Introduction: History, Politics, and Literature in Borges

¿Y el muerto, el increíble?

Su realidad está bajo las flores diferentes de él

y su mortal hospitalidad nos dará

un recuerdo más para el tiempo

y sentenciosas calles del Sur para merecerlas despacio

y brisa oscura sobre la frente que vuelve

y la noche que de la mayor congoja nos libra:

la prolijidad de lo real. (29)

And the dead man, the incredible one? His reality lay beneath flowers different from himself and his mortal hospitality will give us one more memory for time and sententious streets in the South to be savored slowly and a dark gust on the forehead that looks back and night that frees us from the greatest anguish: the prolixity of the real.

The hallmark of Borges criticism is provided by the title of Ana María Barrenechea's important 1957 book, La expresión de la irrealidad en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges [The Expression of Irreality in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges]. "Borges," for many readers and critics, means "irrealidad," and the adjectives that have been created from the surname seem to refer to the unreal, the Active, even the Active to the second or third degree. Since Borges positions himself in the essays in Discusión [Discussion] and Otras inquisiciones [Other Inquisitions] in opposition to the social realist mode of narrative fiction that was dominant in Latin America at the time of the composition of Ficciones [Ficciones] and El Aleph [The Aleph], it is perhaps not surprising that readers and critics, eager to have it one way or the other, have embraced his "fantastic literature" or denounced him as escapist, both reactions which assume that the stories have nothing significant to say about reality, history, or politics. To be sure, Sylvia Molloy's notion of a vaivén [movement back and forth] in Borges (here, between reality and fantasy) (Letras 194) and Marina Kaplan and Davi Arrigucci's attention to the grounding of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz" [Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz] in historical and cultural realities are signs that it should now be possible to reconsider the question of the relation of Borges's fictions to realities beyond the text. Similarly, my Borges index (The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges) and Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes's recent Borges dictionary should quiet those who have been assuming—wrongly—that all of those bookish references in Borges's stories and essays are pure invention.

Perhaps it would be useful to quote a few critics:

In Borges, once the external world has vanished and with it, in consequence, our reality, the only secure possible mooring besides the self, the only term of the relation that is left, is irreality, which, by a simple change of sign, becomes in turn the only Borgesian reality. Thus, then, for Borges—and here we are threatened by paradox—the only reality is irreality. (Ferrer 59, emphasis in original)

Borges takes away the "real" weight of history, situating it in a mythic horizon, negating it. When he places the whole episode (and, we might say, the whole period) in a place outside of the concrete and the factic, outside of the historical, he deprives it of all concrete importance, of every possibility of influencing reality, of forming part of the historical process.... Once again, Borges negates reality. (Borello, Peronismo 180)

Borges has assembled philosophical and literary schools, theologians and poets, murderers and saints, and has endowed them with literary equality. Historical and non-historical events and personalities have shed their traditional myths and taken on new mythical raiment. Borges' allegiance is not to historical truths. The primary purpose of all his motifs is to provide joy for the "fiction maker" and the selected group of seers who will recognize a fictitious web in the no less fictitious history recorded by man. (Sosnowski, "God's Script" 381)

The Borges fiction is ... a context-free paradigm which can be reactivated through reading at any time and under any circumstances. (Franco 62)

Borges trivializes historical study, and this devaluation then becomes a necessary step in the freeing of the fictions from all external determinations. (Franco 69)

We have watched an admirable writer at work at the task of destroying reality and turning us into shadows. We have analyzed the process of dissolution of the concepts on which human beings found belief in their concrete being: the cosmos, personality and time. We have seen besides the horrifying presence of the infinite and the disintegration of substance into reflections and dreams. (Barrenechea, Expresión de la irrealidad 202)

In the stories of Borges ... reality is seen "sub specie aeternitatis," that is to say, not the singular but the general, not individual beings but archetypes. Such a vision of reality must perforce be organized in a system; Borges uses systems already established by philosophy and theology. (Alazraki, Prosa narrativa 89)

Fiction [for Borges] is abstract and artificial rather than representational or mimetic. (Balderston, El precursor velado 176)

This catalog could be continued more or less indefinitely, yet it is—to borrow the title of the final book on Bolívar of the Venezuelan historian Vicente Lecuna (discussed in chapter 8)—a "catalog of mistakes and slanders." To refute Berkeley, Dr. Johnson kicked a stone (Boswell 1: 315); to refute the "irrealists," I will need a whole book, but for starters I shall quote the end of Borges's essay "Nueva refutación del tiempo" [New Refutation of Time]:

Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino (a diferencia del infierno de Swedenborg y del infierno de la mitología tibetana) no es espantoso por irreal; es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges. (771)

To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, are apparent acts of desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightening because...