10 Famous Authors Who Show Up As Characters In Their Own Work

6. Jorge Luis Borges - The Aleph

The Aleph is a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was famously continuously snubbed for the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's one of several stories in which Borges can't be bothered coming up with character names and just uses his own. The story describes an Aleph as "one of the points in space that contains all other points", which sounds pretty trippy.

In the story, Borges meets an overly-ambitious yet mediocre poet named Carlos Daneri, who basically wants to write a poem about every single thing on the planet ever, using the Aleph he claims is hidden in his basement to gain omniscience. Borges detests Daneri, yet demands to see the Aleph for himself, basically because it sounds pretty sweet. When he arrives at Daneri's house, he is left alone in the darkness of the basement, and begins to fear Daneri is planning to kill him. But then, as if materializing from nowhere, he sees it.

I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

Damn. Infinitely cunning, when Borges exits the cellar he pretends to have seen nothing, an attempt to convince Daneri he's actually insane.