Borges and The Tesseract

letting the dream take over

I’ve decided to publish something every day in November 2025. Expect future entries to be much shorter.

I

Another customer at the cider bar saw my copy of Collected Fictions. “Oh! That’s a throwback. I remember reading Borges in AP Spanish. Are you enjoying it?”

“Yes,” I said, with cautious enthusiasm. “Actually, I’m fascinated with it for a strange reason. In a way, Borges’s stories have helped me make sense of a book I read a decade ago, a book that left an impression on me without me really understanding why. Have you heard of House of Leaves?”

“That’s great!” he said. “No, I haven’t heard of it.”

“It’s about… well, it’s a story within a story. Actually, in a way, they’re the same book.”

By “they” I meant Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but I don’t blame him for not following my pronoun-laden rambling. “Oh,” he said. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” I picked up the cider bottle in front of me, “see how this bottle casts a shadow on the counter? That shadow looks different depending on how you hold the bottle. So you could say that the two shadows you see from two different angles are two different pictures.” I turned it around in my hands. “But actually, they’re just different shadows of the same bottle. See?”

The stranger smiled. “That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “I’m on board with that.”

We continued to chat about other topics. But at that moment, his eyes betrayed a reasonable question.

What the fuck are you talking about?

II

It makes sense that I discovered House of Leaves in a series of unlikely events. First, when I was 14, I had a crush on a girl who used Tumblr, so I joined the site. Second, within that global village, I started chatting with another user, who turned out to also live in India. Third, he told me he was coming to Bangalore for Comic Con and suggested we meet up there. Fourth, when we met, he told me about his favorite book, called House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. He was over a decade older than me, and I idolized him. So I immediately pirated the book on my iPod Touch. For weeks I would stay up in bed, reading it on the tiny screen.

It’s hard to reflect on what I really thought about the book back then. In those days, I had the hunger to chew through a new book every day. So I could ingest a book cover-to-cover, without synthesizing any deep impressions from it, before I moved onto another book. That is what happened with House of Leaves. I could only tell you its plot at a surface level after reading it. But despite the fact that I didn’t really understand it, I knew it was a book I had to hold onto. I had the sense that though it didn’t click for me then, I would one day be in a position where it did. I just had to pass the book onto my future selves, until I was the self who needed to read it.

House of Leaves disappeared from my life for years, surfacing only when I would reference it as “my favorite book”. But it reappeared when I graduated high school. I wanted to give my best friend a parting gift as we went off to distant colleges. I hit on an idea: I would give her an annotated copy of House of Leaves. I would read it for the second time, this time adding on my own thoughts and questions in the margin, to add to the book’s existing layers of narrative.

I was proud of this idea. It was based on my sister and her friends having one shared, collectively annotated copy of Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants – a book about a pair of jeans that somehow fits four best friends perfectly despite their different sizes, a pair which they send back and forth between them as their collective friendship evolves. I imagined a future in which my friend and I exchanged this copy of House of Leaves back and forth, our dialog unfolding into a superstructure to elevate the book.

House of Leaves, after all, is composed of layered stories. The (fictional) photojournalist Will Navidson makes a documentary about his mysterious new house, whose inside is bigger than its outside, in defiance of the laws of physics. Then the recluse Zampanò writes a scholarly analysis of Navidson’s (fictional) documentary about his house. Then the tattoo artist Johnny Truant transcribes Zampanò’s (fictional) thesis with annotations from his own deteriorating life. Finally, unseen Editors annotate Truant’s (fictional) manuscript with corrections and further details. All of these narrators exist in the same book. Why not add another narrator to this stack? And if there should be another narrator – I asked with teenage arrogance – why shouldn’t it be me?

Well, it didn’t turn out exactly as I planned. While my friend liked the book, she didn’t annotate it and send it back to me for us to continue the cycle. But having that idea showed that the book had actually registered with me, all those years ago. I wasn’t in the habit of annotating books, especially not ones I would give to others. The idea would not have occurred to me if I didn’t somehow grasp its concordance with the book’s structure. This fact is the main reason I’m proud of having had this idea, not because it was a good gift in any way.

I re-read House of Leaves one more time, prompted by graduating college and moving to California. I bought a used copy on Amazon that declared its origins in the Denver Public Library. After this third reading, I wrote in my diary “Uncanny is the feeling of rereading this book after half a decade and seeing an unnerving amount of my personality explained by a single book.”

But I have zero clue what I was talking about. Today, I can only recall a sketch of the book and its plot. I certainly don’t feel like it has left a deep mark on my personality. Yet each time I have read it, I have come to that conclusion.

So there is a divide between the me who is reading that book, and the me who is not. This makes reading House of Leaves a game of peekaboo. Each time, it ends with a reunion between these two versions of me, who exchange some insight before diverging, planning to meet again four years later.

III

For the past year, I have mainly read short stories. So it was only a matter of time before I read Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I associate with smarmy intellectuals who refer to him while talking out of their hats. I had no exposure to his work, other than hearing The Book of Sand narrated for the New Yorker’s fiction podcast. I was unmoved by it. But I have time these days, so when I found his Collected Fictions in the Berkeley Public Library, I borrowed it.

While I was reading Collected Fictions at a teahouse, another patron spotted the book and started telling me enthusiastically about how much he loved Borges. I told him, with some embarrassment, that I had read ten stories and enjoyed none of them so far. He declared that I just needed to find the right translation. I didn’t tell him my thoughts on that particular argument. But I understood the important part; there was someone who loved Borges’s work enough to speak up to a total stranger about it. I continued reading.

The first time I got a glimpse of that man’s perspective was while reading The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim. Borges’s story is framed as a review of a book of the same name, by the fictional lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali. The novel described within The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim is the story of an apostate Muslim law student who kills a Hindu in the heat of a riot. Stricken by his crime, and without the faith to justify it, he goes on a journey through the dark side of society to redeem himself.

A man (the unbelieving, fleeing law student we have met) falls among people of the lowest, vilest sort and accommodates himself to them, in a kind of contest of iniquity. Suddenly… the law student perceives some mitigation of the evil: a moment of tenderness, of exaltation, of silence, in one of the abominable men… the law student hypothesizes that the vile man before him has reflected a friend, or the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he comes to a mysterious conclusion: Somewhere in the world there is a man from whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates; somewhere in the world there is a man who is equal to this brightness. The law student resolves to devote his life to searching out that man.

Here is the catch: Al-Mu’tasim is himself a wanderer, so the search for him is elusive, and the student can only find a trail of people who had progressively more exposure to Al-Mu’tasim. Each of these people demonstrates progressively more humanity. The novel ends just as the student is about to meet Al-Mu’tasim.

Two aspects together make this story interesting. The first is that the law student’s pilgrimage mirrors a pilgrimage to find God, and so the wandering Al-Mu’tasim mirrors the divine. The second is that the story insinuates that the law student is Al-Mu’tasim. He himself has been the source of the brightness he sees, and the people he has met have been progressively more divine because they reflect his own journey towards becoming the person he seeks. Early in the story, he utters a phrase; later in the story, that same phrase is repeated to him as a quote from Al-Mu’tasim. The name Al-Mu’tasim (“he who goes in quest of aid”) certainly describes the law student.

The first aspect of the story is just another religious metaphor, which is not so interesting on its own. But combined with the second aspect, it creates a dizzying theology. The idea that God is someone in search of someone even greater, and that someone is also in search of someone greater than themselves, and so on… This is a line that can only be resolved by making it a circle. But making it a circle means that we are the divine, searching for God just as God searches for us. Taking it further, maybe searching for someone greater than ourselves is what makes us divine.

The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim is not Borges’s best story, but this idea was the first of Borges’s fantastical notions that boggled my mind. I understood why for most of history, theology was the highest intellectual calling. What better use of a mind than to grapple with the unknowable on a regular basis? Modern minds are too smart to waste time on that task. And I have a well-trained modern mind. That is why I was dismissive of the first few Borges stories that I read.

But The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim slipped past my defenses, and opened me up to a sly notion: maybe there is value in thinking about things that I can’t ever understand.

IV

The Garden of Forking Paths is my favorite Borges story. Its protagonist is Yu Tsun, an ethnically-Chinese German spy in England during World War I. He has to convey a message to his German handlers, with no way to reach them, while the authorities are hot on his heels. For reasons that we will only learn later, he looks through the phonebook until he finds one Stephen Albert, and flees to his house. When he meets Albert, he discovers a coincidence. Albert is actually a Sinologist, who has spent a decade reconstructing a lost book by Yu Tsun’s ancestor Ts’ui Pen.

Ts’ui Pen was a renowned philosopher who declared that he wanted to build an infinite labyrinth. After his death, his family searched for this labyrinth everywhere on his property, but could not find it. They found only a book, which they discarded as a nonsensical jumble of contradictory chapters. But Albert analyzed the manuscript, and came to the conclusion that the book itself was Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth. The reason it seemed to have no structure, and was full of contradictory events, is because Ts’ui Pen conceived it as a labyrinth in time. He imagined a world in which every possible outcome of every possible action all happened. These different possibilities branch off into different futures; it is these branching paths that make up Ts’ui Pen’s infinite labyrinth.

Albert delivers this verdict to Yu Tsun, who is awestruck at the truth that vindicates his revered ancestor. But the mystery looms – why is Yu Tsun there to begin with, given that he did not know of Albert’s involvement with his ancestor before he arrived?

“Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times... In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find my dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.”

“In all,” I said, not without a tremble, “I am grateful for, and I venerate, your recreation of the garden of Ts’ui Pen.”

“Not in all,” he whispered with a smile. “Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.”

I won’t spoil the ending, even though it is difficult to appreciate the story otherwise. Read it. Let’s just say that Borges did not settle for sketching out a concept, like he did with The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero. He created a story in which I could feel the vertigo of countless timelines, and feel the confusion of being in a very strange timeline.

And if this concept seems familiar to you, it is only because it is now ingrained in pop culture. Borges preempted the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics and its popular representations (e.g. Everything Everywhere All at Once). Despite all the fictional depictions of parallel realities that have been created since then, Borges’s original story still flattens me.

V

The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero is not even a story. It starts out with an admission of its nature:

In my spare evenings I have conceived this plot––which I will perhaps commit to paper but which already somehow justifies me. It needs details, rectifications, tinkering––there are areas of the story that have never been revealed to me. Today, January 3, 1944, I see it in the following way…

This is not a literary device. Borges is not setting out a realistic premise for surreal events to follow, or reviewing a fictional book, as he does in The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim. Throughout the next three pages, he does exactly what he stated – he sketches out a story that he planned to write. Within those pages, he storyboards a sequence of events, highlights gaps that would need to be filled if he actually turned it into a story, and wraps it up with a pat conclusion. It reads like a letter to his editor, not like a story.

The substance of The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero is itself interesting enough to make this structure work. Borges reimagines Julius Caesar as a story in which Caesar was secretly the playwright of his own murder, as penance for his crimes. All events around his death were actually an enormous play with thousands of actors. We see a revolutionary leader embrace two contradictory aspects of himself through that play. His traitor self becomes the actor, while his hero self becomes the character. The story’s narrator, a historian reconstructing these events, discovers this hidden truth. He considers telling the world. But he ultimately concludes that society is not ready to see the traitor and the hero as the same person, and hides his discovery.

I have more to say about The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, but then I might write more than the story itself. Borges’s achievement was to take a 300-page novel that could exist, and distill it to a 1000-word outline instead. Does it make sense to analyze a 1000-word story in 1000 words? No. My 300 words are an adequate continuation of Borges’s progression. With more ingenuity I could iterate further, distilling it even further. Why stop at 300 words? I imagine a 100-word summary; very challenging, requires cutting inessential prose. I imagine a 10-word summary; sounds impossible, but perhaps achievable by arranging the words in space in a way that carries semantic weight. I imagine a 0-word summary; a symbol that weaves dualistic motifs into an image of revolutionary fervor.

These are the directions in which my mind wanders after reading Borges. Of course it doesn’t make sense to imagine expressing the theme of the traitor and the hero in 10 words, or 0 words. But I imagine that free roaming towards the bizarre – the surreal, the divine – is what it was like to be him.

The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero showed me that there are no rules. Borges didn’t need to write the story within the story. He didn’t need to construct a literary pretext, or a fictionalized narrator. He simply had an idea and sketched it out.

But it worked.

What would I write if I just let the dream take over?

VI

House of Leaves is unashamed about its Borgesian influence. The boring way to see that influence is through the parallel between Zampanò (the narrator who invents the documentary of Will Navidson’s labyrinthine house) and Borges himself. The story has very few details about Zampanò, making the chosen details even more revealing. Zampanò’s main quality is that he went blind late in life, just like Borges did. Another of his qualities is that he was beloved by cats; Borges wrote a poem revering his own cat, Beppo.

But it doesn’t help me understand the book any better to say “ah yes, Zampanò went blind in his mid-fifties, and Borges went blind at age 55, so they must be the same person.” That is the kind of connection that only serves to make literary critics squeal, because it places each piece of literature in the web of signifiers that they build their lives around. No, the interesting way to see that influence is to see Borges’s DNA woven into the book itself.

One point of convergence is the structural claim of House of Leaves – that you can write a fictional story, within a fictional story, within a fictional story. Borges adopted the same approach in his Fictions collection,¹ arguing in its foreword:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books––setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.

Another point of convergence is in the inner story’s protagonist, the former war photojournalist Will Navidson. At first, he appears to be a hero. He tackles the mystery of the house on Ash Tree Lane with military precision, taking several solo expeditions down there with rope, radio, supplies, and more. He documents a mystery that could break our understanding of the universe, that everyone else is unwilling to stomach.

But in the process, he also destroys his family, and he knows it. His obsession with the house causes them to keep living there, even as its corrupting influence makes his son antisocial, and causes his daughter to have anxious nightmares. His partner is paralyzed at the thought of Navidson being lost forever within the house, and she cannot live with that fear. In the documentary, Navidson-as-character is a pioneer who plumbs the depths of hell to make a stand for mankind against the darkness. But Navidson-as-director includes the emotional wreckage created by his actions, the visual of his partner and children getting into a car and driving away from the man who ruined their lives. He accepts his role as both the traitor and the hero.

The final point of convergence is in the core of House of Leaves – the house on Ash Tree Lane itself. For this whole mystery to feel justified, the house from which all this terror emanates has to be worth it. Danielewski does this by making it defy physics – the house’s interior is one-quarter of an inch bigger than its exterior. This is also the angle of attack Borges takes with his garden of forking paths, by making it a labyrinth that rips up our conception of time. Whether it is a tear in space or a tear in time, both labyrinths are weird for the same reason. They make us question whether we are moving through life under a vast illusion.

These convergences are why I constantly think about House of Leaves while reading Borges. His stories break that book down into a form that I can now make sense of, years after I last read it.

VII

The fact that reading Borges helped me make sense of House of Leaves is trivial. I read a difficult-to-parse experimental novel that was inspired by Borges. In reading the component stories that influenced the novel, I was able to see the same themes more clearly, and thus understand the novel better. This is basic literary analysis.

But what if the truth is something stranger?

Consider a tesseract, a cube constructed in a way that represents higher-dimensional objects. It has infinitely fine-grained textures on its crystalline surface. These textures scatter light in a different way depending on the angle you view the tesseract from. The result is that any two observers looking at the tesseract will see two different images in its glass, because the image is formed from different patterns of light.

The physical explanation for this phenomenon is that the tesseract is an infinite-dimensional object. But we live in a three-dimensional reality, so we can observe the tesseract only through its projections onto a three-dimensional surface. Any observer’s angle of view involves a different projection, and thus creates a unique image. That is why nobody can see the same image in the tesseract. It is impossible for any two people to occupy exactly the same space; even if a director stage-managed ten people to each stand in the same exact spot on the ground, one after another, that infinitesimal precision would elude them. One person will be taller or shorter than another, or their eyes may differ in positions by a few inches, or they may not be able to find the exact millimeter that the director wants them to stand on. Even one observer may sway slightly while viewing the tesseract, so they see not just one image but a dizzying blur of images.

I wish I could say that I came up with it myself, under Borges’s influence. But I pulled it from The Tesseract.

The Tesseract tells the story of one evening in a mansion in Buenos Aires. An art collector and an antique dealer have an argument at a party, after seeing this tesseract in the collection of the eccentric count who is hosting the party. They both vie to impress the count as a possible client, so they start arguing over what they see in the tesseract’s crystal space, each of them dismissing the other’s imagery as the sign of a vapid intellect. The argument grows more and more vicious until the two men leap at each other’s throats and inflict grievous injuries on each other. Meanwhile, the count observes the two and says nothing.

The Tesseract bluntly expresses an idea that Borges explores in many of his stories. In The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, the law student seeks Al-Mu’tasim, but he may be Al-Mu’tasim himself. In The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, a revolutionary leader is both the hero who liberates his country and the traitor who betrays his movement. In The Garden of Forking Paths, it is the universe itself that is shown to be a unified labyrinth of timelines.

Across all of these stories, what looks like many things is always one. The process of unifying these objects requires pulling the rug out from under how we normally view things. That is why the experience of reading Borges or House of Leaves is first and foremost about disorientation.

Why not take it further?

House of Leaves and Collected Fictions are distinct books. But their distinctions can be understood as different projections of the same underlying form. The dimensions along which that form is projected are all of these incidental details, like the author, the text, the time period. From this view, the fact that the two books have similar motifs is not an exciting claim. Even different projections may overlap slightly, because of chance, or because one observer’s point of view has influenced where another observer chooses to view the tesseract from. The only significance between these overlaps is that they help us see a connection that we would otherwise miss.

But the platonic form being projected between them is something separate from both of these books. I don’t want to name it, because I know I will fail to capture it. But it is a form that is both intimate and alien at the same time. It confuses us, scares us, attracts us, fulfills our needs. We want to understand it. We cannot. Our minds are nimble enough to avoid their own mutilation. That is why Borges and Danielewski have to do stage-magic just to give us a glimpse. That is why I can only point to their efforts instead of making my own. Like you, I am not ready.

VIII

Here is a timeline of events that may be of interest.

In 2013, I read House of Leaves for the first time.

In 2017, I read House of Leaves for the second time. I then gave it away.

In 2021, I read House of Leaves for the third time.

In 2025, I gave away my copy of House of Leaves to a recent acquaintance; I simply wanted him to have it. Soon after, I encountered Collected Fictions in the library.

I started reading Collected Fictions in a Berkeley teahouse. Soon after, I discovered House of Leaves on the bookshelf of this teahouse (a place I have visited for years).

I concluded this essay in the same teahouse.

I have not touched House of Leaves throughout this writing. There is no need.

Peekaboo!

1. To clarify, Fictions is a collection of Borges’s fictions, while Collected Fictions is a collection of all collections of his fictions, including Fictions one of these collections. Glad I could sort that out for you.