SOURCE: “The Stories of Emma Zunz,” in Narrative, Vol. 7, No. 3, October, 1999, pp. 335–56.

In the following essay, Wardi applies psychoanalytic techniques to the interpretation of Borges's story “Emma Zunz.”

In a talk given at the Freudian School of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Borges confessed: “My father warned me against Freud. He was a psychology teacher. He had tried to read Freud and failed, and it may well be that I inherited this incapacity.”¹ But as his professional hosts obviously thought and the reporter of this quotation emphatically notes, this is a case of inappropriate self-effacement. It is true that Borges does not generally show much interest in the psychic life of his characters, whom he tends to subject to the requirements of his plots and his philosophical thematizations, but “Emma Zunz” is a different story. It is an exception that confirms the sense of inappropriate, if not false, modesty...