Jorge Luis Borges

For discussion about Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine short story writer, famous for not winning the Nobel prize. He has his own adjective (Borgesian).

Here's some questions to try to get discussion started.

What has everyone read by him? What is your favorite work? What are your favorite Borgesian authors or works? Who is your favorite Borges expy? Who are your favorite authors who influenced Borges and what works are crucial to understanding his?

What is "The Circular Ruins" an allegory of? What about "The Book of Sand"? What is the secret in "The Sect of the Pheonix"?

What is the relative merit of the various translators? Should Borges have won the Nobel Prize? Authors have criticized Borges for being stuck in the Ivory Tower, does this criticism have any merit?

oooh, Borges! Love Borges' stuff. The Library, the Immortal, the House of Asterion, and Deutsches Requiem are some of my favorites

"The Lottery of Babylon" is one of the few stories from recent memory that well and truly screwed with my head.

I wouldn't call "The Circular Ruins" an allegory in the first place. Now, it seems to borrow its theme from the Gnostic theory of emanationism. This taught that the cosmos originally consisted of an initial Creation from the Divine Principle, from that creation came a slightly less perfect sub-creation, then an even less perfect sub-sub-creation, etc. Accroding to the Gnostics, our universe is last in a line of ever more defective sub-creations, or "emanations." (The God of the OT, supposedly, is merely the deity of the sub-sub-[whatever]-creation immediately above us.) Borges's story seems to be a riff on this concept. JLB was interested in the Gnostics, and wrote a noted essay about them, "Una vindicación del falso Basílides."

And as for the "ivory tower" charge ... Borges probably wouldn't have been a social butterfly wherever he landed, but Peronist Argentina was an especially dangerous place for regime-unfriendly public figures. Borges lost several positions and suffered numerous indignities because of his (not very vocal) opposition to the Peróns. This gave him more than ordinarily compelling reasons to avoid the academic, literary, & social life of his day.

edited 26th Mar '14 8:03:58 AM by Jhimmibhob

What Jhimmibhob said. The man was a legitimately free-thinking individual in a very authoritarian, anti-individualist state. Of course he was withdrawn. Also concurring with the observations about Gnosticism, which is a kind of recurring motif in Borges' thought experiment vignettes.

Speaking of which, that one story about the man who writes a multi-volume non-fiction tome in his mind in the suspended second in which he is executed by firing squad is utterly heartbreaking to me.

A while back, Unwinder's Tall Comics did a two-part tribute to Borges. You folks might appreciate it. Part 1, Part 2.

How to tell if you are in a Jorge Luis Borges story

Yuss.