Borges and Plato: a Game with Shifting Mirrors

Borges esencial, 2017

Todos los derechos reservados © Real Academia Española, 2 0 1 7 © Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, 2 0 1 7 © De «Jorge Luis Borges, escritor argentino»: Teodosio Fernández, 2 0 1 7 De «Borges ensayista. La ética de un lector inocente»: Alberto Giordano, 2 0 1 7 © De «Borges, el tiempo y la lógica del asombro»: Darío González, 2 0 1 7 © De «Fulgores y regresos: borgiástica»: Noé Jitrik, 2 0 1 7 © De «Borges y la poesía»: Santiago Sylvester, 2 0 1 7 © De «Borges: la opción por la brevedad»: Graciela Tomassini, 2 0 1 7 © De «Los manuscritos de Borges»: Víctor Aizenman, 2 0 1 7 © De «Esta edición»: José Luis Moure, 2 0 1 7 © De «Otras miradas»: José Luis Moure, Nora Catelli, Jorge Panesi y Juan Pablo Canala, 2 0 1 7 © Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S. L. U ., 2 0 1 7 Travessera de Gracia, 4 7 -4 9 -0 8 0 2 1 Barcelona © Diseño de cubierta: Sánchez/Lacasta © Foto de autor: Sara Fació ISB N : 9 7 8 -8 4 -2 0 4 -7 9 7 8 -1 Depósito legal: B -6 3 9 5 -2 0 1 7 Impreso en Portugal -Printed in Portugal Impreso en el mes de abril de 2 0 1 7 en los talleres gráficos de Printer, Rio de Mouro (Portugal) Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial apoya la protección del copyright. El copyright estimula la creatividad, defiende la diversidad en el ámbito de las ideas y el conocimiento, promueve la libre expresión y favorece una cultura viva. Gracias por comprar una edición autorizada de este libro y por respetar las leyes del copyright al no reproducir, escanear ni distribuir ninguna parte de esta obra por ningún medio sin permiso. Al hacerlo está respaldando a los autores y permitiendo que PRHGE continúe publicando libros para todos los lectores. Diríjase a CED R O (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos, http://www.cedro.org) si necesita fotocopiar o escanear algún fragmento de esta obra. A L 1 8 2 1 7

Mind, 1970

THE CASE OF BORGES I. Borges the Artist and Borges the Thinker A LEADING historian confessed to me once that while he had been acting editor of the journal devoted to his sub-specialism he had one constant nightmare: he feared he might accept for publication a fabricated paper with fabricated documentation, so vast even a historical sub-specialism is. The nightmare represents not merely an expression of anxiety due to ignorance of certain areas-it expresses the terrible idea that the Cartesian demon can fake any symptom of reality and pass for real by any touchstone. Jorge Luis Borges is working for decades now on the execution of the nightmare. Perhaps his most celebrated instance is " Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ". It would take much work to sift the fabricated references in Borges' works from the ones deliberately misread from the over-emphasis on an author's casual remark, etc. 288 CRITICAL NOTICES: This, of course, is part of the game, for Borges wishes to shake in his reader the commonsensical confidence that one knows the difference between dream and reality-be this confidence based on any intuition or on any criterion to demarcate the two. Consequently, it is very hard to demarcate Borges' stories from Borges' essays. If we read the story ' Funes the Memorious ' we may view it as a short story or as a thought experiment about a Lockian mind with total recall. Now that A. R. Luria has published an empirical study of such a mind, one need not vindicate Borges, but may draw attention to additional treasures buried in his stories and essays. Normally one separates stories and essays functionally. The artist's task is to explore the emotional-experiential dimension. When a writer explores a new vision of the world in order to open up a new feeling, a new attitude, he is writing as an artist. As an artist he can also take a platitude and enhance it so as to make you feel its full significance. As an essayist he would rather draw from the platitude conclusions unexpected and unplatitudinous, or he would take an unnoticed fact or an outlandish thesis and show its merit and significance. This demarcation is not clear-cut. In particular, there is the area of overlap. Butler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited include essays thoughtful in their defence or mock-defence of outlandish theses, but also pregnant with a quaint atmosphere peculiar to these novels. So are most of Borges' writings. Like Butler, Shaw, and others, he uses a literary medium to advocate an unpopular philosophy. Like them he is in danger of being valued as a writer of note but as an advocate of a shallow philosophy. The philosophy he advocates is a variant of Schopenhauer's, and much akin to that of Erwin Schrodinger, well-known as a physicist but hardly as the accomplished writer and the intriguing philosopher that he was. It is the Schopenhauerian principle in Borges which makes him wonder what is real and what is illusory in our common experience. And it is this which makes him deliberately blur the borderline between his fiction and his essays: as if in order to imitate nature he blurs the boundary between reality and dream. The result may easily be that his essays be deemed a new form of fiction: besides the reportage novel we may see the non-fiction novel. The English translation of Borges' essays, Other Inquisitions, includes a prefatory essay of over seven pages, by James E. Irby of Princeton. His thesis is that all Borges' essays are works of fiction, in the sense in which Borges' beliefs are ' clearly not ' the ones seemingly advocated in the essays. This, I am tempted to say, is 'clearly' an indication of Irby's reluctance to accept Borges' challenge. In particular he apparently comforts himself by reference to the fact that Borges himself is dominated by skepticism. This would not be the first time that the challenger's skepticism is used as an excuse to maintain one's dogmatism. But, frankly, I do not think Irby's dismissal of Borges the thinker is rooted in dogmatism; more likely it is rooted in

This paper examines the prevalent critical outlook concerning Borges' attitude towards philosophy, demonstrating that he is generally regarded as a dogmatic sceptic or nihilist. A close analysis of his writings reveals that this interpretative paradigm is imprecise, however. In its place, I aim at offering a new perspective regarding the place philosophy holds in Borges' writing and thought, illustrating how he conceives philosophy not as an enclosed theoretical system but rather as a dynamic, incessant and thus incomplete quest for genuine knowledge. Reflecting the classical tension of philo-sophia as the constant craving for wisdom, Borges thus seems to be closer to Socrates than the dogmatic sceptical tradition of the Sophists. This Socratic stance is dominant throughout his fictional and poetic writing. Hereby, he creates a series of literary symbols, such as the labyrinth and the absolute map, that represent and prompt the philosophical search – returning the reader to the primary experience of profound thaumazein (wonderment).

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, held Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the highest regard, often praising it as a masterpiece of world literature. For Borges, Don Quixote was more than just a tale of a misguided knight—it was a profound meditation on the nature of fiction, reality, and the power of storytelling. Both Cervantes and Borges blurred the lines between imagination and the real world, crafting narratives that questioned the very essence of authorship and perception. In their works, the themes of impossible quests, multiple perspectives, and the recursive nature of time serve as a bridge between the two literary giants. This article explores how Borges’s storytelling techniques mirror and build upon the innovations Cervantes pioneered, revealing a shared vision of literature as an endless, transformative quest.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature Revue Canadienne De Litterature Comparee, 2011

Th e Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borgès occupies a unique position in the world of letters, as much as that very idea would be an anathema to him. He belongs in some ways to the generation of the Latin American "boom" writers, whose fi ction is oft en described as that of "magical realism," but his work diverges from theirs in its theoretical implications. For a long time he was considered quintessentially "modernist," but is now also cited as a "postmodernist." Borgès' work exhibits characteristics of all of these, but in fact, Borgès resists our attempts to classify him and has proved to be a writer of multiple times and spaces. Borgès' writing in fact revives a complex literary and cultural heritage, and even as it may suggest other arts, such as the weaving of a vast tapestry, or the creation of an elaborate musical score, or even the techtonics of avant-garde architecture, his writing may fi nd its best analogies in modern physics. Borgès is praised for his erudition and his irony, admired for his arcane storytelling, his irony and playfulness, but he is considered a bizarre writer who lived in his own world, a solipsistic, hermetic world of signs and symbols, removed from history and modern realities. Of course Borgès assisted in the creation of his various personas, donning masks which allowed him to live many lives at once, a strategy which ironically attracted more attention to the act of authorship than he claimed to seek. But perhaps we as readers have been presumptuous in our desire to establish fi rm reference points from which to understand his literary enterprise: as his fables have told us so oft en, there are no stable beginnings or endings, and all limits are also windows upon other worlds. Indeed, perhaps the very undecidability of meaning, so prevalent in Borgès' texts, the spirit of endless transcoding, akin to "infi nite semiosis" in which meaning remains in constant suspension or deferral, can make us feel less guilty, less heretical, in reading Borgès in ways that he may not have himself intended.

https://litteraemundijcherken.blogspot.com/ 2021/08/jorge-luis-borges-life-as-accessoryto. html?m=1, 2021

A presentation of the different “encounters” between the author and the work, and life, of Jorge Luis Borges, during more than half-a-century, and in dissimilar venues in South America and Europe. It underlines the evolution in the perception of the work of the Argentine writer, one of the most “universal” who lived in the 20th century, as well as to the whys his poetry was immediately welcomed, not so however the majority of his short-stories, which only began to “arrive”, and to be accepted as “traveller’s companions” in the 1980s. The visitation of Nordic landscapes, English and Scandinavian, as well as the interpretation of old Anglo-Saxon, and Old-Icelandic (or Old-Nordic) as the last “refuge” of the Argentine writer, helped to gain a more integral, and more relevant, vision.

Introducción a la historia de la lengua española. 2 nd ed. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 2011. 490 pp.

1995

Though part of an apparatus which illusorily stresses individual worth and requires a single name to appear on the cover, this thesis should by all means be seen as the result of a long cooperation, and as a gift to thank my friends, family, teachers, and colleagues who, at one point or another during the last six years and more, have been part of its project. Without them there would not have been a product. Firstly, I would like to thank professor Jos6 Miguel Oviedo for the kind advice and extreme patience with which he continued to support my work, even when tangible results were sorely missing. Special thanks also to Luz Rodriguez who guided me through an earlier project, on the other side of the ocean, and first sparked my enthusiasm for the many possible worlds of Spanish American literature. To all the people who have taught me invaluable lessons in Louvain and Philadelphia, I am greatly indebted; I would especially like to mention Joris Vlasselaers,

Studies in 20th & 21st century literature, 1993

In his most "philosophical'' texts, Jorge Luis Borges paradoxically posits the act of reading as the scene of affectively "immediate" experience: his reader reads a reader reading (ad infinitum). This sort of hypermeditated, specular imitation actually comes to mirror the substantive preoccupation of the "philosophical" text itself. Borges thereby breaks down what Theodor Adorno calls "concept fetishism'' by making mimesis his textual concept. Given Italo Calvino's claim for the novelty of "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" in relation to modern genres, I propose a twofold thesis: first, that this typically Borgesian narrative juxtaposes concept and mimesis (a traditional philosophical antinomy) and then subverts the difference between them as a mediation of immediacy itself. He creates thereby a second-level "rhetoric of immediacy." Borges thus arrives at a re-inscription of the kind of narrative technique upon which traditional texts, even texts that form a part of a sacred canon, operate. The drama and rhetoric of immediacy exploited by Borges-and what is allegory, if not a "rhetorical drama''?-far from amounting to the last innovation of modem forms, as Calvino claims, might more accurately be called the oldest trick of presence in the book of absence.