Orhan Pamuk Reads Jorge Luis Borges

Hi, I'm Nicole Feltz, the global fashion news and features director and co-host of Vogue's podcast The Run Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting voices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join head of editorial content at Vogue, Chloe Mao, and head of editorial content at British Vogue, Chelmanati, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion, with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracy Ellis Ross. The Run Through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month, we're going to hear Ivan Hakan Al-Bokari, dead in his labyrinth by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas D. G. Ivani in collaboration with the author. It was published in the New Yorker in April of 1970. "Where you're from, that lack the dignity of danger. The two friends set great value on these far reaches of Cornwall." The story was chosen by Orhan Pomuk, who was the author of ten novels, including the Redhaired Woman and the Museum of Innocence. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. Hi, Orhan. Hi, Deborah. So the last time you were on this podcast, you read a piece by Vladimir Nabokov. And this time you were quite sure that you wanted to read Borges. So I'm wondering what Borges has meant for you in your reading and writing. Let me put it this way. The greatest novelists are Tostoidostoevsky Proust and Thomas Mann. Then, Kalvino, Borges and Nobako comes for me. The greats were the greats masters of 19th century fiction, great composers of big, moving, deep novels, especially Borges and Kalvino, deconstructed what they achieved. I like it when sometimes Borges says, "Well, Henry James would write 700 pages of a novel about this. Let me tell you this in a brief story." And this is why one is attracted by Borges and this story has all that aspects of Borgesian world that I like. But you yourself write novels. You don't write short fiction. Borges taught me to see the backbone of the story. Borges' stories taught me to look at fiction as a way of thinking about fiction also. Borges prepared me for my so-called postmodernism. So do you feel that you look at this sort of five-page backbone and then thread it through the 500-page novels that. When Borges was cracking these jokes about Henry James, I think he was missing something. And now it's not its backbone. And now it's structure. And now it also gives us a texture. Which Borges, being a short story writer, was not very much interested. But because he was not interested in the texture of the things he taught us, all of us, fiction writers, to think about the structure. And once you begin to think about structure with the help of Borges, we all begin to do a bit acrobatic, so with our backbone. And so Calvino, Borges and Novako paid way to a new inventive way of writing fiction. And this story is one of these essential stories that is about this story. And there are two characters who are talking about two characters 25 years ago. And they, in a way, mirror each other. The stories and characters mirror each other. These are things that I like. Or perhaps these are things that I learn from Borges and begin to like after him. This is one of three stories that Borges wrote three detective stories. He called them mystery stories that he wrote in response to Ed Grail and Poe or Amage to Poe. Do you feel that they're written in a different style than the other stories by Borges? And he alludes to the locked room mystery, for example, then Poe's Perlund letter. Here it's not the style really, but making the logic or even metaphysics of the detective story, part of the story is interesting. That is his invention. Here in a way we see Borges learning a lot from Ed Grail and Poe, Hoffman, then adding Pirandello, Pirandello's influence, that is, he is part of the metaphysics. Before the Pirandello writers would write about symmetries, ironies, things that happen outside of themselves, as things that happen to others. While Borges invented that he himself, Borges is in the story. And we are never sure which one is Borges, which one is the character, and this gave the reader space that has elasticity. That we, when we read Borges, in a sense, our minds are trying to form a space in which these characters can move as they move in a normal, so-called normal novel or a normal short story. It is a detective story, it is a mystery, and by the end of the story the mystery has been solved, and then you get something else which will will here. But in the end, it's so hard to imagine in your mind what is the solution. In fact, it's not the solution, it's he suggests, but are attempt to form this new space or new acrobatics or seeing the world upside down, and just attempt to see the fiction upside down is Borges. We are forcing ourselves to see the world, as he also wants us to see, and it's a very hard thing. And in fact, we realize that this metaphysical acrobatics is the subject itself. We are doing a lot to understand it, be there. Do you think that someone listening can solve the story for the hear the solutions? It's like reading you'll say, "I'm going to finish it, I'm going to see everything he suggested, but one asks himself, the reader asks himself, whether Borges can imagine it completely. It's like philosophy, you make a logic, but to visualize that logic is even harder." He'll talk some more after the story. Now here's Orhan Pomuk, reading Ibn Hakan al-Bukhari, dead in his labyrinth by Jorge Luis Borges. Ibn Hakan al-Bukhari, dead in his labyrinth, like the spider which builds itself a feeble house from the Quran. This set, done raven, with a sweeping gesture that did not fail to embrace the misty stars while it took in the beak more the sea, the dunes, and imposing tumbled down building that somehow suggested a stable long since fallen into this repair. This is the land of my four beers. Unmin, his companion drew the pipe out of his mouth and made some faint sounds of approval. It was the first summer evening of 1914, wary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the two friends set great value on these far reaches of Cornwall. Dunraven, halted weighted a dark beer and tore of himself as the author of a substantial epic which his contemporaries would barely be able to scan and whose subject had not yet been revealed to him. Unmin had published a paper on the theory supposed to have been written by Fermat in the margin of a page of Diophanthus. Both men needed to be said, were young, dreamy and passionate. It's about a quarter of a century ago now said, done raven, that Ibn Hakkan al-Bukhari, chief or king of, I don't know what Nilotic tribe died in the central room of this house at the hands of his cousin Zaid. After all these years, the facts surrounding his death are still unclear. Unmin, as was expected of him, asked why. For several reasons was the answer. In the first place, this house is a labyrinth. In the second place, it was watched over by a slave and a lion. In the third place, a hidden treasure vanished. In the fourth place, the murderer was dead when the murderer happened. In the fifth place, tied out Unmin stopped him. "Don't go on multiplying the mysteries," he said. "They should be kept simple. Bearing mine, pearls, perlund, letter. Bearing mine, zangwills, locked room." Ormade complex, replied Dunraven. "Bearing mine, the universe." Climbing the steep dunes they had reached the labyrinth, it seemed them up close, a straight and almost endless wall of unplasted brick, barely higher than a man's head. Dunraven said that the building had the shape of a circle, but so wide was this circle that its curve was almost invisible. Unwin recollected, "Nikolafs of Kuzah," to whom a straight line was the arc of an infinite circle. They walked on and on, and along about midnight discovered a narrow opening that led into a blind, unsafe passage. Dunraven said that inside the house were many branching ways, but that by turning all ways to the left, they would reach the very center of the network in little more than an hour. Unwin ascended. Their cautious footsteps resounded off the stone-paid floor, the corridor branched into other narrower corridors. The roof was very low, making the house seem to want to imprison them, and they had to walk one behind the other through the complex dark. Unwin went ahead, forced to slacking the pace because of the rough, masonry and the many turns. The unseen wall flowed on by his hand endlessly. Unwin, slowing blackness, heard from his friends lips the tale of the death of Ibn Haqqan. Perhaps the oldest of my memories, Dunraven said, is the one of Ibn Haqqan El Bukhari in the port of Penthryth. At his heels followed a black man with a lion. Unquestionably, they were the first black man and the first lion my eyes had ever seen, outside of engravings from the Bible. I was a boy then, but the beast, the color of the song and the man, the color of the night, impressed me, less than Ibn Haqqan himself. To me, he seemed very tall. He was a man with a shallow skin, half-shot black eyes, an insolent nose, fleshy lips, a saffron-colored beard, a powerful chest, and a way of walking that was self-assured and silent. At home, I said, a king has come on a ship. Later, when the bricklayers were at work here, I broadened his title and duped him, king of Babel. The news that this stranger would settle in Penthryth was received with welcome, but the scale and shape of his house arose disapproval and bevel-dermant. It was not right that a house should consist of a single room and of miles and miles of corridors. Among foreigners, such houses might be common, people said, but hardly here in England are rector, Mr. Alabak, a man with out of the way reading habits, exhumed an eastern story of a king whom the divinity had punished for having built a labyrinth, and he told this story from the pulpit. The very next day Ibn Haqqan paid a visit to the rector, their circumstances of the brief interview were not known at the time, but no further sermon alluded to the sin of pride, and the more was able to go on contracting maisons. Years afterward, when Ibn Haqqan was dead, Alabak stated to the authorities the substance of their conversation. Ibn Haqqan, refusing a chair, had told him these or similar words. No man can place judgment upon what I'm doing now. My sins are such that were I to invoke for hundreds upon hundreds of years the ultimate name of God. This would be powerless to set aside the list of my torments. My sins are such that, where I to kill you, reverend al-Alabay with these very hands, my act would not increase even slightly the torments that infinite justice holds in store for me. There is no land on earth where my name is unknown. I am Ibn Haqqan al-Bukhari, and in my day I ruled over the tribes of the desert with a drop of iron. For years and years with the help of my cousin Zaid, I trampled then underfoot until God heard their outcry and suffered them to rebel against me. My armies were broken and put to the sword, I succeeded in escaping with the wealth I had accumulated during my reign of plunder. Zaid led me to the tom of a holy man, at the foot of the stone hill. I ordered my slave to watch the face of the desert. Zaid and I went inside with our chest of gold coins and slept utterly worn out. That night I believed that a tangle of snakes had trapped me. I woke up in horror by my side in the dawn Zaid lay asleep. A spiderweb against my flesh had made me dream that dream. It pained me that Zaid, who was a coward, should be sleeping so restfully. I reflected that the wealth was not infinite and that Zaid might wish to claim part of it for himself. In my belt was my silver-handled dagger. I slipped it from its sheath and pierced his throat with it. In his agony he muttered words I could not make out. I looked at him. He was dead, but fearing that he might rise up, I ordered my slave to obliterate the dead man's face with a heavy rock. Then we wandered under the sun and one day we spied a sea, where it all ships flowed the course through it. I thought that a dead man would be unable to make his way over such waters and I decided to seek other lands. The first night after we sailed I dreamed that I killed Zaid. Everything was exactly the same, but this time I understood his words. He said, "As you now kill me I shall one day kill you wherever you may hide. I have sworn to avert that threat. I shall bury myself in the heart of a labyrinth so that Zaid's ghost will lose its way." After having said this he went away, Alabi did his best to think that the mule was mad and that his absurd labyrinth was a symbol and a clear mark of his madness. Then he reflected that this explanation agreed with the extravagant building and with the extravagant story, but not with the strong impression left by the man Ibn Haqqam. Who knew whether such tales might not be common in the sandwastes of Egypt? Who knew whether such queer things corresponded like Pliny's dragons? Lest to a person than to a culture? On a visit to London, Alabi combed back numbers of the times. He verified the fact of the uprising and of the subsequent downfall of Albuqari and of his vizier, who his cover dies was well known. Albuqari, as soon as the bricklayers had finished, installed himself in the center of labyrinth. He was not seen against in the town at times, Alabi feared that Zaid had caught up with the king and killed him. At night, the vinn carried to us the grovelling of the lion and the sheep in their pen's pressed together with an ancient fear. It was customary for ships from eastern ports bound for Cardiff or Bristol to anchor in the little bay. The slave used to go down from the labyrinth, which at that time I remember, was not its present rose color but was crimson, an exchange guttural sounding words with the ship's crews and he seemed to be looking among the men for the vizier's gossed. It was no secret that these vessels carried cargoes of contraband and if off Alqahor or forbidden ivories, why not off dead men as well? Some three years after the house was finished, the rose of Sharon anchored one October morning just under the bluffs. I was not among those who saw this sailing ship and perhaps the image of it I hold in my mind is influenced by forgotten prints of a boobbekeer or of Trafalgar. But I believe it was among that class of ships so minutely detailed that they seemed less the work of a shipbuilder than of a carpenter and less of a carpenter than of a cabinet maker. It was, if not in reality, at least in my dreams, polished, dark, fast and silent and his crew was made up of Arabs and Malayans. It anchored at down and in the late afternoon of that same day Ibn Haqqan burst into the rectory to see Alabi. He was completely dominated by a passion of fear and was scarcely able to make it clear that Zai is had entered the labyrinth and that his slave and his lion had already been killed. He asked in all seriousness whether the authorities might be able to help him. Before Alabi could say a word Albuqari was gone, as if torn away by the same terror that had bought him for the second and last time to the rectory. Alone in his library, Alabi reflected in amazement that this fear-ridden man had kept down Sudanese tribes by the knife, knew what the battle was and knew what it was to kill. Alabi found out the next day that the boat had already set sail, bound for a red-sea port of Suakim he later learned. Feeling it was his duty to verify the death of the slave, he made his way up to the labyrinth. Albuqari's breathless tail seemed to him utterly fantastic, but at one turn of the corridor he came upon the lion and the lion was dead and at another turn there was the slave who was also dead and in the central room he found Albuqari with his face obliterated. At the man's feet was a small chest, inlaid with mother of pearl, the lock had been forced and not a single coin was left. Dan Raven's final sentences underline by rhetorical poses were meant to be impressive. Unwin guessed that his friend had gone over them many times before, always with the same confidence and with the same flatness of effect. He asked in order to feign interest how were the lion and the slave killed. The relentless voice went on with a kind of gloom satisfaction, their faces were also bashed in. A muffled sound of rain was now added to the sound of the men's steps. Unwin realized that they would have to spend the night in the labyrinth, in the central chamber, but that in time this uncomfortable experience could be looked back on as an adventure. He kept silent, Dan Raven could not restrain himself and ask in the manner of one who wants to squeeze the last drop. Can this story be explained? Unwin answered as though thinking aloud, "I have no idea whether it can be explained or not. I only know it's a lie." Dan Raven broke out in the torrent of strongly flavored language and said that all the population of pantry could bear witness to the truth of what he had told and that if he had to make up a story, he was a writer after all and could easily have invented a far better one. No less astonished than Dan Raven Unwin apologized. Time in the darkness seen more drawn out. Both men began to fear they had gone astray and were feeling their tiredness when a faint gleam of light from overhead revealed the lower steps of a narrow staircase. They climbed up and came to a round room that lay in room. Two things were left that attested to the fear of the ill-started king. A slit of a window that looked out onto the walls and the sea and the tractor in the floor that opened about the care of the stairway. The room, those spacious, had abouted something of a prison cell. Less because of the rain than because of a wish to have a ready anecdote for friends, the two men spent the night in the labyrinth. The mathematician slept soundly, not so the poet who was hounded by verses that his judgment knew to be worthless. Faceless, desultry and overpowering lion, faceless, the stricken slave, faceless the king. Unwin felt that the story of Albuqari's dead had left him indifferent, but he woke up with the conviction of having unraveled it. All that day he was preoccupied and unsociable, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together and two nights later he met Dan Raven in a pub back in London and said to him, "These are similar worms." In Cornwall, I said your story was a lie. The facts were true or could be thought of as true, but told the way you told them they were obviously lies. I will begin with the greatest lie of all, with the unbelievable labyrinth. A fugitive does not hide himself in a maze. He does not build himself a labyrinth on a bluff of looking the sea, a crimson labyrinth that can be sighted from afar by any ship's crew. He has no need to erect a labyrinth when the whole world already is one. For anyone who really wants to hide away, London is a better labyrinth than a lookout tower to which all the corridors of a building lead. The simple observation I have just propounded to you came to me the night before last, while we were listening to the rain on the roof and were waiting for sleep to fall upon us. Under its influence I choose to put aside your absurdities and to think about something sensible. About the theory of series, say or about a four dimension of space, ask Dan Raven. No, said Unminceyries, I thought about the labyrinth of Kretek, the labyrinth whose center was a man with the head of a ball. Dan Raven, steep in detective stories, thought that the solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself. Mystery has something of the supernatural about it and even of the divine. Its solution, however, is always tainted by slight of hand. He said to put off the inevitable. On coins and in sculpture, the minator has a ball's head. Dante imagined it as having the body of a ball and a man's head. That version also fits my solution on when agreed. What matters is that both the dwelling and the developer be monstrous. The minator simply justifies its maze. The same can hardly be said of a threat uttered in a dream. The minator's image once evoked and avoidably of course in a mystery in which there is a labyrinth. The problem was virtually sold. Nonetheless, I confess I did not fully understand that this ancient image held the key, but in your story I found a detail I could use, the spider web. The spider web repeated Dan Raven baffled. Yes, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the spider web, the Platonic spider web, let's keep this straight, may have suggested to the murderer. For there is a murderer, his crime. You remember that al-Bukhari in the tomb dreamed about a tangle of snakes and upon waking found that a spider web had prompted his dream. Let us go back to that night in which al-Bukhari had that dream. The defeated king and the vizier and the slave are escaping over the desert with treasure. They take shelter for the night in a tomb, the vizier whom we know to be a coward sleeps, the king whom we know to be a brave man does not sleep. In order not to share the treasure, the king nifes the vizier. Several nights later, the viziers ghost tretenes the king in a dream. All this is unconvincing. To my understanding, the events took place in another way. That night the king, the brave man slept and zayed the coward the awake. To sleep is to forget all things and this particular forgetfulness is not easy when you know you are being hunted down with drawn swarms. Zayed greedy bent over the sleeping figure of his king. He thought about killing him, maybe he even played with his dagger, but he did not dare. He walked and napping slave, they buried part of the treasure in the tomb and they fled to swacking and to England. Not to hide themselves from al-Bukhari, but to lure him and to kill him, they built, like the spider its web, the crimson labyrinth on the high dunes inside of the sea. The vizier knew that ships would carry to newbie reports the tale of the red-bearded men of the sleigh and of the lion and that sooner or later al-Bukhari would come in search of them in their labyrinth. In the last passageway of the maze, the trap lay waiting. Al-Bukhari had always underrated Zayed and now he is a man of the world. no, did not lower himself to take the slightest precaution. At last the wished for day came, Ibn Hakan landed in England, went directly to the door of the maze, made his way into its blind corridors, and perhaps had already set food on the first steps when his vizier killed him. I don't know whether with a bullet, from the strapped door in the ceiling, the slave would finish off the lion, and another bullet would finish off the slave, then Zaid crushed the three faces with a rock. He had to do it that way, one dead man with his face bashed in would have suggested a problem of identity, but the beast, the black man and the king formed a series and given the first two terms the last one would seem natural. It is not to be wondered at what he was driven by fear when he spoke to Alabi. He had just finished his awful job and was about to flee England and unearth the treasure. A thoughtful silence or displayed followed Amin's words, Dan Raven asked for another tankard before giving his judgement. I admit he said that my Ibn Hakan could have been Zaid. Such metamorphosis are classic rules of the game, are accepted conventions demanded by the reader. What I am unwilling to admit is your congencture that a part of the treasure remain in the Sudan. Remember that Zaid fled from the king and from the king's enemies, both. It is easier to picture him stealing the whole whole than taking the time to bury a portion of it. But the very end, perhaps no coins were found in the chest because no coins were left. The bricklayers would have eaten up a fortune that, unlike the red gold of the nibelungs, was not inexhaustible. And so we have Ibn Hakan crossing the seas in order to recover a treasure already squandered. I shouldn't say squandered, Unwin said, the visier invested it, putting together on an island of infidels, a great circular trap made of brick and destined not only to lure a king but to be his grave. Zaid, if your guess is correct, acted out of hate and fear and not out of greed. He stole the treasure and only later found that he was really after something else. He really wanted to see Ibn Hakan dead. He pretended to be Ibn Hakan. He killed Ibn Hakan and in the end he became Ibn Hakan. Yes, agreed, Don Raven. He was a good for nothing who, before becoming a nobody in death, wanted one day to look back on having been a king or having been taking for it king. There are two kings and there are two labyrinths. This is the story the Reverend Alabi told from the pulpits. Chronicles worthy of trust have recorded, but only Allah is all knowing that in former times there was a king of the Isles of Babylon who called together his architects and his wizards and set them to build him a labyrinth so intricate that no wise men would dare enter inside and so subtle that those who did would lose their way. This undertaking was a blasphemy for confusion and marvels belonged to God alone and not to men. With the passage of time there came to his court a king of the Arabs and the king of Babylon wishing to mock his guest simplicity, allowed him to set foot in his labyrinth where he wandered in humiliation and bebuilderment until the coming of night. It was then that the second king implored the help of God and soon after came upon the door. He suffered his lips to utter no complaint but he told the king of Babylon that he too had a labyrinth in his land and that God willing he would one day take pleasure in showing it to his host. Then he returned to Arabia, gathered his captains and his armies and overridden the realms of Babylon which saw fair fortune that he ravaged its castles, broke its peoples and took captive the king himself. He bound him unto a swift camel and brought him into the desert. Three days they rode and then the captor said, "All king of time and crown of the century, in Babylon you lured me into a labyrinth of brass cluttered with many stairways, doors and walls. Now, the Almighty had brought it to pass that I show you mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor unending galleries to wear one down, nor walls to block one's way." He then loosened the bones of the first king and left him in the heart of the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Glory be to the living who died not. That was Orhan Pahmuk, reading even Hakan Albukari, dead in his labyrinth by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas D. G. The story was published in the New Yorker in April of 1970 and appears in several collections including the Aleph and other stories published by Penguin Classics in 2004 and collected fictions published by Viking in 1998. On Thursdays, join head of editorial content at Vogue, Chloe Mal, and head of editorial content at British Vogue, Chomanati, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion, with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracy Ellis Ross. So, Morhan Borhas, I can't remember now where I found it, but he wrote a commentary on this story in which he warned readers not to take it too seriously. He says, "When I wrote Ibn Hakan, however, it became a cross between a permissible detective story and a caricature of one. The more I worked on it, the more hopeless the plot seemed and the stronger my need to parody. What I ended up with, I hope, will be red for its humor. I certainly can't expect anyone to take seriously, or to look for symbols in such pictorial whims as a black slave, a lion and cornwall, a red hair tail." "Wine, he also inserts the word symbol in the story, which I was surprised." He said, "The more was mad and that his absurd labyrinth was a symbol." And what was a symbol of? He doesn't let us know which, what is a symbol of? Is a symbol of his madness. "So, he tells us not to look for symbols, not to take these things as symbols. Are you agree? For its humor. What do you think?" I think Borges had already invented himself. And he had done so much. Now he is at the zenith of his fame and, in a way, he is a bit repeating himself, doing a pastiche of Borges. And I also like that this old fashioned partly orientalist imagery of Arabia, Ibn Haqan, El Bukhari, then there is Sudan, especially at those years Sudan was scary for the British because there was a Muslim, a Makhdi of Sudan. He is really, in a very professional way, addressing all the things that the reader would be interested in. But on the right hand, he is not doing this in an old fashioned story. He is also knows that he invented something that he can use this old fashioned orientalist imagery and combine it with what he discovered. His self-conscious about discovering that Borgesian labyrinth, making stories part of the texture of the story. Why was Borges so obsessed with labyrinths? I don't know, probably he was sick and tired of writers who are entering the labyrinth and then showing us something, telling, giving us a message and he was saying, "My message is not what you find in that small room at the labyrinth. The message is walking and getting lost in the labyrinth." And in the end, that's why he also says in this story, that a directive story, a mystery story, the solution is less impressive or what we find in the final room is less impressive than the labyrinth itself. Right. So at the same time, is this a real labyrinth? You know, it's on a hill in Cornwall. Its corridors go for miles and miles. It must be absolutely enormous, unbuildable. An interesting thing about it. about writing fiction is that you know that you're addressing the imagination of the reader. Here, Borges is asking to the readers, his readers, to visualize, and architecture is something almost impossible to visualize. Then, as a writer, I also understand that sometimes when he says, "Labyrinth, labrant is only a word." Sometimes, as he takes us inside the labrant, now the ceilings are low, it's dark, it's essential thing. But we can say that in these short stories, the formula of Borges is to combine the concepts which we, it's so hard to visualize with things that we can visualize. And Borgesian story has always things that are hard to see in our minds eye, and they are floating like concepts. They are floating concepts intertwined with normal cups of water, normal tables, normal countries, England, Africa, Sudan, they are there. But then, there are things that we cannot visualize. But that lends us a sense of a different writer. Borges invented a world which is different than any other writers. It is mostly a world that is not familiar, but a world that contains all the stories, makes us think about philosophy, make us think what happens to us when we read a fiction, make us think about the backbones of stories, and what those backbones, those structures imply those models of stories, imply philosophies. This is what is most interesting about Borges. Well, so let's go back to these two characters, Dunraven and Unwin. One is a writer, a poet who wants to write an epic. The other one is a mathematician, and one of them the writer tells us the story, and the mathematician solves it, as though it were a mathematical problem. Why do you think he chose that opposition between these two? There is also a Sherlock Holmes and Watson in this story, and then they have a metamorphosed into a writer and a mathematician, that we need two things, a description, b, metaphysics or logic. Borges, when he talks about Henry James, my god, Henry James is all description. Or a Borges wants to be all metaphysics and acrobatics and form. So these two sides now, these two desires now, identified with the mathematician and the storyteller. The storyteller has only, it seems, in the story, lists details and lists universe. The mathematician has a formula for everything, a formula for the world. So the effort is to combine these two. Sherlock Holmes gave this, put the detective story, the person who solves the detective story on a pedestal, helped by Edgar Allan Poe, who he refers here, but the hidden influence also partly here is Sherlock Holmes, because they have a distance to the act, and there are two minds, one is a bit naive, and the other is very penetrating and intelligent and sees the metaphysics, and we are all happy that they are chatting. Don Raven, he knows the story from his boyhood. He saw these people, he was amazed to see a lion, to see a black man. You are reading this story like a novel now. That's how Don Raven reads it. Yes, and I don't, for example, if I read this story in my class, I don't want my students to see the story through the character's eyes. While when we read the story, we want the students to see Anna Karanina, to see the events from other person's point of view. This is the enjoyment of a novel, but here, let's not do it. This is something else. Let's not read this story as a long novel. And in fact, this story does not give the joy of Tolstoy or Henry James is giving. It is, after a while, making us a bit feel a bit yes, very cerebral, very dense, very burguesium, but we are a bit lost. We are trying to grab something more strongly central. But we don't go to bogus to read central stories about what is interesting. Here, he's strength, his determination to write a story about stories, lost stories, and the characters in a way mirroring the ambiguities, strengths, the scary parts, mystery parts, romantic parts of the story. Well, Don Raven is very frustrated to be confronted with Unwins' Borhagen solutions. Yes. He wants him to appreciate the exoticism of this story. Yes. And it's always like that in Borges. He said, "Essential details and an logic that wants to contain it." And how does this Reverend Alibi come into this? Very strange. Is this Reverend in a small town in Cornwall who looks up eastern stories and reads them in church? The narrator tells us that he reads strange books or. Eastern literature. Then, I think he wanted to balance these two characters. He probably wanted to detail the story at third time, making sure that we get the message that you can pull out a story like a glow and show another aspect of it. And Borges is good at that. So, what do you think that story is doing appended to the end of this one? I didn't really understand that. He wrote it separately. He wrote it first. And even he said, you know, I had a quote from him where he says, he has no idea how it found its way into the story as a mystery to him. So, he just felt that that had to be tacked on to the ending. I should hear more of this little. I don't know. And it's good that sometimes there are things in a novel in a story. That things we know, that we cannot understand or not that it's very hard to understand. I also think that, yes, it's a retake, a third take on the story that he plays around. And that's it. But I need more information to understand why it is there. But joy of reading fiction is like, is this that in the end you don't understand everything? You let the story go and there is a dark side in it that you don't understand. But on the other hand, one part of you is saying, you're not missing much. This is enough. Something like that. And Boris always gives you that feeling. You cannot exhaust the possible infinite possible interpretations. The fact that we're talking about it, the fact that it's about stories and turning around stories like globes inside out, outside in. And the possibility of continuing like that, I took the third story like that, that there's infinite possibilities of detailing the story or reinterpreting. This is how I took it. But maybe I'm mistaken. Perhaps the suggestion that a labyrinth doesn't have to be a physical structure. Yes. That it can be just a mental wasteland. But our sense of labyrinth is endlessly intertwined with our sense of Borges. I cannot think of an intellectual in the last 50 years who would think of a labyrinth and would not remember Borges. Borges made labyrinth so popular. There's something interesting at the very beginning of the story where he sets it, where he sets it on the first summer evening of 1914. And he has a line about, you know, these young men are bored because their time lacks the dignity of danger. So this is a month before the start of World War I. These are Sligh ironies, Borges makes, of course. I also like it when he says, "Borges loves to dramatize the passionate dreamy youngster who's thinking about metaphysics. And loves even more to dismiss this person." Do you think there's the implication that these two are going to be sent off to war in a few months? I don't know. Maybe. It's such a sliding plant. From 1880 to 1930s, whatever happened in those 50s, were the most important things for Borges. The authors that were famous around those years, then events, First World War. Second World War was not that important for Borges. It was always First World War. In the end, it's like this famous story that once they asked a French guy, "Which French king you like?" and he said, "Some king." And why do you. "Oh wow, it's not important." But I was young then, this person said. So Borges was young before the First World War and then the enthusiasm to go to that war. It was a war of patriotism and machine guns. He was not a radical critic of social structures that led to war, but he had a sense of its stupidity, a sense of its narrowness. And he was writing this. He wrote this story in, I think, in late 1949 or so, it was published in Spanish in '51. So that's after the Second World War. So he's coming out of, you know, 30 years of, at least European crisis and disaster. And he writes this sort of funny story about, well, maybe not so funny, but about an exotic figure turning up on the coast of Cornwall with his lion and his slave. Yes, if you look at it that way, say, around that time Graham Green was going to Africa to Cuba writing very social novels and Borges was doing this old-fashioned thing. But Borges was on the other hand, was in the end writing like Borges. Borges was already famous and everyone wanted him to be a Borges, not a Graham Green. So I accepted that I don't find him a political or not interested in drama of the times. In fact, they asked him, he was successful at this age, not in 50s, actually, but when he published this in New Yorker. In 50s, he was writing one of his classic stories. He was writing like Borges. And for him, this was essential that he did not write Graham Green supplying with local color disorder, local politics, local color. He was busy with something else in trying to invent something. And it's timeless. Yes. That's by definition he was not pinned to something. There's an interesting line actually in the story. I noticed where the two men meet in the pub in London and Borges writes, he met Don Raven in a pub back in London and said to him, these are similar words. That or similar just leaps out at me because there's no real unwinn talking. Someone is going to say whatever Borges tells him to say. Why throw that in? To give a sense of authenticity, to say to the readers, this is so real that if one or two words are different, please excuse me. We may not have recorded this accurately which lands power of truth to the story. Of course it's rhetorical and no Borges reader would confuse that, oh yeah, what a scholarly attitude. Of course it is a little trick but we get it and I like it. That we get the trick that of course this is not fascinous, it is mock fascinous. Right. Yeah. You have the other moment where Unwin says, you know, it's all lies. He told me his lies and he said, and then Don Raven says, no, it's absolutely true. I was here. I saw it. And he says, well, the facts are factual but there's also lies. And that's an interesting theme right now in far lives. Borges, like many writers, enjoyed going around the line between fact and fiction. I wonder what he would have said when absolute truth is disappearing. Ivan has his or her digital truth. He would be cracking joke endlessly and perhaps would be upset about the fact that there is not a center anymore, something like that. But he also talked about Labrins where there is no center or he had also image of the world as a place where there is no center. Yeah. Where it's all bobble. You know, he even refers to Abukhari as the king of bobble. Yes. Do you think we walk away from this story with something more than a mystery solved? We were puzzled. First of all, every author has his or her seasons. Now we are not in the season of discovery of Borges. We are sending, and this is a homage to Borges. He has achieved so much. I have learned so much from him, not only me, my generation of writers, American postmodern literature from Donald Eel to Thomas Pinchon learned so much from Borges. When we read a Borges story again, not only we are refreshing our memories, we are also sending and him our respects that he made it possible for us to see our lives in a different way than flat 19th century realism. And we are very grateful to him for giving us a new vision of fiction. Well, thank you so much, Rohan. I enjoyed talking to you. Jorge Luis Borges, who died in 1986, was an Argentine short story writer, S.A.S.Pohet and translator. His works translated into English include Labyrinth, The Alliph and other stories, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory, and Collected Fictions. Borges' novel includes Snow, My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence. He has also published several books of nonfiction, including Istanbul Memories in the City and other colors. He is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Norman Mailer Prize and many other awards. You can download more than 130 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, including one in which Orhan Pomok reads Vladimir Nabokov's My Russian Education, or subscribe to the podcast for free in the Apple Podcast section of the iTunes Store. On the Writer's Voice Podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page, or rate and review us an Apple Podcasts on iTunes. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast is produced by Jill Duboff. I'm Debra Triesman. Thanks for listening. 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