Literary myths once established tend to endure, and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose centenary this is, is recognised as one of the major figures of 20th century literature. Invariably mentioned in the same breath as Beckett, Joyce, Eliot, Nabokov and Calvino, he has been hailed as a master. Exactly why this is so remains puzzling. Borges, a Homeric presence rather than a direct influence, is impossible to classify and often difficult to read. No writer in translation reads as so exactly that: a writer in translation. His style is a stiff, Latinised Baroque, his preoccupations are metaphysical, and his derivative, pretentious fictions are somehow never quite fiction. Favouring an arch, pompous tone, his narrators are urgent, obsessive, certainly paranoid and possibly crazy. Their worlds are built on lies, deceptions, tormented truths, surreal flourishes, stories told by others, and, above all, tricks with time.
For all their scholarly aspirations, his stories belong most closely to the detective genre; he tosses his red herrings about and then tidies his loose ends with curt little endings usually reached by way of a violent death - "The sword was bloody, for it had murdered Glencairn, whose mutilated body I found in the stables at the rear" ("The Man on the Threshold"), or melodramatic, confessional outburst such as: " `It was I who betrayed the man who saved me and gave me shelter - it is I who am Vincent Moon. Now, despise me.' " ("The Shape of the Sword"). Word for word, Borges is a poor runner-up to another writer favouring short fictional excursions, Donald Bartheleme. Yet Borges has the greater reputation.
Few writers are as frequently deferred to while remaining as unquoted. It is as if he is revered without actually being read. His status as the leading Latin American writer may be traced to the obvious contrast between him and his fellow Magic Realists, whose lush exuberance quickly exhausted the form. His tight, cryptic, humourless fictions seem to exude discipline and restraint, and appeal to those reacting against the stereotypical Magic Realist romantic odyssey. Stories such as "The Secret Miracle", with its Faustian echoes , "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Circular Ruins" or "The Interloper", confirm an individual if hardly original mind. But the test of any writer is to read the entire body of work. In the case of Borges, this has finally become possible with the publication of Collected Fictions, which brings together the nine volumes of stories newly translated by Andrew Hurley.
Far from leaving the reader impressed or moved, the cumulative effect of the Borges oeuvre is more irritating than inspirational. The book highlights the repetition and recurring use of a small number of predictable images - malevolent gods, gaucho knife fights, the Minotaur, tigers, leopards, mirrors, the author's own double, swords, dreams and labyrinths, as well as classical allusions and references to Schopenhauer and The Thousand and One Nights. Even the darkest fable never breaks free of the suggestion of Borges the obsessive reader locked into his chosen prison - a library - in which he laboriously cobbles together stories composed of fragments he has read elsewhere.
His writings are oppressively dependent on his reading, his pedantry and his insistence on fiction as an openly artificial construct. He also has a habit of walking on stage, as it were. In "Bores and I" he begins: "It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to . . . news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary . . . so my life is a counter-point . . . I am not sure which of us it is that's writing this page." As is widely known, Borges the writer was heavily influenced by his favourite English writers - Stevenson, H.G. Wells and Lewis Carroll - whom he discovered in his childhood and never outgrew, while G.K. Chesterton is possibly the closest he came to having a literary father figure.
In addition to the stiff formality of the self-regarding fables, Borges is given to prefacing his collections with intrusive, self-regarding directions as to how best to read him. Clearly Borges does not trust the intelligence of his reader. In his foreword to the Garden of Forking Paths collection (1941) he writes: "The eight stories in this book require no great elucidation. The eighth, `The Garden of the Forking Paths', is a detective story; its readers will witness the commission and the preliminaries of a crime whose purpose will not be kept from them but which they will not understand, I think, until the final paragraph. The others are tales of fantasy . . ." For The Book of Sand' collection (1975) he changed his approach, belatedly acknowledging "writing a foreword to stories the reader has not yet read is an almost impossible task, for it requires that one talks about plots that really ought not to be revealed beforehand", he includes an Afterword summarising the tales, pointing out that "The Congress" "is perhaps the most ambitious of this book's fables", and assessing the various stories before suggesting that "A Weary Man's Utopia" "is, in my view, the most honest, and most melancholy, piece in the book".
However, twenty-six years earlier, he had also supplied an Afterword to the Aleph collection. Having already categorised the various pieces, he then attempts to deflect charges of drawing from another writer's work, helpfully conceding that "In `The Zahir' and `The Aleph', I think I can detect some influence of Wells' story `The Cristal Egg' (1899)".
Alongside the melodrama of men and women intent on murder and revenge as a means of perverse salvation, such as in "The Interloper", in which a woman shared by two brothers must be sacrificed for their sake, Borges exercises his heavy-handed playfulness in the pieces in which he confronts himself. He is a writer of wit, not humour. There is no poetry is his art. He can be philosophical but he is rarely lyric. For all the lofty claims made on his behalf, Borges is not the leading poet of the Spanish-speaking world; Lorca, born one year earlier but whose life was far shorter, is. As for Borges's influence on Magic Realism, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1904-80) has far greater range.
There is no disputing Borges's meticulous, relentlessly scientific assurance, nor the deliberate, deadpan tone of much of the story-telling, which is report-like rather than imaginative. As for his lasting importance, it is debatable. Imagination and invention are two of the qualities most attributed to Borges, but they are difficult to trace in his narrow, airless, sepia-tinted universe. Borges the tireless reader proves at close quarters to be unexciting, repetitive, predictable and disappointing. He has been honoured instead of being seriously assessed. It was once claimed that had Borges been French, he would have been discovered far sooner. Equally, it could be argued that he would have been found out more quickly.