Resumo de Ficciones - Borges, Jorge Luis

Even though the

title was not translated from Spanish along with the text, Ficciones is in fact a

collection of some of Jorge Luis Borges' greatest short fictional works,

grouped together as they were when they first appeared in English. The text

is seminal in the study of Latin American and Spanish literature, as well as in

any exploration of the heights of modernism and sources of postmodernism.

In these stories, Borges delves into the nature of the fantastic, the means by

which narrative is constructed, the distinctions between reality and fiction,

and the connections among science, technology, literature, and a sense of the

spiritual or sublime.

"The Library of Babel" is perhaps the most famous of the pieces included in

Ficciones, and certainly an important text in critical circles as well. In it,

Borges establishes the conceit of the universe as a limitless library, whose

books contain all the combinations of letters in all possible languages. Each

person, a librarian separated from his peers by insurmountable distances and

interminable tasks, reads the books he is fortunate enough to come across in

his lifetime; most of these texts will be garbled at best or, even more

frequently, entirely nonsensical, but the chance that he will encounter the one

book that reveals the secrets of existence always persists, prolonging the

search throughout all his days.

Another significant text, ?Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,? tells the story of a

secret society that invented a country (Uqbar) and its mythology, the origin of

which the society placed in the hands of the inhabitants of Uqbar, who

situated it on a planet (Tlön) imagined by them, but dreamed up in Borges?s

text by the secret society as well. Borges reveals this piecemeal via a

complicated structure of embedded narratives and documents, extending this

literary tradition to a level beyond any that had been seen before, with the

possible exception of The Arabian Nights. This is a narrative mostly about

the power of writing to create mythologies, shift paradigms, and even, in the

extreme case illustrated here, to usurp some objective reality.

On the whole, Ficciones was the book that established Borges as a literary

master in the eyes of the Anglophone world. Besides their academic and

theoretical significance, however, the short texts included within it bear

reading for the insight they offer into the way we interact with texts and with

the universe.

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