Jorge Luis Borges' Poetics of Narrative Fiction: Magic Causality and Defective Memory

Abstract

This article intends to discuss Jorge Luis Borges’ Poetics of the Narrative, that is, to question the form and the literary devices which make a narrative somehow effective. I shall focus on aspects associated with the buildup of the plot, such as the magic causality, the writing style based upon a concept of selective memory and oriented towards a dynamic and concatenated articulation of the events. The technicity inherent to these aspects increases the interaction between the reader and the text, makes of the former a machine operator of an open mechanism.