Victor Farías, a Chilean lecturer at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Berlin Free University, spent years tracking down what he thought might prove the fatal skeleton in the cupboard of Jorge Luis Borges. It is, after the de Man saga, a time for raw disclosures, and Farías, with a nice sense of self-irony and a wary distrust of Borges whom he seems to loathe and love in equal degrees, tells his tale in Humboldt 112 (1994). 'Everyone knows that Borges was a riddle. But few knew that that riddle concealed a well-guarded mystery.' Certainly his political gestures in later years were not calculated to endear him to the liberals or the left of Latin America or Europe. When he visited Germany in 1982, he wanted to meet Ernst Junger, 'the only interesting person in this country'. He had been reading Junger sine his work was first translated into Spanish in 1922.

When he accepted the highest award a writer could get from Pinochet in Chile, he described the country as 'the sword hanging at the waist of America', and alluded to' Heraclitus without irony: 'War is the father of all things'. At an American university, Farías recalls, he asserted the racial inferiority of black people and expressed disbelief that anyone should wish to be of black or esquimo extraction. In 1976 he said to the dictator General Videla who was honouring him: 'Thank you, General. But there are too few terrorists brought to justice.'

There is sufficient evidence in the obiter dicta of the mature Borges to set him beyond the pale for ever. A man of wide influence, he was translated into all major languages. His vehement sentiments, the shadow politics that issue from a rigid aesthetic and consist of a resolute intolerance and a towering vanity, should be identified. Their taxonomy may seem of a piece with those of some of the great Modernists, yet Borges lived through the Second World War - albeit at an ocean's distance. He lived between the ideological extremes of Latin American left and right.

Farías set off in search of three early books - they appeared in bibliographies but the writer had mobilised friends and disciples to ferret them out and destroy them. These books Inquisitions (1925), The Dimensions of my Hope (1926) and The Language of the Argentinians (1928) - vanished from libraries, bookshops, private collections. It was as though they had never been written, invisible fictions among the always strange fictions of Borges's world.

Then Farías found them. 'The surprise I experienced in reading them,' he declares, 'was rather different from what I had expected.' The young Borges whom the old Borges was seeking to erase was not a more extreme creature of the right. 'In the philosophical and literary essays which constitute the three books, the Borges who talks to us is a humanist and democrat, profoundly committed and enlightened, a friend of welcome dailiness, sympathetic and full of the most welcome wit, liberal, even sensual. Someone wholly at odds with the Borges grown out of riddles, of the labyrinths of meaninglessness. What Jorge Luis Borges had buried was not, then, a corpse in his cellar, but a beautiful creature in the graveyard of the postmodern.' The photograph accompanying Farías's article shows a young man close to the nineteenth century, with large dark eyes - a long-faced Lorca, a well-fed Kafka. Not the Teiresias we applauded two and a half decades ago when he came to be honoured at Oxford. Two and a half decades! Almost 1968! And with what respect, with how few ideological misgivings we greeted him.

In 1972 a special issue of the magazine TriQuarterly celebrated him with contributions by Richard Howard, Ronald Christ, Alastair Reid, Robert Alter, John Hollander and others. Laurels did not cease to shadow his brow for the rest of his life. Why was he not called to account, at a time when lesser (and greater) writers in Latin America, the United States and Europe suffered the harsh scrutiny of the young and of those whom history had made pathologically attentive? He was an icon for our generation. He seemed to stand above the fray. In a 1968 interview with Life en Español he made a series of tendentious statements which he then qualified: ignorance, conditioning and other factors made him, he said, an untrustworthy political witness. Nonetheless, with clarity, he defined a series of positions which, even in the mid-199Os after fifteen conservative years, remain extreme. He insisted, however, that his writing was a-political, he tried to keep his opinions out of his creative work, his 'obra estética' (essays? stories?). 'I think a writer can satisfy his conscience and work in a way that seems just to him; but I don't think literature should consist of fables and apologias. It should have the freedom of the imagination, the freedom of dreams.'

He was read, not for his politics but for something else. Not the freedom of dreams - some of the work is nightmarish, but constructed to be so; what is lacking in his Piranesian world of constructions is a psychology (a part from the psychology of the writer which we infer). In a sense imagination is precisely what he lacks, the integrating imagination of a novelist, the penetration of a great poet. Short stories, philosophical and lyric poems: do they add up to an oeuvre? Is it the ur-postmodern, the wily scatter in him that ensures his place on our bookshelves, in conversation, if not in our hearts? He had the specific gravity of a scholar - a fine scholar of Anglo Saxon and Germanic literature, we are told. He was a translator of Hart Crane, Faulkner and Stevens. He was as close as a Spanish-language writer can get to being English or American. These may be secondary attributes, but they are reassuring: he is made of the selfsame clay as English writers. Also the clay of French and Germans who welcomed him.

One critic begins a 1964 encomium with a quote from Yeats: 'Empty eyeballs knew/That knowledge increases unreality, that/Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.' It is perhaps the unreality of the work that seems to make it at once enabling and harmless, something with which critical intelligence can play, as Borges played brilliantly and ironically with a huge range of ideas. The critic who quotes Yeats concludes his piece by declaring that for an understanding of Borges we need critics worthy of the challenge and also 'English translations of his earliest works'. The encomiast? Paul de Man.