My concern with the relationship between woman and representation bears directly on the critical controversies raised by Borges' work, specifically the relationship between his formalism/idealism and his textual politics. I will identify (1.) the strategies by which symbols or metaphors of the feminine—as idealized or poetic objects of desire—serve his mystical and metaphysical interests, and (2.) the ways in which the presence of an apparently more localized theme in Borges' work, the machismo cult (benignly understood as the over-determined Latin American male emphasis on courage, honor, and sexual prowess) operates as the inscription of women in a variation of the classic erotic triangle, even as Borges seems to want to move beyond it. By following the gallery of portraits of women throughout his career, one can trace a change in tendency or attitude away from ideality toward corporeality, especially in his later writings. My point will be precisely that for Borges a conceptual ideal always carries an erotic component. Thus I am arguing against the view that Borges' concept of the universal by definition both eludes and excludes the feminine (despite his sentimental idealizing of women), with the ultimate hope of demonstrating that reading Borges in light of gender consideration radically extends our view of his poetics. For, the issue of gender, although perhaps a variable, cannot be read as arbitrary in narratives so engaged in the interplay of metaphor and metonymy. Indeed, the notions of sexual and textual difference are crucially tied to any reading where the claims of power and language, however ungendered (that is, metaphysical) they may appear, are at stake.
To look at how the mystical and the metaphysical converge in a symbol of the feminine in Borges' literary enterprise, it is necessary to elaborate on a poetics that strives to create cultural analogues to sacred texts, but with a twist—for, in Borges' words, "the imminence of a revelation which does not occur is perhaps the aesthetic phenomenon" (Other Inquisitions). Itself the manifestation of certain aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, Borges' quest for the absolute in language at the same time represents the conceptual "impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe [and should not] dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware that they are provisional" (Other Inquisitions). In place of the multiplicity of philosophical and theological systems that express a yearning for an order unattainable to human intelligence, Borges substitutes others, all testifying with ironic and paradoxical precision, to their rigorous relativity. Thus constrained only by the limits of language, he creates a form of speculative thought as ambiguous and provisional as that which we call fiction but which is no more fictional than philosophy.
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