From 1937 to 1946, the writer who did more than anyone alive to make the fantastic respectable to people who despised it was employed re-cataloguing books at the Miguel Cané municipal library, in the Boedo district of Buenos Aires. That man was Jorge Luis Borges, and it was his first regular full-time job. He was in his late thirties and the work was, by his own account, dismal.

I start with the payroll because nobody else does. Borges is the man who gave us the Library of Babel, an imaginary library holding every book that could ever be written, and he tends to get introduced as though he had been born some kind of literary sage. He was not. He was a clerk with a mind all too aware of its capabilities, who later became a professor, and who was never paid proportionately well for his creative works.

The first half of the twentieth century seems littered with interesting characters like Borges, including many of those who gifted us the foundational blocks of modern fantasy. But few of them genuinely held that reality itself might be an illusion, or seeded our culture with philosophical musings wrapped in a garden maze, and only one of them wrote a solemn scholarly appraisal of an author who had never existed.

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is a review of a French writer Borges invented, whose life’s work was to sit down and re-create Don Quixote word for word, not by copying it but by becoming the sort of man who would write it.

Three years earlier he had reviewed a novel that did not exist at all.

He is filed under labyrinths and infinite libraries. He got there by way of nine years of shelving and a sacking over poultry.

In case you are unfamiliar with him, what follows is my attempt to give some texture and colour to a truly fascinating man, and to make a case about where that work came from. Because the received idea about this genre is that it belongs to the unlimited imagination, and Borges is in many ways the counter-example.

Almost everything he is famous for was produced under some restriction or other, and several of them were not his choice.

The knock on the head

Take the most important one.

On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges ran up a stairway and caught his forehead on the edge of a freshly painted open casement. The wound became infected. There was an operation, then septicaemia, and he spent something close to a month between living and dying.

He told the story to the writer and translator, Ronald Christ, twenty-eight years later, and invited him to feel the scar. In this moment, he related a serious worry he was harbouring.

Until then Borges had thought himself a poet, and had been too timid to attempt fiction: “If I write a story, everybody will know I’m an outsider, that I am intruding in forbidden ground.” Now, out of hospital, he was frightened of something worse. “I began to fear for my mental integrity,” he said. “Maybe I can’t write anymore.”

So he designed a test, and the design is the most Borgesian thing in the entire transcript. He reasoned that if he attempted an article or a poem and failed, the verdict would be final, because he had written hundreds of those and knew he could. So he would attempt something he had never tried instead, where failure would prove nothing at all.

“It would prepare me for the final overwhelming blow: knowing that I was at the end of my tether.”

The story he wrote was “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” which appeared in Sur in May 1939. His verdict on the whole business: “If it hadn’t been for that particular knock on the head I got, perhaps I would never have written short stories.”

There it is. The form that made him, and that made a good deal of the modern fantastic possible, exists because a man walked into a wet window frame and then went looking for a way to check if his brain was still working.

The rabbits

He kept the library clerk job through all of this, up until 1946.

That was the year the former Argentinian Minister of War, Juan Perón, came to power, at which point the administration informed Borges that he was being promoted.

The new post? Inspector of poultry and rabbits at the municipal markets.

When he asked why, he was apparently told, “Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?”

Borges resigned the following day.

This anecdote is perfectly strange and humorous, which is a quality inherent in most of his works and must have been, as we saw with the head-knocking incident, a driving force for them. Reading “The Circular Ruins,” or “The Garden of Forking Paths,” one cannot help being transported away, but the place we find ourselves is a mongrel, at once vaguely threatening and also attractive and cosy. It’s as if we’re sitting in a living room, perhaps, at the foot of a spry old storyteller with a fire crackling nearby, but there’s no roof, and from some shadowed nook nearby, we’re being observed by a stage-hand having a giggle.

All of this is to say that the stories revel in conflict; between comfort and discomfort, realism and unreality, or truth and fiction. The question one man came to about his own mental state and the one he presents us is therefore the same. And it is the true magic of Borges.

The joke about the library

Nine years later, the state changed its mind about him entirely. Jorge Luis Borges was appointed director of the National Library in 1955.

He went blind at more or less the same time, a new misfortune proving perhaps that some grand cosmic joke really was playing out.

Later, he wrote of it: “There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines.”

At least he got a poem out of it, the opening of which runs: “No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of God; who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch.”

I have read a great deal of guff about suffering and art. This is not that. Borges wasn’t that. He was a man who did the accounting on his own life and found the ledger absurd, then said so in public, and got some evident amusement out of it.

Generally, I find that anyone burdened with hardship or unluck who can laugh at it a very good egg…

The room

Which brings us to the interview: The Art of Fiction No. 39, conducted by Ronald Christ across several afternoons in July 1966 and published in The Paris Review the following year, in the Winter-Spring 1967 issue. Borges was eleven years into the directorship, and the conversation took place in his office there.

The introduction is worth as much as the interview, because Christ did the thing all good interviewers do first, which is note down the layout of the room.

There are two revolving bookcases in the far corners. They hold the volumes Borges consults most, and these are arranged, his secretary Miss Susana Quinteros explains, in a fixed order that is never varied, so that a man who is nearly blind can find a book by its position and its size. There is a well-worn Webster’s and an equally well-worn Anglo-Saxon dictionary. There is a portrait over the fireplace, and when Christ asks about it Quinteros answers, without apparently noticing what she has said: “No importa. It’s a reproduction of another painting.”

Each afternoon Borges arrives and dictates letters and poems. Quinteros types them and reads them back. He revises. She makes two or three copies, sometimes four, before he is satisfied. When he wants to think, he leaves the office and walks slowly round the library rotunda above the readers at the tables below, carrying a cane which Christ says that he uses “like a divining rod.”

That is what the production of a Borges poem physically consisted of in 1966: one blind man, one typist, four drafts, and a lap of the building.

What the fantastic is

Did the blindness really mould him, or was he always like that? No idea, and nor has anybody else. What I can tell you is that dry wit is all over the work, and that it sits in an odd spot: right between the ordinary and the flatly impossible, which is where he seems most at home.

If you have not read him, do. The stories are short, which is practical. The prose is plain at times, and goes wandering at others, but it always has a picture to paint. And Borges is uncannily good at describing how things look, which for a man who could not see them is either a joke or hard work. Probably both.

Back to the interview.

The word Christ wants defined is fantastic, and he has picked it deliberately, because Borges uses it constantly about other people’s books.

So how would he define it? Anybody who writes about this genre for a living has watched forty people fail at that question.

Here’s Borges.

“I wonder if you can define it. I think it’s rather an intention in a writer.” (emphasis mine).

Then, he does something better than a definition. Borges reaches for Joseph Conrad, and specifically Conrad’s preface to The Shadow Line, where he addressed the readers who had decided the book was a ghost story. Borges’s summary of the position is this: “Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious.”

Asked whether he shares the belief, Borges says he does, and produces the sharpest formulation of it, which he attributes to his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares: “Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.”

That is the argument, and maybe it’s worth unpicking. It is not the usual defence of this genre, which is that fantasy smuggles in truths realism cannot carry. That defence concedes the ground: it accepts that realism is the default and fantasy the deviation, then pleads mitigation.

Borges refuses that concession outright. On his account there is no default. Realism is not the neutral setting from which the fantastic departs; it is one more bet about what sort of place this is, and it is not a better-evidenced bet than the other one. A novelist writing about a man catching a train in Rosario is making the same wager as a novelist writing about a man walking into a wardrobe, and whether either is more grounded in ‘reality’ is irrelevant.

Note what that does to the received idea. If the world is already unfathomable, then the fantastic is not an escape from an insufficient reality. It is a straight description of the one we have. You do not need a boundless imagination to write it. You need to look at what is in front of you and decline to pretend you understand it.

The process, which is mostly crossing things out

Christ raises something Borges had said elsewhere, that his work had moved from expression to allusion, and asks him what he means. The answer is the most practically useful thing in the interview.

He begins with what he used to do. “When I began writing, I thought that everything should be defined by the writer. For example, to say ‘the moon’ was strictly forbidden; that one had to find an adjective, an epithet for the moon.” He would not write that a man came in and sat down, because it was too easy. He had to find a fancy way of saying it.

He then gives the reason young writers do this, which is both unkind and correct: “when a writer is young he feels somehow that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament.”

He then states the rule he replaced it with, which is one any working writer can apply this afternoon: “Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word, that is to say, a word that may be used by the Spanish classics or a word used in the slums of Buenos Aires, I mean, a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out, and I use a common word.”

His authority for this is Stevenson: “in a well-written page all the words should look the same way.” Break the rule with one archaism or one showpiece, Borges says, and “the attention of the reader is distracted by the word.”

I would put that up on the wall of every fantasy writer in the trade. This is a genre with a standing occupational temptation towards the antique adjective, and here is its most inventive practitioner saying he removed them on sight.

On metaphor, which he investigated and then gave up on

Borges learned Old English and Old Norse because he had read about ‘the kennings’ and wanted the metaphors. He spent, he says, about seven years on it, at which point he concluded the kennings had been a weariness to the poets themselves and stopped caring about them, but by then he had fallen in love with the language and kept going anyway. He ran a study group of six or seven that met almost daily.

The finding he came away with is deflationary and, I think, true: “really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential.”

Invented metaphors, he says, “are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever.” He calls the practice of connecting things that have never been connected “a kind of juggling,” on the grounds that if there is no real connection there is nothing to hold.

He allows himself one exception, and it is from the Norse. A battle, in Old English, is the play of swords or the encounter of spears. In Old Norse it is a web of men. He is visibly delighted by this: a weaving of living people that is still a pattern, still a fabric.

Seven years of study. One metaphor kept. That is a worse return than most people would tolerate and a better one than most people achieve.

The invented employee

Soon enough, Christ asks how the collaborations with Bioy Casares worked. The answer is the strangest thing in the interview, and it is strange precisely because it is so practical.

Borges and Bioy Casares dine together every night and write after dinner. They publish under a single made-up name, H. Bustos Domecq, assembled from one great-great-grandfather each. And what comes out, Borges says, is not a blend: “we have created between us a kind of third person; we have somehow begotten a third person that is quite unlike us.”

The test he offers is the good one, because it is checkable: “Once the story is written, if you ask us whether this adjective or this particular sentence came from Bioy or from me, we can’t tell.”

Two men invent a third and then genuinely cannot recover which of them wrote what. I have sat through a great many arguments about credit in my time on this beat. This is the only account of shared authorship I have ever read in which the question of who did what is unanswerable.

In itself, this anecdote may very well have become another of Borges’s stories, but it’s real, which shows how fine the line was between the man’s work and his actual life.

The gift he left lying in a dictionary

Late on, he talks about Bishop John Wilkins, the seventeenth-century inventor of an artificial language. Borges took the word everness from Wilkins by way of Roget and used it, on the grounds that eternity is worn out.

But Wilkins coined a second word that Borges never used and could not stop admiring, and he describes it as “a word that’s a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair.”

The word is neverness.

Borges turns it over. He notes that no other language has anything with that meaning, that impossibility is far too tame for it, that Keats reached for nothingness and that nothingness is weaker. And then he gives it away: “So if you’re a poet, you should use that word. It’s a pity for that word to be lost in the pages of a dictionary.”

Here, three hundred years after a thing was invented, Borges picked it up, said it was beautiful and that he would not be using it, and put it back where somebody else could find it. Take it if you do.

The charge of coldness, answered

When Christ puts to him the standard criticism: that his stories are cold, impersonal, machined, the transcript catches the tone of the answer clearly.

Borges replies, sadly: “If that has happened, it is out of mere clumsiness. Because I have felt [my stories] very deeply. I have felt them so deeply that I have told them, well, using strange symbols so that people might not find out that they were all more or less autobiographical. The stories were about myself, my personal experiences.”

Then he blames it on English reticence and moves on, because he does not want to be looked at.

Two other admissions of the same kind are worth pairing with it. Asked who he writes for, he says a few personal friends, and adds: “Not myself because I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.” Asked whether he expects readers to catch his allusions, he says most of them are private jokes: “if they share it, all the better; but if they don’t, I don’t care a hang about it.” He contrasts this directly with Eliot and Joyce, who in his view “wanted their readers to be rather mystified.”

I take him at his word, which is not the fashionable reading but is the one the transcript supports. The labyrinths were not a puzzle set for us to solve. They were the shape his own life had taken, written down in symbols strange enough that nobody would notice him standing in them.

The encyclopedias

Which is the moment to look at where one of them actually came from, because we can trace it exactly.

Christ notes that Borges reads encyclopedias for pleasure, and Borges explains the origin of the habit. As a young man he used to come to that same library to read, and he was too shy to ask for anything: “I was a very young man, and I was far too timid to ask for a book.”

So he took what was on the open shelves and needed no request. He would pull a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eleventh edition or the twelfth, open it at random, find an article that interested him and read it through. Those editions, he says, carried long essays by Macaulay and De Quincey, and the point he makes about them is a good one: “They were meant to be read. Now they are merely reference books.”

Clearly, the habit was formative.

In May 1940, Borges published “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Sur, and it opens: “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.” A perfectly Borgesian phrase to begin a perfectly Borgesian story.

The encyclopedia in question is described in the story as a delinquent reprint of the Britannica of 1902, though the narrator later comes into possession of the eleventh volume of an entire encyclopedia devoted to a world that does not exist.

To recap: a shy boy reads the eleventh edition of a real encyclopedia because it is the only book he can obtain without speaking to anybody. Thirty years later, in the building where he did it, he is the director, he cannot see, and the most famous thing he has written is the eleventh volume of a non-existent book.

I am not claiming that he planned that. I am claiming something duller and more useful. A formidable body of work was assembled out of what was once the only thing within reach of a person who could not bring himself to ask a librarian for help.

He was interrupted throughout

One last thing, because it is the bit I enjoyed most.

A Mr Campbell was waiting to see him for most of the afternoon. The secretary comes in twice to say so. Borges, who is plainly enjoying himself, keeps waving it off, and then converts the man into a running joke about a Highland raid: “the Campbells are coming, the Campbells are coming.”

The interview ends on it. He is asked whether he is a Platonist or an Aristotelian, says he is Aristotelian and wishes he were not, and then: “But I’m afraid now that the Campbells are coming.”

Then he signs the interviewer’s copy of Labyrinths, complains about his author photograph, complains that the translation uses too many Latin words when plain ones would serve, and says that Hamlet’s last line is phony because nobody would actually say it.

He died twenty years later, in 1986, in Geneva.

The ledger

So. We are told that the fantastic is the province of the unbounded imagination, and that its writers are people for whom the ordinary world was simply not big enough.

Then there is the man who built the infinite library.

He got into books by shelving them for nine years on a municipal wage. He lost that job over rabbits. He became a writer of short stories only because he ran into a window frame, nearly died, and needed a way to fail that would not tell him he was finished. He wrote most of what we remember blind, by dictation, four retypes at a time, in a building holding nine hundred thousand books he could no longer read. He spent seven years on a dead language and kept one metaphor out of it. He found a beautiful word and gave it away rather than use it. And his most famous story grew out of the only reading a boy too shy to speak to a librarian could actually get his hands on.

Not one of those is a gift. Every one of them is a limit, and the work is what got made inside it.

That is the case, and I think it is the useful thing to take from an hour with him. The fantastic was not, for Borges, a bigger room to escape into. He thought this room was already unfathomable, and he wrote it down with whatever he had left.

The test

Which leaves the practical part, and he handed it over himself.

Find the unusual word. Strike it out. Put a common one in its place. His reason was that a strange word steals the reader’s attention from the thing being said, and his authority was Stevenson.

You do not have to write anything to use this. Take any fantasy novel published this year, open it anywhere, and count the words that are there to be admired rather than to be read: the archaic verb, the invented noun given no work to do, the adjective wearing a costume. That count tells you, in about thirty seconds, whether the author is trying to show you something or trying to show you themselves.

The man who invented the infinite library thought the deleting was the job. He also thought the world itself was probably a dream, and he still turned up to the office every afternoon and made his secretary retype the poem four times.

Those two facts belong together, and most people who quote him only note the first.