Borges, Jorge Luis (Vol. 6) - Borges, Jorge Luis 1899–
Borges, Jorge Luis 1899–
Borges, an Argentinian short story writer, essayist, and poet, is one of the world's great living writers. He has created a unique fiction, an immensely erudite and surreal cosmos. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 21-22.)
The gnostic gazes into the mirror of the fallen world and sees, not himself, but his dark double, the shadowy haunter of his phantasmagoria. Since the ambivalent God of the gnostics balances good and evil in himself, the writer dominated by a gnostic vision is morally ambivalent also. Borges is imaginatively a gnostic, but intellectually a skeptical and naturalistic humanist. This division, which has impeded his art, making of him a far lesser figure than gnostic writers like Yeats and Kafka, nevertheless has made him also an admirably firm moralist. (p. 211)
Borges has written largely in the spirit of Emerson's remark that the hint of the dialectic is more valuable than the dialectic...
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