Borges, Recursion and the Multiverse
Some Reflections

In his essay ‘When Fiction Lives in Fiction’ (1939), Borges states that he can trace his first notion of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that lent ‘mystery and vertigo’ to his childhood. ‘On the side of this unusual object,’ he writes, ‘there was a Japanese scene; I cannot remember the children or warriors depicted there, but I do remember that in a corner of that image the same biscuit tin reappeared with the same picture, and within it the same picture again, and so on (at least, potentially) into infinity...’¹

This childhood experience of Borges’s, in turn, evokes the vertigo the reader might feel before the various mysteries and labyrinths, the doublings and redoublings, and the recursive modes of narration that populate so many of the author’s stories. And it is this notion of recursion (or recurrent self-referentiality) that I wish to address and explore today.

Of course, I don’t know what biscuit tin Borges had in mind, but I definitely remember this one, from my own childhood, which, like his, contains on the lid an image of itself, and within that image another, and so on ad infinitum. Like the young Borges, I remember being enthralled by the image.



A dozen or so years ago I was invited by the Argentine newspaper Clarín to write a piece commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Borges’s death. At around the same time, as chance would have it, I wrote a piece for the British newspaper the Independent for their series ‘Book of a Lifetime’, in which ...