A Brief Survey of Borges' Nonfiction

Jorge Luis Borges' nonfiction reveals the same labyrinthine intellect that characterizes his fiction, but with the added dimension of direct engagement with literature, philosophy, and culture.

Major Collections

Inquisitions (1936) - His first major essay collection, exploring literature with characteristic erudition and iconoclasm. Here we see Borges developing his distinctive critical voice.

Other Inquisitions (1952) - Perhaps his most celebrated nonfiction work, containing essays like "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" and "Kafka and His Precursors." These pieces demonstrate his ability to find profound connections across disparate texts and cultures.

Dreamtigers (1960) - A hybrid collection mixing brief prose pieces, parables, and reflections. The boundary between fiction and essay becomes beautifully blurred.

Key Themes

His nonfiction obsessions mirror his fictional ones: infinite libraries, circular time, the nature of authorship, and the relationship between reality and representation. In essays like "The Aleph" (the essay, not the story), he explores how literature can contain infinite possibilities within finite forms.

Critical Method

Borges approaches literature not as a scholar but as a detective of ideas. He traces how concepts migrate between authors, how translations can improve upon originals, and how every text contains echoes of all literature. His famous assertion that "every writer creates his own precursors" exemplifies this approach.

Lectures and Later Works

His Norton Lectures at Harvard (published as This Craft of Verse) and Seven Nights show an aging Borges reflecting on fundamental questions: What is poetry? What is the divine comedy? What is time?

His nonfiction ultimately reveals that for Borges, criticism and creation were indistinguishable acts of imagination.