Las dos Emmas: vida, trabajo y ficción

Abstract

The “worker Zunz”, the main character in Borges’story “Emma Zunz”, is promoted from textile worker to creator and protagonist of a meticulous fictional fabric. Emma is endowed with an unprecedented power of invention for someone of her class and gender, by which Emma is desidentified and removed from the low visibility in which anonymous subjects of social literature use to live. This duplicity of Emma reappears in the duplicity of a story full of folds, because the disagreement between the Emma that politically counts and the Emma that does not count at all, corresponds to a literary disagreement between two types of story: the tightened plots typical of autonomous literatures, woven around a strong principle of verisimilitude, and the loose text of modern fictions, frayed at its edges because literature becomes life.