Detections: Borges and Father Brown

Abstract

In Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, Jorge Luis Borges affectionately mentions G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories and hints that along with Poe's they are influences on his own stories of mystery, crime, and detection. Borges' stories may be understood better by looking at Chesterton's priest, and at the way both authors experiment with conventions of the mystery genre to examine the supernatural and the nature of evil. Because of the enigmas and paradoxes of his character, the unprepossessing Father Brown, a small man with a dough-face and sea-flat eyes, has a distinct personality which especially appeals to Borges and affects his own detective fiction: the perfect figure for the butt of a joke, Borges sees, Father Brown is also the perfect figure for getting in the way and solving metaphysical jokes. Out of place in the physical world, Father Brown is always in the right place for the supernatural. His mind was all of a piece, and he was unconscious of many incongruities (The Crime of the Communist).' As a priest he is a believer in magic and mystery who consistently produces the most mundane and naturalistic solutions. He works by reason and faith both, and the two are never at odds owing to a middle sense, intuition, which keeps him from acting mistakenly even if truth is not revealed to his intellect: he has a mystic's cloud on him when evil is near. When he doubts, he doubts only because he is not certain whether a case calls for a policeman, a doctor, or a priest. But if Father Brown, as a professional celibate, has a sexlessness about him which puts him further outside the human ordinary (unresponsive to the power of sex, he is not corruptible like ordinary men), nevertheless he is thoroughly a gentleman. The traditionally distinguishing features of the gentleman-power, rationality, and responsibility-mingle in Father Brown with the spy's invisibility and unreality, although in the priest these last two are treated as virtues, not as defects of character. Invisibility comes from his being so unobtrusively in the middle of things (he is, after all, a good priest doing his job), and his unreality is a supremely other-worldly quality. Detachment is his superiority. It fits him for super-impressions and mystical illuminations as well as reasoned solutions. The priest's sense of environment and his comfortable fondness for obscure, unique oddities and trinkets make him a perfect Borgesian character. Mysteries of Good and Evil, God and Devil, Body and Soul, Reason and Faith, Innocence and Guilt, Truth and Falsehood, Appearance and Reality, Time and Eternity, come up continually in the fantastic Father Brown tales.