The Ethical Superstition

Abstract

In “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader” from Discusión, Jorge Luis Borges attacks what he considers to be a disastrous habit among modern-day readers, referring to the habit of mistaking acoustic, metric, and other purely external technicalities for sufficient proof of literary greatness. However sarcastic and seemingly unforgiving, though, this attack against “a superstition of style” clearly implies that its author, like many critics today, believes in the possibility of an “ethics of the reader” that would not be superstitious—one that by contrast would be, let us say, truthful, or enlightened, or genuine.¹