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  • Borges, Henry James and the Europeans
  • Arturo Echavarría
    Translated by Mary G. Berg

Referring to "The New Refutation of Time":

. . . el débil artificio de un argentino extraviado en la metafísica.

. . . the feeble artifice of an Argentine who has lost his bearings in the world of metaphysics.

—Jorge Luis Borges, "Nueva refutación del tiempo" 1351

For Richard A. Macksey

Jorge Luis Borges's interest in North American literature is well known. Some of his essays, and in particular the slim volume Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, originally published in 1967, attest to it. In that book, Borges frequently reiterates, with minimal variations, critical observations and evaluations that had previously appeared in scattered essays, such as those dedicated to Whitman and Hawthorne, and in articles and commentaries on diverse subjects where he makes reference to such writers as Emerson, Mark Twain, Poe, T. S. Eliot and Henry James, among others. But of all the U.S. writers and poets who aroused Borges's interest, I would like to dwell here on the relationship between Borges and Henry James. In particular, I wish to examine some notions, shared by both writers, related to the nature of literature itself and the ways these conceptions are related, in turn, to the wider world of culture. Some of these ideas, common to both artists, regarding what literature is, its modes of production and how the interaction of this phenomenon with a complex culture helps to [End Page 1126] shape it, could shed some light on aspects of Borges's works that have not been, as yet, fully understood.

One of the most thought provoking commentaries published in recent years about Borges's relationship with North American writers appeared in The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story by John T. Irwin. Professor Irwin analyzes some important coincidences shared by the two writers and proposes that one of Borges's most significant literary enterprises consisted of taking the detective story invented by Poe, which he calls analytic, and then proceeding, in Borges's own police stories, to transform that model, thus creating works of pronounced originality. John Irwin proposes that these texts aspire in some ways to improve upon the previous model and reveal Borges's role as an innovator in the context of literary history. But if we leave Poe aside for the moment and turn instead our attention to Henry James, we find that the critical literature about the relationship between the two is very sparsely documented. In the bibliographies I have been able to consult, I have only found two studies: one, rather specific, that examines the relationship of the story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" to The Aspern Papers (Fernández and Zanotti), and another, by Jean François Daveti, which I find of particular interest was published in 2001, "Jorge Luis Borges y Henry James o la soledad mestizada de dos escritores intranjeros" ("Jorge Luis Borges and Henry James or the mestizo solitude of two writers who were internal exiles"2). I will refer to this essay later.

Borges and Henry James

First of all, let me restate what is perhaps obvious: the writings of Borges and Henry James would seem to have little in common. James wrote, as is well known, complex, usually realistic novels, where the psychological analysis of the characters is a sustaining factor. Even his stories, with a few exceptions, are lengthy and follow a narrative model that is quite different from that of, say, a Chekhov or a Maupassant or, of course, Borges himself. The Argentine, on the other hand, has shown a marked disdain for realistic conventions in literature, whether social or psychological. Moreover, when referring to the basic components of a plot, Borges has declared the superiority of what might be translated as "situations" ("situaciones" in Spanish, loosely translated: the basic elements of a plot), as opposed to psychological explorations. But despite these differences, in essays, stories, and many interviews, Borges professed for years a very great admiration for the [End Page 1127] Anglo-American writer. It's true that, when referring to James, Borges played down the importance of the novels and highlights the...

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