[In the following essay, Pennington interprets one of Borges's later stories, “El disco,” as a criticism of his critics.]

The prose works of Jorge Luis Borges from 1969 are not considered by some critics to be as significant as his earlier stories (James Woodall, The Man in the Mirror of the Book: A Life of Jorge Luis Borges [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), p. 251). The great tales of the 1940s, such a “Death and the Compass,” “The Library of Babel,” and “The Circular Ruins” are dense, clinical, cosmic, and baroque, not lending themselves to easy readings or interpretations. But in 1967, Borges announced that he was tired of labyrinths, mirrors, and tigers, and stated that his prose would now take a different, purer form.

In attempting to answer why Borges's fiction took what, on the surface, seems a radical turn, critics have generally ignored the fact that by the 1960's the author had become completely blind. He no longer possessed the abilities to read longer fiction, proof it, and rewrite it. He dictated virtually everything he produced from that time forward. His love of poetry is often not considered either. Borges's first acclaim as an ultraista came through his poetry, and he continued to compose poems throughout his literary life (Linda S. Maier, Borges and the European Avant Garde [NY: Peter Lang, 1996], pp. 21–38). Borges considered himself a good poet, and it is noteworthy that at this point in his life, when the sea change from sight to blindness fully concluded, he chose poetry to express his feelings about this loss, as evident in the title of his collection of poems [and stories] from this period, In Praise of Darkness (1969). We also note that his inclusion of two short stories in this collection of poetry adumbrates the years to come when his prose would resemble poetry to great degree, both in economy and style.

Perhaps critics find Borges's later short stories lacking because they are not as heavily endowed as the more famous tales he wrote decades before. All are briefer and, most noticeably, practically devoid of narrative complexity (Naomi Lindstrom, Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of the Short Fiction [Boston: Twayne, 1990], p. 131). The plots are straightforward and bare-boned. The scarcity of metaphors is glaring, but we should keep in mind what Jaime Alazraki observed about Borges's preferred use of metonymy some time ago (Borges and the Kabbalah [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988], pp. 238–71).

It is really to Carter Wheelock we should turn for the most important clue for reading these stories. In an article written in 1972, he put forth the thesis that the recent fiction of Borges seemed to revolve around a central theme of the death of the text (“Borges New Prose,” in Prose for Borges (Northwestern UP, 1972]; reprinted in Harold Bloom. ed., Jorge Luis Borges. Modern Critical Views [NY: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 120–21). That is to say, there have been many observations on Borges and the aesthetic response, the theses being that Borges's fiction has as its goal such a response in the reader, that there are no exterior referents and nothing outside the parameters of the text; all is creation and fiction. If the story is enjoyed, it is only for aesthetic reasons, not because there is a message, a connection, identification, or an interpretation that we can internalize or extrapolate. Carter's argument is that the stories are not about aesthetic pleasure per se, but rather the expectation of, the anticipation of, or the moment immediately before, the aesthetic sensation. For Borges, the aesthetic event is the “imminence of a revelation, which never comes” (107).

These stories, then, are fictions of denial, lacking epiphanies, recognition, and logical patterns and, as such, against interpretation. In contrast with his earlier works, these are anti-stories. It is as if Borges has gone to war with the Other in “Borges and I.” Not unlike Hemingway, who (once he was critically acclaimed) had to wrestle with the powerful conceptions of what “Hemingway literature” should be, the author battles with the old Borges that the critical world now expects. He finds himself like Cervantes, after learning that Avellaneda has composed the spurious second part of the Quixote, recognizing that there are assumptions and preferences about which directions his texts should take. But in the same way that Cervantes refused to send Don Quixote to Barcelona in his subsequent authentic Part Two, Borges denies his readers and critics the fulfillment of their expectations and the pleasure of the text from this point forward.

Borges refuses to give the interpreters what they want. In his skeletal stories he consistently denies closure and textual unity, in the traditional sense. Wheelock has shown how the stories of Dr. Brodie's Report (1970) symbolize the death and destruction of the text (and hence, any aesthetic response). The refusal to rise to critics' expectations continues in Borges's collection, The Book of Sand (1975), a story of which, “El disco,” is virtually left without critical comment, though it might be taken as an example of synecdoche applying to all of the author's later fiction. The tale involves a woodsman in Medieval England (not “somewhere in Scandinavia,” as Lindstrom reports [104]), who is visited by an aged Norseman, who declares that he is of royal lineage, showing as proof a one sided shining disk he holds in his hand. When the opportunity presents itself, the covetous woodsman murders him. The disk falls free from his hand, and the woodsman-narrator, reports that he has been searching for the disk all his days.

One attuned to the theme of the death of the text, or the denial of the aesthetic response should discern that this tale is an allegory on reading especially on reading Borges. The woodsman is the reader/interpreter whose will is dominant and unopposed. The old man, a worshipper of Odin, represents a tradition that predates the era of the woodsman and his beliefs (Christianity). Symbolically, the former is the traditional, long-standing text, with its secrets and riches represented by the disk. The reader destroys the text in search of its inherent riches, only to find them denied him. But the unshakable belief that there must be value in that which was lost keeps the woodsman searching (closure, meaning, aesthetic pleasure) for the rest of his life. He will not let it go, though he will never find it. Following the logic of this narrative, the one- sided nature of the disk meant that it only had existence or a ‘side’ when held in the hand of the old man while embedded in the text. The reader has destroyed the text, and any meaning, separated from the text, remains forever imperceptible.

In a final note, it is worth underlining that the woodsman is described as dim-witted as well as primitive, a departure from Borges's penchant for providing duelists/antagonists of roughly equivalent capacity. If the woodsman is to symbolize the reader/critic, then Borges has made a transparent comment on the nature, power, and motivation (and intelligence) of those who review his texts and seek his disks. Little wonder he got tired of labyrinths, even less of a wonder why he concretely diminishes his later texts and metaphorically destroys them. If we take “El disco” as the part standing for the whole of his later fiction, we have our answer as to why many critics find the stories less satisfying.