Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art, A Revised Edition

Preface to the Revised Edition

Preface to the Revised Edition S hortly after the first edition of this book came out in 1981, I experienced the enormous pleasure of receiving mail from complete strangers, broadly cultured nonspecialists who simply wanted to convey to me their appreciation as readers. A lawyer in Albuquerque , a painter in Chicago, a freelance writer in Connecticut, a schoolteacher in North Carolina—they and a number of others were to let me know, sometimes eloquently and at great lengths, just how much they liked and enjoyed the way that I had helped them understand Borges. In the intervening years I also received letters and telephone calls from bright high-school students requesting further guidance and advice on the Argentine author. More recently, while the original edition was out of print, I heard from a good many individuals who, finding themselves overly dependent on borrowed copies, wrote or approached me to ask how they could secure a copy of their own. Such moments meant a lot to me because, from the very start, I had conceived Borges and His Fiction as an object that could be picked up and consulted by anyone who wished to inform themselves and learn some useful things about my stated subject matter. Eventually, I began hearing from college and secondary-school instructors who warmly and freely expressed to me their gratitude for having provided them a handy pedagogical tool. Every so often, someone at a conference or a social gathering would casually tell me that, the night before teaching a Borges text, they would reread my own analyses and reflections on the story and then make use of them in the classroom. What has been particularly moving to me is the large number of schoolteachers , participants in the College Board’s Advanced Placement pro- gram, who, time and again, with overwhelming enthusiasm and spontaneity , have indicated to me the crucial role my book has played in leading them and their students through the labyrinthine intricacies of Borges’s mind and art. It is to those teachers, in great degree, that I owe this second edition; I’ve often thought of them, with a great deal of affection, in the process of correcting, updating, expanding, and revising my original text. Borges and His Fiction, written in the 1970s, was first published in 1981. The original printing sold out in 1992. In the interim, in 1986, Borges died. A great deal of new material on the author, particularly new material regarding his life, has since come out. I have made every effort to bring in and integrate the essential aspects of that information within these pages, notably in chapter 2 (which focuses on Borges the man). In addition, I have tried to furnish a more complete look at Peronism and to sum up the peculiarities of that movement, both in chapter 11 and in my additional, new chapter 12. When composing the text back in the 1970s, before Borges’s death, I naturally described him in the present tense. Reflecting Borges’s passing away, I have now changed many of the verbs to past tense. Moreover, the original—being my first published book—contained certain crudities of expression that, to the best of my ability, I have tried to polish and refine. Portions of the initial version also suffered from the stylistic tic of ‘‘reviewese ’’—understandably, inasmuch as most of my critical writing until then had appeared in general-interest magazines such as Commonweal, New Republic, Boston Review, and The Nation. Some of the less felicitous of these passages also have been recrafted. I have also come around in my opinion of Borges’s story ‘‘The South.’’ In one of those little mysteries of the human heart, that evocative work did nothing for me two decades ago. Rereading it in the 1980s, I was struck by its spare and dreamlike beauty, and suddenly felt quite embarrassed at my earlier insensitivity to its incantatory prose and hypnotic power. Finally, having since learned something about Borges’s personal experience of mysticism, I have excised the erroneous and harsh judgments with which I had opened my chapter 9 and substituted for them passages that reflect the knowledge I have since gleaned of his early mystical encounters. I can only hope that the final result delivered herein is a better, more palatable, and more mature work of letters. x borges and his fiction S everal individuals have...