UNIVERSITY of STIRLING JOHN WILSON SUTHERLAND Borges
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
rV\ s i —» UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING JOHN WILSON SUTHERLAND Borges, the poem and the book: a study of Historia de la noche and La ctfra Submitted for of MLitt is-aai « \ Qi r\ ProQuest Number: 13916363 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 13916363 Published by ProQuest LLC(2019). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 - I L- Table of cohtents Abbreviations III Acknowledgements lv Introduction 1 Part 1: H1ST0RIA DE LA NOCHE Introduction 14- The 'Inscrlpclbn' 18 The first group of poems 27 The second group of poems 51 The third group of poems 75 The fourth group of poems 110 The final poem and the book as a whole 14-3 The 'Epllogo1 156 Part 2: LA ClFRA Introduction 163 The 'Inscrlpclbn' and 1Prblogo' 168 The first group of poems 176 The second group of poems 204 The third group of poems 239 -v The fourth group of poems 260 The fifth group of poems 294 The sixth group of poems 329 The seventh group of poems 352 The final poem 381 The book as a whole 390 Conclusion: Borges, the poem and the book v 393 Appendix: abstract of thesis 401 Bibliography of works consulted 403 Abbreviations for titles of Borges1 works used In the notes At las = At las London: Viking Press, 1986. BO = Borges oral Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980. LaC = La cifra Madrid: Allanza / Emec6, 1981. LosC = Los con.iurados Madrid: Alianza, 1985. OCEC = Obras completas en colaboraci6n (2 vols) Madrid: Alianza Tres/ Emece, 1981 (vol 1), 1983 <vol 2) OP = Obra po£tica 1923 - 1977 Madrid: Alianza Tres / Emec6, 1983. PC = Prosa completa <2 vols) Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980. SN = Siete noches Madrid: FCE, 1980. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the guidance given during my period as a research student by my supervisors: Dr Peter Standlsh, Prof Donald L Shaw and Dr Hilary D Smith. I would also like to acknowledge the Scottish Education Department's funding of my project, and the help given by the staff of the Libraries of the Universities of Stirling and Edinburgh and of the National Library of Scotland. Finally I would acknowledge the support of my family while 1 was engaged on this research. Introduct ion The first outstanding figure of the twentieth century, arguably the most important of all in Latin America, and certainly the best known outside, is Jorge Luis Borges. 1 Jorge Luis Borges is undeniably the most significant writer to have emerged in Latin America. His fame and popularity, amongboth critics and readers, stems from his highly cultivated literary style. The salient feature of this style is the precision with which he manipulated language. This precision, which led him to use plain words rather than striking ones, was paralleled by the thematic precision which led him to select a small number of themes. 2 These few themes, however, he made his own: labyrinths, eternity, the paradoxes of philosophy, the problematic nature of the universe and literature itself. The latter is perhaps the major theme in Borges' work. For this reason, any study of Borges is a study of literature itself. When we read Borges, we think about literature. This makes what the reader experiences as he reads Borges different from what he would experience when reading another author. In this thesis I have attempted to elucidate what this experience is. It occurs when the reader interprets, or attempts to interpret, the text. Because Borges makes continual use of the self-conscious author technique, both Borges the man, of whom the informed reader will have a certain amount of information 3, and Borges' poetic persona intervene in this process. This Intervention addsthe perspective given by these two vast and perhaps infinite bodies of information to the interpretative process and effectively blocks any chance of interpretation. A major preoccupation in Borges' texts is that every reading of a text produces a new text: the process of interpretation can never end. This postponement of interpretation bears similarity to Borges' famous definition of the aesthetic event, 'esta inminencia de una revelaci6n, que no se produce' *, and is, in sum, the Borges experience. It is this factor that sets Borges apart from other writers: he has created a special type of reading, and, in doing so, a special type of reader. A vast quantity of material about Borges' work has been published. 3 Almost all of the full length studies on his work, however, examine his prose writing. Far fewer critics have studied his poetic work. Yet Borges always saw himself primarily as a poet and in his lat.ur years devoted himself almost exclusively to poetic writing. To date, there have been four full length studies of the poetry. The first was Cleon Wade Capsas' 'The poetry of Jorge Luis Borges 1923 - 1963', a PhD thesis (1964): this studied the poetry from before Fervor de Buenos Aires to El hacedor. and was written before Borges' prose became widely read and written about in North America. * Capsas links the poetry to contemporary Argentine politics and social history. In his discussion of the books of poems he divides the poems into groups based on themes. Capsas' study, which is usually overlooked by later critics, includes an interview between the author and the poet, and reproduces some poems which had not been published in book form at the time. - 3 - Capsas wrote his study at a time when Borges' poetry had long been ignored by critics, and perhaps it was for this reason that he wrote: . .. we can say that of his verse as a whole, his later poetry will generate more interest. 7 Capsas concluded his study with the idea that Whatever value there is in studying Borges' poetry comes from the verse itself. ® Then came Zunilda Gertel's Borges y su retorno a la poesla in 1968, which covered the same ground. 7 This study had as its central theme the idea that Borges' metaphysics found better expression in poetry than in prose. The longest and most successful section of this study is the chapter entitled 'La teoria pobtica de Borges' where she studies the poet's poetic theory as expounded in his essays. Paul Cheselka sums up the criticism on this work: ...Gertel devotes only one chapter - "Funcibn de los principios poeticos en el verso" - to actual study of Borges' poems. Most of this chapter is devoted to Borges' first three poetry collections, and to analysing the poems Borges wrote during his so-called "lyrical hiatus" when he was supposedly not writing very much poetry; only a few scant pages deal with the new poems contained in El hacedor and Qbra pobtica 1923 - 1964. Gertel's arguments are weakened by the fact that of the fifty-eight "new" poems contained in these two works, she only mentions or attempts an analysis of five texts to illustrate and to prove her basic premise: that Borges' "new" poetry is somehow superior to his previous work because of his discovery of his "personal symbol". Gertel fails to provide convincing proof to show how the mere fact of possessing a "personal symbol" makes Borges' poetry any better than it was before. In - 4 - addition, it is open to debate whether this "personal symbol" came to the forefront in the late 1950's as Gertel maintains, or if it is already present in Borqes' poems back in the 1920's. 10 Gertel's work is valuable as a summary of the poetic theory expounded by the poet in his prose writing, and provides many insights into his poetry, but as with Guillermo Sucre's Borges el poeta. a detailed and thorough examination of the poetry is absent. One of the principal ideas of Gertel's theory is the idea of the 'hiato Ii r ico': Con la publicacidn de Cuaderno San Martin. Ultimo libro en el cual persisten elementos ultraistas, se inicia la etapa de detencidn de la poesia borgiana. Durante un lapso de trece afios el hiato lirico es absolutamente notorio, ya que el autor no vuelve a publicar poesias reunidas en libros. 11 It is ironic that Gertel sees the publication of books as evidence of the poet's creative activity: in her analyses of the poetry itself she ignores the way that the poems fit together into books. She discusses individual poems, without considering their natural context, which is their placing in the individual volumes. The third full length study was Guillermo Sucre's Borges el poeta (1967), which extended in a tater edition (1972) to take in the poetry up until Elogio de la sombra. 12 The study is of a fairly general nature, bringing in anecdotes and biography. As such, it gives a certain amount of perspective to the reader new to Borges, and is a work perhaps best seen as an introduction to the subject rather than _ 5 - as a detailed study of a clearly defined field. About this work Gertel commented: Sucre ilustra su punto de vista critico con numerosas citas de versos, si bien no se detiene en el anblisis intrCnseco de I os poemas.