Borges and Space (Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas)
Bill Richardson
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 3034302460
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book examines the relevance of the concepts of space and place to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The core of the book is a series of readings of key Borges texts viewed from the perspective of human spatiality. Issues that arise include the dichotomy between ‘lived space’ and abstract mapping, the relevance of a ‘sense of place’ to Borges’s work, the impact of place on identity, the importance of context to our sense of who we are, the role played by space and place in the exercise of power, and the ways in which certain of Borges’s stories invite us to reflect on our ‘place in the universe’. In the course of this discussion, crucial questions about the interpretation of the Argentine author’s work are addressed and some important issues that have largely been overlooked are considered. The book begins by outlining cross-disciplinary discussions of space and place and their impact on the study of literature and concludes with a theoretical reflection on approaches to the issue of space in Borges, extrapolating points of relevance to the theme of literary spatiality generally.
our lives, in a context where we may be viewed as being defined merely by our position in space and time at any given moment? What kind of reality can we attribute to such nebulous aspects of our existence, when the sum total of that existence is seen as transitory, in the way that Beatriz’s life is both transitory and mysterious in this story? ‘El Aleph’ appears to imply that mathematical abstraction and the recounting of human experiences are in fact two sides of the same coin, complementary
writings, and was dismissive of what he saw as his own juvenile attempts to capture his native city’s ‘local colour’. In the essay ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’ [‘The Argentine writer and tradition’], originally delivered as a lecture in 1953, he spoke of how, in the 1920s, he had been trying in those ‘�������������������� olvidables y olvidados libros’ [forgettable and forgotten books], to ‘redactar el sabor, la esencia de los barrios extremos de Buenos Aires’ (OC1: 270) [sketch the
your life, and robs your life of its meaning. Another nightmarish city, not identifiable with any actual geographical location, is the ‘City of the Immortals’ that is depicted in the story ‘El inmortal’ [‘The Immortal’]. In the ‘Afterword’ to El Aleph, Borges judged this to be the most ‘worked-on’ story in the collection (‘la más trabajada’, OC1: 629),16 while it has been labelled by Butler (2009: 27) ‘one of Borges’ major works and an essential addition to the canon’. Written in the aftermath
this experience as a social phenomenon, and will consider some of the many important ramifications associated with that; nonetheless, the more abstract notion of space, associated, down through the ages, with the thinking of philosophers, mathematicians and physical scientists, is also of relevance in the case of Borges, since he himself was familiar with, and was inf luenced by, that work. In other words, scientific investigation of the issue of space, from ancient times to the contemporary
one. Apart from the reference to the assumed eternal existence of the Library in the first ‘axiom’ mentioned in the third paragraph, and to the inevitability of the narrator’s own death and the death of the human species, there is little or no sense in the story of development or of prospects for progression, at least in the positive sense. There is mention of decay and the imminent annihilation of the human presence: the narrator talks of increasing levels of suicide and the fact that ‘[l]as