Infinite Regress and the Illusion of Actuality and Participationin Borges＇s The Aleph

作     者：Robin McAllister 

作者机构：Sacred Heart University Fairfield Ct. USA 

出 版 物：《Journal of Literature and Art Studies》 (文学与艺术研究（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2017年第7卷第6期

页      码：656-662页

摘      要：Borges wants his reader to use imagination to participate in his fiction, to imagine the vision of the universe as anAleph. The vision of the Aleph is paradoxical, impossible, inexpressible--a point in space, in the basement of ahouse in Buenos Aires, where all other points in the universe are simultaneously present. The reader sees theAleph--or the illusion of the Aleph, watching it emerge as if through Borges＇ own eyes, as an unrequited lover andfrustrated poet gradually accommodating the infinite vision to the limitations of actual perception. The illusion ofactual presence the reader evokes seems to include the reader as both a subject reading and an object in the *** reader mirrors himself in the enumeration as the reader imaginatively projects associations and expectationsinto the images in order to make sense of them. The reader tries to avoid involving himself in the vision, but theimages the writer presents the reader with are ambiguous, schematic, demanding intervention to try to resolveapparently unresolved contradictions by trying out the different interpretations that may make sense of them. Overand over again in reading the enumeration the reader encounters images that allow him to convert sequence intosimultaneity, part into whole. Other images suggest the presence of infinite, multiple, perspectives on each objectconverging in the Aleph and reveal insights into hidden designs and into secret interiors of structures. The visionthe reader reads must seem to exceed the limits of language and perception. Opposed to images of disintegrationand chaotic dispersal are microcosmic images that suggest a whole reflected or contained in its parts, worldsreflected within worlds by infinite regress. Infinite regress undermines the assumption of a subject and objectdichotomy in the act of reading and enhances the illusion of participation in the vision. Infinite regress, imagewithin image, world within world, is a symmetry that asserts itself against the ill

主 题 词：Borges, Aleph, infinite regress 

学科分类：05[文学] 

馆 藏 号：203230486...