Borges as Realist

I

Ever since French, Italian, German and English translations ¹ of his short fictions helped turn him into an international phenomenon, Jorge Luis Borges has seemed both to epitomize and yet also to stand apart from a Latin American modernist avant-garde. His most iconic short stories, especially those collected in Ficciones and El Aleph, continue to vouchsafe for their author a status that is both canonical but also somehow that of an outlier — as if the canon in question had room only for him. Among those reading him for the first time or who simply recognize the name, it is, in my experience, still not uncommon to encounter mild surprise upon learning that Borges is a Latin American and not a European author. But however deceptively ambiguous his affiliation to Latin America may sometimes appear to be, Borges has nevertheless long since come to be numbered among the veritable icons of high modernism.

Even discounting this now long-established if idiosyncratic pattern of reception it will likely appear still more anomalous, if not downright perverse, to raise the question, even hypothetically, of Borges as realist. Without going so far as to place Borges’s canonical fictions under the mantle of realism, whether in a conventionally generic or in a more strongly and rigorously theoretical sense, I want to propose in what follows that, at least in the case of a discrete and select group of his fictional narratives, the question of what may be, in the case of the latter, a certain aspiration toward realism can, nevertheless, not be discounted without discounting in turn essential qualities of their readerly and aesthetic reception, if not of their narrative form and method themselves.

Such an argument is, at the outset, invariably and doubly complicated: first by the stubborn and lamentable fact that, as both a term and a category, realism per se continues to be liable, at best, to ambiguation when not to misunderstanding and outright confabulation, especially when considered in relation to modernism. ² The second complication, long since a question for analysis and debate within Latin American literary theory and criticism, ³ is the fact that the standard cosmopolitan counterposing of modernism and realism itself tends to become more ambiguous and relativized in modern and contemporary Latin American fiction since at least the epoch of the Boom novel and its more immediate precursors, beginning no later, certainly, than the publication of Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo ⁴ in 1949. (A continual and lamentable mediatized fixation on a stereotyped “magical realism” when—generally outside the region—talk turns to fiction from modern Latin America only further muddies the waters with respect to this question). Consider just two illustrative cases: Carpentier’s incorporation—under the aegis of the “real maravilloso” (“marvelously real”)—of Surrealist principles of montage in what are simultaneously realist and explicitly historical novels such as the aforementioned El reino de este mundo and Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (1962); ⁵ or of analogously vanguardist elements, including purportedly Flaubertian techniques of narrative frame-breaking, in Vargas Llosa’s great historical novel of Peru’s Odría dictatorship, Conversación en la Catedral (1969), ⁶ one of the signal triumphs of Latin American realist fiction. Meanwhile, even if his fictional works are still, in themselves, difficult to classify according to more familiar modernist typologies and stylistic tropes—adjectives such as, for example, “Joycean” or “Faulknerian” somehow do not resonate in the case of a fiction such as, for example, “The Library of Babel”—Borges has always seemed to stand apart even from this regional, Latin American de-centering of the modernism/realism binary, epitomizing something that, in ways perhaps analogous to the brandishing of the adjective “Kafkaesque,” might readily invite facile and question-begging references to a modernism that is itself “Borgesian.”

But, if successful, my argument will demonstrate how, after all, Borges, or at least the short fictions that adhere to what I will characterize in what follows as a definite and recurrent narrative formula unevenly employed by the author, constitute still another, highly discrete instance in which the gravitational pull, so to speak, of realism can come to mediate and, perhaps, overdetermine simultaneously “fantastical” literary qualities more obviously modernist or vanguardist in inspiration. ⁷

As Daniel Balderston, one of the very few recognized Borges scholars to seriously consider Borges’s realist affinities, notes in a 1993 study, critical interpretations and evaluations of Borges’s prose fictions have, since at least the publication of Ana María Barrenechea’s Borges scholarship in the late 1950s, ⁸ largely coincided in positing their essential “irrealidad.” ⁹ And, needless to say, the many ostensibly anti-realist critical pronouncements and judgments to be found in Borges’s own copious non-fictional writings and the author’s long established advocacy of and identification with the literature of the “fantastic” (not always the best or most accurate translation of “literatura fantástica”) have helped to drown out any contrarian attempts to assess Borgesian fiction’s possible realist affinities, however muted, paradoxical and perhaps liable to denial or simply misrecognition on the part of the author himself.

Balderston restricts his unusual and otherwise extremely valuable revisionist case for detecting a definite realist vein in Borges to a survey of the nonfictional archival and historical contexts and subtexts discoverable in a series of short stories, including “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Secret Miracle” and several others. Focusing analysis and interpretation here mainly on just two major and highly canonized exhibits—“Funes the Memorious” and “The Aleph” (but with additional, passing discussion of “The South” and “The Other Death”)—my own concern here will be less with contexts, as crucial as these are, than with the “texts” themselves—i.e., their form and content as narratives—on a more strictly immanent plane. I propose at least to question whether the customary, often dogmatic presupposition—i.e., the idea that no countervailing realist impetus or “aspiration” (independent of, when not superficially hostile to, any authorial intent or consciousness) could possibly contribute to their ultimate literary configuration—will not, in the end, result in readings of these Borgesian texts that are, at best, inadequate and, at worst, distorting and falsifying. ¹⁰

My method here, in more positive terms, will be to undertake a close analysis, especially in “Funes,” of what I propose to identify as (1) an element or “strand” of intensively situated and localized realism, but one that is, at the same time, only made possible, in what will appear to be a paradoxical, recursive and even contradictory formal property of the narrative itself by (2) the explicitly “fantastical,” supernatural dimension of the story. For both expository purposes and for the sake of consistency, I will refer to (1) as the “creole” strand ¹¹ and to (2) as the “pseudo-metaphysical” strand or dimension of the narratives under analysis and interpretation.

And so as to understand, if I am right, what might make such a “fantastical” or “pseudo-metaphysically” embedded realism possible, finally, I turn, as in most of my own previous work, to the critical theory— literary, narrative and social—of the great Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, to the latter’s now classical theoretical concept of the “ideia fora de lugar” or “misplaced idea” (here in colonial and nineteenth century Brazil) and to Schwarz’s seminal and exemplary study of the later novels of Machado de Assis—a Latin American author and literary opus for which, as sometimes observed, ¹² Borges and Borgesian fiction can seem to demonstrate a definite affinity.

II

“Funes the Memorious” ¹³ is frequently considered to be one of Borges’s most brilliant and, ironically or not, one of his most memorable fictions. It is, by my lights, his single most consummately and artistically realized story and an indisputable masterpiece of the genre, surely one of the most stunning and nearly flawless short fictions ever written. Replete with echoes of classic nineteenth century and Victorian precursors—those of Poe and Stevenson seem all but audible in “Funes”— it nevertheless seems impossible for it to have been written in that century or, indeed, much before it was, in the 1940s. ¹⁴ I will assume the reader’s general familiarity with it here and omit any detailed summary, but it tells the story of Ireneo Funes, a poor young gaucho and leather-braider (referred to in the Spanish original as a “compadrito” and an “orillero”) whom the Argentine narrator loosely—and in this instance anachronistically—identified, as is frequently the case, with Borges himself, meets while summering along the Río Negro in the rural Uruguayan settlement of Fray Bentos.

In his first encounter with the narrator in 1884, Funes already demonstrates the skills, evidently unusual for an adolescent, semi-literate and rural plebeian, of remembering the complete names of the members of the local gentry (here the narrator’s cousin Bernardo—or as Funes addresses him, “Bernardo Juan Francisco”—Haedo) and being able to tell the exact time without the use of a watch or a clock. When he returns to Fray Bentos in the late summer of 1887, having spent the intervening seasons in Montevideo, the narrator learns that, after being thrown by a horse, Funes has suffered an injury that leaves him completely paralyzed. Yet as an apparent result of his fall, Funes’s already prodigious memory has become virtually perfect: he now forgets, literally, nothing. The narrator confirms this when, after having agreed to loan Funes a Latin dictionary and Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, he visits Funes one night to retrieve the books and, upon entering the paralyzed youth’s bedchamber, hears him reciting, in Latin and from memory, a lengthy section from the Naturalis historia on the subject of memory, concluding with the lines: “ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.” ¹⁵ There then follows the story’s best-known interlude—and surely the one for which the story itself is most often remembered— in which the narrator recalls the all-night conversation in which Funes was to recount some of his astounding feats of memory. These include an unwritten numerical system of his own invention, extending beyond twenty-four thousand and in which Funes assigns a unique name (“in place of seven thousand thirteen he would say . . . Máximo Pérez”) to each number. “We, at one glance,” the narrator explains,

As breathtaking and unforgettable as Funes’s confession of his superhuman handicap— simultaneously boastful and pathetic—surely is, however, its astonishing vividness is, nevertheless, in keeping, at least stylistically, with the narrative that precedes it. Indeed, the intensity of sensual detail found in the passage just cited concerning Funes’s powers of memory seems almost a continuation of events remembered by the narrator himself as the story begins. Among the most beautiful and memorable of these passages, for me at any rate, is the description of the narrator’s first encounter with Funes in 1884, before his accident:

The characters created by Borges throughout his prose fictions are, to be sure, rarely if ever vague or lacking in singularity and precision. In ways less comparable, say, to the character of the nameless librarian in “The Library of Babel,” to the deathless Joseph Cartaphilus in “The Immortal” or to the spy Yu Tsun in “The Garden of Forking Paths” but more closely resembling Borges’s various other regional, gauchesque and River Plate types, including, e.g., Pedro Damián in “The Other Death,” Carlos Argentino Daneri (as we shall see) in “The Aleph” or even Herbert Ashe in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Funes emerges out of a remarkably rich and meticulously assembled matrix of realistic detail, simultaneously regional, cultural and historical. The latter include:

Together these constitute more than just the brush strokes of a criollismo intent on adding some regional flavor and local color. They give every indication, rather, of flowing from both an intimate and a broadly sweeping knowledge of regional geography, culture and history itself, albeit here only sparingly and casually deployed—as it were, metonymically— by the narrative. Or such, at least, is the powerful effect achieved by Borges in “Funes”—an effect that must surely strike its readers as paradoxical and, to say the least, out of place in a narrative supposedly driven by an anti-realist philosophical credo, a “fictional mise-en-scène of the enslavement of discourse by direct experience,” to cite Beatriz Sarlo’s conventional and, in my judgment, unconvincing and rather tired reading of this story, which is fairly typical of much Borgesian criticism and interpretation. ¹⁸ “Funes,” Sarlo continues in the same vein, is

None of this may, in itself, be literally untrue, but like all such allegorizing readings— sounding, with its ritual evocation of “discourse,” more like a pastiche of the Yale School poststructuralism of the 1970s and 1980s than anything else—it fails to account for most of the plot elements and descriptive apparatus of Borges’s story. For a “parable dealing with the possibilities and impossibilities of representation,” the possibility of reality and its representation do not appear particularly subject to doubt throughout the better part of “Funes the Memorious.

III

Whatever else it is, it would be perverse to deny that “Funes” is a microcosmic tour-de-force of artistic unity and integrity, displaying almost classical narrative poise and a near perfect sense of timing, from the narrator’s electrifying second, initially purely auditory encounter with the Latin-reciting Funes in the darkened room off the house’s second patio, his face invisible and detectable only thanks to the glow of his cigarette, to the simple, declarative sentence that concludes the story: “Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs” (75). ¹⁹ The events it describes are, in the end, of course, impossible, ²⁰ but this, strangely, does little or nothing to subtract from the total effect of a dense, richly and sensually textured and meticulously detailed historical mise-en-scène — an effect, especially considering the brevity of the narrative and the lack of any recourse to the kinds of mediating adjustments possible in novels and longer narrative forms, all the more remarkable. What could account for it?

Although an answer to this question in no way requires recourse to any putative authorial consciousness or intention, it does appear possible that Borges was, on some level, aware of this paradoxical quality, if not specifically in “Funes” then more generally in his prose fictions after 1942, the year in which he first published, in May, in the magazine Sur, “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”). Readers of one of Borges’s most widely-read and cited shorter nonfictional works, his 1951 lecture entitled “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”; first published in 1953 ²¹ and included—in English translation— in the Labyrinths anthology) will recall that, towards its conclusion, he adds a brief “confession” regarding “Death and the Compass.” Arguing against the then standard received wisdom according to which it is in the “gauchesque” tradition, culminating in Martin Fierro, that one must search for an authentically national Argentine literature, Borges cites Edward Gibbon’s observation in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that, in the Arab book par excellence, the Quran, there are no camels. “I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran [sic], this absence of camels,” Borges reasons, “would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian. . . . I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color (174). ²² Borges’s “confession” immediately follows:

Readers unfamiliar with the flavor, especially prior to 1942, of the outskirts of Buenos Aires will of course have to take Borges and his friends at their word here, although, contrary to his self-deprecating dismissal of his early poetic evocations of those same outskirts, one can surely find something of this elusive quality in the superb and anything but “forgettable and forgotten” poetry of Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno San Martín (1929).

Be this as it may, however, one notes what seems to be a subtle but telling inconsistency in Borges’s reasoning in this essay. At pains to proclaim and defend the freedom of the Argentine writer to dispense with regional cults of authenticity and local color and to aim, no less than a Shakespeare or a Goethe or any of the classics of Western cosmopolitan literature, at a thematic and aesthetic universality, independent of the compensatory, hyper-nationalism typical of former colonies, Borges nevertheless implies that something other than outright literary universalism and cosmopolitanism is in play here. Argentine authors may even, like their Irish and Jewish counterparts according to Borges, be in a position to exploit to literary advantage their simultaneous intimacy with and estrangement from Western culture and civilization. But here too, clearly, the issue is not whether to reproduce the authentic “flavor”— that is, the reality—of local and regional experience but how best to achieve this. Borges’s discovery in composing “Death and the Compass,” although framed in the neo-Romantic terms of dreams and nightmares—“that voluntary dream which is artistic creation”(178) ²⁴ —is that by practicing a certain degree of estrangement, here by “think[ing] of the Paseo Colón and call[ing] it rue de Toulon,” etc., the goal—clearly, that corresponding to a certain notion of realism— is, ironically, more likely to be achieved. The writer and artist may and doubtless will be obliged to hit upon this method spontaneously. “A priori discussions concerning the intent of literary execution,” reasons Borges, “are based on the error of supposing that intentions and plans matter a great deal” (178). ²⁵ He is discussing Kipling and Swift and the evident gap between their “literary execution” and their “intentions and plans:” Kipling’s realization late in life that, whatever his literary accomplishments, they seemed disconnected from the imperialist apologetics he had taken to be their meaning and inspiration; and the fact that, after intending it as “an indictment against all humanity,” Gulliver’s Travels turned out to be “a book for children” (178). ²⁶

But Borges appears, however accidentally or irrationally, to have discovered this principle in time to take advantage of it himself. It is not hard to read into this “confession” a prospective literary apologia pro vita sua in which Borges defends what was to become a subsequent practice, in his fictional as well as his nonfictional output, of ranging far beyond the suburbs of Buenos Aires and contemporary Argentine life and history—but without thereby losing—any more than had, according to Borges in this same essay, the minor Argentine poet Enrique Banchs by writing about superficially non-Argentine slanted roofs and nightingales—a claim to be as if not more Argentine than the gauchismo of Ricardo Güiraldes or even Martin Fierro. ²⁷ Echoes of the standard, even normative reception and defense of Borges as a kind of cosmopolitan anomaly, as Latin America’s only truly full-fledged member of a high modernist and effectively European avant-garde canon, may already be detectable here as well. But to take things this far is to risk what may turn out to be a flight forward that sacrifices the more subtle content of the discovery Borges claims to have made in “Death and the Compass,” a discovery the results of which may not, in fact, be universally registered or evenly distributed throughout the whole of his fictional output. At the very least, this seemingly paradoxical moment of simultaneous de-familiarization and of an almost Aristotelian experience of recognition (anagnorisis) deserves a more careful examination with respect to this output than it customarily receives in the orthodox Borges criticism and interpretation surveyed in Balderston’s Out of Context and, unfortunately, probably typified in Sarlo’s allegorizing, reductive and generically poststructuralist reading of “Funes.”

IV

There is, to be sure, nothing in “Funes” immediately or obviously analogous to the estranging, voluntary “nightmare” principle of distortion-cum-revelation that Borges claims to have applied in “Death and the Compass;” no practice of engaging in systematic, intentional and disorienting misnomers. ²⁸ The setting here is evoked with considerable economy of means, but all the more vividly and brilliantly for that, in both the narrator’s opening, first encounter with the hero; in the second, nocturnal session with the now invalid Funes in his mother’s house “a la vuelta de la quinta de Laureles;” ²⁹ and, to perhaps even more stunning effect in Funes’s memories and mental images of local flora (flowers and grape vines), clouds, water and houses. Still, it is likely to be a relatively familiar mise-en-scène for readers of gauchesque or River Plate regionalist literature, not to mention Borges’s many other forays into these sub-genres, from “The Other Death” to “The South” to “The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874).”

But, adopting a less literal and more expansive perspective on the artistic and technical threshold Borges claims to have crossed in “Death and the Compass,” might we not speculate that the story of the hero’s superhuman memory itself serves to activate this principle of simultaneous de- and re-familiarization in “Funes?” Such a theory may not, ultimately, be provable—one cannot, any more than could Funes, “unread” Borges before reading him again—but suppose the matrix of intense, even hyper-realist local and regional detail that precedes, accompanies and, in effect, foregrounds the “fantastical” story of Funes’s infallible memory in fact derives its “reality-effect,” ³⁰ negatively and recursively, from the “irreality” of the latter. I have read “Funes the Memorious” innumerable times and could almost recite from memory many of its passages, but I find that the brilliance of its images, its precision of detail and the indelibly concrete sense of time and place these enable remain amazingly constant, seeming never to suffer a loss of intensity.

This is especially true of the passage, cited above, in which the narrator and his cousin, racing on horseback against the impending downpour, gallop down a sunken alley and spot Funes running above them along the town’s rustic and broken-down walkway (“un muchacho que corría por la rota vereda como por una estrecha y rota pared”). I cannot and no doubt will never be able to remember the first time I read “Funes,” but I am nevertheless convinced that the (for me) strangely and persistently unforgettable quality of this passage in particular is not only the result of the incomparable beauty of the language and imagery but of the manner in which its hyper-real, almost cinematic quality contrasts, on one level, with the later “irreality” of the story that begins after Funes’s paralysis and the narrator’s second encounter with him during the night of February 14 and into the early morning of February 15, 1887. I lack the words with which to describe this hypothetical dynamic as precisely as it probably deserves, but one can perhaps speculate that a species of feedback loop is in fact generated in “Funes” such that the negative and contrastive dynamic that works recursively to heighten the reality-effect of passages such as the above does not stop there but “rebounds” again so as to heighten, similarly, the details framing the narrator’s recounting of his final, nocturnal meeting with Funes, adding a paradoxical quality of verisimilitude even to Funes’s infallible and strictly impossible faculty of memory.

That is, to employ the descriptive and analytical terms suggested earlier, the “creole” and “pseudo-metaphyiscal” strands that together comprise “Funes the Memorious,” although distinct and, grosso modo, separable, have, by the story’s end, become so tightly interwoven with one another that they begin to appear inseparable. ³¹

At this point it will be helpful, and perhaps lend some weight to my still largely occasional theory of a paradoxically Borgesian realism, to survey, briefly, the operative form taken by this dual-strand interweaving/feedback dynamic in several other examples from among Borges’s better known short fictions: in “The Aleph” especially but also, more briefly and schematically, in “The Other Death” and “The South.” (I make no claim here to having undertaken a systematic survey of the entirety of Borges’s fictional corpus in a search for further evidence of such a dynamic).

“The Aleph” ³²

Here the scene has shifted from small town Uruguay in the 1880s to Buenos Aires in the 1930s and 1940s, but, in many ways, it is “The Aleph,” at least among the fictions collected in Ficciones and El Aleph, that most resembles “Funes the Memorious.” As in “Funes,” the narrative opens with a carefully plotted, richly detailed and entirely plausible story—the story’s “creole” strand— that cleverly and subtly hints in its superb and memorable first sentences at the “fantastic” events that are to come when the narrator (here again openly named as “Borges”) encounters the Aleph in the basement of the house on Garay Street:

It is, of course, this very same “wide and ceaseless universe” that “Borges” will ultimately behold in its totality when Beatriz’s cousin and the narrator’s nemesis—the bombastic, third-rate poet Carlos Argentino Daneri—ushers him into the basement and shows him how to lie down and where to look so that he can see the Aleph. Beginning with the moment he actually sees it, the narrative shifts into its “pseudo-metaphysical” mode:

Note how closely this parallels the moment in “Funes” when the narrator begins to recount his conversation with Funes the night before his departure from Fray Bentos:

There then follow the results of this “hopeless” task, one of the most searingly beautiful and moving passages in all of Borges’s writings. I cite it in its entirety:

Here again I propose that the realism that both opens and concludes the narrative in “The Aleph,” tinged with both the humor and irony of the buffoonish Carlos Argentino Daneri’s humiliation of the narrator—literary as well as romantic—is recursively heightened by the intrusion of the supernatural element represented by the encounter with the Aleph. By interposing a strictly impossible fantasy experience of the infinite, the latter, like Funes’s infallible memory, somehow comes both to accentuate but also redeem the finitude of real, mundane events. It is worth noting as well that here the “creole” narrative strand, set in Buenos Aires, creates a mood that is strongly reminiscent of the musical genre indelibly associated with that city: the unwavering but hopeless love of “Borges” for Beatriz, even after death, has, of course, been taken as an allusion to Dante and Beatrice, but it surely would not be out of place in the bittersweet lyrics and melodics of a tango. Along those lines, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to liken the “creole” dimension of “Funes” to the other traditional and popular song form most associated with Argentina, the milonga. ³⁷

“The South” and “The Other Death”

A comprehensive survey, much less an analysis of all of Borges’s short fictions in which there is to be found something approximating this dynamic form of “anti-realist realism” (to adopt an expression employed by Roberto Schwarz when describing the late novels of Machado de Assis) would far exceed the scope of this essay. There are, in my view, strong suggestions of something like this dynamic in any number of Borges’s fictions that lack any obvious Argentine/River Plate regionalist dimension. I think, for no obvious reason here, of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” especially the narrator Yu Tsun’s account of the flight by train from his urban flat (and the approach of his nemesis, Captain Richard Madden) to Stephen Albert’s house near the small English village of Ashgrove.

But it is, clearly enough, in those stories in which Borges explicitly evokes the regional characters, settings and history he knows most intimately that something comparable to the reality-effect in “Funes” and “The Aleph” achieves maximum intensity. The two other exemplars that, for me, come most immediately to mind here are “The South” and “The Other Death.” In both instances the “creole” plot-strand merges with the gauchesque: Juan Dahlmann’s fatal journey from home in Buenos Aires back—in space or in time, or in both?— to his ancestral and provincial estancia in “The South” and the analogous ambiguity of the fate suffered by the poor gaucho Pedro Damián at the 1904 battle of Masoller, the final clash in an Uruguayan civil war. The “pseudo-metaphysical” element in both fictions appears to subvert the “creole” story-line by rendering ambiguous the facts regarding the respective deaths of both characters. In “The South” the reader is left to speculate whether, in the end, Dahlmann is about to die of stab wounds in a duel with a gaucho outside a pulpería (general store) or—as the narrative seems to hint—back in Buenos Aires, the journey to a hoped-for convalescence in the provincial, archaic and romanticized world of “the South” having been a hallucination suffered by the hero as he lies dying in a sanatorium.

In “The Other Death”—to my mind, and against the evident critical consensus, the more brilliantly realized of the two— the narrator, confused by conflicting and shifting memories on the part of those who claim to have known Pedro Damián and witnessed his actions at Masoller in 1904, finally opts for the theory that, through an apparent act of divine intervention, Damián’s biography itself has undergone a kind of bifurcation:

The developing plot that precedes and prepares this supernatural outcome, including the narrator’s interviews with the now aged Uruguayans who led the defeated troops at Masoller and their shifting, inconsistent and, at one point, vain attempts even to recollect Damián or whether he ever existed at all, are a small masterpiece of story-telling, its realism here again somehow greatly intensified by the unreality of the denouement. Take, for example, the way in which Borges achieves this through the specific device of introducing photographic evidence into the narrator’s quest to solve the mystery of Damián’s “other death.” “When I knew,” he reports, as the story opens,

Later, after he has begun to suspect the ghostly agencies that may explain the vacillating and lapsed memories of Damián on the part of his informants, the narrator, questioning whether his own memories have not also been haunted by the concatenations of Damián’s supernaturally altered destiny, sheds further light on this fear:

As with Borges’s customary introduction of intra-textual literary references (here to Emerson’s poem “The Past”), the mention of a letter from Gannon that had first informed the narrator of Damián’s death in 1946, but that now also turns out to be lost and whose existence is ultimately denied by Gannon himself, the fact that a (lost) photograph of Damián is first cited as evidence only to have its very existence questioned somehow serves, contrary to its (so to speak) evidentiary disintegration, to accentuate its reality-effect. As the (intra-diegetic) proof of Pedro Damián’s existence goes missing and finally evaporates, the underlying social and historical reality that his character nevertheless typifies increases rather than diminishes its grip on the reader.

V

What I have claimed to find, above all, in “Funes the Memorious” and “The Aleph,” but perhaps more generally as one of various compositional and narrative methods in Borges, is, to summarize, an outwardly paradoxical form of realism for which a “pseudo-metaphysical” or (in more conventional Borgesian terminology) “fantastical” plot development comes to serve, via a contrastive, negative dynamic, as a vehicle for activating and heightening the potential for realism in an outwardly regionalist or “creole” narrative. It is the latter that then also serves to introduce and frame a subsequent but overdetermined “pseudo-metaphysical” denouement. Supposing that I am right about this, as yet, still essentially impressionistic and descriptive interpretive hypothesis, what could explain it?

As we have seen, Borges himself, writing in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” appears to have had at least an intuitive grasp of this seemingly paradoxical dynamic in the case of his 1942 story “Death and the Compass.” Here he “confesses” to the discovery that, in order to capture, accurately and successfully, the reality—the “flavor”—of local settings and experience without falling back on the formulaic and inadequate devices and cliches of “local color”—and, in the particular case of Argentine literature and popular culture, the more obvious and vulgar trappings of the gauchesque tradition—he has had to estrange the mimetic representation of that reality, to distance it artificially from itself. In the case of the suburbs of Buenos Aires, he claims to have achieved this through the intentional and self-conscious use of foreign place and street names while “thinking” of familiar Buenos Aires locales. Without knowing with any certainty whether Borges himself entertained or drew such a conclusion, it seems reasonable to me to speculate that by inserting into fictional depictions of local characters, settings and historical events and contexts, the other-worldly or at least highly improbable, “pseudo-metaphysical” plot elements for which he has come to be best known, he achieves, whether intentionally or not, an analogous effect. De-familiarization here serves to penetrate the layers of habit and stereotype superimposed on what had become overly familiar, thereby restoring an immediacy and intimacy to what is, in fact, closest to home.

Having reached this tentative conclusion after many years of reading and having my students read Borges’s short stories, I was at length struck by how clearly it resonated, despite the somewhat changed context here, with the thinking of the Brazilian critical and literary theorist Roberto Schwarz, in particular his now classic essay “Misplaced Ideas.” ⁴² Here Schwarz analyzes the flagrant contradiction between the imported ideas of European liberalism emulated and consumed by the nineteenth century Brazilian ruling class and the decidedly anti-liberal system of plantation-based chattel slavery upon which that class based its rule and which, along with the paternalistic and clientelist relations of what Schwarz terms “favor,” constituted the material basis for its mode of life. Classical liberalism, in Brazil, becomes a “misplaced idea.” Whereas, in the most developed capitalist societies of Europe, it remained “an ideology well-grounded in appearances,” liberalism in Brazil “came to stand for the conscious desire to participate in a reality that appearances did not sustain” (23). “In this context,” Schwarz continues, “ideologies do not describe reality, not even falsely, and they do not move according to a law of their own; we shall therefore call them ‘ideologies of the second degree’” (23). Such second-degree ideologies are, writes Schwarz, characterized by “the dissonance between representations, and what, upon consideration, we know to be their context” (27).

In a sequel to this essay, ⁴³ Schwarz shows how such ideological “dissonance” foregrounds and shapes the fictions of José de Alencar, Brazil’s most prominent mid-nineteenth century novelist and playwright. Thanks to their fashion-driven, typically neocolonial embrace of second-degree ideology in the form of Balzacian plot formulas, novels such as Alencar’s Senhora (1875) collapse into an aesthetically debilitating duality in which only secondary characters such as servants and tradespeople are drawn from local Brazilian life while Alencar’s heroes and heroines, socially favored if at times fashionably poor in origin, are driven to their variously tragic fates and happy ends by the supposedly powerful but exotic social forces that make them appear to be imports themselves — say, for example, the ultimate power of money to dissolve and sweep away the class distinctions and moral proprieties of a modern bourgeoisie that doesn’t (yet) exist in Brazil. “One novel,” writes Schwarz, “but two reality-effects, incompatible and superimposed” (Schwarz, “Contradictions in Alencar” 59). In Alencar the “alternation between incompatible ideological presuppositions breaks the fictional spine of the book” (60)

This “ideological repetition of ideologies” is only overcome, according to Schwarz, in the later novels of Brazil’s most celebrated author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, beginning in 1880 with the appearance of Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas (Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas) — to be followed by Quincas Borba (1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899) and including numerous shorter fictions, among them the novella The Alienist (O Alienista) (1881). Schwarz has written extensively and brilliantly on Machado in works—including his best known, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism—that it would be impossible to summarize adequately here. But again, readers can scarcely do better than refer to “A Brazilian Breakthrough,” which I here take the liberty of citing at moderate length: ⁴⁴

And, most significantly for purposes of adapting Schwarz’s reading of Machado to the understanding and the possible social and historical explanation for a putative Borgesian “reality-effect:”

The language of form and content here echoes Schwarz’s earlier reference, vis-a-vis Machado’s (so to speak) “sublation” of Alencar, to a complex variant of the so-called dialectic of form and content: “our literary material only achieves sufficient density when it takes in, at the level of content, the unsuitability of the European form, without which we cannot be complete” (Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas 68).

VI

Extrapolating, in my own previous work, ⁴⁵ from Schwarz’s insight into the “misplaced idea: and “second-degree ideology” as relations of form and content in Machado, I once proposed schematizing the said “dialectic of form and content” as follows:

Representing content and form as “C” and “F,” we might abbreviate their spontaneously dialectical, organic relationship as:

If form is further specified as ideology, then “C—>F” can be understood schematically to signify what, according to the logic of Schwarz’s argument, would count as “first-degree ideology,” or, again very schematically, the determination of “superstructure” (“F”) by “base” (“C”).

The logic of the “misplaced idea” or “second-degree ideology” might then be abbreviated as:

Here, “C,” then, might also represent the illiberal and unequal patron-client social relations, always directly and indirectly reflecting the dominant economic reality of chattel slavery, that Schwarz terms “favor”; and “F” the imported liberal ideas that the nineteenth century Brazilian elite privileged while attempting, to contradictory and ironic effect, their forceable superimposition onto a social reality in relation to which they could only appear “misplaced.”

Given the above, then, the “complex variant” of the dialectic of form and content that Schwarz attributes to Posthumous Memories and to Machado’s later novels becomes:

It will now perhaps become apparent how, under a form/content dialectic of the type “(F—>C)—>F,” there might also be subsumed the complex and seemingly paradoxical dynamic that synthesizes the “creole” and “pseudo-metaphysical” strands in stories such as Borges’s “Funes the Memorious,” “The Aleph” and “The Other Death” so as to produce the peculiar “reality-effect” we have sought to describe and analyze in these fictions. But this will work only if, as I further propose, we see in this dynamic—the enigmatical Borgesian device of de-familiarization and distancing for the purposes of recognition and re-approximation—a replication, on the level of form-determining content, of the “misplaced idea.”

This of course presupposes that, at some, perhaps not always conscious level, Borges fashioned such narratives at least in part out of a felt pressure to overcome Argentina’s and Latin America’s neocolonial practice of importing and imitating European and, more broadly (by the early twentieth century) metropolitan and “Western” literary and cultural models. Borges’s published remarks in essays such as “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” surely suggest this to be a reasonable premise, but one does not, in my view, require its documentary or biographical proof to recognize in the “pseudo-metaphysical” dimension of these fictions a content that seems, outwardly, foreign and “imported” with respect to their local, regional or “creole” dimension.

That, to be sure, gibes perfectly well with what has, for decades, become the standard and even normative, canonizing reception of Borges noted at the beginning of this essay, i.e., that Borges’s most celebrated short fictions are “universal” and on a par with classical European literature, especially its high modernist canon, in ways that other Latin American literature, however broad and cosmopolitan its appeal, apparently is not. The location of those Borges critics who replicate this opinion need not be outside Latin America, needless to say, for this to hold true. Consider, again, Beatriz Sarlo’s passing judgment regarding “Funes the Memorious” as a “conte philosophique on literary theory,” not to mention the many other Argentine and Latin American critics and scholars of Borges noted by Balderston, from Barrenechea to Jaime Alazraki, who have advanced and promoted a similar idea. ⁴⁶ This, again, is not to say that such interpretations are false in and of themselves, only that they are inadequate in that they fail to account for the rich vein of realism that is also present in Borges. Such readings and interpretations are, in the end, too one-sided, losing sight of the “complex variant of the dialectic of form and content” that, according to our hypothesis, is operative in “Funes” and the other short stories discussed above—albeit here thanks to formally literary means that outwardly may bear little resemblance to those identified by Schwarz in Machado’s Posthumous Memories and other late novels.

Taking what is still essentially a working hypothesis concerning Borgesian realism as a point of departure but drawing on Schwarz’s enormously rich and suggestive historical and materialist analyses in “Misplaced Ideas” and the other writings referenced earlier, ⁴⁷ there opens up the potential for a concrete and detailed effort of Borgesian interpretation and critique capable of delving still deeper into the paradoxical intricacies of realism in stories such as “Funes the Memorious” and “The Aleph” and further, perhaps, than just those narratives with an explicitly Argentine and River Plate regionalist or “creole” content. By no means do all of Borges’s narratives display the form of “anti-realist realism” we have sought to identify and analyze above, but, at least in my view, those prose fictions that stand out as his most impressive and memorable—even, say, stories such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Library of Babel,” “Death and the Compass,” “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” and “The Immortal”— perhaps owe some essential facet of their artistic success to their formal mimicry of “second-degree ideology.”

I try to make it a rule to avoid the kinds of allegorizing interpretations resorted to, in the case of Borges, by Sarlo and De Man. Clichéd readings of Borges’s fictions as, say, allegories for the process of writing itself epitomize what, after Hegel, dialectical criticism rightly condemns as a practice of “bad abstraction,” the antithesis of the concrete and the determinate. But in considering what, finally, could account for the negative, often counterintuitive pull of realism within the overarching unity of Borges’s fictional opus it would not be amiss to recall the narrator’s concluding reflection, previously cited, in “Funes the Memorious:"

Neil Larsen is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. He has published widely in the areas of critical and social theory and Latin American literary studies. His recent publications include “The Jargon of Decoloniality” (Catalyst, 2022). He lives in Lisbon.