Borges and I

Borges explores the power of literature to create personas and characters. He depicts “Borges” as a character brought to life through his writing. This highlights the transformative capacity of storytelling, where an author’s words breathe life into fictional or semi-fictional entities.

The theme of literary creation also underscores the idea that authors don’t fully control the characters they create. Once born from the written word, these characters can take on lives of their own, sometimes influencing the author’s public image. The essay explores how the act of writing blurs the line between reality and fiction. Borges suggests that “Borges” is a constructed persona as much as any of the characters in his stories. This underscores the ambiguity between the author’s actual self and the literary entities he creates. This theme reflects the idea that writing is an art that reflects the author’s experiences, influences, and imagination. The line between fact and fiction is porous, and authors often infuse their work with aspects of their own identity, intentionally or unintentionally.

The essay also emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between an author and their readers. “Borges” exists as a construct shaped not only by the author’s words but also by how readers interpret and engage with his work. This underscores the collaborative nature of literature. Authors create narratives, but readers play an active role in giving those narratives meaning. The readers contribute to constructing the author’s public identity through their interpretations. In turn, reading a piece of literature will affect the reader’s thoughts and perception—neither the reader nor the author comes away from the interaction the same.

Another aspect of Borges’s narrative is the nature of celebrity. The public “Borges” persona is the version of the author that the audience knows. Achieving celebrity often results in the audience perceiving a distorted image of the writer. The fragment of the author’s identity that the public encounters may not necessarily align with the author’s own self-perception. Once celebrity status is attained, an author faces considerable challenges when attempting to create without taking the audience and considerations of public perception into account. The public may be privy to certain aspects of a person’s identity, such as preferences like “hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, [and] the taste of coffee” (Paragraph 1). However, the nuances, historical significance, or personal stories associated with these preferences do not always translate. These nuances belong to the inner identity, while the external world perceives a simplified list of likes and dislikes or factual information. Borges’s fame as a writer creates a paradoxical situation in which success leads to a divide between his public and private selves. This highlights the alienating effects of public recognition. As an author garners acclaim, their identity as perceived by the public increasingly overshadows their personal self, leading to a sense of estrangement.