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

1. Buenos Aires and Beyond

1 Buenos Aires and Beyond A bove all a superb author of fiction, but also a fine poet and a hauntingly original essayist, the elder Borges loomed infinitely larger as public figure than as flesh-and-blood individual—the personally shy, multilingually bookish, all but blind octogenarian who spent his final two decades living more or less alone in his native Buenos Aires. For, beginning in the 1960s, Jorge Luis Borges evolved as an international phenomenon, a name commonly invoked by literati from Stockholm to San Francisco, from Poland to Peru, a sculptor of words whose three- or four-dozen short stories and as many brief essays came to be mentioned in the same breath with the big tomes of Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, a man of letters whose mode of writing and turn of mind were so distinctively his, yet so much a revealed part of our world, that ‘‘Borgesian’’ eventually became as common a neologism as the adjectives ‘‘Orwellian’’ or ‘‘Kafkaesque.’’ Knowledge of Borges’s work is now simply taken for granted by the myriad artists, scholars, and critics who choose to make casual mention of him. Alain Robbe-Grillet alludes to a well-known Borges conceit in his fiction manifesto, For a New Novel; high theorist Michel Foucault takes a bit of Borges whimsy (from the essay ‘‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’’ in Other Inquisitions) as a starting point on page 1 of The Order of Things; the exquisitely irreverent Jean-Luc Godard cites Borges in at least two of his movies, at the beginning of Les Carabiniers and toward the end of Alphaville; Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci makes the plot of Borges’s story ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’’ the basis for his drama of fascism, The Spider’s Stratagem; American metanovelist John Barth hails Borges as the literary model for our time; and sociologist Daniel Bell quotes six full paragraphs from ‘‘The Library at Babel’’ to illustrate the modern epistemological dilemma in The Coming of Post- Industrial Society. Perhaps the greatest artistic homage to the Argentine author is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a dazzlingly erudite detective novel set in a medieval monastery with an enormous manuscripts collection (‘‘Borgesian’’ traits, all) presided over by a blind librarian named Jorge de Burgos (an obvious play on Borges himself ). On another level of discourse, Time magazine once likened the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C., to Borges’s infinite Babel of books, and film critics routinely spice up their reviews with passing comparisons to Borges fantasies. The author’s slim volumes have been displayed on American drugstore racks, are read by French students in the trains of the Paris Métro, were being studied by a hotelkeeper I once met in Warsaw, and are still varyingly imitated by a number of contemporary novelists in the United States. This is a renown truly remarkable for an author so learned, so difficult, and at times so precious as is Borges (approximate English pronunciation: BOR-hess). His achievements as an artist aside, this global fame owes something to the fact that Borges’s prose fiction translates and travels abroad quite gracefully, whereas the works of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the only Hispanic-American author to have gained a world following prior to Borges, appear almost exclusively in a medium not known for moving with ease across frontiers and oceans. On the other hand, Neruda justly received the Nobel Prize in 1971, an award that never was to be Borges’s lot, presumably because of the Swedish Academy’s original mandate to honor only those authors positively marked by moral idealism. (The idea that Borges’s latter-day conservatism cost him the Nobel is not necessarily the case; after all, Octavio Paz was so honored in 1991, by which time he had become a figure of orthodoxy and a defender of the brutal contra wars in Nicaragua.) Still, virtually every other international accolade managed to come Borges’s way. His first leap into the world arena occurred in 1961 when he shared a major European publishers’ award (the Prix Formentor) with another multilingual writer, the Franco-Irishman Samuel Beckett, after which the plaudits and publicity accumulated at a dizzying rate. Starting in the decade of the 1960s through the year of his death in 1986, Borges embarked on countless lecture tours across the Americas, Western Europe , and Asia, delivering hundreds of talks in four languages. In 1967– 1968...