Mimesis and Time in “El inmortal” by Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

The present work addresses, firstly, two different modulations of the literary mimesis present in “El inmortal”: mimesis as an aesthetic procedure, as a way of writing and inscribing reality in the text (signifier level, I), but also as a fundamental principle of Borges’ literary work, whose writing is, very often, the rewriting of the Western literary canon, its various centers and their peripheries (signified level, II). The third and final section (III) examines the problematization of the concept of time that Borges carries out in his short story. In it, a hybrid temporality is textualized, halfway between the cyclic time of the myth and the teleological time typical of religious discourse without attending the benefits of any of them (the cyclical conception of time as denial of change or the conquest of immortality after earthly life), postulating a metaphysics of immortality as punishment or negation of life