University of Pittsburgh

Beatriz Sarlo
Borges: a Writer on the Edge

Back to the Index    -  Next Chapter

 

CHAPTER 6

A Question Of Order

 

Fiction has the power to construct an order or a meaning in the face of a disorderly world, not only by interpreting reality in terms of deciphering hidden clues, which would be a form of Romantic ideology, but by challenging its causal, spatial and temporal logic with a different type of pattern. In this sense, fantastic fiction, far from being a somewhat secondary discourse, stands as an independent response to reality. Fantastic fiction disturbs reality not through re-presentation but through contradiction or divergence. It stresses the tension present in the act of writing, as writing drifts away from realistic discourse which is, of course, only one of the possible ways of relating art to social life. Although reality and fiction obey different logics, at some point they intersect. For instance, when the reader of a text finds that a conflict arises between these two logics, that something in the logic of reality contradicts the logic of a text or where the logic of a text appears to be more persuasive or consistent than that of reality.

When history seems to offer no sanctuary for values (when history is assailed by wars and inhuman or immoral public actions), literature can provide a model, often as horrendous as that of history, but one which through its fictional nature is bound to keep an ironic, parodic, aesthetic or philosophical distance from what is at risk in immediate experience or direct reflection.

Borges always withdrew from an open discussion of contemporary politics in his literature, yet the question of the ways in which order imposes itself on human communities can be found woven into the fabric of his plots. In fact, he is examining the ideological and cultural conditions of society when he outlines imaginary worlds that belong, by their own right, to the purest tradition of fantastic literature. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Lottery in Babylon" and "The Library of Babel", which we have analysed in the previous chapter, offer alternative images of society. In fact, they are nightmares that show institutional organization to be based on blind power, arbitrary rulings or myths. The question of the acceptance of order is often examined, as are the conditions that produce disorder when that order, for some reason, is weak or absent.

Borges has written a great deal on violence and individual revenge. His urban orillero stories and his re-working of the gauchesque tradition show individual violence to be necessary where a code of honour is in place, and formal law has not established its domain. The idea of violence is deeply embedded in his version of criollo culture: it is lived as a South American destiny, which for decades has endangered society, but which has also given it a consistent meaning. The public confrontation of two men in a duel, in a rite which both parties accept as law, refers us to values that could be judged barbaric but that, at the same time, uphold a certain form of community in which no state and no formal codes had managed to organise social relations. Duels defined not only what a society was, but also what it was not. It shows that no formal procedures were in place to offer an alternative to a confrontation between armed men who trusted in the code of honour to resolve their disputes or to uphold justice.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Argentine society was suffering the effect of the wars of Independence, that had disrupted the old colonial order and had liberated certain forces that fought each other for decades before agreeing to a constitutional pact in 1853. Until then, especially in the countryside, individual or group violence coped with the tasks that a very weak state (or rather, a non existent national state) could not carry out. In fact, the conflicts that occured in regional governments were an obstacle to the imposition of formal procedures which could transform individual feuds into regulated conflicts. In this criollo world, the myth of personal courage was bound to take the place of other, more 'civilised', forms of public behaviour and their corresponding values.

Borges saw that this problem was a central issue of criollo culture. By exploring the myths of this culture, he indirectly pointed out that these myths came from, and were nourished by, a historical situation in which society was weak, state institutions were absent and, consequently, conflicts were resolved through violence. In the poem "Noche conjetural", ('Conjectural poem'), Borges imagines the last thoughts of Francisco Laprida, the man who had signed the act of Argentine independence from Spain in 1816. They reveal the contradiction between abstract notions of justice and the concrete forms of criollo violence. In 1829, during a extraordinary acute period of civil war, Laprida is killed by the montoneros, that gaucho warrior band whose members excelled in the art of knife and spear fighting:

I who studied canon law and civil
Francisco Narcisco de Laprida
whose voice declared the independence
of these harsh provinces, am overthrown
covered with blood and sweat
without fear or hope, lost,
fleeing south through the farthest outskirts
(....)
I longed to be something else, a man of
sentiments, books, judgement
and now will lie in a swamp under the open sky
And yet, a secret joy inexplicably
exalts me. I've met my destiny,
my final South American destiny." [1]

Borges often pointed out that the criollo branch of his family had its roots in this nineteenth century Argentina, and that his great grand-parents had possessed a knowledge which was related to a primitive world of cattle raisers and cavalry commanders that was ruled by custom and the unwritten laws of violence: a sort of heroic, primitive, rural dystopia. Yet it was a society where the use of power and physical force had not undergone a process of institutional regulation and much less of state monopoly. There, myths of courage and masculine endurance flourished as the cultural response to a social environment. Such a society could exist only if some form of virtue was seen in personal ties of dependence, concrete services or obligations secured by traditional vows, and loyalty to the patron or to other leaders. Without this kind of bondage, rural society (where state officials, if there were any, had less power than private landowners) would tend to dissolve into anarchy. This is very probably one of the reasons why there was a long tradition of political insult used against modernizing tendencies in nineteenth century Argentina. They (the modernizing fraction) were labelled as anarchist, heretical, unlawful, nihilist, indeed 'savage', because modernising ideas about state and society eroded the traditional ties that kept life going despite the instability caused by Independence and civil wars, that had been fought, almost without interruption, during the first half of the nineteenth century. Although Borges's family ties bound him to the modernising fraction of the elites, he also realised that traditional values were being threatened, and he was aware of the fragility of the abstract relations that modernity was establishing through material progress and republican institutions.

The search for a new social and political order was the main objective of the modernising programme of the nineteenth century. But it could not be established merely through institutions: a new set of values had to be implanted in order to give stability to a fragile and loosely-knit society. Moreover, the arrival of thousands of immigrants in the last decades of the century, reinforced, as we have seen, the sense of a new order, but an order with no fixities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, intellectuals began to consider the difficulties and not only the advantages of being a new and young country. Because the transition to a modernised republic, governed by formal institutions, had proved painful and difficult, they could point to the solidity of traditional rural values. Although most of them praised the formal structure of modern Argentina, at the same time a sense of insecurity, which was not merely the result of a reactionary or elitist viewpoint, pervaded their images of society and their sense of the future. If few looked back to the past as a source or a model for the present, nevertheless it was seen as a time when society had had knowable dimensions and when values were shared not as a result of formal pacts, but because they sprang from the same soil that nurtured common identities. Although the elite seemed satisfied with the modernisation process (which opened up what appeared to be almost limitless economical opportunities), intellectuals found that the very process that had created modern Argentina was flawed by the absence of strong cultural ties. Society was firmly entrenched, secularized and autonomous; but, like all modern societies, its institutional and formal basis, was deprived of the strong echoes of tradition and myth.

Borges stated this sense of loss (or absence) in one of his first essays: what Buenos Aires needed badly, he wrote, were ghosts. Although it could be read ironically, his assertion also implies a 'cultural policy': where the myths of a traditional society recede into an unretrievable past, the traces of those myths in literature construct an analogon not of a previous reality, but of an ideal model according to which a society can view itself. 'Ghosts' imply a common ground and a sense of harmony with the past. In a society where modern institutions, built according to written law, had eroded traditional beliefs and 'natural' bonds, the fact of sharing the same "ghosts" opened up symbolically, the possibilities of finding a deep cultural awareness that was endangered in the modern republic which, itself, was riven by different conflicts.

 

The question of how a social and cultural order is established, preserved or destroyed belongs to the philosophical dimensions of political theory, a dimension that is seldom mentioned in relation to Borges, whose fascination with philosophy has attracted almost unanimous critical attention. I would argue that a question that could be described as political philosophy is present in some of his very finest stories, for the historical reasons that have been stated above and for reasons connected with world developments in the twentieth century. Around the mid-twenties, when Borges stated that Buenos Aires was in sore need of ghosts, and that it was his task to provide them, the world had been already shattered by the First World War, and Western countries had been compelled to recognise the existence of the Russian revolution and the building of the Soviet republics. At the same time, Fascism had established itself in Italy, and had pervaded populist movements in other parts of Europe, and democracy had given way to political forms (tainted by populism and a plebeian style of mass politics) that had not been envisaged in the pure republican ideals of the liberal intellectual elites. Books like Ideology and Utopia, by Mannheim, and La trahison de clercs, by Julien Benda [2] , as well as Ortega y Gasset's essays on the massification of culture, are the signs of a period marked by menacing and swift changes that altered very deeply the role of the man of letters in modern societies. Borges never explicitly took sides in this debate that was taking place not only in Argentina. In fact, he always stated his aversion to literature that chose to be permeated by political ideologies. In his "Preface to the First Edition" of Doctor Brodie's Report, written in 1970, he states once again:

"My stories, like those of the Thousand and One Nights, try to be entertaining or moving but not persuasive. Such an intention does not mean that I have shut myself up, according to Solomon's image, in an ivory tower. My political convictions are quite well known; I am a member of the Conservative Party -this in itself is a form of skepticism -and no one ever branded me a Communist, a nationalist, an anti-Semite, a follower of Billy the Kid or of the dictator Rosas. I believe that some day we will deserve not to have governments. I have never kept my opinions hidden, not even in trying times, but neither have I ever allowed them to find their way into my literary work, except one when I was buoyed up in exultation over the Six-Day War. The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral, and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of intelligence". [3]

Yet the dramatic shifts in this century, like the rise of fascism, especially in Germany and Central Europe, left very visible traces in his fictions. Let us begin with the most explicit: racism is seen as a arbitrary form of state ideology that dismisses reason and distributes death at random, as in the case of Jaromir Hladik the writer victim on whom God bestows "The Secret Miracle". Antisemitism as an obtuse ideology (which for Borges is, of course, a heavy indictment) is also examined in a famous dialogue in "Death and the Compass". When Inspector Treviranus discusses with Lönnrot, the "pure reasoner", in the presence of the editor of the Yidische Zaitung the murder of Doctor Marcel Yarmolinsky, Treviranus dismisses "rabbinical explanations" as useless. He immediately receives the sharp response of an enlightened id éologue:

"'I'm a poor Christian, he said. 'Carry off those musty volumes if you want; I don't have any time to waste on Jewish superstitions.'

'Maybe the crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions,' murmured Lönnrot.

'Like Christianity,' the editor of the Yidische Zaitung ventured to add." [4]

But there is also the much more complex case of "Deutsches Requiem", a story built on a very explicit Nietzschean topic of the reign of violence prevailing over Christian virtues. A very Borgesian critique of violence is offered from the standpoint of a German officer. By taking responsibility for the death of a Jewish poet, the officer hoped to destroy in himself every trace of compassion with regard to the Other and to what is different: Nazism is "an act of morality, a purging of corrupted humanity". [5]

The internal perspective Borges adopts in this story allows the argument of the Nazi officer to develop with its own logic; it emphasises his options and his values, as the basis of an alternative order. Thus Borges makes the reader give him careful consideration instead of dismissing him out of hand. On the eve of his execution the German officer Otto Dietrich zur Linde (well-read in Schopenhauer, Splenger and Nietzsche), asks how human actions can be judged when they have been carried out to establish an order that entails a new organization of society according to new principles. These can of course be judged from a moral standpoint which, if it is different from the one upheld by the founders of a new order, could be said to endorse evil instead of good. But, if viewed outside its historical context, the question of order is present in those systems which we approve and in those which we condemn. By offering a Nazi officer (the image of Ernst J ünger comes to mind in this portrayal of Otto zur Linde) as the voice of his story, Borges is pointing out the dilemma of all political orders, not only those that have been universally condemned but also those that we consider legitimate. Both offer arguments that might be logically developed. In fact, he is obliquely persuading us to reflect on the general question of order precisely because it is discussed by a 'civilized' and cultured Nazi that, as subdirector of a concentration camp, carried out the task of destroying the Jewish poet Albert Soergel. When the war was over, Otto zur Linde asked himself why he felt relieved, and discarded several reasons before coming up with the truth:

"The world was dying of Judaism and from that sickness of Judaism, the faith of Jesus; we taught it violence and the faith of the sword. That sword is slaying us, and we are comparable to the wizard who fashioned a labyrinth and was then doomed to wander in it to the end of his days; or to David, who, judging an unknown man, condemns him to death, only to hear the revelation: You are that man. Many things will have to be destroyed in order to construct the New Order; now we know that Germany also was one of those things". [6]

A Borgesian theme runs through this passage: a man is himself and his enemy, fate runs its course through the blind consequences of our actions. Yet, there is something else here that cannot be overlooked. On one hand, there is the organization of the world according to values, such as Nazism in the case of Germany. On the other, there is the idea that every order is based on the destruction of a previous one, based on different values, and that every order relies on an act of forceful imposition, although myths and philosophy can explain that imposition as a gift, a tradition, or a pact. Furthermore, the voice of the Nazi officer and his hideous racism, questions the naivete of believing that to demonstrate the validity and universality of values is a simple and straightforward intellectual exercise. Otto zur Linde is not only testifying to the extremes of Nazism, but also to the painstaking task of establishing our beliefs about what is right and wrong in society. "Deutsches Requiem" chose the difficult route of doing so through a voice of a man almost universally condemned, and it explores at the same time the cruelty of even one death, that of a Jewish poet, and the dilemma of how a new order can be established. Society is contructed through violence, although the degree of violence and the values which legitimate it are, and should be, differentiated.

Questions concerning the foundations or the lack of foundations of values are related to questions about society. What is it that makes the existence of a society possible? How can a balance be kept betweem different customs on the grounds of collective administration or on the grounds of public interest? How is the very concept of the 'public' constructed, and how is power given to some positions and denied to others? According to what principles, which are not just based on punishment and reward, do men obey the law? Borges, in the footsteps of Swift, asks these questions of the reader of "Doctor Brodie's Report". [7]

Brodie, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who had worked for the faith in Africa and Brazil, wrote (and left among the pages of Lane's Arabian Nights' Entertainments) a report on the 'Mlch' people, whom he calls Yahoos because of "their bestial nature" and because it was difficult to give an exact transcription of their real name since their language contained no vowels. Thus the Mlch bear the mark of their literary ancestors and, can thus be considered as a quotation. The Mlch are transformed by Doctor Brodie (via Swift) into his 'Yahoos', in the report the narrator of the story has found and transmits almost in its entirety. This structure en abîme, that Borges often used, releases the fictional power of the double quotation from Brodie and from Gulliver and, at the same time, establishes the text in a tradition of travellers to distant lands who find elements that mirror, in an allegorical or ironic fashion, their own societies.

Like Swift, Borges opens up a moral argument through Brodie's report. But, unlike Swift, he does not propose an explicit term of comparison between the 'Yahoos' of Brodie's report and another people: there are no noble Houyhnhnms in his story, and their absence leads to different conclusions. While Gulliver has, at last, found in an animal society the opportunity to present a utopia, Brodie is only able to offer, in the last paragraph of his report, a tolerant opinion of his 'Yahoos', from a truly relativistic point of view: "After their fashion, they stand for civilization much as we ourselves do, in spite of our many transgressions". What does this mean? Is it merely an ironic conclusion or is there also a veiled critique of the civilization that produced Doctor Brodie's missionary expeditions?

Brodie's ends his report with the "fervent prayer that the Government of Her Majesty will not ignore what this report makes bold to suggest". This is indeed bold, after the description of the 'Yahoos' that the report gives and the comparison that it makes between their civilization and the one to which Brodie belongs. It seems that nothing prepares us for this final remark: Brodie has been piously shocked by the cannibal habits of the 'Yahoos' who devour their king's and witch-doctors's corpses, and by the naïve promiscuity of their Queen who offered herself to the missionary only to find that he turned this honour down. What, then, is he suggesting to Her Majesty? The 'Yahoos' have a rudimentary language - and Brodie found it impossible to make out discrete logical parts of speech - composed of monosyllabic words, the meaning of which is regulated by the context or by the pragmatic forms of enunciation. They cannot discriminate between nature and culture (they consider that the hut Doctor Brodie has built for himself is a tree and are seen to be incapable of even perceiving such complicated objects as a chair). They have no idea of history and of the past in the broadest sense (only the witch-doctors are able to remember in the evening what had happened that same morning) and make obvious and indeterminate predictions about what they consider to be the future (that amounts to the next ten minutes).  They are not burdened by the weight of events, like the crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews which we include in a past that has a bearing on our present. They are ignorant of remote causality and are thus deprived of notions such as fatherhood (that hindered their conversion to the Christian faith and their understanding of the Christian concept of divinity). They endow poetry with a very special status that deprives the poets of the right to life because the poetic act has the power of turning them into gods with whom nobody communicates and anyone is entitled to kill.

Yet, when Doctor Brodie gets back in touch with a civilized man, who happens to be a Catholic missionary, he felt shocked by the habits he had practiced throughout his life: eating in public, for instance, which the 'Yahoos' avoided as a taboo: "At first I found it revolting to see him open his mouth without the slightest dissimulation and put into it pieces of food. I still covered my mouth with my hands, or averted my eyes". [8] Back in his country, Doctor Brodie does not feel as Gulliver felt after his return from the land of the Houyhnhnms, except in the fleeting impression he received from seeing that people eat in company without embarrassment. His fate is not that of Gulliver, who could not tolerate for years any physical human contact, much less the spectacle of his family consuming food in his presence. Furthermore, Brodie, does not yearn for the perfect happiness Gulliver had experienced, and learned to enjoy, with the Houyhnhnms, but instead recalls the "essential horror" of his days with the 'Yahoos'.

Nevertheless he begs Her Majesty not to ignore what his "report makes bold to suggest": namely a relativistic vision of 'Yahoo' civilization, which no reader of the report would consider as civilised. He summarizes what makes the 'Yahoos' not only the barbaric nation he has described, but also a tribe whose organization and beliefs entitle them to the privilege of being considered as civilised in the same way as Europeans:

"They have institutions of their own; they enjoy a king; they employ language based upon abstract concepts; they believe, like the Hebrews and the Greeks, in the divine nature of poetry; and they surmise that the soul survives the death of the body. They also uphold the truth of punishments and rewards". [9]

Doctor Brodie's report has made an unexpected and spectacular turn. On reaching this point, Her Majesty would doubtless be surprised by the earnest defence, based on a flawless cultural relativism, of the 'Yahoos". She might ask on what grounds this equal comparison between European nations and the 'Yahoos' is founded. What do the 'Yahoos' have that gives them the right to be seen alongside the Christian nations? Or, putting it in the terms of the last words in the story: What is the report's bold suggestion?

Readers of the report may decipher the suggestion as Doctor Brodie might have hoped Her Majesty would. The 'Yahoos' have found answers to the major questions concerning order in society without having to solve internal conflicts like modern Christian nations. They live in a perfect relationship with nature. In fact, since they are not able to discriminate between nature and culture they do not experience the pain of that separation (although it also produces our civilization, industry, art and progress). Free of notions like "remote cause" and effect, they are also not troubled by philosophical and scientific preoccupations. Since their language is completely free of a set pattern of meanings they only use words that express general notions. This is a language in which the power of speech might be considered weak, but this weakness prevents them from opening up potential areas of conflict over topics such as government or religion. They entrust the witch-doctors with the power of choosing their authorities but believe that the doctors do so on the basis of certain character traits in the man chosen, which prevents quarrels over power and dynastic wars. They have a system of justice that, unlike our own is not based on proof and argument: verdicts are given without more ado after the allegation of the crime. This nation is primitive if compared to the Christian nations, but, at the same time, it has solved for ever (or, at least, until their present state guides the 'Yahoos' to their extinction) the question of order in society. Brodie's description of the nation, in the narrator's transcription, is, no doubt ironic in its content, but not in its themes. The main characteristics of human organization are presented as in a sort of very ambiguous dystopia. Readers hesitate (as Doctor Brodie does) as to whether it is fair to judge the 'Yahoo' nation as a dystopia, if the 'Yahoos' themselves do not have that uncharitable opinion about their own private and public regime.

The effect of the story is equivocal, because although Doctor Brodie has decided to judge the 'Yahoos' according to his values, he finds that they have achieved results that are, at least formally, and no matter how crudely, those of an organized nation. The tone of his description fluctuates between the emphasis on differences and the final discovery of the general similarities. Something of this hesitation is conveyed in the last words of the story. He begs Her Majesty not only to allow them, as Christians, to carry out the seemingly impossible task of saving the souls of the 'Yahoos', but he also hopes that the 'suggestion' of his report should not pass unnoticed. This suggestion is enigmatic, but could be understood as the conclusion of an elliptical comparative study of the habits of the Yahoos and those of the Christian nation. Brodie points out, at the end of his report, that the 'Yahoos' stand "for civilization much as we ourselves do, in spite of our many transgressions". He also adds that the horror of the experience he has undergone has not diminished since his return to Scotland: living in Glasgow he feels that the 'Yahoos' are still around him. This feeling is neither explained nor justified in terms of a memory of the time he spent with them. It could be read in this way, but it could also be read as the trace of 'Yahooism' in the daily life of a Christian nation. Without doubt the "essential horror of his experience" is part of the past; but it is not as obvious that the sense of being surrounded by 'Yahoos' in the streets of Glasgow can be so directly explained as a vestige of memory. After his assertion, he feels constrained to add: "Only too well do I know the Yahoos to be a barbarous nation", as if he had to respond to someone who had challenged what, in any event, he had not written. Doctor Brodie is presenting a report but also an argument: that of cultural relativism. He has given voice to his repulsion but, at the same time, he has offered a balanced summary of the basic institutions of civilization: government, religion, arts and language.

But earlier in the report, almost as an aside, Brodie has offered the hypothesis that the 'Yahoos' were once a more civilized nation whose present decadence should be explained not as primitivism but as degeneration. Their coarse language which is built around very general concepts allows them, nonetheless, to "draw abstractions". His hypothesis is also based on some old inscriptions he has found, that the tribe is no longer able to decipher. The 'Yahoos' can be thought as the future of the European nations and not only as their past, just as Tocqueville discovered in the United States not the infancy of that country but the future of Europe.

 

"Doctor Brodie's Report" displays an unsettling mixture of fictional reportage and philosophical commentary: political philosophy through narrative. Borges's concern with the question of order in society takes the form of a classical genre and the traces left by his productive reading of Swift are so evident as to guide us, on one hand, back to a tradition of philosophical travellers and, on the other hand, to alert us to his own uses of that tradition. While Gulliver is unambiguous with respect to his Yahoos (because he has the virtuous Houyhnhnms as a point of comparison), Doctor Brodie gives a puzzling verdict on his own 'Yahoos', who at the beginning of the report are seen as belonging to a "bestial" race and, at the end, as standing, in their own way, for "civilization", because in spite of their nature they had succeeded in building up an order, which amounts to solving a political question. As readers of the text, we are left unsatisfied by our own opinions of this people. Following the argument, we would expect only to experience relief at Doctor Brodie's return to his country, but, instead, a careful reading is faced (as Her Majesty would have been faced) with a comparison between 'Yahoos' and Christian nations. Readers of Swift can find peace and security in the moral lesson the Houyhnhnms teach Gulliver, but readers of Borges do not have the same consolation because there are no noble horses in the land of his 'Yahoos'. Yet a lesson is being given in the report, about different types of civilizations and different types of order based on values that appear to those on the inside as absolute truths, but which careful observers, such as Doctor Brodie, may in the end show to be contingent and relative. The report also offers a warning, albeit ambiguous and almost smuggled into the narrative, about the danger that threatens civilised nations: the barbarism that resides there and that Brodie could have encountered in the streets of Glasgow.

I do not claim that this is the only interpretation of the fantastic stories we have considered in this and in the previous chapter. We have read them with a careful eye to their poetic principles and in this way we have found that they convey basic philosphical questions couched in the perfect lucidity of the narrative. The quest for an impossible perfect order and the certainty that all order has unknown and terrible consequences is embedded in the perfection of the plot itself.


 

Notes

[1] . "Poema conjetural", in El otro, el mismo, Obras completas, Buenos Aires 1974, p.867. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan as 'Conjectural Poem' in J.L. Borges, A Personal Anthology, Pan 1967, pp. 161-2.

[2] . It is at least very probable that Borges read the book by Benda, that was considered a sort of intellectual guru by the group of Sur with which Borges belonged.

[3] . Doctor Brodie's Report, Penguin 1976, p.11-12.

[4] . 'Death and the Compass', in Labyrinths, Penguin, London, p.108

[5] . "Deutsches Requiem", Labyrinths, London 1970, p.176.

[6] . Ibid., p.178.

[7] . Doctor Brodie's Report, Penguin 1976, p.91-100.

[8] . For the above quotations, ibid, pp. 99-100.

[9] .       ibid, p.100.

 


Former published as: Beatriz Sarlo. Borges, a Writer on the Edge. London: Verso, 1993.


       
 

© Borges Studies Online 14/04/01


How to cite this chapter:

Beatriz Sarlo. Borges, a Writer on the Edge. Ch. 6. Borges Studies Online. On line. J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation. Internet: (http://www.borges.pitt.edu/bsol/bsi6.php)