An Ordinary crime? The Shift of Identities in Jorge Luis Borges' Emma Zunz (1948)

Abstract

Emma Zunz by Jorge Luis Borges – published for the first time in 1948 in the magazine Sur and reprinted one year later in the collection El Aleph – apparently tells an ordinary crime story centered on the stereotypical and common motif of revenge: a young woman kills the man believed to be responsible for her father's suicide. Right from the start, however, behind this apparently classic story, a series of ambivalences and abysses gradually opens up, with the result that the protagonists motives and positions change permanently: perpetrators become victims, the subject changes to the object of revenge and the original intentions turn into their opposite. As a result of these shifts, something uncanny - i.e. once familiar - in Freud's sense can increasingly be recognized behind the supposedly ordinary crime.