Jorge Luis Borges

• 1. Introduction

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  Jorge Luis Borges once described his blindness as a gift wrapped in cruel irony. In a poem he wrote that God, with splendid irony, granted him books and night at a single touch. By the late 1950s he was the director of the Argentine National Library, surrounded by volumes he could no longer read. He had become completely blind. This was the man who imagined a library containing every possible book, and a man who could forget nothing he experienced. Born in Buenos Aires on the 24th of August 1899, Borges grew up bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare at twelve. He died of liver cancer in Geneva on the 14th of June 1986, aged 86. Between those dates he never wrote a novel, calling it a genre that requires padding. His longest work of fiction runs fourteen pages. How did a man who preferred the short story become, in the words of David Foster Wallace, arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature? How did losing his sight sharpen rather than silence him? And why, decades after his death, do physicists and computer scientists keep returning to stories he wrote in the 1940s?

• 2. The Father's Library

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  If asked to name the chief event in his life, Borges said he would point to his father's library. The family home held an English library of over one thousand volumes. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations and wrote the novel El caudillo in 1921. Borges said his father tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt. The father gave up practicing law because of failing eyesight, the same affliction that would later claim his son. At age ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish, and it was published in a local journal. His friends assumed the real author was his father. Taught at home until the age of eleven, Borges read philosophy in German and Thomas Carlyle in English. He came from a family of soldiers and felt their shadow keenly. He wrote that, as most of his people had been soldiers and he knew he never would be, he felt ashamed quite early to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action. His mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, worked as a translator and spoke often of her family's heroic actions in the Argentine War of Independence. His sister Norah Borges became a painter. The 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem Isidoro Acevedo, commemorating his grandfather, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army who died in the house where Borges was born.

• 3. Europe And Ultraism

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  In 1914 the Borges family moved to Geneva, where the father sought treatment from an eye specialist and the children attended school. Borges learned French and began reading philosophy in German, and in 1917, at eighteen, he met the writer Maurice Abramowicz and began a friendship that lasted the rest of his life. He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. Political unrest in Argentina kept the family in Switzerland through the war. After World War I, the family lived in Lugano, Barcelona, Mallorca, Seville, and Madrid before returning to Argentina in 1921. In Spain, Borges joined the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. His first poem, Hymn to the Sea, was written in the style of Walt Whitman and published in the magazine Grecia. Borges set out the principles of Ultraism in the magazine Nosotros in 1921. The movement reduced lyric poetry to its primary element, the metaphor, eliminating transitional phrases, links, and unnecessary adjectives. It abolished ornamental devices and confessionalism. Borges argued that personality, the self, was merely a broad collective designation for a plurality of states of consciousness. The goal, he wrote, was the transmutation of the palpable reality of the world into an inner and emotional reality. The writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, published in 1915, became influential on his thinking during these years.

• 4. Buenos Aires And Sur

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  Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 with little formal education, no qualifications, and few friends. He complained in a letter that the city was overrun by arrivistes and correct youths lacking any mental equipment. In 1923 he published his first poetry collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires, and contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro. He co-founded the journals Prisma, distributed largely by pasting copies to walls, and Proa. Later in life he regretted some of these early publications and tried to buy up all known copies to destroy them. From its first issue, Borges contributed to Sur, founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo and then Argentina's most important literary journal. Ocampo introduced him to Adolfo Bioy Casares, a frequent collaborator and close friend with whom he wrote works under the shared pen name H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series. A family friend, Macedonio Fernández, became a major influence; the two presided over discussions in cafés and in Fernández's tiny apartment in the Balvanera district. In 1933 Borges gained an editorial appointment at Revista Multicolor de los Sábados, where he first published pieces collected as Historia universal de la infamia in 1935. The book mixed essays that read like stories with literary forgeries he initially passed off as translations. In 1938 he found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library, where so few books needed cataloging that the task took about an hour a day, leaving the rest of his time for writing in the basement.

• 5. The Accident And The Stories

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  On Christmas Eve in 1938, Borges suffered a severe head injury and nearly died of sepsis during treatment. His father had died earlier that year, shortly before his 64th birthday. While recovering from the accident, Borges began exploring the new style for which he would become famous. His first story written after the accident, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, appeared in May 1939 and examined the nature of authorship and an author's relationship to his historical context. His first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, appeared in 1941, composed mostly of works previously published in Sur. The title story follows a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I. Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel through it, describing a theory of the universe based on the structure of such a novel. The collection was well received but failed to win the prizes many in his circle expected. In response, Victoria Ocampo dedicated much of the July 1942 issue of Sur to a Reparation for Borges, with leading writers across the Spanish-speaking world contributing. His best-known stories deal with time, infinity, mirrors, and labyrinths. The Library of Babel imagines a library containing every possible 410-page text. Funes, the Memorious describes a man who forgets nothing he experiences. The Aleph offers an artifact through which the user sees everything in the universe. Because of the success of Forking Paths, the term Borgesian came to describe a quality of narrative non-linearity.

• 6. Blindness And Renown

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  By the late 1950s Borges had become completely blind, having never learned to read Braille. Scholars have proposed that his progressive loss of sight pushed him toward innovative literary symbols through imaginative techniques. As his eyesight waned, he focused increasingly on poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress. His mother became his personal secretary when he could no longer read or write himself, and he lived with her until her death at age 99. In 1956 the University of Cuyo awarded him the first of many honorary doctorates, and the following year he received the National Prize for Literature. International fame arrived in 1961, when he received the first Prix International, shared with Samuel Beckett. Beckett already had a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, while Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world, so the prize stirred great interest. In 1962 two major anthologies, Ficciones and Labyrinths, were published in English by New York presses. His reputation was further consolidated by the Latin American Boom and the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Honors accumulated, including a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1976, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1980, and the French Legion of Honour in 1983. He received a British honorary knighthood in 1964 and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard between the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968. He earlier translated William Faulkner's The Wild Palms in 1940, forming a bridge that influenced writers such as Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez.

• 7. Politics And Principle

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  Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty, Borges wrote in a speech read at a dinner held in his honour. In 1946, under Juan Perón, Borges was told he was being promoted from the Miguel Cané Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at a municipal market. When he demanded the reason, he was told it was because he had been on the side of the Allies. He resigned the following day. His treatment became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. In 1951 he reluctantly accepted the presidency of the Argentine Society of Writers, recalling that he awoke every morning to remember Perón was president and feel ashamed. After Evita Perón's death on the 26th of July 1952, police ordered Borges to display portraits of the ruling couple at the society; he refused, and the organization was ordered closed in September. When the Revolución Libertadora toppled Perón on the 16th of September 1955, Borges marched through Buenos Aires shouting Viva la Patria until his voice grew hoarse, and the provisional government appointed him director of the National Library. He called himself a Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State. In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists claimed he was secretly Jewish, and he answered with the essay Yo, Judío, declaring he would be proud to be a Jew. He published essays attacking the Nazi police state, fueled by his deep love for German literature, and in 1946 wrote Deutsches Requiem, framed as the testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde. In 1983 he applauded the election of Raúl Alfonsín, saying Argentine democracy had refuted him splendidly and resoundingly.

• 8. Stories That Became Science

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  The Garden of Forking Paths, published in 1941, anticipates in an almost literal way the doctoral thesis of Hugh Everett III, published in 1957 as the Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Bryce DeWitt would later popularize that thesis as the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Borges could not have known this. Physicist Alberto Rojo analyzed the correspondence and concluded it shows how deeply Borges's mind was immersed in the cultural fabric of the 20th century. The Library of Babel is cited to illustrate the paradoxes of infinite sets and fractal geometry, while Funes the Memorious is invoked to represent numeral systems. Commentators including Umberto Eco have concluded that Borges anticipated the World Wide Web. A 2007 book, Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores how his stories turn the reader into an active participant. His widow and heir, María Kodama, gained control over his works on the basis of their marriage and two wills. She rescinded the English translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni and commissioned new ones by Andrew Hurley, which became the official English translations. Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize, something that continually distressed him. He remarked that not granting him the Nobel had become a Scandinavian tradition. During his final days in Geneva he brooded about an afterlife and asked for both a Catholic priest, in memory of his mother, and a Protestant minister, in memory of his English grandmother. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, and his grave there is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.