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Jorge Luis Borges

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Chronicles of Bustos Domecq

December 16, 2015 by Roy Johnson

short stories, satirical sketches, and parodies of criticism

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (1979) is a collection of short fiction that Jorge Luis Borges wrote in collaboration with his fellow Argentinean, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares. Both of them wrote stories, reviews, and skits for a variety of newspapers and literary journals – particularly Sur, founded by their friend Victoria Ocampo in 1931.

Their stories explore the playful, imaginative, and sometimes fantastic relationship between fiction and reality which Borges was to make his hallmark in works such as the famous collection of stories Fictions. His collaborator Casares was a writer, journalist, and translator best known for his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq

Jorge Luis Borges

Honorio Bustos Domecq was an Argentinean man of letters. A brief note on Domecq written by Dr Gervasio Montenegro (Argentine Academy of Letters) acts as an introduction and preface to the stories. This preface itself arouses our suspicions, for it is written in an absurdly inflated and self-regarding manner. Montenegro showers praise on his own achievements as a writer, and damns the work of Domecq with praise so faint it is almost insulting. It is no surprise to learn that both Domecq and Montenegro are entirely fictitious.

Homage to Cesar Paladion is a biographical sketch of the Argentinean writer whose ‘poetical method’ was inspired by the fact that T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound quoted from Baudelaire, Verlaine, and The Odyssey in their work. Paladion took this approach one step further by ‘appropriating’ entire works from other writers. He had books such as The Hound of the Baskervilles and Uncle Tom’s Cabin printed under his own name and at his own expense.

In another story a newspaper reporter goes to interview Ramon Bonavena, the author of a six-volume masterwork called North-Northwest. When asked to give an account of the work’s genesis for his admiring readers, Bonavena explains that he set out with the idea of a large scale historical drama exposing social injustices in the province where he lived. However, when faced with legal difficulties, he decided to limit his subject matter – and chose to write about the objects on the right-hand corner of his desk.

The skill in the telling of these stories lies in a combination of conceptual manipulation, structural artifice, and stylistic flair. The credibility of the essential concept behind each story is established by reference to real places and real people. This material is then blended with quite credible life histories that are actually fictitious.

The absurdity of each proposition is usually concealed until the story is well under way – by which time the reader is prepared to entertain it as acceptable. And once the absurdity is revealed, the story is short enough to prevent the conceit becoming tedious.

A study of the poetical works of F.J.C.Loomis traces the development of his publications from his breakthrough Bear in 1911, through Pallet, Beret, Scum, Moon, and Perhaps? which was published posthumously following his death from dysentery in 1931. Bustos Domecq explains that Loomis’s particular genius was for an exact match between the title of his works and their contents. He points out that “The words Uncle Tom’s Cabin do not readily communicate to us all the details of its plot.” In the case of Loomis all the common poetical trappings of metaphor, symbol, rhythm, and alliteration are stripped away to create an exact match between title and content – because each text consists of just the single word of its title.

G.A.Baralt is an Argentinean attorney who has written a multi-volume study of the Brotherhood Movement. This movement is based on the observation that at any given time, all over the world, some people will be doing exactly the same thing. This could be anything from getting out of bed to striking a match. At the conclusion of the story Baralt is compiling, as a supplement to the main study – a list of all possible Brotherhoods, including those who thought about a particular topic two minutes ago, or those who three minutes ago forgot about it.

Some of the stories are amazingly prophetic, given some of the more absurd ‘developments’ in modern art in recent decades. The tales deal with what we would now call ‘happenings’ (random gatherings of people) uninhabitable architecture, ‘concave’ sculpture (composed from the space between objects) and the work of an ‘abstract’ artist all of whose canvases are covered in black shoe polish.

Bustos Domecq emerges as a comic figure in his own right from the stories he relates. As an occupational sideline he sells tickets for events that don’t take place, orders drinks he doesn’t pay for, and publishes (strictly by subscription in advance) the work of a worthless poet. He is pompous, self-regarding, and his literary style is amusing in itself – filled with creaking and orotund journalese, recent archaisms, irrelevances, and non-sequiturs.

The weaker examples of this collection lapse into silliness and mere whimsy, but the basic approach is quite subtle – given that the stories contain amusingly absurd ideas and are related by not only an unreliable narrator but one with an off-beat, almost bizarre literary style.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2015


Jorge Luis Borges, Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, New York: E.P.Dutton, 1979, pp.143. ISBN: 0525080473


Jorge Louis Borges links

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq Jorge Luis Borges – biography

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq Borges Center – University of Pittsburgh

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq BBC Radio 4 audio documentary

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq Paris Review – Interview


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Filed Under: Jorge Luis Borges Tagged With: Jorge Luis Borges, Literary studies, The Short Story

Fictions

November 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

short stories of fantasy, parody, mystery, and satire

Fictions (1944) is a single-volume compilation of two collections of short stories which made Jorge Luis Borges famous – his 1941 publication The Garden of Forking Paths and the 1944 follow-up Artifices. He is one of the few writers to achieve international fame merely on the strength of short stories (Katherine Mansfield was another rare case).

Fictions

His approach is distinctly playful. The stories are in the form of fantasies, essays on imaginary objects, fake biographies, bibliographic parodies, detective stories, and a form he is particularly fond of – commentaries on other people’s work, real and imaginary. He defends this approach in a typically witty manner:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that these books already exist, and offer a commentary on them.

This illustrates the ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach he brings to the short story form. He is also keen on blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. A story might begin by referring to the real world or a well known text, but he then blends it with fictional inventions or fanciful distortions which produce an effect like philosophic mind games. As a reader, you are suddenly no longer sure in which conceptual plane the narrative is taking place.

As a former librarian, he frequently highlights the bibliographic elements of his creations. He offers academic references (often spurious) for the sources of his information and bogus but amusing footnotes to support the authenticity of his narratives .

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story in which Borges and his friend Bioy Casares (a real Argentinean writer) find one volume of an encyclopaedia that documents an imaginary world. It has been written by a collective of scholars working in secret. The language of this world has no nouns, there are no sciences, and one of the many schools of its philosophy denies the existence of time. The story has a postscript explaining how the project was later expanded to produce the invention of an entire planet. This at first appears to be a failure, but then physical objects from this imaginary world begin to appear in the fictional ‘present’.

In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a French belle-lettrist decides to re-write the whole of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word from scratch. The story has an amusing defence that claims his reproduction (of which he only manages a couple of chapters) is more subtle than the original – because it was written three hundred years later. This conceit prefigures a school of literary criticism (Cultural Materialism) which argues that the meaning of a text is influenced both by the time in which it was produced as well as the time in which it is read.

In The Circular Ruins a man crawls into a primitive temple with the task of dreaming another person into being. He eventually manages it – first the heart, then the lungs, and so on. This being becomes his ‘son’, and he worries that his creation might come to realise that he is the projection of somebody else’s dream. When he tries to escape from this metaphysical problem, he suddenly realises that somebody else is dreaming him.

The Lottery of Babylon is a Kafka-like invention of a society run on pure chance, in which everyone is compelled to participate. Lots are drawn which might result in torture, death, or infinite riches. But even the administration of the results are subject to chance, and might be carried out at random, reversed, or simply ignored.

Another plot device favoured by Borges is the point of view reversal or the hidden narrator – such as the Irish republican in The Shape of the Sword who tells the story of how he saved the life of a coward during the civil war. He protects his comrade from his abject fear, only to find that the man has betrayed him to the Black and Tans. When the narrator is brought before a firing squad for execution the story turns itself inside out to reveal that the narrator is in fact the coward.

Funes, the Memorious is the potted biography of a poor young Argentinean boy who has a memory so prodigious that he cannot forget anything. As a child Ireneo Funes always knows exactly what time it is at any moment and can remember trivial events with chronological exactitude. He is thrown off a horse, crippled, and when he recovers he discovers that his memory is virtually infinite. He can remember the shape of clouds on any particular day, the pattern of the leaves on a tree, or the veins of decorative marbling in a book he has only seen once.

Whilst the stories are marvellously inventive, it has to be said that they are not uniformly consistent in quality. Some are formless and not much more than self-indulgent whimsy. But the best are tightly wrought and well constructed, with no superfluous material at all – just as a good short story should be. Borges went on to produce an enormously varied body of work – essays, poetry, translations, lectures, film and book reviews – in addition to his now-famous stories. But this collection Fictions remains what might be called his ‘signature’ work.

Fictions Buy the book at Amazon UK
Fictions Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2015


Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, pp.179, ISBN: 0141183845


Jorge Louis Borges links

Fictions Jorge Luis Borges – biography

Fictions Borges Center – University of Pittsburgh

Fictions BBC Radio 4 audio documentary

Fictions Paris Review – Interview


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Filed Under: Jorge Luis Borges, The Short Story Tagged With: Jorge Luis Borges, Literary studies, The Short Story

Jorge Luis Borges biography

December 6, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essayist, librarian, master of the modern short story

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) – full name Jorge Francisco Isodoro Luis Borges Acevedo – was born in Buenos Aires Argentina into an educated middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and a teacher of psychology who was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English. His mother was Uruguayan of Spanish descent. They lived in a lower-class suburb famous for its cabarets, brothels, knife fights and the tango.

Jorge Luis Borges - portrait

He grew up in a house speaking both English and Spanish (as a child he thought they were the same language) and was he taught at home until he was eleven years old. The family lived in a large house with over one thousand volumes in English in its library. Despite the raffish nature of the neighbourhood, Borges reflected later in life that the two principal features of his childhood were his father’s library and a large garden – both of which feature prominently in his writing.

When he was only nine years old Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish, and it was published in a local journal. His friends all thought it was the work of his father.

In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland where his father was seeking treatment for his failing eyesight. Borges attended school, learned French, read Carlyle in English, and began to study philosophy in German. The family travelled to Spain, and because of political unrest in Argentina at the time, decided to stay in Switzerland during the war.

Jorge Luis Borges received his baccalauréate from the College de Geneve in 1918. The family stayed in Europe after the war, living in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. Whilst in Spain Borges became attracted to the avant garde Ultraist literary movement inspired by Appolinaire and Marinetti. He also published his first poems.

In 1921 the family returned to Buenos Aires, where Borges published his first collection of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) a sixty-four page booklet paid for by his father and with a cover designed by his sister Norah. There was no profit made from this enterprise: he simply gave the book away to anybody who was interested. He produced journalism, essays, and book reviews, and contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro.

The family returned to Switzerland in 1923 so that his father could resume treatment for his eyes, and when they returned to Argentina the following year, Borges discovered that he had developed a reputation as poet on the strength of his first book. In 1929 his book Cuaderno San Martin won a Municipal Prize, the prize money for which he spent on a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica.

In 1931 Borges began publishing in the literary journal Sur established by Victoria Ocampo, which helped him to establish his literary reputation. He wrote works including parodies of detective stories with another Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares under the name H. Bustos Domecq. He also began to explore existential themes in his work, drawing a great deal of his inspiration not from his own personal life, but from his experience of literature.

He was appointed editor at the literary supplement of newspaper Critica in 1933 where he published works that were a blend of non-fictional essays and short stories. These were later collected under the title of A Universal History of Infamy (1936). The collection explored two types of writing. The first used a combination of the essay and the short story to tell what were really true stories. The second were literary spoofs or forgeries – texts which he passed off as translations of little-known works, but which were in fact his own inventions.

In 1935 he published the prototype of what is now considered a typical ‘Borgesian’ short story – ‘The Approach to Mu’tasim – a review of an imaginary novel. He had been influenced by his reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sator Resartus, a book comprised of reflections on the work and life of an imaginary German philosopher. It is a mark of Borges preference for shorter literary genres (and what he jokingly called his ‘laziness’) that rather than creating complete imaginary works, he thought it was more inventive to conjure up their existence by writing reviews of them as if they actually existed.

Between 1936 and 1939 he wrote a weekly column for El Hogar, and in 1939 found work as an assistant in the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. His duties were so light he could complete them in the first hour. He spent the rest of the day in the basement, writing and translating the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner into Spanish. His first volume of short stories The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) collected work he had previously published in Sur.

His eyesight began to fade in the late 1930s and, unable to support himself as a writer, he began giving public lectures. He lived with his widowed mother, who became his personal secretary. Although he relied a great deal on his imaginative responses to literature, he never learned to read Braille. He became completely blind by the late 1950s.

When Juan Peron came to power in 1946 Borges was ‘promoted’ to the job of Inspector of Rabbits and Poultry in the Public Markets, a post from which he immediately resigned. He was elected to the presidency of the Argentine Writer’s Society in 1950 and given the job of director of the National Library in 1955, even though he was by that time completely blind.

Some of his work was translated into English during the 1940s and 1950s, but his international reputation dates from the early 1960s when he was awarded the International Publisher’s Prize, the Prix Formentor – which he shared with Samuel Beckett. He was appointed for a year to the Chair of literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and went on to give lecture tours in America and Europe.

Two major anthologies of his work were published in 1962 – Ficciones and Layrinths – which further enhanced his international reputation. In 1967 Borges embarked on a five year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni which helped to make his work better known in the English-speaking world.

Then in 1967 Jorge Luis Borges married an old friend Elsa Astete Millan who had become a widow, but the marriage only lasted three years. Borges went back to his mother, with whom he lived until her death at the age of almost one hundred. He travelled extensively on lecture tours, and published further collections of his work – The Book of Sand, Dr Brodie’s report, and The Book of Imaginary Beings.

In 1986, a few months before his death, he married his literary assistant Maria Kodama, who thereby gained control of his literary estate and the considerable income from it. Despite international protests, she rescinded all publishing rights for the existing collections of his work and commissioned new translations.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: Biography, Jorge Luis Borges Tagged With: Jorge Luis Borges, Literary studies, Modernism, The Short Story

The Total Library

February 11, 2011 by Roy Johnson

criticism, journalism, film reviews, and essays

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the few writers to establish an international reputation on the strength of only having written short stories: (Katherine Mansfield is another). In fact because he never wrote any long works, it is often assumed that he didn’t write very much. The truth is the exact opposite: he never stopped writing, and The Total Library, this huge collection of his non-fiction works is only a sample of his vast output.

The Total LibraryFrom his earliest years he produced book reviews, essays, lectures, film reviews, prologues, and translations in addition to his now-famous fictions. He even invented literary genres – the essay which is part philosophic reflection and part fiction; studies of imaginary works; and biographies of people who did not exist. This in addition to spoofs, mind games, and metaphysical writings of a kind that seem to transcend national boundaries – which is partly why he managed to establish his international reputation.

Borges’ attitude to the lecture illustrates both his personality and his versatility. In his earlier years he gave ‘lectures’ by sitting on the stage and letting somebody else read out a prepared text to the audience. After he went blind he didn’t write out a text at all, but sat in front of the audience and improvised monologues on his chosen topic. He is an immensely sophisticated playboy of the literary world

This volume is a very wide collection in chronological terms – from his earliest pieces written in the 1920s to fragments written shortly before his death in 1986. It even includes early work he later disowned, but which here has wisely been included. This allows us to follow (in excellent translation) the development of his approach to writing.

It has to be said that his early work is marked by an inflated and pretentious literary style – for instance his habit of trying to impress with paradoxical statements “all the film’s characters are recklessly normal”. He also seems to have adopted a great deal of whimsy from the English authors who were the favourite reading of his earlier years. But this affectation drops away from the early 1930s onwards.

At their most lightweight, some of these pieces are no more than paragraph long observations, but at their best they offer amazingly perceptive analyses based on his encyclopaedic knowledge and love of literature. For instance in the middle of discussing Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener he persuasively argues that the text prefigures the work of Kafka in its rigorous logic and black humour. This is a perception he elaborated into a full length essay seven years later – ‘Kafka and his Precursors’ (1951) in which he wittily argues that great writers create not only their own works, but also their readers and even their precursors. He illustrates what we now call Kafkaesque elements in the work of Kierkegaard and Robert Browning, then observes:

Kafka’s idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. .. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

There are surprises on nearly every page. Borges repeatedly asserts that whilst James Joyce is a great twentieth century writer, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are ‘unreadable’. In his film criticism, he pours scorn on King Kong and Now, Voyager (‘Across the screens of the most remote movie houses, the film spreads its bold thesis: A disfigured Miss Davis is less beautiful‘). He defends Rudyard Kipling against his political detractors. And his celebration of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass will make you want to dash out and buy a copy, if you don’t already have one.

There would be a good argument for reading this collection backwards – starting with pieces such as the magnificent essay on ‘The Detective Story’ (1951) or on ‘Blindness'(1977) which is a poetic meditation on the advantages he has gained from losing his own sight – which turn out to be his learning Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian languages. Work your way in reverse chronological order through his essays on anti-Semitism and the second world war, via the sketches he produced for Hogar (the Argentinean equivalent of Ladies’ Home Journal) until you reach the material he (understandably) disowned. For those who have read his celebrated short stories in Ficciones, Labyrinths, and The Book of Imaginary Beings, this collection is a welcome addition to understanding a fascinating writer.

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library, London: Penguin Books, 2001, pp.560, ISBN: 0141183020


More on Jorge Luis Borges
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Filed Under: Jorge Luis Borges Tagged With: Essays, Jorge Luis Borges, Journalism, Literary studies, The Short Story

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