Cultural Margins in Borges: Mimesis, Autobiography and Catastrophe

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Date
1998
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Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos
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The history of commentary on the work of Jorge Luis Borges is marked by a persistent resistance, which manifests itself in the difficulty or impossibility of identifying and documenting a Borgesian system (a poetics, a grammar, a rhetoric, and also a philosophy), and likewise in the problem of delimiting a field and an application with respect to Borges' text, of assessing its standing with cultural, national and socio-political concerns. With respect to these difficulties, there are two prevailing tendencies in reading Borges: 1) the tendency to critique, devalue or even dismiss him, on the grounds of a self-evident Eurocentrism, in light of his conservative political statements or on the basis of a supposed lack of political relevance (identified in the author's refusal to provide a political context in or for his stories, and his insistence on the textuality of any and all context), and finally his silence with regard to issues of Argentine or Latin American specificity or communality (and here the devaluation consists in a deprivation: Borges is not Argentine enough); 2) from the other pole, a prevailing tendency to celebrate Borges as a writer of the universal who is - again - essentially indifferent to a particular question of origin and community (whence, it seems, his "universal" applicability and appeal). This latter assessment continues to allocate Borges' text to broadly defined categories (mystical, fantastic, escapist) while refusing, or finding itself unable, to address the specificity of Borges' subject matter, which may indeed appear to be universal in scope, but which also never ceases to return upon and re-articulate the question of a particular. In either of these common readings, Borges' text could be said to be essentially reducible to an ideal notion of translation, or a movement between the particular and the universal: as either absolutely impossible or absolutely possible, and in both cases entirely devoid of any remainder or play of difference.
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“Cultural Margins in Borges: Mimesis, Autobiography and Catastrophe,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 23:1 (Autumn 1998): 41-60.
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