Any analysis of how history and reality are included in Jorge Luis Borges’ work must accept the premise that Borges saw both as precarious ideas; man-made orders that shared the frailty of all other attempts at classifying the universe. This bold premise certainly cannot be used as grounds for assuming that Borges kept aloof from experience or that he lived detached in his own world of intellectual, quasi-autistic games. Rather, it warns readers that they are dealing with an author constantly alert to the limitations and possibilities of language and of symbols.
These limitations and possibilities are part of what is adduced by the ambitious term reality. That some readers can still perceive Borges as an unconcerned, comfortable storyteller requires them to bypass completely his radical approach to the heady problems of representation and belief. It also requires a solid ignorance of Argentine political and cultural history. Borges cannot be fully understood or appreciated without following his conversation with fellow countrymen—politicians, writers—who in the nineteenth century faced the problem of creating a nation out of a section of the collapsed Spanish Empire. This transparently ambiguous and anguished conversation exposed Borges intimately to the backstage, fiction-ridden architecture of nationalistic thinking. It also gave him insights with which to measure how the term history could be understood: perhaps as a succession of events, but more significantly as an explanation of how those events were remembered or forgotten by particular authors. Any study attempting to recover the contexts for Borges’ apparently platonic work is bound to face many challenges: challenges to the philosophical imagination and to the capacity to venture into a careful reconnaissance of Argentine cultural history.
Daniel Balderston deals better with the second challenge than with the first. Of the seven Borges stories he examines, those that show Borges trying to reconcile his English grandmother to the feral, barbaric life in la desaforada llanura, the open plains (“Historia del guerrero y la cautiva”), or leaving behind law and order to embrace “the fate of the wolf,” of the renegade gaucho (“Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz”) come closer to meeting Balderston’s own goal of revealing the “implications” of the texts. The inevitable analysis of “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” would have gained in resonance if a link had been established between this work and another fictional essay by an Argentine, Juan Bautista Alberdi, who in the nineteenth century had already tried the idea of rewriting the Quijote in America. Alberdi, though, with political and satirical purposes, followed the line Borges did not recommend: that of “composing another Don Quijote—which would be easy” instead of “the” Don Quijote, as Menard/Borges mischievously preferred. Similarly, as an influence behind the “Conjectural Poem,” it seems less relevant to mention Browning than Walt Whitman’s “Death Sonnet for Custer,” to which Borges’ reflective poem bears a striking moral and imaginative resemblance.
The assumption that Borges was an author who turned his back on reality owes much to unfavorable reviews by fellow Argentine writers between the 1920s and 1960s, so it is curious that Balderston does not cite the book by María Luisa Bastos, Borges ante la crítica argentina, 1923—1960 (1974), which takes precisely that angle. Those writers, for the most part, either sided with the Left or identified themselves as nationalists, and were obviously not taken in by Borges’ (often derisive) iconoclasm. This piece of information in itself provides a useful historical context.
Borges’ firm roots in Argentine history and his sometimes earthy reaction to contemporary events are not invisible in his work. It is fitting, perhaps, to the nature of the topic that such a statement may sound to some like a Borgesian tale. So be it. More studies in the same vein as Balderston’s are necessary to reverse the tide.
