SOURCE: “The Unconscious of Representation (‘Death and the Compass’),” in Variaciones Borges, J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation. January, 1996, pp. 101-12.

In the following essay, using Borges's story “Death and the Compass,” Ostergard formulates a definition of the unconscious as the difference between the reality of a situation and the representation of that situation.

Representation

In the ordinary interaction between man and the world, in perception and communication for instance, the conceptual structure stabilizes the relation between objects and events and their representation in a linguistic or logical form. Contrary to this stable situation, we can say that the fictions of Borges are dealing with singular circumstances in which the relation between representation and the represented dissolves, that is, situations in which representation as such becomes impossible. We then have the following two possibilities. Either the fictions are splendid constructions, and yet they belong to the fantastic...