Jorge Luis Borges y Mircea Eliade: Dos metamorfosis del laberinto literario

Abstract

This comparative study between eight fantastic narratives written by Jorge Luis Borges - Argentine poet, essayist and writer-, and Mircea Eliade -Romanian historian of religions and writer-focuses on the figure of the labyrinth as a metaphor of literature and an epistemic symbol. The approach is based on Hans Georg Gadamer's hermeneutical theory, holding that texts are "inexhaustible," in the sense that every historical moment generates a new interpretation, and therefore the meaning is produced during the reader's encounter with the text. The argument is twofold. Firstly, based on Mikhail Bakhtine's theory of the chronotope in literature, the work examines the way the labyrinth, a fundamentally spatial figure, acquires a temporal coordinate, in the literary text. Secondly, it argues that there is a significant difference between the two authors, regarding the connotations of the destination that the travellers reach. At the end of their voyage, the protagonists -motivated by the ancestral longing for immortality, the quest for an existential mystery, and the desire to transcend the human boundaries- find something that is linked to the way in which the literary texts integrate elements from anthropological, religious and philosophical discourses. The analysis of their journey toward the centre of the labyrinth leads to a questioning of the nature of the real, an aspect that each author envisions differently. The mythical and theological meanings that can be attributed to the labyrinth in other discourses function in Borges's literary universes according to a different logic. In his works, this figure is mostly a metaphorical configuration of literature, which becomes reproduction of and reflection on itself, and hence its non-referential nature. Paradoxically, in Borges, the real is the experience of the unreal and it is absurd, incomprehensible and unsubstantial. Eliade's literary labyrinths are closely connected to the works of the historian of religions. In his literature, the real is the experience of the sacred and it is, therefore, moving, significant and substantial. In conclusion, the experience through the labyrinth as a literary journey in Borges, and an encounter with the sacred in Eliade are means of accessing a different reality, in the ceaseless effort of the human being to transcend the chronological time.