Borges’s Poe, Poe’s Borges, and Other Possessed Apostrophes

The perennial equivocation that has dogged the history of Poe scholarship most consistently also serves as fulcrum for the book under review. Emron Esplin’s Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America pivots on the counterpoint of Poe the tragic romantic poet versus Poe the master algebrist of prose as instrument of ratiocination. Poe anticipated and sought to diffuse that dichotomy: “The highest order of the imaginative intellect is always preëminently mathematical; and the converse” (“Griswold’s American Poetry,” https://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bm42gr01.htm [218]). The best of Poe’s readers––Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Rubén Darío, Bernard Shaw, Paul Valéry, William Carlos Williams, Julio Cortázar––have heeded Poe’s admonition and productively subsumed its wisdom in their own work. Jorge Luis Borges certainly figures in this company of Poe readers tuned in to Poe’s advertence. Esplin, however, grinds the argument and justification of his book on the old equivocal millstone by diligently trying to disambiguate the poetic and mathematical synergy in Poe and in the complexity of Borges’s reception of Poe’s legacy. He does so by rendering the Argentine poet and short-story writer a partisan and advocate of Poe the mathematical calculator of narrative prose. Fully aware of the primacy accorded to a moralistic bent over a (self-)critical ratiocinative calculus in the American context in which he was writing, Poe endeavored to preempt such reductionism: by discursion in his critical essays and by demonstration in his Dupin stories, most notably in “The Purloined Letter,” through characters that embody the combined imaginative and mathematical intellect. All that notwithstanding, there continues to be a strain of reading with an incorrigible attachment to binary thought.

The relationship of Borges to Poe has engendered a considerable critical corpus animated by the Argentine author, as amply documented in the volume under review. The most trenchant and most informed undertaking in this regard is The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story by John T. Irwin [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994]. Unlike Irwin’s, Esplin’s study trains its focus on a “solution” rather than exploring the nature of the “mystery,” and as a result, it assiduously pursues traces and lines of influence, seeking to document flows of affect and impact in both directions––from Poe to Borges and, retroactively, from Borges to Poe. Borges’s essay “Kafka and His Precursors” invariably serves as Esplin’s lever in this meticulous excavation of prospective and retrospective determinacies, which in turn define his reading of both Poe and Borges [see “Kafka y sus precursores,” La Nación, 15 August 1951, in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2007), 2:107–9]. The protocols of reading and of deciphering influence in this study, however, end by being neither those premonitorily limned by Poe nor those illustrated by Poe’s reader Borges. Rather, the dominant critical discourse on influence that informs Esplin’s project and that of his generation of scholars in the United States of America is the legacy of Harold Bloom and his definitive work, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973]. Esplin labors mightily to differentiate his study of influence from Bloom’s, even as he notes the commonplace—namely, that the calculus of “revisionary ratios” through which, according to Bloom, later authors deal with their precursors has its genesis in good measure in Borges’s 1951 essay “Kafka and His Precursors.” While Bloom’s psychoanalytic enterprise owes much to Borges and his significance for literary historiography, Esplin’s invocation of Bloom yields mixed results for understanding Poe and, by extension, Poe’s Borges. Bloom’s shadow skews the adumbration of Poe and his legacy by narrowing the focus on poetry at the expense of prose, especially the short story, whose primacy in Esplin’s self-declared goal is...