This review was originally a submission to Adam Mastroianni’s 2024 blog post competition. I spent a lot of time on it, and I am very proud of the result! After much procrastination, I am finally posting it here in very slightly edited form.
A note on spoilers
This is a review of fiction; as such, it contains spoilers. Should you care? I usually do, but in this book’s case, I don’t think they really matter.1
Also, there is a minor spoiler for the sixth season of Game of Thrones.
PART I: INTRODUCTION
This is a review of Mirrors (Los espejos), a short story collection by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It contains 11 short stories:
The Heart and the Feather, which is about a dream in which the Egyptian god Anubis judges the soul of a manipulative newspaper astrologer,
The Library of Babel, which is about an endless library that contains every possible book,
Windmills, which is about an attempted introduction of Tibetan prayer wheels to Europe,
Plato’s Invention, which is about the hypothesis that Plato was a fictional character invented by Socrates,
Rights of the Author, which is about a copyright-themed murder mystery novel,
The Genius, which is about how several Industrial Revolution inventions were actually created by a character in someone’s lucid dream,
Poor Niagara!, which is about a gambler who believes to have seen an omen on the wings of a butterfly,
Parasites, which is about a dictatorship mandating the correct interpretation of a poem,
The Trap, which is about a fairy tale library that contains magical secrets,
Siamese Chess, which is about a chess–theater hybrid,
Tragedy, which is about a method actor who gets too deep into character,
and Mirrors, a poem about mirror-induced horror.
This review is structured as follows: I first give a short outline of Borges’ life and work, then in Part II I overview each item in the collection individually with some minor commentary, and finally, in Part III I attempt an analysis of the book as a whole, in which I try to argue that it provides insights on the role and value of art.
…well, that was the plan, anyway. Fair warning: Part III is an essay in the original meaning of the word, i.e. I started writing it without knowing where it would end up, and so eventually I ended up digressing quite a lot from the book proper, to the extent that I hesitate to even call it a book analysis. I still think the result is Borgesian in nature, and I’m glad that I wrote it, but I admit that it would be totally fair to describe it as “the reviewer uses the book as a springboard to talk about his own ideas”. If that sort of thing is not your cup of tea, maybe skip that part.
Borges, the man
In high school literature class, students are required to learn biographical facts about the authors they read. Do these facts really matter? Shouldn’t the work speak for itself? Well, it’s debatable. Personally, I think they matter enough to answer questions that naturally occur when reading the text, such as “hey I read a story with a similar idea before, is one of them inspired by the other?” or “what’s with this guy’s obsession with Buenos Aires, is he, like, from there?”
That said, virtually everything I know about Borges’ biography comes from Wikipedia. I cannot offer you any kind of deep narrative about his life, only some facts that I personally find interesting. So here’s a listicle:
12 Things You Didn’t Know About Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (1899–1986) was arguably Argentina’s most famous writer.
He lived most of his life in Argentina, though he spent both his youth and his old age in Switzerland.
In addition to writing fiction, he was also a poet, essayist, translator, lecturer and librarian.
There is an infamous (and likely apocryphal) anecdote about his own father sending him to a brothel to lose his virginity, which greatly traumatized him.
Politically, Borges was somewhat of a conservative/classical-liberal centrist who strongly disliked both Nazis and Communists. When a fascist publication asked him about his Jewish roots, he, not unlike Tolkien, responded saying that he regretted not having any.
He was a critic of the left-wing authoritarian populist president Juan Perón2, whose election caused Borges to be demoted from librarian to poultry inspector.
He personally knew the man who would later become Pope Francis.
He became completely blind at 55, but never learned Braille, instead having people read to him and write down his words.
He was married twice, at ages 68 and 89. Neither marriage lasted more than 3 years.
He received honors from, among other people, the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and Queen Elizabeth II. While he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he never won.3
He made explicit references to his contemporaries H. P. Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien.
If you’re an old Slate Star Codex reader, you might have at one point seen Borges’ classification of animals (“embalmed ones”, “those belonging to the Emperor”, etc.) used as the basis for the blogroll.
Borges, the writer
Borges wrote short stories, essays and poetry. He never published any long-form fiction.
Here are some common elements of his stories:
First, magical realism, which is when you have prose describing a realistic, grounded, boring world which nonetheless has some mystical and supernatural elements.
Isn’t that just fantasy? Some would say so.4 But it tends to lack common fantasy elements, like worldbuilding and grand heroic narratives. A Borges story doesn’t explain where the magic comes from, or why it works the way it does, or how much of it there is (and there usually appears to be very little). Think less “only this sword can defeat the Dark Lord” and more “this book seems to have an infinite number of pages, how weird is that!”5
Borges’ work can also be classified as philosophical fiction. The term “novel of ideas” is unsuitable but only because he never wrote any novels – his short stories are very much “of ideas”. Most of them explore a particular concept, gimmick or what-if about the nature of time, space, knowledge, identity, paradoxes and other philosophical subject matter. What if you had a perfect memory? What if you could meet yourself from the future? What if you were a character in someone else’s dream?
Isn’t that just science fiction? In a narrow sense, no. There are few descriptions of future societies affected by technological changes.6 Still, I think science fiction fans will find a familiar approach to narrative focus in Borges. The umbrella term for sci-fi and fantasy, speculative fiction, is very apt – Borges definitely speculates a great deal.
In addition to that, many Borges stories constitute metafiction – fiction about fiction. They often explore the nature of books, authorship, storytelling, originality and other similar themes. Often it seems as if Borges had an idea for a totally plausible and enjoyable book, but then decided he’d rather pretend it already existed. From the Jorge’s mouth:
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.
Because Borges’ metafiction often involves an irreverent, boundary-breaking approach to literary form, he is sometimes classified as a postmodern author, although he started writing several decades before the postmodern literary movement proper.
There is another feature of Borges’ writing that I struggle to put into words, possibly because it is redundant with some of the others mentioned above. Even so, it feels worth emphasizing. What I have in mind is that Borges is thematically focused on artifices and maps (as in “the map is not the territory”7). He seems to have liked writing precisely about manmade inventions and manmade ways of seeing the world: encyclopedias, riddles, folklore, labyrinths, fictions, urban legends, alphabets, paradoxes and, of course, mirrors.
Finally, a significant number of Borges stories are largely plotless. They describe a person, thing or setting, but involve them in few events.
Borges and I
I first came to like Borges in the first half of the 2010s, back when I had a big interest in the relationship between religion and the theory of evolution.8 I was reading some blog or website on this topic and it brought up Daniel Dennett’s idea of the Library of Mendel (a hypothetical library that contains every possible genetic sequence), which is itself based on the Library of Babel (a hypothetical library that contains every possible book). The latter concept intrigued me, and I learned that it came from a Borges story with the same name (that also appears in Mirrors). I read it and was blown away.
But actually, I first came to know Borges a bit earlier, which is when I was a first year undergrad English major. A literature professor of mine included Borges in her syllabus. We read some of his work, but it didn’t leave an impression on me, at all.
It would be generally wrong for me to disparage said professor here. We weren’t each other’s favorite teacher/student, but from her classes I ended up learning many ideas about literary theory that stayed with me to this day; some of them even made it into this review.9 In a way, this is actually kind of a prodigal son moment on my part.
Yet there is one thing about her I can definitely be critical of, and that is the first impression she gave me of Borges. She made him seem like some blind librarian poet from Argentina who was a Very Deep And Important Writer and who wrote about Subtle Intellectual Ideas. To a 19-year-old guy, that came off as the literary equivalent of eating your vegetables – healthy but lame.
It was like describing a Superman comic as a “story about an immigrant’s relationship with his new homeland”, which, yeah, is a true and meaningful part of Superman, but you can’t neglect mentioning the laser eyes!
Don’t be fooled. Borges is cool. Borges is entertaining. You can have Borges for dessert.
I hope nothing I’ve written so far has made me come off as a Borges expert. I have read maybe half of all of his fiction (which really isn’t that much; for a lifelong author, his output had been relatively sparse). This is because I really like variety and novelty, and would usually rather explore an unfamiliar author than delve deeper into the work of a familiar one. Borges is one of my favorite writers, and I treat even him this way. And I think that’s a perfectly acceptable approach to reading, actually.10
I have one more story to share. For many years, I suffered from an insecurity about having lived a sheltered and insufficiently adventurous life. I felt like I owed it to myself to leave my home country of Lithuania and go on a trip to a different continent, so that I could see more of the world. For some reason, likely because of my appreciation of Borges, I had the idée fixe that my destination should be Argentina.
And so in 2023, I actually went. It was totally worth it – I still sometimes get chills when I spontaneously remember that I walked on a different hemisphere!
Anyway, in Buenos Aires, city buses don’t automatically stop at bus stops; instead, they have to be hailed like taxis. One day, I was waiting at my stop, a bit nervous about the possibility of accidentally missing my ride. I am of the pacing sort, so “waiting” here means “walking in circles”.
And then I saw someone standing in a store window. He was a thin, solemn old man who somehow looked familiar.
I didn’t want to stare, so I turned away and kept pacing. The next time I came back, he was no longer there.
For just a moment, I thought to myself:
“Was that him?”
PART II: THE BOOK
Mirrors is a collection of Borges’ fiction published in 1978. It spans several decades of his work, and includes reprinted stories, previously unpublished (arguably “trunk”) stories, one unfinished story, and one poem.
In addition to that, it also includes an introduction, a foreword, and so on, but I have little to say about that, so I’ll just get right into the stories themselves.
NB: many of the stories in the collection feature a fictionalized version of JLB as the main character and/or narrator. To avoid confusion, I will henceforth refer to the author as Borges, and to the character as “Borges”.
The Heart and the Feather
In this story, “Borges” recounts a dream in which he ends up in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife, awaiting his soul’s judgment by the god Anubis.
He sees many other souls in line to be judged, including a man whose face “resembled that of either Boccaccio or Petrarch”.11 Most of the account, however, is about the judgment of a particular newspaper astrologer from Jujuy Province.
Said man is accused of printing fraudulent horoscopes in pursuit of a selfish goal. Apparently he had been lusting after his neighbor’s wife, whom he knew to be a subscriber to his newspaper and a reader of his work. So he devised a plan whereby he would continue writing vague, noncommittal Forer effect astrological forecasts, but would occasionally start adding hyperspecific pieces of advice (e.g. a warning against getting into vehicles whose last two license plate digits are both zeros).
Most of these latter predictions were nonsensical, except those which corresponded with the woman’s star sign (Sagittarius), in which case he started predicting eerie “coincidences” that he later made sure to have come true (e.g. first her horoscope said she would receive a call from a wrong number falsely informing her of her mother’s death, and then he made that call himself).
After believing to have sufficiently manipulated her into increasing her credulity in astrology, he began setting her up for a future encounter with a charming mysterious stranger, and eventually ended up playing the role of said stranger and seducing her.
The astrologer makes a long defense before Anubis’ judgment in which he claims that all newspaper horoscopes are lies anyway so he wasn’t adding to the sum total of human deception by manipulating said lies to his own benefit; that it was the woman’s own responsibility as a modern educated person not to fall for obvious nonsense; that he never could have seduced her if she didn’t find him attractive and didn’t have a prior interest in adultery, so his newspaper scam was basically an insignificant part of their affair; and that newspaper astrology is basically an artistic endeavor, so condemning him would be tantamount to condemning all painters and novelists for their “lies”. Upon hearing this last part, “Borges” experiences deep terror as his eyes meet Anubis’ “dark canine gaze”.
“Borges” here expects a complex moral counterargument about how not all lies are equally harmful, how intentions matter more than incidental consequences etc. But Anubis merely claims that regular newspaper horoscopes are actually literally true, and as reliable as the weather forecasts printed in those same newspapers. The man’s heart outweighs the feather of truth, he is condemned, and the dream ends.
A very funny element of the story is how, throughout his account, an increasingly nervous “Borges” tries to convince himself that his dream did not have supernatural significance, and tries to connect elements from the dream to his recent mundane experiences (that would later be transformed by his subconscious) in increasingly farfetched ways.
So he remembers how he recently pet a street dog (hence Anubis); how he discussed the Spanish word for ballpoint pen with a visiting academic colleague from Mexico and patriotically defended the “proper” term for this Argentine invention12 – the Argentines call it bolígrafo (lit. ball-graph) while the Mexicans say pluma (lit. feather, hence the feather on the scales); and how he was recently reminiscing about his childhood in Switzerland, the country whose national hero is William Tell, a legendary marksman (hence Sagittarius). It’s interesting how this takes the typical criticism of astrology and similar practices (i.e. it allegedly having a bias towards finding supernatural meaning in random connections) and inverts it (by instead having a bias towards finding naturalistic meaninglessness).
The Library of Babel
This is one of those stories that describe a world in some detail but don’t really have a plot as such.
In it, the entire known universe is a seemingly endless library consisting of a series of interconnected hexagonal rooms. Society consists of “librarians” who are born, live and die in the hexagons. Every bookshelf contains books written in a seemingly unknown language, until the librarians discover that they actually contain every possible permutation of the letters a-z, the comma, the period and the space. In other words, the library contains every possible book that can be written with the above symbols – the Iliad, Mein Kampf, the lost plays of Shakespeare, the war manual Sun Tzu would have written if he had access to military drones, the source code for Microsoft PowerPoint 97, this review, an accurate biography of every person who will ever live, billions of inaccurate biographies, and an ocean of gibberish. Once the librarians realize this, some of them are overjoyed as they know that some book somewhere contains any kind of knowledge they desire, yet others realize that their chances of finding said knowledge amidst the gibberish are virtually nil. Borges goes on to discuss the philosophical implications of all of the above, as well as various features of librarian society.
I’ll be honest: The Library of Babel might just be my favorite piece of fiction ever. I read it a decade or so ago and it changed the way I think of such concepts as language, knowledge and invention. My mind sometimes comes back to it when I consider some epistemological question – instead of asking “is it possible to answer such-and-such question?”, I might ask “is the answer to such-and-such question somewhere on some shelf in the Library of Babel?”. I cannot recommend it enough.
Here’s the crazy part: Borges’ story was published in 1941, but in 2015, someone made the library into a real thing! That’s right, a digital version of the Library of Babel exists at libraryofbabel.info and it works exactly the same as the original, with hexagons, shelves, and everything. Yes, the website really contains every possible text, including this very paragraph!
Plato’s Invention
Historians generally agree that Socrates was a real historical figure, though there is a fringe, generally rejected claim that he was a purely fictional character invented by Plato. But it doesn’t end there! In this story, “Borges” discusses an even fringier hypothesis by the Italian historian Eugenio Migliorini which claims that it was Plato who was the fictional character.
According to this version, Socrates was an impatient, arrogant person who decried all types of formal education of his time and wanted to be considered the wisest man in the city without putting much effort into earning that kind of reputation. After insulting every respected man in Athens, disrupting several public events and generally being very annoying, Socrates was exiled by the Athenians to the city of Atarneus (located in present day Turkey). There he took the name Plato and wrote a series of dialogues in which he presented himself as a rational, ever-right teacher who was martyred for speaking uncomfortable truths.
“Borges” pretty confidently agrees with the researchers who view Migliorini’s hypothesis as shoddy, mostly because it fails to account for other evidence of Socrates, such as Xenophon et al. He himself adds that, in addition to being false, it is also uninteresting as it fails to fully and elegantly invert the “Socrates myth”, i.e. according to the “original” myth, Plato was a real person who invented Socrates, meanwhile in Migliorini’s account, Socrates was a real person who did not only invent Plato, but also had to invent a highly distorted version of himself. Thus the symmetry is broken, and Migliorini’s story isn’t even a fun falsehood to speculate about.
This one definitely feels like a trunk story. While I didn’t hate it, it might be my least favorite of the collection. So why was it included? My guess would be that Borges came up with kind of a lame story, and then tried to salvage it by reframing it as a story about bad stories, drawing the reader’s attention to what it is that makes certain stories underwhelming. And hey, that sort of works!
Windmills
A 15th century trader from the Netherlands (at the time mostly a part of the Holy Roman Empire) ends up traveling to Tibet. There he becomes fascinated by and essentially converts to Buddhism (though he maintains its compatibility with Christianity, making his faith a kind of syncretism).
He is especially impressed by Tibetan prayer wheels. In case you didn’t know: these are devices that have the mantra aum mani padme hum (“jewel in the lotus”) written on them and, according to believers, generate good karma when they spin, just as well as a person saying the prayer. Having a prior interest in technology, he is highly intrigued by how worship can be effectively automated, and comes up with what he sees as an improvement on the invention.
After returning to the Netherlands, he uses his trading fortunes to construct many new windmills. He then uses the newly invented printing press to print many pages of aum mani padme hum in the smallest possible font, and hides the pages under the windmill blades. In his mind, this generates much more good karma much more quickly than the wheels in Tibet.
His plan is discovered after one of his mills is struck by lightning, which ends up revealing what’s inside. Urged by the furious local people who see the lightning reveal as a providential sign, he is prosecuted for heresy by the authorities. However, being a previously influential and well-liked man, he is afforded a fair trial with legal representation.
His legal defender argues that the concept of karma in general and of “jewel in the lotus” in particular are incoherent, and a statement needs to be coherent to constitute any kind of meaningful claim, including a heretical one. His client’s actions, he says, are no more offensive than the proposition “the Swiss sea harbor is ill-maintained”.
The court is convinced by this and the man is declared not guilty, although he is still required to remove the mantra from the windmills. The book the story originates from, which is revealed to be a work of Dutch legal history, celebrates this as a great victory of juristic rhetoric.
Mentioned briefly and in passing is the arguably much more interesting13 story of the monk who realized that because written language is an arbitrary human convention, any kind of symbol can be declared to represent any kind of meaning. He then dedicates his life to a meditation practice whereby he tries to convince himself that the spinning stars in the sky are letters that represent the Buddhist mantra, which should then create a giant celestial prayer wheel that generates arbitrarily large amounts of good karma. It is unknown why his plan didn’t work, though one account makes the bold claim that simulating all of this information in his mind caused it to overflow with karmic energy, which made his physical body literally explode.
Rights of the Author
“Borges” reviews a murder mystery novel written during the Second World War by the British author Charles Corney. It details the first case of the aspirationally recurring Holmes-like detective Ildephonsus Tower, nicknamed “the Tower” on account of being very tall.
The Tower investigates the death of a beloved but early retired children’s author. The police rule it was an accident by spider bite, but her sister suspects murder. The suspects are: a humorless schoolteacher who believes the victim’s books corrupt children, a patent clerk neighbor who denies having had an affair with the victim, a failed writer accusing her of plagiarism, her bitter ex-fiancé, the local chemist possibly involved in selling unauthorized drugs, and the sister herself.
The Tower’s investigation leads him to the discovery that she was indeed murdered by means of a mixture of synthetic chemicals that both attracts venomous spiders and causes them to be aggressive. He then reveals that the chemist is actually a German spy, and while the Tower does ensure his capture, this is actually a red herring with nothing to do with the murder. The real murderer is the patent clerk who recognized great value in the victim’s work and wanted to hasten its expiry into the public domain, which could only be done by hastening her death.
Corney himself waived the copyright to his novel, suggesting that he might also be apprehensive of being murdered for similar reasons. It was, of course, a publicity stunt; he still released a copyrighted “official” version of the book whose first run was fully printed shortly before the waiving, with the publisher being contractually bound to never print the copyright-free version.
The stunt backfired as it ended up spoiling the ending of the story; though the book might have also been unpopular for other reasons – it was perceived by the wartime British public as tone deaf for asking the reader to sympathize with a rich, independent victim as well as for exonerating a traitor (in a way). Also, there are no deadly spiders native to the UK.
And so, Corney’s debut novel was also his final one. After the war, he ended up opening a perfume shop and was never involved in publishing again.
The Genius
“Borges” discusses the discovery of an 18th century dream journal belonging to an unnamed Earl of Leicester.
At first, the dreams described in the journal are vague and random, but over time they become more lucid and coherent. Eventually the Earl starts being visited by a bright young woman named Joan Hargreaves.
Joan gives him ideas for great industrial inventions; however, she insists on taking credit. Even though she realizes that, as a daimon, she could not benefit from any fame or fortune that her inventions might bring, she still thinks it unfair for the Earl to falsely call himself inventor.
The way they end up resolving this is that the Earl ends up constructing the false identity of “James Hargreaves” (a female name would have attracted too much attention) under which he patents all of Joan’s inventions, and whom history credits as the true inventor. He also names her most influential invention, the spinning jenny, after Joan.
The journal ends abruptly. The story doesn’t say so outright, but it heavily implies that the Countess of Leicester discovered that her husband had been regularly engaging in dream sex with his imaginary girlfriend, and she wasn’t having it. “Borges” is mournful of other inventions by Joan that may have thus been lost.
Poor Niagara!
The main character of this story is a junior diplomat in Eleanor Roosevelt’s entourage during her diplomatic trip to Brazil.
Despite projecting the persona of a highly rational, skeptical man, he is actually very superstitious, and a compulsive gambler to boot. Unsurprisingly, he is in debt and wants a big win to pay it off. He contemplates making a bet on an upcoming high-stakes automobile race.
During the group’s excursion to Iguaçu Falls, he is mesmerized by the beauty of the waterfall and its natural surroundings. This puts him in a mystical state of mind. He asks providence for a sign, and soon enough, a butterfly with a double-digit number on its wings lands on a railing next to him.
He is elated. At his next opportunity, he rushes to a telephone to place an international call to his bookie, asking him to put all his money on the automobile whose number matches that of the butterfly.
The story is unfinished; we never learn whether the man won his bet. Perhaps Borges felt it was too mean-spirited and too much of a “dumb gringo” story, or too reliant on what are essentially inside jokes. Still, I would argue that it wouldn’t be too uncharacteristic for him to write an ending where the man actually wins his bet, despite how irrational it might seem.
In case you’re wondering: the numbered butterfly is real. It’s called Anna’s eighty-eight (Diaethria anna) and it looks like this:
The original title of this story is also in English, and is a reference to a (probably apocryphal) anecdote in which Eleanor Roosevelt utters this phrase upon being faced with the majesty of Iguaçu Falls for the first time.
Parasites
This story takes place in an unnamed (possibly fictional) Latin American country under authoritarian rule. The country’s Minister for Education gives a speech in which he quotes a line from the poem Our Home by the beloved poet Julio Tovian. The original line is “and you will invite the parasites to your table”, and the context in which it appears is the Minister’s condemnation of useless and disloyal journalists and academics; he urges that the country “kick out the parasites”.
This serves as a catalyst for the formation of a group of intelligentsia dissidents calling themselves the Parasites. They choose this name as they argue that the parasites in Tovian’s poem are named so with bantersome endearment and that the true meaning of the line has to do with beloved guests, not freeloaders.
The Parasites face persecution for many reasons, the most salient among them being their interpretation of the poem. The author, the government argues, has clearly intended “parasites” as a moral condemnation, and by appropriating the name, the Parasites are perverting the meaning of the artwork, and spitting in the face of the author and of the national culture as a whole.
Eventually Tovian himself, who is very reclusive but still alive, comes out saying that the Parasites’ interpretation of the poem is more or less in line with his own – he did intend the “parasites” to be beloved guests, playing on the original Greek meaning of parásitos (“person who eats at another’s table”).14 He presents written evidence that he also thought this way when he was writing the poem over two decades ago.
This causes a great shock in society. In response, the government does a 180 whereby it accuses Tovian of being an eccentric old fool who misunderstands his own work, and insists that its interpretation of Our Home is still correct because the text means what it says, not what the author intended.
The theme of Parasites is authorial intent — how should we think about, if at all, about how the artist meant for the artwork to be understood?15 In particular, it is about people’s views on authorial intent being self-serving and biased. It reminds me of how people discuss the question of whether The Matrix is a transgender allegory.
It seems that the people who really wanted it to be one insisted on interpreting the film based on evidence from the film itself, while those who didn’t like this interpretation pointed to a lack of confirmation from the filmmakers. But much later, when one of the directors came out saying that yes, the transgender themes were actually intended (sort of), both sides switched approaches – the proponents of the trans interpretation started pointing to the interviews as indisputable evidence, while the opponents took a “the author is dead” view.
…at least I think that’s what happened. All of this is just an impression by someone who’s been very casually paying attention to the discourse around the film over the years; it could straight up be a misrepresentation. I do, however, think it’s reasonable to believe that there is at least a temptation to pick one’s approach to the question of authorial intent based on one’s preferred interpretation and one’s politics. So watch out for that bias!16
The Trap
A Borges story about libraries and labyrinths? Must be a días ending in -es! (Or in -o. Yeah, this joke doesn’t translate.)
This one is about one of the stories from Antoine Galland’s French translation of One Thousand and One Nights, called The Sorcerer’s Library. “Borges” considers the story an interpolation by Galland himself, possibly based on a Sephardi morality tale about how popular literature of the time might tempt young people away from studying scripture.
The story is told by a poor village scribe (in this context, basically a man who makes his living reading and writing letters and simple documents for a majority illiterate community).17 A long time ago, he says, there lived a sorcerer who, through many years of study, had learned to perform great feats of magic, such as making saffron rain from the sky and commanding rocks to rearrange themselves into buildings.
These powers allowed the sorcerer to become quite rich and influential. Wary of this threat to his own power, the sultan forced him to take an oath to share his knowledge with the realm.
The stingy and cunning sorcerer devised a plan. He declared that he would build a great library filled with magical books. He then called for poets from across the country, supposedly for their skill in the art of writing, to help him with preserving his magical knowledge on parchment.
As intended, what ended up happening was that the poets, feeling creatively stifled by boring magical science, ended up taking great creative liberties, thus distorting beyond usefulness the information they were supposed to transmit.
The sorcerer also wrote down accurate magical instructions himself and put them on the library shelves (unmarked). Thus, he was successful in both fulfilling the wording of his oath and keeping his ideas inaccessible. Any reader in the library would most likely fall for the trap of reading false but engaging books written by the poets, and never finding the boring but true magical texts. Thus the library became a labyrinth – not of walls, but of ideas.
Even though it eventually fell into obscurity, says the storyteller scribe, the library still exists and daring seekers after knowledge still journey far to attempt discovering its secrets. He himself was one such seeker, but failed to navigate the labyrinth and filled his mind with useless false ideas until he couldn’t learn anything else. As a kind of ironic punishment, he can now only spend his days reading and writing texts that are both boring and unimportant.
There’s also a story-within-a-story about a deceptive magical rock which appears to most as an emerald of great value; however, the night after acquiring it, the new possessor dreams of being mocked by baboons, and in the morning they wake up to see their new treasure having revealed its true form as a worthless pebble. “Borges” remarks on the paradox here: the fake emerald’s power of illusion is so amazing and useful that even someone who knows exactly what it is might pay a fortune for it, making it not so worthless after all.18
As suits a fairy tale, I think The Sorcerer’s Library actually has a pretty good moral! There’s this very optimistic idea about education which claims that schools could be greatly improved if they a) taught subjects that students are actually passionate about and b) used innovative, fun methods carried out by charismatic teachers. And there is some truth to that.
But my experience working in education says that even if you do all of the above, some major patches of boredom are still unavoidable. If you’re a medical student, you might be passionate about helping people, but you’re almost certainly not passionate about memorizing the names of all 206 human bones, and you can’t be a good doctor without doing that! If you don’t realize this about whatever you’re studying, you might not make it in the labyrinth of ideas.
Siamese Chess
Here “Borges” discusses a variant of chess played in 17th century Siam (present day Thailand).
The game is a kind of mixture of chess and theater played in front of an audience during big feasts hosted by kings, noblemen and other big shots. Two storytellers take turns moving red and black chess pieces (either player may move either color pieces) and then interpreting their move in some kind of narrative manner. While the rules for piece movement are strict (though lenient judges may permit entertaining exceptions), interpretation is freeform and limited only by the players’ creativity.
So a typical move might look like this: a storyteller captures the black Lady with the red Ship, and then proclaims: “Behold, the courageous sailor has freed the princess from her captivity!”
Storytellers are generally expected to make their contributions to the same shared narrative and to not contradict facts established by the other player; that said, some degree of tug of war is acceptable.
The game has no set end goal, rather, the judge (usually the aforementioned big shot host or his guest of honor) awards victory to the person who told the best story in the best way.
While, as said before, there are no strict rules for move interpretation, over time, some conventional interpretations emerged; e.g. the King typically represents a monarch or someone’s father, while the Sun typically represents a great battle or the passage of many years. There is an anecdote about a storyteller who supposedly made a move which he interpreted unconventionally (“the virtue of the people is corrupted by vice”) but whose conventional interpretation would have been “the son kills his father”; this caused the rumoredly patricidal judge to be visibly unnerved; later, the storyteller was murdered. “Borges” considers this a Shakespeare-inspired urban legend.
By the early 18th century, the game declined in popularity as storytellers started adding increasingly great amounts of spectacle into the game (including music, stunts, fireworks and trained monkeys), as more judges tended to grant more rules exceptions, and as it became an open secret that most popular storytellers started playing rigged games so as to increase their entertainment value and therefore their chances of being hired again.
Eventually, all of this led to the chess elements being dropped from the game entirely and most players pivoting into regular performance art.
Tragedy
Using newspaper archives and personal correspondence, “Borges” puts together the story of Andrew Fleet (originally Andrew Bylinkiewicz), an ambitious American film actor from the 1950s.
Fleet starts out in theater and becomes known as a prodigy and an actor’s actor. Despite his disdain for the superficiality and vanity of Hollywood, he nonetheless seems interested in breaking into film so as to bring his art to a greater number of people. And so, despite expressing skepticism in the artistic integrity of big studio films, he accepts the lead role in MGM’s Moonlight Sonata, a Beethoven biopic.
During the film’s pre-production, Fleet leans hard into method acting. He starts adopting Beethoven’s mannerisms, improves his piano skills significantly and works on his German pronunciation (for a film that’s going to be in English!). He starts plugging his ears, and, according to some of the less credible sources, ends up developing a psychosomatic form of deafness.
Eventually Fleet, who now only responds to Ludwig 24/7, walks on set. The director, the crew and the rest of the cast, having been annoyed at his method acting antics for a long time, are expecting to at least get to see an impressive performance. But they are to be disappointed. Right after the AD yells “action!”, Fleet becomes frightened, immediately goes off script, and starts panically trying to insist to all the characters in the scene that he is an American film actor stuck in 19th century Austria who wants to go home. When he hears “cut!”, he goes back into character again.
This happens a few more times – Ludwig when the cameras aren’t rolling, Andrew when they are. Nothing can budge him. Soon enough, MGM cancels the production and destroys any remaining footage out of embarrassment.
Fleet, meanwhile, keeps insisting he is Beethoven, which eventually leads to him being institutionalized. He gets better in a few months of mostly talk therapy with little need for pharmaceuticals, and returns to his critically acclaimed but otherwise obscure theatrical career.
The Fleet story is seen by some as a demonstration of the dangers of method acting and the Stanislavski system, the overapplication of which apparently drove Fleet insane. A minority of crackpottish commentators contemplate the possibility that no insanity really occurred, and Fleet really did switch minds with a Beethoven from an alternate universe for a while.
“Borges”, meanwhile, finds his quick recovery suspicious and accuses Fleet of planning the entire affair as a kind of pretentious piece of performance art. According to him, the actor intended on carrying on with his shtick for a long time, but immediately chickened out after seeing the inside of a 1950s insane asylum.
Mirrors, the poem
Does it make sense to try to summarize a one page poem? Maybe not, but I’ll do it anyway.19
Mirrors, including “unintentional” mirrors like still water and polished wood, are scary. This is because they multiply the world, and because they make you think that you yourself might be a reflection. Also, dreams kind of work the same way, and so does representational art (like the theater play seen by Hamlet’s Claudius), so, in a way, these also are a kind of mirror.
This sort of poetry uses an artistic process called defamiliarization. This is when an artwork compels you to look at something familiar with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before. This can be done by indirect, unconventional descriptions (e.g. describing mirrors as “those dimensioned cabinets of glass”), an unusual painting style (e.g. Picasso’s cubism), or just by the mere choice to portray something and contextualize it as an artwork (I would argue that when it comes to found object art (such as My Bed), defamiliarization is sometimes virtually all it does).
Why defamiliarize a mirror? In this case, it may be to point out how weird it is that you yourself think of mirrors in this way sometimes. Perhaps as a child you pretended that your reflection is another kid. But even as an adult, you might give yourself a pep talk by talking to the mirror surface as if it was someone else. “You got this!”
From a physics point of view, there is no difference between looking at someone directly vs. through a mirror – both cases involve light hitting a surface and then getting reflected into your eyeballs. But this is hard to accept for the human brain, which at some level thinks “if I’m looking at something then that something is not me”, almost tautologically. And so we end up alieving in mirror people.
I think this is a cool insight, and defamiliarization helped me arrive at it.
PART III: ANALYSIS (of sorts)
So what is the book Mirrors about? It’s mostly about art.
Rights of the Author, Parasites, The Trap, Siamese Chess and Tragedy are pretty clearly about art and the people who make it. Some of the others are more of a stretch but I would still count them: The Heart and the Feather (which is about dreams and lying, both of which are fiction-like), The Library of Babel (about books, fictional or not), The Genius (also about dreams, and about imaginary characters) and Mirrors (about the relationship between mirrors, dreams (again) and fiction).20
Why make so much art about art?
I would claim that while Mirrors-the-poem defamiliarizes mirrors, Mirrors-the-book defamiliarizes art itself.
Defamiliarization, again, is when an artwork causes the viewer to look at a familiar subject as if it was actually unfamiliar. What would happen if we tried looking at art, as a whole, with fresh eyes? Let’s try it!
In the remainder of this review, I will make an attempt to answer the question: is art actually good?
Art demarcation
I will be using a broad and inclusive definition of art. All poems, paintings, tattoos, songs, ballets, video games, NFTs, etc. etc. are art. If it’s good, it’s “good art”, not “true art”; if it sucks, it’s “bad art”, not “fake art” or “not art”. To me, this approach seems more useful than the alternative.
Art fans and critics
Some art lasts centuries. Homer’s epic poems have long outlived the historical events that inspired them (if any).
The same is true about the reputations of some artists. You probably can’t name many Renaissance merchants, military generals or athletes, but you know at least a few Renaissance writers and sculptors.
This may be for good reasons. Some people go as far as to say that art is so important as to be among the ultimate purposes of human civilization. Among them are John Adams:
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
and C. S. Lewis:
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
And Borges himself seems to agree, at least when it comes to the art of literature in particular. His arguably best-known quote is “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”. At the age of 61 he describes the sum of his life experiences thus:
Few things have happened to me, and I have read a great many. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worth remembering than Schopenhauer’s thought or the music of England’s words.
And in the eyes of the world, it seems to have been worth it. People who praise Borges are impressed not only by his creativity, but also his broad erudition.21 “Guy who read a lot of books” is a significant, positive part of his legacy.
So it seems that art has a pretty stellar reputation. While there are many people who will criticize particular artworks or types of art, it’s hard to find people who will attack art-as-a-whole. Besides Plato, who accused artists of leading people away from the truth of the Forms,22 who else is there?
I suppose the portrayal of the poets in The Trap, who write entertaining falsehoods that tempt people away from boring truths, qualifies.
Another fictional example: Randyll Tarly, who chastises his son Samwell for being, well, a nerd:
You managed to stay soft and fat, your nose buried in books, spending your life reading about the achievements of better men. I’ll wager you still can’t sit a horse or wield a sword...23
It’s a bit of a stretch to include this quote as an example of anti-art sentiment, as the books about the “achievements of better men” are here presumably nonfictional (though if they weren’t, Randyll would probably be even more disappointed). I included it because I have to admit that it hits a nerve. For someone writing a 15,000+ word review of a book by an author who died before I was born, I’m not even that bookish, and yet even I’ve had moments in my life where it felt like other people are out there living while I sit here reading. Even typing out this review feels a bit alienating.
At least Samwell Tarly is generally seen as a heroic, unfairly maligned character. The same can’t be said about Tatsuhiro Sato, the protagonist of Welcome to the NHK! He is a hikikomori and an otaku, i.e. he is an unemployed antisocial recluse who watches anime and plays video games all day. The lifestyle of Sato (and of his real life counterparts) is generally viewed as pathetic and meaningless.
So.
Borges reads the Western canon all day, and that makes him admirable.
Sato watches anime all day, and makes him a loser.
Something’s not right here. Aren’t both engaged in art? What’s the difference?
“The difference is that Borges used his literary erudition to become a successful writer” – true, he did. But surely we aren’t saying that that is a necessary justification for art? Surely engagement with good art isn’t meaningful only if it inspires you to make your own?
“The difference is that the Western canon is made up of great art, while anime is trash” – that’s debatable, to say the least, but let’s grant it. Perhaps Sato does spend his life engaging with inferior art. But it’s still art! Is it really so bad that it’s worse than no art at all?
Let’s consider this. What would life be like without art?
An artless life
For an example of this, we might call to mind someone like 1984’s Winston Smith. He spends his days in environments that are poor and filthy, or else dull and sterile. Any kind of art that isn’t state propaganda or mindless mass entertainment is illegal. If you read the book, you know that world is dystopian for many other reasons, but for this reason as well.
Indeed, Smith’s artless life is unenviable. But let’s imagine the life of another man, whom we’ll call Neville Jones. Jones lives in a house that overlooks Iguaçu Falls. Whenever he wants, he can travel to the most scenic locations on Earth – canyons, forests, dunes, river deltas, fjords, mountains, lakes – and see their flora and fauna up close. He shares his bed with a uniquely gorgeous woman (or several women, or several men, or what have you). He regularly clashes with some of the toughest fighters in the world, and he enjoys defeating them, which he always does. He has an obedient pet tiger who follows him around. But he rarely, if ever, consumes any art.
Jones’ life is, of course, not a plausible one. But that aside, would we really say that he is missing out on Michelangelo’s take on the human body, Bruegel’s take on landscapes and FromSoftware’s take on melee combat? Isn’t it at least tempting to say that Neville Jones’ life is so good that he doesn’t need art?
And if that is true, then why did anyone ever pursue a life of art, instead of a life like his?
After all, art didn’t always exist. Where did it come from?
Connoisseur genetics
There’s an annoying practice on the internet of when someone who never formally studied either evolution or psychology tries to speculate about some aspect of human behavior or society from an evo-psych perspective, which results in them coming up with some just-so story about how people do XYZ because “we’re just wired that way by evolution, bro”.
I am about to do just that.
You would probably be wise to assume that the just-so stories I’m about to present are likely to be wildly inaccurate in the particulars. At most, I am hoping that the big picture I am gesturing towards is at least vaguely accurate.
To reflect my own dumbed down understanding, I will be using dumbed down language. Here goes:
Why are you the way that you are?
It is because inside you is a caveman who acquired certain traits that helped him survive and reproduce during the prehistoric era.
You see faces on the moon because the caveman needed quick facial recognition to quickly detect predators.
You think rotten fish smells bad because eating it was likely to kill the caveman as he had no access to modern medicine.
You are good at outsmarting your opponent when you play chess because the caveman had to be good at outsmarting the wild hare he was trying to catch.
You get seasick because the caveman thinks that the world you see swiveling back and forth while you’re on a boat is actually a poison-induced hallucination, and he wants you to throw the poison up.
And so on.
Aesthetics might also work like this.
You think kittens are cute because the caveman thinks they look like human babies.
You think a meadow is beautiful because it is the kind of place where the caveman is likely to find food.
You think music sounds good because it has a rhythm, and being excited by rhythmic sounds helps the caveman be on alert when hearing the footsteps of approaching predators.
But we can go even deeper.
Inside the caveman there is a demon monkey. The demon monkey does not care about survival or reproduction, it only cares about gratification.
In many situations, things that lead to gratification and things that lead to survival/reproduction are one and the same, and so the caveman and the demon monkey are indistinguishable.
It only becomes a relevant concept when we go outside of the prehistoric era and the rewards that used to be straightforwardly beneficial to the caveman and his tribe cease to be so.
In the jungle, any kind of sugar was a great source of energy, so eating as many sweet berries as you wanted was a good idea. But now the demon monkey wants to eat more dessert than could possibly be healthy.
In the jungle, it was a good idea to sometimes take small risks with potential great rewards. So the demon monkey will spend all of your savings on slot machines.
In the jungle, it was a good idea to hold on to useful items, as nearly all of them were scarce. But now the demon monkey makes you hoard old newspapers and cables in your house for years because you “might need them some day”.
I would argue that all seven deadly sins are manifestations of the demon monkey, i.e. they are all harmful side effects of adaptive traits. Wrath motivates you to fight threats or hunt prey. Sloth preserves scarce metabolic energy and allows you to freeload. Envy gives you a baseline of what’s achievable by a member of your tribe, and motivates you to take it away if possible. Pride motivates you to win status competitions. Greed, lust and gluttony – you get the idea.24
But there’s another entity to talk about. Inside the caveman, and beside the demon monkey, there’s also a crystal angel.
The crystal angel also doesn’t care about survival or reproduction except as a means to an end. It is a stowaway, a co-opter, a subverter, a servant of the goddess of everything else. It cares about the things that give value to survival, like friendship, love, philosophy, universal morality, and, of course, art.
In the jungle, it was useful to help out members of one’s tribe, but the crystal angel turned that into charities that help out strangers overseas.
In the jungle, it was useful to know how to count things, but the crystal angel turned that into the study and contemplation of the elegance of n-dimensional geometry.
In the jungle, as mentioned above, it was useful to pay attention to the rhythm of running animals, but the crystal angel turned that into symphonies that are totally unlike any sound in nature, and incomparably more beautiful.
Here’s the tricky part:
What the demon monkey and the crystal angel have in common is that they are both entities created by evolutionary processes but pursue goals that are orthogonal to said processes.
But where they differ is that… well, that the former is bad while the latter is good. Or, in other words, whether you designate something as monkey or angel depends not on their origin in evolutionary adaptation (as both of them share this origin), but on your moral values.
So, for example, traditionalists might say that contraceptive use and casual sex are demon monkey behaviors (an imperative to procreate has been perverted into hedonistic self-gratification) while progressives might respond that they’re actually crystal angel behaviors (reproductive burdens have been overcome, allowing people to pursue joy and self-empowerment).
I am, for all intents and purposes, not a moral relativist, and I don’t think disagreements like the one above are insoluble. But any solution has to be based on arguments that are not grounded in evolution. That is, it doesn’t make sense to either say “pursuit X is invalid solely because it is driven by evolutionary adaptation” or “pursuit Y is invalid solely because it is not driven by evolutionary adaptation”, as that would deny the existence of either the crystal angel or the demon monkey, and it seems that both of them demonstrably exist.
I agree with Nietzsche who says:
[T]here is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put, its actual application and integration into a system of goals; that anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it; everything which happens in the organic world is part of a process of overpowering, mastering, and, in turn, all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation, in the course of which the previous ‘meaning’ and ‘aim’ must necessarily be obscured or completely effaced.
So it’s not enough to know about the origin of art to understand if it’s actually good or not. Let’s instead look at its functions directly.
What does art actually do?
Art as a tool
Art lets us do useful things.
We can use it to communicate information. A most obvious example of this is how before photography, seeing a drawing or painting of something might have been the only way to find out how it looks. A less straightforward manner of art communication is persuasion, which is when an artwork exists to change people’s minds on some issue, such as when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin argued against slavery so well that it may have been one of the causes of the American Civil War.
An author might also use art as experimentation in order to obtain new information. The Belgian painter René Magritte did this to explore the relationships between ideas, words and images:
I’m sure you can come up with some other ways in which art can be more or less unambiguously useful.
Now that’s all well and good. But suppose that wasn’t necessary? Clearly there are non-artistic ways we can communicate, persuade and experiment. What if those worked better in more cases?
Neville Jones comes up to you and says “I don’t need art, I already get that knowledge from a magic black box with a button that says press to know stuff”. You quiz him, and indeed, he knows and understands many of the things that you thought could only be known and understood from art. Now what?
Digression: knowledge as a tool
Follow-up question: if we like art because it is a source of knowledge, why do we like knowledge? Why are we curious?
First answer that comes to mind: because knowledge is useful. If we know and understand things about the world, we can manipulate it to our advantage.
Sure enough, that’s true. But that brings us back to the question: what if we could get the benefit without the tool? What if we had a black box that gave us the same benefits that knowledge and understanding bring us, but without needing to actually learn anything?
To an extent, we already do this. Most of the technology in my apartment works in ways that I barely understand, and I don’t feel I need to.
But on the other hand, surely in order to fulfill your goals, you need to know what your goals are and what their fulfillment looks like.25 The concept of a person with zero knowledge seems like an incoherent idea – even babies know something.
I think there is something else valuable about knowledge, something that, perhaps, transcends mere pragmatism. I’ll come back to this later.
Art as self-expression
By making art, artists change a part of the world from how it was to how they want it to be. Something something Nietzschean will to power.
A good example of this are the storytellers in Siamese Chess, who, not unlike athletes, are able to dominate their opponents with their superior skill and thus gain the admiration of their audience.
But an even better example is Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan, a superhero with godlike powers, who builds a giant crystal palace on Mars for himself:
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I would totally do that if I had superpowers and a bare planet of my own. It’s hard to argue that this would be anything but empowering, and, in that case, so is non-superpowered art (if to a lesser extent).
So that explains why making art has value. What about merely consuming it?
Well, if you are a parent and you notice that your child is genuinely good at drawing or painting, you’ll be proud. Finding pride and joy in your child’s self-expression is a normal and morally desirable manifestation of your parental love.
And if you love all of humanity, then you can extend this principle to every artist. In this way, to enjoy art is, perhaps, to say “a stranger whom I love is self-expressing, hooray!”
There’s another way of looking at it, but it’ll have to wait until much later in this essay.
Art as pleasure
Art is fun.
To put it more broadly: art makes us experience emotions that we want to experience. These emotions include obviously fun ones like mirth and excitement, and also ones that are less obviously fun but still worth opting into like melancholy or fright.
I’m guessing that pretty much all philosophers in history agree that pleasures can be good or bad, but don’t agree which are which.26 I will not be solving the latter problem here.
Instead, I will again draw your attention to the black box problem. What if we could get the same desirable emotions without the art?
The Good Place, a comedy show taking place in the afterlife, has a minor gag about a frozen yogurt shop whose yogurt flavors induce various emotional experiences, e.g. one type of yogurt tastes like the feeling of satisfaction you get when you notice that your phone is fully charged.
If we had this kind of yogurt and could use it to induce the deep and complex emotions that we get from art (“this yogurt tastes like the surreal post-apocalyptic horror of a Beksiński painting”), would art be obsolete? Could we just throw away all of our books and music?27
Art as escapism
Escapism, here, is when someone finds their day-to-day life inadequate, and so “escapes” into fantasies fueled by art. Such fantasies may involve living in the fictional world presented by the artwork, especially inhabiting the life of a relatable character that’s easy to imagine oneself as (the so-called “audience surrogate”).
Examples include:
becoming really powerful, in a physical or social sense (the “power fantasy”, e.g. shooting ignorant douchebags in God Bless America)
having an exciting relationship with a desirable romantic partner (the “romantic fantasy”, e.g. the human-vampire-werewolf love triangle in Twilight)
inhabiting a beautiful adventure-filled world (e.g. the gorgeous alien planet Pandora from Avatar, which supposedly made some people depressed after they felt disappointed that they don’t live there)
It seems like modern media, such as video games, anime and fantasy novels, are more likely to be described as escapist, though, as the TVTropes article on escapism notes, escapism goes all the way back to Roman bread and circuses.
While some people will sincerely defend their choice to escape, “escapism” is more likely than not to be a critical label. The idea here is that while escaping might be enjoyable, it is also a kind of indignity that disconnects one from the real world. On the other hand, facing the real world with all of its problems might not always be pleasant, but is ultimately more noble and meaningful.
Out of all the functions of art mentioned so far,28 escapism seems the most pertinent to the question of whether art is actually good.
This is all about the dignity of being connected with the world. Does art help or hinder this goal?
Art, artifice and nature
What are people who use art for escapism escaping from? Let’s say it’s everyday responsibilities, like school, a job, family or relationships.
You know who else does that? Monastics. Doubly so for hermits, like the pillar-dwelling stylites or the English Buddhist nun who meditated in a cave for years. But we don’t call their lifestyles escapist! They themselves would probably say that their connection to reality is exceptionally strong, but even people who think that what they do is insane would probably not put them in the same category as hikikomori. Why not?
One obvious difference is effort. Being a hermit monk requires almost superhuman effort, while hikikomori are stereotypically seen as lazy.
But the other thing is that pillar monks and cave nuns engage with nature while hikikomori engage with art, which is artificial.
Let’s back up a bit. Why make this distinction at all? Waterfalls are beautiful, paintings are beautiful, so should we care about the difference?
It seems that people generally do.
Climbing Mount Everest is considered (perhaps irresponsibly) such a quintessential human challenge that it is used as a metaphor for any kind of great achievement. Indeed, the trail to the peak of Everest is dangerous and can be deadly, but Krazy Karl’s Obstakle Kourse is even deadlier (or it would be if Krazy Karl could find a jurisdiction that would allow him to build it), and no one is as impressed. What gives?
Maybe climbing Everest feels more objective? “Climb the tallest mountain, whatever it is” seems like a more straightforward challenge than whatever Krazy Karl could come up with.
Or perhaps there is a certain manner in which we feel oppressed by nature and want to fight back.29
Another example: Adam Ragusea claims that cooking with liquid smoke produces a result indistinguishable from that of smoking with wood while also being healthier; nonetheless, he says, purists still reject it because it’s “not real smoke”.
I think a good explanation is our desire for authenticity. Nature cannot lie (at least not obviously), humans can. So something artificial that has an obvious natural counterpart feels like a deception.
There are many reasons why we don’t want to be deceived, but when it comes to products, deception is a proxy for low quality. People making counterfeit Chanel bags don’t have the financial incentives to deliver a product as good as the original, so they probably won’t.
And so when people are surrounded by such deceptions, some turn to nature, which, not being human, is incapable of deception.30
What’s problematic here is that it’s not always obvious whether something artificial has a natural counterpart.
From the aforementioned perspective of your inner caveman, it always does – you only like present-day artificial stuff because it imitates natural stuff the caveman found in the jungle.
You only like diet soda because it is an imitation of high-calorie jungle fruit.
You only like paintball because it is an imitation of an exciting hunt.
You only like your cozy apartment because it is an imitation of a safe, clean and dry cave.
…hold on a second. A modern apartment isn’t an imitation of a cave. It is a cave!
That is to say, it performs the exact same function as a cave, but better. If, for some reason, one was transported back in time to the prehistoric era and a tribe of real cavemen found it, they would make it their home.
What’s going on here?
I will just posit this hot take: has an overapplication of the “imitations are probably low quality” heuristic caused us to equivocate between artificial-as-in-deceptive and artificial-as-in-merely-manmade?
I think that might just be what happened.
More intuitions about artificiality
So artificial things in general aren’t necessarily “fake”. What about art in particular?
I’ll try a kind of clumsy line of reasoning now. I’ll throw out a bunch of examples of interests or fascinations that people might have. All of them are “artificial” in some way, though some have more elements of “nature” than others.
Try to think to yourself if these are “real” or “fake”. Don’t focus too much on whether they are morally valuable (a few of them are clearly unethical), just whether, through liking them, someone is connected to or disconnected from the real world.
Here’s the list:
driving a Formula 1 car on an asphalt racetrack
going to see a carnival freak show in the 1920s
watching hot air balloons fly through the sky on a blue summer afternoon
breaking your neighbor’s window with a slingshot for fun
going on a tour of your local furniture factory
watching bacteria through a microscope
looking at anthills and beehives
looking at Neanderthal cave paintings
reading Martian poetry (in a world where Martians exist)
To me, all of the above feel real.
So then why, if we wouldn’t call someone interested in Neanderthal or Martian art disconnected from reality, would we say that about someone interested in Homo sapiens art?
I’d argue that we shouldn’t.
Well, what do you know?
There’s one more argument I want to attempt.
Previously, I argued that knowledge is necessary not only to achieve one’s goals, but also to even have anything resembling coherent goals. But I think this goes deeper than this.
In my overview of The Trap I mentioned that schools often get criticized for not having sufficiently engaging teaching methods. Here’s another common criticism: school allegedly teaches children too much specialized information of questionable usefulness (“when are we ever going to use this?”) and not enough practical skills.
And, as before, maybe there’s some truth to that. But I sometimes think back to my high school chemistry class. I never became anything even close to a chemist, and it’s hard to come up with anything I learned there that I can practically apply to my day-to-day life besides a few minor things like “mixing acids and bases gives you something fizzy”.
So was it a waste of time to practice balancing all those equations and memorizing parts of the periodic table? Opportunity cost aside, I don’t think so. Even if I only scratched the surface of it, learning about ions, molecules and isotopes made the world I live in feel more understood, and that made my very life feel more real.
My trip from Europe to South America made me experience the Earth, and my high school class made me experience inorganic chemistry. And both increased my connection with the world.
So knowledge increases one’s connection to reality. Let’s dig deeper into this. What things can be known?
(Here I will again provide a fair warning that my knowledge of philosophy is only slightly better than my knowledge of evolutionary biology. The categorization I am about to provide may not be very rigorous at all, but, for my purposes, I don’t think it needs to be. Hang on!)
We can know empirical truths about the world, like “water boils at 100°C”. These are things we discover by observation.
We also know mathematical truths like “2 + 2 = 4” and logical truths like “If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal”. We arrive at them via reasoning.
We know moral truths like “murder is wrong”. We arrive at them through… well, it’s complicated.
And we know hypothetical truths like “if you teleported to the surface of the Sun for exactly one nanosecond before teleporting back, you wouldn’t even get warm”. These we cannot get through direct observation, but if we apply reasoning to previous observations, we can arrive at them.
All of the above claims are true, and their negations (2 + 2 does not equal 4, murder is not wrong) are false. Both the claims and the negations are what epistemologists call truth-apt; i.e. they can be true or false.31
But what about a claim like this?
Macbeth is a traitor.
Is this truth-apt? Can it be known?
If Macbeth is just a made-up character, then it seems like a nonsensical claim that cannot be true or false, like “colorless green ideas dream furiously”.
But that seems wrong. “Macbeth is a loyal, unambitious man” is clearly false.
So how about this?
If Macbeth was a real person, he would be a traitor.
That’s a hypothetical truth, not at all unlike the solar surface teleportation thing!
Likewise, with non-narrative art:
If fairies existed, their funeral would look like this:
If we accept this, then much about art is truth-apt.32
Good art, in this sense, contains truth-apt claims that are true (or at least convincing) and interesting.
This is better demonstrated with bad art. Stories that aren’t (in this sense) true include stories that are unbelievable, stories that have one-dimensional characters,33 but also things like the North Korean propaganda cartoon Squirrel and Hedgehog34 – the latter is not just false in the sense that all fiction is false (obviously there is no such thing as talking animals, and the filmmakers aren’t claiming otherwise) but also because what it says about the real world is false).35
The same goes for art whose claims may be true but aren’t interesting. This is why originality is important. An artwork that is not meaningfully different from ones you’ve seen before, even if it’s just as good, has little value to you. Art means New Art.
The artist as pathfinder
The Library of Babel contains all conceivable truths, but also all conceivable falsehoods, and a lot of nonsense. The artist is the librarian guide, leading everyone else through the hexagons and the stairways.
Being the guide isn’t easy, and so the artist’s reward is choosing where to go. Oh, you wanted to go that way? Too bad, we’re going this way. If you don’t like it, blaze your own trail.
This is a cope an optimistic way of looking at things like AI art. Midjourney and its competitors may very well get to the point where this kind of software outshines even the best human artists in terms of technical skill. But when it comes to approving the artwork for publication, a human will always have to have the last word. A computer can make it, but only a human can like it.36
It is, then, taste and not productive skill that is the true core of artistic activity. To be an artist is to be a curator.
I previously came to the conclusion that making art constitutes self-expression, which is dignifying and empowering for the artists. Then I argued that this also includes non-artists by extension, as it makes sense to be happy not only about one’s own successful self-expression, but also the people one loves.
But also, if curators are artists, then everyone is an artist. Even you. When you select the next book you’ll read, when you run your eyes through the page and play a little movie about the characters in your head, when you notice similarities between the book and other books, or historical personalities, or your own life, when you imagine possible sequels, you are engaging in a creative act. You are an artist even when you perform for an audience of one.
So the crazy upshot of all of this: the escapism criticism of art is false because there is nowhere to escape. If knowledge is what connects us to the real world, and art gives us knowledge, then art connects us to the real world. And if a connection to the real world is something deeply important and desirable, then the answer to the question is art actually good? must surely be affirmative.
Borges’ Razor: art is a part of reality, therefore all engagement with art is engagement with reality.
And yet
INT. COFFEESHOP – DAY
A deeply focused BLOGGER (rotund, follically challenged) is typing on his TYPEWRITER.
He hits RETURN. DING!
He pulls out the page, which reads:
“Borges’ Razor: art is a part of reality, therefore all engagement with art is engagement with reality.”
He frowns and crumples up the piece of paper, then throws it into the TRASH CAN. He MISSES.
A BARISTA (blue hair, fishnet stockings) approaches him.
[BARISTA:] Sir, you have to order something if you want to sit here.
…yeah, I can’t actually accept this.
Borges’ Razor sounds like a clever insight, a cool insight. It makes me feel cool for writing it down.
But I don’t think I really believe it. Clearly some things are actually real.
And the story that makes me realize this is The Genius. While Borges generally describes the Earl’s relationship with Joan Hargreaves as a real one, and maybe, in the universe of that story, it actually is, I don’t recognize its counterparts in our universe – the parasocial romantic relationships people have with celebrities, anime characters, AI chatbots and lucid dream entities – as real.
It’s okay to have a crush on a fictional character (for the same reason it’s okay to root for a fictional hero or despise a fictional villain). I’ve done it! But it’s not in the same qualitative category as a real relationship.
So I do think escapism is real (and at least sometimes a bad thing). Therefore, Borges’ Razor can’t be entirely true. But maybe there’s a way to salvage some of it?
Art as the next best thing
At this point, my main intuition would be something like this:
Art is good when it adds to reality, not when it replaces it.
It’s noble to visit (and, if they don’t yet exist, build) the Egyptian pyramids because nothing like them exists in nature. But it’s not noble to have an anime girlfriend because you could have a real girlfriend instead.
But, from before, we know that whether something is its own thing or an imitation of something in nature is a fundamentally difficult question.
Hmm. Maybe real is just not the right category to use?
Earlier, when I tried to define art, I decided that “true art” vs. “fake art” is not a very good distinction, and “good art” vs. “bad art” is better.
So perhaps we could extend the same principle to all human experiences? In that case, escapist art, whether or not it is “real”, is just inferior compared to some other experiences.
Perhaps in the future, virtual girlfriends and boyfriends will be so convincing that they will genuinely be hard to distinguish from the real thing. Maybe then we will have to wrestle with the question of whether “realness” is valuable in itself. But in the present, we don’t – they are clearly inferior!
Likewise, if in the future, we discover a planet of real life Pokemon that you can catch and befriend, then catching virtual Pokemon on your Game Boy might be seen as pathetic escapism. But in the present, this is the only way you can have a Pikachu, so maybe it’s fine.
Perhaps this is a better conclusion:
Art is better than some non-art experiences, but not all. Art is an obstacle when it tempts us away from achievable real things that are better than it.
It is undesirable for Tatsuhiro Sato to be a hikikomori otaku who watches anime and plays video games all day because if he wasn’t, he could have a productive job and real relationships, and would most likely feel better about himself. So his escapism is keeping him down.37
On the other hand, if you are stuck in an unhappy life with no way to improve it, then maybe escapism is no indignity. The aforementioned TV Tropes article on escapism quotes Tolkien, who says:
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
Indeed, it would be cruel to take away fantasies from a prisoner, and I would not do so “for his own good”.
The only thing anyone remembers about Cast Away, the Robinson Crusoe movie set in the 1990s, is that, after being stuck on the island for quite some time, the Tom Hanks character ends up painting a face on a volleyball and acting as if it was his friend Wilson. And I don’t think I can blame him. In the absence of human friends, a volleyball is fine.
This brings us back to our artless superman, Neville Jones. Previously we asked, if he can get all the benefits of art elsewhere, is he better off without art?
And I think the answer is: sure, maybe!
The thing is that we aren’t him. We don’t have a house overlooking Iguaçu Falls, or a pet tiger, or a knowledge-producing black box, or the Good Place frozen yogurt. Barring some kind of truly fantastical utopia, we never will.
But we do have art, which, perhaps, is a close enough substitute.
Kind of an unsatisfying conclusion, isn’t it? Oh well!
The role and value of art, probably
I am still not sure about any of this. I hate to end an essay with “well, I don’t have any answers, but at least I asked some interesting questions :)”. It would be a better essay, and I would be a better essayist, if it presented definite answers.
Nonetheless, even if it is a bit disappointing, I still think this review was worth writing.
It is, after all, a piece of art. Right?
This isn’t true for all Borges stories – I really recommend reading Emma Zunz blindly.
I think this characterization is accurate, but keep in mind that I speak as a foreigner and a non-leftist. Perón’s legacy in Argentina and elsewhere is complex (from what I can tell) and I will not do it justice in this review, nor, for that matter, will I do justice to Borges’ politics in general.
There is this idea that only hacks are concerned with personal accolades while great artists are too humble and absorbed in their art to care. But it seems that Borges, who was definitely a great artist, genuinely cared. This makes me feel better about my own vanity.
Gene Wolfe says that “magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish”; Terry Pratchett says it’s “like a polite way of saying you write fantasy”. For more discussion, see Wikipedia.
Besides Borges, my only familiarity with magical realism in literature comes from Franz Kafka and Ursula K. Le Guin. From my understanding, the latter two are considered true but noncentral examples of the genre, so this part could very well be based on a skewed impression.
That said, Borges has been included in at least one explicitly science fiction anthology, namely Robert Silverberg’s The Mirror of Infinity.
A well-known story of his, On Exactitude in Science, is very explicitly about the map–territory distinction:
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
(Suarez Miranda, Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658)
Yes, that one paragraph is the entire story. This translation is by Andrew Hurley.
This entire section is largely based on personal recollections, which, needless to say, can be very inaccurate.
The ones I actually mention are defamiliarization, Plato’s criticism of artists and Barthes’ Death of the Author, but there were many other concepts I don’t reference explicitly but which I had in the back of my mind while writing, including:
M. H. Abrams’ classification of literary theories into mimetic, pragmatic, expressive and objective;
Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, which characterizes reason as the ability to notice differences and imagination as the ability to notice similarities;
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief;
The sublime
But does that disqualify me from writing a review of one of his books? I’ll let you decide…
I assume that this is a reference to another Italian poet from the same era whose work might be more thematically relevant to this story.
I guess the Dutch trader’s story didn’t impress me that much because the difference between a prayer wheel and an old-timey windmill isn’t that striking. Maybe it should have been set in the modern era so that it could involve electric motors?
The best known essay on this topic is Barthes' Death of the Author, but I find it amusing that Tolkien's thoughts on allegory and applicability in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings constitute a surprisingly similar message to Barthes’, despite coming from a significantly different intellectual background.
See also: the question of whether the men joining the titular fight club in Fight Club in order to meet their perceived unrealized need for violence are “supposed to be” seen as sympathetic or contemptible.
The story describes mass illiteracy as something to be shocked by, which to “Borges” is the most obvious piece of evidence of it being a post-Enlightenment addition.
In the tabletop RPG Into the Odd, there is an item called the Fool’s Coin that works very similarly; so if you’re interested in testing how it would work, then perhaps you could run that game; or you could just implement Borges’ emerald (as it is described in the story) into the game you’re already running.
The English translation included in the book is the one by Alastair Reed, which you may find here; though note that this webpage mistakenly replaces “rabbis” with “rabbits”.
Note that Windmills and Poor Niagara! are excluded here – these two I really don’t consider to be about art.
E.g. the University of Pittsburgh’s Borges Center says that he “could justifiably be considered the most erudite writer of this century”.
If I understand him correctly, Plato believes that physical objects are mere inferior imitations of their ideal counterparts in the realm of the Forms, and that representational art constitutes imitation of an imitation, making it doubly inferior.
This is a quote from the show; I don’t know if it has a counterpart in the original manga.
This should go without saying, but just in case it’s not obvious: I’m not saying these things should therefore not be considered sins, only that they are attached to useful drives. It explains why we engage in them more often than in no-less-harmful but much more arbitrary actions, like intentionally setting oneself on fire.
What’s that? You’re happier being ignorant? How do you know you are?
“It is better to be a crystal angel dissatisfied than a demon monkey satisfied” —John Stuart Mill, probably
Wait a minute. If someone were to make this kind of yogurt, would it itself constitute art? We think of haute cuisine as an art in part because of the subtle flavors that it manages to achieve, so why not this?
Some of the functions on this list may be redundant or absent, but I don’t think that’s a huge problem. Perhaps it would have been better to call them four approaches to art that I wanted to try speculating about.
There are counterexamples: some people do care a lot about totally artificial challenges, such as Super Mario 64 speedruns.
This, of course, isn't strictly true – nature deceives humans all the time (e.g. chameleons); that said, it's definitely not that good at it.
By contrast, utterances like “what time is it?” and “go to your room!” cannot be true or false, so they are not truth-apt.
Most of this argument is about representational art. What about nonrepresentational art, like music without lyrics, modern architecture or abstract painting? I don’t have a good answer. But I think that you either have to agree that either a) nonrepresentational art still has some kernel of representation within (in which case the same argument applies), or b) it doesn’t, but then that makes it its own unique thing (in which case you cannot accuse it of being an inferior imitation of reality).
On the other hand, some fictional characters are simple enough so as to be able to portray certain human traits in pure and vivid ways, therefore serving as better examples of said traits than any historical human. So perhaps Plato was wrong, and artistic representations actually come closer to the world of the Forms than physical entities?
I haven’t seen it myself, and I’m taking other people’s word for it regarding it being shameless NK propaganda.
Realizing this has recently made me become more sympathetic towards people who say “all art is political”. I think the creationist comedian Brad Stine has perfectly adequate comedic timing, delivery etc. but when he jokes about evolution, it just doesn’t make me laugh because, due to my disagreement with its factual basis, it just doesn’t feel believable. It’s not funny because it’s not true.
I wanted to make a “there’s no accounting for taste” pun here but I just couldn’t come up with one. Counting, as in computing? User accounts? I was so close!
To come back to the Borges vs. Sato question, I don’t know whether reading the Western canon all day (instead of anime and gaming) is any better. Maybe it really is about quality, i.e. very good art can actually compete with jobs and relationships? I’m really not sure.