“Emma Zunz” in the Mirror and the Labyrinth

Abstract

“Emma Zunz” exemplifies Borges’s particular use of literary devices, including extra-literary references and motifs that refer to the author’s earlier stories. Among those motifs the most central to “Emma Zunz” is the mirror. The use of the verb “multiplicar” reiterates the phrasing from two earlier stories: “Tlön, Uqbar y Orbis Tertius” and “El tintorero enmascarado, Hakim de Merv.” At the same moment the author only proposes that the character sees her reflections on her way to the port of Buenos Aires but promptly offers another scenario, meaning that the reader’s perception of omniscience is authorial sleight of hand. As in “Tlon,” fiction invades reality, and some of the sources of fiction are identifiable in “Emma Zunz” as the Book of Exodus, a lost silent film called “The Yellow Ticket” and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The convergence of Hebrew and Minoan legends are also implied in the title of the collection, El Aleph through the hieroglyphic origins of the initial letter of the Hebrew abjad.