Epilogue - a fictional entry from 'Enciclopedia Sudamericana' of the year 2074 about Jorge Luis Borges - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

Literary Review, Fall, 1994 by Jorge Luis Borges, Leah Lin, Jennifer A. Mattson

AT THE RISK OF COMMITTING AN ANACHRONISM, a crime unforeseen by the penal code, but condemned by the law of probabilities and by fashion, we will transcribe an entry from the Enciclopedia Sudamericana, which will be published in Santiago de Chile in the year 2074. We have omitted one paragraph that might prove offensive and have antiquated the spelling, since it does not always conform to the demands of the modern reader. The text reads:

"Borges, Jose Francisco Isidoro Luis: Self-taught author, born in 1899 in the city of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina at that time. The date of his death is unknown, since the newspapers--a literary genre of the age--disappeared during the expansive conflicts that the local historians now summarize. His father was a professor of psychology. He was brother to Norah Borges (q.v.). His inclinations were literature, philosophy, and ethics. Proof of the first is the product of his labor, which nonetheless reveals certain irremediable limitations. For example, he never developed an appreciation for Hispanic letters, despite the habit of Quevedo. He was a supporter of the thesis of his friend Luis Rosales, who argued that the author of the inexplicable The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda could not have written the Quixote. Moreover, this novel was one of the few that merited Borges's indulgence; others were those of Voltaire, Stevenson, Conrad, and Eca de Queiroz. He contented himself with stories, a characteristic that reminds us of Poe's shortcoming. There is no such thing as a long poem, which is confirmed in the uses of poetry in certain Oriental nations. In reference to metaphysics, it will suffice to recall a certain Clave de Baruch Spinoza, 1975. Borges held professorships at the universities of Buenos Aires, Texas, and Harvard, with no further official title than a vague Swiss bachelor's degree that critics continue to investigate. He was doctor honoris causa of Cuyo and Oxford. According to legend, he posed no questions on exams, and invited students to select and consider any aspect of a theme. He did not demand deadlines, claiming that he himself ignored them. He detested bibliography, which separates the sources from the student.

"He was pleased to belong to the bourgeoisie, a position evidenced by his name. The common people and the aristocracy, devotees of money, gambling, sport, nationalism, success, and fame, appeared to him almost identical. About 1960 he joined the Conservative Party, because (he said), 'it is undoubtedly the only one which cannot provoke fanaticism.'

"The renown that Borges enjoyed during his life, documented by a body of monographs and polemics, never ceases to astonish us today. It is clear that he was the most surprised of all, and always feared that he would be declared an imposter or a bungling amateur or a singular mixture of both. We will investigate the reasons for this fame, which now strikes us as so mysterious.

"It must not be forgotten in the first place, that Borges's time corresponded to a national decline. He was of military lineage and felt the nostalgia of his forefathers' epic destiny. He thought valor to be one of the few virtues of which men are capable, but his cult applied it, like so many others, to the reckless veneration of the criminal underworld. Thus, the most-read of his stories was Hombre de la esquina rosada, whose narrator is a murderer. He composed fibbing tales that commemorate homicides of the same sort. His verses in the popular style, which are an echo of Ascasubi, exhumed the memory of knifewielding scoundrels quite reasonably forgotten. He wrote a merciful biography of a certain minor poet, whose only boast was to discover the rhetorical possibilities of the slums. The troubadors had already equipped a world that essentially belonged to Borges, but the cultured gentry could not take pleasure in the spectacle with an untroubled conscience. It is forgivable that they applauded the one who authorized this affection. His secret and perhaps unconscious desire was to fabricate a mythology of Buenos Aires, which never existed. Thus, at the end of his years, he contributed, without knowing nor suspecting it, to that exaltation of barbarism that culminated in the cult of the gaucho, of Artigas and Rosas.

"To return to the obverse, despite Las fuerzas extranas (1906) of Lugones, Argentinian narrative prose did not generally transcend argumentation, satire, and traditional chronicles. Borges, guided by his northern studies, elevated it to the fantastic. Groussac and Reyes taught him to simplify his vocabulary, then burdened by curious defects: afflicted, aggressiveness, alienation, inquiry, to apperceive, transposition, conjunctive, procreative, categorical, commerce, to promote oneself, to consort, to self-animate, to actualize oneself, situationism, verticality, finding one's inner being...The academies, which could have advised against the use of such absurdities, were not impressed. Those who condescended to that gibberish publicly exalted Borges's style.