Jorge Luis Borges: "The Lottery in Babylon" and a different End of the World

Some quick background info on Borges might be a good idea before we start getting into a discussion of one of his more famous short stories. Borges was a prolific writer, poet, and essayist, who began publishing his work in Argentina in the early 1920s. Though popular in Spanish speaking countries to a certain extent starting in the 1940s (depending on whether one agreed with his politics or not), he wasn't read and translated widely until the 1960s and 70s, when the Latin American Boom* and magical realism** began to captivate the rest of the world. Many critics say Borges was robbed of a Nobel Prize for his works because of some of his fascist political leanings (he was very anti-Peron and anti-socialist), but his stories and essays have had a great impact on writers throughout the Americas, including here in the USA. His tone, his allusions to other works, and the way he completely makes up references, critics, and pretty much anything else necessary for his stories, sets his body of work very much apart.

In "The Lottery of Babylon," we are introduced to many of the tactics that make so many readers fall in love with his writing. The eerie tone of the first person narration sets the reader immediately on edge, as does the way Borges buries the main plot of the story underneath the allegorical and metaphorical aspects of the story. Our narrator is running away from the Lottery and from the Company that runs it. Babylon, his world, is at its end times, and he is trying to get away as fast as he can. Yet the Company, as a representative of organized religion, or capitalism, or socialism, or any other organization or -ism one could think of to overlay onto the story, occupies the main conflict. And beyond that, this is about World War II and the political and social conflicts in Argentina at the time. Yet even this vision of conflict is, well, conflicting. Has the Company brought about the chaos our narrator flees? Or are the citizens to blame? Is Babylon the work of consensual degradation and madness or is it the work of some menacing overlord who wants to subjugate the masses?

These questions, I believe, are at the center of the story. The text is not here to give us answers, but to force us to ask questions. How does all this actually work? Why has it progressed this way? Who is to blame for this society, a society that goes beyond the usual duplicities and iniquities of the multiple Babylons to which it alludes? This story is about the End of the World because it shows us extremes. This is not anarchy, but chaos; no one is to blame and everyone is to blame. This is the end of humanity as defined by logic, order, and law. Everything we use as a frame of reference is gone - which is also what makes the story harder to read and understand. The footing we usually use to find ourselves within a narrative has been taken away, just as it has been taken from Babylon itself. We are down the rabbit hole, with no rabbit to guide us. And that is the point... when everything is taken away, what is left? When taken down to its core, this story is about human nature, in a way that mirrors so many other stories about the End of the World. How do we react in such extreme situations? What is left when there is nothing left? Does humanity rise to the challenge or fall along the wayside? Is there anything that can keep us human, in our own definition of the term?

The story becomes, then, a version of Schrödinger's cat. We won't know the answers to these questions until we open the box, but in this case, the box cannot be opened, as we have no way to visit Babylon or get any 'real' or 'factual' information about it, so the answers will always be up in the air.

* Though I've linked to the wikipedia page, be careful reading it. Some of its claims are contentious at best and it doesn't go into the kind of detail needed to have a good grasp on the Boom. But it's a start.

** The wikipedia page for magical realism is NOT useful. It completely confuses certain definitions and claims certain authors, including Borges, as magical realists when they aren't. Borges influenced magical realism, but his stories are more in keeping with Poe than someone like García Márquez.

++ On a side note, an intriguing use of the story as a way to understand sports can be found here.

Why read science fiction?

I've been thinking quite a bit about why we do or don't read, write, and analyze science fiction, especially in a university setting... Some English departments or profs love using sf in class, while others loath the genre, labeling it as pulp silliness, one dimensional techno porn, or stuff that's just too foreign or weird to use with students, especially in intro classes. And still others fall into an in-between category, comfortable to teach what they know (which usually doesn't include science fiction). But I've been an sf fanatic since I first started reading (at least, I know enough that the snobs call it sf instead of scifi), so I'm drawn to the genre not just because of the challenge of teaching something a bit out of the ordinary, but also because I truly believe there is something genuine and important in science fiction that really should be taught in the classroom.

Case and point: the work of Ray Bradbury. Most of us know his name because of Fahrenheit 451, though I'm just as big a fan of The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes, which scared me pretty badly when I was a kid. Bradbury is a master of horror as much as he is a master of science fiction, and the atmosphere of many of his best stories exudes the kind of chill that makes us want to continue reading, even if we don't want to. What happens next? Why is this happening in the first place? What does all of this even mean? And the importance of meaning, of the purpose of his stories, highlights the reason why science fiction makes a lovely focus in the classroom. Setting aside the truly didactic stuff - the novels and stories that hold to well worn cliches, archetypes, and tropes so over-used they've become useless - scifi, when done well, leaves things open to interpretation. These stories can put us (both characters and audience) in situations that could never really exist so we can see how human nature adapts, or doesn't, to irreality, the surreal, the impossible. It truly encapsulates what fiction is all about (and conjures eerie allusions to what Plato famously hated about poetry).

In Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World," he opens with the question, "What would you do if you knew this was the last night of the world?" This sentence immediately puts the reader inside the story. What would you do? The characters in the story simply go about their normal lives, eating dinner together, playing with their children, washing the dishes, getting up to turn the faucet off after they've already gone to bed. Holding hands and saying good night, the last words they'll every say to each other. And what is the purpose of all this? Why give us a story that seems to have no real plot, no major, obvious theme? Is this a warning about something, like some of Bradbury's other stories in The Illustrated Man? The Veldt, The Highway, and There Will Come Soft Rains all warn of the problems with technology and our own loss of humanity. They speak of a distraction from nature and the more important things in life (like family and emotion). Yet "The Last Night of the World" isn't the kind of apocalyptic story that warns us to stop relying of technology or else we'll die (unless turning off the faucet is an ecological plea for sustainability, which I doubt). Instead, it's very tediousness, lack of real plot, and stoic characters actually point to the mundane as part of the problem. Why don't these people do anything? Why don't they care? If they had panicked, if they had tried to save themselves, could they have stopped the End of the World? This corruption of the usual End of the World trope is a twisting of the usual theme for a reason. It speaks to the banality of evil, to the way bad things happen when good people do nothing (yes, that was a reference to both Hannah Arendt and The Dark Knight in the same sentence). Suburbia, family, normality: all well and good, all safe, as long as it's kept in check, as long as we don't get too complacent. But if we get too wrapped up in our own complacency... The End of the World will catch us in our beds, fast asleep.