"El secreto de los Flamencos", by Federico Andahazi, and the Other Aleph

Abstract

This essay has the purpose of discussing the main issues addressed in the novel The secret of the Flemish, by Federico Andahazi, departing from the texts that have determined its composition. Among these texts, the most influential has been Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph”; not only that the story is mentioned specifically in Andahazi’s novel but also the ideas developed in it depart from the Borgesian concept of the Aleph. Borges’s Aleph, however, comes from the mathematician Georg Cantor, who developed a transfinite epistemological system that Borges makes his own to question what we call reality to later suggest that nothing apart from language is real. Both, Borges and Andahazi, may be classified as ‘ironist’ writers who, being aware of the finitude of the epistemic systems that we humans utilize, develop a style of writing that is characterized by a constant metaphorical re-description, not with the intention of establishing a final vocabulary but to maintain open the intellectual dialogue among the different disciplines that deal with theories of knowledge.