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Popular Culture Review
A text like “Borges and I” (1960) becomes an obvious challenge to the modernist
notion of the author’s relationship to his work.
Borges begins the story by describing a distinction between himself (I)
and Borges, “It’s Borges, the other one, that things happen to” (324). Indeed, the
self or the “I” that Borges refers to merely “allow[s itself] to live, so that Borges
can spin out his literature,” and he laments that “I shall endure in Borges, not in
myself,” suggesting the etemality of this author known as Borges but the
mortality of whoever this man, this “I” is. On the face of it, these ideas seem no
less objective than those of the high modernists. If the Borges represents the “I,”
then he is a persona not unlike a Stephen or a Prufrock. Borges claims that the
author “Borges” “shares [his] preferences” and notes a number of similar interests
and talents that these two selves share, but that this “Borges” persona has a way
of “distorting and magnifying everything.” Such distortion and magnification
would seemingly unite this “Borges” with Stephen and Prufrock as semiautobiographical fictions, which present a correlative but not a duplicate of the
self. The problem here, though, is that while Borges has fictionalized himself as
“Borges,” he has also fictionalized himself as “I.” Indeed the metanarratorial
nature of this text defies the objectivity of representation. In large part, this lack
of objectivity found in naming seems to be related to why both Joyce and Eliot
“renamed” themselves in their work. While Joyce and Eliot could clearly claim
to be able to distinguish between author and character or author and narrator,
Borges rejects such an ability in the closing line of his story: “I am not sure which
of us it is that’s writing this page.” Borges’s self here has become a
representation of a representation. Through metanarrative, he has fictionalized
himself as author and essential self. So, how can there be an essential self, if even
that true self is fictional?
This kind of metanarratorial interrogation of the self has been of interest
to many postmodern writers. John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick
have all at times integrated a character with the same name as themselves into
their work thus creating what Linda Hutcheon, in Narcissistic Narrative: The
Metafictional Paradox, calls a “subjective realism” by causing the reader to be
“drawn into and out of the text” when the reader is forced to consider that the
fiction being read is “both real and Active by the decision-making process of the
narrator” (36). In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale calls the introduction of
real-world figures into a text an “ontological scandal,” noting the ontological
implications of revising “selves” since that revision reveals their constructedness
in the first place, saying:
In postmodernist revisionist historical fiction, history and
fiction exchange places, history becoming fictional and fiction
becoming “true” history—and the real world 6VV