The Underappreciated Library That Forged Borges Finest Stories.

Miguel Cané library in the Boedo district of Buenos Aires. Photo Creative Commons License Wikimedia

 

 

 

 

 A dream of mine is to visit Buenos Aires, Argentina, and track the footsteps of the great master of short stories and father of magical realism Jorge Luis Borges. One of the points in his life that deserves a closer look is the Miguel Cané library, where he worked for nine underappreciated years. I say underappreciated because it was where he produced many of the great writings for which he is known and it preceded his greatest output of the fiction that made him famous. One of his most famous works, The Library of Babel, which imagined the library as a multiverse long before that was even a thing, and has influenced the notion of libraries across literature, was published just after he left work at the library. He writes in An Autobiographical Essay:

 

"My Kafkian story "The Library of Babel” was meant as a nightmare version or 

magnification of that municipal library, and certain details in the text have no particular meaning. 

The numbers of books and shelves that I recorded in the story were literally what I had at my elbow. 

Clever critics have worried over those ciphers, and generously endowed them with mystic significance.

“The Lottery in Babylon,” “Death and the Com-

pass,” and “The Circular Ruins” were also written, in

whole or part, while I played truant. These tales and others

were to become The Garden of Branching Paths, a book

expanded and retitled Ficciones in 1944. Ficciones and El

Aleph (1949 and 1952), my second story collection, are,

I suppose, my two major books."

 

 

Though my research has yet to be exhaustive, a deep dive into biography and interview yielded little more than a few sentences and paragraphs where his time at the library is mentioned mostly in passing. Most, like this clip from Harper's, focus on it being a sad time when he worked with a very "unlibrarianlike" staff more interested in bawdy jokes and football than books, and his reaction was to withdraw and focus on books. To me, the strange environment of the library, its staff and lack of work ethic at the time is of great interest and deserves more attention. As a librarian, the bizarre Kafkaesque work environment of the library had a greater impact on his best fiction than has been previously appreciated and deserves more attention.

 During that time, he did what many think librarians do, but is valid for few; to sit and read books all day. I have often been asked questions like "what it is like to read all day?" or if I get bored sitting around. In several sources, he notes that because he was encouraged not to work too much, lest someone lose their job, he finished his library work after only an hour each day and could devote the rest of the day to learning in the library. Nine years is a long time to be able to devote the better part of every workday to reading and writing. 

 

As a librarian, knowing what I could have done with nine years of reading books and exploring the library's depths, I see this as an underappreciated time of his life. Instead of the constant movement, engagement, and never-ending work that librarians do all day, he could dive into the intellectual labyrinth of the library, drinking long and deeply.  The Miguel Cané library, like the strange worlds created by Borges, was a place where the staff, unlike most libraries, worked hard not to work and was staffed by boorish anti-intellectuals better suited to bar stools than library ladders.  These may have been the most important nine years of his life in forging the labyrinthine stories for which he is best known. 

I want to visit the Miguel Cané library one day to get a feel for the spatial dimension of a place that played a big part in forming the spatial dimensions of his writing.

While I was revisiting some of the links above, I discovered this new talk that seems to explore the very answers I seek.  I will have to see if he has written something that I can translate. At least in Argentina, the impact of his time working at the library seems to be receiving new attention.