Jorge Luis Borges: At Play with Mental Models of the World

Abstract

Jorge Luis Borges: At Play with Mental Models of the World explores mind-world relations through the creative writings and reflections of the iconic Argentine author, along with insights from corresponding findings in the field of cognitive studies. A selection of representative works—stories, poems, and essays—illuminates features of the constructive imagination that Borges sets in motion to personally blend mind and world, a venture to which he dedicated his life to the very end. This book is for readers from a broad range of backgrounds, interested in the interactive workings of mind and world through fiction, the imagination, and embodied cognition.

Over the years, Borges playfully created and tinkered with models of the self, time, fiction, reality, history, solitude, and reciprocity, among other cognitive objects. Arata focuses on a selection of representative works of Borges to examine how he modeled and then remodeled, over time, his perceptions of the world and his presence in it. Of particular importance was the onset of blindness halfway through his literary life, which led him to playfully remodel certain aspects of his early views of experiencing the world. There was also his surprising partnership with María Kodama toward the end of his life, when he went from prizing solitude to experiencing a sense of reciprocity hardly felt before. Arata concludes this exploration with a view of Borges’s burial headstone that is in stark contrast to his youthful idea that his death would happen in Buenos Aires, with his vanishing engraved in cold marble. Instead, Borges chose to pass away in Geneva, and was buried next to an earthy, rough headstone engraved simply with what could be seen as his playful final story.

Ultimately, Arata’s book asks, to what extent does the mind shape our perception of the world? Through his work, Borges provides us with a personal, passionate example of how fiction and reality blend to create a multiplicity of striking meanings and his writings trace the poignant human quality of a life devoted to conjuring meaning through the interactions of narrative models that emerge from weaving dreams, memories, observations, reflections, and choices.