The Utopia of a Tired Man: Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

ION It is hardly possible to open a book of criticism these days without encountering a reference to Borges. The name magically transports writers from the drier labors of analysis and explanation to the oasis of parable. His have the force of a demonstration whilst remaining eminently disponibles, which possibly explains why they appeal to the avant-garde left like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, to the quietist skeptic in the University profession as well as to those who take the unequal balance of power between metropolis and periphery as part of the natural order of things. In effect, the graph of Borges's reputation outside the Argentine began to rise rapidly after 1961 when he was co-recipient with Samuel Beckett of the Formentor prize. This was precisely the time when G6rard Genette, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, the Tel Quel group, and others had begun to challenge the procedures of discourse and the assumption on which traditional narrative, history, metaphysics, science, and anthropology based their authority. The fictions opportunely became the exemplary texts. The laughter provoked by reading Borges's imaginary Chinese taxonomy' shattered, according to Foucault the familiar landmarks of my thought, our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography. Everyone would surely want to join this particular revolution which involved no bloodshed. Borges's fictions could be claimed as examples of e'criture, as religious, metaphysical, or skeptical demonstrations, as existential searches, as demonstrations of stoical quietism, and, more modestly, as proof that Latin America was indeed in the avant-garde.3 On the other hand, Borges's works also hold comfort for conservatives. They do not shatter the peace and order of military governments. They confirm metropolitan critics in their belief that Latin America, and Argentina in particular, do not deserve the civilized pleasure the fictions provide. According to one critic, it is only Borges's triumphant overflow of civility and intelligence that salvages the entire continent of brutality and stupidity. In all that barbarism, he is held up as the exception that proves the rule.4 What is surprising is not that the fictions are read in these different ways nor that they become arguments both for the right and for the left, but rather the critical consensus: 'El idioma analitico de John Wilkes, Otras Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1960), p. 142. 2Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. xv. 3See, for instance, the special issue of Revista Iberoamericana, XLII, 100101, (June-Dec., 1977). 4Paul Fussell in his review of Paul Theroux's The Old Paragonian Express in the book supplement of the New York Times (August 26, 1979). JEAN FRANCO, the author of An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, is the chairperson of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. A co-editor of the periodical Tabloid: A Review of Mass Culture and Everyday Life, she has most recently published Cesar Vallejo: Dialectics of Poetry and