Fiction in Pain: Mourning and Melancholia in Borges’s Emma Zunz and El Aleph

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the representation of mourning and melancholia in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Emma Zunz” and “El Aleph.” First, I propose a reconceptualization of mourning and melancholia. Starting from Freud’s premises, I rethink both concepts to argue that mourning is a social activity anchored on social frames and that melancholia comes from the impossibility of the social frame of mourning to carry and signify a loss. Then, I discuss how the short stories represent mourning processes that, in both cases, are difficult to achieve since the social conditions do not allow the mourner to grieve.