Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges in 1951, by Grete Stern
Born Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo
24 August 1899(1899-08-24)
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died 14 June 1986(1986-06-14) (aged 86)
Geneva, Switzerland
Occupation Writer, poet, critic, librarian
Language Spanish

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), best known as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxorxe ˈlwiz ˈβorxes]), was an Argentine writer, essayist, and poet born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school and traveled to Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize, the Prix Formentor. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1986.

His work embraces the "chaos that rules the world and the character of unreality in all literature."[1] His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of magical realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century.[2][3][4] Scholars have suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. Borges commented "poets, like the blind, can see in the dark".[5] Borges wrote: "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who knows themselves better than the blind?' - for every thought becomes a tool." [6] The poems of his late period dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Luís de Camões, and Virgil.

His international fame was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the "Latin American Boom" and the success of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).[2] Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."[7]

Contents

Life and career

Early life and education

Jorge Luis Borges was born to an educated middle-class family. They were in comfortable circumstances, but were not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires, they resided in Palermo, then a poorer suburb of the city. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of "pure" criollo, (Spanish) descent. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and she spoke often of their heroic actions. [8]Borges's 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borges grew up hearing about the faded family glory.

On the other side, Borges's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English, also the son of a colonel. Haslam, whose mother was English, grew up speaking English at home, and took his own family frequently to Europe. England and English pervaded the family home.[8] Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt." He wrote, "as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action." [8]

Borges was taught at home until he age of 11, bilingual, reading Shakespeare in English at the age of twelve. [8] The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library".[9] His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son. In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland and spent the next decade in Europe. [8]Haslam Borges was treated by a Geneva eye specialist, while his son and daughter Norah attended school, where Borges junior learned French. He read Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was 18, he met Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that would last the rest of his life. [8] He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war, staying until 1921. After World War I, the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. [8]

At that time Borges discovered the writing of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915) which became influential to his work. In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernist Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Apollinaire and Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea", written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia.[10] While in Spain, he met noted Spanish writers, including Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

Early writing career

Jorge Luis Borges in 1940s, photograph taken from "Historia de la Literatura Argentina Vol II" (1968)

In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires. He had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies". [8] He brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. In 1930, Nestor Ibarra called Borges the "Great Apostle of Criollismo", celebrating Latin American regionalism.[11] Borges published his first published collection of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires in 1923 and contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro. Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications, and attempted to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.[12]

By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and fiction. He worked in a style that Ana María Barrenechea has called "irreality." Many other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier, were also investigated these themes, influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. In this vein, his biographer Williamson underlines how careful readers must be not to infer a biographical basis for Borges's work as books, philosophy and imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as personal experience, if not more so. [8] From the first issue, Borges was a regular contributor to Sur (South), founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and helped Borges find is fame.[13] Ocampo introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known figure of Argentine literature, who was to become a frequent collaborator and close friend. Together they wrote a number of works, some under the nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series and fantasy stories. During these years a family friend Macedonio Fernández became a major influence on Borges. The two would preside over discussions in cafés, country retreats, or Fernández' tiny apartment in the Balvanera district.

In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at the literary supplement of the newspaper Crítica, where he first published the pieces later collected as the Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy, 1936). [8] The book included two types of writing. The first lay somewhere between non-fictional essays and short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consisted of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works. In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores and wrote weekly columns for El Hogar, which appeared from 1936 to 1939. In 1938, Borges found work as first assistant at the Buenos Aires Municipal Library in Miguel Cané, a working class area. There were so few books, that cataloguing more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff and so look bad. The task took him about an hour and day and rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing articles, short stories and translations. [8]

Later career

Borges in 1976.

Borges's father died in 1938, a tragedy for the writer, as father and son were very close. On Christmas Eve that year, Borges suffered a severe head wound; during treatment, he nearly died of septicemia. While recovering from the accident, Borges began playing with a new style of writing, for which he would become famous. His first story written after his accident, "Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote" came in May 1939, examining the father-son relationship and the nature of authorship. His first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), appeared in 1941, composed mostly of works previously published in Sur. [8] The title story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.[14][15] Eight stories over sixty pages, the book was generally well received, but El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected.[16][17] Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1941 issue of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges". Numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the "reparation" project.

With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. [Notes 1][18][19] Borges became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as President of the Argentine Society of Writers, and as Professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story "Emma Zunz" was made into a film (under the name of Días de odio (Days of Hate), directed in 1954 by the Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson).[20] Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.

By the late -1950s, he had become completely blind, as had one of his best known predecessors, Paul Groussac, for whom Borges wrote an obituary. [8] Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch
this declaration of the mastery
of God who, with magnificent irony,
granted me both the gift of books and the night.

The following year Borges was awarded the National Prize for Literature from the University of Cuyo, and the first of many honorary doctorates. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, while frequently holding temporary appointments at other universities. As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help. When he was not able to read and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his mother, to whom he had always been close, became his personal secretary. When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.

International renown

Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H. R. Hays.[21] [Notes 2] "The Garden of Forking Paths", one of the first Borges stories to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, translated by Anthony Boucher.[22] Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s, his international fame dates from the early 1960s.[23] In 1961 he received the first International Publishers' Prize, the Prix Formentor, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges was still largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In 1962 two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths. In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. In 1980 he was awarded the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; numerous other honors were to accumulate over the years, such as the French Legion of Honour in 1983, the Cervantes Prize, and a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre".[24]

In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. He also continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings, (1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975). He also lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays).

Later personal life

Quotation by Borges at Buenos Aires Madrid Metro station: "It smacks of fiction that Buenos Aires was ever founded. I judge her to be as eternal as the sea and the wind."

In 1967 Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99.[25] Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.[26] From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay.

Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in 1986 in Geneva and was buried there in the Cimetière des Rois. After years of legal wrangling about the legality of the marriage, Kodama, as sole inheritor of a significant annual income, gained control over his works. Her administration of his estate was denounced by the French publisher Gallimard, by Le Nouvel Observateur, and by intellectuals such as Beatriz Sarlo, as an obstacle to the serious reading of Borges's works.[27] Under Kodama, the Borges estate rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges himself cooperated, and from which di Giovanni received fifty percent of the royalties. The estate commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley.[28]

Political opinions

Anti-Communism

In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges stated that his opposition to Marxism and Communism was absorbed in his childhood. "Well, I have been brought up to think that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual."[29] After the overthrow by a military coup of the democratically elected second term of Peron in 1955, Borges supported efforts to purge Argentina's Government of Peronists and dismantle the former President's welfare state. He was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges' opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estella Canto. In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for Communists within the Latin American intelligentsia. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred to Chilean Pablo Neruda as, "a very fine poet, but a, "very mean man" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States.[30] During the 1970s, Borges' expressed support for Argentina's military junta, but was scandalized by the mass killings of suspected Communists during the Dirty War.

Opposition to Peronism

When President Juan Domingo Perón began transforming Argentina into a populist regime, in 1946, with the assistance of his wife Evita, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the new order were dismissed from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that he was being "promoted" from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, "Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?"[31] The following day, Borges resigned from Government service in response to an insult he would never forget, or forgive.

Peron's treatment of Borges became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. It said,

"Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine virtue."[32]

In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by Anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then suffering from depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Peron was President and feel deeply depressed and ashamed. Peron's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with indifference. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors."[33] Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the regime. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'."[33]

After Evita's death on July 26, 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges told them he would do nothing of the sort and that it was a ridiculous demand. He was told he would face the consequences."[34] The regime placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September it ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Peron, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State and very few active members remained. Borges later came to believe that the Peronistas had manipulated his appointment in order to destroy his influence over Argentine writers and intellectuals.

In 1955, after General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's military coup, named the "Revolución Libertadora", forced Peron into exile, the military dictatorship appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library.[35] However, Peron's fall did not in any way alter Borges's feelings towards Peron. In an interview with Richard Burgin in 1967, he said "Peron was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Peron could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute."[36]

When Peron returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for National Geographic, he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humilate me as they did before my books sold well."[37] After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, "I resented Peron's making Argentina look ridiculous to the world... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentinians hesitated to wear bandaids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the Atomic Bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because Argentina really has world class scientists."[37]

After Borges' death in 1986, the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writer's memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party stated that this was in reaction to, "certain declarations he had made about the country." [38] One Peronist declared that Borges had made statements about Evita Peron which were, "unacceptable." Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, a storm raged when Peronist politicians decided to give only conditional support for a condolence on the writer's death. [38]

Works

Borges in L'Hôtel, Paris

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. But whatever his particular literary rank, he was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power." [39]

In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction was a 14 page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971. [8] He was a prominent translator of English-, French- and German-language literature into Spanish, including works in Old English and Norse. His late-onset blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.

Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress. His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. For example, his interest idealism is reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in his essay "A New Refutation of Time", "On Exactitude in Science", and in his poem "Things". Similarly, a common thread runs through his story "The Circular Ruins" and his poem "El Golem" ("The Golem").

Borges was a notable translator. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story The Happy Prince into Spanish when he was nine.[40] At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of the Prose Edda. He also translated (while simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling, Gide, Whitman and Woolf. [Notes 3] Borges wrote on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid. Borges also employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.

Hoaxes and forgeries

Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg[Notes 4] or One Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero.[Notes 4] Several of these are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.

At times he wrote reviews of nonexistent work, by some other person. The key example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who tries to write Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote verbatim, not by having memorized Cervantes' work, but as an "original" narrative of his own invention. Initially the Frenchman tries to immerse himself in sixteenth-century Spain, but dismisses the method as too easy, instead trying to reach Don Quixote through his own experiences. He finally manages to (re)create "the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two." Borges's "review" of the work of the fictional Menard uses tongue-in-cheek comparisons to explore the resonances which Don Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written. He discusses how much "richer" Menard's work is than that of Cervantes, (even though the actual text is exactly the same).

While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, Borges developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva "[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart." [41] In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven, remarking, however, that "those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books." [42]

Criticism of Borges' work

Borges's change in style from criollismo to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as Contorno, a left-of-center, Sartre-influenced publication founded by the Viñas brothers (Ismael & David), Noé Jitrik, Adolfo Prieto, and other intellectuals. Contorno "met with wide approval among the youth [...] for taking the older writers of the country to task on account of [their] presumed inauthenticity and their legacy of formal experimentation at the expense of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems".[43]

Borges and Eduardo Mallea were criticized for being "doctors of technique"; their writing presumably "lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality [...] that they inhabited", an existential critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork. [43]

Nobel Prize omission

Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer.[8] He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour.[44] Borges commented "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me." [45] Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award because of his conservative political views; or more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from dictator Augusto Pinochet.[46][47]

Influences, collaborations, and themes

Special two-Argentine pesos coin featuring Borges, 1999

Fact, fantasy and non-linearity

Many of Borges's most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths and reality. Williamson writes,"His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author’s ability to generate 'poetic faith' in his reader." [8]His stories often have fantastical themes, such as "The Library of Babel" containing every possible 410-page text, a man who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a year of time standing still, given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). Borges also told more and less realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic: fact with fiction. His interest in compounding fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights", while The Book of Imaginary Beings is a thoroughly (and obscurely) researched bestiary of mythical creatures. [48] In the preface, Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition." [48] Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom Borges coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967, often under different pseudonyms including H. Bustos Domecq. Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy, crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery. [Notes 4]

Due to the success of "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941), the term "Borgesian" came to reflect a quality of narrative non-linearity. [Notes 5] This title story presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make." [49] The "forking paths" have "branches" to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. [49]

Multiculturalism

Borges's work maintained a universal perspective that reflected a multi-ethnic Argentina, exposure from an early age to his father's substantial collection of world literature, and lifelong travel experience. At the time of Argentine independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo, (of Spanish ancestry). The Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, led to waves of immigration from Europe and Asia and in the following decades and the Argentine national identity diversified. [8] Borges therefore was writing in a heavily mutli-cultural and strongly European literary context, and worked immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. Borges's writing is also steeped by influences and informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including mainline religious figures, heretics, and mystics. Heretical forms of Christianity, for example, make a dominant appearance in the short story "Three Versions of Judas". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the story, is characteristic of Borges' approach to theology in his literature.

He described himself, saying "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors." [45] As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas where the boundaries of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil blurred. He lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student, travelling Europe. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, ending his life in Geneva where he had been a boy. Drawing on influences of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism. [50] Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of the Argentina, are especially pronounced in Six Problems for Don Isidoro Parodi (co-authored with Adolfo Bioy Casares) and "Death and the Compass", which may or may not be set in Buenos Aires. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican essayist Alfonso Reyes "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time." [51]

Argentine culture

Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history . Borges's first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borges's writings on things Argentine, include Argentine culture ("History of the Tango"; "Inscriptions on Horse Wagons"), folklore ("Juan Muraña", "Night of the Gifts"), literature ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition", "Almafuerte"; "Evaristo Carriego") and national concerns ("Celebration of The Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores"). Ultra-nationalists, however, continued to question his Argentine identity. [50]

Borges's interest in Argentine themes reflects, in part, the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the civil wars in what is now Argentina and Uruguay. Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (for example, "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," "The Dead Man," "Avelino Arredondo") as well as poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Isidoro Suárez , was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín." The city of Coronel Suárez in the south of Buenos Aires Province is named after him.

His non-fiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem Martín Fierro explore specifically Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as "La muerte y la brújula", used Argentine models without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine culture as 'exotic'. [50] In his essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof enough that it was an Arabian work. He suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel. [50]He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos (subjects he himself used).

Martín Fierro and Argentine tradition

Borges contributed to a few avant garde publications in the early 1920s, including one called Martín Fierro, named after the major work of 19th century Argentine literature, Martín Fierro, a gauchesque poem by José Hernández, published in two parts, in 1872 and 1880. Initially, along with other young writers of his generation, Borges rallied around the fictional Martín Fierro as the symbol of a characteristic Argentine sensibility, not tied to European values. As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the poem. Hernández's central character, Martín Fierro, is a gaucho, a free, poor, pampas-dweller, who is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend against the Indians; he ultimately deserts and becomes a gaucho matrero, the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges's 1953 book of essays on the poem, El "Martín Fierro", separates his great admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his rather mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. He uses the occasion to tweak the noses of arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem, but disdains those (such as Eleuterio Tiscornia) whom he sees as failing to understand its specifically Argentine character.

In "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses that character in the crucial scene in which Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs about universal themes such as time, night, and the sea. The scene clearly reflects the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes — as distinct from the type of slang that Hernández uses in the main body of Martín Fierro. Borges points out that therefore, Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry on universal themes, versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati. Borges goes on to deny the possibility that Argentine literature could distinguish itself by making reference to "local color", nor does it need to remain true to the heritage of the literature of Spain, nor to define itself as a rejection of the literature of its colonial founders, nor follow in the footsteps of European literature. He asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to define Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the world from the point of view of someone who has inherited the whole of world literature.

Borges uses Martín Fierro and El Moreno's competition as a theme once again in "El Fin" ("The End"), a story that first appeared in his short story collection Artificios (1944). "El Fin" is a sort of mini-sequel or conclusion to Martín Fierro. In his prologue to Artificios, Borges says of "El Fin," "Everything in the story is implicit in a famous book [Martín Fierro] and I have been the first to decipher it, or at least, to declare it."

Modernism and Existentialism

Borges lived through most of the 20th century, and was rooted in the Modernist pre-dominant in its early years. He was especially influenced by Symbolism.[52] Like contemporary novelists Vladimir Nabokov and the older James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with broader perspectives. He also shared their multilingualism and their inventiveness with language (they, like Borges, were both also buried in Switzerland). However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works as they grew older, Borges remained a miniaturist. Borges's work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque," while Joyce's and Nabokov's moved towards it: his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented the tool, then Borges were more interested about how the tool could be used to relate to people. [39]

Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borges's greatest artistic production. It has been argued that his choice of topics largely ignored existentialism's central tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, "Whatever Borges's existential anxieties may be, they have little in common with Sartre's robustly prosaic view of literature, with the earnestness of Camus' moralism, or with the weighty profundity of German existential thought. Rather, they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits."[53]

Political influences

As a political conservative, Borges "was repulsed by Marxism in theory and practice. Abhorring sentimentality, he rejected the politics and poetics of cultural identity that held sway in Latin America for so long." [54] As a universalist, his interest in world literature reflected an attitude that was also incongruent with the Perónist Populist nationalism. That government's confiscation of Borges's job at the Miguel Cané Library fueled his skepticism of government. He labeled himself a Spencerian anarchist in the introduction to Atlas.

In 1934, extreme Argentine nationalists, sympathetic to the growing Nazi ideology of the time, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not a full Argentine. Borges responded with the essay "Yo Judío" ("I, a Jew"), a reference to the old "Yo, Argentino" ("I, an Argentine"), a phrase used during nationalistic beatings of Argentine Jews to make it clear to approaching attackers that one was a "true" Argentine, and not a Jew. [55] In the essay he notes, that he would be proud to be a Jew, with a backhanded reminder that any "pure" Castilian might be likely to have Jewish ancestry from a millennium ago.[55]

Mathematics

A book by Argentine mathematician and writer, Guillermo Martínez, was published in 2003, collecting the transcript of a series of talks given by him in the MALBA auditorium, concerning how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martínez believes that Borges had at the very least a superficial knowledge of set theory and several other topics, as he seems to handle them with great elegance in his stories; an example of this would be Borges' "The Book of Sand", which always has a page in between the others, thus making it infinite, and its pages infinitely thin; this being a very clear nod to Cantor's set theory.

Sexuality

There has been discussion of Borges's attitudes towards sex and women. It is undeniable that, with a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from the majority of his fictional output.[56] For instance, the plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends, but Borges made their fictional counterparts brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.[57] Borges dismissed these suggestions.

There are, however, instances in Borges's writings of heterosexual love and attraction. The story "Ulrikke" from The Book of Sand tells a romantic tale of heterosexual desire, love, trust and sex. The protagonist of "El muerto" clearly relishes and lusts after the "splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira.[58] Later he "sleeps with the woman with shining hair".[59] "El muerto" ("The Dead Man") contains two separate examples of definitive gaucho heterosexual lust.

Other themes

Notes

  1. ↑ "His was a particular kind of blindness, grown on him gradually since the age of thirty and settled in for good after his fifty-eighth birthday." From , Alberto Manguel (2006) With Borges, London:Telegram Books p 15-16.
  2. ↑ The Borges poems in H. R. Hays, ed. (1943) 12 Spanish American Poets are "A Patio," "Butcher Shop," "Benares," "The Recoleta," "A Day's Run," "General Quiroga Rides to Death in a Carriage," "July Avenue," and "Natural Flow of Memory."
  3. ↑ Notable translations also include work by Melville, Faulkner, Sir Thomas Browne, and G. K. Chesterton.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 His imitations of Swedenborg and others were originally passed off as translations, in his literary column in Crítica. "El Teólogo" was originally published with the note "Lo anterior...es obra de Manuel Swedenborg, eminente ingeniero y hombre de ciencia, que durante 27 años estuvo en comercio lúcido y familiar con el otro mundo." ("The preceding [...] is the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, eminent engineer and man of science, who during 27 years was in lucid and familiar commerce with the other world.") Bibliografía cronológica de la obra de Jorge Luis Borges ("Chronological bibliography of the work of Jorge Luis Borges"), Borges Center, University of Iowa. Retrieved 7 November 2006.
  5. ↑ Non-linarity was key to the development of digital media. See Murray, Janet H. "Inventing the Medium" The New Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003

References

  1. ↑ Jozef, Bella. "Borges: linguagem e metalinguagem". In: O espaço reconquistado. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1974, p.43.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 (Portuguese) Masina, Lea. (2001) "Murilo Rubião, o mágico do conto". In: O pirotécnico Zacarias e outros contos escolhidos. Porto Alegre: L & PM, p5.
  3. ↑ (Portuguese)__, "O maravilhoso no Novo Mundo: ecologia e discurso", (1992) Ecologia e discurso. Rio de Janeiro, Tempo Brasileiro p. 115-129.
  4. ↑ Theo L. D’Haen (1995) "Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Descentering Priviledged Centers", in: Louis P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community. Duhan and London, Duke University Press p. 191-208.
  5. ↑ From the song "Choro Bandido" ("Crying Bandit", literally) by Chico Buarque and Edu Lobo quoted in Ferriera, Eliane Fernanda C. "O (In) visível imaginado em Borges". In: Pedro Pires Bessa (ed.). Riqueza Cultural Ibero-Americana. Campus de Divinópolis-UEMG, 1996, p. 313-314. In short, Borges's blindness led him to favour poetry and shorter narratives over novels.
  6. ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis. (1994) Siete Noches. Obras Completas, vol. III. Buenos Aires: Emecé
  7. ↑ Coetzee, J.M. "Borges's Dark Mirror", New York Review of Books, Volume 45, Number 16 · October 22, 1998
  8. ↑ 8.00 8.01 8.02 8.03 8.04 8.05 8.06 8.07 8.08 8.09 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 8.14 8.15 8.16 "Don’t abandon me" Tóibín, Colm London Review of Books 2006-05-11. Retrieved 2009-04-19
  9. ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis, "Autobiographical Notes", The New Yorker, 19 September 1970.
  10. ↑ Wilson, Jason (2006). Jorge Luis Borges. Reaktion Books. p. 37. ISBN 1861892861. 
  11. ↑ Borges Center, University of Pittsburg. Accessed 2010-08-16
  12. ↑ Borges: Other Inquisitions 1937-1952. Full introduction by James Irby. University of Texas ISBN 9780292760028 Accessed 2010-08-16
  13. ↑ Ivonne Bordelois, "The Sur Magazine" Villa Ocampo Website
  14. ↑ Bolter, Jay David; Joyce, Michael (1987). "Hypertext and Creative Writing". Hypertext '87 Papers. ACM. pp. 41–50. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=317431. 
  15. ↑ Moulthrop, Stuart (1991). "Reading From the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of 'Forking Paths'". In Delany, Paul; Landow, George P.. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press. 
  16. ↑ "Borges, Jorge Luis (Vol.32)". enotes. http://www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/borges-jorge-luis. Retrieved 2008-12-03. 
  17. ↑ Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Montfort, Nick (2003). The New Media Reader. MIT Press.
  18. ↑ , Alberto Manguel (2006) With Borges, London:Telegram Books p 15-16.
  19. ↑ Woodall, J: The Man in Mirror of the Book, A Life of Luis Borges, (1996) Hodder and Stoughton pxxx.
  20. ↑ "Days of Hate". Imdb. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046947/. Retrieved 2008-12-04. 
  21. ↑ H. R. Hays, ed. (1943) 12 Spanish American Poets. New Haven: Yale University Press p118-139.
  22. ↑ Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections.
  23. ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis (1998) Collected Fictions Viking Penguin. Translation and notes by Andrew Hurley. Editorial note p 517.
  24. ↑ Mystery Writers of America. Edgar Award Database. Retrieved 24 September 2007.
  25. ↑ Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Lessons of the Master
  26. ↑ "Fanny", El Señor Borges
  27. ↑ (Spanish) Octavi Martí, Kodama frente a Borges, El País (Madrid), Edición Impresa, 16 August 2006. Abstract online; full text accessible online by subscription only.
  28. ↑ Richard Flanagan, "Writing with Borges", The Age (Australia), 12 July 2003. Accessed 2010-08-16
  29. ↑ Burgin (1968). P104.
  30. ↑ Burgin (1968) p95-6
  31. ↑ Williamson (2004) p292
  32. ↑ Williamson (2004) p295
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 Williamson (2004) p313
  34. ↑ Williamson (2004) p320.
  35. ↑ (Spanish) Jorge Luis Borges. Galería de Directores, Biblioteca Nacional (Argentina)., Retrieved 23 December 2006.
  36. ↑ Burgin (1969) p121
  37. ↑ 37.0 37.1 National Geographic, March 1975. p303.
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 Williamson (2004) p491
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, ed. (2003). The New Media Reader. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p29. ISBN 0262232278
  40. ↑ Kristal, Efraín (2002). Invisible Work. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. p. 37. ISBN 0826514081. 
  41. ↑ Borges This Craft of Verse (p104)
  42. ↑ Borges Collected Fictions, p67
  43. ↑ 43.0 43.1 Katra, William H. (1988) Contorno: Literary Engagement in Post-Perónist Argentina. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP p56-7
  44. ↑ Feldman, Burton (2000) The Nobel Prize: a History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige, Arcade Publishing p57
  45. ↑ 45.0 45.1 Guardian profile. "Jorge Luis Borges" 22 July 2008. Accessed 2010-08-15
  46. ↑ "Briton Wins the Nobel Literature Prize." James M. Markham. The New York Times 7 October 1983. Accessed 2010-08-15
  47. ↑ Feldman, Burton (2000) The Nobel Prize: a History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige, Arcade Publishing p81
  48. ↑ 48.0 48.1 Borges, Luis Borges (1979) The Book of Imaginary Beings Penguin Books Australia p.11 ISBN 0525475389
  49. ↑ 49.0 49.1 Murray, Janet H. "Inventing the Medium" The New Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
  50. ↑ 50.0 50.1 50.2 50.3 Takolander, Maria (2007) Catching butterflies: bringing magical realism to ground Peter Lang Pub Inc pp.55-60 ISBN 3039111930
  51. ↑ Borges Siete Noches, p156
  52. ↑ Britton, R (July 1979). "History, Myth, and Archetype in Borges's View of Argentina". The Modern Language Review (Modern Humanities Research Association) 74 (3): 607–616. doi:10.2307/3726707. http://jstor.org/stable/3726707. 
  53. ↑ de Man, Paul. "A Modern Master", Jorge Luis Borges, Ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House Pub., 1986. p.22.
  54. ↑ New york Times Article. Paid Subscription only
  55. ↑ 55.0 55.1 De Costa, René (2000) Humor in Borges (Humor in Life & Letters). Wayne State University Press p49 ISBN 0814328881
  56. ↑ The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges's "El muerto" and "La intrusa"], paper presented at XIX Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress held in Washington DC in September, 1995.
  57. ↑ Keller, Gary; Karen S. Van Hooft (1976). "Jorge Luis Borges's `La intrusa:' The Awakening of Love and Consciousness/The Sacrifice of Love and Consciousness.". In Eds. Lisa E. Davis and Isabel C. Tarán. The Analysis of Hispanic Texts: Current Trends in Methodology. Bilingual P. pp. 300–319. 
  58. ↑ Hurley, Andrew 1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin p197.
  59. ↑ Hurley, Andrew 1988) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin p200

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