ABSTRACT
Many of Jorge Luis Borges’s readers – especially those interested in critical theory – see his prose works as self-conscious allegories commenting discreetly on the ontological status of fiction itself. This is an élitist way of fitting him into present fashions, but it is just to go along with those admirers who call Borges – the great reader who by his driftingly ingenious fictions teaches others to read – the old master of several sorts of literary Postmodernism. He is equally master of the art of writing a densely allusive and formidable new genre which, with typical humility, he continued to call the short story until the end of his life. Like Nabokov and Beckett, his early career is firmly fixed in high Modernism; unlike them he did not continuously advance to newer styles, but remained with his best work – the style of fiction, poetry, and meditation he established in the 1940s and 1950s, when his greatest work occurred. Borges’s case, more than that of any other writer, indicates the problem of trying to distinguish between Modernism and Postmodernism in a historical way, and a textual study of his fictions takes the reader toward an exemplary rather than a theoretical view of what literary Postmodernism might actually be.
