Borges made a habit of differing from himself. "El otro" and "Borges y yo" are only the most overt examples from a corpus that constantly played with his biography, his beliefs, and his proper name. In his "non-fiction," this Auseinselbstsetzung takes the form of self-contradiction, asserting opposed theses in his own name, celebrating romantico-mystical union with the absolute together with the difference-from-self that makes it impossible. In his fiction, this disseminative impulse takes the form of irony. No difference could be more radical--in the ironic text, not only is every word compromised or crossed-out, but the absent center (what we blithely call the narrator or author) from which the narrative seems to issue is also split. Nor is Borges's irony the relatively simple sort of satire that lampoons a naive view in order to place itself and the canny reader among the enlightened few. He straddled this divide as well, identifying himself with both poles of the ironic text, as though the ignorance he mocked was nonetheless, ineluctably, his own. This even comes across in the relentless humility of his interviews, where he constantly expresses feeling both inferior next to and less vain than--Borges.

The temptation, perhaps the necessity, of avoiding or effacing these self-contradictions is manifest in the most prevalent readings of Borges. The ideas considered most characteristic of his style, such as the combinatoric exhaustibility of language from "The Library of Babel" or the context-dependence of meaning from "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" are precisely the ideas he relentlessly ironized in those very stories. It is hard to say whether Borges would be disappointed or satisfied to see that his narrators were taken literally. After all, one must always ask--which Borges?

The narrator of "The Library of Babel," a librarian living within its stacks, relentlessly asserts its totality and infinity. (1) It contains, according to him, not only all possible permutations of its character set, but all possible meaning; it has existed always, will continue forever, and extends infinitely in space as well. Of course, none of these propositions could ever be verified by a creature conditioned by finitude, limited in space and time. Our narrator takes them on faith. There are several indications that Borges treats these claims ironically, not in order to denigrate the library (as though it could house all possible expression but falls short), but to show that totalizing expression is an impossible ideal. Despite all the ways Borges laces these ideas with irony in the story, it is rare to find critics willing to question the veracity of his narrator. (2)

Though the narrator makes the facile equation that the library contains "todas las posibles combinaciones de los veintitantos simbolos ortograficos" and therefore "todo lo que es dable expresar: en todos los idiomas" ["all possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols" and therefore "all that it is given to express, in all languages"] ("Biblioteca" 98), there are traces throughout the story of both the accidental and essential impossibility of this exhaustion of...