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5 Ficciones I doubles, dreamers, and detectives B orges’s genius as maker of fiction at long last became fully manifest in 1941, his forty-second year, when El jardı́n de los senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), a thin volume containing eight fantastic tales, appeared. (This was also the year of the local scandal in which Borges did not receive the National Literary Prize for a group of stories that would eventually earn Borges, and Argentine letters, worldwide fame.) These narratives were reissued in 1944, under the now-familiar collective title Ficciones, with a supplementary section, consisting of six stories, labeled ‘‘Artificios’’ (‘‘Artifices’’). To this last section Borges was to add yet another three pieces in the 1956 edition. As we saw in chapter 2, the immediate reason commonly cited by Borges for his having taken up story writing was his almost fatal bout with septicemia. As Borges repeatedly would tell his interviewers, ‘‘Pierre Menard,’’ produced during convalescence, was a useful means of steering himself away from poetry—his preferred medium—and thereby fending off writer’s panic had the result been found wanting. The writing of prose fiction served as proof to Borges that he was still a writer. It is a dramatic and even convincing anecdote. Nevertheless, artists are notoriously fond of launching and perpetuating humorous half-truths, of hiding behind faintly absurd smokescreens when interrogated about the touchier aspects of their own lives. In the same way, one could not expect Borges, a shy man, to enjoy reminiscing out loud with a casual interviewer on the subject of his very worst years, especially when that faithful old chestnut, ‘‘How did you first begin writing stories?’’ invariably comes up for discussion. In any event, the larger facts of the time suggest a situation more complex than that of a Borges producing superb fictions merely by default. Actually, Borges had written almost no verse since 1930; it is difficult to conceive of his feeling suddenly compelled to do so once again. On the other hand, as we noted in the preceding chapter, the author had been experimenting for some six years with prose fiction, seeking out a viable means of organizing narrative fantasy, theorizing some, writing some, and even achieving notable success in the case of ‘‘Streetcorner Man.’’ It is evident to us now that Borges, in the Infamy pieces and in ‘‘The Approach to Al’Mu-tasim,’’ was consciously feeling his way through new territory—was ‘‘onto something,’’ without being yet sure of what that something was. What is far more likely, then, is that Borges’s illness and recovery furnished him concrete incentives, an emotionally charged moment of leisure during which certain ideas, long on his mind but not yet fully worked out, could definitively crystallize and assume their most fitting shape. The years intervening since ‘‘The Approach to Al’Mu-tasim,’’ moreover , had been confronting Borges with certain crises and extraliterary tensions, had been putting him in touch with basic human problems rather than merely bookish and metaphysical ones—in short, had been exposing him to the world of everyday conflict and concrete reality, elements hitherto quite absent from his life and art. Until 1937 Borges’s existence had been mostly unproblematic and carefree; in the period following , he inhabited for the very first time the darker passages of life. Borges’s father died in 1938; some months later Borges’s own illness nearly killed him. In addition to these dramatic personal shocks, there were Nazism in Europe and growing military dictatorship at home— larger social developments that were putting Borges, together with his relatives and friends, on the defensive. And of course there was his personal loneliness. Moreover, because the family’s finances had by now dwindled severely, the author had had to start earning his living full-time—and under highly unpleasant conditions as it turned out. In 1937, Borges accepted a poorly paid post as cataloguer in a drab suburban library. A seedy place, its employees cared only for—in Borges’s own words—‘‘horse races, soccer matches, and smutty stories’’ (TA, 241). Literature did not figure among their interests; a favorite recollection of Borges concerns a fellow clerk who, casually leafing on one occasion through an Argentine encyclopedia , happened upon the entry for ‘‘Jorge Luis Borges’’ and marveled at the coincidence that his fellow cataloguer and a nationally recognized author should somehow share the same name. The job gave Borges a...

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