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

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

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

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

Herbert Quain’s imagined books are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.