Borges by Julio Premat;

Author:Julio Premat;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

A Pensive Sentiment

Materials

I’ve fixed my feelings into durable words

When they could have been spent on tenderness.

“Almost a Last Judgment,” 19251

ITALO CALVINO ASSERTED that Borges had perfected a modality of fiction, a “Borgesian fiction” that he considered to be the latest novelty to take place in terms of literary genres. This novelty consisted in a specific kind of erudition, guided by imaginary books and potential literature.2 Michel Lafon thought the biographical pattern played a similar role in the definition of this personal narrative form.3 To be complete without being exhaustive, I will add two additional characteristics that distinguish the functioning as well as the semantic significance of Borges’s texts: first, the dynamic that connects writing composed of clues (borrowed from police novels) to possible readings and interpretations, and second, the variations in the representation of time and therefore the links that fiction creates with history, be it literary or social.

What follows will offer a few transversal commentaries on these aspects of the Borgesian story (biography, incendiary writing, erudition, temporalities), the “story” being understood in its largest definition: short stories, essays, and poems (or at least certain poems) included. The story is, fiction is, for Borges, a way of being in the world and not only a literary form. Just as the figure of the author can be closely linked to aesthetic and semantic tendencies appearing in the works, these modalities of the story imply a conception of literature, a vision of the world, a metaphysics of the subject and of meaning.

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