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

3. What Borges Did for Prose Fiction

3 What Borges Did for Prose Fiction B orges is one of the foremost literary innovators of the twentieth century, a true originator and discoverer, a master artisan and meticulous maker, a man whose verbal inventions have effectively altered, in both the Americas and in Europe, the guidelines for writing, reading, and judging prose fiction. Within the Hispanic American world, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, Borges’s thirty-odd stories stand as an event of immeasurable cultural importance. Quite simply, had Borges not existed or had he died before producing the Ficciones, the panorama of Latin American literary life in the later twentieth century—with its awesome standards of performance , its high level of discourse, its intellectual freshness and vigor, its seriousness of craft, its artistic originality—would have been noticeably different. Borges’s work played a primal role in nurturing the writers of the celebrated Latin American ‘‘boom.’’ Julio Cortázar’s numerous collections of fantastic fiction stand in a direct line of succession from Borges ’s own tales of time travel and double identity in El Aleph, and such major novelists as Garcı́a Márquez, Cabrera Infante, and Cortázar himself were to assimilate, expand upon, and transcend the lessons of Borges in such far-reaching books as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Three Trapped Tigers, and Hopscotch. Although nearly every younger Hispanic author deplored the retrograde politics of the elder man, writers in Lima or Mexico City or Havana had to reckon with the author Borges, whether they accepted his writings whole, singled out certain aspects of his art, or ultimately rejected him outright. Attitudes toward Borges, even on the part of his admirers, have varied widely. Literary specialists tend to give equal time and assign equal value to the entire Borges oeuvre of poetry, essays, and fiction; general readers know him mostly by his fanciful tales and an occasional essay; and a small minority group (one that includes, among others, the Argentine novelist Ernesto Sábato) discounts Borges’s prose narratives as ivorytower escapism, yet considers him a major poet in Spanish. Cuban literary critics on the island, inevitably at odds with Borges’s politics, are given to citing him frequently, if with some discomfort. Whether one likes the fact or not, Borges is there, politically a relic of the nineteenth century but artistically a recognized universal genius, one whose labyrinthine imaginings constitute a fruitful presence and a milestone in Spanish American cultural history. Pablo Neruda—famed and beloved Chilean poet, Nobel Laureate for 1971, dedicated Marxist activist, and one of the first victims of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship—once characterized the Argentine author with words that fully sum up the ambiguous pride with which Latin American intellectuals look upon Borges: He’s a great writer, and good heavens! All Spanish-speaking peoples are very proud that Borges exists. And Latin Americans in particular, because before Borges we had very few writers to compare with European authors. We have had great writers, but a universal one, such as Borges, is a rarity in our countries. He was one of the first. I can’t say that he is the greatest, and I only hope there may be a hundred others to surpass him, but at all events he made the breakthrough, and attracted the attention and intellectual curiosity of Europe toward our countries. That’s all I can say. But to quarrel with Borges, just because everyone wants to make me quarrel with Borges—that I’ll never do. If he thinks like a dinosaur, that has nothing to do with my thinking. He doesn’t understand a thing about what’s happening in the modern world, and he thinks I don’t either. Therefore, we are in agreement.1 Neruda forgives Borges his latter-day conservatism in recognition of the vast prestige rendered to the Hispanic world by his stories, those cosmopolitan artifacts that, for the first time, have forced Europeans to take Latin American culture seriously and to accept that an Argentine writer can be as worthy of consideration as a French or an English one. This in itself is a major breakthrough for the status of Hispanic letters, the first decisive step in the rise to world prominence of the Latin American novel in the second half of the twentieth century. One issue on which there is almost unanimous agreement in Latin America is the matter of Borges’s style, a painstakingly wrought instrument that is shorn of the airy...