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• 1 2025-04-14T22:17:16+00:00 Jorge Luis Borges and the Truth 88 As a postmodernist writer Borges explored the limits of language and how that effects our understanding of the truth. image_header 2025-05-13T20:20:41+00:00

  Introduction
  In May of 1939, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was published in its original Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur. This fictional piece is written as if it were a literary criticism of Pierre Menard’s work as the author of the novel Don Quixote. From the very title of the piece, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Borges has set the reader against what they believe to be true. As the story continues, Borges lists the works of Pierre Menard creating a chilling dissonance for the reader by mixing real and imagined works to create Menard’s résumé. This résumé is meant then to build up confidence in the fictional reader that Menard is a trustworthy academic, but for the actual reader, Menard is a fictional character and yet his work is almost plausible because it mentions real academics and their work woven together with the fictional work. This differs from historical fiction which takes place in a real time and real history and yet is not actually historical, but it is instead an alternative history, suggesting a different world that is close to our own. This speculative fiction story is believed by some to be the first Postmodernist work or perhaps a proto-postmodernist piece.

  
  Limits of language
  Borges seems to have been a fan of both Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein explains to us in the preface of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

  How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been though before me by another.[1]

  This is mirrored in Pierre Menard when Menard tells us that he will not share how he was able to reach a point where he could write Quixote, “The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.”[2] Wittgenstein is known for his work describing how language of complex ideas cannot be put into language and therefore all complex philosophical conversations are meaningless. Once language passes the stage where it represents a physical object, we can no longer describe these thoughts and ideas well enough with language to fully transmit these ideas to others. This is reiterated by Russell in his introduction to Tractatus where he states “in practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.”[3] Russell continues and states “the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.”[4] Russell is of the opinion that we can get close to an idea with language but it will not be able to name the item directly. For Borges it was poetry that was able to most closely reach this goal.
  
  
  
  Poet & Mystic
  In his interviews with Roberto Alifano between 1981 and 1983 Alifano asks Borges about poetry:

  Alifano: So that in concurring with Plato's definition, you would accept the idea that poetry is, above all, an aesthetic act?
  Borges: Yes. I still believe that poetry is the aesthetic act; that poetry is not the poem, for the poem may be nothing more than a series of symbols...Poetry is a magical, mysterious, unexplainable - although not incomprehensible - event.[5]

  Borges suggests that poetry is able to point the reader in the direction of a thought or understanding that cannot be described well with our existing language. Borges attempts to describe the indescribable through poetry but also by expanding into mystical topics such as religion and philosophy but also by moving towards mathematical ideas and logic. Borges was always searching for a way to express what he was able to understand about the universe. Perhaps, Borges is describing himself when Menard states in “Pierre Menard” that “he was often swept along by the inertiae of the language and the imagination.”[6]

  
  The Sum (La Suma) Jorge Luis Borges, 198, Translation by A. S. Kline
  
  The silent friendliness of the moon
  (misquoting Virgil) accompanies you
  since that one night or evening lost
  in time now, on which your restless
  eyes first deciphered her forever
  in a garden or patio turned to dust.
  Forever? I know someone, someday
  will be able to tell you truthfully:
  You’ll never see the bright moon again,
  You’ve now achieved the unalterable
  sum of moments granted you by fate.
  Useless to open every window
  in the world. Too late. You’ll not find her.
  We live discovering and forgetting
  that sweet familiarity of the night.
  Take a long look. It might be the last.

  
  Below you can view the art piece “La Suma” which has the text of the poem “La Suma” worked into the piece.
  
  
  
  Truth or Post-truth World
  Speculative fiction can often offer a way to see a possible future, however, it becomes unsettling when these things come to pass. In “Pierre Menard” Borges explains that texts can be interpreted in as many ways as there are readers to interpret the work. Perhaps nothing embodies this as much as Morris’s footnote in part 4 of “The Ashtray: The Author of the ‘Quixote’”:

  [70] An updated version of the “conflict” between Menard and Cervantes is embodied in an quote from a Bush aide. It appeared in a New York Times Magazine article, Oct. 17, 2004, and was later attributed to Karl Rove. It pits those that are influenced by facts against those that (take your pick) create them or make them up. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[7]

  Perhaps this example explains why Borges could be critical of academic work such as he was in “The Theologians.” The concept is then taken even further when Kellyanne Conway asks us to interpret President Trump’s words differently in her interview with Chris Cuomo:

  You can't give him the benefit of the doubt on this, and he's telling you what was in his heart? You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.[8]

  It is clear that language can fail us and we are not always able to express what is in our hearts. This concept can be contorted in a number of ways and used as a gaslighting technique. However, the truth, in some instances, cannot be proven or disproven. All things are still possible and no one can fully state what is in another’s heart. Borges shows us the limitations of communication and hopefully has prepared us for a future where truth is vague. 
  
  Post-modernist Literature
  If we can view the modernists as having defined the world then we can view the post-modernists as pointing out the limits of those definitions or going even further to state that no definitions are possible. Douwe Fokkema states that “the Postmodernist does not discriminate. He is eager to dethrone the intellectuals, who in a time of secularization tried to climb on the empty throne of God in order to spread the gospel of their private semantic universe.”[9] Fokkema goes on to state that postmodernist literature “is driven by a democratic, even populistic, iconoclastic impulse.”[10]
  
  Conclusion
  Borges enjoyed exploring philosophical issues and in ways that both illuminated and confused. As a post-modernist he was not interested in putting the world into tidy boxes. It seems he preferred to expose as much as he could through his writing and then allow his writing to be interpreted in the multitude of ways that were possible.
  
   

  ---

  [1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. (Charles Kay) Ogden, 2010, 23, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5740.

  [2] Jorge Luis Borges and Andrew Hurley, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Collected Fictions, Penguin classics deluxe edition., Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (New York: Viking, 1998), 91.

  [3] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.

  [4] Wittgenstein, 8.

  [5] Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems : Interviews, 1981-1983, An Altamira Inter-American ed., Altamira Inter-American Series (Housatonic, MA: Lascaux Publishers, 1984), 37.

  [6] Borges and Hurley, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” 92.

  [7] Errol Morris, “The Ashtray: The Author of the ‘Quixote’ (Part 4),” Opinionator, 1299720616, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/the-ashtray-the-author-of-the-quixote-part-4/.

  [8] Aaron Blake, “Kellyanne Conway’s Laughable ‘Look at What’s in His Heart’ Defense of Donald Trump,” The Washington Post, January 9, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/09/kellyanne-conways-laughable-look-at-whats-in-his-heart-defense-of-trump/.

  [9] Douwe W. Fokkema, “Postmodernist Impossibilities: Literary Conventions in Borges, Barthelme, Robbe-Grillet, Hermans, and Others,” in Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism, vol. 19, spring 1983, spring 1983., 19., Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature (Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984), 41.

  [10] Fokkema, 41.