The World in a Poem? Góngora versus Quevedo in Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph

The famous ‘Góngora controversy’ plays an important part in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story El Aleph (1944), where the rivalry of the two protagonists is projected onto that of the Spanish Golden Age writers Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo. Thus, El Aleph is transformed into a discussion about the nature of poetry. The link between these seemingly incongruous elements is the theme of the temporal limitations of human consciousness and language, which impede not only our ability to fix the image of the dead in memory, but also the ability of literature to fix the changing universe in a finite poem. The story is not only projected onto the Soledades controversy, but also onto the philosophical discrepancy between mysticism and scepticism, turning it into a highly complex palimpsest. The Góngora controversy – seen in the critical attacks launched at Góngora's encyclopaedic and formally extravagant poem by the ambitious Quevedo, the quintessential genius of Baroque disillusionment – adds depth to the story about the writer‐narrator Borges and his rival Carlos Daneri Argentino. But, more importantly, it points to a Borgesian reception of the Baroque, not only of interest to Baroque scholarship, but also to the field of Borgesian studies.