An Aesthetic Strategy of the South for Interpreting Mystical Distance in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

This paper attempts to carry out the exercise of understanding the literature of Jorge Luis Borges as moving between theoretical extremes favorable to the acceptance of aesthetic multiculturalism. It proposes a strategy of an “aesthetics of the South”, consisting of grounding Borges’s literature in events represented in episodes of world literature, brought into the field of possible analogies with the short story “The South” as an interpretive paradigm.

One may speak of a literature made out of other literatures. This implies the mystical possibility that all literature has already been imagined. It is necessary to find a theme, a new native subject for an anthropology capable of resolving the mysticism of literatures.

The mystic moves with the certainty of that reality upon his flesh. Few attain this type of mystical wisdom, or only those who possess a spirit of intellectual self-denial. It is a secret that can hardly be shared, one that alludes to a universal status of the foreigner, as shown in the story “The South”, even of the foreigner who has arrived with a trade. The trade must be abandoned in order to accomplish what still cannot be done through a mechanism that does not tire the body. At such moments, immigrants cling to their memories and convictions strongly enough to conceive of themselves as illustrious exiles, placing their memories in their constructive labors, as if there they were leaving behind the identity of their place of origin.