SOURCE: "Borges—Literature and Politics North and South," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 222, No. 7, February 21, 1976, pp. 213-17.

In the following essay, Bell discusses Jorge Luis Borges 's literary output during a fifteen-year period of personal and political crisis, and assesses his subsequent influence on North American literary and cultural theory.

I

Surveying the sum total of Borges's works, one is struck by a kind of "bulge" at approximately the middle of his career. This bulge constitutes the relatively brief spell—1939 to the middle 1950s—during which the Argentine writer produced the stories gathered in Ficciones and El Aleph, as well as the prose parables in Dreamtigers. Until then, Borges had published many of his strangely provocative essays and some lovely books of verse—but little as yet of universal import. Years later, during the 1960s and 1970s, well after his writing career had reached its peak, he...