Fantastic Reality, Real Fantasy: Reading Borges
For my winter break, I am reading Borges. In Borges, worlds collide, or rather they infiltrate one another. They are not the infiltrations of worldviews or of governments into one another, although secret societies are involved. Rather, it is the mutual infiltration of fantasy and reality. How reality becomes fantastic or fantasy becomes real. It is the task of imagining a world. A world of pure imagination, and yet to imagine is to rearrange what you know--or, more accurately, rearrage what you perceive. Perceptions become reversed, as in a mirror, turned upside-down and twisted all around, until you find a world of fantasy, a world of pure imagination. And then, once Borges has set up this alternate world of pure fiction and imagination, he starts pulling the threads of reality. He begins to drain our perceived world of its reality and the imagined world feels more real. In fact, it begins to impinge on our reality, or, perhaps more accurately, this imagined world begins to manifest ...