Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899 - June 14, 1986) was an Argentinian
writer, known primarily for his short stories; he also wrote poetry and a
considerable amount of literary criticism. He is considered to be one of the
foremost South American writers of fiction of the 20th century. His
blindness (which, like his father's, developed in adulthood) strongly
influenced his later writing. Paramount in his intellectual itinerary are
elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, philosophy, and, as a personal
integration of these, Borges' sense of literature as recreation—all
these disciplines treated as writers' playthings.
Borges was born in Buenos Aires and lived through most of the twentieth
century, and so was rooted in the Modernist period of culture and
literature. His fiction is profoundly learned, and always concise. Many of
his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors,
labyrinths, reality and identity. A number of stories focus on fantastic
themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text, a man who
forgets nothing he experiences, an artifact through which the user can see
everything in the universe, and a year of time standing still, given to a
man standing before a firing squad. The same Borges told more and less
realistic stories of South American life, stories of folk heroes,
streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures. He mixed
the real and the fantastic, and fact with fiction. In his early career these
mixtures sometimes bordered on hoax—and perhaps once or twice crossed
that line.
His abundant nonfiction includes astute film and book reviews, short
biographies, longer philosophical musings on topics such as the nature of
dialogue, language, and thought, and the relationships between. He also
explores empirically or rationally many of the themes that are found in his
fiction, such as the identity of the Argentinian people. In articles such as
"The History of the tango" and "The Translators of The Thousand and One
Nights," he writes lucidly on things that surely held a place in his own
life. The Book of Imaginary Beings is an thoroughly and obscurely researched
modern bestiary of mythical creatures, in the preface of which Borges wrote
that "there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way
erudition".
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned, Borges
increasingly relied on the medium of poetry to make it easier to remember
his work in progress. Many of his poems concern the same wide range of
possibilities as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical
works and translations, as well as more personal musings. The same
continuity extends across his fiction, nonfiction, and poems. For example,
the idealism of the fictional "Tlön" that's common to his essay "New
Refutation of Time" reaches as well to his poem "Things". Similarly, a
common thread runs through his story "The Circular Ruins" and his poem "The
Golem". Thus readers who appreciate his fiction and nonfiction may find his
poetry especially accessible.
As well as his own work, Borges was notable as a translator into Spanish. At
the age of ten, he translated Oscar Wilde into Spanish. At the end of his
life he produced a Spanish version of the Prose Edda. Borges also translated
(whilst simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, amongst others,
Edgar Alan Poe, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Rudyard Kipling, Herman
Melville, André Gide, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Sir
Thomas Browne, and G. K. Chesterton. In a number of essays and lectures
Borges assessed the art of translation and articulated his own view of
translation. Borges held the view that a translation may improve upon an
original, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of
the same work can be equally valid, and further that an original or literal
translation can be unfaithful to a translation.
Borges as Argentine and as World Citizen
From a vantage point in South America, his writing is steeped not only in
European influences, but informed by scholarship and mysticism from
Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish sources (albeit largely lacking in
indigenous [Amerind] ones, owing to the decimation of that population).
Maintaining a universal perspective, Borges belittled the notion of race and
derided nationalism. Yet his writing reflected the sensibilities of the
particular multicultural environment he emerged from. In terms of race, with
its history of Spanish domination, stock that the Argentine republic was
built on was in large part Spanish Creole. After the national constitution,
immigrants to Argentina were Italian, Spanish, French, German, Russian,
Turkish, Syrian, British, Austro-Hungarian, Portuguese, Polish, Swiss,
Yugoslav, North American, Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, with the Italians
and Spanish forming the largest influx (see Yust 1951: vol. 2, 318). This
was quite a melting pot—with the indigenous population all but
squeezed out. A multicultural Buenos Aires populates Borges' fiction, and
ultimately inspires Borges' synthesis of diverse Asian, European, and Middle
Eastern sources.
In Borges himself is the mixed seed of an English grandmother who married
into a criollo family. In fact the person she married, c.1870, was Francisco
Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the civil wars
in what is now Argentina and Uruguay. Spurred by pride in his family's
heritage, JLB often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and
quasi-fiction (e.g. The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, The Dead Man, Avelino
Arredondo) as well as poetry (General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a
Carriage). JLB's maternal great-grandfather was another military hero, whom
Borges immortalized in a poem (A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suarez, Victor
at Junin). Nevertheless, no matter how authentic were Borges' Argentine
origins, his universalism necessarily put him in conflict with fascist,
ultranationalist, and anti-intellectual movements of his time. A watershed
in his life was in 1946 when the military government of Peron stripped him
of his job as a librarian and assigned him to be inspector of poultry and
rabbits in the Buenos Aires municipal market. (A subsequent military
government appointed him head of the National Library in 1955.)
By the time JL was born, the family lived in what he himself has described
as a typical Buenos Aires neighbourhood—Palermo—where he
remembered hearing the music of guitars and was aware of the compadritos or
knife-men—men who were mythically brave, and became either outlaws or
bodyguards to conservative politicians. In the house he grew up
in—which was set off from the street by an iron gate wrought into a
surrounding colonial architecture—was an immense library of books in
English, where as a boy he first met Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde,
Mark Twain, Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights (see Sarlo 1993: 42-43).
These names recur throughout Borges's career, as do those of Charles-Pierre
Baudelaire, G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Alan Poe, Paul Valéry, Franz
Kafka—to list but few.
Borges furthered his education at the College of Geneva (Switzerland)
between 1914 and 1918. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges—forced into
early retirement from the legal profession owing to the same failing
eyesight that would eventually afflict JLB—was treated by a Geneva eye
specialist while JLB and his sister Norah attended school. 1914-18 was a
period of enormous political, ideological and cultural change in Europe, not
to say enormous instability.
(During this period—1916 in fact—the founding work of modern
structural linguistics, Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, was first
published. There is no suggestion that Borges was familiar with this work,
although it is manifestly the case that in his story 'Funes the Memorious',
first published in the collection Ficciones in 1944, Borges proposes his own
version of language as a system of signs and significations.)
His first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for
Buenos Aires) appeared in 1923. JLB contributed to a few avant garde
publications in the early 1920s, including a popular one called Martin
Fierro. That name is familiar in Argentina: The major work of
nineteenth-century Argentine literature was Martín Fierro, a gauchesque poem
by José Hernández, published in two parts, in 1872 and 1880. The poem's
central character, Martín Fierro, is a gaucho. Gauchos were of a free, poor,
rural population who were never wholly absorbed into the labour market, but
as an economic unit were often coerced into primitive exploitation of the
pampas, or drafted into the army, whose job was to defend the frontier from
Indian incursion. Gauchos eventually disappeared, to be replaced by rural
wage-earners, and therefore Fierro, as a symbol of the past (and uniquely
Argentine), was held in the highest importance, at least by the kind of
intellectual who values national emblems (see Sarlo 1993: 37). Borges was
not one of these. Initially, along with other young writers of his
generation, Borges rallied around the fictional Martin Fierro as the symbol
of a characteristic Argentine sensibility, not tied to European values. But
as Borges matured, he criticized nationalism in politics and literature.
Borges in the Modern and Postmodern Context
Nevertheless, much of Borges's writing suggests that his cultural locus was
often Europe—more specifically a Europe whose theological authority
had palpably dissolved under the pressure and success of science. Tensions
inherent in the intellectual climate of that Europe, at that time, one may
view as prefigured in the Enlightenment (or slightly before), and fully
formed by the fin de siècle (or slightly after). By the time of Descartes
(1596-1650), the Church still had difficulties with Copernicus's
heliocentric cosmology, first propounded in his De Revolutionibus in 1543
(as a system this was restated by Kepler in the early seventeenth century),
and Descartes it was who made possible the remorseless programme of science,
as a thing co-existent with the will of God. His celebrated Cogito ergo
sum— je pense, donc je suis, 'I think, therefore I am'—was
central to his system of knowledge (see Honderich 1995: 138). It is that
system which gave rise to Continental rationalism, in which the human
purview is very much a matter of subject and object—the subjective
mind making rational judgments about the objective world. Another name for
this is Cartesian dualism, which has at its centre the maxim that knowledge
of the world is acquired initially through observation of it, then through
formulating correctly considered questions, then arriving at answers through
rational thinking (see Magee 1988: 78-95). God's role in all this is, on the
one hand, as creator of the objective world, and on the other as progenitor
of the subjective, human soul, which is an imperfect image of Himself. It
was precisely this dualism that allowed Isaac Newton (1642-1727) to devise
his mechanistic universe, with its implacable laws of motion, and all neatly
regulated by an absolute, Time, whilst simultaneously meditating on God. It
has been noted by many other commentators that Newton's written output is
devoted more to theology than it is to physics. According to Samuel Johnson,
Newton began as 'an infidel' (or physicist), but came to be 'a very firm
believer' (see Boswell 1909: 172).
It need hardly be stressed that a cognitive dualism has persisted in one
form or another ever since, through Hegel's dialectic of the world (thesis,
antithesis, synthesis), through Karl Marx's materialism (a class struggle),
to those handy juxtapositions beloved of the structuralists (our world of
text as a world of binarisms), even through to the presences and absences of
post-structuralism. Somehow the case for God has never quite disappeared in
all this, despite the fact that in the dulled embers still visible from the
Romantic period, it was Nietzsche who officially called a moratorium on the
Deity, asking the seemingly innocent question that if nobody actually
believes in God, whom do we hold ultimately responsible for our actions?
Borges himself, if he doesn't overtly restate that kind of question,
certainly knows how to dramatise it (metaphysically, of course). His 'Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' (Borges 1986: 32) is a revision of Berkeleian
idealism. This, a seventeen-page story (long for him), opens as follows: 'I
owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an
encyclopedia'.
Berkeley, who was Bishop of Cloyne in 1734, denied the existence of matter.
This was in a reply to Locke (1632-1704), whose conception of the universe
was Newtonian and mechanistic, a place where material bodies conformed to a
clockwork modus operandi—that is to say, a universe exhibiting
solidity, figure, extension, motion or rest, and number. Among other things,
these bodies, for Locke, operate on human sense-organs, and on the
immaterial substance of human minds—all of which amounts to a
conjunction in those minds of ideas. Therefore what we perceive as the world
around us is not really the world around us, but only our ideas of it. To
Berkeley this was repugnant, not least because, although as a system it
allowed that God may have created the world, it did not require God's
eternal supervision. (See Warnock 1991: 47.) It was this that led him to
deny the existence of matter, maintaining that material objects exist only
through being perceived, or to put it another way, through the act of
perceiving them. That things don't cease to exist in our absence is
Berkeley's proof for the omnipresence of God, who at all times perceives all
things everywhere. (See Russell 1991: 623.) It was in this way that for
Berkeley the world existed as a divine syntax, through which any well
adjusted mortal may commute with his maker.
In Borges's revision of Berkeley, Uqbar is an undocumented region of Iraq or
of Asia Minor, one of whose heresiarchs had declared the visible universe
either an illusion or sophism, and that mirrors and procreation were
abominable because they multiplied and disseminated that universe. As the
story develops, it emerges that Uqbar is a region of Tlön, and that Tlön is
an invented country, the work of a secret and benevolent society conceived
in the early seventeenth century, and numbering Berkeley among its members.
As the society's work began, it became clear that a single generation wasn't
sufficient to articulate an entire country. Each master therefore agreed to
elect a disciple who would carry on his work and also perpetuate this
hereditary arrangement. However, there is no further trace of this society
until, two centuries later, one of its disciples is an ascetic millionaire
from Memphis, Tennessee, called Ezra Buckley, who scoffs at the modest scale
of the sect's undertaking. He proposes instead the invention of a planet,
and with certain provisos—that the project be kept secret, that an
encyclopædia of the imaginary planet be written, and that the whole scheme
will have no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ (and therefore none with
Berkeley's God either). The date of Buckley's involvement is 1824. (See
Borges 1986: 28, 39-40.) The timing of events in Borges's story is
approximately a century after that, when Buckley's encyclopædia is beginning
not to be a secret, and as a kind of mirror is beginning to disseminate its
own universe.
What kind of encyclopædia that is, and therein what kind of planet we
behold, is something we glean at various points in the story. For example it
is not a construct of objects in space, with the consequence that one of the
languages of Tlön—necessarily a conjectural language—is without
nouns. As its central unit are impersonal verbs, inflected by monosyllabic
extensions bearing an adverbial value. Borges offers us, for what would be
our own the moon rose above the water a Tlönic equivalent: upward behind the
onstreaming it mooned (Borges 1986: 33). In another language of Tlön, the
prime unit, rather than the verb, is the monosyllabic adjective, which, in
combinations of two or more, are noun-forming—therefore for moon read
instead round airy-light on dark. We may say further, that because there are
no nouns—or because nouns are composites of other parts of speech, and
are subordinate to them—there can be no possibility of a priori
deductive reasoning (and therefore no telos), and no possibility either of a
posteriori inductive reasoning—which renders history void and ontology
an alien concept. At this point we understand that we have entered into a
Berkeleian idealism with one critical attenuation, i.e., Buckley's removal
of the multiple and omnipresent percepts of a deity. It is tempting at this
stage to recall Husserl—particularly when Tlön's one cultural
discipline is psychology (ibid.)—and to start to think about a
phenomenology which does not merely bracket off objective reality, but
parcels it separately into all its successive moments. This leads us to the
interesting paradox that any citizen of Tlön drawing his present breath, is
not the same citizen who drew his previous breath (I speak the chronologised
jargon of an Earthling), and will become yet some other citizen in the act
of drawing his next. This fantastic and replicating notion bears
similarities to the position held by certain contemporary physicists,
particularly Julian Barbour, who has argued that time as something measured
by a clock isn't consistent with a quantum theory of gravity. He has
proposed that we may have to consider each moment as an entity in itself,
moreover as an entity which does not change (see Smolin 1997: 289). We, who
are not of Tlön, believe in time because identifiable objects—persons,
texts, the firmament—persist not as an act of mentation, but
independently of us, through a succession of equally identifiable moments.
Barbour on the other hand conceives of a universe giving rise to its entire
stock of moments simultaneously, and what we call time is the approximation
of those moments in a sequencing process which we ourselves perform (ibid.:
290)—we, of course, having invented, and having access to, nouns.
What perplexes physicists is the absence of a single overarching structure
unifying the macro and micro scales—or Relativity and Quantum Theory.
Nor does there seem to be much willingness to accept that these two aspects
of our cosmos (though undoubtedly interactive—one might even say
'intertextual') might be irreconcilable. Neither Borges the philosophical
writer nor Derrida the philosopher of writing approaches any such centred
locus, for example Borges desisting the solemnity of a Russell (op. cit.:
626-633), who having set out the essentials of Berkleianism then proceeds to
critique it (Borges merely removes it from its European loci then returns it
to an indeterminate world as Buckleianism). Derrida is apt to view formal
European schema in terms of the human sciences, and records a privileged
place to one in particular—ethnology (Greek
?θνος, nation). For Derrida, ethnology could not
approach to the status of a science until European culture had been
decentred, change bringing with it the dislocation of metaphysics as a
concept of European Being. Here also was the point at which European culture
ceased to be the culture of reference (point also at which the reflected
image of Berkeley gazes back at us as Buckley). Derrida would like to
consider further that this point also is not principally one of
philosophical and scientific discourse, but is at once political, economic,
technocratic. Ethnology, he says, or implies, arises in discourse, a
primarily European discourse, one that for all its liberal pretensions
continues to employ traditional concepts. As a consequence of this, the
ethnologist (and not just any ethnologist) accepts into his discourse the
premises of ethnocentrism (and the centrist race he has in mind is a
European race) while at the same time denouncing them. (See Derrida 1993:
282.) It is this dualism, or dynamic binarism, which in my opinion is the
sine qua non of Borges's art, in its character of non-European Europeanness.
This rears itself everywhere in Borges, and perhaps never more pointedly
than in his short fiction 'The Book of Sand'. That, I will argue, is the
Book of all books, and is a monster. Once revealed as such, its owner
surreptitiously transports it to the Argentine National Library, and
'slipping past a member of the staff and trying not to notice at what height
or distance from the door ... [loses] the Book of Sand on one of the
basement's musty shelves'—i.e., a book hidden by many others (Borges
1979: 91). Here already I shall have to cast the fictive Borges into the
same blur as his biographical senior, writing as narrator. In a dream of
himself, in a dreamed apartment in a dream of Buenos Aires, 'volumes', or
books that the wraith called Borges has frequently handled, include
encyclopædias, maps, sacred tomes, the world's fantasies concerning itself.
Someone very like him, whose domicile is Belgrano St, receives a caller who
initially introduces himself as someone selling Bibles. But Bibles aren't
the requirement, and so the salesman, who is a Presbyterian from the
Orkneys, instead produces an octavo volume, bound in cloth, on whose spine
are the words 'Holy Writ', and 'Bombay'. On opening the book, the pages
appear in double columns, and ordered in versicles, as is so in a Bible. The
bookseller advises a close look at the page, since it will never be found,
or seen, again, and goes on to say that he acquired the book in exchange for
a handful of rupees and a Bible, from an owner who did not know how to read.
It is impossible to find its first and last page, and is called The Book of
Sand because it has no beginning or end—its very pages are terms in an
infinite series. As to the bookseller's conscience, it is clear: he feels
sure of not having cheated the native in exchanging the Word of God for
this, a diabolic trinket. Hume is mentioned, as has been George Herbert
('Thy rope of sands', epigraph to the whole destructive rig-up), and the
book is sold to the citizen of Belgrano St. (See Borges 1979: 87-90.)
George Herbert (1593-1633), who balanced a secular career with a life of
theological contemplation, was ordained deacon c.1624, and was installed as
a canon of Lincoln cathedral and prebendary of Leighton Bromswold, near the
Anglican Eliot's Little Gidding, in 1626 (see Drabble 1989: 454). Herbert
the poet is at all times in pursuit of what Derrida has called a
'transcendental signifier', God's summarising logos, the last syllable of
recorded time, as the divine extension of the Book of Genesis (In the
beginning, God said ...), suspiration that renders as revealed and knowable
everything that has been uttered and written in between—life and the
world as a sacred inscription:
Thy rope of sands, /
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee /
Good cable, to enforce and draw, /
And be thy law, /
While thou didst wink and would not see.
(Wain 1996: 242.)
Above all, Herbert wants us to see God's revealed truth—which the
Presbyterian bookseller believes is written in a book, in the Book, to the
point that his evangelism extends to the Hindu caste system in Bombay, where
he has found what to him must be the opposite of incontestable writ, what
with its textual flickers, its Derridean presences and absence. Note that
Presbyterianism occupies an intermediate position between episcopacy (the
Church of England is Episcopal) and congregationalism, whose form of worship
has been marked by extreme simplicity—this explains its appeal to
Cromwell and his Puritan followers (see Yust 1951: vol. 18, 440-444). One
imagines that to the average Presbyterian, God's truth is a simple truth. By
contrast one can't ever imagine this being the case for Hume (1711-76),
himself a son of Presbyterianism, whose 'persistence in irreligion shook the
conviction of Boswell, and provoked some particularly unpleasant comments
from Dr. Johnson' (Honderich 1995: 378): 'Hume owned he had never read the
New Testament with attention. Here then was a man who had been at no pains
to enquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind
the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would
alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right'
(Boswell 1909: 409). According to Hume, '... evidence ... for the truth of
the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our
senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion [whose texts are
founded on the testimony of the apostles], it was no greater; and it is
evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can
any one rest such confidence in their testimony, as in the immediate object
of their senses' (Hume 1982: 109).
It can be by no means accidental that Borges as author (as author of 'The
Book of Sand') has passed into the simplified hands of an evangelical
Presbyterian an 'immediate object', the sense of which undermines plain
faith in a Christian eschatology. Derrida has pointed out that a structure
(we'd describe Christianity more as a superstructure) always presumes a
centre, and himself finds only suspect evidence for such a co-ordinate: what
we call a 'center ... is the point at which the substitution of contents,
elements, or terms ... is forbidden ... Thus it has always been thought that
the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing
within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes
structurality' (Derrida 1993: 279)—meaning that, paradoxically, the
centre is and isn't the centre. Any one page of an infinite book, for that
moment while we contemplate it, is the central term of an infinite series,
yet is merely engulfed by that infiniteness during those other moments while
we don't. I go further and say that this counter-Book posited by Borges is
in fact an interpretation of the Book, to whom he has called Herbert, Hume
and a Presbyterian Bible-vendor as first witness. The Book of Sand is the
Book of the basis of Western Christianity, decentred.
So why should the cauldron of a new and appropriated
country—Argentina—whose influx was largely European, cast back
on to us a quasi-European, such as I am suggesting Borges was? As Homi
Bhabha puts it, in the complex wording of an essay I have translated from
English to English, called 'Signs Taken for Wonders',
The Bible has to be considered as the first Book of Imperialist propaganda,
and being so has paved the way for subsequent European books springing up
all over the colonised world, in a similar miraculous aura. The Word as the
Word of God, is the Word transmitted by European man, and is a Word that
encapsulates a vision of half-made societies everywhere. It therefore
becomes not only the Word of God, but of truth, and of art, and as it
follows, the basis for founding not only a 'true' and 'artistic' beginning,
but a practice of history and narrative. But. Implanting the Word in the
wilds is also a process of displacement, and the immediate vision of the
Word is therefore freed from the discourse that accompanied or even
encumbered it (to echo Derrida). Displacement is therefore what the Word now
communicates [and is especially what the Word in the Borges ?uvre
communicates]. The Word is a hybrid, and of course any hybrid is neither
certainly the One nor certainly the Other. Difference and Otherness at that
point become a pressure and a presence on the boundary of Authority [an
Authority which in Argentina failed to make of Martín Fierro the unequivocal
Argentine tradition. Similarly Borges has taken the European Book and turned
it into a rope of sand]. Such pressure and presence do not amount to overt
opposition (in a political sense), but to a form of resistance. What is
resisted is the content of another culture, while at the same time that
other culture reinvents its signs and its various discourses to bolster its
role as a colonial power. What this results in is an ambivalence towards the
rules and dominating discourses of that colonising power [and Borges, being
of that power, could not enjoy a relation to European culture in any
straightforward way—it was inevitable that the relation was shifted].
(See Bhabha 1995: 29-32.)
One further complication in the case of Argentina is that the colonising
power also quickly became the 'native' population, since the Indian presence
was almost entirely expunged. The argument though I think is still relevant,
if in this instance its relevance is to a transplanted European
culture—a culture in opposition to itself.
Quotations
* "Mirrors and copulation are obscene, for they increase the numbers of
mankind." - the dogma of a fictional religion in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius"
Collections in English
* Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1942) (with Adolfo Bioy Casares*)
* The Book of Imaginary Beings (1944)
* A Universal History of Infamy (1954)
* Ficciones (1956)
* A Personal Anthology (1961)
* Dreamtigers (1964)
* Labyrinths (1964)
* Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (1967) (with Adolfo Bioy Casares)
* Extraordinary Tales (1967) (with Adolfo Bioy Casares)
* Doctor Brodie's Report (1970)
* The Book of Sand (1975)
* The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 (1978)
* Seven Nights (1988)
* Obras Completas (1989)
* Everything and Nothing (1997)
* Collected Fictions (1998)
Short Stories
* "The Chamber of Statues" (1933)
* "The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell" (1933)
* "The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke" (1933)
* "The Mirror of Ink" (1933)
* "Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities" (1933)
* "Streetcorner Man" (1933)
* "Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter" (1933)
* "The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate" (1933)
* "The Wizard Postponed" (1933)
* "The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv" (1934)
* "Tale of the Two Dreamers" (1934)
* "A Theologian in Death" (1934)
* "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan" (1935)
* "The Circular Ruins" (1941)
* "The Lottery in Babylon" (1941)
* "The Library of Babel" (1941)
* "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1941)
* "Funes the Memorious" (1944)
* "Death and the Compass" (1944)
* "The Aleph" (1945)
* "A Double for Mohammed" (1946)
* "The Generous Enemy" (1946)
* "Of Exactitude in Science" (1946)
* "The Zahir" (1949)
* "The Immortal" (1949)
* "The Intruder" (1966)
* "The Meeting" (1969)
* "Rosendo's Tale" (1969)
* "Doctor Brodie's Report" (1970)
* "The Duel" (1970)
* "The Elder Lady" (1970)
* "The End of the Duel" (1970)
* "The Gospel According to Mark" (1970)
* "Guayaquil" (1970)
* "Juan Murana" (1970)
* "The Unworthy Friend" (1970)
* "Utopia of a Tired Man" (1975) (Nebula award nominee)
* "Avelino Arredondo" (1975)
* "The Book of Sand" (1975)
* "The Bribe" (1975)
* "The Congress" (1975)
* "The Disk" (1975)
* "The Mirror and the Mask" (1975)
* "The Night of the Gifts" (1975)
* "Odin" (with Delia Ingenieros)
* "The Other" (1975)
* "The Sect of the Thirty" (1975)
* "There Are More Things" (1975)
* "Ulrikke" (1975)
* "Undr" (1975)
* "August 25, 1983" (1982)
* "The Rose of Paracelsus" (1983)
* "Shakespeare's Memory" (1983)
* "Blue Tigers" (1983)
