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When it comes to imaginative influence, size really doesn't matter. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges, a slim collection of 17 short stories that first appeared in 1944, has, over time, made waves in the pond of literature that only a door-stopper of a prose epic such as Joyce's Ulysses can match. Borges's collection whispered from the library that literature had a new subject: literature itself. A glance at what happened to that collection lets us track how that whisper became a roar, and how a writer could surf a wave that he himself had started.

The anglophone literary world at that time made use of a set of pigeonholes, and the work of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) fit nicely into several. First, it came out of nowhere, because that is where Argentina was for even the most cosmopolitan English-bound sensibility. Spain had shrunk from world-historical empire into wrecked state squeezed into the grip of a fascist dictatorship. Argentina was a place near the South Pole ruled by a Hitler-leaning populist despot whose regime was boosted by his pop-tart wife, the stuff of romance and even — as time proved — musical theatre. The prospect of colonial outposts generating artistic energies powerful enough to thrust that mother tongue into the centre of world literature seemed remote, something out of science fiction.

And in fact, SF was what Ficciones' opening story, the bizarrely titled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, most closely resembled. But a science fiction written by obsessive cataloguers and bibliographers gone mad, encyclopedic summaries of texts from imaginary, intricately knotted worlds. Small wonder that the first translation into English of one of those Borges stories was executed by a leading SF editor and reviewer of pop mysteries (Anthony Boucher), who placed it in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

For Borges's genius — and by the 1960s, the torque of that genius would propel avant-garde readers and writers to where they hadn't gone before — lay in his mining of the most popular of writers and genres. Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, science fiction, adventure fiction: These spirits hover about Borges's work, guardian angels previously invoked by adolescent readers.

Ficciones rests upon this rock: The multitudinous imaginative takes upon the world that inform culture as we experience it do not really line up sequentially, as in slide shows. They function instead as chips colliding within a kaleidoscope. Wobble that tube and you reshuffle the figure you've been looking at. Read another book, and all that you have read before realigns itself in a new dance of meaning. By envisioning this 360-degree panorama of infinite mutual referentiality — the man inside the Quaker Oats box inside the man inside the Quaker Oats box — Borges's imaginings (I owe this to Clive James) gave us the Internet.

This explosive little volume created a fiction without characters, or rather, one that distends the Romantic inflation of selfhood to its logical end. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote have as their heroes the newly created sensibility of us, the readers. Our own imaginings are vacuumed up into the shelves of that vast library that images the sum of visionary experience.

Those energies extend beyond the obvious: Everyone acknowledges the debt that world literature owes to Latin American fabulism, a phenomenon unthinkable without Borges. Stand on home ground, and try to imagine the fiction of Michael Ondaatje or the poetry of Anne Carson coming into being without his influence. His role has been as seminal in the imaginative literature of the last half-century as the essays of Montaigne were to the writing of the English Renaissance.

Yet how close to solipsistic self-absorption that labyrinthine sensibility can veer. Could this explain Borges's shameful, unforgivable indifference to the bestiality of the junta that turned Argentina into a Sadean torture brothel from 1976 to 1983?

Borges's genius at distillation jolts his readers the way a shot of espresso ratchets up your morning more than a pot of Pride of Arabia can. To switch metaphors, Ficciones dropped off a hot little visionary package that still leaves the dosimeters clicking away.

Dennis Duffy teaches in the Vic One program at the University of Toronto.