# The Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

**URL:** <https://www.libertarianism.org/essays/fictions-jorge-luis-borges>

**By** George Eckerle

**Published:** January 1, 1988

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“The current movement among Latin American intellectuals towards classical liberalism has demonstrated that there is no necessary link between collectivist politics and literary worth.”

Jorge Luis Borges has long been recognized as one of the greatest of Latin American writers. Rarely, however, is his work considered for its “political” or “ideological” content. This has at least two grounds, both of which will be examined in this essay. First, his attachment to liberalism was often seen as an anachronism in the second half of the twentieth century, the age of collectivism. (The current movement among Latin American intellectuals towards classical liberalism, including such thinkers as the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and—more strikingly—the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, has demonstrated that there is no necessary link between collectivist politics and literary worth.) Second, his writings seem remarkably nonpolitical, indeed, they seem a study in the deliberate avoidance of the political and the exaltation of the private. This very feature, as I hope to show later in this essay, provides the key to understanding the distinctively political aspect of Borges’s work.

## Biography

Educated at home because his father’s “then fashionable anarchistic inclination prevented him from entrusting his children to a state school,” Borges immersed himself in foreign literature. In 1936 he wrote the “Foreign Books and Authors” column for the periodical _El Hogar_ and used this position to begin an antifascist campaign. He frequently denounced new German books for their state-approved antisemitism. When he was writing against the Nazis, the predominant public opinion in Argentina was in favor of Germany. As Emir Rodriguez Monegal reports, Borges was astonished that “Germanophiles (at least Argentine ones) are indeed uninterested in Germany. \[Borges\] notes that he has often argued with them about Germany, only to learn that they can never recognize the names of Holderlin, Schopenhauer or Leibniz, and that their interest in that country centered around only one fact: that Germany was an enemy of England.“² There is a certain appealing innocence in Borges’s astonishment that people could admire a country not for its poets and philosophers, but for its armies and its plans for military conquest.

In his essay “Two Books,” Borges wrote that even those who proclaimed themselves enemies of National Socialism shared one of its worst traits, the belief that “the inevitable and trivial circumstances of having been born in a certain country or belonging to a certain race (or mixture of races) is a singular privilege and an effective talisman.“³ After the war, Colonel Perón came to power in Argentina. While not himself a Nazi, he surrounded himself with Nazi sympathizers. Perón came to power in a coup d’etat and proceeded to fix elections to legitimize his regime. Borges wrote that power should be turned over to the Argentine Supreme Court and that truly free elections should be called. Now that a real fascist was in power, Borges would pay for his previous writings. It is fortunate for Borges that Perón was a fascist devoted to small cruelties rather than wholesale murder. Borges was a librarian in the municipal library, and in August 1946 he was notified that he was being “promoted” to the rank of Inspector of Chicken and Rabbit Coops in the municipal market. In an autobiographical essay, he wrote about the incident: “I went to City Hall to find out what it was all about. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘it’s rather strange that among so many others at the library I should be singled out as worthy of this new position.’ ‘Well’, the clerk answered, ‘you were on the side of the allies...what do you expect?’ His statement was unanswerable; the next day, I sent in my resignation.” (quoted in Rodriguez Monegal).

Borges wrote shortly after this incident: “\[D\]ictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy. Hotel clerks mumbling orders, effigies of caudillos, prearranged ‘long live’s’ and ‘down with’s’, walls embellished with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline substituting for lucidity.... To combat such sad monotonies is among the writer’s many duties. Do I have to remind readers that individuality is an old Argentine virtue?” (_ibid_.)

His mother and sister were arrested for participating in an antigovernment demonstration, and his sister was sent to jail for a month. The government again revealed its instinct for petty cruelty, as Borges notes, by “sending her to a jail for prostitutes in order to insult her.” (_ibid_.)

> The current movement among Latin American intellectuals towards classical liberalism has demonstrated that there is no necessary link between collectivist politics and literary worth.

Borges said that for the ten years of Perón’s regime the first thought that struck him on waking up in the morning was the sinking realization that Perón was still in power. Monegal writes: “For the left, which would fight against Perón for a whole decade, Borges (the exquisite, the paradoxical Borges) had become a symbol of intellectual resistance against the regime. It was a strange role for as ironic a man as he, but Borges played it with utmost simplicity.” After Perón’s fall “\[Borges\] was named director of the National Library, in 1956 he was awarded the National Literature prize, he was applauded for having been one of the few who had not yielded or had kept silent during the Perón years.” (_ibid_.)

Politically, Borges has something of a mixed reputation today, based on remarks he made during interviews in the latter part of his life. Although perhaps intended only to shock, they in any case betrayed a stunning naivete about then current political events. He had words of praise for leftist _bêtes noires_, from Nixon to Pinochet to the Argentina military junta that ousted the Peronists in the 1970s. Notably, these belong only to the last years of his life. Rodriguez Monegal reports: “As of 1956, owing to his increasingly poorer vision, doctors forbade Borges to read or write. Thus he had to rely, more than ever before, on his mother for all intellectual activity, and above all, for information about politics.” Borges the anarchist, the radical, the liberal gadfly, was put in the position of learning about the current world second hand, from an extreme conservative. “As of 1956, then, Borges’s political opinions stop having anything to do with Argentina, or, for that matter, world political reality. Those opinions are the symptom of a loss of contact with a complex and ever changing reality in a man whom blindness has isolated from the world of everyday events; the world of politics.” (_ibid_.) (It should be noted, however, that in his very last years Borges repudiated the Argentine generals, their murders, and the Falklands War they launched.)4

## Fictions

The fictions of Borges are distinguished by their purity, their form, their commitment to the delineation of the impact of an idea above all other aesthetic considerations. Borges once said that long novels bored him because they used hundreds of pages to tell a story, when the idea in them, which interested Borges most, could be depicted in a few pages. It is the story, the depiction of the unfolding of human action, that requires those hundreds of pages, and this is what is given up before the demands of Borges’s rigorous aesthetic. For this reason, the majority of Borges works should be called fictions rather than stories, because they could not properly be called accounts of human actions. Instead of writing a novel or a treatise, Borges often uses the device of having a character write an essay on an imaginary book, giving us the idea in this book, and allowing us for a moment to share in Borges’s pleasure in this idea.

Because his fictions often pretend to be essays, we are justified in using one of his essays to illuminate his fictions. Borges’s concerns and method are presented in miniature in his essay “The Wall and the Books.“5 It shows us the rationale behind Borges’s relentless economy; it shows most clearly what he consciously leaves out of his fictions and his reasons for doing so.

It opens: “I read some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost infinite wall of China was that first emperor, Shi Huang Ti, who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned.” The union of limitless construction and limitless destruction, attributed to the same man, presents the author with simultaneous and opposite emotions. He writes that contemplating the Emperor’s dual action “satisfied, and at the same time, disturbed me.”

Oddly enough, the stated purpose of the essay is not to clarify the action, but to attempt to uncover the reasons for the mixed emotion Borges felt when reading about it. The essay takes run through three possible types of explanations of Shi Huang Ti’s dual action, and shows that all three are inadequate to explain away the peculiarity of Borges’s reaction. The conclusion of the essay will justify the emotion as a kind of perception inexhaustible through explanation. A mystery is presented as a mystery, and Borges’s ambivalent emotion is a reaction to the presence of this mystery.

There are three types of explanations that the essay will show to be inadequate to the particular strangeness of this emperor’s action. These are: history, psychology, and drama. It is no coincidence that these three elements are conspicuous in their absence from Borges’s fiction.

Borges recreates the way a historian might explain and demystify the Emperor’s undertaking. Building walls is a defense against external enemies, and burning books a defense against internal ones. As Borges dryly notes: “Burning books and erecting fortification are the usual occupations of princes....” But the scale of this particular action marks it as something different. Shi Huang Ti burned the totality of a nation’s books and walled in the entirety of an empire. This operation is an imprisonment of a singular type. Borges presents half of the mystery when he states that the order to burn the books involved “the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past” and that by having them destroyed “Shi Huang Ti ordered that history begin with him.”

Borges then attempts a psychological explanation. The Emperor’s mother was a libertine, and in destroying the past he hoped to obscure the shame caused by her memory. But this says nothing about the need to create the wall. Borges than moves immediately from psychology to magic (perhaps the juxtaposition shows a sarcastic attitude towards psychology). “Shi Huang Ti, according to the historians, forbade that death be mentioned, and sought the elixir of immortality and secluded himself in a figurative palace containing as many rooms as there are days in the year; the facts suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death.”

At this point Borges presents the other half of the problem. He recounts that the emperor wished to found a dynasty that would extend forever into the future. The wall’s infinite extension is a physical symbol for this half of the mystery. Walling in the entirety of the empire is analogous to imprisoning the entirety of future generations within the confines of an infinite future dynasty.

Borges then refuses to make this mystery mundane by rendering it as a drama. If the unlimited construction and destruction are considered as being willed simultaneously, they together provoke a particular feeling of strangeness for Borges. But if the two actions are considered as following one another, they form nothing more than a story. The Emperor destroys, repents of destruction, and then creates.

One story. Or the Emperor creates, despairs of creation, and then destroys. Another story. As Borges states: “Both conjectures are dramatic, but they lack, as far as I know, any basis in history.” He cites historical authority that assures us that the actions were indeed simultaneous.

> Walling in the entirety of the empire is analogous to imprisoning the entirety of future generations within the confines of an infinite future dynasty.

The destruction of the books establishes dominion over the past. The creation of the wall exemplifies dominion over the future. Both actions emerge from a single will. The central image in this essay is that of the “figurative palace” mentioned above. This is the symbol of the single will that led to opposite actions. Each room of this palace is to embody one day of the year. By means of the simultaneous existence of all the rooms of the palace, all the days of the year are made to exist at once. The flow of time is thus frozen in the fixed, unchanging form of the palace. Time’s intangible evanescence is to be bound and imprisoned in a palpable, permanent object. Only this palace can exemplify the single “magical purpose” inherent in the dual action of the creation of the wall and the burning of the books. Both are two sides of the same attempt to imprison all of time and thus to render a ceaseless process of change into something static and permanent.

The essay’s final paragraph reveals that the essay itself is a kind of fiction. It pretends to be about a Chinese emperor when it is really a conscious display of Borges’s aesthetics and artistic method. Borges rejects history, psychology, and drama in his fictions because, for him, all three forms exalt explanation over perception. All three explain a present moment in terms of one past. But the sentiment Borges felt, the sense of something uncanny, seems to him to represent a moment not wholly contained by the past. It seems to him the intimation of something other, something perennial that is always waiting to recur.

In the figure of this emperor, Borges came in contact with an idea that “moves us in itself, aside from the conjecture it allows.” He has attempted to present to us an idea whose form itself moved him, without reference to outside explanation or inner content, the way the pure forms in music are capable of moving us. He concludes by giving us a description of the type of emotion that was exemplified by his reaction to Shi Huang Ti’s action. This emotion was the impetus to this essay, and, indeed, the impetus behind most of his writings. “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”

Carter Wheelock, in his essay “_The Committed Side of Borges_,” argues against the view that Borges’s commitment to pure aesthetics involves a retreat from the problems of life into “pure distraction, a game without bets.” He argues that Borges is committed to the aesthetic phenomena because, for Borges, it is a mode of perception that can say something true about the world. He writes: “Reality for Borges or what most recommends itself as reality is an experience, a moment of apprehension without specific content or language, in which an inexpressible reality is intuited; it is simply the moment of a heightened sense of awareness—a concept totally consistent with the dictionary definition of ‘aesthetic.’”

But the possibility still exists that Borges has divorced himself from all connection with the problems of the world. We have seen how Borges’s commitment to the aesthetic phenomenon leads him to reject history, psychology, and drama as inadequate to render it. But these are precisely the disciplines by which we render the meanings of human action more clear to ourselves. Has Borges radically and irrevocably divorced himself from human praxis? Does Borges’s commitment to the inexpressible and idiosyncratic mean that he has separated himself from the common discourse by which we hold the world in common?

If politics is human action set against the world we hold in common, then Borges may have gone beyond the attempt to be nonpolitical and actually have given up any capacity for being political at all. Baldly stated: Is Borges an idiot? (I mean an idiot in the sense of a man who has lost the capacity to see beyond the private and idiosyncratic, to what is public and objective).

These charges can be rebutted if it can be shown that Borges’s aesthetic insights can render a political phenomenon more clear to us, and if it can be shown that his extreme aesthetic individualism itself has political implications. We can observe at this time that if aesthetics is indeed a mode of perception, it should make the world stand out in a new light and reveal things to us that would otherwise be unavailable. Further, we can infer that a man who is appreciative of ideas and persons for their strangeness and idiosyncracy is likely to be hostile to regimes that make banality and conformity compulsory.

> His “figurative palace” of frozen time may be a disguised exemplar of certain features of our current political world.

In fact, the insight expressed in “The Wall and the Books” is applicable to a significant political phenomenon of our time. Borges’s commitment to the value of individual insight led him to a commitment to individuality in general. He precisely depicted certain abominable aspects of human tyranny and proclaimed himself on the side of individuality and mutual tolerance.

His “figurative palace” of frozen time may be a disguised exemplar of certain features of our current political world. The “magical purpose” implicit in its construction may also be implicit in many of the dominant ideologies of our time. Hegel, in his _Phenomenology of Spirit_, describes intellectual systems as if they were alive, existing in process, containing an internal purpose and necessity that forces them to give birth to their antithesis. Yet ultimately he betrays his own insight by positing that Philosophy’s historical process leads to a terminus in which all these living systems achieve a final stasis. History is to become ahistorical, as all process is eliminated: “the True,” he writes, “is the whole.” The Marxists translate Hegel’s observations of the historical movement of ideas into an account of forces inherent in the economic and political movements of men. They too posit an end to history. There will come a revolution against the entire previous history of Man. This revolution is to be, somehow, both completely predetermined and completely spontaneous. After the movement of history has achieved its final form, there cannot be a revolution against the revolution. Spontaneous action is to give rise to a regime under which nothing spontaneous can ever happen again.

Can we begin to see a “magical purpose” behind these systems, the same purpose as that behind the “figurative palace”? Do they not all involve the attempt to freeze time and eliminate change? Will this purpose find its truest expression in actions like the emperor’s, the attempt to set up perpetual dominion and complete control? It is noteworthy that during the Cultural Revolution Mao publicly claimed the Emperor Shi Huang Ti as his only true precursor.

In this era, we have become only too familiar with tyrants moved by simultaneous urges to burn and create to the largest possible scale. Their wholesale censorship and rewriting of history, their attempts to uproot and eliminate entire classes, races, and religions of men all show the impulse to destroy any collective memory they do not control. Might the motivation for Hitler’s war against the Jews have been not simply the targetting of an easy scape-goat, but a deeper hatred against the mere existence of a five-thousand-year-old tradition he did not create? The tyrants’ impulses to build have been on a similar inhuman, cyclopean scale. They wish the regimes they create, their “thousand year Reichs” and “dictatorships of the proletariat,” to stretch limitlessly into the future with the same monotonous regularity with which the great wall of China stretches across the land. Their impulses to burn and to build are both motivated by the will to imprison time, to eliminate change and spontaneity. They wish to ensure that nothing other than what they will and create themselves can ever exist or ever be known to have existed. History, psychology, and drama all possess the implicit certainty that all facts can eventually be explained and proved to have a hidden rationality. When confronted with something so strange and irrational as Shi Huang Ti’s intention, their attempts to render it comprehensible within an abstract system may actually be a betrayal of the facts themselves. This is where something like Borges’s aesthetic commitment to perception above explanation can be useful. His essay may not render the tyrant’s intention understandable, but it does depict it with sufficient clarity to make it recognizable in its incomprehensibility. Shi Huang Ti has been seen as a type, and we can now see that others possess the same nature.

Borges realized that the intentions of the tyrant’s followers, those who actually burn the books and build the regime, cannot be the same as those of the tyrant himself. How can men give themselves over to another’s limitless self-aggrandizement?

## The Follower

Borges has described the limitless self-will of the tyrant, the will to impose complete control over the past and the present simultaneously. But the attempt to imagine the purpose behind the actions of the tyrant’s followers was more difficult for Borges. In his essay “A Comment on August 23, 1944” he reports receiving a shock of recognition, which enabled him for the first time to see a certain consistency in the actions of the tyrant’s followers. He was eventually able to use this insight to imagine himself into the position of those whose hands build the walls and burn the books.

On the day reported in the title, Paris was liberated from the Nazis, and the news caused general rejoicing, even among those in Argentina who had supported the Nazi cause. Borges recalls feeling surprise on seeing “the enigmatic and obvious enthusiasm of many who were supporters of Hitler.” This essay, like “The Wall and the Books,” begins with surprise and attempts to uncover the meaning held in that reaction. Why should Argentine “germanophiles” be overjoyed at the defeat of the cause they espoused? Borges writes that it would be pointless to ask these people to explain the reasons for their action. He has already seen them to be so full of contradictions that they have obviously lost contact with the real motives for their conduct.

Borges has to wait for another event to trigger an insight into their conduct. He writes: “Several nights later a book and a memory enlightened me.” The book was George Bernard Shaw’s _Man and Superman_, in which it is written: “The horror of Hell is its unreality.” This triggers a memory of “the day that is the exact and detested opposite of August 23, 1944: June 14, 1940”—the day that Paris was occupied by the Nazis. Borges remembers being informed of the fall of Paris by a fascist. This man was not quite capable of giving himself over to “insolent joy” at news of the Nazi victory. He exhibited a hidden fear in his voice, a fear that came out when he was convinced his cause was undefeatable. Borges had seen the same contradiction exhibited on both days. Just as the Argentine fascists could not prevent themselves from being overjoyed at fascism’s defeat, on that earlier day a fascist could not make himself happy after receiving news of fascism’s victory.

Borges infers from these observations that “Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hells. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph.” He begins to suspect that the fascists have a secret will to failure, kept secret even from themselves, and are “collaborating blindly” with the forces that must inevitably destroy them.

Borges attempts to imagine this insight more deeply, from the inside, by writing two fictions about characters who embody this secret desire to be destroyed, which will relieve them of the burden of their monstrous unreality. One story takes a mythical, the other a historical form. In the first, “The House of Asterion,” a monster (the minotaur), who is periphally aware of the fact that he is a monster, realizes that the only place on earth for him is the maze. When he has attempted to leave the maze and go out into the world of men, awareness of his difference has always driven him back. He is at home only in the maze. The maze repeats itself endlessly; every place within it has another mirror image within the maze. No place is truly itself, just as no mirror image has the same feel of reality as what it reflects. Therefore, the world of the maze is not a sum total of individual places, but a collection of unreal reflections. This maze is therefore a world of unreality. The minotaur half-knowingly begins to desire the advent of Theseus, the man who will “redeem him,” the man who will kill him.

> Borges realized that the intentions of the tyrant’s followers, those who actually burn the books and build the regime, cannot be the same as those of the tyrant himself.

In the second story, “Deutsches Requiem,” another monster (Otto Dietrich Zur Linde, Subdirector of the Concentration Camp at Tarnowitz) contemplates the meaning of his nature on the eve of his execution.⁹ He becomes dimly aware of the possibility that he has collaborated with the forces that are about to destroy him.

In “Deutsches Requiem” Borges speaks in the voice of Linde. With great artistry, Borges allows the reader to become aware of a fact that the narrator never clearly sees: the fact that he wished the destruction of his own cause. The narrator is a symbol of Germany, a disciple of music and metaphysics, of Brahms and Schopenhauer, yet somehow capable of surrendering to National Socialism. Linde states that he did not speak out in his own defense at his trial because to do so “would have obstructed the verdict and would have seemed an act of cowardice.” Why would a man not want to obstruct his own death penalty? He says, “I do not seek pardon, because I feel no guilt; but I would like to be understood.” What we read is in fact Linde’s attempt to understand himself.

The narrator is a civilized man who is repelled by violence. Yet he gave himself over to the party and took part in violence because he feels that the world is on the verge of a new era that requires violence. The defense of this new era requires each man to suppress his own individuality before a common purpose.

> The follower comes to be oppressed by the feeling that everything else is real, except himself.

Linde almost achieves true self-awareness when he states: “The theologians maintain that if God’s attention were to wander for a single second from the right hand which traces these words, that hand would plunge into nothingness, as if fulminated by a lightless fire.” He appears to have some feeling of his own unreality. This feeling is somehow connected in his mind with the memory of his desire for the upcoming war. He himself believes that the union of these two thoughts shows that he desired the war as a trial that will test his faith. By proving his faith he will have some proof of his own reality. He doesn’t yet entertain the idea of a secret desire for self-destruction, arising out of his sense of his own unreality. He only remembers awaiting the attack of the other countries with a strange anticipation.

When news of the war he has wished for reaches him, he is in the hospital. He has been wounded during an attack on a synagogue and is reading Schopenhauer when the news arrives that the Nazis have themselves precipitated the war against them. He remembers what he learned from Schopenhauer that day, “everything which can happen to man...is preordained by him. Thus, every negligence is deliberate...every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide.” Something he sees in his own life makes him agree to this. Yet even after the destruction of the Nazis, he still does not see the fact that, if this doctrine is true, the Nazis must somehow have collaborated in their own defeat.

He considers Schopenhauer’s doctrine that we ourselves cause everything that happens to us, and remembers wondering what made him want to be wounded, want to be killed. “Surely not fear of war, I know: something more profound. Finally I hit upon it. To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.” He would rather die in the war for Nazism than live in the world the Nazis wish to create. Somehow, he knows, and also does not know, that he is engaged in the construction of a hell he could not inhabit.

While master of the concentration camp, he comes in contact with a poet, “David Jerusalem,” whose work he admired. Significantly, the main theme of this poet’s work is the joy in the imminent and overwhelming reality of each individual thing. Linde destroys the poet. He tells himself that he does this to kill his own passion. The true motivation—hatred, jealousy, and resentment at the poet’s ability to feel and enjoy reality—is hidden from him.

Linde shows the same inability to take pleasure in his own victories that Borges observed in the fascists around him. When Linde remembers the days of the Nazi victories, he almost obscures this inability from himself. “We reveled in the great days and nights of a successful war...Everything was new and different then, even the flavor of our dreams. (I, perhaps, was never entirely happy. But it is known that misery requires lost paradises).”

When Nazism falls, Linde is surprised by an emotion he never expected to feel, “the mysterious and almost terrible flavor of happiness.”

Linde is somehow aware of the failure to achieve self-understanding. At the end of the story, awaiting execution, he is still looking in the mirror to discover who he is.

## Tyrant and Slave

Borges has imagined the will of both the tyrant and of his follower. He has seen them as two opposite kinds of men, motivated by opposite wills, and this very opposition allows them to complement each other and to work together. The tyrant seems to believe that he himself is the only true thing that ever has, or ever can, exist. He imposes the mark of his will on everything that is not himself. The past is to be wiped out of memory, or rewritten to show that all paths have inevitably led to the tyrant. No other possible outcomes have ever existed but the tyrant’s own will. The future is to be imprisoned completely, to conform forever to the tyrant’s plan and the tyrant’s will. No actualities must ever exist except those that follow directly from the tyrant himself. Nothing is real, nothing has an inherent right to exist, save that for which the tyrant himself wishes. His follower, in giving himself up to this plan, gives up his own individuality, his own reality. He comes to be oppressed by feeling that everything else is real, except himself.

As Wheelock said, for Borges, the sense of reality comes from an experience of surprise and wonder at the inner meaning of one’s own deepest perceptions. Borges’s determination to follow these wherever they may lead is more than a dedication to aesthetic phenomena, it is an affirmation of individuality. We can begin to see why unreality (hell) is what the tyrant’s followers impose on themselves. To sacrifice one’s individuality to another’s ideas, to another’s will, is to devalue the reality of one’s own perceptions.

Borges’s joy at his own inner reality has made him optimistic. In his short story “Deutsches Requiem” Borges has achieved the same depth of insight into a Nazi that Arthur Koestler gained of a communist in his novel _Darkness at Noon_. Both works are motivated by wonder at the fact that a party member can collaborate in his own destruction. But there is a significant difference between the two men’s views. In _Darkness at Noon_ Koestler shows that his protagonist assists in his show trial, in the cause of his own distruction, out of hope for the final victory of his cause. Borges, perhaps more subtly, posits a secret hope for the failure of his cause in his protagonist. It is in this that Borges is an optimist; I hope he is correct.

Borges wrote an explicit response to his country’s fascists, who wished to forge a nation bound by a common purpose. In his essay “Our Poor Individualism” he obstinately praises the Argentines for their stubborn individualism and their almost complete lack of talent for government. While in this era, in which we have seen men capable of limitless self-abnegation in their devotion to a cause and capable of the kind of mechanical efficiency that ensures that the trains to the camps always run on time, there may be much to recommend Borges’s position. There will never be a Great Wall of Argentina, and Borges is glad of the fact.

> There will never be a Great Wall of Argentina, and Borges is glad of the fact.

In “Our Poor Individualism,” Borges writes: “Unlike North Americans and almost all Europeans, the Argentine does not identify himself with the State. That can be explained by the fact that, in this country, the governments are usually exceedingly bad, or the State is an inconceivable abstraction; the truth is that the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen.” Borges cites Herbert Spencer to the effect that the greatest problem of our time is the “interference of the State in the acts of the individual; in the struggle against this evil—called communism and fascism—Argentine individualism, which has perhaps been useless or even harmful up to now, would find justification and positive value.”

> Works of art designed to move a mass of men to action rather than to arouse a single man to perception, bear the same relation to aesthetic phenomena that national anthems bear to music.

Borges concludes by saying, “Nationalism seeks to charm us, but the vision it presents is that of an infinitely importunate State; if the utopia were established on earth, it would have the providential virtue of making everyone desire, and finally achieve, its antithesis.”

In conclusion, we have seen that the initial intuition of the strangeness and force of certain ideas is the primary value for Borges. He calls this kind of awareness the aesthetic phenomenon. This private insight is the standard against which he measures the value of his work. Loyalty to the force of his insights leads him to bypass the usual public forms of discourse because they are inadequate to the idiosyncracy of the truths available to him. If the insight appears to him in the form of a mystery, he will present it as a mystery. Borges rejects the kind of artistic commitment that values the presentation of a world-view above the presentation of an individual perception. Committed, tendentious works of art, designed to move a mass of men to action rather than to arouse a single man to perception, bear the same relation to aesthetic phenomena that national anthems bear to music. If the world-view can be formulated, that is, separated from particular experience through abstraction, then it has given up the strange immediacy proper to perception. Borges’s commitment to the peculiar strangeness of the aesthetic moment over any aesthetic system has become political due to the placement of that commitment in the context of the modern world. The collectivism and tyranny of the twentieth century rest on the implicit belief that only the abstracted, the generalizable, is real. The state is considered more real than the individual, and persons are considered not in their peculiar individuality, but only as members of a class. Borges’s commitment to individuality, idiosyncracy and particularity has been made into a political position by the era in which we live. Borges has the virtue of being political only against his will. His implicit position is that the artist must be committed to aesthetics, to perception, above all other values. It is for others to interpret that which the artist has first perceived. Borges is a citizen of a better, secret world, a world in which artists don’t make political pronouncements and politicians don’t make laws concerning art.

## Notes

¹Donald Yates, _Jorge Luis Borges: Life, Work, and Criticism_ (Fredericton, N.B., Canada: York Press, 1985), p. 5.

²_Diacritics_ \[8\] 4 (1978) pp. 55-69.

³Borges, _Other Inquisitions_ (New York: Simon \& Schuster, 1968) p. 129.

⁴Cf. Octavio Paz (“Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986: In Time’s Labyrinth,” _The New Republic_, November 3, 1986): “His political opinions were moral, even aesthetic, judgments. Although he expressed them with bravery and with honesty, he did so without truly comprehending what was going on around him. At times he affirmed, for example, his opposition to the Perón regime and his rejection of totalitarian socialism; at others he slipped up, and his visit to Chile when it was under military dictatorship, as well as his facile epigrams against democracy, caused consternation among his friends. Later he repented. One has to add that always, in his certainties and in his errors, he was consistent with himself and honest. He never lied or knowingly justified evil, as many of his enemies and detractors have done. Nothing was more foreign to Borges than the ideological casuistry of our contemporaries.”

⁵Borges, _Labyrinths_ (New York: New Directions, 1964) p. 186.

⁶_Modern Fiction Studies_, \[19\] (1973) pp. 373-379.

⁷_Other Inquisitions_, pp. 134-137.

⁸_Labyrinths_, pp.138-141.

⁹_Labyrinths_, pp. 141-148.

¹⁰_Other Inquisitions_, pp. 33-36.

_George Eckerle is a graduate student in the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America._