Who was Jorge Luis Borges? To understand someone, you must first know some background to his life, as well as where and when he lived his life. Much can also be learned from Borges’ writing style. First of all, Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 24, 1899. Borges’s father was a lawyer and psychology professor, his mother was a descendant of many soldiers and freedom fighters. Borges and his younger sister Norah, his only real childhood friend, acted out scenes from books and spent their time wandering through the library, the maze, and the garden. His lack of friends founded a friendship with a local poet, Evaristo Carriego, an intrepid man of Argentine tradition who became something of a minor idol for the young Borges.
Young Jorge grew up in Palermo, a suburb on the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires. At the time it was a lower-class suburb known for its brothels, cabarets, and knife fights. Most of the people went to these places to dance tango and tell stories in front of the fire. Gauchos engaged in knife fights to show their courage, settle disputes, and gain respect for the way they handled a knife. Much of Borges’ earlier work was steeped in Palermo thought, though most of it grew up in a garden or library of limitless English-language books. In 1908 Borges began to go to school, but he soon came to hate school for the other students, despite the fact that he excelled academically. In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, where Borges completed four years of high school at the Calvin College. The next few years he spent mainly traveling in Spain. In 1921 the family returned to Buenos Aires where Borges published his first collection of poems. In 1938 his father died. That Christmas Eve, Borges himself had an accident that left him hallucinating in bed for a week, and after being operated on he suffered sepsis that kept him between life and death for a month. Although there are many interesting facts about his life, what was happening in the world at that time affected his daily life. Just as our world affects us, his world affected his thinking, his work over the years, and almost every other facet of life.
When the Borges family first moved to Geneva, a war broke out and they were forced to stay. After the war, they moved to Spain. The twenties brought a certain political awareness to Borges. He supported the campaign of former president Hipólito Yrigoyen, who served as president from 1916 to 1922. But he proved too out of touch with the times to be an effective ruler. Borges was disheartened when Yrigoyen was overthrown by a military junta, which would prove to be only the first of many more repressive governments. Borges’s distaste for politics became total. Ironically, he gained more recognition for his political articles than for his fiction. This fact caused him problems when the fascists came to power in the mid-1940s. In 1946 Juan Perón was elected president, and due to his political affiliations, Borges was “promoted” to “Inspector of Birds and Rabbits in Public Markets.” He immediately resigned, saying that “dictatorships encourage servility, dictatorships encourage cruelty, the more abominable it is that they encourage stupidity.”
The Perón regime, although it did not arrest him personally, did make life more difficult for him and his family. After participating in a protest, his mother and Norah were arrested in 1948; her mother was placed under house arrest, but Norah was thrown into a jail reserved mainly for prostitutes. In 1950, Borges was elected president of the Argentine Society of Writers. SADE had mainly political thoughts and was being investigated by the government. A typical meeting would start with complex literature and philosophy until the police officers got bored to sleep or went home, then the real political discussions would take place. Although cautiously, SADE was finally closed. In 1955 the “Revolución Libertadora” took place. Although the government continued to be military, SADE was reopened and Borges was appointed director of the National Library. But it turned out that the new government abused power like any other traditional Argentine junta. Borges began to criticize his policies, until the “absurd war” for the Malvinas Islands made Borges retire in disgust from the world of politics. By then, Borges was going completely blind. There is no doubt that all this had its own influence on Borges’s writing, but it all came together in his own style.
Borges had his own style of writing from a mixture of many people’s styles and in a way made it uniquely his own. It seemed that whoever had an impact on Borges’s life also influenced some of his writing. He began writing at the age of six, mostly stories inspired by Cervantes. When he was nine years old, he translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, which appeared in a local newspaper called El País. Since it was signed only “Jorge Borges”, everyone assumed it was his father’s handiwork, and further noted how close her handwriting was to his father’s. Borges has also mentioned that his grandmother’s dry English wit was the origin of his concise style. It was at the Calvino College where Borges discovered a completely new way of relating to the world through abstract literature through the work of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. It was also in Geneva that he first acquired his love for Schopenhauer, his favorite of all philosophers, and for Walt Whitman, whom he for a time believed to be the culmination of all the subtle aims of poetry. According to John Updike, “despite his modesty and no-nonsense tone, he proposes some kind of essential revision in the literature itself”, saying that “Borges’s driest paragraph is somehow convincing”. Also the historian and philosophizing George Steiner wrote: “When he cites fictitious titles, imaginary cross references, folios and writers who have never existed, Borges is simply regrouping counters of reality in the form of other possible worlds. When he moves, by means of puns and echo, from tongue to tongue, is turning the kaleidoscope, casting the light on another piece of the wall.” I could, I chose to evaluate one of his many works.
Reading his first story, El hombre de la esquina, allows us to capture everything that Borges is. The story was inspired by a local ‘compadrito’ who died. The story was never dry or boring. The story was all the more real because of the setting that could have been a local cabaret where Borges grew up. Although written under the pseudonym “Francisco Bustos” and becoming a huge success, Borges did not want to be known as a populist drama-writing mother. Her mixture of reality and fiction made the story flow until an unexpected twist at the end. Seeing how her past is vividly recounted and described through her work is one of the joys of reading Borges. It was fascinating to see how well it portrayed all aspects of the story. The mood she set was along with the story, how someone from that time period would have told it, to how people would have reacted to each stimuli in the story. The characters were so real, it’s hard to tell if it’s really not fiction. Through this story, as with many of his stories, it becomes clearer as it progresses, that is, until the final twist. It was at that moment that she knew it wasn’t the same, Borges simply has more elements in his stories than most writers. Even in such a short story, Borges found a way to include so many details. So many details, in fact, that you pick things up reading the story a third and fourth time. Hopefully you understand Borges a bit now, if not, go read some of his works and see what sets him apart from other writers.
