Episode 3: The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges

Possibly not. I believe that there was a certain savior at a book club that you went to about this very subject. What went on there Desi?

so in Berlin, I host the short story meetup. So we're in Berlin, out in the sunshine, sitting around, maybe 14 of us, and we're going through Cortazar's House Taken Over. And someone remarked, "This is silly. I mean, Cortazar himself went on the record stating that this was just a nightmare." And up until this point, there had been this gorgeous waitress walking around, but kind of a little too near to the table, like, suspiciously. And she comes over and she interrupts and goes, "Excuse me, are you talking about Casa Tomado by Julio Cortazar?" And we're like, "Yeah, we are. Welcome. Sit down if you want." And she goes, "No, I'm from Argentina." And then she goes on to explain how much she loves this story and how they're taught this story in school and how absolutely, without a doubt, this was a story about the Peron movement and that at this time it was quite unsafe for anyone to be vocally critical of the Peron movement. And one of the things that makes this story so precious is that it is vague enough that it can never really be accused of doing the very thing that it's doing. So, yeah, she saved the day there it was quite a nice little moment.

Just like it's out of a movie. Couldn't have written that, could you?

We can get into a conversation maybe another time about whether the final word on the meaning of a story does in fact rest with its author or not.

I wouldn't necessarily put that conversation with that story. So I like the idea that we'd be doing it with a different one because that one's quite important in terms of the undercover interpretation that was actually going on, rather than whether an author really knows what they're writing about to begin with.

This is unreliable author in this case. So, yeah, you're right. What are we talking about today?

Today we have a mind bending enigma nested inside an infinitesimally splintered space. A spell book of multi dimensional incantations. Yes, it's Jorge Luis, what on earth did I just read? - Borges with the short story the Lottery of Babylon.

So I am super excited. One, because it's Borges. He is like the towering figure of Latin literature. He wrote a lot of poetry, a lot of essays, and it wasn't till his 40s that he really started the short story form for which he became almost Godlike in stature. I think it is no exaggeration to label him as the greatest short story writer of all time?

Yes. Yeah, I'm definitely with you on that. To experience a Borges story is to have your mind expanded to places it had never thought possible before, simply by the engineering of his descriptions and the fragmented use of language that he employed, particularly in regard to the infinite, the story of the Library of Babel being a perfect example of that. So if you haven't read it, I would implore you to do so instantly. And the whole story reads like a description of this library realm, if you will. The universe which others call the Library is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. So that gives you the kind of idea of what Borges does in terms of these tiny, tiny short stories.

You urged me to do library instead of lottery, and I resisted because I thought, oh, goodness, there's no way I have the time around my day job to get into that particular story. It take me forever. Let's just do lottery. You said desi. It's a daunting prospect. And I said, oh, it'll be fine. And how many hours of sleep I have lost. I underestimated it and I'd read it and studied it many times in the past. Unlike a lot of other geniuses, like, he was considered a genius by his contemporaries while he was alive.

Yes,

Garcia Marquez, it referred to him as simply the greatest writer in Spanish, full stop. It is not wrong to label him as a writer of magical realism, but it's insufficient.

I mean, he was an ultra-ist in style, which was formed as a reaction to modernismo, translating to modernism, that was the dominant literary style of Spain and Latin American countries. And while modernismo used ornate language and symbolism, which is certainly definite in Borges, ultra-ism stripped away all of the excess, going for something more concise and direct in style, something that the Spanish language, as said by Andrew Hurley, does lend itself quite well to, excess. And if you hear Borges speak in either English or Spanish, it is very, very short, very laboured, concise and well thought out, but definitely has many a pause. And it's not really how you would say a conversation would usually flow, even in terms of stream of consciousness. Would you agree to that?

Yeah. So I've been reading through a lot of these essays and it is shaking up my whole belief system as to what it means to communicate a complicated idea. So my personal essays, I mean, my shitty essays that I write to myself, they kind of drag on, they're long. I'm just so determined to communicate "No, I mean this" and get the words right. And I think Borges, reading through his essays, they're so short, they're shockingly short. They're like half a page long, but it's all there. And he was once an interview asked, like, Why don't you write novels? And he responded that "I could write a novel, but why would I waste so many pages to communicate an idea which could be said in only a couple." And what I think Borges does, one, he respects his readers, and two, I think he understands the nature of humans is all it takes is an idea, and we will unfold and unfold and unfold that idea ourselves. It's kind of like when you do a business pitch. You don't want to spell out all the details. You want to excite the person in front of you to fill in the gaps themselves. And he does this in his stories.

Yeah, to the nth degree. I mean, the amount of mystery that he loves to leave, even in, say, like, his adjectives or just the themes themselves. Again, going back to the ultra-ism, they drew inspiration from futurism and cubism and in the same way, loved fragmenting reality and exploring multiple perspectives, using that and always hard hitting in the implications if you're applying it to your real world counterparts. It's a philosophical exploration and one that you're never likely to forget.

So what I find interesting about the Borgesian style is it's a little hard to pin down, but it is immediately distinct and recognizable. You know, when you're reading a Borges story and anything that tries to imitate it, somehow it falls short as an obvious counterfeit, at least in my eye.

Definitely.

I think he combines three authors. He combines this futility of Kafka. He mixes this with the fevered madness of Poe, and then somehow he adds to this existential, mystical terror of Lovecraft. And he was clearly influenced by all three of these writers, especially Kafka. So Borges translated 18 of Kafka's works. A lot of his essays are about Kafka. He regards him as one of the most extraordinary writers of all time.

I sensed a lot of Kafka in both this story and the Library of Babel. It's interesting that you mentioned Lovecraft, too, because I hadn't detected that thus far. But in terms of the almost cosmic level of horror to his realms, where there's no other than these realms that are going on like such as in the Infinite Library, there's no escaping from that library. You're just in it. That's your whole universe, and that's your done. Where did Lovecraft come into it for you?

For me, I feel Lovecraft a lot. So where Lovecraft does like this cosmic terror, when I read any of Borges, I get goosebumps a little bit. It's a little bit scary what's going on. And it's not the scariness of the cosmos. It's the scariness of everyday things. He has this way of making the familiar seem extremely strange.

The fact that he's not only making the unfamiliar familiar, but making the familiar unfamiliar.

There is a hint of the elders, the ancient ones he deals with, like ancient secrets. You get a feeling like you've stumbled across a journal of someone who lived when the pyramids were being built that had access to ancient knowledge.

Yeah, like an alchemical book almost, or picking up a book of the Kabbalah or something along those lines.

He wrote extensively about Esoterica. He was certainly very interested, even if he wasn't a true believer.

It has a lot of symbolism. It has a lot of symbolism to it that is highly employed by writers now. I have tried to get you into Alchemy at a brief moment, but I think that that was quickly brushed aside.

I'm very interested in Alchemy from like the historical and the influence on culture. And also we seem interested in these ideas and there must be something to them in the human, if not in the reality.

It's a bit Jungian in that sense that we're somehow gravitating towards these symbols and things that shouldn't mean anything to us anymore. But there's something in the spirit of the depths that's reaching up to us that I'm incredibly interested in the symbolism used in Alchemy and maybe even, I don't know, you joked around saying that you'll be doing Horoscopes next, but astrology does have a fair few symbols that people are clearly gravitating towards. But I'm certainly not advocating for astrology. By the way.

One interesting relationship between astrology and Borges