SOURCE: “Borges, Cortazar, and the Aesthetic of the Vacant Mind,” in International Fiction Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter, 1985, pp. 3-10.

In the following essay, Wheelock explains the notion of “magical causality” in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

Fifty-two years ago Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay, “Narrative Art and Magic,”¹ in which he described a common narrative device—that of prefiguration by innuendo—to show how it produces in fiction the effect that he called “magical causality.” Such foreshadowing by suggestion replaces objective reality with an inner reality belonging to the text alone. By addressing the question of causality, and by reminding us that it is not necessarily rooted in everyday truth, Borges put his finger on the essence of an artistic credo that was destined to characterize the main line of Spanish-American fiction from 1940 onward. His essay, long familiar to critics, is attracting...