The Borges virus Profile

2023-08-06 05:56:16

In 1957, the publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica de México published the Fantastic Zoology Manual, a compendium of strange creatures, “sometimes mythical, sometimes almost true, which make up an exceptional literary museum curated by Jorge Luis Borges in collaboration with the writer and dancer Margarita Guerrero. In Animals of the Mirrors, the third story of the book, we are told that in the legendary era of the Yellow Emperor, men and beings from the mirrors lived in peace and harmony, communicating through the mirrors that they used as portals. But one night the Earth was invaded by specular creatures, who following bloody battles were defeated by the magical arts of the Yellow Emperor, imprisoned in mirrors and forced to repeat each of the acts of men. However, the story also warns that one day the mirror creatures will shake off that magical lethargy, stop imitating us and break the metal and glass barriers, although this time they cannot be defeated. That day finally came in October 2002, when PS Publishing published the first edition of Quicksilver, a short novel by British writer China Miéville that narrates the invasion of imagos, creatures that escaped from mirrors following centuries of living in slavery and forced to imitate us. In this post-apocalyptic fantasy, the city of London finds itself torn apart by a clearly one-sided war, while the small factions of surviving humans fighting the imagos also wage a Hobbesian war in which man is wolf to man. The curious thing regarding El azogue is that it is not, as is often said, only a narrative inspired by the story of Borges and Guerrero, but rather it is a direct continuation, a literary sequel that takes up the mythology and characters of Animals from mirrors and expand your story. The second thing to note is that this novel by Miéville is considered one of the inaugural works of the literary current known as New Weird (New Strange Fiction) which, to top it off, in its original edition had a prologue by M. John Harrison whose title (“China Miéville and the New Weird”) is probably one of the first mentions of “new weird fiction” to refer to this type of literature. “I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), I saw endless immediate eyes scrutinizing myself as in a mirror, I saw all the mirrors on the planet and none reflected me,” Borges wrote in El aleph (1949), fifty years before El azogue. His work was decisive in forming the foundations of the New Weird, and yet the Argentine writer is not usually taken into account when analyzing his influences.

pulp modernism. For a new strange fiction to exist, a strange fiction had to have existed before. That classic “weird fiction” originated in the early 1920s from the pen of the writers of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, whose signatures include HP Lovecraft and the writers of what is known as “Lovecraft’s circle”. : Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long and August Derleth, among others. The traumas of the postwar period, the fusion of genres as an aesthetic search and the exploration of new ways of narrating that distanced themselves from the traditions of the conventional Gothic story –with its pale specters and their souls in pain that drag chains– gave rise to the story of cosmic horror and the materialistic tale of terror, where the ghost that wandered in the lonely castle was replaced by primal beings from other dimensions, archetypal gods and alien races from remote regions of the universe that transcend space-time. In order to narrate these stories, the writers of strange fiction had to modify the classical conception of the monster and the monstrous and introduced the idea of ​​a non-human perception of temporality, in order to approach the notion of deep time and reveal the insignificance of the human before the immensity of the cosmos. The spaces of cyclopean architectures and notions related to mathematics and physics such as non-Euclidean geometry or the fourth dimension coexisted with pagan rituals, esoteric cults and underwater races fused with humans, thanks to the indiscriminate mixture of the imaginaries of terror and Science fiction. Eighty years later, the literary current called to be the spiritual successor to the Lovecraft circle would take up many of these characteristics to update and adapt them to an urban, technological and globalized context. New Weird Fiction would take genre fusion and formal experimentation a step further—assimilated from both the old weird and the New Wave of 1960s science fiction—by indiscriminately using the literary tools of detective fiction, the horror, science fiction and the fantastic to erase the limits between avant-garde literature and the pulp of Weird Tales, making surrealism coexist with body horror, urban fantasy mix with experimental literature and social criticism cross the cosmic horror, organically.

It is right, then, that with this background, HP Lovecraft is the most cited author when it comes to talking regarding the influences of strange fiction; but at the same time it is a mistake to omit the figure of Borges, a writer who had as much influence as the native of Providence.

This omission may be due to the direct association that exists between the New Weird and the pulp or the “minor genres, issues closely linked to Lovecraft and his circle; Borges, on the other hand, is usually associated with Anglo-Saxon modernism, the avant-garde, “high literature”. However, both Lovecraft and Borges might be two representative faces of what Mark Fisher called “pulp modernism”, that is, the connection between modernism and its forgotten double pulp” – or what is the same, modernity and culture. of masses–, such as Lovecraft’s texts that, even though they were born from a veiled exchange between modernism and pulp horror, were published in magazines such as Weird Tales. According to Fisher, the intertextual methodology is essential in pulp modernism, which claims a fictional system above the author-God. In Memorex for the Krakens (2006) he writes: “By producing a fictional plane of coherence between different texts, the pulp modernist becomes a conduit through which a world can emerge.” Intertextuality is a typically Borgesian procedure that, as in Lovecraft, transforms his stories from simple discrete texts to “part-objects that make up a myth-space that other writers can in turn explore and extend.” The new strange fiction originated, in part, thanks to the influence of both the pulp of the weird fiction and the modernism of the work of Borges, which resulted in a literature that, having one foot in each area, ended up establishing itself. in that territory that Fisher called pulp modernism.

The world will be Tlön. Borges’ relationship with Lovecraft’s work was, to say the least, erratic. The Argentine went so far as to say in various interviews that Lovecraft “did not build his stories well” or that “his described images are horrendous, but the feeling they provoke is not”, and that his style was “interjective and atrocious”, but he also considered that his plots were good and he liked his horror stories. Finally, in 1975 he gave in to the temptation to write a Lovecraft-style story entitled There Are More Things that he included in The Book of Sand, in whose epilogue he wrote: “Fate, which is famously inscrutable, did not let me in peace until I perpetrated a posthumous tale of Lovecraft, a writer who I have always judged an involuntary parodist of Poe.

But ironically it was not this story –Lovecraftian and close to weird fiction– that the New Weird writers took as an influence on Borges’s work, but others much more Borgesian. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius, the mythical story first published in 1940 in the magazine Sur and later compiled in Ficciones (1944), is possibly, due to its narrative procedures, its ideas and its theme, one of the most influential stories for the writers of the strange new fiction. Tlön is the story of a fortuitous discovery and the invasion of a fictional world into reality. In this tale all Borges’s obsessions turned into fiction are condensed: the aversion towards mirrors, mazes (even if only from a footnote), libraries, heresiarchs, anomalous objects -like the small cone of extremely heavy metal comparable to the coin of El Zahir (1949) or the Odin disk of El disco (1975)–, the apocryphal texts, the copies, the metafiction, which connects with other texts such as The Theologians (1949) or The Abominable Mirrors (1935)–, and the fictions that invade the real world. Some writers linked to the strange new fiction directly conceived their own version of Tlön: M. John Harrison wrote Egnaro in 1981, a tale that narrates the search of two friends for a place that may or may not exist, “a secret country, a place behind the places we know”, a conspiracy that obsesses the protagonists. Grant Morrison, for his part, conceived a Borgesian city-world for his ultraweird comic Doom Patrol, a fictional space called Orqwith that escaped from a nameless black book to invade reality: “It was actually a game, an intellectual joke”, says one of the philosophers who wrote the black book: “We came together and created Orqwith, their language, their religion. And then, somehow, Orqwith crossed over. Now its too late. Our fiction is devouring the real world. Soon the whole world will be Orqwith.”

Borges virus. The idea of ​​a fiction that makes itself a reality and invades our world will be taken up many years later by the CCRU (Cyber ​​Culture Research Unit, formed by Nick Land and Sadie Plant at the University of Warwick, England) and will call it hyperstition. The CCRU took Lovecraftian fictions as its inspiration and appropriated certain Borgean writing procedures to propose, as Ramiro Sanchiz says in the prologue to the anthology Mundo Weird (2022), “a series of theoretical concepts, writing practices and generic matrices such as hyperstitional production (creation of fictions that retroactively found their own reality), xenopoetry and theory-fiction (hybrid instance of theory not institutionally regulated or approved). According to the CCRU, Tlön, by incorporating real characters and events, falls within the tradition of theory-fiction: it is a story that describes a hyperstitional process (the invasion of the fictional Tlön into the narrator’s reality) within which other hyperstitions, such as the Rosicrucian community, which was first a fiction imagined by the German theologian Johannes Valentinus Andreä and later became an actual secret order. Borges even took this practice out of fiction and generated at least two hyperstitions in our reality: the first when, supposedly and as a joke, he included the Necronomicon in the National Library catalog and further fueled the rumor that the apocryphal grimoire Lovecraftian was real; the second, when he wrote El acercamiento al Almotásim, a review of an apocryphal book that he included in his essay Historia de la eternidad (1936), which, according to Ricardo Piglia, prompted his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares to go out in search of a copy. of a non-existent book.

The idea of ​​the apocryphal text and hyperstition is also found in a strange fiction book linked to the CCRU: Ciclonopedia (2008), a theory-fiction novel by the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in which an American student finds a strange manuscript in Istanbul –signed by Reza Negarestani– which analyzes the theories of the late Dr. Hamid Parsani regarding the Middle East as a sentient entity and the “rotten corpse oil of the sun” as an intelligent entity that feeds off capitalism and modernity. Negarestani develops in this work some theories on writing procedures that are both Borgesian and Lovecraftian: apocryphism, false authorship and the intervention of anonymous groups, and the use of hyperstitional carriers. In other words, what he calls “hidden writing”: “”The technique that uses all the narrative holes, all the problems, all suspicious darkness and all revulsive mistakes, to build new narrative plots with an autonomous and tentacular mobility” . The House of Leaves (2000), by Mark Z. Danielewski, is one of the most interesting and original novels of the last twenty years and perhaps the most potent example of the influence of both Borges and Lovecraft in weird fiction: a house with an architectural aberration that leads it to be larger inside than outside and generates corridors with forking paths, infinite mazes and an ineffable monster in the form of a Minotaur, which inhabits those anomalous and fantastic spaces to which manuscripts must be added , apocryphal texts, countless footnotes, unreliable narrators and an experimental layout that turns it into an unusual and cult book-object-labyrinth that uses literary but also typographic and aesthetic resources that include calligrams, crossed out sentences, morse code texts, upside down pages, poems, photos, drawings and a long etcetera.

The suspicion is great: probably if we review one by one the works of the most representative writers of the new strange fiction, in all of them we will find traces of Borgean narrative procedures because, as the writer Juan Mattio says: “It is not only Miéville but the entire area of the New Weird the one who is infected by the Borges virus”.

extraordinary stories

*Juan Mattio

It is probably just a coincidence that the term new weird was used for the first time to think of a novel where Miéville takes up a story by Borges and uses it as a starting point to deploy his own fiction. It is probable but, as Lönnrot would say, uninteresting. And the real world can resign itself to not being interesting, but not so the hypotheses. Kike Ferrari once defined Miéville’s literature as “fantastic class warfare”. It seems to me a success since Miéville is permanently concerned with narrating the confrontation of beings in a position of submission that use magic and fantasy to combat his oppressors. But in this case, the rebellion of the imagos has resonances not only in this short text by Borges but also in one of his main conceptions. In one of the four extraordinary classes that Piglia gave for Public Television, he said that Borges’ central question was not how reality is in fiction, but how fiction is in reality. With this apparently simple inversion, Piglia managed to synthesize one of the main ideas of Borges’ fiction. And it is none other than the one that Miéville takes up in El quicksilver.

We can think of this problem area in the following way: a classical ontological model would affirm the superiority of the original over the copy, that is, the existence of the representation is subordinated to the existence – temporally and ontologically prior – of what is represented. And this is repeated in all the planes where objects derived from others come into play. Wakefulness precedes sleep, people their reflections or shadows, historical facts their story, the sensitive world photography or painting, reality fiction. But what Borges narrates, over and over once more, is the rebellion of representations. Borges’ universe poses, recursively, dreams, mirrors, fictions and imaginary worlds that invade reality, that refuse to uphold the authority of the original before the copy, that fight for their autonomy and, in this way, corrupt the solidity ontology of what we call the real. But it is not only Miéville but the whole area of ​​the New Weird that is infected by the Borges virus. I think that a good part of the field of new strange fiction, that area that Harrison began to delimit in the prologue to El azogue, reused Lovecraft’s imaginary but hacked it with procedures that come, in a direct line, from the work of Borges. This hybrid territory between formal experimentation and fantastic literature is what allows this trend to be, moreover, a new reading of tradition. What the New Weird recovers from Borges, at least in a good number of texts, is one of his central concerns, the one that has to do with the obedience of the copy to the original, which shows hierarchically organized ontological planes and which he strives to demarcate the real world and imaginary worlds. What Piglia synthesized in his classes: the problem is not how reality is in fiction, but how fiction is in reality.

*Writer and journalist. In 2015, his novel Three Times Light received a mention at the Casa de las Américas Award (Cuba) and in 2022 he won the Fundación Medifé Filba Award with his novel Materials for a Nightmare.

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