Narrative Aspect Change and Alternating Systems of Justice: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Borges

In his preface to the short story collection Doctor Brodie’s Report (1970), Jorge Luis Borges remarks: “I want to make it quite clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a preacher of parables or a fabulist and is now known as a committed writer. I do not aspire to be Aesop.” Borges denies here a moralistic or didactic dimension to his writing—a position which remains consistent throughout his writing and seems to be intimately linked with his view of poetic inspiration as an irrational event and of himself as a “dreamweaver.” At the same time, he remarks that in his works he has been able to achieve a “modest and secret complexity.” y aim in this essay is to unravel one of the dreamweaver’s yarns, the short story “Emma Zunz” from the collection The Aleph (1949), and to present the narrative and ethical foundations of the “modest and secret complexity” of which Borges speaks.