Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Eric Ormsby (essay date 1999)

Eric Ormsby (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: “Jorge Luis Borge and the Plural I,” in The New Criterion, Vol. 18, No. 3, November, 1999, pp. 14-21.

[In the following essay, Ormsby praises some new editions of Borges's work.]

It was ironic of fate, though perhaps predictable, to allow Jorge Luis Borges to develop over a long life into his own Doppelgänger. In a 1922 essay entitled “The Nothingness of Personality,” Borges asserted that “the self does not exist.” Half-a-century later, an international personality laden with acclaim, he had to depend on wry, self-deprecating quips to safeguard his precious inner nullity. “Yo no soy yo” (“I am not I”), wrote Juan Ramón Jiménez; this was a proposition that Borges not only endorsed but also made a fundamental axiom of his oeuvre. In his story “The Zahir,” written in the 1940s, he could state, “I am still, albeit only partially, Borges,” and in “Limits,” a poem...

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