Signs of Borges, written by New York University professor Sylvia Molloy, has been an extremely successful book. The Princeton professor James Irby is quoted on the back cover, praising it as the best book on Borges known to him in any language. The theoretical framework is also indicated: ‘With a critical sensibility informed by Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Blanchot, and the entire body of Borges scholarship, Sylvia Molloy explores the problem of meaning in Borges's work by remaining true to the uncanniness that is its foundation.’ So runs the publisher's advertising for this book. This influential book originally appeared in the Spanish version Las letras de Borges in 1979.

Molloy deals with some of the same themes as I do, such as Symmetry, the Double, and a Writer's Precursors, but takes a very different approach. She relies heavily on French literary critical theory, fashionable in the second half of the twentieth century, for the structures into which she slots her Borges interpretations. Her prose is at times dense and arcane, written using a specialised vocabulary. I see the symmetries created by Borges as ultimately aesthetic if applied to art, but potentially dangerous if imposed on reality. I see Borges's use of characters, who are often in some kind of symmetrical relationship with others, as symbolic, but also as potential windows into Borges's own personal intimate world. She refers to characters as ‘combinations of narrative elements organized as personalized paradigms’. In the section ‘Lack of Symmetry: Contamination and the Illusion of Desire’ she writes:

Later Molloy mentions ‘bits and pieces of characters, deceptively unique, deceptively paradigmatic’ which ‘integrate a series where they alternately come into being or are turned into shadows.’ And she describes ‘the character in Borges’ as ‘little more than a prop, a deconstructed support’.