Jorge Luis Borges

From Philosopedia

Borges, Jorge Luis (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986)

An Argentinian fiction writer, poet, and critic, Borges was educated in Europe and became associated with ultraísmo. Like that movement’s pioneer, Spanish poet and critic Guillermo De Torre, Borges wrote in an extreme form of expressionism in which man is not the center of the universe and is, in reality, no more than a speck in his universe. The ultraíst elevated image and metaphor above plot or story, above ornament or rhetoric. For Borges, who was to become an anti-realist, life became escapism, art but an indulgence. He also became, to many, the greatest 20th century author never to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Although he wrote much poetry, he is known for his short stories such as Historia universal de la infamia (1935; A Universal History of Infamy), which is a landmark in Latin American literature and illustrates “Magic Realism.” That term (magischer Realismus) first described writing of some of the German artists of a new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) characterized by clear, cool, static, thinly-painted, sharp-focus images, frequently portraying the imaginary, the improbable, or the fantastic but in a realistic or rational manner.

• Franz Roh, a German art critic, was the first to use the phrase in describing an art movement that was opposed to expressionism. Neue Sachlichkeit (new dispassion) referred to a "new objectivity" in music, architecture, and literature, a movement that stopped when the Nazis rose to power.

• Venezuelan essayist and critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri used "magical realism" in describing how realism and fantasy are used in work by Mário de Andrade. In addition to Borges, other authors who blended realism and fantasy have been Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, and Isabel Allende.

In Argentina, however, “fantastic literature” is the Latin American term, one that also fits the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.

Borges’s stories might tell about real or fictitious criminals. Labyrinths (1953) brought him an international reputation and was translated into English in 1962. Often his stories deal with the cyclical nature of time, are labyrinthine in form, are metaphysical in their speculations, are dreamlike in their endlessly reflected facets of reality and arcane knowledge. As an editor of Proa, he examined the idealism of David Hume and Bishop Berkeley. His Collection Fictions (1998) contains all his short stories in English.

Borges, whose ancestors include Portuguese Jews and English Quakers, did not follow any established religion or philosophy. On the contrary, according to Current Biography (1970), “he is committed to metaphysical speculation.” On the other hand, in “Of Heaven and Hell,” a poem in which he speculates about Judgment Day, he concludes that on that final day Inferno for the rejected will be the equivalent of no longer being able to see a loved one’s face . . .but for the elected, Paradise. Critic J. M. Coetzee, professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town, has described Borges’s outlook:

• Borges’s gnosticism - his sense that the ultimate God is beyond good and evil, and infinitely remote from creation - is deeply felt. But the sense of dread that informs his work is metaphysical rather than religious in nature: at its base are vertiginous glimpses of the collapse of all structures of understanding including language itself, flashing intimations that the very self that speaks has no real existence.

• In the fiction that responds to this dread, the ethical and the aesthetic are tightly wound together: the light but remorseless tread of the logic of his parables, the lapidary concision of the language, the gradual tightening of paradox are stylistic traces of an ironic self-control that stares back into the abysses of thought without the Gothic hysteria of a Poe.

Noga Tarnopolsky (“Borges in the Afterlife,” The New York Times, 22 August 1999) claims that Borges was “fascinated in life by the idea of his own immortality. Disagreeing, Rodolfo A. Windhausen (The New York Times Magazine, 19 September 1999) retorted that her claim

• . . . is incompatible with the writer’s repeated statements on the subject. As I heard from him many times when I interviewed him in Argentina and the United States between 1976 and 1983, Borges summarily dismissed the idea of his own immortality. He loved to declare himself “an agnostic at heart.” In 1985, a year before his death, the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación reproduced his remarks at a lecture: “To die for a cause?” Borges asked rhetorically. “Nowadays, that’s a form of stupidity. I am not a believer, and that takes anxiety away from the notion of death.” When somebody in the audience asked him if his fame wouldn’t make him live forever, he snapped, “Don’t be a pessimist!”

(See Wieland Schmied's Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties for more about New Objectivity and Magic Realism.)

{J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998; OCP; WWTCL}