Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Our mission here
is, as always, the same. We take a huge stack
of source material, biographies, critical essays,
you name it, and we build the ultimate shortcut
to being well -informed. Today, we are immersing
ourselves in the dizzying, precise, and profoundly
influential universe engineered by Jorge Luis
Borges. And it is so essential we do this justice.
Why so? Well, because Borges, the Argentine master,
is arguably the most important... intellectual
pivot point in 20th century literature that's
a huge claim it is but he sits right on that
line he is the bridge between high modernism
with its concerns about fragmentation and post
-modernism's obsession with structure information
and well Absolutely. And the sources we have
for this deep dive are they're incredibly comprehensive.
They track not only his literary techniques,
but also the intense philosophical and political
battles that really defined his life. Right.
So for you, the learner, our mission is to move
far beyond that basic image of the blind man
wandering through the archives. We want to show
how Borges didn't just write stories. Yeah. He
engineered new literary forms. He was an architect
of what we now call narrative non -linearity.
A true. Renovator. The critic J .M. Coetzee put
it perfectly, I think. What did he say? He said
Borges renovated the language of fiction. And
that renovation, it happened across so many forms.
He was a poet, an essayist, a translator. But
his global reputation, that really rests on his
short story collections. Primarily Fictiones
and LLF. Both from the 1940s. And these works
are like... They're like intellectual puzzles.
They explore concepts that feel so contemporary.
Eerily so. Infinity, the illusory nature of time,
self -referential systems. And the overwhelming
nature of archives. Yeah. The feeling of being
drowned in information. The genius is that he
managed to synthesize mythology, mathematics,
and philosophy into these miniature fictional
universes. On just a few pages. It's dense material,
for sure, but we'll guide you through it all.
The fascinating biographical ironies, the philosophical
hoaxes he championed, and the political resistance
that really characterized his career. Okay, let's
start with the man himself. Let's do it. Let's
unpack the accidental education that created
this strange architect. To begin, we have to
plant our flag in Buenos Aires. Right. That's
where Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was
born in 1899. What a name. It is. And he was
born into an educated middle class family. But
what's instantly fascinating is the sheer cultural
cocktail of his heritage. That mixed lineage
was absolutely crucial, wasn't it? Oh, completely.
He had these deep roots in military and early
Argentine history. On his mother's side, the
Criollo, the Spanish -Argentine side. But then
you have this other very strong influence. The
English influence from his father, Jorge Guillermo
Borges Haslam, who was half English. And this
blend, it wasn't just a genealogical footnote,
you know? No, not at all. It structured his entire
intellectual environment. It certainly did. I
mean, he was remarkably bilingual from his earliest
years. Speaking Spanish and English simultaneously.
And his proficiency in English just allowed him
to read the foundational texts of Western literature
directly. The sources note he was tackling Shakespeare
in English by age 12. Just think about that for
a second. The level of fluency, the complexity
at such a young age. And this brings us to what
Borges himself defined as the chief event of
his life. Not his first publication, not a literary
prize. No. his father's private English library,
which contained well over a thousand volumes.
It's an amazing detail. This wasn't just a domestic
collection. It was more like a self -contained
liberal arts university in his own home. So he
grew up literally surrounded by the entire history
of English literature. From the Anglo -Saxons
right up to the Victorians, it was all there.
And that library was the initial laboratory for
his mind. But it wasn't just, you know, passive
absorption. He was already... There's that fantastic
anecdote. I love this one. At just 10 years old,
he translates Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince
into Spanish. And it gets published in a local
journal. What was the reaction? Well, the sources
point to an inherent irony there, too. His friends
and most of the readers, they just assumed the
published piece must have been his father's work.
Which is fascinating because his father was a
lawyer and a psychology teacher. Right. But he
also harbored these frustrated literary ambitions.
Yeah. So this early confusion, it foreshadows
Borges' later themes about the nature of authorship
and, you know, authenticity. It also hints at
that complex relationship with his father who
cast this long shadow. Borges was acutely aware
of his own difference. He knew he'd be a bookish
kind of person and not a man of action, which
was so different from the soldiers he admired
in his ancestry. And the father, though, he provided
the immediate catalyst for the family's big shift.
To Europe. Precisely. In 1914, the family moved
to Geneva, Switzerland. And the primary reason
for this relocation was, tragically, very pragmatic.
It was his father's eyesight. He was progressively
losing his sight from a degenerative disorder.
A condition that Borges himself would later inherit.
And the family ended up staying for seven years.
They were sort of trapped there by the outbreak
of World War I and then political instability
back in Argentina. So Borges suddenly finds himself
in Geneva studying at the Collège de Genève during
wartime. A huge shift. He learned French, deepened
his reading of English authors like Thomas Carlyle.
And then crucially, he started grappling with
philosophy written in German. This was just an
explosion of intellectual expansion for him.
But maybe the most formative period came right
after, in Spain. Yes. Upon moving to Spain, he
just dives headfirst into the avant -garde scene.
He joins the altruist literary movement. Can
you unpack what that was? Sure. It was a direct
reaction against the ornate. often overly sentimental
style of modernismo. So they were stripping things
down. Exactly. Altruism emphasized stark metaphor,
free verse, and a real distillation of language.
That focus on precision and economy would become
a trademark of Borges' own style. And it was
here he published his first poem, Hymn to the
Sea. It was. But the real seeds of the Borghesean
universe, the one built on illusion and skepticism,
they weren't sown by poetry. It was philosophy.
It was philosophy. The sources consistently highlight
two monumental influences. The first being? The
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Right.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical theory, particularly
the concept that the phenomenal world, the world
we perceive, is largely a manifestation of an
underlying will or even an illusion. That became
foundational for Borges. So his later obsessions
with dreams, mirrors, alternative realities,
it all stems directly from that philosophical
bedrock. It does. And the second influence was
a novel. Gustav Meyrink's The Golem. Yes. This
German novel, which is just steeped in esoteric
themes and Kabbalistic lore, it introduced Borges
to the power of the urban labyrinth and the concept
of a simulated or artificial man. So you have
this sense of... ancient mystery and engineered
reality. And that provided the perfect fictional
framework for Schopenhauer's idealism. So he
returns to Argentina in 1921, armed with the
whole of European literature and philosophy.
But, you know, he needs a livelihood. Which is
where we confront the first major irony, the
government subsidized writer. It's incredible.
Despite his burgeoning reputation as a writer,
contributing to literary journals, he takes a
job in 1938 at the Miguel Canet Municipal Library.
And the conditions of the job are, well, they're
legendarily absurd. They perfectly illustrate
the bureaucratics ennui he often wrote about.
Tell us about the job itself. He was hired as
a cataloger on his very first day. He's explicitly
told by his superior that cataloging more than
100 books a day was strongly discouraged. Discouraged,
why? Because exceeding that number would make
the rest of the staff look bad. So he was actively
punished for being efficient. He was. And Borges,
being highly efficient and focused, found he
could complete his quota in about an hour. And
for the rest of the day. He spent the remaining
seven hours of his shift writing, translating,
and thinking, often relegated to the dusty basement
stacks. So it was basically a quiet, government
-subsidized writing retreat, hidden in plain
sight. Funded by the very state apparatus he
would often critique. This job gave him the security
and the solitude he needed to begin his most
innovative work. The irony just deepens in the
following decades. The family condition, that
progressive loss of sight, it culminates. By
the late 1950s, the man who lived for reading
and writing was completely blind. Definitively
so by age 55. And this is where the sheer majesty
of the timing just hits you. In 1955, at the
very moment he was engulfed by darkness. He was
appointed director of the Argentine National
Public Library. And simultaneously a professor
of English literature at the University of Buenos
Aires. The national custodian of books could
no longer read them. It sounds like something
straight out of one of his own fictions. It does.
What was his intellectual response to this? I
mean, this profound personal tragedy. It must
have been devastating. It was, of course. But
Borges was a classicist at heart. He saw tragedy
as a catalyst. How so? He noted that the loss
of sight freed him from the visual world and
pushed him toward intellectual and acoustic forms.
He moved more and more toward poetry and shorter
narratives. Because he could compose them internally,
memorize them. Exactly. It forced him to rely
on others for dictation, which also changed his
creative process. So the physical darkness actually
enhanced his internal vision. It sharpened his
focus on abstract symbols and eternal forms.
That's the interpretation he embraced. And his
poetry just beautifully captures this terrible
paradox. There's that quote from Seven Nights.
Right. Reflecting on God's splendid irony, he
wrote, No one should read self -pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty of God, who
with such splendid irony at one touch granted
me books and night. Books and night. The two
core elements of his life, literature and darkness,
were granted to him simultaneously. And he frames
it not as cruelty, but as a form of divine, majestic
irony. It's a defining image that we have to
carry forward with us. It is. That profound connection
between the physical void and the philosophical
search for light is foundational. And that search
intensified in the years leading up to his blindness,
following a massive personal crisis. A near fatal
incident. Let's transition now to how he actually
invented a whole new way of writing after that.
So the period between 1938 and 1941 was just
transformative for him. And it was marked by
intense trauma. First, the death of his beloved
father in 1938. And then shortly after that.
Borges suffered a severe head injury. Right.
He nearly died of sepsis during the treatment.
And this traumatic recovery period where he was
in an environment where he questioned his own
sanity, it prompted him to just jettison the
literary styles of his youth. And develop the
precise, paradoxical voice we recognize today.
It was a real crucible moment for him. He emerged
from that trauma with a distinct new approach
to narrative. And his first major story in this
new vein was Pierre Menard, author of The Quixote.
which he published in 1939. This story is the
perfect entry point into Borges' intellectual
universe. It really is. For the listener who
hasn't encountered it, the premise is so simple,
but it's revolutionary. Tell us about Menard.
Pierre Menard is a fictional 20th century French
symbolist. And he decides not to copy Cervantes'
Don Quixote. Right. He decides to rewrite it,
word for word, through sheer exertion of will.
And he succeeds. He produces several chapters
that are identical to the original. The irony,
of course, is that a sentence written by Cervantes
in the 17th century about history as the mother
of truth is... You know, it's just a standard
platitude of the time. But when Menard writes
the exact same line in the 20th century, knowing
everything that has transpired since, it becomes
startlingly profound, anachronistic. Exactly.
So it's not about the words themselves. It's
about the context and the historical baggage
they carry. Borges is showing us that authorship
isn't fixed, meaning is historical. Precisely.
It examines the nature of authorship, of literary
reproduction. And this leads directly to his
reliance on the literary forgery and pseudo -epigrapha.
Which became a hallmark of his career, collected
initially in A Universal History of Infamy. He
wasn't just writing new stories. He was claiming
they were translations of obscure or even imaginary
existing works. Sometimes attributed to ancient
Persian scholars or fictional mystics, why the
deliberate obfuscation? I mean, why the literary
hoax? The rationale is absolutely key to his
whole approach to literature, and he famously
articulated it. He believed that composing vast
books, you know, the typical sprawling 19th century
novel, was a laborious madness. Right. His better
and more philosophical method was to pretend
that those books already exist. and offer a summary,
a commentary on them. So why write the entire
library when the catalog entry, the critical
review, is the true intellectual achievement?
It's the ultimate conceptual shortcut. It is.
It's an act of deconstruction that's applied
to creation itself. He saw the critical commentaries
being superior to the original text. Because
it could encompass the entire imagined work in
miniature. And he certainly developed this from
precursors. He references Thomas Carlyle's Sartre
Resardus. Which was a critical review of a non
-existent German transcendentalist text. But
Borges pushed it even further. He felt even Carlyle's
work suffered from the imperfection that they
themselves are books. He wanted to write notes
on imaginary books. Yes, creating literature
through the device of academic critique. which
gives his prose that wonderful, dry, professorial
tone, even when he's describing completely impossible
events. And this technique became the perfect
vehicle for exploring the central motifs that
define the Borghesean universe. Dreams, infinity.
mirrors and labyrinths these aren't just decorative
elements are they they are philosophical structures
absolutely let's dedicate some time to these
core conceptual structures starting with maybe
his most famous depiction of infinity library
of babel In the Library of Babel, Borges envisions
a universe that's composed of an infinite library.
It contains every book that could possibly be
written. Each with 410 pages, uniform format
with all possible variations of characters. And
because the library is infinite, it must contain
true statements, false statements, gibberish.
And most frustratingly, the key to the library
itself, the catalog. Which is, of course, just
another book lost somewhere in the library. So
the paradox here is that in a universe of infinite
information, knowledge becomes impossible. If
everything that can be said has been said, then
nothing has meaning. Exactly. The human struggle
in the story is this futile search for meaning
within an infinite archive. The sources describe
the librarians resulting despair. their tendency
towards suicide, the rise of nihilistic cults
who believe certain books are worthless and must
be destroyed. It's Borges using this structure
to comment on the modern condition of information
overload. That feeling that we are drowning in
data without the ability to synthesize wisdom.
It's a terrifying vision of the internet written
decades before the internet existed. Which brings
us to Plon. ukbar orbis tertius wow yes perhaps
the story that most directly prefigures the simulation
and the blurring of reality that we live with
today this story is about the discovery of an
encyclopedia entry describing a fictional planet
tuamon and as scholars research this obscure
non -existent planet the rules and concepts of
tuam Which include a radical philosophical idealism
where objects cease to exist when they are not
perceived. Those rules begin to infiltrate and
eventually contaminate the real world. Objects
from Twan start spontaneously manifesting. This
is the ontological question applied to fiction.
The ideas of this fake world are so compelling,
so logically consistent, that they start replacing
the rules of our own reality. That's the dark
core of it. The sources note that Borgias is
essentially describing a highly successful information
operation. A world so perfectly documented in
its fictionality that it gains reality. And the
narrator concludes that the entire world will
soon become Tlan. It's pure information warfare.
It shows how the desire for order and structure
can lead to the embrace of a beautiful, systematic
lie over chaotic, unpleasant reality. So if Tlan
is about the infiltration of ideas, The Garden
of Forking Paths, published in 1941, is about
dismantling linear time. This story is crucial.
This is the moment he anticipates the conceptual
framework for hypertext and the multiverse. It
absolutely is. The story is a metafictional puzzle
told by a Chinese spy named Yuzhen. Right. And
he is trying to decipher a novel written by his
ancestor, Qi Pen. And this novel, which is also
a physical labyrinth, it never resolves. Because
at every point, the protagonist chooses all possible
outcomes simultaneously. If he enters a house,
he also doesn't enter it, leading to countless
branching narratives across time. A combination
of a book and a maze. This is why the term Borghesean
became synonymous with narrative non -linearity.
He took a spatial concept, the maze, and he applied
it to temporal structure. He argued that the
universe of his ancestor was not a spatial maze,
but an infinite series of times in a growing,
dizzying network of divergent, convergent, and
parallel times. And that for a writer working
decades before digital programming is just astonishing.
He conceived of a network of potential narratives
where every decision opens new timelines and
no single path is definitive. It's the conceptual
blueprint for interactive fiction digital archives.
Even the many worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics all encapsulated in a spy thriller.
This relentless questioning of reality and merit
of structure, it leads us directly to the philosophical
concept that actually bears his name. The Borghesean
Conundrum. What is it fundamentally? It's an
ontological question. A question about the nature
of being, it asks. Whether the writer writes
the story or it writes him. It challenges the
concept of singular, intentional creation. Does
the author truly invent the themes? Or do the
themes, the collective human archive of history,
myth, and psychology, simply use the author as
a vessel to express themselves? He expanded on
this idea in that astonishing essay, Kafka and
His Precursors. One of the most brilliant pieces
of literary criticism ever written. Precisely
because it uses this conundrum to rewrite history.
It's mind -bending. Borges identifies several
older, seemingly unrelated texts. from Zeno of
Leia to writings from the 19th century, and argues
they all contain the thematic idiosyncrasies
we now associate with Franz Kafka. But then comes
the punchline. The punchline is that Borges argues
that if Kafka had never written a single line,
we would not perceive this quality in those older
texts. In other words, it would not exist. So
the present writer, Kafka, retroactively creates
his own past. He changes the way we look at history
and tradition. And Borges concludes. Every writer
creates his own precursors. It is genius literary
revisionism. And Borges knew he was creating
his own precursors, too. His influence, built
on these short, precise conceptual fictions,
was massive. It provided the essential toolkit
for the magical realist movement in Latin America.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortázar, and others.
They learned how to infuse the fantastic into
the real world with this dry procedural logic,
a technique they absorbed directly from Borges'
faux academic style. And his influence stretched
far beyond the Academy. He devoured genre fiction.
He certainly did. He had a deep, critical understanding
of science fiction Lovecraft, Heinlein, Bradbury.
And his work inspired entire generations of conceptual
fiction writers, particularly those obsessed
with archives, unstable reality, and simulation.
Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe. William Gibson, the
acknowledged father of cyberpunk, famously said
that reading Trillin, Ukebar, Orbis Tertius felt
like installing software that instantly increased
his conceptual bandwidth. It's a perfect description.
Borges didn't invent the Internet, but he certainly
invented the concept of the universally interconnected,
potentially illusory, self -replicating information
network. He was defining the structure of the
digital age using paper and ink. And this structural
innovation, this claim to universal culture was
directly tied to his political identity as an
Argentine writer. Which brings us to the real
world fight that consumed his adult life. So
Borges spent decades building these fictional
worlds of infinite archives and theoretical mathematics.
But he was also a fiercely political Argentine.
And his stance on nationalism tradition and dictatorship
shaped his life as profoundly as any book he
ever read. Early in his career he did briefly
embrace a more local identity. He was part of
the avant -garde Martin Fierro magazine. Which
focused on Argentine sensibility, the gaucho
figure. But he quickly broke away from what he
saw as literary constraints. And that intellectual
break came in his famous 1951 essay, The Argentine
Writer and Tradition. What was his key argument
here? He argued forcefully against the notion
that Argentine literature must be limited to
local color. To writing about gauchos and tangos
and local customs? Yes. He asserted that a writer
from Argentina, writing from the geographical
and cultural margins, had inherited the entirety
of world literature. So his marginal status was
a strategic advantage. Precisely. He believed
they were free to innovate because they didn't
have to carry the heavy canon of a central European
literature. They could draw from old Norse sagas,
Anglo -Saxon poetry. Buddhism, the Jewish Kabbalah,
Islamic scholarship. All with equal freedom.
So his core belief was that this cosmopolitan
reading made Argentine writing universally relevant,
not just locally provincial. And his personal
politics mirrored this emphasis on freedom and
the individual against the collective. He identified
as a mild classical liberal, influenced heavily
by his father. Declaring himself a Spencerian
anarchist who believes in the individual and
not in the state. It's important to clarify what
that means in this context, right? It is. Spencerian
anarchism. from Herbert Spencer, emphasizes extreme
individualism and minimizing state power. It's
about personal liberty and voluntary cooperation.
And for Borges, this meant a staunch anti -communist
and most vehemently an anti -fascist stance.
His anti -fascism was tested early and very personally.
In 1934, Argentine ultra -nationalists, who were
certainly sympathetic to the rising Nazi movement
in Europe, they attempted to discredit him by
asserting that Borges was secretly Jewish. trying
to paint him as foreign, as non -Argentine. Borges'
response was spectacular and defiant. He wrote
the essay Yo Judeo, I a Jew. And in it, he declared
he would be proud to have Jewish heritage. And
then he deployed his genealogical knowledge to
argue that any pure Castilian like himself likely
had ancient Jewish or Moorish descent anyway.
It was a sophisticated intellectual rejection
of their racial nationalism. And his political
hatred for Nazism was fueled by a love for German
culture. The Nazi police state's actions, like
banning or rewriting classical German texts,
were intellectual crimes to him. He called the
Nazi rewriting of history a chaotic descent into
darkness. And he used his fiction to analyze
the pathology of fascism. In his 1946 story,
Deutsche Requiem, he created the ultimate ideal
Nazi. An intellectual who valued violence for
its own sake, completely detached from political
victory. Right. This Nazi narrator, reflecting
on his defeat, concludes that defeats and victories
are mere matters of chance. He asserts that the
true victory was simply upholding the principle
of necessary violence and absolute authoritarianism.
So Borges used this fictional device to explore
the moral void at the heart of the fascist ideology.
Fascist. fascinating, isn't it? But the defining
political conflict of his actual life was his
relentless, bitter anti -Pyronism. When Juan
Fron took power in 1946, Borges became an immediate,
highly visible intellectual enemy. And his intellectual
resistance was met with administrative spite.
Borges, who was an outspoken supporter of the
Allies during the war, was promoted from his
quiet scholarly post as a municipal librarian.
A job which paid just enough to allow him to
write. To the ludicrous position of inspector
of poultry and rabbits at the municipal market.
I mean, inspector of poultry and rabbits. We
just have to pause there and appreciate the sheer
absurdity of the insult. It's perfect Peronist
pettiness. It is utterly perfect, and it reveals
the regime's contempt for the intellectual class.
The idea was to humiliate him. Forcing him either
to resign or to dedicate his intellect to supervising
meat quality. A task completely beneath his professional
standing. And when he demanded a reason for this
demotion disguised as promotion, he was told
simply, well, you were on the side of the Allies.
What did you expect? And he resigned immediately.
turning a personal humiliation into a massive
public symbol of intellectual resistance. Absolutely.
He became the intellectual leader of the anti
-Paranist opposition. At a dinner held in his
honor following his resignation, a speech he
wrote was read aloud. Which contained one of
his most powerful political statements. Asserting
that dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships
breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty,
more loathsome still is the fact that they breed
idiocy. That word idiocy is doing so much work
there. It frames dictatorship not just as evil,
but as intellectually beneath contempt. That
was the core of his critique. He saw Peronism
as an intellectual failure, a regression. His
battle with Peron lasted for decades. It served
as an axis around which Argentine intellectual
life rotated. And when the military shouldn't
have temporarily overthrew Peron in 1955, Borges
was appointed director of the National Library
in celebration. But the conflict wasn't over.
Perón was eventually reelected president in 1973
after years of exile. And Borges' immediate reaction.
He resigned the prestigious directorship at the
National Library immediately. He could not serve
under Perón again. He didn't mince words referring
to the leader as a humbug. In claiming that he
had made Argentina look ridiculous to the world.
He cited specific examples of Perón's ridiculous
claims, like the infamous 1951 announcement that
Argentina had achieved control over thermonuclear
fusion. A claim, as Borges noted, that still
hadn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the
stars. His ability to inject this high -level
historical and scientific context into petty
political disputes is just remarkable. His political
trajectory was complex, however. While staunchly
anti -Paranist, he did initially support the
military junta that took over in the 1970s. Hoping
for stability and an end to populism. But he
was quickly and profoundly scandalized by their
brutal actions during the Dirty War. By the time
democracy returned with Raul Alfonso's election
in 1983, Borges had returned to his faith in
classical democratic values. He had. And he even
offered his unique literary commentary on the
1982 Falklands War. Writing a short, evocative
poem about two fictional soldiers, one from Argentina,
one from the UK, who died in the conflict. His
most memorable comment on the geopolitical absurdity
of that conflict was classic Borges. What did
he say? He called the war a fight between two
bald men over a comb. A perfect, cynical, and
universally relevant encapsulation of why territorial
conflicts often seem so pointless. So his political
engagement, born of these deep individualist
beliefs, led to a life marked by bureaucratic
spite, international controversy, and continuous
intellectual fire. Right then. Let's wrap up
with the final ironies of his legacy and the
greater mission. Okay, moving on from the political
battles, we have to honor Borges' immense practical
contribution to world letters. Specifically as
a translator. His linguistic capacity was extraordinary.
Fluent in Spanish, English, French, and German.
He also mastered enough Old English and Old Norse
to translate them. And his theoretical views
on translation were revolutionary and, well,
liberating for other writers. He rejected the
rigid idea that a translation must be perfectly
faithful. Instead, he maintained that a translation
could actually improve upon the original. Or
be unfaithful. and that contradictory renderings
of the same source material could all be equally
valid literary achievements. It ties back to
his idea that absolute originality is a fictional
construct. It does. And he didn't just translate
European masters. Crucially, he created an indelible
bridge between American and Latin American literature.
By translating William Faulkner's The Wild Palms
in 1940. And this exposed a whole new generation
of Latin American writers, Juan Rulfo Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, to the psychological depth and
fragmented narrative structures of contemporary
American fiction. This willingness to engage
across genres and traditions was also evident
in his extensive collaborations. His partnership
with fellow Argentine writer Adolfo Bayoy Casares.
Often under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domek. This
is a wonderful display of Borges' lighter side.
Tell us more about the Domecq works. That often
gets overshadowed by his philosophical fiction.
They created these parody detective stories and
dark humor fantasies. The detective, Isidro Perotti,
operates from a jail cell. Another great Borgesian
constraint and irony. Exactly. The humor is dry
and highly stylized, often parodying the Argentine
social scene and the inflated rhetoric of the
intelligentsia. It shows Borges' capacity for
fun and satire. proving that his dry style was
a tool, not a limitation. And later, the collaboration
with the American translator Norman Thomas DiGiovanni
was key to his rise to fame in the English -speaking
world. Though that relationship became legally
complex later on. It did. But DiGiovanni helped
introduce Borges to a mass audience in the 1960s
and 70s. That partnership gave him global visibility.
It did, but it wasn't without future complication.
After Borgias' death, his widow, Maria Kadama,
aggressively asserted her rights over the works.
Which led to the revocation of the rights to
Di Giovanni's translations. Right. Which resulted
in a complex and sometimes contentious literary
legacy regarding which translations were authorized.
Now we come to the monumental question. The Nobel
Prize. Ah, yes. He was nominated over 30 times,
considered a towering figure of 20th century
letters alongside contemporaries like Nabokov
and Neruda. Yet he never won. He treated the
whole affair with characteristic wit and irony,
didn't he? He did. He famously quipped that not
granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian
tradition. We know he was frequently close. For
instance, he was one of the final three choices
in 1967. The year the Guatemalan writer Miguel
Engel Asturias won. So why the snub? The sources
point clearly toward political controversy overriding
his literary merit. Absolutely. The decisive
factor cited by at least one prominent committee
member, Arthur Lundqvist, was Borges' acceptance
of an honor from the Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet in the 1970s. And Lundqvist cited this
acceptance as making Borges an improper Nobel
laureate for ethical and humane reasons. Which
is a devastating irony. The man who risked his
life and career fighting fascism and Peronism
in Argentina. The same man who wrote essays declaring
pride in Jewish heritage against Nazi sympathizers.
Was denied the world's highest literary honor
due to a single controversial gesture toward
another authoritarian figure later in his life.
It's the ultimate tragedy of political labeling.
He saw Matinache initially as a necessary stabilizer
against chaos, aligning with his anti -statist
beliefs that sometimes preferred order over populism.
But this proved to be a political disaster for
his international image. Stepping back to the
intellectual pillars that buttressed his work,
we should just reinforce the philosophical influences
we touched on earlier. He consistently named
Bishop George Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer
as his two greatest philosophical influences.
Berkeley, the great idealist, who argued esse
es percipi. To be is to be perceived. This idealism
provides the groundwork for Borges' preoccupation
with dreams and the precariousness of external
reality, exemplified in stories like Klun, Uckbar,
and Schopenhauer's influence, Schopenhauer's
pessimism, and his emphasis on the illusory world
of appearances, the idea that the phenomenal
world is merely representation, driven by an
irrational will, that lends Borges' stories their
profound skepticism. a skepticism regarding purpose
and linear progression. Borscht's universe is
rational but fundamentally meaningless, a very
Schopenhauerian concept. He also played with
concepts from mathematics, showing a sophisticated
if sometimes superficial knowledge of set theory.
Which he used in stories like The Book of Sand
to explore the nature of impossible collections
and infinity. Finally, let's look at his end,
which, like his life, was marked by contradiction
and ecumenism. He declared himself an agnostic.
But he clarified that this didn't rule anything
out. He specified that being an agnostic means
all things are possible, even God, even the Holy
Trinity. And despite his intellectual skepticism,
he maintained a lifelong practice of praying
the Our Father nightly. A promise he made to
his Catholic mother. And he was raised with the
Bible, taught by his English Protestant grandmother.
And in a final, very Borghesean act of literary
and personal reconciliation before his death
in Geneva in 1986. The city he dedicated his
final work, The Conspirators, to. He requested
two clergymen attend. Yes. A Catholic priest
in memory of his mother and their shared traditions.
And a Protestant minister. In memory of his English
grandmother who instilled in him his love of
the English language and literature. He died
in Geneva in the presence of the priest. And
the Protestant minister, Pasteur de Montmelin,
later noted that Borges had unceasingly searched
for the right word, the term that could sum up
the whole, the final meaning of things. And the
ultimate irony and beauty is that he knew the
search itself was a labyrinth. But the act of
constructing that labyrinth is his meaning. Hashtag
tag outro. So what does this all mean for you,
the learner? Jorge Luis Borges. mastered the
synthesis of mythology, mathematics, and philosophy
within these fictional miniature worlds. He created
entire universes on just a few pages. He was
a man defined by radical, complex ironies. The
blind librarian, the cosmopolitan nationalist,
the anarchist who died in the presence of religious
men. He showed us that the essay could be a work
of fiction, that criticism could be creation,
and that the past is malleable. He was obsessed
with libraries and archives, and he gave us that
ultimate writer's sentiment. I always imagined
Paradise to be some kind of a library. We end
this deep dive with one final provocative thought.
tying his life's irony to his most radical literary
ambition. Borchers believed that every writer
creates his own precursors. Meaning his work
now permanently modifies our conception of the
past and influences the future. So... if borges's
own constructed universe those 410 page libraries
those infinite lefts those systems of forking
paths is now an indelible force in world literature
shaping how we write and how we read does his
paradise already exist within the infinite library
he helped construct If every writer who comes
after is unconsciously structuring their work
according to rules he already summarized, what
book written today is unconsciously copying a
structure he already invented? Something to consider
the next time you pick up a dense collection
of short stories or open a browser window and
find yourself lost in an infinite stream of information.