Abdelfattah Kilito, Borges and the Blind (original title: العميان) (original) (raw)
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"The Story of a Defeat": Equivalence and Imagination in Borges "Averroës Search"
I reflected… a more poetic case than [this] would be a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to other men, but is forbidden to him. I recalled Averroës, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy. I told his story." 1 Islam and the Arabic language have always posed problems for translation. Recognized early on by its preachers as the language of God, it has resisted outside influences in the name of protecting its purity from contamination. When the Qur'an was translated into Medieval Persian, it was deemed as a mistranslation, classified as a heretical text which sought to intentionally usurp the words of Allah and Mohammad. The history of the Arabs is rooted in language; the answers to how one should speak, debate, or write were derived from the authority of the Qur'an.
Ilahiyat Studies, 2010
In this paper, we try to understand Jorge Luis Borges' references to the East, especially Islamic thought, by analyzing his short stories, including Averroes' Search and The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald. This paper also attempts to conceptualize Borges' philosophical gesture. It seems that we could reconstruct his deep epistemological insights through the metaphor of palimpsest writing. In this way, it is supposed to answer the question of orientalism in Borges' work and clarify the difference between to be an orientalist and re-appropriating the orient. Finally, this paper critiques the "native orientalism" of Muslim thinkers in the Islamic philosophical context through the case of Borges.
Confronting the shadow: the hero’s journey in Borges’
Th is article focuses on 'El Etnógrafo' ['Th e Anthropologist' (di Giovanni trans.)], a brief and deceptively simple tale from Borges' Elogio de la sombra (1969) [In Praise of Darkness (1975)]. Th e tale's protagonist, Fred Murdock, undergoes a profound transformation whilst conducting anthropological fi eld research in the North American prairie, centred on his separation from his home and his dialogue with the tribal medicine man. In particular, under the instruction of the medicine man, Murdock learns to focus on and recount his dreams. Th e brief narrative may be appraised and amplifi ed as embodying characteristics of the hero's journey as examined by Carl Jung, and as illustrated by Joseph Campbell. In this perspective, Murdock accepts the call to adventure, engages in symbolic struggles, experiences a deep and transformative healing with the shaman, and returns home empowered with deeper wisdom. In this article I concentrate on the pattern of the hero's journey as depicted both in 'El Etnógrafo' and in other tales of Borges, evaluating the particular healing dimension of the confrontation with the personal and collective shadow, the relationship with the wise senex-fi gure of the medicine man, and the attention to the language of dreams. I consider, consequently, the nature of psychic healing as portrayed both within the narrative -Murdock's journey -and outside the narrative -the reader's journey, as twin epistemological destinations. Th is article constitutes part of a larger project that evaluates the relationship between Borges' aesthetic obra and Jung's psychological writings, their shared attention to mysticism and to the role of dreams, myths, narratives, creativity and active imagination, healing and the process of individuation.
Confronting the shadow: the hero's journey in Borges' 'El Etnógrafo
Journal of Romance Studies, 2012
This article focuses on 'El Etnógrafo' ['The Anthropologist' (di Giovanni trans.)], a brief and deceptively simple tale from Borges' Elogio de la sombra (1969) [In Praise of Darkness (1975)]. The tale's protagonist, Fred Murdock, undergoes a profound transformation whilst conducting anthropological field research in the North American prairie, centred on his separation from his home and his dialogue with the tribal medicine man. In particular, under the instruction of the medicine man, Murdock learns to focus on and recount his dreams. The brief narrative may be appraised and amplified as embodying characteristics of the hero's journey as examined by Carl Jung, and as illustrated by Joseph Campbell. In this perspective, Murdock accepts the call to adventure, engages in symbolic struggles, experiences a deep and transformative healing with the shaman, and returns home empowered with deeper wisdom. In this article I concentrate on the pattern of the hero's journey as depicted both in 'El Etnógrafo' and in other tales of Borges, evaluating the particular healing dimension of the confrontation with the personal and collective shadow, the relationship with the wise senex-figure of the medicine man, and the attention to the language of dreams. I consider, consequently, the nature of psychic healing as portrayed both within the narrative-Murdock's journey-and outside the narrative-the reader's journey, as twin epistemological destinations. This article constitutes part of a larger project that evaluates the relationship between Borges' aesthetic obra and Jung's psychological writings, their shared attention to mysticism and to the role of dreams, myths, narratives, creativity and active imagination, healing and the process of individuation.
The Oldest Trick in the Book: Borges and the "Rhetoric of Immediacy
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.
In his short story 'The House of Asterion', originally published in 1947, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges turns the protagonist of the Theseus myth from Theseus to the minotaur, Asterion. Borges, herein, proses labyrinthine design of reality. The house of Asterion denotes a psychic space of memory (mnemotechnic sphere of ambiguity, mourning, despair, hope and melancholia) the doors of which are being unlocked/locked to the experience of the metaphysics of presence (spatiotemporal equation of the labyrinthine characteristic of the house with the 'world'). In this plot, Borges proses minotaur's relief from the existential pain of the labyrinth/world by the succour of his 'redeemer' (Theseus). The experience of the world, for Asterion, connotes not only an epochal re-treat from markers of exactitude, but also the unconcealment of undecidability. By going through Bataille and Derrida, this paper interprets the aporetic context of the in-between via central tenants of Borges' mythopoetic. [Arası(nda)lığın Aporetiği: Jorge Luis Borges ve Karar Verilemezliğin Labirenti] ÖZET 1947 yılında yayınlanan 'Asterion'un Hanesi' isimli kısa hikayesinde, Arjantinli yazar Jorge Luis Borges, Theseus efsanesinin kahramanını Theseus'tan minotaura, yani Asterion'a çevirir. Burada Borges, gerçekliğin labirente benzer vasfını kaleme alır. Asterion'un hanesi;; kapıları, mevcudiyet metafiziğinin tecrübe edilişine (hanenin labirente benzer vasfının 'dünya'nın tecrübesi ile mekânzamansal olarak özdeşleştirilmesine) açılan/kapanan, psişik bir hafıza mekanı (tuhaflığın, yasın, umutsuzluğunun, umudun ve melankolinin mnemoteknik alanı) olarak karşımıza çıkar. Bu hikayede Borges;; minotaurun, labirentin/dünyanın verdiği varoluşsal ıstıraptan cezalandırıcısı (Theseus) eliyle kurtuluşunu işler. Asterion için dünyanın tecrübesi, yalnızca, kesinlik işaretlerinden epokhal bir geri çekilmeyi değil;; aynı zamanda, karar verilemezliğin açığa serilmesini de ifade eder. Bataille ve Derrida'dan hareketle, bu çalışma, arası(nda)lığın aporetik bağlamını, Borges mitopoetiğinin öne çıkan belirleyicileri itibariyle değerlendirmektedir.
BORGES: THE REALITY OF MAKING SENSE
Rhetoric Bates College, 1985
The interest in pursuing further studies concerning Jorge Luis Borges was born out of my attraction to the problematic relationship between reality and fiction. While believing that writing is ultimately an expression of the self, it was necessary for me to understand Borges’s fictional world to come to grips with his short story “The Other” (1980). Borges’s fictional world is essentially based on his conception of art as an illusion. Identity, individuality, and time are also illusory. Identity exists inasmuch as every man is also another man and even all men. Time is past, present and future existing simultaneously. The universe is considered as a total oneness in which individuality is a mere illusion. Since, as Borges states, “the ego is the past, the present, and also (…) the future”, reality as the reflection of an ego becomes dubious and uncertain. However, man has the need to understand the world in which he lives. By reading Borges, and by studying “The Other” in specific, I have come to realize that man understands his world according to his own reality. Borges’s main purpose in confounding the boundaries between reality and dream in his fiction is to enable man to create his own reality according to the laws which he can know. As such, different realities may exist to different men.
JORGE LUIS BORGES: LIFE AS AN ACCESSORY TO LITERATURE.
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.