SOURCE: “Death and Denial in Borges's Later Prose,” in Notes On Contemporary Literature,Vol. XXIX, No. 4, September, 1999, pp. 2–4.

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...