Borges Marathon, Part 15: A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain

Join me as I survey Jorge Luis Borges’s survey of the works of the non-existent writer Herbert Quain.

Join me as I survey Jorge Luis Borges’s survey of the works of the non-existent writer Herbert Quain.

In this instalment of my massive and probably never-to-be-completed Borges Marathon, we return to the realm of literary criticism as fiction. In “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim“, Borges wrote a book review of a non-existent book; in “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain”, he invents an entire life for a non-existent writer.

As with the book review, this survey is very convincing. If it weren’t contained in a collection of “fictions”, I’d believe that Herbert Quain was a real writer. Borges describes several of his books in detail, giving him a chance to play with ideas and sketch how they might form a full book. His introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths, the collection in which this story appears, tells us more about his motives:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.

Herbert Quain’s imagined books are:

  • The God of the Labyrinth: A detective story that follows the usual pattern of “murder > investigation > solution” but unravels in the last paragraph with a sentence that proves the solution to be false and forces the reader to go back over the book and find the correct one.
  • April March: A book that begins with the final scene and then goes back to give three different possible versions of what happened the evening, each of which then branches out into three more possible versions of what happened before that. The result is nine separate novels, all with the same ending/beginning but with entirely different plots and even genres.
  • The Secret Mirror: A two-act play in which the two acts have parallel plots and characters, but in the second, transposed from a grand country house to a miserable rooming house, “everything is slightly menacing— everything is put off, or frustrated.”
  • Statements: Aimed at the “writers manques” whose name is legion, this volume consists of eight stories that promise a good plot, which is then intentionally frustrated by the author.

This survey of the works of Herbert Quain also gives Borges a chance to poke some subtle fun at the world of literary criticism. The tone of his survey is noticeably more verbose and pompous than his usual laconic style. It begins:

I see with no great surprise that the Times Literary Supplement devoted to him a scant half column of necrological pieties in which there is not a single laudatory epithet that is not set straight (or firmly reprimanded) by an adverb.

In some ways, Herbert Quain did end up existing beyond the pages of Borges’s Collected Fictions. In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago has his fictional writer Ricardo Reis, who is based on one of the heteronyms of the real writer Fernando Pessoa, read a book by Borges’s invented writer Herbert Quain.

Herbert Quain also has an appearance now, thanks to the mysterious workings of artificial intelligence. I generated the image at the top of the post by asking ChatGPT to “paint a portrait of Herbert Quain”.

Of course, if you ask the same question again, you get a different response, although all of mine had certain elements in common. Borges never provided a physical description of Quain, so the model has clearly “learned” enough about his characteristics to form a generic look.

Herbert Quains generated by ChatGPT

One can imagine a Borges story featuring infinite Herbert Quains, all sharing common characteristics but differing in significant ways, their lives intersecting at some points and branching off at others…

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There are 8 comments

  1. Yay, the marathon continues! What a good reminder that we can always choose to begin again.

    Mavis Gallant has a very clever story that had me believing that the focus of study in one of her stories was actually real too. You know when you hit up Wikipedia that they’ve done a good job. /eyeroll

    1. Yes, although I’m not sure if “marathon” is even the right word at this point since it implies a consistency that I seem to lack. I mean, if you keep stopping every mile, is it even a marathon or just a series of separate acts of jogging?!

  2. Every time I read one of your posts on Borges, you remind me how innovative and funny and fascinating Borges is and I think I MUST get to read him. And then.. I look at my bloated TBR (the return to blogging has destroyed it – though I suppose in a good way!) and all the books i want to read and wonder when I’ll ever manage it. I must keep you company one of these days – what do you think you’ll read next by him? The idea of creating a whole author and his bibliography is a hoot. Makes me think of Jim Crace, who used to create the epigraphs he puts in his books. I loved this quote from him: “It always cheered me up when my books were badly received to learn that the scholarly critic was nevertheless more than familiar with the works of my bogus epigrapher” Lol!

    1. Oh, I’d love to have you along for part of the ride! I am working my way through every story in the Collected Fictions in order, so next up will be The Library of Babel and then The Garden of Forking Paths, both of which are excellent. I’m aiming to stick to a monthly schedule, around the 20th of each month. I haven’t been very good at that in the past, but I’m hoping to be more consistent!

      As you can see from the table of contents below, I’ll be at this for a while… So feel free to dip in any time in the next decade or so as your schedule and TBR list allow 🙂

      A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INIQUITY (1935)
      Preface to the First Edition
      Preface to the 1954 Edition
      The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell
      The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro
      The Widow Ching—Pirate
      Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
      The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
      The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette —
      Kôtsukéno Suké
      Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv
      Man on Pink Corner
      Etcetera
      Index of Sources

      FICTIONS (1944)

      THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS (1941)
      Foreword
      Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
      Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
      The Circular Ruins
      The Lottery in Babylon
      A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain
      The Library of Babel
      The Garden of Forking Paths

      ARTIFICES (1944)
      Foreword
      Funes, His Memory
      The Shape of the Sword
      The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero
      Death and the Compass
      The Secret Miracle
      Three Versions of Judas
      The End
      The Cult of the Phoenix
      The South

      THE ALEPH (1949)
      The Immortal
      The Dead Man
      The Theologians
      Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden
      A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
      Emma Zunz
      The House of Asterion
      The Other Death
      Deutsches Requiem
      AverroĂ«s’ Search
      Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His
      Labyrinth
      The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths
      The Wait
      The Man on the Threshold
      The Aleph
      Afterword

      THE MAKER (1960)
      Foreword: For Leopoldo Lugones
      The Maker
      Dreamtigers
      A Dialog About a Dialog
      Toenails
      Covered Mirrors
      Argumentum Ornithologicum
      The Captive
      The Mountebank
      Delia Elena San Marco
      A Dialog Between Dead Men
      The Plot
      A Problem
      The Yellow Rose
      The Witness
      MartĂ­n Fierro
      Mutations
      Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote
      Paradiso, XXXI, 108
      Parable of the Palace
      Everything and Nothing
      Ragnarök
      Inferno, 1, 3
      Borges and I

      MUSEUM
      On Exactitude in Science
      In Memoriam, J.F.K.
      Afterword

      IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS (1969)
      Foreword
      The Ethnographer
      Pedro Salvadores
      Legend
      A Prayer
      His End and His Beginning
      BRODIE’S REPORT (1970)
      Foreword
      The Interloper
      Unworthy
      The Story from Rosendo Juárez
      The Encounter
      Juan Muraña
      The Elderly Lady
      The Duel
      The Other Duel
      Guayaquil
      The Gospel According to Mark
      Brodie’s Report

      THE BOOK OF SAND (1975)
      The Other
      Ulrikke
      The Congress
      There Are More Things
      The Sect of the Thirty
      The Night of the Gifts
      The Mirror and the Mask
      “Undr”
      A Weary Man’s Utopia
      The Bribe
      Avelino Arredondo
      The Disk
      The Book of Sand
      Afterword

      SHAKESPEARE’S MEMORY (1983)
      August 25, 1983
      Blue Tigers
      The Rose of Paracelsus
      Shakespeare’s Memory

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