Pluralism and Diversity in the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges
By Mark Frisch
Duquesne University
The epistemological crisis within the intellectual community that followed World War II with its questioning of where Western Civilization went wrong ,with the resulting emphases on multiplicity, ambiguity, randomness, fragmentation, indeterminacy, its challenges to privileged discourse, its democratic orientation, its problematizing of “reality” vs fiction, its re-exploration of the meaning of the self, its re-examination of the nature of the literary work and of woman's/man's place in the universe, and its tilt toward pluralistic model for explaining our world laid the foundation for numerous literary and intellectual movements, including Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism, Lo real-maravilloso or realismo mágico y el Boom in Latin American literature, and what I call Postmodernism (Postmodernismo). This cultural shift away from utopian models and monistic visions to explain history and toward philosophical pluralism had various roots, but one of the most important was the literary writings of Jorge Luis Borges. As a precursor and perhaps one of the first if not the first, of the postmodernists, Borges played a pivotal role with his focus on pluralism and diversity. I propose to do a close reading and examination of a few of Borges’ stories and essays to highlight Borges’ important link.