Our guy Borges was one of the earliest writers to embrace what we now know as postmodern techniques. But get this: Borges never wrote a single novel—he was all about the short story format (plus other short works such as poems and essays), explaining that "the short story can be taken in at a single glance. On the other hand, in the novel the consecutive is more noticeable. And then there's the fact that a work of three hundred pages depends on padding" (source).

Translation: he believed that everything that needed to be said could be expressed more quickly and effectively using this shorter format. And though his works are tiny in size, Borges packs in more experimentation than we might find in a novel 100 times the size.

These stories aren't about naturalism or realistic depictions of daily life; they're more into the philosophical stuff and the breaking down of traditional ideas about time and space. Despite their philosophical themes, though, these stories go down the postmodern route in refusing to offer any grand narratives to explain human existence. What's more, they give us early examples of intertextuality, metafiction, and fragmentation—some of postmodernism's most recognizable techniques.

"The Library of Babel"

If you're looking for the big answers about the meaning of life and the ways of the universe…then you've come to the wrong place.

This story describes a massive library containing every text that's ever been written—and the narrator takes a postmodern angle in stating that everything has already been written. People come from far and wide to spend their days combing through the library's contents, trying to decode their unknown language systems. The hope is that one of these books will offer some kind of grand meaning, but after centuries of searching, no one's had any luck.

Maybe it's time to call it a day?

FYI: the title is a reference to a story in the Book of Genesis. Quick recap of the passage: all human beings are united by one language and get together to build a tower in the city of Babel. Their aim is to reach the heavens, but God isn't so enthusiastic. His response? To make sure that people speak—and are divided by—multiple languages and can therefore never take on such a project again.

It's this story that gives us the source of the word "babble," and when applied to Borges' story, suggests that people's quest for meaning is doomed to fail. The narrator admits that he himself has wasted years searching only to realize that the library will probably outlast the human race, its contents forever remaining secret and impossible to decipher.

"On Exactitude in Science"

This 1946 story is short even by Borges' standards (it's only a paragraph long!), but it's gone on to become one of his best-known works. What's extra interesting for us is that Jean Baudrillard used it to demonstrate the notion of hyperreality.

Borges' story is presented as a quotation from a book called Viajes de varones prudentes by "Suárez Miranda" (NB: Borges sometimes refers to real texts, but this ain't one of 'em) that describes some, er, interesting developments in mapmaking over the ages. It turns out that maps became larger and larger until only a life-sized map was good enough. Of course, folks realized that this wasn't exactly convenient and left these maps to decay.

Wacky? Yes. But the whole idea takes on another angle when we look at it as a metaphor for hyperreality. And that's what Baudrillard did when he outlined this concept, arguing that these maps had taken over the land that they were meant to chart and represent. The result? The original becomes buried through the process of simulation and we can no longer separate true from false. We might imagine that the rotting away of the map leads to the uncovering of reality, but Baudrillard is way more pessimistic. For him, the map has become tangled with the landscape and we're now living in the dreaded hyperreal.

P.S. Borges wasn't the first to play with this concept: Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) had included references to a life-sized map and remarked on how impractical it was.

Chew on This

Want to see how Borges combines his experimental, dreamlike approach with a real, historical setting? Check out "The Secret Miracle" (1943), in which a writer who's been captured by the Nazis pleads for God to grant him an extra year to finish one of his works. Jump forward to his execution, and time seems to freeze. It's super confusing until he realizes that God has granted him an extra year in his mind. This may not give him the chance to write anything, but it lets him finish his story. Is this dream or reality? Borges isn't telling, but then, would you expect anything less?

Surfing from one website to another is a normal part of life for most of us, right? Well, to see a story that predicted this kind of structure, look no further than "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941). On one level, we have a wartime espionage plot, but what's more interesting is the labyrinthine book—The Garden of Forking Paths—that becomes the story's centerpiece. The story also announces itself as intertextual and self-reflexive right from the start, referring to a real history book and presenting the story as a fragment. Put this all together and we can see why Borges is known as one of the early postmodernists.