Borges Beyond the Visible

Borges Beyond the Visible presents radically new readings of some of Jorge Luis Borges’s most celebrated stories. Max Ubelaker Andrade shows how Borges employed intertextual puzzles to transform his personal experiences with blindness, sexuality, and suicide while allowing readers to sense the transformative power of their own literary imaginations.

In readings of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El Aleph,” and “El Zahir,” Ubelaker Andrade argues that Borges, considering his own impending blindness, borrowed from Islam’s prohibitions on visual representation to create a “literary theology”—a religion focused on the contradictions of literary existence and the unstable complexities of a visual world perceived without everyday sight. Embracing these contradictions allowed Borges to transform his relationships with sex, sexuality, and family in multilayered stories such as “Emma Zunz,” “La intrusa,” and “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” Yet these liberating transformations, sometimes offered to the reader as a paradoxical “gift of death,” are complicated by “La salvación por las obras,” a story built around Borges’s relationship with a suicidal reader and the woman to whom they were both connected. The epilogue presents “Místicos del Islam,” an unpublished essay draft by Borges, as a key source of insight into an irreverent, iconoclastic writing practice based on a profound faith in fiction.

Compelling and clear, Borges Beyond the Visible is a revelatory examination of the work of one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. It opens up exciting areas of inquiry for scholars, students, and readers of Borges.

“Borges’s ideal reader is, of course, Borges himself. Max Ubelaker Andrade is not only sharp, knowledgeable, and comprehensive but also passionate—a trait that is surprisingly rare among literary scholars today, so well trained in the art of detached thinking. Ubelaker Andrade knows not only what Borges knew but what he didn’t know. He delivers explorations that make the invisible tangible. My advice to the reader of this book is the same as Borges often gave: mistrust everything in its pages. It’s the only way to come up with your own interpretation. In that task, Ubelaker Andrade will be an astonishing guide.”—Ilan Stavans, author of Borges, the Jew

“A witty, elegant and erudite book written with contagious passion. What a rewarding read for scholars and general readers!”—Alicia Borinsky, author of One-Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile

Max Ubelaker Andrade is Assistant Teaching Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Literary Studies

           Modernism

           Romance Studies

           Literary Theory & Criticism