SOURCE: “The False Artaxerxes: Borges and the Dream of Chess,” in New Literary History, edited by Ralph Cohen, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 425–45.

In the following essay, Irwin uses psychoanalytic methodology to postulate the symbolic significance of chess for Borges.

In Borges's first collection of pure fictions, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), the game of chess is mentioned in four of the volume's eight stories and alluded to in the epigraph to a fifth. Let me recall briefly three of these references. In the volume's final tale (the detective story that gives the collection its title), Stephen Albert, the murder victim, asks the killer Dr. Yu Tsun, “In a guessing game to which the answer is chess, which word is the only one prohibited?” To which Yu Tsun replies, “The word is chess.”¹ In the volume's sixth story, “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain,” the narrator, summarizing...