On the Impossibility of a Preface

Mitchell arrived with a thermos and two paperbacks stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat. Borges was already seated, though “seated” suggests an intention he seemed to have bypassed — he was simply there, in the wooden chair, his hands folded over the head of his cane, as if the chair had formed around him. The room we’d been given was a seminar room in a building whose function I never determined. There was a whiteboard with the ghost of an equation nobody had bothered to erase. The overhead lights buzzed at a frequency just below annoyance.

“I brought mate,” Mitchell said, setting down the thermos. “Or something that was sold to me as mate. I can’t vouch for its authenticity.”

“Mate requires a bombilla,” Borges said. “Without the straw it is merely hot water with pretensions.”

“Then it has something in common with most literary theory.”

Borges smiled at this — not the polite smile of a man being humored, but the quick, private smile of someone who has just been given a gift he did not expect. I realized I had underestimated Mitchell. Not his intelligence, which I had expected, but his speed. He arrived at things fast, and by a route you did not see until he had already passed through it.

I explained the premise: a work structured as texts commenting on each other. Reviews of books that contain reviews. Citations pointing to citations. The whole critical apparatus gradually revealed as the story itself, until the reader cannot locate a ground floor — cannot find the thing that is being discussed, because the discussion has eaten it. Borges listened without moving. Mitchell poured from the thermos.

“This is a familiar problem,” Borges said. “The map that is the size of the territory. The encyclopedia that contains itself. I have written some version of this premise seven or eight times. Perhaps more. The difficulty is not the idea. The idea is obvious the moment you encounter any footnote — every footnote whispers that the real text is somewhere else, in the thing being cited, and when you go there, another footnote whispers the same thing. The difficulty is making the reader feel this rather than merely understand it.”

“Right,” Mitchell said. “Because as a concept it’s just — ” he made a gesture with one hand, a spiral — “it’s just recursion. Recursion is easy to state and boring to demonstrate. Have you ever watched someone explain recursion to a computer science student? They draw a function calling itself. Everyone nods. Nobody feels anything. The challenge is that the recursive structure has to produce something in the reader that the reader cannot get by simply understanding the recursion.”

“You are describing the difference between a labyrinth drawn on paper and a labyrinth you are lost in,” Borges said.

“Exactly. And the thing is — drawn on paper, a labyrinth is just a puzzle. You can trace it with your finger. You’re always outside it, looking down. But the moment you’re inside — ”

“You do not know you are in a labyrinth. That is the essential point. The man lost in a labyrinth does not experience himself as lost in a labyrinth. He experiences himself as walking through a series of corridors that seem to lead somewhere. Each corridor is perfectly legible. It is only the totality that is illegible.”

I said something then that I had been carrying around for days, a formulation I was proud of and nervous about. “I want the reader to realize that the critical apparatus has become the story. That there is no primary text — the reviews and citations and commentary ARE the text, and the thing they’re supposedly about never existed.”

Borges nodded slowly. Mitchell did not nod. He tilted his head, which I was beginning to understand meant disagreement brewing.

“I think that’s half of it,” Mitchell said. “Maybe less than half. Because if the reader realizes the critical apparatus is the story, that’s a revelation. It’s a twist. And a twist gives you a moment of vertigo followed immediately by stable ground. You thought you were here, actually you’re there, now you know where you are. I don’t want the reader to know where they are.”

“What do you want?”

“I want the reader to be unable to determine whether they’re reading the primary text or the commentary on it. Not because it’s cleverly disguised — not because I’ve hidden the seams — but because the distinction has genuinely collapsed. The commentary IS primary. The primary text IS commentary on something else. And when you go looking for what that something else is, you find another commentary. Not infinitely — infinity is boring — but enough times that you stop looking for the ground floor and start living on whichever floor you happen to be on.”

“In Ghostwritten,” Borges said, and the reference surprised me — I had not expected him to have read Mitchell’s work, though of course it was foolish not to expect this from a man who had read, or claimed to have read, everything, “the chapters do not comment on each other so much as infect each other. A character in Tokyo makes a phone call that disrupts a life in Petersburg. The connection is causal but also — what is the word — ”

“Viral,” Mitchell said.

“Viral. Yes. Each story is complete in itself but carries within it the genetic material of the others. The reader who finishes the book and returns to the beginning discovers that the first chapter has been changed. Not on the page — the words are the same — but in the reader’s understanding. The first chapter now contains the ninth chapter. It is a kind of temporal contamination.”

“That’s what I want here too,” Mitchell said. “But instead of characters contaminating each other across chapters, I want texts contaminating each other. A review that changes the book it reviews. A citation that rewrites the source. Not metaphorically — actually. The reader reads the review first and then the book, and the book has been altered by the review. Not because the review was accurate but because the act of reading the review has made the reader a different reader.”

“You are describing something I attempted in ‘Pierre Menard,’” Borges said. “The same text is a different text because the context has changed. Cervantes’s Quixote and Menard’s Quixote share every word but are different works. The difference is not in the text but in the reading. But I wrote that as a joke — or rather, as a philosophical proposition disguised as a joke. You are proposing to build a narrative around this proposition, which is considerably more dangerous.”

“Why dangerous?”

“Because a philosophical proposition is content with being true. A narrative must also be felt. And the feeling you are reaching for — the vertigo of having no primary text — is an unpleasant feeling. It is the feeling of having no ground. Most readers do not want this feeling. They will resist it. They will construct a ground floor out of whatever materials you give them, and they will stand on it and read your labyrinth from above, as a puzzle, as Mitchell says. To prevent this you must — ”

He paused. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Mitchell waited. I waited. I had learned in these meetings that Borges’s pauses were not hesitations. They were architecture.

” — you must make the reader complicit. The reader must be producing the very thing they cannot find. They must be writing the primary text as they read the commentary, and they must not realize they are doing this until it is too late to stop.”

“Yes,” Mitchell said, and the speed of his agreement told me he had arrived at the same place by a different route. “The reader as co-author of the thing they’re searching for. They keep looking for the original text, and their looking IS the original text. Their confusion is the story.”

I felt something tighten in my chest. Not anxiety exactly, but the feeling you get when two people who are both smarter than you suddenly agree and you are not sure you can execute what they have agreed on. “How do I do that, practically? In terms of actual prose on a page?”

Mitchell leaned forward. “You need multiple textual registers. A review. A critical essay. A personal letter. Maybe a translator’s note. Each one refers to the others. Each one is convinced that it is the commentary and the thing it refers to is the primary text. But the reader starts to notice that the review quotes the letter, and the letter quotes the essay, and the essay quotes the review, and nobody quotes the book.”

“Because the book does not exist.”

“Because the book is what happens between the quotations. The book is the white space. The book is the reader’s attempt to reconstruct what all these people are talking about, and that attempt — that reconstruction — is the only primary text there is.”

Borges shifted in his chair. “I am not satisfied,” he said, and his dissatisfaction was a cold, still thing, not irritable but final. “What you describe is elegant. It is even beautiful. But it is still a machine. A very clever machine. The reader admires the machine. The reader says: look how cleverly the gears interlock. This is not enough. A story must be about something other than its own construction.”

Mitchell looked at him. “What should it be about?”

“I do not know. That is the question I cannot answer, which is why I am not satisfied. In my best work — and I have written perhaps four or five things I consider good, the rest being exercises — the formal ingenuity serves a human terror. The Library of Babel is about the formal properties of an infinite library, yes, but it is also about the despair of a librarian who knows that the book that would explain his life exists somewhere in the stacks and he will never find it. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is about the formal properties of branching time, yes, but it is also about a man who must kill someone he respects in order to transmit a message. The form is the feeling. They are the same thing. What you are describing — this network of citations without a source — what is its human feeling?”

Silence. Not an uncomfortable one. A working one.

“Loneliness,” I said, and was surprised to hear myself say it. “The feeling of reading something that refers to an experience you almost recognize but can’t quite reach. Like reading a love letter addressed to someone else. You understand every word. You feel the weight of it. But it is not yours. And the more carefully you read it, the more thoroughly you understand it, the more it is not yours.”

Mitchell looked at me with an expression I had not seen before — not approval exactly, but recognition. As though I had said the thing he had been circling.

“That’s good,” he said. “That’s actually — yes. The reader as someone perpetually adjacent to the real experience. Always reading about the thing, never in the thing. And the terrible revelation is that being in the thing might not be possible. That the letter, the review, the commentary — these might be all there is. There might not be an experience underneath the descriptions of it.”

“Now I am interested,” Borges said. “Now we are talking about something real. The terror of the commentary that has no original. Not as a formal game but as a condition. The human condition of always reading about life rather than living it. Or — more precisely — the terrifying suspicion that there is no difference. That reading about life IS life, and the ‘direct experience’ we imagine exists beneath the reading is a fiction we have invented to comfort ourselves.”

“Ghostwritten did something adjacent to this,” Mitchell said. “Each character is living what they think is a primary experience — falling in love, committing a crime, losing their mind — but the reader sees that each primary experience is actually a secondary effect of someone else’s primary experience. The love in one chapter is the consequence of the crime in another. And the crime is the consequence of the madness in a third. Nobody has an original experience. Everyone is living in someone else’s footnote.”

“But the reader is above it,” Borges said. “The reader sees the pattern. The reader is the one who stands outside and perceives the network.”

“And in this story, the reader shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“No. The reader should be inside the network. Another citation. Another commentary. Reading the story is itself a text that someone else might cite. The reader is not outside the book. The reader is on one of its pages, and does not know which one.”

I opened my mouth to suggest a way this might work — some structural device, some framing — and Mitchell cut me off, not rudely but with the urgency of someone who has just seen something and needs to say it before it dissolves.

“The story should feel like you’re reading scholarship about a text that doesn’t exist, and halfway through you realize you’re producing the text by reading the scholarship. And then you realize even that realization is just another layer of scholarship. There’s no bottom. But — and this is what Borges is saying — the no-bottom has to hurt. It can’t just be clever. The loneliness of it, the — what did you call it — the adjacent-ness. Always next to the thing. Never the thing.”

“In Ficciones,” I said, “every story is a report on something that happened elsewhere. ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ is a report. ‘The Library of Babel’ is a report. ‘Pierre Menard’ is a review. The narrator is always mediating. Always one step removed. And that removal is where the terror lives.”

“And you want to take that removal and multiply it,” Borges said. “Several steps removed. So many steps that the original event — the original text, the original experience — is not merely distant but ontologically uncertain. It may not exist. The reader holds a chain of references and follows it link by link, expecting to arrive somewhere, and arrives instead at another link.”

“A chain with no anchor,” Mitchell said.

“Yes. But the links are beautiful. Each link is finely wrought. Each commentary is itself a small work of art. The reader must care about each individual text enough to keep following the chain, even as they begin to suspect it leads nowhere.”

Mitchell uncapped the thermos again and poured what was left into his cup. The liquid was dark and over-steeped. “There’s a practical danger here,” he said. “Which is that the reader gives up. You’re asking a lot. You’re asking them to read texts about texts about texts and maintain emotional investment even as you systematically deny them the satisfaction of arriving at a primary text. Some readers will throw the thing across the room.”

“Good,” Borges said. “Let them. The readers who remain will have understood something about their own condition as readers. They will have felt — not merely understood, felt — that they have never read a primary text in their lives. Every book they have ever read was already a commentary on something else. Every experience they have ever had was already a citation.”

Mitchell said nothing to this. He drank his over-steeped mate. The fluorescent light buzzed. I looked at the whiteboard and its spectral equation, and thought: that equation was a commentary on a problem that someone carried into this room and then carried out again, and the ghost on the whiteboard is a citation of a thought that no longer exists, and I am reading it, and my reading is another commentary, and there is no