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As a student in Europe during World War I, Borges was greatly influenced by the Symbolist poets and Ultraism, a literary offshoot of Dadaism. Later, back in Argentina, he wrote poetry and essays for avant-garde journals, and edited anthologies of Argentine literature, including a book of detective stories. But it was not until the late '30s that Borges wrote Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of the first and perhaps best known of his short fictions.
Like the subsequent stories brought out under the title Ficciones, the short story Tlön is a form of metaphysical bemusement. In Tlön, a whole new planet is willed into being by a group of scientists, artists and philosophers. One of the instruments of the creation is an encyclopedia that they compile to cover every aspect of Tlön's existence. The entries and extrapolations are so logical and convincing that Tlönian artifacts start showing up on Earth.
In effect, Borges creates literary logarithms that raise base ideas to exhilarating heights. Funes the Memorious posits a man crippled by a memory so perfect that he must devise a system of enumeration to handle the infinite series of indiscriminate recollections that play on his mind. Funes is incapable of generalized thought because, as Borges explains, "to think is to forget differences." In The Aleph, omniscience takes the form of a small spot of light where everything going on in the world can be seen simultaneously from every angle. And in an imaginative murder mystery called The Garden of Forking Paths, time is envisioned as a complex network of planes on which spatial events may occur independently of one another—unless, of course, the planes happen to intersect accidentally.
In such stories Borges is playing with philosophy—Schopenhauer's concepts from The World as Will and Idea, Bishop Berkeley's assertion that existence is dependent upon individual perception; Hume's denial of the existence of absolute space. For Borges' admirers, the delicious point is simply that he takes reality with a grain of salt. Great events, vast trends, the pompous certainties implied by the French phrase grands mots —all these are not for Borges. History, that troubling angular presence that the middle-aged invoke to prove to the young that nothing ever really changes or can be changed, may not exist at all. In a typically brief but suggestive essay, significantly entitled The Modesty of History, Borges rejects "the influence of Cecil B. DeMille" and self-serving nationalism, asserting that the truly essential events of history have probably gone unrecorded. Everyone knows the paltry date upon which Columbus first set foot in the New World, but who knows, Borges asks, the really important and prophetic moment when Aeschylus added a second actor to his stage—opening possibilities for dialogue and dramatic interaction.