title: Kafka, Borges, and the creation of consciousness, Part II: Borges--a life of letters encompassing everything and nothing.
abstract: The ways in which Kafka and Borges struggled with the creation of consciousness in their lives and in their literary works are explored in this two-part essay. In Part II, a biographical sketch of Jorge Luis Borges is juxtaposed with a close reading of one of his fictions, "The Library of Babel" (1941a). In this story, the universe is an infinite Library, a psychological/literary space comprised of books that contain everything that has ever been or ever will be written. By the end of the story, Borges becomes a character in his own fiction. This development was paralleled in Borges's "real life" as he invented a persona named "Borges," a literary creation that allowed Borges to become a character in a story that was his life. The essay concludes with a comparison of the ways in which Borges and Kafka each used writing as a way of creating his own distinctive form of consciousness, and, in so doing, contributed to the creation of twentieth-century consciousness.
authors.affiliation: Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, USA.
authors.forename: Thomas H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Ogden
mesh_terms: D001364:Awareness; D003243:Consciousness; D005197:Famous Persons; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D012649:Self Concept; D014956:Writing