SOURCE: Wicks, Ulrich. “Borges, Bertolucci, and Metafiction.” In Narrative Strategies: Original Essays in Film and Prose Fiction, edited by Syndy M. Conger and Janice R. Welsch, pp. 19-36. Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University, 1980.

In the following essay, Wicks places the work of Jorge Luis Borges within the metafictional tradition of Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, André Gide, and John Barth.

Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote”

If we want to give Borges' story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”¹ a literary ancestry (and progeny), we might find it in a tradition of which the...