Verbal realism in a magic world: Carlos Santiago Nino vs. Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

This paper is an investigation of the reference made by Carlos Santiago Nino about Jorge Luis Borges, in the fifth chapter of his Introduction to Legal Analysis, in which he introduces the concept of verbal realism. The production by Borges mentioned by Nino is the poem The Golem, which tells the story of rabbi Judah Loew, who attempted to create another human being in his rituals. Thus, this study develops new considerations on the power of words to evoke things, and the common belief that words intrinsically relate to what they represent. In order to do that, the first objective of analysis is the immediate reference of Borges, the dialogue Cratylus, by Plato, together with other references, such as Goethe’s Faust, which has a similar narrative to the analyzed poem. The question raised is whether verbal realism offers definitions to constitute the universe built up by Borges. Hence, this article concludes that words, in normative contexts, are useful for summoning certain phenomena towards the events, and that verbal realism, then, has a dimension that Carlos Santiago Nino did not explore.