An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. Released in 1941, it is the sixth short story in The Garden of Forking Paths and tells of its titular fictional author's work.
Characters[]
- The narrator - presumably a fictionalized version of the author
- Herbert Quain
Plot[]
On hearing of Herbert Quain's death at Roscommon, our narrator was unsurprised to find little praise of his works. According to him, Quain was "not a man who ever considered himself a genius". Herbert himself said that he "[did] not belong to Art, but merely to the history of art" and believed that "good literature was common enough, that there is scarce a dialogue in the street which does not achieve it".
After describing this, our narrator begins a description of Quain's works. His first work, The God of the Labyrinth was a detective novel. Published in 1933 (around the same time as Ellery Queen's Siamese Twin Mystery), the novel was forgotten by critics. Even the narrator is unable to "recuperate the details of the action", though he does remember its plot. He describes it as such:
An indecipherable assassination takes place in the initial pages; a leisurely discussion takes place toward the middle; a solution appears in the end.
Despite this "solution" appearing in the end, a line at the end reveals that the solution is erroneous. This leads "the unquiet reader" to flip back through its pages and find a new solution to the mystery.
Quain's next work was April March, published in 1936. The narrator describes it as an obvious game. April March's thirteen chapters are said to be "regressive and ramified" and lead to nine separate endings and nine separate novels.
The narrator next describes Quain's only (known) play, The Secret Mirror. This play is described as having two acts. The first of these acts is an elaborate fiction created by one of the characters featured within its second act. Rumors spread about The Secret Mirror being a Freudian comedy, though the narrator does not believe this. Finally, the narrator briefly describes a collection of short stories called Statements. Published in 1939, each of its eight stories was carefully constructed to be disappointing to the average reader - "each of them prefigures or promises a good plot, deliberately frustrated by the author." The narrator ends his examination by stating that one his own short stories, The Circular Ruins, was a smaller fragment of one of the short stories within Statements.
Sources[]
- Wikipedia