The Quest for God in the Work of Borges by Annette U. Flynn (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2010 on what left-right entails, or that this dimension does not capture the full content of elite polarization, as in the case of AMLO’s relationship with the PRD. Bruhn aptly compares AMLO’s campaign platform with that of his party, and finds him quite centrist compared to the PRD elite. Yet to regard him as “moderate” is misleading. Even without 20/20 hindsight—AMLO radicalized his discourses following his defeat—he was long known for shrill populist rhetoric. His and his followers’ lack of respect for institutional processes was manifested on numerous occasions even before the dramatic post-election events revealed a fundamental disregard for Mexico’s current democratic setups. As such, the claim that AMLO was “decidedly more moderate than his party” (17) must be qualified. The pro-system/anti-system cleavage may thus be far from dead in Mexico, at least among sectors of its elite. This volume ends on a notably positive note regarding the state of Mexican democracy, backed up by data from its individual chapters. Since partisanship, evaluations of incumbent performance, and economic voting mattered much, Mexico appears similar to more advanced democracies. Yet did this election unequivocally consolidate democracy? One must not forget that while Calderón’s voters found the election clean, only 16 percent of AMLO voters agreed, and the electoral court would later confirm several irregularities. To the extent that a significant section of Mexico’s electorate still believes the electoral dice to be loaded, not all of the readers of this volume may share its sanguine conclusions. Dag Mossige Department of Political Science Davidson College THE QUEST FOR GOD IN THE WORK OF BORGES. By Annette U. Flynn. London and New York: Continuum, 2009, pp. x + 220, $120.00. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind poet who became director of Argentina’s National Library, fashioned his entire literary career on an ironic view of life. One of the greatest ironies concerns the fact that, although Borges at various times professed some version of agnosticism, skepticism, or atheism, he continually alluded to the existence of God in his writings. Given that this seemingly omnipresent spiritual component is so pervasive in his work, it is surprising that relatively few critics have investigated it. Annette U. Flynn (Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese at University College, Dublin) acknowledges Borges’ numerous statements regarding his skepticism, but declines to make assumptions regarding his personal religious beliefs. She does, however, convincingly assert that Borges spent his entire adult life and career engaged in a quest for truth, a “deep, though anguished and complicated” search for God, which she labels “a major and enduring preoccupation” (ix). 100 Book Reviews Flynn divides her study into three parts, arranged generically. In Part One she analyzes the Argentine writer’s denial of self, time, and God in his essays from the 1920s to the 1950s. Borges engaged the concepts of duality , multiplicity, and fragmentation, especially with regard to personal identity, and he was frustrated by the inability to discern answers to life’s ultimate questions. This comes through clearly in his earliest essays, written in the 1920s. Borges was searching during these years for “order and structure; for an underlying (absolute) reality or truth; for some permanence giving cohesion to our fleeting mortal existence; for some purpose” (37). Arguing for philosophical idealism, he concluded that the world was a dream, an illusion, and beyond it there was chaos and nothingness – “no end, no purpose, no cause” (53). The texts from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s reveal the persistent influence of Schopenhauer and Leibniz and convey his ongoing sense of frustration at failing to reach the transcendent. In 1953 in a new prologue to Historia de la eternidad he declares his belief in Platonic Forms, a concept he had rejected in the original 1936 edition of that volume. In Flynn’s view this evolution in his thinking allows the possibility of a form of reality based on faith rather than just knowledge or experience. The second section treats Borges’ short fiction, which he began composing in the 1930s. In these writings he further explores themes first developed in the essays and continues the search for...