Late Modernism, Pulp History: Jorge Luis Borges' A Universal History of Infamy (1935)

"It is undeniable that all disciplines are contaminated by history. I need merely name two: literature and metaphysics."

—Jorge Luis Borges, "H.G. Wells. Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (January 1940)."²

The Revista multicolor de los sábados: from Joyce to Herbert Ashbury

In 1935, Jorge Luis Borges published his Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) with Tor, the popular Buenos Aires publishing house. With its cheap editions and graphic, color-saturated covers, Tor was a natural choice for this motley collection of capsule biographies of tricksters, assassins, and thugs from different parts of the globe. Here, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was juxtaposed with Sir Percy Skye's A History of Persia; Argentine and New York gangsters volleyed for attention within a single, slender story. On one hand, A Universal History of Infamy stages what will become Borgesean signatures; in the lack of hierarchy and sense of accumulation that organizes the stories, for example, it anticipates his beloved encyclopedia. On the other hand, this minor work represents not only his first attempt at fiction, but also his most sustained engagement with mass media, both popular journalism and Hollywood films.³ If, that is, the collection anticipates the globally-renowned writer of erudite essays and speculative ficciones, it also represents a unique moment in his own relationship to writing, the market, and the materials of a burgeoning culture industry.⁴

Before being gathered together and published in 1935 by Tor, the majority of these stories had been published in the Revista multicolor de los sábados ("Multicolor Saturday Magazine"), a cultural supplement of Crítica, a newspaper that proudly proclaimed on its masthead "Largest South American circulation." A singular force in modern Argentine culture, Crítica was responsible for publishing many of the interwar period's most famous writers, as well as incorporating into its elastic form a wide swath of genres, modalities, and geographic and historical referents. Borges not only published frequently in the newspaper's Saturday supplement from 1933–1934, he also co-directed it during those same years, and it is this dual role—as author and as producer, as it were—that I wish to explore here.

In his Prologue to the first edition, Borges diagnoses the formal strategies of the Universal History of Infamy: "Certain techniques are abused: mismatched lists, abrupt transitions, the reduction of a person's entire life to two or three scenes."⁵ This list describes not only specific elements of the stories, it also gestures at the context of their initial publication. Crítica, their mass culture incubator, is characterized by just these elements: the composition of visual images saturated with colors; the "reductive" mode of its layout, privileging brevity over a sense of profundity; "mismatched" juxtapositions of spaces and times which lack, per modern journalism, connection to each other. Further cut up by subsections that bear the material trace of their presence in the Saturday supplement, the stories, like the publication in which they emerged, also borrowed from the emergent aesthetic of the cartoon, an effect further heightened by the color illustrations that initially framed them. As though to acknowledge and exploit this material position within the Revista multicolor, in them Borges draws extravagantly from popular culture, including Eduardo Gutiérrez's pulpish gaucho tales, Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York, and the films of Josef Von Sternberg.

Such strategies echo the project of Crítica to both tap into and shape emergent publics through the modalities and velocities of modern print culture.⁶ In fact, Borges' writings from the 1930s represent a moment in which he wrote for radically different publications and publics: from Victoria Ocampo's Sur, which introduced Latin American readers to Faulkner and Woolf, with its vision of an international community of elite intellectuals; to the pages of Crítica; passing through the women's magazine El hogar and even a publication sponsored by the Buenos Aires subway system. In short, this is a moment in which Borges directly and frequently experiences...