“It is as if Borges were a grandfather and not a literary father; and with grandparents one has no conflict,” the writer Pedro Mairal (Buenos Aires, 1970) often says and outlines a change of era in the relationship between the great Argentine author and the latest generations of national writers. It is that both the adoration and the impossible imitation as well as the patricidal drive, which for years led many to write against Jorge Luis Borges, seem to have given way to new perspectives, unprejudiced and with greater freedom to take or discard at will. The question about how the author of The Aleph was one of the axes of the Borges Festival that took place during the last week in Buenos Aires. And perhaps the rehearsed answers would not have upset the writer who defended pleasure as the only valid reason for reading: reading, Borges said, “must be one of the forms of happiness.”
In the writer born in 1899 and died in 1986, a masterpiece of high culture and a figure of mass recognition, almost a popular celebrity, are combined, the blind and wise old man who harmonized “serene modesty” with iconoclastic irony. Perhaps part of his enduring appeal lies in that ambivalence. “On the one hand, Borges amazes, he occupies that canonical place in Argentine literature, he is one of the great figures of universal literature. But, at the same time, there is something about it that seems very accessible, despite having many complexities,” observed the writer Olivia Gallo (Buenos Aires, 1995). “He had a very horizontal vision of literature, very pure and playful. He did not put himself in the place of a serious writer who spoke from above, there is something very punk in his figure, in running away from that place to which at the same time he belonged.”
The Borges Festival is an independent cultural project with free admission that, in its fourth edition, took place between last Monday and this Saturday. It included workshops, talks and tours – some virtual activities and others in person – with the participation of academics, researchers, journalists, writers and other artists.
“Borges’ literature waits, waits for the moment when each and every one can find in Borges what speaks to us, what story does and what story does not,” characterized Yamila Bêgné (Buenos Aires, 1983), author of The limits of control and Natural protocols, among other books. “Borges’ literature is there so that we can return, not only as individuals throughout our lives, but also as generations: my parents read it in one way, I read it in another, my son will read it in another way.” . This is also how a classic is configured. It is a work that waits because it has the quality to wait, because there is something inside that cannot be fully deciphered. A quality of condensation, of a black hole. We are there hovering all the time and it waits for us, it waits for us to communicate in a more direct way with those texts.”
Influence and words
The question regarding the influence of Borges and his mythology on current literary production was formulated at the festival by the professor and journalist Gisela Paggi. “There is a tension between the people who write and Borges,” responded Sonia Budassi (Bahía Blanca, 1978). “Borges can inspire fear, trepidation, but he also makes a young writer feel that another world exists and that they can be part of it. Many writers have confessed that the first thing they wrote were stories imitating Borges’s gesture, the labyrinths, the circular ruins… Although he is an erudite writer, he has what Beatriz Sarlo calls the strategy of the minor, of not putting extra words. In all the sophistication of him, Borges is truly stimulating for anyone who wants to write.” The author of Pets and Where nothing stops He highlighted “the rhetorical tools” that Borges’ texts offer, his use of metaphor and prosopopoeia, “the contradictory figures with which he denies something while affirming it”, present in the titles of stories such as “The implausible impostor Tom Castro” or “The atrocious redeemer Lazarus Morell.”
“Borges not only writes about reading, but he writes all the time about writing. So when it comes to writing or providing tools to others so that they can write, in a workshop or class, it is essential,” said Yamila Bêgné. She recalled that in the essay “Gauchesque Poetry,” Borges warns that knowing how a character speaks is knowing the character: “That is unavoidable advice for constructing a character or a narrator. If we know that voice, if we internalize it, the path of writing, which is never easy, will have a guide.”
Present absence
Do young people read Borges? Without data available, the responses shared sensations and perceptions. Olivia Gallo, author of Girls don’t cry and It’s not a vacation, said that, with his friends interested in literature, they do not usually talk about Borges. “He is not in the conversation, nor does he appear much in the literary workshops. But there is something of his presence that sneaks in elsewhere, perhaps through other Argentine authors touched by his work. At the time, Borges was discussed, criticized, canonized, there is something of the debate in those terms that is already there, it is no longer discussed and that can alienate an author and cause him to be read less. But, at the same time, people of my generation, I think, are not fighting with the idea of reading it,” he said and remembered that phrase from Mairal: “You don’t fight with your grandparents, you fight with your parents.”
As a first-year professor at the university, in the area of social sciences, Bêgné commented that her current students “of course know Borges, but few have read him. They did read writers like Mariana Enríquez or Samanta Schweblin. They have other, more visible and closer options to reach literature. They will have time to reach Borges and, if they don’t arrive, it doesn’t seem like a capital sin to me either. Today perhaps there may be great readers who have not read Borges,” she risked, knowing, she said, that she was going to regret it.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when he advised his students not to read books that bored them, Borges suggested something similar about the latent, permanently suspended power of literature: “Read Shakespeare. If Shakespeare interests you, fine. If you find Shakespeare tedious, leave it alone. Shakespeare has not yet written for you. There will come a day when Shakespeare will be worthy of you and you will be worthy of Shakespeare. But in the meantime, there is no need to rush things.”
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