Chaosmos of Labyrinths

Jorge Luis Borges remains, for eternity,1 in the number of the few great writers who―apart from writing texts to occupy the central hexagon of The Library―deserve our admiration and gratitude for turning us into “model readers.”2 Too generous and considered, he would not wish to be responsible for the birth of the ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia. Anyway, Joyce took care of that, once and for all. Borges would have rather wished to conceive the innocent reader willing to be challenged by all kind of metaphysical and cultural, linguistic, epistemological, semiotic interrogations. But he also strove to invent the reader capable of being aesthetically gratified by his lucid, decorous, witty and urbane, finely crafted prose, ordered narrative, elegantly musical diction: thoughtful and gentle as he was, always meticulously attentive to the word and the concept, with their respective and attuned harmonic resonances. In their intrinsic aesthetic and lyrical merit, Borges’s writings deserve our gratitude for an added significant reason. They have guided, inspired, and influenced the birth of other writings, and the art of writing of other writers. They have helped to shape, also theoretically, a new sensibility: all that is sensible and plausible in postmodernism. Williamson is perfectly right when he writes in the Preface to his recent biography: