SOURCE: “Biography of an Immortal,” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 47, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 136-59.

In the following essay contrasting Borges with several literary predecessors, Jullien explores the process by which Borges moves his characters from “existence to essence,” and what the meaning of “immortality” is for him.

“El hacedor,” Jorge Luis Borges's two-page story about Homer, is a biography paradoxically devoid of biographical data. Names and dates—the elements that make up an individual's specificity—are missing. The Maker could be, and for that matter is, anyone. The reader identifies the character as Homer only when the Iliad and the Odyssey are mentioned at the end of the text: “el rumor de las Odiseas e Ilíadas que era su destino cantar y dejar resonando cóncavamente en la memoria humana” (Obras 2:160). Quite appropriately, the author's identity proceeds from his work.

Dispensing with the contingent flow of events, the...