Egyptian Professor Lectures on Argentinean Writer Jorge Luis Borges

Left to right: Ibtihal Younes and Professor Mona Amyuni

Invited by the Anis K. Makdisi Program in Literature (AMPL), Professor Ibtihal Younes gave a lecture on November 19 entitled "The Influence of Oriental Heritage in Worldview of Argentinean Writer Jorge Luis Borges."

Mona Amyuni, a senior lecturer in AUB's Civilization Sequence Program, introduced Younes as a culturally savvy Sorbonne graduate and a specialist in European and French civilization, who is currently a professor of French literature at the University of Cairo. A multilingualist par excellence, Younes is fluent in Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and German. She is the first female Arab scholar to translate the works of Borges into Arabic, and it is the pervasive influence of that Oriental cultural and literary heritage on his "transcendental literary theory" that Younes focused on in her lecture.

Addressing an eager audience of scholars and students in West Hall, Younes, who has written extensively on comparative cultures of exile, said that Borges's "worldview" is primarily a function of four main principles, in which the universe is a larger-than-life narrative whose incomprehensible alphabet man is continually trying to decipher in order to invent a new human language. However, the human attempt to understand the world, as Younes pointed out, is a "futile endeavor leading to inevitable frustration."

This universal narrative, moreover, is two-dimensional, in that the visible world becomes a mirror reflection of the other world, hence releasing the possibility of multiple interpretations, as explored by Borges in his fiction. Younes noted that the concept of time in the Borges worldview is "a complex tapestry of intersecting historical epochs," supporting the claim that "history is a collage of facsimiles" in which times and actions repeat themselves. Therefore, the Borges worldview culminates, according to Younes, with the principle of predestination, which reduces the human race to "a series of cogs keeping the process of existence on the move."

Younes delineated the paradox of the Borges belief that the production of literature steeped in fantasy and imagination can help man leave his mark on the world. Accordingly, the literary theory of Borges posits that the real value of any kind of fiction lies in its imaginative value, its surreal element, which allows for a vicarious kind of transcendentalism. This Younes described as a state in which the minds of readers and writers alike are able to escape the constraints of mortality and step into a world of magic where human aspirations are finally realized.

Borges, Younes continued, owes a great intellectual debt to the classical Oriental masterpiece, One Thousand and One Nights, which in addition to the Holy Koran largely influenced Borges's worldview. From this masterpiece, which he