SOURCE: “To Have and Have Not: Modernist Literature as Fetishism,” in Jorge Luis Borges and His Predecessors or Notes Towards a Materalist History of Linguistic Idealism, The University of North Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 122-41.

In the following excerpt, Read subjects Borges's fiction to a Marxist-psychoanalytic critique.

Critics have been accustomed to emphasize the subjective integrity of Borges in the early part of his career: “En ese período, la psique y la mente, la intuición de la lógica, la pasión y la razón aún no se habían disociado en Borges y se daban en perfecta hipóstasis, por lo que acentuaba y producía unilateralmente, sin doblez ni dicotomía, en plena entidad vital” (Ferrer, 63). The Romantic poet, safely ensconced within the warmth and intimacy of the maternal home, keeps the debased social world at a distance. The poem itself operates as...