False.
4. False. Perón’s government, suspicious of Borges’s political writings, actually gave him a so-called promotion to the bureaucratic post of Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets. Borges later did become director of the National Library, but he resigned after Perón’s 1973 reelection.