Circe: Borges
Yet the most profound turn in Borges’s interpretation lies in his reading of the encounter between Circe and Odysseus. In the Odyssey , after Hermes gives Odysseus the herb moly , the hero forces Circe to restore his men and then stays with her for a year, becoming her lover. This is a classical victory: the rational man (Odysseus) conquers the irrational enchantress (Circe). But Borges, in his essay “The Last Voyage of Ulysses” (from Discusión , 1932), inverts this hierarchy. He argues that Odysseus’s stay on Aeaea is not a triumph of will but a surrender to the infinite . Why does the most cunning of men waste a year in idleness? Because, Borges suggests, Circe offers him the one thing he truly lacks: immobility . The hero’s life is a linear arrow—from Troy to Ithaca, through trials and nostos. Circe offers a circle: endless days, transformed bodies, and the delicious horror of not knowing whether you are the enchanter or the enchanted.
In the end, Borges’s deepest innovation is to rescue Circe from the moralizing framework of temperance and lust. She is not a warning against pleasure; she is a prophet of multiplicity. In a universe where time may be circular (as in The Circular Ruins ), where every choice spawns infinite diverging paths (as in The Garden of Forking Paths ), the ability to change form is not a curse but a liberation. The horror of Circe is not that she turns men into pigs; it is that she reveals that they were already pigs , and heroes, and gods, and nothing—all at once. Her magic, for Borges, is the magic of the text itself: a space where fixed identities dissolve, where the reader becomes the writer, and where the only permanent truth is the endless, beautiful, terrifying act of transformation. circe borges
The essay “The Mirror of Enigmas” (in Other Inquisitions , 1952) further illuminates Borges’s Circe. He draws a parallel between Circe’s transformations and the act of reading. Just as Circe turns men into beasts, a reader turns inert letters into living images—a magic no less mysterious. And just as Odysseus must confront Circe without succumbing to her, the reader must confront a text without being absorbed by its illusions. Yet Borges knows this is impossible. We are always absorbed; we are always, in some sense, pigs rooting for meaning in the mud of the page. The hero who resists the text is a myth. The real reader—the Borgesian reader—is the one who, like Odysseus, stays on Aeaea for a year, not to conquer but to linger in the ambiguity. Yet the most profound turn in Borges’s interpretation
In the vast tapestry of Western literature, Circe—the daughter of Helios, the bewitching goddess of Aeaea—has long served as an archetype of the perilous feminine, the alchemist of desire who turns men into swine. From Homer’s Odyssey to the paintings of Waterhouse, she is the ultimate obstacle of appetites: a sorceress of transformation who must be mastered by the heroic (and, in Odysseus’s case, pharmacologically protected) will. Yet when Jorge Luis Borges turns his gaze upon Circe, he does not merely retell her myth. He dismantles it, reassembles it into a metaphysical prism, and, in the process, transforms her from a character of action into a symbol of the infinite, recursive nature of narrative and identity. For Borges, Circe is not a cautionary tale about lust or magic; she is a mirror of the labyrinth—an embodiment of the unsettling truth that reality, time, and the self are all mutable fictions. But Borges, in his essay “The Last Voyage
