Borges and the Labyrinth: Why His Short Stories Never End
To be honest, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) published The Garden of Forking Paths in 1941 and four years later placed it alongside Artifices in a book titled Ficciones—the same book that many today regard as the turning point of the modern short story. Even so, he himself never wrote a novel and frankly said he did not have the patience to construct psychological characters and narratives running to hundreds of pages.
The result of this reluctance was something that itself created a new possibility in literature: a story too short to bother introducing anyone, yet so dense that the reader’s work only begins after the final period. Below, we turn to the techniques that turned Borges from a writer from Buenos Aires into an enduring intellectual structure.
Labyrinth Instead of Plot
In Borges’s stories, the labyrinth is not a frightening place but often a structure. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” we learn that the unfinished novel by Ts’ui Pên is nothing but a labyrinth: a book in which all the possible destinies of one person are written simultaneously and in branching form. The story’s key sentence—“I leave the Garden of Forking Paths to future generations, but not to all future generations”—offers a new definition of time: time is conceived not as a line but as a network of choices.
“The Library of Babel” is the most extreme version of this same idea: a universe of hexagonal rooms containing every possible book, including the book of books and endless catalogues of books that do not exist. With the calm, precise tone of a reporter, Borges turns infinity into a simple room. At the opposite extreme, “The House of Asterion” narrates the same labyrinth in the voice of the Minotaur himself; the result is that in the end the reader both sympathizes with the monster and, at that very moment, lets him go.
Essay Instead of Story: Fabricated References and Fake Footnotes
Borges practically abolished the boundary between criticism and narrative. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is ostensibly a review of the works of a writer who never existed, a man who decides to rewrite Don Quixote word for word; and the most absurd part of the affair is that the second text is not as delightful as the first. The story’s plain proposition is that the meaning of every sentence depends on its history, and Borges imposes this claim on the reader in the form of a dry satire.
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” goes a step further: a book that ostensibly describes an imaginary universal encyclopedia gradually takes over reality and changes the history of the Earth. The technical devices Borges employs in these stories have today become a complete toolbox:
- References to fabricated sources, in such a way that the reader cannot easily tell whether they are real
- Footnotes that complete the main content and make the narrative multilayered
- Unfinished lists and lost works, to create the sense that something exists outside the text
- Frame narrative: a story told not directly but through the discovery of a manuscript or a report
- Spare, underdeveloped characters, because the main value lies in the idea, not in biography
Mirror, Double, and the Riddle of the “I”
The mirror image in Borges’s works is never decorative; it is a source of horror. In “The Circular Ruins,” a man sleeps in a ruined temple in order to create a new human being by dreaming. The story proceeds calmly until the end, when in the last few lines we learn that the dreamer himself is also the creation of someone else’s dream. That ending turns the entire story into a question, not an answer.
“The South” is another brilliant example: two parallel deaths, two incompatible interpretations, and a text that leaves the final decision to the reader. Even in the short piece “Borges and I,” the author opens a gap between the “I who lives” and the “I on paper” that is never filled. He himself also wrote somewhere:
Time is a river that carries me along, but I myself am that river; time is the substance of my being.
It is this very intertwining of identity and time that makes his short stories behave like equations whose answer changes slightly each time they are reread.
The Detective Story That Never Gets Solved
Borges was fascinated by Chesterton and Stevenson and considered the detective story a “rational genre.” But in “Death and the Compass” he internalizes this genre: Detective Lönnrot sees the pattern of the murders as Kabbalistic, and for precisely this reason becomes the fourth victim. The detective’s logic is itself a trap; reason, instead of saving him, becomes an instrument of entrapment. Shortly after the publication of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges said the publisher had rejected the book because they could not tell whether it was a detective story or a metaphysical treatise—and precisely this indeterminacy is his signature.
| Story | Collection | Central Technique |
|---|---|---|
| The Garden of Forking Paths | Ficciones (1941) | Detective puzzle and branching time |
| The Library of Babel | Ficciones (1941) | Infinity and mathematical wit |
| Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote | Ficciones (1944) | Re-reading and fabricated reference |
| The Circular Ruins | Ficciones (1944) | Dream and the duality of identity |
| The Aleph | The Aleph (1949) | Cataloging the absolute |
| The House of Asterion | The Aleph (1949) | Rewriting myth in the voice of the “Other” |
Why Later Writers Returned to Him
Borges’s work appears in places where we least expect it. Umberto Eco in “The Name of the Rose” builds a labyrinthine library that is explicitly borrowed from “The Library of Babel.” Roberto Bolaño in “Nazi Literature in the Americas” brings that same device of the list and fake reference into the novel. Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez learned from him that structure can play with the reader from within, and in the English-language tradition, figures such as Nabokov of “Pale Fire,” Gene Wolfe, and Ted Chiang are direct and indirect continuers of his path.
Perhaps his most tangible influence, however, lies where it is not literature: the idea of branching paths that the reader chooses later became the guiding muse of interactive narratives, video games, and hyperlinked stories. The title “The Garden of Forking Paths” today, in the discourse of interactive narrative criticism, is the name of a concept, not merely the title of a story.
Where Should We Start?
Borges is not a difficult writer, but reading him requires a particular skill. If you want to enter his world, try this short path:
- Start with “The South”; it is short, human, and less labyrinthine than the rest.
- Then read “The Circular Ruins” and pay attention to its last three lines, not the whole story.
- Go on to “The Garden of Forking Paths” and write out its temporal structure on paper.
- Read “The Library of Babel” aloud; its report-like rhythm is part of the meaning.
- Weeks later, reread the same stories; the change in your interpretation is itself part of the Borges experience.
The last point is that Borges should not be judged by the standards of the novel. Instead of building people, he builds small, complete worlds that fit into a few pages and remain infinite in the reader’s mind. This is why, after eighty years, his stories are not finished; they simply continue elsewhere: in the mind of the person who has read them.
