Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I” describes his own real-life, normal version of multiple personality, but literary critics think it is philosophy or a joke

Borges (1899-1986), according to Wikipedia, was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator. In 1955, about the same time he became completely blind, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961, he came to international attention when he shared a literary prize with Samuel Beckett. His work embraces the “character of unreality in all literature.” In the words of Nobel Prize novelist J. M. Coetzee, Borges, “more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.”

However, since Borges’s writing includes many avowed literary hoaxes, he had the same problem as Mark Twain, who complained that nobody believed him when he told the truth. His brief essay, “Borges and I,” rather than being read as a straightforward admission of multiple personality, has been misinterpreted as humor or philosophy.

But here is where Borges, in his real life, was coming from: “The boy was a worry to his parents…He was an extremely anxious child…He used to have bad dreams about peeling off his face and finding someone else’s beneath it, or of taking off a mask only to discover that he was wearing another. Similar anxieties invaded his waking life, too: He was frightened of mirrors…at times he imagined he could see someone else's face staring back at him…” (1, p. 38).

If you search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog, you will find posts about the clinically well-known fact that people with multiple personality sometimes see their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror.

Borges and I (translated from the Spanish) by Jorge Luis Borges

It’s to that other one, to Borges, that things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause, one could say mechanically, to gaze at a vestibule’s arch and its inner door; of Borges I receive news in the mail and I see his name in a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of [Robert Louis] Stevenson; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live so that Borges may write his literature, and this literature justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that he has put together some decent passages, yet these passages cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to live on in the other. Little by little, I continue ceding to him everything, even though I am aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and magnify.

Spinoza understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger. I will endure in Borges, not in myself (if it is that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in those of many others, or in the well-worn strum of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’ and I will have to conceive of other things. Thus my life is a running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.

I do not know which of the two is writing this piece.

1. Edwin Williamson. Borges: A Life. New York, Viking, 2004.