“The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Played”: Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as Metaphor for the Construction of the Narrative of Imperial America
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32870/cl.vi24.7424Palavras-chave:
Borges, Tlön, America, United States, Metaphor, Deconstruction, ImperialismResumo
As Hernán Díaz points out in Borges: Between History and Eternity (2012), Borges wrote and thought prolifically about the literature, philosophy, popular culture, and history of North America: “from his first book of essays to his last […] there is a vast Borgesian corpus dealing with the American tradition” (p.p.73-78). This paper will explore deconstruction-based theories of narrative construction of personal and collective history as a background for Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. I will discuss that the narrator Borges in the short story becomes one who “omit[s] or disfigure[s] the facts” of American history so as to “permit a few readers […] to perceive an atrocious or banal reality” revealed by the short story acting as a monstrous “mirror spy[ing] upon us”. Borges’ fusion of autobiography and fiction in the short story embodies the use of “false facts” to reveal the banal historical reality that the conspirators of Tlön symbolize the European thinkers and American political leaders that shaped America’s historical narrative. The result is a reading of Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as Marxist deconstruction of the American Dream.Referências
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