The providential apotheosis of his industry. Display of causal systems in Borges

CÁMPORA, MAGDALENA

The New Centennial Review

Michigan State University Press

Lugar: Michigan State; Año: 2011 p. 125 - 142

1532-687x

The display of causal systems in Borges results from a recognizable aesthetical and historical background. Yet the form of the display is surprising. Our idea is that to the author of “La lotería en Babilonia”, the display of the system only becomes stimulating when it is the result of an internal need of the plot. That is to say, when it retains the method of classical writing, where facts must succeed each other –as prescribed by Aristotle— according to an inherent, necessary causal order. This method arises from something that is deeply rooted in Borges’ writing: the deliberate motivation of each of the parts that compose the story (in Borges’ words: the text as “an artificial object which does not suffer from any unjustified parts”). Thus, borgesian texts from the thirties and the forties show a peculiar dynamic where the avant-garde desire to exhibit causality’s rules of construction co-exists with the classical use of those very same rules. It is this dynamic that I would like to discuss in this work.