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- Convenor:
-
Carlos Fonseca
(Princeton University)
- Location:
- Malet 351
- Start time:
- 4 April, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to discuss those aspects of Jorge Luis Borges' work that become visible the moment his intuitions regarding the short story become intuitions regarding the novel.
Long Abstract:
As is well know, Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel. However, as Ignacio Echevarría's praise for Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives - "the novel that Borges would have agree to write" - makes evident, the contemporary novel has flourished amidst speculations of what the genre might have looked like if Borges had dared to play with it. Contemporary authors from Cesar Aira to Ricardo Piglia, from Roberto Bolaño to Enrique Vila-Matas, from Juan Villoro to Mario Bellatín, not to mention international authors like W.G. Sebald and Paul Auster, have all worked this Borgesian legacy with a great understanding of what the gesture entails. Writing a novel after Borges not only requires thinking about the difference between the short story and the novel as genre, but also elicits a series of questions already implicit within Borges' work. This panel aims to discuss those aspects of Jorge Luis Borges' work that become visible the moment his intuitions regarding the short story become intuitions regarding the novel. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Borges and the Question of Legacy
• Borges and the Ends of Fiction
• Borges and the Detective Novel
• Borges and the Critical Novel
• The Novel and Speculation
• Questions of Genre
• Theories of the Novel
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
My article will attempt to sketch, departing from a reading of three novelistic inheritors of the Borgesian legacy – Sebald, Foster Wallace and Bolaño – a series of thesis regarding what happens to the novel as genre once it is forced to encounter the disruptive force of Borges’ formal innovations.
Paper long abstract:
In 2002 Roberto Bolaño finished his intervention in the Fiesta de Literatura Amplificada with the following words: "Hay que releer a Borges." Two years later, prompted by his early death, the manuscript of his posthumous novel 2666 was published. Bolaño's last novel, which had remained a secret until then, showed itself first and foremost to be a fascinating reading and writing of the novelistic potential implicit within Borges' work: its more than a thousand pages attempt to think, departing from strategies already present in Borges, the relationship between reading, information and experience. Bolaño was not, however, alone in this re-reading. My article will attempt to sketch, departing from a reading of three novelistic inheritors of the Borgesian legacy - Sebald, Foster Wallace and Bolaño - a series of thesis regarding what happens to the novel as genre once it is forced to encounter the disruptive force of Borges' formal innovations. In doing so I will attempt to think through what it would mean to say that with Borges the novel begins to think itself within the space of criticism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to investigate the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Mario Vargas Llosa's fiction, particularly the adoption of Borges' technique of cultural and literary association in 'Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto'.
Paper long abstract:
Vargas Llosa wrote that Borges’ rejection of the novel may represent the basis for a disquisition on this genre. Commenting on John Sturrock’s analysis of Borges’ fiction, he observes that the Argentinean writer used culture and literacy as a stimulus for his imagination.
The hypothesis of this paper is that Vargas Llosa displays the same technique in Los cuadernos. Indeed, differently from his other works dedicated to the theme of imagination such as Kathie y el hipopótamo, erudition plays a dominant role in this novel. The mechanism of cultural and literary association will be described in the light of Los cuadernos’s fragmented structure and of themes such as the library, dream and (erotic) fantasy.
The aim is to underline how Los cuadernos seems to be modelled on Borges’ view of literature. In fact, through the incorporation of quotation from other texts, Vargas Llosa emphasises the ontological plurality of his novel and the circularity of creation which breaks with chronological linearity. Using Allen Graham’s words, Los cuadernos appears to suggest that “art works, or ‘texts’, refer not directly to external reality but to other texts” (Intertextuality, p.215). Particularly, opening the doors of Borges’ Library of Babel to visual art, the Peruvian novelist shows the power of (written) language to translate iconic signs into a verbal system.
Considering Borges’ influence is crucial to shed a new light on the reflection on the limits of mimesis that has characterised Vargas Llosa’s narrative since the publication of La tía Julia y el escribidor.
Paper short abstract:
What happens when history is seen through Borges' literary models? This paper aims to answer by reading Sebald's texts where the Borgesian labyrinthine logic is reproduced for a historical hermeneutics that finds its key in melancholia.
Paper long abstract:
Both Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz can be read as borgesian experimentations of time and space operating on history. As with many short stories in Borges, the tension between time and space collapse. The effects in Sebald, however, are haunting. In Rings of Saturn, it is precisely the gravity of twentieth century history that blows up the stability of time as experienced in memory. This is done through a first person account of a nameless meandering figure that incorporates history, literature and nature into a phenomenological interpretation of the surroundings, yielding melancholia and not meaning. In order to shape this overbearing mood into a novel, Sebald introduces a proper character in Austerlitz. An expert in European architectural history, Austerlitz is portrayed as the personification of non linear temporality who goes around Europe finding preserved pockets of meaning and memory in old buildings and ruins.
I want to read both novels as unexpected literary borgesian legacies. I want to consider Sebald's work as the result of stuffing Borges' conceptual literature with history, and argue that it is through this operation that the Argentinian's short story is able to expand into a novel, while warping its conventions as genre. On the side of history, I want to read Borges as a model of time underlying a historiographic method in Sebald where the labyrinthine logic is reproduced for a historical hermeneutics that finds its key in melancholia.