Imaginative Geography: Dialectical Orientalism in Borges

Shlomy Mualem

doi:10.5070/t461030928

Abstract

The following essay investigates Borges’ cultural-ideological stance as an Argentinean writer opposed to national literature and ideological rhetoric. This position will be elucidated via a comparison with Edward Said’s Orientialism which, following Foucault, argues that literature is subservient to the ideological paradigms of the period. The discussion demonstrates how Borges presents a dialectical orientalism in his work: a philosophical-universal position deviating from the delimited framework of national ideology, hereby establishing an uni-ideological philosophical and transcultural view of the interrelationship between “East” and “West.” In line with Said, the essay examines the literary representation of Islam in Western literature, focusing on the image of Mahomet in Dante's Divine Comedy.

Highlights

I believe that Said would regard Jorge Luis Borges as an Orientalist par excellence
Spring 2016 activity in which they are embedded, Said posits (1994, 24) that individual texts and the collective literary enterprise synergistically nourish and augment one another, all cultural activity in the West serving the ideology of Western hegemony
In its attempt to firmly ground its strength and identity, Orientalism outlines an “imaginative geography” that determines and delineates scope of “East” and “West.” Taking Giambattista Vico’s observation that “men make their own history” literally, Said argues that Orientalism extends it to geography: “as both geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made” (1994, 5)

Summary

Introduction

I believe that Said would regard Jorge Luis Borges as an Orientalist par excellence. does he appear to portray the East as mysterious and exotic—“something vast, immobile, magnificent, incomprehensible”—in typical Orientalist fashion but he seems to accept the essentialist distinction between “East” and “West” (Borges, 1984, 42). Within the Orientialist web of representations, literature lies at the service of the ideological myth of the “West.” Wittingly or unwittingly, in shaping the representative figures of Islam, with Muhammad at their head, Dante sought to “characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe” (1994, 71 [original italics]).

Results

Conclusion