Humorístico oprobio: el destino irónico de las ‘vidas imaginarias’ de Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, y Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

Through the analysis of three works by Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, and Roberto Bolaño — the three of them devotees of Marcel Schwob’s biographic mission in his work Vies imaginaires (1896) —, the present article analyses from a comparative perspective the use that Schwob made of irony and that used by the aforementioned triad of Latin-American authors. If irony becomes a kindly sceptical mechanism towards the world’s imperfections in the French author’s writing, it will gain greater rage and causticity in the Latin-American’s, where the narration of their fake biography books becomes a parody of the illustrated encyclopedic tradition. By grotesquely exaggerating the technocratic and avant-garde excesses of their characters, it will be manifest how irony — mainly studied here from the perspective of Søren Kierkegaard and Pierre Schoentjes — constituted an appropriated means through which Borges, Wilcock, and Bolaño emphasized the negative determinants of the historical periods in which they lived.