The bit of Borges that has always stuck most firmly in my head (and let’s be honest, everyone has a bit of Borges stuck in their head; even if — perhaps especially if — they’ve never actually read him) is the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In his 1942 essay ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’ — which is indeed an essay, not a short story — Borges describes the real-life 17th century philosopher’s actual and historically documented attempt to create a universal language based on the categories, subdivisions, and yet further subdivisions of all known things. This ambitious yet essentially arbitrary systemisation of knowledge Borges judiciously compares to the list of animals in “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia”:
“In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”
Borges then states, in the very next paragraph, that this encyclopaedia (not, of course, directly seen by Borges himself, but attributed to the further attribution of the very eminent sounding, and most recognisably initialled, Dr Franz Kuhn) is apocryphal; and indeed no other reference to it has ever been found. Because Borges, obviously, and deliberately obviously, made it up for the purposes of his essay (I mean, come on: “those that have just broken the flower vase”?). Which is why ‘John Wilkes’ Analytical Language’ is probably actually my favourite Borges short story, but since this is the Introduction it doesn’t count.
Anyway. I think that this, or something very like this, works equally well as a set of criteria for what constitutes an includable-in-my-personally-curated-short-story-anthology ‘short story’. Curator is an interesting job description, after all. Curate, curious, cure, curare. A choosy person who chooses; chooses which artefacts to preserve, to fix in amber, to paralyse. And every choice, however discriminate, is also partially indiscriminate, because informed or framed or fed (or poisoned) by personal experience. Every act of curation has something particular to say; it is its own story, and it’s usually mostly about the curator.
And there are hundreds, obviously; thousands, tens of thousands if you cast the net of ‘what is a short story?’ wide enough. Curating that down to twelve is like paring an iceberg down to a handful of cubes for your gin, then looking over your shoulder to find you’ve made a whole other, very different-looking iceberg with all the shavings.
And so:
A Personal Anthology 