Jorge Luis Borges’s critiques of other writers from OTHER INQUISTIONS The rest of the page is generated by Gemini 2.5

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Based on the nonfiction texts provided, here are the opinions of the writer (Jorge Luis Borges) on other writers, as well as opinions on Borges’s opinions as stated by the book’s various introducers. The information is organized by the writer who is the subject of criticism or praise.

Addison, Joseph

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges notes that Addison stated more precisely than Góngora the metaphor of dreams as a theatrical performance, writing that when the soul dreams, “it is the theatre, the actors, and the audience.”

Aeschylus

• In “The Modesty of History”: Borges identifies Aeschylus as the man who “brought in a second actor,” raising the number of actors in a drama from one to two. He speculates on this moment, noting that with the second actor came “dialogue and the indefinite possibilities of the reaction of some characters upon others.” He suggests a “prophetic spectator” would have seen Hamlet, Faust, and Macbeth accompanying this second actor.

Agrippa, the Skeptic

• In “Avatars of the Tortoise”: Borges notes that Agrippa used the idea of infinite regression to deny that anything can be proven, since every proof requires a previous proof.

Agrippa of Nettesheim

• In “The Nothingness of Personality”: Borges quotes Agrippa’s poem from De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum (“Among gods, all are shaken by the jeers of Momus…”) as an example of a writer who scrutinized his own fundamental incongruence and expressed his own disparity.

Alain de Lille

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges states that Alain de Lille, at the end of the twelfth century, discovered in the Corpus Hermeticum the formula “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Anaxagoras

• In “Pascal”: Borges notes that Pascal’s idea of worlds within worlds could have been influenced by Anaxagoras’s ancient words “to the effect that everything is within each thing.”
• In “A New Refutation of Time (A)”: Borges cites the doctrine of Anaxagoras, which he attributes to Lucretius, “that gold consists of particles of gold, fire of sparks, bone of tiny imperceptible bones.”

Apollinaire, Guillaume

• In “The Paradox of Apollinaire”: Borges argues that Apollinaire, despite being a “notable poet,” is less important for any single work than for being a “myth of an epoch.” He sees Apollinaire as the embodiment of the era between 1900 and the First World War, just as Victor Hugo embodied the entire nineteenth century. He finds Apollinaire’s work to have “a certain gracelessness, a certain awkwardness” and notes that his fame is partly based on the “accidents of friendship,” like his association with Picasso, Braque, and de Chirico. Borges concludes that Apollinaire’s most vivid and lasting creation was his own public persona.

Apollonius of Rhodes

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges lists him among writers who chose lofty subjects for an “absolute book,” his subject being “the first ship that braved the dangers of the deep.”
• In “Narrative Art and Magic”: Borges notes that Apollonius had set the Argonauts’ deeds to verse and describes his depiction of the Sirens as women from the waist up and birds below.

Ariosto, Ludovico

• In “Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles”: Borges mentions Ariosto’s sixteenth-century work where a hero discovers on the moon all that has been lost on earth. He contrasts this “free and capricious invention” with Kepler’s work, which was tempered by a desire for verisimilitude.

Aristotle

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges notes that Aristotle thought speaking of an endless sphere was a “contradictio in adjecto.”
• In “Avatars of the Tortoise”: Borges states that we owe to Aristotle the “first refutation” of Zeno’s paradoxes. He also explains Aristotle’s “third man” argument against Plato’s doctrine of archetypes.
• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges identifies Aristotle as one of the two “immortal antagonists” in the history of philosophy, representing the view that ideas are generalizations and language is a map of the universe.
• In “Quevedo”: Borges mentions that Quevedo’s political work, Política de Dios, is based on the hypothesis that Christ’s actions and words are symbols for politicians, a method Borges calls a “cabala.”

Arnobius

• In “Pascal”: Borges notes that the texts of Arnobius were indicated by Asín Palacios as relevant to understanding Pascal’s “Pari” (wager).

Attar, Farid al-Din

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges mentions the Persian poet Attar’s story of the birds’ pilgrimage to find their king, the Simurg, only to discover they themselves are the Simurg.
• In “The Simurgh and the Eagle”: Borges extensively praises Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. He calls the Simurgh one of the most memorable figures in literature, “which implicitly encompasses and improves upon” Dante’s Eagle. He notes that behind the “magical Simurgh is pantheism” and praises the “rigor and economy” of the plot, where “the searchers are what they seek.”
• In “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald”: Borges mentions FitzGerald’s translation of Attar’s mystical epic, Mantiq al-Tayr.

Augustine, St.

• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges states that St. Augustine said the first moment of time coincides with the moment of the Creation.
• In “The Biathanatos”: Borges mentions St. Augustine’s conjecture that Samson was obeying the Holy Spirit when he killed himself, a conjecture Donne rejects.
• In “On the Cult of Books”: Borges recounts St. Augustine’s story from the Confessions about being amazed to see St. Ambrose reading silently, an act Borges identifies as the beginning of the “new cult of writing.”
• In “A History of Eternity”: Borges identifies the eleventh book of Augustine’s Confessions as the best document of the Christian concept of eternity. He notes Augustine’s refutation of Pelagius and his doctrine of predestination.

Bacon, Francis

• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges mentions that Ben Jonson, in writing his literary testament, combined fragments from Bacon and others.
• In “On the Cult of Books”: Borges discusses Bacon’s idea that God offered two books: the Scriptures and the “volume of the creatures” (the universe). He also notes Bacon believed the world was reducible to an “abecedarium naturae,” or a series of letters forming a universal text.
• In “The First Wells”: Borges notes that Wells praised the work of Francis Bacon as a precursor.

Balzac, Honoré de

• In “A Note on Carriego”: Borges lists Balzac alongside Shakespeare and Whitman as an author who offers “a taste of the fullness of life.”
• In “A Defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet”: Borges notes that Flaubert condemned the “statistical or ethnographic” novels of Balzac.

Barbusse, Henri

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges praises Barbusse’s unjustly neglected novel L’Enfer for attempting to avoid the limitations of time by accounting for man’s basic acts.

Baudelaire, Charles

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges contrasts Whitman’s dramatization of joy with Baudelaire’s dramatization of unhappiness.
• In “On William Beckford’s Vathek”: Borges suggests that Beckford’s Vathek “foretells, in however rudimentary a way, the satanic splendors” of Baudelaire.

Beckford, William

• In “On William Beckford’s Vathek”: Borges argues that Beckford’s novel Vathek is significant for inventing “the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.” He distinguishes it from Dante’s hell, which is a place “where atrocious things happen,” whereas Beckford’s is inherently atrocious, “the tunnels of a nightmare.” He finds it prefigures Poe, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Huysmans. He also notes Beckford’s influences, including Piranesi’s etchings.

Bede, the Venerable

• In “The Innocence of Layamon”: Borges records that Layamon used an “English book made by St. Bede” as one of his sources for the Brut.
• In “Coleridge’s Dream”: Borges recounts Bede’s story of Caedmon, the uneducated shepherd who was given the gift of poetry in a dream. He quotes Bede’s assertion that Caedmon “did not learn the art of poetry from men, but from God.”

Belloc, Hilaire

• In “The First Wells”: Borges notes that Wells debated “(politely and mortally) with Belloc.”
• In “On William Beckford’s Vathek”: Borges mentions that Belloc, in A Conversation with an Angel, compares Beckford’s prose to Voltaire’s and judges Beckford to be “one of the vilest men of his time.”

Berkeley, George

• In “A New Refutation of Time”: Borges uses Berkeley’s idealism as a cornerstone of his argument. He quotes extensively from Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous to explain Berkeley’s denial of matter and his concept of time. He then extends Berkeley’s logic to deny time itself, arguing that if matter and spirit are not continuous, time cannot be either.

Bloy, Léon

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges discovered a prefiguration of Kafka’s tone in Bloy’s writings and that Borges follows in Bloy’s works “the increasingly desperate interpretations of a single phrase in St. Paul.”
• In “On Oscar Wilde”: Borges mentions that one of Wilde’s pronouncements—that to repent is to modify the past—is “not unworthy of Léon Bloy or Swedenborg.”
• In “The Mirror of the Enigmas”: Borges extensively analyzes Bloy’s “astonishing” interpretation of the verse from St. Paul, Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate. He quotes several versions of Bloy’s conjecture that “everything is a symbol” and that we see everything “backwards.” Borges finds this view “verisimilar and perhaps inevitable within the Christian doctrine” and notes that Bloy, who believed himself a rigorous Catholic, was actually a “continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs.”

Boccaccio, Giovanni

• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges identifies a specific moment in 1382 as the ideal date for the transition from allegory to the novel: the day Geoffrey Chaucer translated a line by Boccaccio (“E con gli occulti ferri i Tradimenti”) into the more concrete and individualistic “The smyler with the knyf under the cloke.”

Boethius

• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges notes that Boethius, writing De Consolatione under the shadow of execution, would not have understood the modern distaste for allegory.

Browning, Robert

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges finds a prefiguration of Kafka’s tone in Browning’s poem “Fears and Scruples.”
• In “On Chesterton”: Borges mentions that Chesterton dedicated his first works to the justification of two “great gothic craftsmen,” Browning and Dickens.
• In “Kafka and His Precursors”: Borges cites Browning’s 1876 poem “Fears and Scruples” as a prefiguration of Kafka’s work. The poem is about a man who has a famous friend he has never seen, whose existence is then doubted, leading the man to ask, “And if this friend were . . . God?” Borges argues that “our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem.”

Browne, Sir Thomas

• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges quotes Browne’s curious line, “The man without a Navel yet lives in me.”
• In “Pascal’s Sphere”: Borges notes that Sir Thomas Browne, like others before Pascal, used the metaphor of the infinite sphere to define the divinity.
• In “On the Cult of Books”: Borges quotes Browne from Religio Medici: “Thus there are two Books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of His servant Nature…” and “In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God.”

Bruno, Giordano

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges states that for Bruno, the “rupture of the stellar vaults was a liberation.” He quotes Bruno’s exultant declaration from 1584: “We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” He contrasts this with Pascal’s later anguish over the same concept.

Bunyan, John

• In “On Chesterton”: Borges contrasts Kafka’s parable of the Law with a parable from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where an intrepid man fights his way into a guarded castle. He states that Chesterton “devoted his life to the writing of the second parable, but something within him always tended to write the first.”

Burton, Richard F.

• In “About The Purple Land”: Borges lists Burton among the Englishmen who, unlike other foreigners, are able to perceive “Creole nuances.”

Butler, Samuel

• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges states that Shaw’s ideas will one day be sought in the works of Schopenhauer and Samuel Butler.

Byron, Lord

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges contrasts Whitman’s dramatization of joy with Byron’s dramatization of unhappiness.

Camoëns, Luís de

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges lists him among writers who chose lofty subjects for an “absolute book,” his subject being “the Portuguese armies in the Orient.”

Carlyle, Thomas

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges is a friend to Carlyle.
• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges mentions Carlyle’s artifice of pretending Sartor Resartus was a translation of a German work as an example of blurring the line between reader and book.
• In “On the Cult of Books”: Borges mentions Carlyle’s idea that “universal history was a Sacred Scripture that we decipher and write uncertainly, and in which we too are written.”
• In “Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny”: Borges cites Carlyle as an example of a writer whose legendary persona is more important than his literary work.
• In “On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History”: Borges provides a lengthy analysis of Carlyle’s thought. He traces the origin of the book to Carlyle’s meditation on Mohammed and the Arabs. He explains Carlyle’s central thesis that “Universal History… is at bottom the History of the Great Men.” Borges, citing Russell and Chesterton, identifies Carlyle’s political theory as Nazism, listing his praise for Germany, his desire for strong leaders, his contempt for democracy, and his defense of Cromwell as evidence. He notes Carlyle’s belief that “history is conflated with justice” and that only work has meaning in an unreal world. He contrasts Carlyle’s “romantic” and “plebeian” style with Emerson’s “classical” and gentlemanly one.

Carroll, Lewis

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges mentions that Hawthorne planned to write a dream that resembled a real dream, a feat which perhaps “has only been achieved by Lewis Carroll.”
• In “Avatars of the Tortoise”: Borges recounts Lewis Carroll’s parody of Zeno’s paradox, where Achilles and the Tortoise engage in an endless dialogue about the premises of a syllogism, with the tortoise continually demanding another proposition to justify the conclusion.
• In “The Total Library”: Borges notes that Lewis Carroll observed that the number of possible books is limited and that literary men will one day ask “Which book?” to write, not “What book?”

Castro, Américo

• In “Dr. Américo Castro Is Alarmed”: Borges launches a sustained and scathing critique of Castro’s book La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense. He accuses Castro of using a “sophistic” method by taking caricatures of slang as evidence of linguistic corruption. He ridicules Castro’s claim that Spaniards speak better than Argentines and mocks his “conventional superstitions,” his praise for Ricardo Rojas, his disdain for the tango, and his flawed style, which Borges calls commercial, picturesque, and absurd. He concludes by asking who is more “dialectal,” the “limpid” poet Martín Fierro or the “incoherent” Castro.

Cervantes, Miguel de

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that in “Pierre Menard,” Borges develops the idea that one literature differs from another based on how it is read, a concept applied to Don Quixote. Updike also praises Borges’s own story as a superior gloss on a theme from Hemingway, just as Cervantes wrote from within Ariosto.
• In “Quevedo”: Borges notes that one of Quevedo’s great predecessors was Cervantes, and his happy balance of Sancho and Quixote.
• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges argues that Cervantes, contrary to the realist plan of his book, “loved the supernatural” and insinuated it subtly. He points out Cervantes’s technique of “confusing the objective and the subjective,” citing the priest and barber discussing Cervantes’s own Galatea, and the claim that the novel is a translation from an Arabic manuscript. He sees the culmination of this in the second part, where the protagonists are “readers of the Quixote.”
• In “Our Poor Individualism”: Borges states that the Argentine feels with Don Quixote that “it is not seemly, that honest men should be the executioners of their fellow-creatures.” He calls two lines from the Quixote a “secret, tranquil symbol of our affinity” with Spain.
• In “About The Purple Land”: Borges criticizes Cervantes’s use of two symmetrical character types in Don Quixote (Quixote and Sancho), arguing that this “persistent disharmony finally deprives them of reality, lowers them to the stature of circus figures.”

Chateaubriand, François-René de

• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges states that Chateaubriand, in 1802, for aesthetic reasons, formulated a thesis identical to Gosse’s: that the world was created with an “original antiquity” already in place, because a world of “baby pigeons, larvae, puppies, and seeds” would be banal and less charming.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges identifies Chaucer’s 1382 translation of a line by Boccaccio as the symbolic moment of transition from allegory to the novel, because Chaucer replaced an abstract concept (“Betrayal with hidden weapons”) with a concrete individual (“The smyler with the knyf under the cloke”).
• In “The Innocence of Layamon”: Borges notes that two centuries after Layamon, a character in Chaucer would mock Layamon’s alliterative style (“I can not geste—rum, ram, ruf—by letter”).

Chesterton, G.K.

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike highlights Borges’s special fondness for Chesterton. He notes Borges’s argument that Chesterton, beneath his optimistic surface, had a “nightmarish” disposition and was “always on the verge of becoming a nightmare.” Updike states that much in Borges’s fiction that suggests Kafka in fact derives from Chesterton.
• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges presents Chesterton’s defense of allegory against Croce’s refutation. Chesterton argues that language is insufficient to express reality’s richness, and that allegory is one of the other languages, like music or architecture, that can correspond to it.
• In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: Borges quotes Chesterton’s argument that language is an “arbitrary system of grunts and squeals” insufficient to represent the “mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.”
• In “On Chesterton”: Borges analyzes Chesterton’s work as a symbol of his own internal struggle. He notes that Chesterton’s work, though professing to be sane and optimistic, “tends inevitably to revert to atrocious observations” and a “nightmarish” quality. He cites examples of Chesterton’s teratological fantasies. He sees the Father Brown stories, which propose and then reject magical explanations for mundane ones, as an emblem of this conflict between a “demoniacal will” and the reason of Catholic faith.
• In “The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton”: Borges credits Chesterton with a specific tour de force in detective fiction: proposing a supernatural explanation for a mystery and then replacing it with a worldly one without losing anything.

Cicero

• In “Quevedo”: Borges notes that Quevedo, like Cicero, uses the order of the stars to prove the existence of a divine order.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges presents Coleridge’s idea—“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him… and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke…"—as a “perfect” and seemingly final literary invention. He sees it as the first in a series of evolving ideas, followed by versions from Wells and Henry James.
• In “Coleridge’s Dream”: Borges recounts the story of Coleridge dreaming the poem “Kubla Khan” after reading Purchas. He calls the poem a “page of undisputed splendor.” He then adds the “nearly unfathomable” discovery that the historical Kublai Khan had built his palace according to a plan he had seen in a dream. Borges speculates on this symmetry, suggesting it might be a coincidence, a deliberate fiction by Coleridge, or the work of a “superhuman executor” or an “eternal object” gradually entering the world.
• In “The Nightingale of Keats”: Borges observes that “all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists,” a statement he attributes to Coleridge.
• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges notes Coleridge’s observation that “all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists.”

Conrad, Joseph

• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges contrasts Cervantes with Conrad, stating that Conrad wrote “novels of reality because [he] judged reality to be poetic,” whereas for Cervantes, the real and poetic were antinomies.
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges notes that Conrad believed his character Schomberg was real, an attitude he contrasts with Hawthorne’s method of starting with situations rather than characters.
• In “William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!”: Borges praises Conrad as perhaps the last great novelist before Faulkner to be interested in both “the techniques of the novel and in the fates and personalities of his characters.”

Cooper, James Fenimore

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges dismisses him as “a sort of Eduardo Gutiérrez infinitely inferior to Eduardo Gutiérrez.”

Copernicus

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges states that Copernicus’s manuscript “transformed our vision of the cosmos.”

Croce, Benedetto

• In “The Wall and the Books”: Borges notes that his idea that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in a conjectural “content” would concord with the thesis of Benedetto Croce.
• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges presents Croce’s refutation of allegory. Croce argues that allegory is a “tiresome pleonasm” and a “kind of writing or cryptography” that monstrously tries to encode two contents into a single form. Borges notes that while Croce is right, the genre was once enchanting.
• In “Capsule Biography: Benedetto Croce”: Borges describes Croce as a “man who represents European culture” better than any other living person. He calls Croce’s Aesthetic a “capital book” and notes that his philosophy has been compared to a “layman’s Catholicism.”

Dante Alighieri

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike observes that in Borges’s sketches, Dante is imagined dying “as unjustified and as alone as any other man,” and that in a dream, God declares the secret purpose of his life was so he could place a leopard in the Inferno.
• In “Quevedo”: Borges lists Dante’s “nine circles of hell and the Rose of Paradise” as one of the symbols that has granted a writer universal fame.
• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges notes that Dante’s poem “preserved the Ptolemaic astronomy.”
• In “The Simurgh and the Eagle”: Borges analyzes the Eagle in Canto XVIII of the Paradiso, composed of thousands of just kings. He calls it an “unmistakable symbol of Empire” but deems it “merely implausible” compared to Attar’s Simurgh.
• In “The Meeting in a Dream”: Borges analyzes the scene of Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice in Paradise. He recounts the traditional allegorical interpretations but finds the procession to be of “convoluted ugliness” and better suited to the Inferno. He conjectures that the severity of Beatrice and the ugliness of the emblems derive from the same source: a dream stained with “sad obstructions,” reflecting Dante’s real-life unhappy and unrequited love for a Beatrice who barely knew he existed.
• In all the “Nine Dantesque Essays”: Borges provides detailed, subtle, and often personal interpretations of specific moments in the Divine Comedy, focusing on themes of divine justice, free will, the nature of Hell, and the psychology of the characters, often rejecting or refining traditional commentaries.

De Quincey, Thomas

• In James E. Irby’s Preface: Irby notes that Borges’s reference to De Quincey in the essay on John Donne is a “candid confession of influence.”
• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges notes De Quincey’s argument that the Scriptures are not meant to instruct in science.
• In “The Biathanatos”: Borges credits De Quincey with his first notice of Donne’s treatise and quotes his summary of it.
• In “The Mirror of the Enigmas”: Borges notes De Quincey’s declaration that “the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.”
• In “On William Beckford’s Vathek”: Borges suggests Vathek foretells the “satanic splendors” of De Quincey.

Descartes, René

• In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: Borges mentions that Descartes, in a 1619 letter, had already proposed the creation of a general language that would organize all human thought.

Dickens, Charles

• In “On Chesterton”: Borges mentions that Chesterton dedicated his first works to the justification of Dickens.
• In “The First Wells”: Borges says Wells wrote “garrulous books in which the gigantic felicity of Charles Dickens somehow reappears.”
• In “Bartleby, the Scrivener”: Borges notes that the first pages of Melville’s story “allude to or repeat Dickens.”

Donne, John

• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges quotes Donne’s “Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness” as an intense example of the conjunction of the two Adams.
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges mentions Donne’s choice of the soul’s transmigrations as the lofty subject for a great book.
• In “The Biathanatos”: Borges provides a detailed analysis of Donne’s treatise on suicide. He argues that the book’s “apparent thesis” is to mitigate suicide, but its “fundamental aim” is the esoteric argument that Christ committed suicide. He sees in this the “baroque idea… of a god who creates the universe in order to create his own gallows.”

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

• In “William Faulkner, The Unvanquished”: Borges notes the comparison between Faulkner and Dostoevsky, but finds Faulkner’s world “so physical, so carnal” that the “explicative murderer Raskolnikov” is slight by comparison.
• In “Crime and Punishment, film review”: He refers to Dostoevsky’s novel as “extraordinarily intense.”

Dreiser, Theodore

• In “Capsule Biography: Theodore Dreiser”: Borges calls Dreiser a “great and somewhat awkward novelist” and notes his work is characterized by “a sad, elementary force” and a “solemnity” that can be overwhelming. He finds Dreiser’s characters to be “elementary monsters” who are nevertheless real.

Dumas, Alexandre

• In “A Note on Carriego”: Borges speculates that Evaristo Carriego was reading Dumas, who “offered him what Shakespeare or Balzac or Walt Whitman offers to others, a taste of the fullness of life.”

Dunne, J. W.

• In “Time and J.W. Dunne”: Borges analyzes Dunne’s doctrine of time and the observer. He finds his conclusions “most unusual, almost shocking” but his method “less convincing and more ingenious.” He argues that Dunne commits the “bad intellectual habit… of conceiving of time as a fourth dimension of space” and that his infinite dimensions of time are actually spatial. Despite this, Borges finds Dunne’s thesis that in death we will recover all the moments of our lives and combine them as we please so “splendid” that “any fallacy committed by the author [is] insignificant.”

Dunsany, Lord

• In “Kafka and His Precursors”: Borges cites Dunsany’s story “Carcassonne,” about an army that never reaches its destination, as a prefiguration of Kafka’s work.
• In “Patches of Sunlight, review”: Borges notes that Dunsany’s autobiography is as “fantastic” as his stories, and he calls his work “one of the secret treasures of contemporary literature.”

Eliot, T.S.

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges asserts Eliot practices “the deliberate manipulation of anachronisms to produce an appearance of eternity.” Updike finds this only “rather incidentally” true.
• In “Kafka and His Precursors”: Borges mentions in a footnote that T.S. Eliot had already pointed out that a writer modifies our conception of the past.
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges mentions Eliot’s practice of manipulating anachronisms.
• In “Capsule Biography: T. S. Eliot”: Borges describes Eliot as one of the great poets of our time, but whose work (like that of Mallarmé or Valéry) has an “air of being a splendid artifice.” He notes Eliot’s influence on English poetry has been “enormous and, sometimes, pernicious.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges quotes Emerson’s essay “Nominalist and Realist,” where he states, “one person wrote all the books,” as an expression of the pantheistic idea that all authors are one.
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges mentions Emerson’s poem “History” as being induced by the presentiment that the universe is a projection of our soul.
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges credits Emerson with influencing Whitman’s basic ideas.
• In “On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History”: Borges contrasts Emerson with Carlyle. While Carlyle’s heroes are “intractable demigods,” Emerson “venerates them as splendid examples of the possibilities that exist in every man.” He highlights Emerson’s monism, his happiness, his generosity, and his status as a “great intellectual poet.” He refutes Swinburne’s and Groussac’s accusations that Emerson was a mere disciple of Carlyle. He quotes Nietzsche’s praise for Emerson and concludes that, line for line, Emerson is greatly superior to Whitman and Poe.

Empedocles

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges notes Empedocles’ cosmogony, which includes a stage where all elements make up “the rounded Sphairos, which exults in its circular solitude.”
• In “Quevedo”: Borges recounts how Quevedo mocked Empedocles’ belief in transmigration, saying Empedocles was “a man so foolish that he said he had been a fish and then… died as a butterfly on Mount Aetna.”

Erigena, John Scotus

• In “From Someone to Nobody”: Borges identifies Erigena as the ninth-century translator of the Corpus Dionysiacum. He explains Erigena’s pantheistic doctrine that God “does not know what He is, because He is not a what” and is a primordial “nothingness” (nihilum).
• In “A History of Eternity”: Borges mentions Erigena’s “hybrid eternity” in which God perceives neither sin nor evil, and which foresees the final reversion of all creatures, including the demon, to God. He notes this was condemned and his work burned.

Flaubert, Gustave

• In “A Defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet”: Borges analyzes Bouvard and Pécuchet at length. He refutes Faguet’s criticisms, arguing that Flaubert’s use of two “imbeciles” to review all modern ideas is an aesthetic strategy, not a logical fallacy, in the tradition of placing wisdom in the mouths of fools. He sees the novel as a satire and a parable, comparable to Swift and Kafka, and notes how Flaubert, the forger of the realist novel, was also “the first to shatter it.”
• In “Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny”: Borges argues that Flaubert is “the Adam of a new species: the man of letters as priest, ascetic, and almost martyr.” He was the first to consecrate himself to creating a “purely aesthetic work in prose.” Borges praises Flaubert’s pursuit of the mot juste and his belief in the “pre-established harmony of the euphonious and the exact.” He concludes that Flaubert’s destiny continues to be exemplary, influencing Mallarmé, Moore, James, and Joyce.

Gide, André

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges suggests that Hawthorne, in his journal sketches, prefigured the theme of the confusion of art and reality later explored by Gide.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

• In “Quevedo”: Borges states that Quevedo, like Goethe, is “less a man than a vast and complex literature.”
• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges lists Goethe among writers who are “less a man of letters than a literature.”
• In “The Modesty of History”: Borges recounts Goethe’s statement at the Battle of Valmy: “At this place and on this day a new epoch in the history of the world begins.”

Góngora, Luis de

• In “Quevedo”: Borges notes that Góngora is an example of a writer who “laboriously creates a secret work.”
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges states that Góngora was the first to say an important book can exist without an important theme, as the story of the Soledades is deliberately trite.
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges quotes Góngora’s sonnet “Varia imaginación” as an example of the metaphor comparing dreams to a theatrical performance.

Gosse, Philip Henry

• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges examines Gosse’s “astonishing” and “unbelievable” thesis from the book Omphalos. Gosse proposed that the world was created with a hypothetical but detailed past already in place (e.g., Adam was created with a navel). Borges claims two virtues for this “forgotten thesis”: its “somewhat monstrous elegance” and its “involuntary reduction to absurdity of a creatio ex nihilo.”

Gourmont, Remy de

• In “A Defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet”: Borges mentions that Gourmont considered Bouvard and Pécuchet “the principal work of French literature, and almost of literature itself.”

Gracián, Baltasar

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges mentions Gracian as one who used the concept of literature as a formal game.
• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges lists Gracián as an example of a writer whose work, seen as a formal game, can lead to “vexations… formed of surprises dictated by vanity and chance.”

Güiraldes, Ricardo

• In “About The Purple Land”: Borges criticizes Güiraldes’s novel Don Segundo Sombra for its “propensity to exaggerate the most innocent tasks,” stating that Güiraldes “assumes an air of solemnity when he relates the everyday work of the country.”

Gutiérrez, Eduardo

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges says that James Fenimore Cooper is “a sort of Eduardo Gutiérrez infinitely inferior to Eduardo Gutiérrez.”
• In “About The Purple Land”: Borges lists Gutiérrez alongside Ascasubi and Hernández as writers who describe even atrocious events with “complete naturalness.”

Han Yü

• In “Kafka and His Precursors”: Borges cites a “mysterious and calm” apologue by the ninth-century writer Han Yü about the unicorn as a prefiguration of Kafka. The affinity, he says, is in the “tone.”

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges values Hawthorne for his “intense unreality” and that Borges’s essay speaks of the Argentine aptitude for realism, onto which Borges’s own fantasy is grafted.
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges provides a lengthy analysis. He calls Hawthorne a “dreamer” who thought in “images, in intuitions.” He argues that Hawthorne’s “Puritan desire to make a fable out of each imagining” was an “aesthetic error” that often led him to add morals and deform his plots. He asserts that Hawthorne’s “stimulus” was situations, not characters, which makes his stories better than his novels. He praises the story “Wakefield” as being in the “world of Herman Melville, of Kafka” and notes that Kafka “modifies and refines the reading of ‘Wakefield.’” He critiques “Earth’s Holocaust” for being marred by a preoccupation with ethics. He concludes that Hawthorne’s reality was the “filmy twilight, or lunar world, of the fantastic imagination” and that his hallucinatory kind of brutality inaugurated a new American tradition.

Hazlitt, William

• In “Valéry as a Symbol”: Borges quotes William Hazlitt’s description of Shakespeare (“he is nothing in himself”) and applies it to Valéry.

Hegel, G.W.F.

• In “Our Poor Individualism”: Borges states that aphorisms like Hegel’s “The State is the reality of the moral idea” strike the Argentine “as sinister jokes.”

Hemingway, Ernest

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike suggests that Borges’s story “The Waiting” may be a “gloss” on Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and that Borges, with “superior compassion and keener attention,” has enriched the theme.

Heraclitus

• In “Note on Carriego”: Borges quotes Heraclitus: “Enter, for the gods are here also.”
• In “A New Refutation of Time (A)”: Borges mentions Heraclitus’s Fragment 91 (“You never go down to the same stream twice”) and says he admires its “dialectical skill” for imposing its meaning on the reader.
• In “Avatars of the Tortoise”: Borges notes that the universe, for Heraclitus, is eternal.

Hernández, José

• In “About The Purple Land”: Borges judges Martín Fierro to be less the “epic of our origins” than the “autobiography of a cutthroat.”

Homer

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that in Borges’s sketches, Homer is described as a man from whom the “beautiful universe was slipping away.”
• In “Quevedo”: Borges cites Homer’s Priam as an example of a writer creating a symbol that captures the popular imagination.
• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges mentions the Iliad as a classic book against which the realism of Don Quixote is measured.
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges cites the passage in the Iliad where Helen weaves the Trojan War into her tapestry as an ancient origin for the theme of confusing art and reality.

Hudson, W.H.

• In “About The Purple Land”: Borges deeply praises The Purple Land, declaring it is “perhaps unexcelled by any work of Gaucho literature” and “one of the very few happy books in the world.” He admires its dual plot: the visible adventures and the invisible “assimilation of Lamb… to a barbarous morality.” He contrasts Hudson’s naturalness with the artificial solemnity of Güiraldes. He notes that Hudson’s choice of the Banda Oriental as a setting is a “propitious choice” that enriches the hero’s destiny. He concludes by quoting Hudson’s line that he undertook the study of metaphysics but “happiness always interrupted him” as “one of the most memorable I have encountered in literature.”

Hugo, Victor

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges lists Hugo alongside Shakespeare and Donne as a writer who “thinks in images.”
• In “Pascal”: Borges notes that Hugo’s poem “La chauve-souris” contains a reappearance of Pascal’s idea of universes within atoms.

Hume, David

• In “A New Refutation of Time”: Borges uses Hume’s philosophy as the other cornerstone of his argument against time. He credits Hume with logically extending Berkeley’s idealism to deny the existence of the self, making each man a “bundle or collection of different perceptions.” Borges then takes Hume’s argument a step further: if matter and spirit (continuities) are denied, then the continuity of time must also be denied.

Huxley, Aldous

• In “Stories, Essays, and Poems, review”: Borges calls Huxley a “man of letters of admirable and almost infinite variety” and notes his work ranges from the “almost truculent realism” of Point Counter Point to the “abstract and lucid utopias” of Brave New World.

Huxley, T.H.

• In “Time and J.W. Dunne”: Borges mentions that Huxley “derides the pure metaphysicians who distinguish in every sensation a sensible subject, a sensation-producing object, and that imperious personage, the Ego.”

Ibsen, Henrik

• In “On Chesterton”: Borges states that Chesterton reviled Ibsen, but that “the Trolls and the creator of Peer Gynt were the stuff his dreams were made of.”

James, Henry

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges reverses the usual comparison between Wells and James, calling James “sad and labyrinthine… a much more complex writer than Wells, although he was less gifted with those pleasant virtues that are usually called classical.”
• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges presents James’s unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, as the “most improbable” version of Coleridge’s “flower from Paradise” idea. He praises the “incomparable regressus in infinitum” where the hero returns to the past because of a portrait, but must have returned to the past for the portrait to exist.
• In “The Abasement of the Northmores, prologue”: Borges declares, “I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James.” He argues that James’s art lies in the “voluntary omission of a part of the novel, which allows us to interpret it in one way or another.” He praises James’s use of situations that are justified by the characters he creates for them. He concludes by quoting Graham Greene’s assessment that James is “as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.”

Johnson, Samuel

• In “On Oscar Wilde”: Borges compares Wilde to Johnson, saying both were wits who were “also right.”
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges mentions Johnson’s account of a proposal in Cromwell’s parliament to burn the archives of the Tower of London and erase the past.
• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges lists Johnson as a “proper craftsman” whose work results from treating literature as a formal game.

Jonson, Ben

• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges cites Ben Jonson as another “witness of the Word’s profound unity” because, when writing his literary testament, he “simply combined fragments from Seneca, Quintilian, Justus Lipsius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and the two Scaligers.”

Joyce, James

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges, in an interview, stated that “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” was the first story he ever wrote.
• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges uses Joyce’s phrase from Ulysses—“Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel”—to introduce the subject of Gosse’s cosmogony.
• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges mentions that George Moore and James Joyce “incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of others.”
• In “A Fragment on Joyce”: Borges states that a “consecutive, straightforward reading of the four hundred thousand words of Ulysses would require… monsters.” He praises the “multitudinous diversity of styles” and says Joyce, “like Shakespeare, like Quevedo, like Goethe… is less a man of letters than a literature.” He admires Joyce’s “gift for words, a felicitous verbal omnipotence” comparable to Hamlet or Urn Burial, but finds he lacks “the capacity to construct,” which he makes up for with “arduous symmetries and labyrinths.”
• In “Joyce’s Latest Novel, review”: Reviewing Finnegans Wake, Borges calls it a “calamitous” and “unreadable” book, a “desperate and weary game” whose subject is language itself. He finds it to be an “audacious experiment” but also an “artistic failure.” He concludes that Joyce, who began with such clear work, “has ended with mere words.”

Jung, C.G.

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges introduces his essay by mentioning Jung’s doctrine comparing “literary inventions to oneiric inventions, literature to dreams.” He finds this doctrine applicable to North American literature, especially Hawthorne.

Juvenal

• In “Quevedo”: Borges notes that Quevedo’s poetic work includes “variations of Persius, Seneca, Juvenal, the Scriptures, and Joachim du Bellay.”

Kafka, Franz

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that an “analogy with Kafka is inevitable” for Borges, and that Borges finds a prefiguration of Kafka’s tone in Zeno, Han Yü, Kierkegaard, Browning, Bloy, and Dunsany. Updike sees Borges’s conclusion—that each writer creates his own precursors—as a “sensation” Borges has, not just a thought. He also suggests that much in Borges that seems like Kafka actually derives from Chesterton.
• In “Our Poor Individualism”: Borges contrasts Kipling, whose subject is the defense of order, with Kafka, whose subject is “the unbearable, tragic solitude of the individual who lacks even the lowliest place in the order of the universe.”
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges claims the story of “Wakefield” puts the reader in the “world of Herman Melville, of Kafka—a world of enigmatic punishments and indecipherable sins.”
• In “Kafka and His Precursors”: Borges lays out his thesis that Kafka’s work modifies our reading of the past. He lists Zeno’s paradox, an apologue by Han Yü, parables by Kierkegaard, a poem by Browning, and stories by Bloy and Dunsany as works that “resemble Kafka” but would not be seen as having “Kafka’s idiosyncrasy” if Kafka had never written. “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

Keats, John

• In “The Nightingale of Keats”: Borges defends Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” against critics who see a logical fallacy in it. He argues that Keats, by addressing the bird as if it were immortal, was intuitively grasping the Platonic concept that “the individual is somehow the species.” He states that Keats “divined the Greek spirit” and anticipated a thesis by Schopenhauer by a quarter of a century. He concludes that we “inevitably attach its image [the nightingale’s] to John Keats, as we attach the tiger’s to Blake.”

Kierkegaard, Søren

• In “Kafka and His Precursors”: Borges notes the “spiritual affinity” between Kierkegaard and Kafka and cites two of Kierkegaard’s religious parables—one about a counterfeiter in the Bank of England, the other about expeditions to the North Pole—as prefigurations of Kafka’s work.
• In “Fear and Trembling, prologue”: Borges calls Kierkegaard one of the “great religious poets” alongside Léon Bloy and Blake. He notes Kierkegaard’s profound influence on Unamuno and his posthumous fame in Germany. He finds that Kierkegaard, with a “prodigious dialectic,” justifies and sanctifies Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, an act that “transcends all human ethics.”

Kipling, Rudyard

• In “Our Poor Individualism”: Borges states that Kipling’s subject is “the defense of order.”
• In “Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kipling, review”: Borges criticizes those who reduce Kipling to a “mere apologist for the Empire.” He argues that Kipling’s work is “infinitely more complex than the theses they elucidate” and that, compared to his stories, Maupassant’s are “like a child’s drawing.” He praises Kipling as an “experimental artificer, secret, anxious, like James Joyce or Mallarmé,” for whom there was no greater passion than “the passion for technique.”

Lasswitz, Kurd

• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges mentions Lasswitz’s fantasy of a “universal library that would record all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols.”
• In “The Total Library”: Borges credits Lasswitz as the “first exponent” of the Total Library, inspired by Fechner. He explains Lasswitz’s idea of a library made from the recombinations of twenty-five symbols that would encompass everything expressible in all languages.

Lawrence, D.H.

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges lists Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature as a work that analyzes Hawthorne.

Lawrence, T.E.

• In “The Modesty of History”: Borges cites Lawrence’s tribute to an enemy in Seven Pillars of Wisdom as another example of a writer transcending nationality. He quotes Lawrence’s words about a German detachment: “Then, for the first time in that campaign, I was proud of the men who had killed my brothers… They were glorious.”

Layamon

• In “The Innocence of Layamon”: Borges analyzes the “pathos” and “curious isolation” of Layamon. He calls him “the last of the Saxon poets” and notes the paradox that he “abhorred his Saxon heritage with Saxon vigor” by singing of the Britons’ battles against the Saxon invaders. Borges finds him a touching symbol of “personal ignorance,” a man who was the last poet of a language “and never knew it.”

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm

• In “Avatars of the Tortoise”: Borges mentions that Leibniz rediscovered the cosmological proof for God’s existence.
• In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: Borges notes that Leibniz’s binary notation was inspired by the hexagrams of the I Ching.

Llull, Ramón (Raymond Lully)

• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges uses Lully’s “thinking machine”—a frame with revolving disks of Latin words—as an example of the flawed tendency to view metaphysics and art as a “combinatory game.”
• In “Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine”: Borges describes Llull’s Ars Magna as an attempt to create a “thinking machine” to demonstrate Christian dogma through logic. While acknowledging the project’s failure and its current status as a curiosity, Borges defends Llull’s ambition, stating that this “madman of love” sought to invent a “spiritual machine” that could reason about all things, a project that prefigures both symbolic logic and the calculating machines of Pascal and Leibniz.

London, Jack

• In “The Concentric Deaths, prologue”: Borges calls London a “great popular novelist” whose work, while lacking psychological subtleties, possesses an “epic breadth.” He admires London’s ability to create a “primitive, almost mythical atmosphere” and notes the influence of Spencer’s philosophy and Nietzsche’s “blond beast” on his characters.

Lucan

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges lists him among writers who chose lofty subjects for an “absolute book,” his subject being “the struggle between Caesar and Pompey.”

Lucian of Samosata

• In “Quevedo”: Borges notes the common comparison between Quevedo and Lucian, but distinguishes them: Lucian attacked the gods as a “religious polemist,” while Quevedo, centuries later, was merely “observing a literary tradition.”
• In “The First Wells”: Borges notes that Wells praised Lucian of Samosata as a precursor.
• In “Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles”: Borges cites Lucian’s True History and its description of the Selenites as an early example of an imaginary voyage, contrasting its “free and capricious” nature with later, more realistic works.

Lucretius

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike observes that “perhaps not since Lucretius has a poet so definitely felt men as incidents in space.”
• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges notes that the “absolute space which had inspired the hexameters of Lucretius… became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal.”
• In “Quevedo”: Borges mentions Lucretius’s “infinite stellar abyss and the clashing of the atoms” as a memorable symbol from a great writer.

Machado, Antonio

• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges states that men like Machado, who were deeply moved by evocations of La Mancha, would have been incomprehensible to Cervantes.

Mallarmé, Stéphane

• In “Quevedo”: Borges notes that Mallarmé is an example of a writer who “laboriously creates a secret work.”
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges cites Mallarmé’s search for “negative” themes—the absence of a flower or a woman—and his belief that “all the arts gravitate toward music.” He also quotes his famous dictum, “Tout aboutit à un livre” (Everything ends up in a book).

Marino, Giambattista

• In “On William Beckford’s Vathek”: Borges notes that Marino, in his Adone, had described five gardens dedicated to the five senses, similar to the five palaces in Beckford’s Vathek.

Melville, Herman

• In “Quevedo”: Borges cites “the abomination and the love of the White Whale” as a memorable literary symbol.
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges finds that Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield” prefigures the world of Melville.
• In “Bartleby the Scrivener, prologue”: Borges analyzes Moby-Dick as a novel that grows to “the dimensions of the cosmos,” with the whale symbolizing the universe’s “vast inhumanity, its beastly or enigmatic stupidity.” He connects Moby-Dick and “Bartleby” through a central affinity: the idea that “It’s enough for one man to be irrational for others and the universe itself to be so as well.” He also notes that Kafka’s work casts an “ulterior light” on “Bartleby.”

Mill, John Stuart

• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges explains Mill’s argument from Logic that the state of the universe at any moment is a consequence of its state at the previous moment.
• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges mentions Mill’s fear that “the number of musical combinations would some day be exhausted.”

Milton, John

• In “Our Poor Individualism”: Borges mentions Milton as an example of a writer who expressed patriotic illusions, observing that “God is in the habit of revealing Himself first to His Englishmen.”
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges lists Milton among writers who chose lofty subjects, his being “the most ancient of sins and Paradise.”
• In “Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny”: Borges describes Milton’s lifelong dedication to constructing a heroic poem. He notes Milton’s fear of being born too late for the epic, his rigorous self-schooling in languages and versification, and his belief that the poet “ought himself to be a true poem.”

Montaigne, Michel de

• In “Pascal”: Borges mentions that the editor of a Pascal edition cites similar passages from Montaigne, a work he believes could be enlarged.

Morris, William

• In “Narrative Art and Magic”: Borges praises Morris’s The Life and Death of Jason for achieving “that willing suspension of disbelief which, for Coleridge, is the essence of poetic faith.” He analyzes in detail Morris’s technique for making the centaur and the sirens believable through gradual, indirect, and sensory details, rather than direct description. He admires the “persuasive method” and the “striking honesty” of Morris’s narration.

Murasaki Shikibu

• In “The Tale of Genji, review”: Borges calls Murasaki’s novel a “psychological novel” that would have been “inconceivable” in Europe before the nineteenth century. He praises its complexity and the subtlety of its intended audience. He highlights specific visual and psychological details—“the blurred stars behind the falling snow,” a woman instinctively smoothing her hair even though she can’t be seen—as evidence of its refined art.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges notes that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra recommends happiness but has the “principal defect” of not existing. He also recounts the story of Nietzsche conceiving the doctrine of the Eternal Return in the woods of Silvaplana, after having previously ridiculed it.
• In “About The Purple Land”: Borges states that the “barbarous morality” to which Richard Lamb is gradually converted anticipates Nietzsche.
• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges dismisses Nietzsche’s “histrionic Zarathustra” when compared to Shaw’s characters.

Novalis

• In “Avatars of the Tortoise”: Borges quotes Novalis’s memorable line: “The greatest magician… would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?”
• In “The Mirror of the Enigmas”: Borges mentions the “psychological fragments by Novalis” as containing a hypothesis similar to Léon Bloy’s: that the outer world is a forgotten language.

Omar Khayyam

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges mentions Omar Khayyam’s idea that the history of the world is a play contrived by God to entertain his eternity.
• In “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald”: Borges recounts the life of Umar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyami, the eleventh-century Persian astronomer, mathematician, and poet. He details his studies, his reputed atheism, his orthodox interpretations of the Koran, and his composition of quatrains. He then contrasts this figure with Edward FitzGerald and posits that the two, through “death and vicissitude and time… become a single poet.”

Ortega y Gasset, José

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges critiques Ortega for having good thoughts that are “obstructed by difficult and adventitious metaphors.” He states that Ortega “can reason, well or badly, but he cannot imagine.”

Ovid

• In “The Nightingale of Keats”: Borges mentions the “eternal nightingale of Ovid and Shakespeare.”

Pascal, Blaise

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges traces the history of the metaphor of the universe as “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,” from Xenophanes and Bruno’s exultation to Pascal’s anguish. He highlights that Pascal, in his manuscript, first wrote effroyable (frightful) to describe the sphere.
• In “Pascal”: Borges argues that Pascal’s Pensées are less a contribution to solving metaphysical problems than “predicates of the subject Pascal.” He sees the book as projecting the image of a “poet lost in time and space.” He finds Pascal’s manifestation of solitude more eloquent than his manifestation of joy, and notes that God “matters less to Pascal than the refutation of those who deny Him.”

Pater, Walter

• In “The Wall and the Books”: Borges notes that Pater, in 1877, affirmed that “all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form.”

Plato

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges notes that in Plato’s Timaeus, the sphere is called the most perfect figure.
• In “Quevedo”: Borges mentions the Platonic doctrine of transmigration as one that exercises an “obscure charm on human imagination,” a charm to which Quevedo was immune.
• In “Pascal”: Borges references the passage in Plato’s Republic about the painter creating a copy of a copy of God’s Archetype of a table.
• In “A History of Eternity”: Borges provides a detailed explanation of Plato’s doctrine of archetypes, calling it a “motionless and terrible museum.” He discusses the archetype of the bird and the table, and the “incompatible cluster of generic and abstract terms” that populate the Platonic world.

Plotinus

• In “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald”: Borges notes that Omar Khayyam read the texts of Plotinus, known in Islam as the “Egyptian Plato.”
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges mentions that Plotinus was ashamed to dwell in a body and refused to have his portrait painted, not wanting to perpetuate the “image of this image.”
• In “A History of Eternity”: Borges calls Plotinus’s work the “best document of the first eternity,” stating that he “amplifies and splendidly sums up all that those who went before him had imagined.” He quotes extensively from the Enneads to describe the “unanimous universe” of the intelligible heaven and the “motionless and terrible museum of the Platonic archetypes.”

Poe, Edgar Allan

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges notes that Poe “accused Hawthorne of allegorizing and that Poe deemed both the activity and the genre indefensible.”
• In “On Chesterton”: Borges observes that Poe wrote stories of “pure fantastic horror or pure bizarrerie” and invented the detective story, but never combined the two genres, a feat Chesterton accomplished.
• In “The First Wells”: Borges calls Wells “an heir to the concise style of Swift and Edgar Allan Poe.”
• In “Narrative Art and Magic”: Borges uses Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to illustrate a narrative technique where the secret theme—in this case, the terror of whiteness—is revealed at the very end. He praises Poe’s resolution of a specific descriptive problem in the novel.
• In “On William Beckford’s Vathek”: Borges states that Vathek foretells the “satanic splendors” of Poe.

Pope, Alexander

• In “The Wall and the Books”: The essay begins with an epigraph from Pope’s Dunciad: “He, whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds…”

Pound, Ezra

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges asserts Pound practices “the deliberate manipulation of anachronisms to produce an appearance of eternity.”
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges mentions Pound’s practice of manipulating anachronisms.

Propertius

• In “Quevedo”: Borges points out that Quevedo’s memorable line “Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado” (They will be dust, but dust in love) is a “recreation, or exaltation,” of a line by Propertius.

Proust, Marcel

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges has little to say about Proust in Other Inquisitions.

P’u Sung-ling

• In “The Tiger Guest, prologue”: Borges praises the Chinese writer’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, noting that while western literature requires that the fantastic be preceded by the real, in this work “the fantastic insinuates itself into everyday life.” He admires the stories’ “placid tone” and “discreet magic,” comparing the atmosphere to that of Kafka.

Quevedo, Francisco de

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges’s essay on Quevedo begins by calling his “strange partial glory” a disconcerting enigma.
• In “Quevedo”: Borges argues that Quevedo’s greatness is “verbal” and that it is an error to consider him a philosopher or theologian. He calls Quevedo a “student of truth,” immune to the charm of fantastic doctrines. He finds Quevedo’s political works based on a “curious hypothesis” and having “trivial” conclusions, but praises his “lapidary” style. He asserts that for Quevedo, language was a “logical instrument” and that his poetry, while unsatisfactory as a document of passion, contains admirable Petrarchan experiments and splendid verbal effects. He concludes that Quevedo’s best works are “verbal objects, pure and independent like a sword or a silver ring” and that he is “less a man than a vast and complex literature.”

Rabelais, François

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges notes that Pascal could have found the metaphor of the infinite sphere in Rabelais, who attributed it to Hermes Trismegistus.

Rojas, Ricardo

• In “Dr. Américo Castro Is Alarmed”: Borges notes that Américo Castro “venerates Ricardo Rojas.”

Royce, Josiah

• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges cites Royce’s formulation of an infinite regress: a perfect map of England on English soil would have to contain a map of the map, and so on to infinity.
• In “A New Refutation of Time (A)”: Borges cites Royce’s opinion that time is made of time and that “every now… is therefore also a succession.”

Russell, Bertrand

• In “The Creation and P. H. Gosse”: Borges states that Bertrand Russell has “brought up to date” Gosse’s thesis by imagining that the planet was created a few minutes ago with a humanity that “remembers” an illusory past.
• In “Two Books”: Borges summarizes and praises Russell’s essay “Genealogy of Fascism,” which traces the doctrine to Fichte and Carlyle. He approves of Russell’s proposal that schools teach the art of reading newspapers with incredulity.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that few things are more worth remembering to Borges than “Schopenhauer’s thought.”
• In “Time and J.W. Dunne”: Borges mentions that Schopenhauer rediscovered the Indian philosophical denial of the self as an object of knowledge. He also notes that Schopenhauer, in a handwritten note, had already discovered and rejected Dunne’s idea of a second time.
• In “A New Refutation of Time”: Borges uses Schopenhauer’s dictum—“The form of the phenomenon of will… is really only the present, not the future nor the past”—as a key element in his own refutation of time.
• In “The Nightingale of Keats”: Borges uses a metaphysical paragraph by Schopenhauer to clarify Keats’s ode. He quotes Schopenhauer’s argument that the individual is the species, and that the cat playing now is the same one that played there 500 years ago.
• In “From Someone to Nobody”: Borges quotes Schopenhauer’s idea that history is an “interminable and perplexed dream on the part of generations of humans.”
• In “The Nothingness of Personality”: Borges quotes Schopenhauer’s metaphysical answer to the question of what he was before his birth: “I was always I; that is, all who during that time said I, were in fact I.”

Shakespeare, William

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges follows the evolution of Shakespeare’s reputation from “something to nothing,” and that in one of Borges’s sketches, Shakespeare is described as having “no one in him.”
• In “Quevedo”: Borges lists “his worlds of violence and music” as one of Shakespeare’s enduring symbols.
• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges mentions Shakespeare’s inclusion of a stage-within-a-stage in Hamlet as an analogue to Cervantes’s artifice, but finds it less effective.
• In “From Someone to Nobody”: Borges traces the magnification of Shakespeare’s reputation from Ben Jonson’s praise “on this side Idolatry” to Coleridge’s view of him as a “literary variant of the infinite God of Spinoza.”
• In “Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny”: Borges notes that Flaubert believed good lines by Boileau and Hugo were the same, just as a good line by Shakespeare is always good.

Shaw, George Bernard

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes Borges’s praise for Shaw, whose work “leaves an aftertaste of liberation” comparable to “the doctrines of Zeno’s Porch and the taste of the sagas.”
• In “On the Cult of Books”: Borges mentions that in one of Shaw’s comedies, Caesar declares of the burning library of Alexandria, “A shameful memory. Let it burn.”
• In “For Bernard Shaw”: Borges offers his highest praise to Shaw, basing his “conviction of the preeminence of Shaw” on the belief that an author cannot create characters superior to himself. He argues that Shaw’s characters—Caesar, Shotover, Blanco Posnet—“surpass any character imagined by the art of our time.” He dismisses Shaw’s political ideas and jokes as ephemeral, but finds that his work, unlike that of the existentialists who “flatter the vanity,” leaves an “aftertaste of liberation.”
• In “A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”: This is a slightly different version of the previous essay, with the same core argument and praise.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges cites Shelley’s opinion that “all the poems of the past, present, and future were episodes or fragments of a single infinite poem, written by all the poets on earth.”

Spenser, Edmund

• In “Quevedo”: Borges quotes Lamb’s statement that Spenser was “the poet’s poet,” and says that Quevedo, by contrast, is the “writer’s writer.”

Spinoza, Baruch

• In “The Wall and the Books”: Borges quotes Spinoza: “All things long to persist in their being.”
• In “The First Wells”: Borges cites Spinoza’s statement that God “does not hate anyone and does not love anyone” to criticize authors who show aversion to their own characters.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

• In “Borges and I”: Borges (via the character “I”) says, “I like… Stevenson’s prose.”
• In “Coleridge’s Dream”: Borges mentions Stevenson’s “Chapter on Dreams,” where he describes receiving the plots for his stories in dreams.
• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges notes that Stevenson, also the son of Puritans, never ceased to feel that the writer’s task was frivolous or sinful.
• In “The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton”: Borges mentions the similarities between the “fantastic London of Stevenson and that of Chesterton.”
• In “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Transformed”: Borges criticizes the Hollywood film version for moral and structural errors. Morally, it reduces Stevenson’s complex vision of evil to illicit sex. Structurally, it gives away the surprise of Jekyll and Hyde’s identity, which Stevenson saved for the end, turning an allegorical detective story into a simple transformation scene.

Swift, Jonathan

• In “Quevedo”: Borges lists Swift’s “republic of virtuous horses and bestial Yahoos” as another enduring literary symbol.
• In “A Defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet”: Borges notes the affinity between Flaubert and Swift, stating both “hated human stupidity with a minutious ferocity” and wanted to “demolish the ambitions of science.” He cites Swift’s description of the academy in Gulliver’s Travels as an example.
• In “A History of the Echoes of a Name”: Borges recounts the story of Swift, in his final years of madness and decay, repeating the words “I am that I am,” which Borges interprets as an affirmation of his “invulnerable personal essence.”

Tacitus

• In “The Modesty of History”: Borges notes that “Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, though his book records the event.”

Tagore, Rabindranath

• In “Collected Poems and Plays, review”: Borges criticizes Tagore’s work, finding his poetry “always imprecise” and his drama “as weak as his poetry.” He judges Tagore’s fame to be a product of a misunderstanding by Gide, Yeats, and Pound, who mistook his “nebulousness” for mysticism.

Torres Villarroel, Diego de

• In “The Nothingness of Personality”: Borges quotes from Torres Villarroel’s autobiography (“I am angry, fearful, compassionate…”), where the writer “probed his fundamental incongruence” and “saw that he was like everyone else: that is, that he was no one.”

Unamuno, Miguel de

• In “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: Borges notes that Unamuno would have been incomprehensible to Cervantes.
• In “The Duration of Hell”: Borges cites Unamuno as an example of an Argentine writer who is preoccupied with the soul’s destiny.

Valéry, Paul

• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges quotes Valéry’s statement: “The history of literature should not be the history of authors… but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature.”
• In “Valéry as a Symbol”: Borges argues that Valéry, like Whitman, is less valuable for his poetry than for the “exemplary poet created by that work.” He sees Valéry as a symbol of “infinite dexterities,” “infinite scruples,” and the “lucid pleasures of thought.” He is the personification of intellect, just as Whitman is the personification of fervor. He notes that Valéry’s creation, Edmond Teste, is essentially a Doppelgänger of Valéry himself.

Van Dine, S.S.

• In “Capsule Biography: S. S. Van Dine”: Borges praises Van Dine for restoring “intellectual dignity” to the detective genre. He admires the “lucid, austere, and impersonal” nature of his novels and the character of Philo Vance, who solves crimes through “pure reason.”

Verne, Jules

• In “The First Wells”: Borges contrasts Wells and Verne. He finds Verne a “pleasant and industrious journeyman” who wrote for adolescents about “probable things,” while Wells was an “admirable storyteller” who wrote for all ages about “mere possibilities, if not impossible things.” He quotes Verne’s indignant exclamation about Wells: “Il inventé!” (He invented!).

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

• In “The Guest at the Last Banquets, prologue”: Borges praises Villiers as a master of both prose and verbal music, noting his influence on the Symbolists and his connection to Wagner. He highlights Villiers’s use of “irony, hyperbole, and the macabre,” and calls his work a precursor to the literature of paranoia and persecution that would later be explored by Bloy, Kafka, and Leonov.

Virgil

• In “Nathaniel Hawthorne”: Borges mentions that in the Aeneid, Aeneas sees scenes from the Trojan War, including his own likeness, sculpted on a temple, an example of the confusion of art and reality.
• In “Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny”: Borges notes that Virgil consecrated himself to the composition of a heroic poem, the Aeneid, which followed the model of the Iliad.

Voltaire

• In “On Oscar Wilde”: Borges compares Wilde to Voltaire, saying both were wits who were “also right.”
• In “The First Wells”: Borges states that Quevedo, Voltaire, and Goethe were, like Wells, “less a man of letters than a literature.”

Wells, H.G.

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges gives his “highest praise” to the early fantastic narratives of Wells, claiming they will be “incorporated… into the general memory of the species.” He also notes Borges’s admiration for Wells over the “sad and labyrinthine Henry James.”
• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges presents Wells’s The Time Machine, with its hero returning from the future with a wilted flower, as the second version of Coleridge’s “flower from Paradise” idea.
• In “The First Wells”: Borges argues that Wells’s excellence lies not just in his ingenious stories, but in their “symbolic” nature, representing processes “inherent in all human destinies.” He praises the “lucid innocence” of Wells’s first fantastic works (The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, etc.) as the most admirable part of his oeuvre. He deplores, however, Wells’s later tendency to insert his own doctrines into his narratives, which breaks the artistic illusion.
• In “Two Books”: Borges praises Wells’s book Guide to the New World for its denunciation of nationalism and its call for humanity to “suppress our miserable differential traits.”
• In “Wells, the Visionary”: Borges reviews the film Things to Come and contrasts it unfavorably with Wells’s published screenplay. He finds the film monstrous and gruesome where Wells intended dignity and order.

Whitman, Walt

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike notes that Borges values Whitman for his “intense unreality.”
• In “Note on Walt Whitman”: Borges analyzes Whitman’s poetic strategy. He argues that there are two Whitmans: the “poor writer” and the “semidivine hero of Leaves of Grass,” an “imaginary identity” the writer created. He sees Whitman’s plan as displaying “an ideal democrat” by identifying himself, “in a sort of ferocious tenderness, with all men.” He renovates the pantheistic procedure of identifying with all things, not to define the divinity, but to establish a “personal relationship with each future reader.” This, Borges concludes, was a “vast and almost inhuman” task, but the “victory” was no less important.
• In “Valéry as a Symbol”: Borges contrasts Whitman, the symbol of “the morning in America” and the “interjections of the body,” with Valéry, the symbol of “delicate twilight” and the “labyrinths of the mind.” He argues that both are less valuable for their poetry than for the “exemplary poet created by that work.”
• In “Leaves of Grass, prologue”: Borges states that Whitman, more than any other writer, “is his book.” He repeats his thesis of the two Whitmans and argues that Whitman’s “principal innovation” was his use of free verse, which he sees as a return to the primitive verse based on the stanza or syntactic unit. He concludes that Whitman is not only America’s greatest poet but “one of the greatest in the history of mankind.”

Wilde, Oscar

• In John Updike’s “The Author as Librarian”: Updike highlights Borges’s admiration for Wilde, noting that Borges finds “the provable and elementary fact that Wilde is almost always right.”
• In “A Note on Carriego”: Borges notes that Wilde thought Japan had been “invented by Hokusai.”
• In “The Flower of Coleridge”: Borges mentions that Wilde “used to give plots away for others to develop.”
• In “On Oscar Wilde”: Borges argues against the common perception of Wilde as a mere dandy or symbolist. He points out that Wilde’s syntax is “very simple” and that he is “so accessible to foreigners.” He asserts the “elementary and demonstrable fact that Wilde is nearly always right,” citing the correctness of “The Soul of Man under Socialism” and the profoundness of many of his observations. He calls Wilde a “man of the eighteenth century” and a “wit who was also right.” He finds that the “fundamental flavor of his work is happiness,” in contrast to Chesterton’s, and that Wilde retains an “invulnerable innocence.”

Wilkins, John

• In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: Borges describes Wilkins’s seventeenth-century project to create a universal language where “each word defines itself.” He explains Wilkins’s system of dividing the universe into forty categories and assigning letters to classes, differences, and species. While he finds the classification system itself full of “ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies,” he calls the artifice of using letters to indicate subdivisions “undoubtedly ingenious.”

Woolf, Virginia

• In “Capsule Biography: Virginia Woolf”: Borges notes Woolf’s contribution to making the novel a “more intimate and sensitive instrument” than it was for Meredith or Hardy. He finds her work to be one of “infinite and delicate complexity” and her novels “admirable.”

Wordsworth, William

• In “Quevedo”: Borges notes that Quevedo’s pensive sonnets reveal “a prefiguring of Wordsworth.”
• In “From Allegories to Novels”: Borges mentions that an allegorical process can be embellished “to dishonor the reader’s understanding, as Wordsworth said.”

Xenophanes of Colophon

• In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”: Borges states that Xenophanes, “wearied of the Homeric verses,” offered the Greeks “a single God, a god who was an eternal sphere.”

Zeno of Elea

• In “Avatars of the Tortoise”: Borges calls Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise “magical” and uses it as the central theme of his essay. He traces the “avatars” of the paradox through Aristotle, Agrippa, St. Thomas Aquinas, Lotze, Bradley, and Lewis Carroll. He concludes that the “tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason” found in Zeno’s dialectic tell us that the world is “false.”
• In “Kafka and His Precursors”: Borges states that Zeno’s paradox against movement is the first prefiguration of Kafka in literature, making “the moving object and the arrow and Achilles… the first Kafkian characters.”