A dialogue in J. L. Borges’ artistic world: liberation from labyrinth
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2024.4.3Keywords:
Borges, rhizome, modernism, post-modernism, labyrinth, Minotaur, dialogueness, intertextualityAbstract
The subject of the study is dialogueness as a defining feature of Jorge Luis Borges’ artistic thinking, which becomes the basis for characterising the Argentine writer's work as a space for accumulating productive artistic developments that were not fully realised by the postmodern artistic practice of literature on the verge of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The goal of the article is to analyse the peculiarities of the poetic manifestation of the dialogical nature of Borges's artistic thinking, which carries the potential for acquiring a new quality of artistic and creative cognition of the world and self-knowledge, the need for which is indicated by the artistic concept of the labyrinth. The methods of intertextual, narratological and hermeneutical analysis contributed to the achievement of the goal.
The study reveals that the peculiarities of the development of the artistic concept of ‘labyrinth’, which is crucial for the artistic picture of the world created by Borges, represent the way out of the labyrinth as one of the author's leading intentions. The liberation from the labyrinth — i.e. the demonic space that condemns the subject of consciousness to loneliness and frustration, unproductive repetition, and limitation of existence becomes possible due to the dialogical interaction with the Other. The God, as a universal archetype of the Other, accounts for different variants of the Other i.e. from the characters of novels and the writer’s alter ego in the poetry to the ingenious authors-interlocutors enrooted into different temporal and culturally-national worlds that are briefly described in essays, the dialogue with whom opens the productive semantic perspective of the truth. The fundamental dialogic nature of Borges’ artistic thinking is matched by the intertextuality that is fundamentally inherent in all his texts.
The dialogical power and openness of the writer’s works bear the underestimated, within the post-structural paradigm, potential of perfect artistic thinking called to refresh the literary language according to the European ideal of the lost ancestral language so much longed for by Dante, as well as outline the horizons of a new perception of the world based on the mutual enrichment in different cultural traditions of the lingual representation of existence.
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