Wikipedia Deep Dive

Jorge Luis Borges

15 min read

The Blind Librarian Who Saw Everything

Here is a paradox that Jorge Luis Borges would have appreciated: at fifty-five years old, he became the director of Argentina's National Library, a building containing hundreds of thousands of books. By that same year, he had gone completely blind.

"I speak of God's splendid irony," Borges wrote, "in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness."

This was the man who would transform twentieth-century literature. Not through sweeping novels or political manifestos, but through short stories so concentrated and strange that they bent the minds of readers like light through a prism. His tales of infinite libraries, forking paths, and mirrors reflecting mirrors would influence everyone from Umberto Eco to the creators of hypertext. David Foster Wallace called him "the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature." The Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee said Borges "renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."

Yet Borges never wrote a novel. He considered them padded, unnecessary. Why take three hundred pages to accomplish what could be done in fifteen?

A Boy in a Library

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, in a neighborhood called Palermo that was then considered poor and rough. His family, however, was educated and middle-class. His mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from old Argentine stock—the kind of family that had fought in the War of Independence and never let you forget it. She spoke constantly of ancestors who had been soldiers and heroes.

This created a problem for young Jorge. He was not soldier material. He was a bookish, nearsighted child in a family that revered military courage. "As most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be," he later wrote, "I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action."

But what books he had access to. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer with literary ambitions and, crucially, an English library of over a thousand volumes. The household was bilingual—English and Spanish spoken interchangeably—and the young Borges was reading Shakespeare in the original by age twelve. When asked later in life to name the most important event of his existence, Borges said simply: "my father's library."

At ten years old, Borges translated Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish. It was published in a local journal. His friends assumed his father had actually written it.

Europe and the Education of a Writer

In 1914, when Borges was fifteen, his family made a decision that would shape his literary imagination forever. They moved to Geneva, Switzerland. His father needed treatment from an eye specialist—the same deteriorating vision that would later claim the son was already destroying the father's sight.

What was meant to be a medical trip became a decade-long exile in Europe. World War One broke out shortly after they arrived, and political unrest in Argentina made return inadvisable. So the teenage Borges attended the Collège de Genève, learning French and German alongside his English and Spanish. He read German philosophy—Arthur Schopenhauer especially, whose ideas about the world as representation would echo through his later fiction. He discovered Gustav Meyrink's novel "The Golem," a tale of mysticism and artificial life that fascinated him.

In Geneva, Borges met Maurice Abramowicz, a writer who would become a lifelong friend. Their literary discussions began a pattern that would define Borges's intellectual life: intense conversations about books and ideas, conducted in cafés and apartments, that fed directly into his creative work.

After the war, the family wandered through Lugano, Barcelona, Mallorca, Seville, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges discovered the avant-garde. He joined a literary movement called Ultraism, which took its cues from the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The Ultraists rejected the ornate flourishes of turn-of-the-century Modernismo in favor of stark imagery and compressed language. Borges published his first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," in the style of Walt Whitman in a magazine called Grecia.

He was finding his voice. But he would not find his subject—or his form—for another twenty years.

Return to Buenos Aires

The Borges family returned to Argentina in 1921. Jorge Luis was twenty-two years old, poorly educated in any formal sense, without qualifications or connections. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies." This was not a promising start.

But Borges had something: he had Ultraism, imported directly from the Spanish avant-garde. He published surreal poems and essays in literary journals. He co-founded magazines with aggressive names like Prisma and Proa. Prisma was distributed by literally pasting copies to walls around Buenos Aires. His first book of poetry, "Fervor de Buenos Aires," appeared in 1923.

Later in life, Borges was embarrassed by these early works. He tried to track down and destroy all existing copies. This was not false modesty. The young Borges was talented but unfocused, writing poems that impressed fellow avant-gardists but did not yet reveal his mature genius.

That genius needed time, and suffering, to emerge.

The Discovery of Fiction

Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, Borges wrote poetry and essays. He worked as a literary adviser, wrote columns for newspapers, and became a regular contributor to Sur, Argentina's most prestigious literary journal, founded by the wealthy intellectual Victoria Ocampo in 1931. Through Sur, he met Adolfo Bioy Casares, another Argentine writer who became his closest collaborator and friend.

Borges and Bioy Casares wrote detective parodies and fantasy stories together under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. They held long discussions in cafés about philosophy and literature. Another crucial influence was Macedonio Fernández, an eccentric thinker who lived in a tiny apartment in the Balvanera district and presided over rambling philosophical conversations. Fernández appears by name in Borges's story "Dialogue about a Dialogue," discussing nothing less than the immortality of the soul.

In 1938, Borges took a job as an assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library, a small branch in a working-class neighborhood. The collection was so limited that cataloging more than a hundred books per day would leave nothing for the other employees to do—and make them look bad. Borges finished his daily quota in about an hour. He spent the rest of his time in the library basement, writing and translating.

That same year, his father died. Then, on Christmas Eve, Borges suffered a severe head injury in an accident. The wound became infected. He nearly died of sepsis—blood poisoning. During his recovery, something shifted in his mind.

He began writing fiction.

Pierre Menard and the Garden of Forking Paths

The first story Borges wrote after his accident appeared in May 1939. It was called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," and it remains one of the strangest and most influential short stories ever written.

The premise is simple, almost absurd. Pierre Menard, a fictional early twentieth-century French writer, decides to write Don Quixote. Not to copy it, not to translate it, not to write a modern version of it. Menard wants to write, word for word, the exact same text that Miguel de Cervantes wrote in the early 1600s. And he succeeds—producing several chapters that are letter-for-letter identical to Cervantes's original.

But here is the twist. Borges's narrator argues that Menard's Quixote, though textually identical, is actually richer and more subtle than Cervantes's. Why? Because Menard wrote his version in the twentieth century, not the seventeenth. The same words, written in a different historical context, mean different things. When Cervantes wrote about chivalry, he was describing something that had recently existed. When Menard writes the same sentences, he is evoking a world four centuries dead.

The story is a kind of joke. It is also a serious philosophical argument about the nature of authorship and meaning. And it announced that Borges had found his form: short fictions that operated like thought experiments, using narrative to explore ideas that philosophy could only state abstractly.

In 1941, Borges published his first collection of stories, "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan"—"The Garden of Forking Paths." The title story is nominally a spy thriller set during World War One. A Chinese professor in England named Yu Tsun is working as a German spy. He needs to communicate a piece of military intelligence to Berlin before British agents kill him. The plot twists and turns, eventually involving a murder.

But inside this spy story is another story—about a book called "The Garden of Forking Paths" written by Yu Tsun's ancestor, a Chinese philosopher. This book, we learn, is also a labyrinth. A labyrinth of time. In most novels, when a character faces a choice, they choose one option and the story continues. In Yu Tsun's ancestor's novel, the character chooses all options simultaneously. The narrative forks, and forks again, and keeps forking, creating a story that contains all possible stories.

Borges had invented, decades before the technology existed, the concept of hypertext fiction—narratives that branch and loop, that can be read in multiple ways, that have no single path from beginning to end. He had also articulated a theory of time that physicists would later take seriously: the idea that every quantum event might split the universe into parallel versions, each continuing independently.

The collection was well-received but did not win the prizes Borges's friends expected. Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large section of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges," with major writers and critics throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributing essays in his defense.

Ficciones and The Aleph

Borges continued producing stories through the 1940s. In 1944, he published "Ficciones," the collection for which he is best known. Three years later came "El Aleph." Together, these two slim volumes contain the work that made Borges immortal.

The stories share certain obsessions. Labyrinths appear everywhere—physical labyrinths, temporal labyrinths, bibliographic labyrinths. Mirrors recur, multiplying images into infinity. Characters encounter books that contain all other books, maps that are as large as the territories they represent, encyclopedias devoted to imaginary countries. Fictional writers populate the stories: Pierre Menard with his rewritten Quixote, the unknown authors of the Encyclopedia of Tlön.

In "The Library of Babel," Borges describes a universe that is a library. The library contains every possible book—every possible combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks. Somewhere in its endless hexagonal galleries is a book explaining the meaning of life. Somewhere else is a book predicting your death. But for every true book there are millions of books containing only gibberish, and no one knows how to find the meaningful volumes among the nonsense.

In "The Aleph," the narrator (named Borges) descends into a cellar and finds a small point in space through which the entire universe is simultaneously visible. Every angle, every location, every moment—all visible at once. The experience is ineffable. How do you describe infinity?

In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," a secret society creates an encyclopedia about a fictional planet called Tlön. The encyclopedia is so detailed, so internally consistent, that it begins to influence reality. Objects from Tlön start appearing in our world. Eventually, Borges implies, our world will become Tlön.

These are not conventional stories with plots and characters. They are something new: fictions that function as philosophy, that use the tools of narrative to make arguments about the nature of reality, language, and knowledge. Gabriel García Márquez, who would go on to write "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and win the Nobel Prize, said that reading Borges showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way."

The Irony of Blindness

Even as Borges was producing his greatest work, his eyesight was failing. The deterioration ran in the family—his father had gone blind, his grandmother had gone blind. By his early thirties, Borges could barely read. By fifty-five, he was completely blind.

For a man who lived through books, this should have been a catastrophe. And in some ways it was. Borges never learned Braille. He could no longer read or write by himself. He became dependent on others—primarily his mother, Leonor, who served as his personal secretary, reading to him and transcribing his dictation.

Yet Borges transformed his blindness into material. His later poetry collection "Elogio de la Sombra"—"In Praise of Darkness"—meditates on what it means to live without sight. Scholars have argued that losing his vision actually freed his imagination, forcing him to develop his characteristic literary symbols through purely mental techniques. The labyrinths and mirrors and infinite libraries that populate his fiction are not things you see. They are things you think.

When Borges was appointed director of the National Library in 1955—that cruel gift of 800,000 books he could not read—he was also given a position as professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He lectured from memory, having internalized so much literature over his lifetime that he could quote and analyze without notes or texts. He became a public intellectual, a figure of Argentine cultural life, even as his physical world shrank to darkness.

International Fame

For decades, Borges was known primarily in the Spanish-speaking world. A few stories appeared in English translation in the 1940s and 1950s—"The Garden of Forking Paths" was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1948, translated by Anthony Boucher. But he remained largely unknown to English readers.

This changed in 1961. That year, Borges shared the first International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett. Beckett was already famous in Europe and America. Borges was a revelation—a writer from Argentina who seemed to come from nowhere, writing stories unlike anything in the Western tradition.

English translations began appearing in greater numbers. The Latin American literary boom of the 1960s brought international attention to writers like García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes—all of whom acknowledged Borges as an influence. When García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" became an international sensation in 1967, readers went looking for the roots of magical realism and found Borges waiting.

Borges himself was fluent in multiple languages. He had spent his adolescence reading German philosophy and French poetry. He translated Faulkner, Kafka, Virginia Woolf. In 1940, he rendered Faulkner's "The Wild Palms" into Spanish, a translation that influenced a generation of Latin American writers. His intuitive understanding of Faulkner's style—the long sentences, the temporal dislocations, the mythologized geography—helped shape the prose of Rulfo, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez.

He received honorary doctorates from universities around the world. In 1964, he was awarded an honorary British knighthood. In 1967 and 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. The Nobel Prize for Literature eluded him—one of the most notorious omissions in the award's history—but his influence exceeded that of many winners.

The Politics Problem

Borges's political views complicated his legacy, particularly in his home country. He was a conservative in an era when Latin American intellectuals were expected to be leftists. He supported the military coup that overthrew Juan Perón in 1955—perhaps understandably, given that the Perón government had demoted him from his library job to the position of chicken inspector in the public markets, a transparent attempt at humiliation.

When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library. His antipathy to Peronism was genuine and lifelong.

More troublingly, Borges expressed qualified support for some of Latin America's military dictatorships, including the Argentine junta that seized power in 1976. He later regretted some of these statements and became increasingly critical of the juntas' human rights abuses. But the damage to his reputation in progressive circles was done. Some have speculated that his political views cost him the Nobel Prize.

The Final Works

Borges continued writing into old age, though his output slowed. He produced more poetry, more essays, more collaborations. He traveled constantly, lecturing at universities, receiving honors, conducting interviews.

His mother Leonor, who had been his secretary and companion for decades, died in 1975 at the age of ninety-nine. Borges remarried—his second marriage, to María Kodama, his former student and longtime assistant—in the final weeks of his life.

He died on June 14, 1986, in Geneva, the city where he had spent his formative adolescent years. He was eighty-six years old. His final work, "The Conspirators," was dedicated to Geneva.

The Infinite Library

What Borges left behind was something new in literature. Not a body of work in the conventional sense—he wrote no novels, his complete fiction fits in a single volume—but a way of seeing. He showed that stories could be machines for thinking, that fiction could address philosophical problems more directly than philosophy itself.

His influence is everywhere, even where it is not acknowledged. Every novel with an unreliable narrator owes something to "Pierre Menard." Every story that plays with metafiction—fiction about fiction—extends techniques Borges pioneered. The concept of hypertext, of narratives that branch and fork, was his idea before computers made it possible. When you click a link on the internet and find yourself in a labyrinth of references, you are living in a Borgesian world.

David Foster Wallace was right to call Borges's stories "inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything." But they are also generous. They invite readers into a world where ideas matter, where books are living things, where the library might actually be infinite and somewhere in its stacks is the book that explains everything.

The blind librarian who saw everything has been dead for nearly forty years. His library remains open.