Borges Marathon, Part 14: The Lottery in Babylon

When I was driving on a winding road through the hills of Corsica several years ago, just as I was approaching a blind corner, a car came speeding through that corner on the wrong side of the road, driven by a teenage boy with his friend in the passenger seat, both laughing their heads off.

If I had been a few metres further along the road that day, we would all have died. Head-on collision. Absolutely nothing anybody could have done to avoid it.

I think about that from time to time, and I think about all the small events that led me to still be alive today and all the small things that could have gone differently. If I’d been driving a little faster, if I hadn’t slowed to let another car in front of me at a crossroads in the previous town, if I’d been a few seconds quicker in the shower that morning or the checkout from the hotel had been a little faster, and so on. Make a slight change to a small, seemingly random event, and my wife and I would have died on a road in Corsica years ago, and all the things that we’ve done since then would not have happened.

In his short story “The Lottery in Babylon”, Jorge Luis Borges grapples with those issues of random chance that human beings have been trying to explain and rationalise in so many ways since our histories began. Like so many of his stories, this one does not have a conventional structure. There are no real characters or dialogue or plot development: it’s more like a sociological essay, except that the society it’s describing doesn’t exist. I suppose that’s why he called them “fictions” rather than “short stories”. They are fictional, but many of them are not stories as we know them.

This fiction starts with a description of a regular lottery in the ancient city of Babylon: you buy a ticket and have a chance of winning a prize. But then a change takes place:

“Naturally, those so-called “lotteries” were a failure. They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealed not to all a man’s faculties, but only to his hopefulness. Public indifference soon meant that the merchants who had founded these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone tried something new: including among the list of lucky numbers a few unlucky draws.”

Those with unlucky draws are forced to pay a fine instead of winning money. But then, much later, some people refuse to pay and are imprisoned, and over the course of many years, this refusal becomes seen as the more honourable course of action. Eventually, the fine is replaced by a prison sentence.

Then, gradually, the monetary element disappears altogether. The Lottery in Babylon is now open to all, and the results become purely about chance:

“A lucky draw might bring about a man’s elevation to the council of the magi or the imprisonment of his enemy … an unlucky draw: mutilation, dishonor of many kinds, death itself.”

The Company that runs the Lottery assumes total power, so that it can implement the results of its secret drawings. In the end, all events in the city are governed by the outcomes of the Lottery, or at least are seen that way.

At this point in the story, the Lottery has clear parallels with religion, from its obscure, ancient origins to the secrecy and mystery of its workings, the faith many people have in it and the doubts others have over its existence. The story ends with this wonderful paragraph in which new possibilities open up at every turn:

“One scurrilously suggests that the Company ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional; another believes that the Company is eternal, and teaches that it shall endure until the last night, when the last god shall annihilate the earth. Yet another declares that the Company is omnipotent, but affects only small things: the cry of a bird, the shades of rust and dust, the half dreams that come at dawn. Another, whispered by masked heresiarchs, says that the Company has never existed, and never will. Another, no less despicable, argues that it makes no difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.”

It’s a remarkably succinct precis of the various attempts people have made over centuries and millennia to understand the kind of thing that happened to me in Corsica. I tend to subscribe to the “despicable” side of the argument, but I also feel the pull of other explanations involving Fate, or God/god/gods/goddesses, or an impersonal but somehow rationally ordered Universe. The despicable shrug of the shoulders, even if it seems the most logical response, is in some ways terrifying. The impulse to make order out of chaos is strong within us, I think, and Borges’s invention of an all-powerful Lottery is a fascinating way of provoking deeper thought about other, less fictional but still not entirely factual methods we use to try to explain it all.

This post is part of my Borges Marathon, a slow reading of all of the short fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Please leave your own comments below and check out some of the other posts in the series.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.