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Which stories in Ficciones challenged the conventions of realist fiction?
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Latin American literature
Francisco Javier Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, statue at Central Station, Sydney, Austl.
In Ficciones (1944), Jorge Luis Borges challenged the conventions of realist fiction by creating texts that unsettled traditional norms from within, ultimately making the prevailing regionalist novels of the time appear obsolete.1
Specific stories noted for this departure include:
- "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": In this story, Borges parodies the procedures of regionalist fiction by inventing an entire country, effectively highlighting the disingenuous nature of regionalist claims to faithfully reflect reality.1
- "La muerte y la brújula" ("Death and the Compass")1
- "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" ("Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote")1
These works are characterized by a dreamworld that is an ironical or paradoxical version of reality, featuring its own unique language and systems of symbols. By utilizing apocryphal references, bogus bibliographies, and a rejection of long-form narrative, Borges moved away from the regionalist aspiration of providing a direct, unmediated version of Latin American reality, favoring instead a style that was avowedly bookish and derived from the Western tradition.21