Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Nov 2019)
De Quincey’s “Piranesi Effect” as fictional device in Borges
Abstract
The “Piranesi effect” is a special literary effect created in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century to connect the representation of the human mind to the experience of the infinite in the context of the popularization of Romanticism in the new media of the 1820s, and as an instantiation of the aesthetic of the sublime. The invention took place in a fragment from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), presenting a plate after the manner of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione that shows Piranesi himself as a delirious hero of his own architectonic imagination. The term “Piranesi effect” was coined in 1963, after this very same passage, by the Northamerican critic Hillis Miller as the name of a general device-experience in De Quincey’s work. More than a hundred years after De Quincey invented the effect, and twenty before Miller named it, Jorge Luis Borges introduced the Piranesi effect as a technique in his experiments in fiction of the 1940s in Argentina. For Borges, this romantic effect acquired the role of a literary weapon in the context of World War II. In this article we retrace relevant moments of this history in order to project some light on the singular scene of importation implied in the Borgesian appropiation.
