The universe (which others call the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library) is composed of a series of narrow, half-storied, iron-framed trellis-walkways with floors and ceilings of glass. Looking up or down, you find yourself surrounded by books, an almost vertiginous experience that imparts a feeling of the infinite. The main stacks can be reached through the library’s various grand reading rooms, the most notable of which is the second-floor humanities room, a large neoclassical chamber with a curved and coffered ceiling. To the left of that room, past the South Wing Reading Room and up a pair of rusted iron steps behind a service door that is accessible only with the express permission of the rare books’ librarian, is the Simon Kautsch Collection. “I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library,” writes the great Argentinean poet and metaphysical fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. Sharing his vision, I have always considered this otherwise nondescript office overlooking Schenley Drive one of heaven’s anterooms.
Kautsch died in 1948, and, having married the Monegasque Barone’s de Bacourt late in life, he left no descendants. Consequently, the Pittsburgh philanthropist and only scion of a once-massive family fortune (made in glass) donated his substantial wealth in a trust to the library, the jewel of which was his book collection, now held in a mahogany-lined sepulcher on the third floor. Once sequestered in Kautsch’s massive, gothic mansion on Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue (which was recently converted into condos for tech-sector workers), the collection holds a variety of bibliographic treasures, including first editions of several works by Herbert Quain, the papers of Sinologist Stephen Albert, and a first printing of Isaac Newton’s Principia, though the last has apparently gone missing. Most prominent in the Kautsch archives is a rich assortment of occult works—Ramon Llull, Isaac Lauria, Cornelius Agrippa—that comes from the millionaire’s Swedenborgian ancestors on his father’s side, being only a generation removed from Lund, Sweden.
Having finished my last writing project, a close reading of several passages from the largely forgotten Czech Jewish novelist Jaromir Hladik’s Vindication of Eternity, I was considering working on a new essay that would explore the work of the obscure and heretical Swedish theologian Nils Runeberg, whose manuscripts are held in the Carnegie’s Kautsch Room. Making my way from my office on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University across the Schenley Park Bridge to the library, I could scarcely have imagined what I would discover as I sifted through the detritus of Kautsch’s eccentric enthusiasms. I was almost immediately diverted from my original intention when I came upon the personal writings of the industrialist, amateurishly bound in a red leather-covered book about the size of a quarto with his name inscribed in neat handwriting on the marbled flyleaf. Within, I learned of Kautsch’s supposed membership in a secret society known as the Aleph, which he claimed originated in sixteenth-century Britain. Even more stunning, I discovered notes from Kautsch about his enthusiasms for the aforementioned Argentinean librarian and writer Borges, hailed by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa as the “most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes.”
Specifically, I came upon the passages concerning Borges about halfway through the untitled codex, most of which was an eccentric commonplace book given over to mystical and hermetic speculations. Amid the disorganized and often inscrutable oddities, Kautsch penned some passages of fascinating prose, even if the claims made therein seem totally unsubstantiated. In one, he discussed a text supposedly written by the twelfth-century Persian poet Farid Ud-Din Attar, which Kautsch claims to have come upon in a Tehran archive. In it, the poet describes a mirror crafted for a minor member of the Khwarezm-Shah Dynasty and said to be able to interpret the secret meaning of any text placed before it. According to Attar, by way of Kautsch, readers were chosen by lottery to bring particularly difficult books before the polished silver of the mirror. Legend further held that anyone so chosen would go mad, since, regardless of the chosen work, the only thing reflected in the mirror was a blank nothingness.
Another passage in the manuscript referred to a footnote in the Hermetic Corpus describing a massive stone labyrinth constructed for Apollonius of Tyana, at the center of which was an oracle that called upon whichever individual daemon was responsible for inspiring a chosen papyrus to be conjured. Here, it was said, every author discovered that the same daemon was responsible for all works. Yet another sentence from the codex demonstrates Kautsch’s intellectual enthusiasms: “A schism between two opposing philosophical schools of gnostic Mandeans (or perhaps pagan Yazidi) is that one contingent maintains that writing is a means of theurgically creating a universe, while the other maintains that it’s we who are contained within some demiurge’s writing.” Yet as fascinating as all such speculations are, whether based in reality or only in the fevered fantasies of the Fifth Avenue hermit, it is the Aleph and Kautsch’s Borgesian affectations that most caught my intention.
Descended on his father’s side from those immigrant Swedenborgians, Kautsch could also claim descent, on his mother’s side, from established Pittsburgh Presbyterian Scots Irish (with some marriage into German communities associated with the Ephrata Cloister). From this branch, Kautsch bore a distant connection with the notorious Edinburgh necromancer Thomas Weir, a Covenanter executed for occultism (and bestiality) in the seventeenth century. Weir, while serving with Cromwell’s forces during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, was initiated into the secret society of the Aleph by a fellow soldier. Established by Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee and associated with a range of figures from Thomas Traherne to Henry Vaughan and the Cambridge Platonists, the Aleph embraced one central teaching: that our entire reality is a fiction, and that the writer who manipulates fiction is a magician. All members are inducted into the Aleph by a family member, with an uninterrupted line of succession going back to the society’s establishment. (Kautsch conjectured that the society is related to the ancient Egyptian Sect of the Phoenix.) In Kautsch’s case, it was his maternal uncle Negley Brackenridge who tapped him for membership, while Borges was inducted by his English grandmother (the rare female Aleph), Frances Ann Haslam. These details, according to Kautsch, are confirmed by an English compatriot in Buenos Aires, an Aleph member named Herbert Ashe.
Quoting a letter from Ashe, Kauthsch wrote that “there is a young literary man named Burges (sic) who was recently inducted into the society; because of his turn of metaphysical mind he is the ideal conduit to disseminate the principle of fictionism throughout the world.” No doubt, I thought, Kautsch was a literary-minded man himself, fluent in five languages (including Spanish), conversant in all manner of global avant-garde literature, and undoubtedly a reader of Borges’s classic short-story collection Ficciones, published seventy-five years ago this year but not translated into English until 1962. Regardless, Kautsch’s rather Borgesian conceits, from imagining this secret society to placing the Argentinean among its ranks, were a dutiful homage to the master. As was the idea of “fictionism” an appropriate name for the metaphysical speculation engendered by Borges’s work.
Ficciones, published in two parts—the first, The Garden of Forking Paths, appearing in 1941; the second, Artifices, released three years later, with yet another addendum in 1956—is composed of nineteen short stories in total. Among these are some of Borges’s most celebrated works: “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” which imagines the authorial implications of the eponymous Menard producing a “new” work that matches Cervantes’s seventeenth-century magnum opus with perfect word-by-word fidelity; “Funes, the Memorious,” which interrogates the idea of a man unable to forget anything, no detail being too small, so that he is incapable of abstraction; and “The Library of Babel,” which envisions a universe commensurate with an archive that’s almost infinite. Labeled “fictions” by nothing less than the book’s own title, such stories are more like essays or philosophical meditations. Whether these pieces interrogate fiction through nonfiction or vice versa, Ficciones is less a story collection than an extended meditation.
Alone among great twentieth-century writers of fiction, Borges never produced a novel, preferring rather to work within the elegant parameters of only a few thousand words at a time. His short stories differ from those of other masters, however. As much as he adores the poetry of the proper name, his characters are not even symbols. They are something close to cyphers, similar to those created by his more Latinate colleagues, Italo Calvino or Raymond Queneau, all sharing an admirably Catholic expansiveness unbridled by the Puritan’s aversion to anything that smacks of unrealism. Human psychology, in any case, is largely irrelevant to Borges, whose great subject is the strangeness of fiction.
Indeed the adjective “Borgesian” is as potent in its own way as “Orwellian” or “Kafkaesque” are in theirs, signifying the author’s intermingling of fact and fiction, his enthusiasm for textuality, aphorism, and paradox, and his insatiable curiosity in the (often invented) esoteric details of history, literature, philosophy, and religion. This intellectually playful disposition maintains that the “composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance,” as Borges writes in the prologue to his first edition, because the “better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and to offer a resume, a commentary.”
Borges’s central project, if one could be devised, was the promulgation of a particular religious vision, a metaphysics of fictionality that might be called “fictionism,” or perhaps “literary idealism.” That is to say, the only reality Borges recognized was that of the story, the physics of the universe consisting of nothing other than shifting narratives. Excluding a handful of entries that are superficially realistic, embedded in the colorful details of his native Argentina—of gauchos and the pampas, mate-sippers and tango-dancers—most of the collection is dedicated to his metaphysical explorations.
Those spiraling speculations figure clearly in the celebrated opening story of Ficciones, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Like so many of Borges’s narratives, this story features the author as first-person narrator musing upon a false document, in this case an account of a secret society that over the centuries has produced a massive encyclopedia accounting for the culture of Tlön, a mythic realm of pure idealists imagined by the (equally fictitious) inhabitants of the Near Eastern province of Uqbar. Attempting to answer the question of what a completely idealist culture would be like, Borges answers, “For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogenous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial.” The ultimate joke, if we can call it that, is that this of course does describe Tlön, since Tlön is not a real place and thus exists only in the mind. Then again, that is also true of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, Colombia.
“The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement,” writes Borges, because they “consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature.” Fair to think of Borges’s narrator, who shares his name, as also sharing that perspective, because Ficciones offers an ontology of fiction. Consider just how bizarre fiction is. The construction of complex linguistic patterns that bear no correspondence to the “actual” world but often containing the depth and complexity of reality. Furthermore, true to the magicians of the Aleph, Borges maintains that the kabbalistic manipulation of these twenty-six letters of the alphabet, an activity called “writing,” can generate reality.
“Everything,” he writes in “The Library of Babel,” including the “minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library…the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books” is already hidden in the alphabet, emerging only through the magical shifting of those letters here and there.
John Sturrock, Borges’s American editor, writes that the Argentinean “savors metaphysical ideas, but he sees no need to subscribe to them--except, that is, at those times when he is a practicing writer of fiction. Then, he becomes a philosophical Idealist.” But fiction, by its nature, is only ever in the head, and thus only ever idealist. Like mathematics, fiction is completely true while being totally unreal. “The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book,” writes Borges in a close reading of Whitman, “a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.” This Book is called Literature.
Such sentiments are in keeping with the Aleph, laid out by Kautsch in his neat secretary’s hand. They are, as first enumerated by Dee, that the “Operative metaphor (for all that exists are operative metaphors) for the cosmos is the library; that all writing is the result of one single Author, and that the rule of nature is merely fiction, and should these axioms be false that only all the more confirms them.”
Kautsch’s phantasmagoria enlisted Borgesian tropes as a way of making a claim about fiction, a pastiche that, at least in the manuscript, seemed only partially successful to me. This was, I thought, the raw material for an essay that I could write concerning Borges’s influence on the otherwise obscure Kautsch. Quickly, however, I discovered that I had that direction of transmission completely backwards, in a way that recalled the nameless protagonist of Borges’s “The Circular Ruins” who tries, in Kabbalistic fashion, to create a man from pure thought but ultimately, “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”
I learned that while the bulk of Kautsch’s collection was donated after his death, some of his personal effects were sent beforehand after financial considerations made him downsize his address from Fifth Avenue to a modest Victorian on Marchand Street. I learned, too, that Kautsch’s unpublished, unread, and heretofore unreferenced mention of “Burges” (sic) was made in 1935, when Borges was thirty-six years old, a full year before the earliest pieces of Ficciones were written. It would seem that Aleph is real, or at least as real as the purposes of this essay require. Fiction, and her ostensible opposite, are forever inextricably bound, their boundary a circumference that is nowhere but their secrets a center that is everywhere.
Author’s Postscript: The reader is asked to indulge the author’s experiment in the above essay, wherein large portions of the narrative are completely fictitious as a Borgesian homage, but where all of the ideas at least are intended to be very real (insomuch as anything is).