The search of the ‘Borges factor’ has been intense: vast amounts of critical work and biographical accounts have been written as part of it. Surprisingly little, however, has been written about the mechanisms of this ongoing quest itself. This study focuses on that ‘fatal blindness of the horizons’ which constructs the variety of historical ‘Borges elements’ that Pauls mentions. It seeks to demonstrate the fluid quality of the process and the illusory nature of its aim. Crucially, it intends to uncover the intimate links between the processes of construction of Borges and of formation of an Argentine cultural identity.² The...

This chapter explores the construction of a multiplicity of Borgeses in a selection of literary biographies written between 1964 and 2004 in Argentina and abroad. These are Alicia Jurado’sGenio y figura de Jorge Luis Borges(1964); Emir Rodríguez Monegal’sBorges: Una biografía literaria(1987, first published in 1978); Estela Canto’sBorges a contraluz(1989); María Esther Vázquez’s Borges:Esplendor y derrota(1996); and Edwin Williamson’sBorges: A Life(2004). Many other biographical accounts of the author have been written in Spanish and English.² Among these is, notably, Adolfo Bioy Casares’sBorges(2006), which provides valuable insight into both Borges...

‘Si … lo dice’ is a formula that is often completed by ‘… es palabra santa,’ a phrase mostly used to suggest that the words of whoever has spoken are to be taken as gospel. ‘Si Borges lo dice’ was the phrase chosen as a title for an article published inSomosmagazine (Fig. 5) in 1982 about the recent publication ofBorges el memorioso, a book containing a selection of conversations between the writer and the famous radio presenter Antonio Carrizo which had been broadcast in 1979.¹ This is only one of several books of this type in existence,...

The relationship between the physiognomy of the world and that of a person, as Borges suggests in his epilogue toEl Hacedor(quoted above), centres on the search for identity. The man imagined by Borges, who embarked on the task of representing the world and spent his life filling it with images, comes to the end of his life and realizes that the representation of his world and that of his personal identity coincide. Used in juxtaposition with ‘espacio’, Borges’s choice of the verb ‘poblar’ to describe the filling of a space with images suggests that the identity of a...

The now iconic love affair between Borges and Buenos Aires has many facets. Borges gives to and takes from the city: Buenos Aires is described, fictionalized and mythologized in Borges’s work, and the figure of Borges is constructed and narrated in the life and spaces of the city. Argentine writer and journalist Carlos Alberto Zito notes that Buenos Aires ‘cría (crea) a Borges, y Borges re-crea a Buenos Aires, hasta llegar a inventarle una nueva fundación, poética y excéntrica.’¹ Zito refers to the poetic founding of the city powerfully depicted in Borges’s ‘Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires’, a poem with...

In the context of Argentina’s bicentenary celebrations, which propitiated the consideration of the concept of ‘Argentineness’, the figure of Borges emerged as a constant in a variety of discourses. These discourses pertain, in turn, to the construction of a sense of national cultural identity. This study has explored this link and it has come to the conclusion that the anxieties and expectations projected onto the iconic figure of Borges are those which have contributed to defining Argentina’s sense of cultural identity. These rest largely on the oscillation between being ‘local’ and being ‘foreign’, an opposition which is intimately linked with...