Self aware, self referential, and meta in, essentially, all the ways I can think of. While meta is something I quite like as additional context through connective tissue, the other qualities are things I typically dislike - sometimes outright despise, actually.

Yet it all works wonders here. Even when referencing antiquated stories I am barely familiar with or haven’t even a vague inkling of, because they are make his own, it also doesn’t quite matter. I’m sure it might be slightly more satisfying to know how they have been altered but the context provided through the one of the particular piece usually enough. And then it begins to build on itself in compelling ways. Referring to books that do or do not exist and have been expounded on previously. Altering existence as we know it in order to theorize about the craft even as he is applying the trade as you watch.

Even the book gets additional context through a fictional book and location in one such ‘story’. It’s very stimulating and dense in a way I had not expected. The accessibility, I think, is not as exclusive as I imagined. Diction is intuitive and does much of the work. It’s economical and has flow, but you also cannot read it quickly. You’ll trip over yourself and need to go at the pace Borge likes, controlling even that aspect of experience.

Where most fiction attempts to produce some kind of truth, or universal kind of experience as the buttressing for the lie, that is, the conceit or overt fiction which will require the suspension of disbelief, Borges simply refuses to distinguish or accept that framing device. A review of a story sounds incredible. When you search for it, however, it is completely fictional. But it is also already somewhat consumed by the reader with the review and by the intertextual elements later on in the book.

While I have always subscribed to the strict framing of the real and the unreal, I have also never read an agreement that illustrated my own position to me before.