When Fiction Lives in Fiction  

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When Fiction Lives in Fiction [“Cuando la ficción vive en la ficción”], published in El Hogar in 1939, is the title of a significant narrative essay written in 1939 by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Weighing in at something less than three pages in length, Borges explores in his inimitable way the teleological nature of metadocuments in fiction such as, for example, False documents. Amongst the works examined in this essay are William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, with its play-within-a-play, Gustav Meyrink's novel The Golem with its motifs of dreams within dreams within dreams, and the nub of the essay itself, a short review of the then recently published At Swim-Two-Birds by Irish writer Flann O'Brien with its circular daisy chain of characters writing novels about each other.

The essay described Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds as follows,

I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien, At Swim, Two Birds. A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitues of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student. At Swim, Two Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.




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