Borges: An Introduction

by Julio Premat, Amanda Murphy (Translation)

This book, available for the first time in English, offers a thorough introductory reading of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most remarkable and influential writers of the twentieth century. Julio Premat, a specialist in the field of Borges studies, presents the main questions posed by Borges's often paradoxical writing, and leads the novice through the complexity and breadth of Borges's vast literary production.

Originally published in French by an Argentine ex-pat living in Paris, Borges includes the Argentine specificities of Borges’s work—specificities that are often unrecognized or glossed over in Anglophone readings.

This book is a boon for university students of philosophy and literature, teachers and researchers in these fields who are looking to better understand this complex author, and anyone interested in the advanced study of literature. Somewhere between a guidebook and an exhaustive work of advanced research, Borges is the ultimate stepping-stone into the deeper Borgesian world.

Genres: Poetry

174 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2021

Reviews

[Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thanks to Vanderbilt University Press for a review copy of this book via Edelweiss.

Originally published in French, Borges: An Introduction is a short (174pp) but in-depth introduction to the Argentinian writer, poet and essayist Jorge Luis Borges and his work. The volume is translated by Amanda Murphy, a translator and Professor at the Sorbonne.

In seven chapters divided into two parts, Premat explores Borges—the writer rather than Borges the man (only some aspects of his personal life are referred to insofar as they influenced or were reflected in his work)—and his work highlighting some of its key themes and forms as well as philosophical influences and underpinnings.

The three chapters in the first part trace his journey as a writer, from a young man who returned to Buenos Aires (having lived with his family in Geneva), and made his entry into literature through the device of ‘inventing a city’ to later ‘inventing a cosmos’ and his exploration of the Ultraist movement which rejected pure symbolism and verbosity and demanded innovative use of metaphor to the changes brought about in him in his ‘second’ stage so to speak, after his life threatening accident in 1938, which turned him from his initial explorations to an author of fascinating labyrinths. Then came the third development which changed is relationship to what he created once more: this was the loss of his sight. However, even at this stage he produced a significant body of work, now also incorporating themes like death and revisiting his own texts to present them anew, trying to wrest free of the baroque forms and impetuosity of his youth. These developments may have a chronological element to them but they should rather be seen, as Premat points out, as a gallery of possibilities rather than a logical sequence.

The four chapters of the second part dive more deeply into his work taking up themes and forms that characterised his writings. Amongst these are the use of biography which was the form adopted in many of his short stories. The story for him is a way of being in the world (rather than simply a narrative form), and while he used the biographical pattern as a model for his storytelling, some of these very stories also reflect ‘his disbelief in this kind of historical narrative’. Another mode or form that is seen in his work is the detective novel; while he may have written few stories that would seem to us the traditional mode of detective story (for instance, those featuring Isidro Parodi; note the last name), much of his work features its elements (guilt, traitors, cowards, redemptions, and so on) and his ideal reader (he was himself the precursor of ‘educated reading’) is required in a sense to be a detective, unravelling its various layers and meanings.

Reading for Borges was as important, even more so, in fact than writing and was a catalyst or starting point for writing or creation. (In some ways, in his views also reflect Barthes’ the ‘author is dead’ idea). Borges was a voracious reader, on a range of disciplines from Western philosophy to Jewish and Muslim metaphysics to fiction, and his personal collection (donated to the Argentine National Library) was full of marginalia. And erudition was, in some ways, a writing technique in itself.

Time and temporal aspects or dimensions are another aspect that reflect in his writings whether in exploring the eternal (for instance, recovering the moments of life and combining them as we please through the mode of death which enables one to handle eternity) and seeing belonging to time as an irrelevant fact. Works after all, belong both to the time when written but also all the subsequent times when read.

These are just the bare bones and broad structure of this exploration of Borges which brings out numerous nuances and aspects of his fascinating and complex body of work. Using various poems and volumes of poetry short stories and essays as illustrations, Premat examines each of his themes, while also showing how Borges’ work challenged thought, destabilized certainties and pushed boundaries (‘In Borges’s work, writing often leads to a process of endangering conventional forms of thought and epistemological paradigms’.) And Premat does very much succeed in his objective of ‘render[ing] highly complex phenomena comprehensible’ without ‘simplifying their content, limiting their pertinence or merely outlining their processes’.

While certainly, this book would make for far more interesting reading for those familiar with at least Borges’s key works, even for some one like me, who’s been reluctant (so far) to dive into Borges because of his complexity, I felt this book did help me get an idea of his journey as an author as also of the body of his work and its many intriguing themes and threads. I enjoyed seeing for instance his ideas of the relationship between writer, work and reader (the relevance he attached to reader-work over writer-work), the manipulation of time without affecting outcomes, and also some ideas in line with some of the spiritual notions of oneness or connectedness I’ve been reading/listening to in some other works lately (which for instance enables one to be another).

When we feel this oneness, time is a delusion which the indifference and inseparability of a moment from its apparent yesterday and from its apparent today suffice to disintegrate.

Though in a sense, approaching his work after having read an analysis might interfere with the thoughts that may have come to me had I gone in completely ‘blind’ so to speak, it will also enrich my experience by giving me an idea of how to approach (like a detective) it and the many layers that each work has (by no means am I expecting to uncover very many on the first go, of course).

Borges the man, though the book considers him only in the context of his work, was every bit as interesting, on the one side, challenging much that is established, and even his reader, and on the other also very human, editing his early work in his later years so as to present an image that he wanted to project of himself (wresting himself free of what he didn’t like about his initial years, but in some instances also poking fun at at). The book also touches upon his complicated (may be also somewhat questionable) relationship with politics and the regimes he lived under (which did to an extent also affect his legacy) and his contributions to literature through (besides his own work) bringing into the mainstream some lesser-known poets and writers.

What the book leaves one with is both a desire to explore Borges’s work and learn more about the man himself and his life experiences that reflected in his writing. Definitely recommended.

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jorge Luis Borges was a thinking person’s writer, his works are both global and local (of Argentina or, specifically, of Buenos Aires focus,) are philosophical and literary and cut across scholarly domains, and they can also be arcane and fragmented. It’s because of this -- combined with the fact that Borges work remains well worth reading -- that a volume like this is beneficial. While the book does -in part - simplify and elucidate Borges’ work, it also expands on the Borges canon as a way to present the reader food-for-thought about ways in which one might approach the thoughts of Borges, oneself. The book is divided into two parts, one on the man and the other on his writings.

While this book is subtitled, “An Introduction,” I would suggest it’d be beneficial if one has read some of Borges’ major works (e.g. “A Personal Anthology,” “Ficciones,” “Aleph and Other Stories,” “Selected Non-fictions,” etc.) Premat does offer some relevant background information when he references texts in order to help clarify his points, but not always enough to get the full understanding and less and less as the book progresses – so as to avoid redundancy. Borges’ work (tending toward short [even micro-] writings across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) is challenging enough for this kind of study. As opposed to a novelist who would have a few major works to discuss, Borges has a vast body of writings that are no more than a few pages each.

As a reader of Jorge Luis Borges, I found this book to be beneficial and thought-provoking, and would recommend it for others who want to expand the depths of their understanding of this Argentinian writer and his ideas.