New Ways to Kill Your Mother

And I left him grunting and thrashing about,
With his tripes all over the floor.

‘The figure of the gaucho,’ Williamson writes, ‘thus came to embody the unresolved question of national identity, a question that would gnaw away at the Argentine conscience and would resurface periodically in a violent impulse to hold onto or to retrieve some vital essence that might be lost as Argentina acquired the trappings of a modern nation.’ Indeed, Hernandez’s impulse in writing the first part of the poem was to protest against Argentina turning its back on its heritage and becoming unduly modern and civilized.

In a lecture he gave in Buenos Aires in 1950 about gaucho literature, Borges very cleverly ducked the choice between Martin Fierro and a pure European example. He pointed out that the richness of gaucho literature in Argentina arose not from the gaucho’s isolation but from the close relationship many of the gaucho writers had with the literary world of Buenos Aires. ‘Gaucho poetry,’ he wrote, ‘is a perhaps unique fusion between the city spirit and rural forms.’ The following year, in a brilliant and wise lecture called ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, he returned to the subject, pointing out that El Gaucho Martin Fierro and other poems by Hernandez’s contemporaries did not come direct from an oral tradition, but were highly wrought literary artefacts. ‘I believe that Martin Fierro,’ he wrote, ‘is the most lasting work we Argentines have written; I also believe, with equal intensity, that we cannot take Martin Fierro to be, as has sometimes been said, our Bible, our canonical book.’ His argument was with critics who suggested that ‘the lexicon, techniques and subject-matter of gauchesco poetry should enlighten the contemporary writer, and are a point of departure and perhaps an archetype’. He attacked the idea that ‘Argentine poetry must abound in Argentine differential traits and in Argentine local colour’.

Borges admired Martin Fierro, then, for its self-conscious manipulation of language and for its hybrid nature. In 1924 he read Joyce’s Ulysses and found a template for what he would view as the role of peripheral societies in the creation of literature. Of Irish writers he wrote:

The fact of feeling themselves to be Irish, to be different, was enough to enable them to make innovations in English culture. I believe that Argentines, and South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can take on all the European subjects, take them on without superstition and with an irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate consequences.

This was written in 1951, when most of Borges’s great work had been done, but as early as 1925 he was arguing the case for a new and strange cosmopolitanism that would also make a hero of the local: ‘Already Buenos Aires, more than a city, is a country, and one must find the poetry and the music and the painting and the religion and the metaphysics that will do justice to its grandeur. That is the extent of my hope, which invites us all to be gods and to work towards its incarnation.’ Over the next few years, as he wrote a short biography of a minor poet of the city’s suburbs, he would refine this view; he would come to see both his city and his country as places of estrangement and their legacy as thin; he would accept a need to create a universe in their stead and find a language precise enough to re-create the essential contours of that new world.

In 1951, to illustrate his point, he described his story ‘Death and the Compass’, composed nine years earlier, as

a kind of nightmare, a nightmare in which elements of Buenos Aires appear, deformed by the horror of the nightmare; and in that story, when I think of the Paseo Colon, I call it Rue de Toulon, when I think of the quintas of Adrogue, I call them Triste-le-Roy; after the story was published my friends told me that at last they had found the flavour of the outskirts of Buenos Aires in my writing. Precisely because I had not abandoned myself to the dream, I was able to achieve, after so many years, what I once sought in vain.

In the early 1930s Borges began to consider what could be done in fiction. ‘He was proposing an aesthetics of radical mistrust,’ Williamson writes. ‘His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author’s ability to generate “poetic faith” in his reader.’ Fiction, Borges believed, did not hold up a mirror to reality, instead it became ‘an autonomous sphere of corroborations, omens and monuments’.

In 1931 the magazine Sur was launched by Victoria Ocampo, a member of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Argentina, a woman ‘easily dictatorial and excessively bossy’ in Borges’s words. She would play a significant role in winning him fame as a writer. Borges continued to write essays and reviews and to take part in literary faction fighting. In 1933 he found his first real job, working on the literary supplement of a daily paper. Here he wrote a number of fictionalized biographies and some fables; he assembled them in his first book of fiction, A Universal History of Infamy, which was published in April 1935; by the end of the year it had sold thirty-seven copies. Borges had placed himself in what was for him a fortunate position of having no world to describe, except an invented one, and no audience to speak of, allowing him the luxury to address his fictions to one or two of his friends. The world could, if it pleased, listen in, but it would take time.

Bioy Casares, the reader who would matter most to Borges, came, like Ocampo, from the higher reaches of Argentine society. Ocampo introduced them in 1932, when Bioy was eighteen and Borges thirty-two. Borges’s mother must have been pleased at his friendship with this scion of the cattle-ranching oligarchy whose father was a cabinet minister and whose family owned one of the most prominent dairy businesses in the country. Bioy was handsome, self-confident and well read. He would come to have what was perhaps the largest personal library in all of South America. He also owned an estate in the country where Borges spent some time in 1935. Both men loved recondite references, strange books, literary jokes. Bioy, like Borges, had no illusions about his fellow countrymen’s interest in serious literature, but he had many other illusions and he sought now with his new friend to put them into print.

After Borges lost his job at the literary supplement, he began his career as a librarian in January 1938 in a working-class district on the other side of Buenos Aires. It was ignominious. There were so few books in the library that they did not need anyone to catalogue them; fifty people were doing a job that a third of them could have easily done. When Borges attempted to do some work, he was taken aside and told that he would ruin it for the rest of them. His colleagues had no interest in books. Borges did his day’s work in an hour. The pay was miserable. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, he wrote: ‘Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears.’ He kept sane by doing translations, including a selection of Kafka’s stories. Soon after he started his work in the library his father died.

Over the next two years Borges published some of his best fiction. ‘Pierre Menard’ appeared in Sur in May 1939, ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ a year later. In between, he wrote ‘The Library of Babel’. In December 1940 Sur published ‘The Circular Ruins’ and the following month ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, and ‘A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain’ three months later. These were among the stories gathered into a book, The Garden of Forking Paths, which Sur published at the end of 1941. While the author’s friends viewed this as a significant literary event, it failed to win any of the National Awards for Literature, the judges deeming it inappropriate to recommend to the Argentine people ‘an exotic and decadent work’ that followed ‘certain deviant tendencies of contemporary English literature’, hovering ‘between the tale of fantasy, a pretentious and recondite erudition, and detective fiction’.

The eight stories that make up the sixty pages of The Garden of Forking Paths represent Borges’s best work. For any biographer an exhumation and an autopsy of the years during which they were composed is a great challenge. It is hard to allow for the possibility that nothing, nothing at all, caused these to come into being. Borges did not keep diaries or write many letters; in interviews done years later he tended to be vague and misleading.

It is possible that certain things that happened in 1939 and 1940 mattered. His translating Kafka, for example; his having a magazine at his disposal with an imperious editor and an international circulation; his father’s death; his dreadful job with seven or eight hours a day free to do nothing; his reading of Dante while travelling on the tram to and from work — or perhaps more importantly his claim to have done so; the outbreak of war and his