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   kc4u Teacher
   College - Senior

   Borges's short stories are associated with the most brilliant use of intermingling fantasy and reality in the whole of 20th century literature. His fictional labyrinths evoke the mythical and fabular so often and yet underneath all that fairy-tale like gleam, there is a dangerously gaping void which is the chaotic and often incomprehensible world that he envisages. In a story called Borges nad I, he makes Borges a character. But that is not to say, the author has become the protagonist; it might well represent the author-character split or even a self-deconstruction. In Borges's world, the hyper-real and the simulacrum creates indiscernible doublets where a self-other dichotomy is always left unresolved. The fictional Borges might well be that other of the real Borges. Like Cortazaar and Burroughs, Borges's technique of a parodic self-inclusion can be seen as a postmodern playfulness which breaks the realism of the text by making indistinct the dividing line between the world and the text. If we see this as a reduction of author to a fictional character, this might well the Barthesian sense of authorial death. The author (a split I) is seen as different from Borges. This is a radical Othering of the author.

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   Posted by kc4u on Sunday October 25, 2009 at 12:24 PM