Introduction

This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts.

The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic, fascinated Borges because of its cross-cultural adaptability and metamorphic nature, and because it resonated so powerfully across philosophy, politics and aesthetics.

The Morphological Conception of Literature

From the story and its many variants, Borges’s essays formulated a morphological conception of literature (borrowing the idea from Goethe), whereby a potentially infinite number of stories were generated by transformation of a finite number of archetypes.

Political and Artistic Significance

The king-and-ascetic encounter also tells a powerful political story, setting up a confrontation between power and authority; Borges’s own political predicament is explored against the rich background of truth-telling renouncers.

In its poetic variant, the renunciation archetype morphs into stories about art and artists, with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process: the discussion weaves in and out of Borges to highlight modern writers’ debt to asceticism.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the enigmatic appeal of the renunciation story aligns it with the open-endedness of modern parables.