Foucault’s Pendulum is an 800-page novel about the representatives of a vanity press, hell-bent on fabricating historical conspiracy for profit, who discover too late that they have fabricated truth, or something sufficiently indistinguishable from truth in the minds of its beholders to be worth killing for. The Name of the Rose is a 1000-page novel about the catastrophic failure of an investigation into a series of murders committed in a repetitive, mazelike library devoted to absurdly complex, meaningless religio-bureaucratic apocrypha.
Borges never wrote a novel. He wrote sketches for novels, two- or three-page treatments, spare and ephemeral, yet which laid out the bones of ideas so fathomless and colossal that, coming to the end of one, my thoughts are pulled in as many directions as though I had just completed something four hundred pages long.
I remember reading a comment of his upon this preference, in which—with that typical combination of self-effacing humility and absurdist ambition—he judged himself both unskilled or undisciplined enough to muster the great effort required to go from sketch to novel and consummately uninterested in the task, since another idea just as immense was always waiting. It was the creation of such kernels, the ambiguity and the possibility of them, that interested him most. Or so I recall him having said. Perhaps I am projecting. I’ve read so much Borges, in so many obscure, pencil-thin editions with titles varying endlessly upon the motif of tigers multiplied by optical illusion, dug from wonderful book-glue-mildew-smelling university library stacks where I had no business being, that I’ll likely never find that precise quote again. I have a vague impression of it coming from an introduction to someone else’s work—a heterogeneous anthology or a collection by Bioy-Casares…. But it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that at the end of this passage forswearing the long form, Borges encourages other authors to do with his ideas what he will not: make novels of them.
And so we get these labyrinthine, Borgesian novels of the real and unreal, of conspiratory mass-self-delusion and headlong dives into the carefully-delineated infinite, things like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Carlos Ruis Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, to name two distant poles within that spectrum. And we get Umberto Eco.
And me. I hope. Someday.