Discurso e historia en la obra narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges. Examen de Ficciones y El Aleph

Abstract

Discurso e historia en la obra narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges. Examen de Ficciones y El Aleph. By Nicolas Emilio Alvarez. Colorado: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1998. 258 pages. To undertake a substantial addition to the large and complex body of Borges criticism is an increasingly daunting task. One need only glance, for example, at James Woodall's 1996 biography of the Argentine master, one title among a number of recent books and major articles. Woodall limits himself to critical materials written in Spanish, English, and French, and even so compiles an incomplete reference listing of some fifty book-length studies. In spite of such abundance, however, we can still agree with Martin Stabb, who in his Borges Revisited (1991) suggests that there is yet much to be done in the application of recent critical theories to Borges' fiction. The situation has not changed appreciably since 1991, and Alvarez' book must therefore be approached as a significant contribution in a relatively underworked aspect of commentary on Borges' fiction. Alvarez' central purpose is to examine narrative production techniques in Borges' two principal short story collections, and he develops and applies an analytical approach based in large part on the ideas of Gerard Genette and Jacques Derrida. The framework he uses for his examination is straightforward: an Introduction, which includes a few pages of biographical information and a brief initial essay on method and terminology; extended chapters on Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949), constructed of separate commentaries on each major story; a shorter concluding chapter; a final Bibliography; and an Indice analitico. The fleshing out of the framework, however, often belies its apparent simplicity. The introductory essay on method, for example, is a brief but rather complex exposition. Some thirty terms or concepts are presented, set off in bold type, and considered in summary fashion. Many are taken from Genette, Derrida, et al., but a number are adapted or created by Alvarez as applicable to the analysis of Borges' texts. All of this material is intended, obviously, as a preparation for the detailed readings of the main chapters, but I have to confess that the proliferation of terms at this point in the study produces a bit of vertigo rather than clarity (e.g., prediegesis, posdiegesis, prodiegesis, subdiegesis, metadiegesis, meta-metadiegesis, 6-7). The chapters on the two principal Borges story collections constitute, as one would expect, the largest part of Alvarez' book. Once again the overall structure is simple and direct, with separated commentaries arranged in the order in which the stories appear in Borges' definitive editions. …