Jorge Luis Borges
Can a great writer be blind to the world around him?
By Clive James
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died there in 1986, near the end of a century that he had lived almost all the way through and done a great deal to shape. If we now think of Latin American literature as central to the Spanish world, and of the Spanish world as a vitally renewed force in the world entire, it has a lot to do with Borges. As a 20th-century master artist, he was celebrated even by 19th-century standards—famous on the scale of Tennyson, Kipling, and Mark Twain. By the end of his life, his every spoken word got into print: Dialogues with Borges appeared in The New Yorker as fast as they were recorded in Buenos Aires. By “The White Whale,” of course, Borges meant Moby-Dick. (He was often very approximate about the details of his enthusiasm for literature in English.)
When I encountered this idea of Borges’—that the whole world is, or should be, our country—I was wondering already if the idea, so attractive on the face of it to a displaced person like myself, was really quite right.
Before interrogating Borges about his politics, it is wise, as it were, to go crazy about him first.
