Did Jorge Luis Borges write novels, and what did he write instead?

He wrote no novels. The fiction is short, and it is collected in books like Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph. He also wrote essays, poems, prefaces, and detective stories with Adolfo Bioy Casares under the joint pen name H. Bustos Domecq. This matters for anyone borrowing the method, because the apparatus of invented sources and edition histories is calibrated to a dozen pages and starts to creak when it has to carry three hundred. A reader will accept a footnote that undermines a report. Hold the same trick for a novel and the reader starts checking the index. Write the twelve pages.

How do you invent a source and still get believed?

Give it the flaws a real document has. Sol Stein's rule for this is that small accuracies buy big improbabilities, and Borges pays in advance: a publisher, a year, a printing city, a second edition, a translator who quarrelled with the first. None of it is flattering. The invented novel in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is reviewed as a flawed book by a minor writer, and the reviewer prefers its premise to its execution. Praise would have exposed the fake. A masterpiece the world has not heard of is suspicious. A mediocre second novel from Bombay, badly reprinted, is not.

Why does Borges summarise the plot instead of dramatising it?

Because the idea is the event. A staged scene puts a reader inside a minute. Borges needs the reader outside, at the distance of a report, where a century can be handled in a sentence and a system can be seen whole. Mario Vargas Llosa calls what the summary leaves out the hidden fact, and his condition on it is strict: the silence has to press on the part you did write, or it is only material you failed to include. Test it by cutting the scene you were proudest of. If the story tightens, the scene was ornament.

Which Borges stories should a writer read first?

Start with four. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" for the review of a book that does not exist. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" for the scholarly apparatus turned into a plot. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" for how far one invented citation can grow. "Funes the Memorious" for the summary that beats any scene, since a man who forgets nothing is unstageable, and the story knows it and files a report on him instead. Read them in that order and you can watch the machine get bigger without getting more complicated, from one paragraph of fake bibliography to a planet assembled by a secret society of scholars working across generations. All four are in Ficciones.

What is the footnote doing in a Borges story?

Carrying the objection. A footnote is where a text argues with itself in public, and Borges uses it to plant the doubt his narrator would look weak raising in the body of the report. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" carries footnotes. So does "Three Versions of Judas", where an invented Swedish theologian is given a bibliography and his critics are given room to answer him. Borges also uses it to name a source the main text has to ignore. The effect on a reader is odd and useful. A page with an apparatus reads as a page that has been checked. Put your own doubt down there. Keep it dry.

Why do his narrators carry his own name and his friends' names?

He signs the report. The narrator of "The Aleph" is called Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" opens with Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was a real friend and a real novelist, and "Borges and I" is a page about the gap between the man and the byline. Real names are the cheapest authentication available. A verifiable person standing next to an invented encyclopedia lends it a passport. The risk is coyness. It works in these stories because the author-narrator has work to do inside them, where he takes dictation, checks a citation, loses an argument, and is not there to be admired.

Fiction

Jorge Luis BorgesWriting Style

Born 8/24/1899 – Died 6/14/1986

Review the book you are not going to write, quarrel with its second edition, and the invented source will carry more world than a chapter of description.

Write like Jorge Luis Borges

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Jorge Luis Borges: voice, themes, and technique.

In 1936 Borges published a book review inside a collection of essays. Its subject was a novel by a Bombay lawyer named Mir Bahadur Ali. The novel did not exist. The review does not wink. It gives dates, compares editions, quarrels with the ending, and treats the reader as a colleague who might reasonably want to know whether the second version repaired the damage done by the first.

Borges wrote no novels. The prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths gives his reason: composing vast books is a laborious folly, and the honest course is to pretend the book exists and write the commentary. The stories keep that promise. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is an obituary correcting a rival's catalogue. "Funes the Memorious" is a witness statement written for a memorial volume. The title story is a deposition whose first two pages are missing. The form does the work a scene would have done, and it does it faster, because a report can cross a decade in a clause and then stop dead on the one detail that matters.

The difficulty is bookkeeping. An invented source has to cost something later. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" a friend's copy of an encyclopedia volume holds four pages that other copies lack, and the story proceeds from that discrepancy into a world assembled by a secret society of scholars. Strike the four pages and there is no story left. Most imitators copy the citation and then leave the bookkeeping out of the ledger. That is the test to apply to your own apparatus.

Writers arrive at Borges with an idea and no plot. He offers a form for exactly that predicament, which is why Lem later built whole books out of prefaces and reviews of books that did not exist. The last step is left to the reader. You supply the missing link in the chain, and because you supplied it, you believe it.

How to Write Like Jorge Luis Borges

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Jorge Luis Borges.

1
Review the book instead of writing it
Pick the book you are not going to write. Now write eight hundred words of criticism of it. Name a publisher and a year. Say which chapter fails. Quote a sentence you have invented and then complain about the translation of it, because the complaint is what makes a reader assume the sentence exists in another language somewhere. The story is the review. Do not signal the joke in a preface. The piece has to be filed where reviews are filed.
2
Break the document on purpose
A real document is damaged. Pages are missing, the copy is doubtful, two editions disagree, an official has redacted a name. "The Garden of Forking Paths" begins with two pages of the deposition gone, and that absence licenses everything the narrator later declines to explain. Choose your damage before you write the report. Then make it pay: the gap has to fall exactly where a reader would otherwise demand a mechanism, so the missing page does the work an explanation would have done badly. Damage in the wrong place reads as evasion.
3
Count something
Take the impossible thing in your story and give it an inventory. Dimensions, quantities, intervals, a serial number. The Library of Babel is believable because it has been measured by someone who lives there, and the measuring is done in the flat voice of a man reciting shelf counts he has recited before. Pick numbers that could be wrong. Round ones sound invented. Four hundred and ten does not.
4
Summarise the scene you can already see
Write the scene in your head. Do not put it on the page. Report it instead, in the past tense, with the turning points and the consequences and one physical detail, and stop. You will feel like a cheat. That feeling is the technique working, because the reader's own version of the scene is better staged than yours and arrives at no cost to your page count. Italo Calvino praised this economy in a legend he retold, where long events go punctiform and the line between them runs straight. Try it on the scene you are proudest of.
5
Let the postscript contradict the report
End outside the document. Add a note, dated later, by a hand that has doubts. "The Immortal" closes with a critic charging the manuscript with interpolations, which re-sorts every earlier detail into evidence and sends a careful reader back to the first page without your having to ask. Keep the note short. Keep it flat. A postscript that gloats undoes the whole apparatus in two lines.

Jorge Luis Borges's Writing Style

Breakdown of Jorge Luis Borges's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Read one sentence of "The Library of Babel" and you have the pattern. A plain clause states the case. Then a tail of specification arrives: twenty shelves, five to a side, four hundred and ten pages to a book, forty lines to a page, eighty letters to a line. The numbers do the persuading. Nothing in that sentence is figurative, and the impossible library it describes becomes checkable, the way a warehouse inventory is checkable. He also likes the parenthesis that concedes. A narrator interrupts himself to admit he cannot verify a name or a date, then carries on, and the admission buys the next three impossible claims. Jorge Luis Borges's writing style keeps the syntax of the reference book even where the content has left the world behind. Short sentence, long sentence, no ornament in either.

Vocabulary Complexity

His working vocabulary comes from the reading room. Variant, recension, interpolation, apocryphal. The postscript to "The Immortal" has a critic accusing the manuscript you have been reading of interpolations, which is a joke only a philologist would set up, and it works because the word is the correct technical one. "Three Versions of Judas" runs on theology: heresiarch, gnostic, the disputed reading of a verse. Against that he sets flat nouns. A coin, a knife, a staircase, a book of sand. The abstraction stays legible because it is bolted to something you could pick up. One rare word, doing one job, in a paragraph of ordinary ones.

Tone

The voice is a colleague's. In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" the narrator is annoyed, and the annoyance is about a catalogue: a rival has published a list of Menard's works and left things out. That is the emotional register of the whole story. Nothing raises its voice. "Funes the Memorious" opens in the courtesy of a man who has been asked to contribute to a memorial volume. He restrains himself where another writer would push, and the restraint is what makes the last turn land, because a level voice reporting something enormous is more frightening than a raised one. Politeness, in his hands, is load-bearing.

Pacing

He skips the scene on purpose. In "The Secret Miracle" a playwright waits to be shot and is granted a year of frozen time to finish his verse drama. We get the play as a summary of its acts. We do not watch a minute of it. Percy Lubbock called this choice panoramic against scenic, and he thought the panoramic commanded time and space in a way the staged hour cannot, which is the exact bargain Borges takes, over and over. "Death and the Compass" moves through a sequence of murders in a few pages and slows only for the geometry of the map. A reader who wants the murder staged will find only its date and its consequence. He slows where a detail carries the construction. Speed comes from refusing to dramatise.

Dialogue Style

People in these stories rarely converse. They are quoted. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" turns on a line Bioy Casares half remembers, attributed to a heresiarch of Uqbar, about mirrors and copulation multiplying the number of men, and the plot begins when he cannot say where he read it. The speech is evidence with a chain of custody. When Borges does allow a long stretch of talk, as with Stephen Albert in "The Garden of Forking Paths", the talk is an argument being delivered, complete with the manuscript on the table. The listener does not interrupt to be human. Try it as a rule for one draft: let a character speak only where the words can be entered as an exhibit.

Descriptive Approach

One object, described as an entry in a catalogue. The Aleph sits on the nineteenth step of a cellar staircase in a house on Garay Street. The number is doing the work. A point containing the universe would be hard to believe if it floated in the room, and the nineteenth step pins it to a basement in a real street, at a countable height above the floor. The Book of Sand is specified the same way: you cannot find the same page twice, and the illustrations recur at a fixed interval the narrator tries to pin down. Nothing is painted. Everything is measured. That is why the impossible object stays in the room after you close the story, because you were given its dimensions rather than its atmosphere.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Jorge Luis Borges uses across their work.

The damaged document

Missing pages, a doubtful copy, a redacted name. A report that answers everything invites the question of how the reporter knows, and a report with a hole in it does not. Placement is harder than it looks. The damage has to land where the reader was about to ask for a mechanism, and there is one right place for it in a given story, which is why the missing pages of a deposition come at the start and the anomalous volume of an encyclopedia turns up in the middle. Only what a catalogue knows about can be damaged, so this tool needs the invented citation beside it.

Inventory-grade specification

Counting is his substitute for describing. Give an impossible object quantities and a reader files it with real objects, since the mind treats a measurement as a claim someone could check. The measurement has to sound like something the narrator wrote down rather than composed. The tool is cheap and it is easy to overdo. Three numbers persuade, and ten turn the page into a spreadsheet the reader starts auditing, at which point the credibility you borrowed goes back where it came from. Choose the awkward figure.

The real name as guarantor

A verifiable person, placed next to an invented one. Bioy Casares opens "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and the encyclopedia arrives in his hands, so the fake volume inherits the credit of a friend who existed and published. The tool answers the reader's opening question, which is whether to treat this as reportage or invention. Hard part: the real person has to be doing something ordinary. A friend who remembers a line wrongly is useful, and a friend who marvels at the story you are telling is a signal that the story needs help.

The rival version

Two accounts of the same thing, neither settled. A first edition against a revision, a translation quarrelling with the original, an earlier catalogue that left a title out. The tool gives him a second plot with no extra events, since the reader is now following a dispute, and a dispute has stakes even when its subject is a footnote. Discipline decides whether it works. Both versions have to be specific and only one can flatter the narrator, or the argument reads as an author talking to himself.

The withheld step

One link in the chain, left out. Vargas Llosa's elliptic fact is the extreme case, the thing cut forever, reconstructed by the reader the way a palace is reconstructed from a handful of stones. The tool buys ownership. A reader who completed the thought defends it, because it is now partly theirs, and that is a stronger attachment than agreement. Get the size wrong and it collapses in either direction: a step too large and the reader gives up, a step too small and you have written a hint at a thing you then explained.

The closing fact that re-files the story

A last detail that turns earlier details into evidence. "Death and the Compass" ends with the detective learning that the pattern he traced was built for him, and each clue he admired becomes a piece of the trap. The tool produces a re-read on the first pass, since the reader goes back a page or two while still holding the last one. It has to be a fact rather than a reflection. A dated postscript, a name repeated, a number that does not match the earlier number, delivered without commentary and then nothing.

Literary Devices Jorge Luis Borges Uses

Literary devices that define Jorge Luis Borges's style.

The invented citation

A reference to a work that does not exist, given in the form references take. Author, title, city, year, edition, translator. The device does the job description does for other writers, which is to make a world present, and it does it in one line instead of a page, because a bibliography implies libraries, disputes, and time. It also fixes the reader's posture. Given a citation, you read as a checker rather than a witness, and a checker tolerates compression that would leave a witness stranded. The failure mode is a citation that is only atmosphere.

The review as a story

The whole story wears the shape of criticism: notice, summary, judgment, a word about the reprint. He filed one among his essays, where a review belongs, and the form did the rest. It carries a second plot, which is the story of how the reviewer came to know, and that plot can move while the reviewed book stands still. The form has a long afterlife. Roberto Bolaño wrote an encyclopedia of invented writers and let their bibliographies do the characterisation, and the pleasure there is the same pleasure: a life reported through its publication history. Keep the tone at the level of a notice.

The apparatus: footnote, postscript, editorial bracket

The machinery around the text argues with the text. A footnote objects. A postscript dated two years later corrects the report, an editorial bracket admits a page is missing, and the reader watches a document being handled rather than a story being told. This is where the doubt goes. Nabokov built a whole novel out of the same parts in Pale Fire, where a commentary eats its poem, and the parts were lying around in Borges a generation earlier. One rule keeps it working: the apparatus has to be duller than the text.

Plot delivered as précis

Events reach the reader already over, weighed, and filed. "The Secret Miracle" gives a verse drama in the shape of a synopsis, and that is where the idea lives, because the play's point is that it repeats itself, which a summary states in a sentence and a stage would take three hours to fail at. Summary also fixes the tense of the reader's attention. You are not waiting to see what happens. You are being shown what it meant, which is a colder pleasure and a faster one. It costs him the immediate scene, and he pays without complaint.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Jorge Luis Borges.

Furnishing the story with labyrinths and mirrors

The props are the most copied and the least functional part of the work. A labyrinth in Borges is a floor plan with a consequence. The mirror in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" arrives as a half-remembered quotation, at second hand, from a heresiarch of a country that turns out to be invented, so the image comes wrapped in three layers of paperwork before it means anything. Put the mirror in the room and you have a mirror. The comparison worth making is Lovecraft, whose Necronomicon works for the same reason: several stories cite it, editions and translators are named, and the citations agree with each other. Furniture without a citation is set dressing.

An invented source that costs the story nothing

Writers invent the book, describe it well, and then let it sit there. Nothing depends on it. Ask what breaks if you delete the source, and when that answer turns out to be nothing, you have written a costume. In Borges the invented document is load-bearing, and the plot is usually the sequence of events that follows from a bibliographic anomaly: an extra four pages, a catalogue with an omission, a copy the libraries cannot produce. Spend it or cut it.

Summary chosen because the scene is hard

Summary is a decision about distance, and it fails when it is a way out of writing the difficult minute. Hemingway's condition on omission applies here. Skip something you understand and the reader feels its weight anyway, and skip something you have dodged and the page goes hollow. The difference is visible on the page. A chosen summary names the turning points and admits the gap, and a lazy one gestures at events the writer had not troubled to imagine, which a reader detects within a paragraph even without being able to say why. Write the scene, then withhold it.

Making the imaginary book a masterpiece

The instinct is to praise it. Borges reviews his imaginary books the way a critic reviews a disappointment. The novel in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" has a fine idea and a weak execution, and the works of Herbert Quain are examined as the output of a writer who did not come off. Disappointment is a documentary detail. A reviewer who liked everything he read would be the least credible witness available. It tells the reader that someone read the thing, formed a view, and had the ordinary reaction people have to most books. Enthusiasm reads as invention.

Books

Explore Jorge Luis Borges's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Ficciones
Ficciones

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Jorge Luis Borges's writing style and techniques.

Did Jorge Luis Borges write novels, and what did he write instead?: He wrote no novels. The fiction is short, and it is collected in books like Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph. He also wrote essays, poems, prefaces, and detective stories with Adolfo Bioy Casares under the joint pen name H. Bustos Domecq. This matters for anyone borrowing the method, because the apparatus of invented sources and edition histories is calibrated to a dozen pages and starts to creak when it has to carry three hundred. A reader will accept a footnote that undermines a report. Hold the same trick for a novel and the reader starts checking the index. Write the twelve pages.
How do you invent a source and still get believed?: Give it the flaws a real document has. Sol Stein's rule for this is that small accuracies buy big improbabilities, and Borges pays in advance: a publisher, a year, a printing city, a second edition, a translator who quarrelled with the first. None of it is flattering. The invented novel in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is reviewed as a flawed book by a minor writer, and the reviewer prefers its premise to its execution. Praise would have exposed the fake. A masterpiece the world has not heard of is suspicious. A mediocre second novel from Bombay, badly reprinted, is not.
Why does Borges summarise the plot instead of dramatising it?: Because the idea is the event. A staged scene puts a reader inside a minute. Borges needs the reader outside, at the distance of a report, where a century can be handled in a sentence and a system can be seen whole. Mario Vargas Llosa calls what the summary leaves out the hidden fact, and his condition on it is strict: the silence has to press on the part you did write, or it is only material you failed to include. Test it by cutting the scene you were proudest of. If the story tightens, the scene was ornament.
Which Borges stories should a writer read first?: Start with four. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" for the review of a book that does not exist. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" for the scholarly apparatus turned into a plot. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" for how far one invented citation can grow. "Funes the Memorious" for the summary that beats any scene, since a man who forgets nothing is unstageable, and the story knows it and files a report on him instead. Read them in that order and you can watch the machine get bigger without getting more complicated, from one paragraph of fake bibliography to a planet assembled by a secret society of scholars working across generations. All four are in Ficciones.
What is the footnote doing in a Borges story?: Carrying the objection. A footnote is where a text argues with itself in public, and Borges uses it to plant the doubt his narrator would look weak raising in the body of the report. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" carries footnotes. So does "Three Versions of Judas", where an invented Swedish theologian is given a bibliography and his critics are given room to answer him. Borges also uses it to name a source the main text has to ignore. The effect on a reader is odd and useful. A page with an apparatus reads as a page that has been checked. Put your own doubt down there. Keep it dry.
Why do his narrators carry his own name and his friends' names?: He signs the report. The narrator of "The Aleph" is called Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" opens with Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was a real friend and a real novelist, and "Borges and I" is a page about the gap between the man and the byline. Real names are the cheapest authentication available. A verifiable person standing next to an invented encyclopedia lends it a passport. The risk is coyness. It works in these stories because the author-narrator has work to do inside them, where he takes dictation, checks a citation, loses an argument, and is not there to be admired.

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