The Oldest Trick in the Book: Borges and the "Rhetoric of Immediacy''

• Main Author: James Winchell
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Prairie Press 1993-06-01
• Series: Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
• Online Access: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol17/iss2/4

In his most "philosophical'' texts, Jorge Luis Borges paradoxically posits the act of reading as the scene of affectively "immediate" experience: his reader reads a reader reading ( ad infinitum ). This sort of hyper-meditated, specular imitation actually comes to mirror the substantive preoccupation of the "philosophical" text itself. Borges thereby breaks down what Theodor Adorno calls "concept fetishism'' by making mimesis his textual concept . Given Italo Calvino's claim for the novelty of "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" in relation to modern genres, I propose a two-fold thesis: first, that this typically Borgesian narrative juxtaposes concept and mimesis (a traditional philosophical antinomy) and then subverts the difference between them as a mediation of immediacy itself . He creates thereby a second-level "rhetoric of immediacy." Borges thus arrives at a re-inscription of the kind of narrative technique upon which traditional texts, even texts that form a part of a sacred canon, operate. The drama and rhetoric of immediacy exploited by Borges—and what is allegory, if not a "rhetorical drama''?—far from amounting to the last innovation of modem forms, as Calvino claims, might more accurately be called the oldest trick of presence in the book of absence.