In The Book of Imaginary Beings, by short-story writer and surrealist Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, fabricated mythological creatures are created and then passed off alongside legitimate folkloric beings without any specific textual nods to this. In fact, Borges and Guerrero invented fictional texts and then cited them for the purposes of legitimizing their fiction. This leads to a threading of the line between what can be considered a fact, and what can be considered fiction, a narrative playfulness that calls into questions the very legitimacy of the encyclopedic format.

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The Book of Imaginary Beings is, as suggested by the title, a bestiary of sorts, containing various animals, plants and peoples with either legendary or literary pedigrees. There are, however, two fictional beings that were created wholecloth for The Book: the A Bao A Qu and the Peryton. The A Bao A Qu is a resident of The Tower of Victory, a real-world tower, built in the eighth century and located in the state of Rajasthan in western India. The A Bao A Qu is a kind of formless shape with skin the texture of the peach, which, when someone climbs the tower, begins to glow with an inner light, glowing progressively brighter as the visitor climbs. When they reach the top of the tower, if they have attained Nirvana the A Bao A Qu reaches its perfected form, but as the visitor descends, it “wheels and tumbles down the first steps where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor” (Borges et al. 15). Borges and Guerrero in the original version of the text cite as the source for this legend a footnote to The Arabian Nights by Captain Richard Francis Burton, but in the 1974 English Edition, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with Borges, changes the citation to the fictional treatise On Malay Witchcraft, written by the equally fictional C. C. Iturvuru. The Peryton, meanwhile, is a deer-bird hybrid which casts the shadow of a man. An apocryphal prophecy from ancient Byzantium claims that the city of Rome would be destroyed by Perytons, and when a Peryton takes the life of another, afterwards “their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favour of their gods” (116). For the entry on the Peryton Borges cites the manuscript of a rabbi in Fez, which was conveniently destroyed during the firebombing of Dresden. While both fabricated beings have gained some legitimacy, it is particularly the Peryton that has taken off, being treated with some legitimacy by a variety of less scrupulous compendiums of myth, and being popularized by the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, which it has appeared in since the 1970’s. 

Amusingly, these two pieces are not the ends of the falsified information located within the book. A great number of the citations in the book, even those cited as sources for the descriptions of beings that are more than Borges and Guerrero’s literary in-jokes, are obscure, and likely created wholecloth by Borges. As said by Borges translator Andrew Hurley in his notes on the 2006 translation, the nature of Borges’ “erudition, creativity, and sense of fun is such that it has been simply impossible to ferret out all the originals,” with him later adding that at least some of Borges’ quotations are “almost certainly apocryphal, put-ons” (Hurley 218). This kind of play with the truth is common throughout Borges’ body of work. A frequent forger, many of Borges’ works either examine the concept falsified information or are themselves falsified documents. In fact, after Borges’ death, thanks to the number of falsely-attributed works he created himself, there were actually several cases of poems being falsely attributed to Borges, under the mistaken belief that they were yet more of his forgeries. Borges’ works toy with the line between fact and fiction, and in The Book of Imaginary Beings he and his collaborators toy with the ideas of categorization, and ask whether or not some things, such as ideas or fiction, could ever be successfully categorized, or whether such categorization could even have any value. This is apparent even in the basic concept of the book; The Book of Imaginary Beings is an encyclopedia (something ostensibly factual) containing only fictions. It is reminiscent of another of Borges’ works, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. In Wilkins, Borges describes a fictional taxonomy of animals supposedly taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia. The encyclopedia categorized animals by fourteen categories: Those that belong to the emperor, Embalmed ones, Those that are trained, Suckling pigs, Mermaids (or Sirens), Fabulous ones, Stray dogs, Those that are included in this classification, Those that tremble as if they were mad, Innumerable ones, Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, Et cetera, Those that have just broken the flower vase, and Those that, at a distance, resemble flies. It was this absurd, arbitrary list that would inspire postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault to write his book The Order of Things: an Archaeology of Human Sciences. In the book’s preface, Foucault writes that Borges’ taxonomy inspired in him a “laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other” (Foucault XVI). Foucault’s description of the taxonomy’s threatening of the definitions of the Same and Other exemplifies the liminal space that much of The Book operates upon, and frames Borges’ falsifications, from the A Bao A Qu to the possibly fictional citations throughout the book, as subversive, undermining and confusing the way we perceive and categorize our world.

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Borges’ and company’s playful approach to fact in The Book of Imaginary Beings blurs the lines between reality and fiction, both in the book and in the outside world, where the fictional beings constructed for the book have spread, having been given legitimacy by the credulous. Just the fact that these stories have spread shows that we as people are often happy to accept obscure information as true. Although of course the legendary legends created for The Book of Imaginary Beings are harmless to all but frustrated anthropologists and historians, it is important to remember that sometimes more insidious ideas are smuggled into both public and academic discourse under the atmosphere and aesthetics of intellectualism and fact, and that nowadays it has only become increasingly important to be critical of the ideas we accept and incorporate into what we accept as Truth.