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Literature and Ideology: Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen

From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Fri, 2009-06-12 08:26

One of the best modern critics of ideology, Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), often called on literature for the light it sheds on distortions of perspective in politics and thought. The novelists, poets, and essayists, being highly attuned psychologists and social observers, can penetrate, with heightened perspicacity, into derailments of orderly life and the demonic workings of the libido. In previous discussions, I have shown how works as various asHerman Melville’s Typee, the Thirteenth-Century Vinland Sagas, and Ray Bradbury’sFahrenheit 451 illuminate our current, early Twenty-First-Century situation in Europe and North America. In the present discussion, I wish to consider the seemingly disparate cases of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) and the Danish writer Isak Dinesen (the pen-name of Karen Blixen) and her story “The Poet” (1934). I wish also to examine these stories in a framework of Voegelin’s analysis of totalitarianism as a type of secular religiosity or “Gnostic derailment,” a term whose meaning will emerge in the discussion.

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