In Ficciones, the journeys of many of Borges’s characters (including Borges himself) demonstrate that the discovery of knowledge can be just as important and seductive as the knowledge itself. Perhaps the most famous story in the collection, “The Library of Babel,” goes into extensive detail about the structure and contents of the titular library. This fact alone demonstrates Borges’s reverence for the structures and processes that allow people to disseminate and produce knowledge. What’s more, because the library is a metaphor for an infinite universe in which each person is a “librarian,” Borges aligns human existence itself with the pursuit of knowledge and discovery.
Furthermore, many of Borges’s stories revolve around a detective trying to solve a mystery (like in “Death and the Compass”) or a scholar seeking deeper knowledge (like the group of scholars attempting to find adequate information about Tlön in the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). In the case of Erik Lönnrot in “Death and the Compass,” the detective seeks out patterns in texts. Ultimately, however, those patterns are revealed to lead to a trap set by a man seeking revenge on Lönnrot, and the story ends in Lönnrot’s death. Lönnrot’s story thus highlights the human impulse to seek patterns in chaos, and it ultimately acts as a cautionary tale about obsessing over finding knowledge in the face of the unknown.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Investigation and Knowledge ThemeTracker
Investigation and Knowledge Quotes in Ficciones
There was one notable characteristic: it remarked that the literature of Uqbar was fantastic in character, and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mjelnas and Tlön.
In the classical culture of Tlön, there is only one discipline, that of psychology […]. This monism, or extreme idealism, completely invalidates science […]. Each state of mind is irreducible. There mere act of giving it a name, that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it [….]. The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, not even an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.
The plot is as follows: a man, the incredulous and fugitive student whom we already know, falls among people of the vilest class and adjusts himself to them, in a kind of contest of infamy. All at once, with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand—he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men.
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth. I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can scarcely decipher what I write, I am preparing to die a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born.
To me it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book…. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. May heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but may Thy enormous Library be justified, for one instant, in one being.
“You don’t believe me?” He stammered. “Don’t you see the mark of infamy written on my face? I told you the story to way I did so that you would hear it to the end. I informed on the man who took me in: I am Vincent Moon. Despise me.”
Kilpatrick was brought to his end in a theater, but he made of the entire city a theater, too, and the actors were legion.
I have mentioned that the history of the sect does not record persecutions. Still, since there is no human group which does not include partisans of the Phoenix, it is also true that there has never been a persecution which they have not suffered or a reprisal they have not carried out.
