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Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
Against Representation: A Note On Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph, Ilan Stavans
Against Representation: A Note On Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph, Ilan Stavans
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Faced with the need to represent Jorge Luis Borges’s classic tale “The Aleph,” which also gives name to his 1949 collection of stories, for decades publishers have resorted to a variety of dependable images, including works by Borges’s friend Xul Solar. Yet the argument of the tale is that no human language, either verbal or visual, is capable of summing up the fullness of the object Borges’s narrator discovers in a dark Buenos Aires basement. That object—the universe itself—is unrepresentable.
Infinite Regress And The Illusion Of Actuality And Participation In Borges's 'The Aleph', Robin Mcallister
Infinite Regress And The Illusion Of Actuality And Participation In Borges's 'The Aleph', Robin Mcallister
English Faculty Publications
Borges wants his reader to use imagination to participate in his fiction, to imagine the vision of the universe as an Aleph. The vision of the Aleph is paradoxical, impossible, inexpressible—a point in space, in the basement of a house in Buenos Aires, where all other points in the universe are simultaneously present. The reader sees the Aleph—or the illusion of the Aleph, watching it emerge as if through Borges’ own eyes, as an unrequited lover and frustrated poet gradually accommodating the infinite vision to the limitations of actual perception. The illusion of actual presence the reader evokes seems to …