If, as Wittgenstein thought, ‘philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,’ then Borges’ prose, at least, performs a precisely similar function, for there is scarcely a story which is not built upon a sophistry, a sophistry so fanatically embraced, so pedantically developed, so soberly defended, it becomes the principal truth in the world his parables create (puzzles, paradoxes, equivocations, and obscure and idle symmetries which appear as menacing laws); and we are compelled to wonder again whether we are awake or asleep, whether we are a dreamer or ourselves a dream, whether art imitates nature or nature mirrors art instead; once more we are required to consider whether things exist only while they are being perceived, whether change can occur, whether time is linear and straight or manifold and curved, whether history repeats, whether space is a place of simple locations, whether words aren’t more real than their referents—whether letters and syllables aren’t magical and full of cabbalistic contents—whether it is universals or particulars which fundamentally exist, whether destiny isn’t in the driver’s seat, what the determinate, orderly consequences of pure chance come to, whether we are the serious playthings of the gods or the amusing commercial enterprises of the devil.
William H. Gass, ‘Imaginary Borges and His Books,’ in Fiction and the Figures of Life (p. 128–9)
