ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a psychoanalytic reading of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The secret miracle”, a short story about the Shoah, for which S. Freud’s concept of negation and psychoanalytic approaches to symbolization and the functions of fiction form the theoretical background. It argues that the effects of negation, present in literary fiction, become forcefully magnified in the fiction of the Shoah, because of its specific inversion of the relations between life and art. The chapter illuminates the conservation of the relations between external and internal realities as a basic difference between negation and related concepts such as disavowal, and repression, in relation to creative imagination. It provides the story’s perplexing effect to its subversion of fundamental axioms such as temporality and questioning the existence of sense itself. The chapter suggests that the malaise the story produces may stem from the way in which its narrative structure negates time, the fabric from which narratives—and life—are woven.