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Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) | |
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Argentine poet, essayist,
and
short-story
writer, whose tales of fantasy and dreamworlds are classics of the
20th-century world literature. Jorge Luis Borges was profoundly influenced by
European culture, English literature, and thinkers such as Berkeley,
who argued that there is no material substance; the sensible world
consists only of ideas, which exists for so long as they are perceived.
Most of Borges's tales embrace universal themes – the often
recurring circular labyrinth can be seen as a metaphor of life or timeless
riddles. "One of the colors that the blind—or at least this blind man—do not see is black: another is red. Le rouge et le noir are both colors denied us. I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind. I wanted to lie down in darkness. The world of the blind is not the night that people imagine. (I should say that I am speaking for myself, and for my father and my grandmother, who both died blind—blind, laughing and brave, as I also hope to die. They inherited many things—blindness, for example—but one does not inherit courage. I know that they were brave.)" ('Blindness' by Jorge Luis Borges, in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, selected and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate, New York: Anchor Books, 1995, p. 377) Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires. His family
included British ancestry and he learned English before Spanish. Jorge
Guillermo Borges, his father, the son of a Staffordshire Englishwoman
named Frances Haslam, was a lawyer and a psychology teacher. To the
young Jorge Luis ‒ or "Georgie" as the family referred to him ‒ he
demonstrated the paradoxes of Zeno on a chessboard. In
the large house was also a library and garden which enchanted Borges's
imagination. "If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I
should say my father's library," Borges said in his
'Autobiographical Notes'. (The New Yorker, September 19, 1970; translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni) Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Haedo, was a translator;
she lived far into her 90's. Borges himself translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish at
the age of nine. Later in life, he taught himself German in order to
read Schopenhauer and Heine in the original language. In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, where Borges learned French and received his B.A. from the Collège of Geneva. According to a story, Borges's father, worried about his son's sexual initation, sent him to a prostitute in the red-light district area, the Place Dubourg de Four. There Borges started to think that his father was her "client". Borges's visit failed miserably and perhaps contributed to his lifelong difficulties with women. After World War I the Borges family lived in Spain, where he
was a member of avant-garde Ultraist literary group. His first poem,
'Hymn to the Sea,' written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published
in the magazine Grecia. In 1921 Borges settled in Buenos Aires.
There he started his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays
in literary journals. Among his friends was the philosopher Macedonio
Fernandez, whose dedication linguistic problems influenced his thought.
Borges's first collection of poetry was Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). He
contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro, and
co-founded the journal Proa (1924-26). For decades Borges was
the chief contributor of Sur, Argentina's most important
literary journal, which was founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. He also
served as literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores,
worked as a literary editor of the Saturday Color Magazine of
the tabloid newspaper Crítica, and wrote weekly columns for El
Hogar from 1936 to 1939. As a critic Borges gained fame with interpretations of the Argentine classics. His writings displayed a deep knowledge of European and American literature, in particular for such writers as Poe, Stevenson, Kipling, Shaw, Chesterton, Whitman, Emerson, and Twain. He also translated Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Henri Michaux's A Barbarian in Asia, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, and William Faulkner's The Wild Palms. Borges's father died in 1938, a great blow because the two had
been unusually close. Borges also suffered a severe head wound. He
developed a blood poisoning and nearly died. The experience freed in
him deep forces of creativity, and at the hospital, where he spent
several weeks, he wrote several of his most important stories. His
first collection, El jardín de
senderos que se bifurcan (1941) was nominated for the National
Literary Prize, but a lesser book was awarded, in spite of a special
issue by Sur, in which a number of his friends and
acquaintances expressed their support. Later collections include Ficciones (1944), El Aleph (1949), and El hacedor (1960). Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by another well-known Argentine writer of fiction, Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom Borges coauthored under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq several collections of tales. From 1937 Borges worked as a cataloguer at the Miguel Cane branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. The job did not interest him and he usually disappeared into the basement to read (especially Kafka), write, and translate. The never-ending process of cataloguing inspired one of Borges's most famous short stories, 'La biblioteca de Babel' (1941, The Library of Babel), in which the faithful catalog of the Library is supplemented with "thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog". Borges spent nine years at the suburban library. He was fired in 1946 from his post by the Péron regime, and appointed poultry inspector for Buenos Aires Municipal Market, a position he declined. Borges's political opinions were not considered inoffensive. As a sign of negative attention, an attempt was made to bomb the house where Borges lived with his mother. His sister was imprisoned and his mother was placed under house arrest. With he help Miguel Cohen-Miller, a psychotherapist, Borges managed to overcome his shyness and he could accept lecture offers. Dr Cohen-Miller noted that Borges was exaggerated sensitive, had guilt feeling and fear of sex. Later Estela Canto, whom Borges met in 1944, said in Borges a contraluz (1989), that Borges's attitude toward sex was one of "panic and terror". In 1946 Borges took over the editorship of Los Annales de
Buenos Aires, an academic magazine. His first story in English, 'The
Garden of Forking Paths', was published in 1948 in Ellery Queen
Mystery Magazine.
After Peron's deposition in 1955 Borges was appointed director of the
Biblioteca Nacional (National Library). "I speak of God's splendid
irony in
granting me at once 800,000 book and darkness," Borges noted in his acceptance speech, alluding
to his now almost complete blindness. (The Power of Disability: 10 Lessons for Surviving, Thriving, and Changing the World by Al Eymanski, Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2020, p. 122) Many of Borges's stories and essays mention books that came from his
imagination. 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quiote' (1939) featured an
imaginary writer, who took on the task of reinventing Don Quixote, he did not want to compose "another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote." (Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, New York: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 91) Curiously, Borges was not the
first head of the library, who suffered from poor eyesight: like
Borges,
Paul-François Groussac (1848-1929) was complete blind by the end of his
tenure and Jóse Mármol (1818-1871) retired after losing his eyesight.
Borges worked at the National Library for eighteen years. He loved this
empire of books so much that he celebrated almost every one of his
birthdays there. (The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 273) At his wood-panelled office, Borges dictated
his poems and fictions and had books read to him by secretaries. The
boring bureauratic work was done by his assistant director. Besides running the National Library, Borges was professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aires, teaching there from 1955 to 1970. After the death of his mother, his constant companion, Borges started his series of visits to countries all over the world, continuing traveling until his death. In 1967 Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and gained new fame in the English-speaking world. In 1961 Borges shared the Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett. When Juan Perón was again elected president
in 1973, Borges resigned from his post at the library. Despite
his opposition to Perón and later to the junta, his support to liberal
causes were considered too ambiguous. "If he thinks like a dinosaur,
that has nothing to do with my thinking," said the Chilean poet
and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda of Borges. "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." (Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art by Gene H. Bell-Villada, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981, p. 35) Borges himself criticized Neruda for denouncing all the South American dictators except his own arch-enemy, Juan Perón. "Perón was then in power. It seems that Neruda had a lawsuit pending with his publisher in Buenos Aires. That publisher, as you probably know, has always been his principal source of income." (Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, edited by Richard Burgin, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1998, p. 94) Borges signed in 1980 protests against the political repression and the "disappeared". In 1982 he condemned the Falkland Islands War – "Two bald men fighting over a comb" was his cited comment in the international media. Although Borges totally blind in his last decades, he never taught himself Braille. He had a congenital defect that had afflicted several generations on his father's side of the family. However, he continued to publish several books, among them El libro de los seres imaginario (1967), El informe de Brodie (1970), and El libro de arena (1975). "I need books," he once said. "They mean everything to me." In New Orleas he developed a passion to jazz. Borges was married twice. In 1967 he married his old friend,
the recently widowed Elsa Asteta Millán, whom he had met decades ago
when she was just seventeen. Elsa claimed that they even had
exchanged rings in 1930. Borges wrote two love letters to her in 1944.
The first included a description of his room, with his bookcase
containing the Encyclopædia Britannica, Chesterton's works, and various editions of the Arabian Nights. Elsa herself shared none of his literary
interests and the marriage lasted three years. One night at Harvard,
Borges was found outside the residence, in his pajamas,
because she had locked him out. Since divorce did not exist in
Argentina, they entered into a legal separation agreement, and Borges
moved back in with his mother. His last years Borges lived with María Kodama, his assistant; they married on 22 April in 1986, though his marriage to Elsa had never been annulled. However, the relationship brought much happiness in the authors life. Kodoma had earlier participated in Borges's Old English study group and earned doctorate in English from the University of Buenos Aires. In 1984 they produced an account of their journeys in different places of the world, with text by Borges and photographs by Kodoma. Borges moved in 1985 permanently to Geneva, Switzerland. Far from Buenos Aires he died there of liver cancer on June 14, 1986, and was buried at the old Plainpalais Cemetery. Borges's fictional universe was born from his vast and
esoteric readings in literature, philosophy, and theology. He sees
man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort.
In the universe of energy, mass, and speed of light, Borges considers
the central riddle time, not space. ". . . he believed in an infinite
series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and
parallel times." ('The Garden of Forking Paths,' in Collected Fictions, p. 127) The theological
speculations of Gnosticism and the Cabala gave ideas for many of his
plots. Having no great desire to write a novel, he said in the foreword to Ficciones: "It is a
laborious madness and an impoverishing one, thee madness of composing
vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly
related orally in five minutes." ('Foreword,' in Collected Fictions, p. 67) Reading was for Borges a more profound
act than writing. Borges once told in an interview that when he was a boy, he
found
an engraving of the seven wonders of the world, one of which portrayed
a circular labyrinth. It frightened him and the maze has been one of
his recurrent nightmares. "I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze
of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained
both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those
illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was pursued man; I felt myself,
for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world." ('The Garden of Forking Paths,' in Collected Fictions, p. 122) Another recurrent image is the mirror, which reflects different identities. One of his fictional characters was named Borges. The idea for the short story 'Borges y yo' came from the realization that there is a well-known man, who writes stories, and then there is the real person. "The first book I ever read in German was Mayerig's novel Der Golem. I read it through and therein I found that idea which always attracted me, the idea of the double. As they say in Scotland, the "fetch," because the fetch is your own image that comes to fetch you and lead you to death." (Borges at Eighty: Conversations, edited and with photographs by Willis Barnstone, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 82) Influenced by the English philosopher George Berkeley
(1685-1753), Borges played with the idea that concrete reality may
consist only of mental perceptions. The "real world" is only one
possible in the infinite series of realities. These themes were
examined among others in the classical short stories 'El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan' (1941, The Garden of
Forking Paths) and 'La muerte y la brújula' (1942, Death and the Compass), in which Borges showed his
fondness of detective formula. In the story the calm, rational
detective and adventurer Erik Lönnrot (referring to the
philologist/poet Elias Lönnrot, 1802-1884,
the collector of Kalevala poems) finds
himself trapped in cryptographic labyrinths in a fantastical city,
while attempting to solve a series of crimes. However, Borges's Lönnrot
has more in common with C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and Father
Brown and their amazing powers of deduction than with the Finnish
namesake, who traveled in the northwest Russia to collected ancient
poems. The Kalevala was created by Lönnrot, edited from poems of his own and a number of separate poems and poem-fragments he had received from rune-singers. In similar way, Erik Lönnrot creates a coherent story from a series of crimes by interpreting cryptic messages and filling the holes with his own insights. Detective stories bring order into chaos. "In this chaotic era of ours," said Borges, "one thing is has humbly maintained the classic virtues: the detective story. For a detective story cannot be understood without a beginning, middle, and end. . . . I would say in defense of the detective novel that it needs no defense; though now read with a certain disdain, it is safeguarding order in an era of disorder." ('The Detective Story', in Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, New York: Viking, 1999, p. 499) In 'The Library of Babel' the symmetrically structured library represents the universe as it is conceived by rational man, and the library's illegible books refers to man's ignorance. In 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' (1940) Borges invented a whole other universe based on an imaginary book, entitled A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr (there is no date or place of publication). The narrator states: "At first it was thought that Tlön was a mere chaos, in irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know that it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so." ('Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' in Collected Fictions, p. 72) When many Latin American writers dealt with political or social subjects, Borges focused on eternal questions and the literary heritage of the world. As an essayist Borges drew on his European education and brought attention to ancient philosophers and mystics, Jewish cabbalist and gnostics, French poets, Cervantes, Dante, Schopenhauer, and above all such English writers as Shakespeare, John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, H.G. Wells, and G.K. Chesterton. Of the female writers he mentioned with admiration Emily Dickinson. His major essay collections are Discusión (1932), Historia de la eternidad (1936, A History of Etenity), and Otras inquisiciones (1937-1952) (1952, Other Inquisitions). For further reading: Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges by John Sturrock (1977); Jorge Luis Borges by George R. McMurray (1980); Jorge Luis Borges by Donald Yates (1985); The Aleph Weaver by Edna Aizenberg (1984); Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Harold Bloom (1986); The Poetry and Poetics of Jorge Luis Borges by Paul Cheselka (1986); Borges a contraluz by Estela Canto (1989); A Concordance to the Works of Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986 by Rob Isbister and Peter Standish (1992); Jorge Luis Borges by Beatriz Sarle (1993); A Dictionary of Borges by Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes (1990); Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, edited by Richard Burgin (1998); Borges and His Fiction by Gene H. Bell-Villada (1999); Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson (2005); Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge by Beatriz Sarlo, John King, James Dunkerley and Jean Franco (2007); Borges' Short Stories: A Reader's Guide by Rex Butler (2010); The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2011); Borges at Eighty: Conversations, ed. by Willis Barnstone (2013); Georgie & Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story by Norman Di Giovanni (2014); Borges and Kafka: Sons and Writers by Sarah Roger (2017); Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry by Robin Fiddian (2017); Borges, Language and Reality: the Transcendence of the Word, edited by Alfonso J. García-Osuna (2018); Jorge Luis Borges in Context, edited by Robin W. Fiddian (2020); Agnosticismo y fe poética en Jorge Luis Borges by Lucrecia Romera (2022); Young Ultraista: The Early Writing of Jorge Luis Borges by Mario Rene Padilla (2023); The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton (2023); Borges's Creative Infidelities: Translating Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner by Leah Leone Anderson (2024) Selected works:
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