Jorge Luis Borges: His background and the influence of foreign philosophers and writers

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires. His family included British ancestry and he learned English before Spanish. Jorge Guillermo Borges, (his father), was a lawyer and a psychology teacher, who demonstrated the paradoxes of Zeno on a chessboard for his son. In the large house was also a library and garden which enchanted Borges's imagination. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Haedo was a translator. In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, where Borges learned French and German and received his BA from the College of Geneva. According to a story, Borges's father, worried about his son's sexual initation, sent him to a prostitute in the red-light district area, the Place Dubourg de Four. There Borges started to think that his father was her "client". Borges's visit failed miserably and perhaps contributed to his lifelong difficulties with women, although he did marry twice.

Schopenhauer

George Berkeley

Shakespeare

Influenced by the English philosopher George Berkeley, (18th century Irish philosopher (1685-1753), Borges played with the idea that concrete reality may consist only of mental perceptions. The philosophy, is known as 'Subjective idealism' - a theory of perception. The theory describes a relationship between human experience of the external world and that world itself, in which objects are nothing more than collections (or bundles) of sense data to those who perceive them. The "real world" is only one possible in the infinite series of realities. These themes were examined among others in the classical short stories 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and 'Death and the Compass', in which Borges showed his fondness of detective formula. In the story the calm, rational detective and adventurer Erik Lönnrot, finds himself trapped in cryptographic labyrinths in a fantastical city, while attempting to solve a series of crimes. The detective stories bring order to chaos. "In this chaotic era of ours," said Borges, "one thing is has humbly maintained the classic virtues - the detective story. A detective story cannot be understood without a beginning, middle, and end... I would say in defense of the detective novel that it needs no defense, though now read with a certain disdain, it is safeguarding order in an era of disorder".

As a writer Borges drew on his European education and brought attention to ancient philosophers and mystics, Jewish Cabbalists and Gnostics, French poets, Cervantes, Dante and Schopenhauer. Above all English writers as Shakespeare, John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, H.G. Wells, and G.K. Chesterton. When many Latin American writers dealt with political or social subjects, Borges focused on eternal questions and the literary heritage of the world. However, Borges criticized his friend Pablo Neruda, a politically highly visible author, for denouncing all the South American dictators except Juan Perón, Borges's own arch-enemy. "Perón was then in power. It seems that Neruda had a lawsuit pending with his publisher in Buenos Aires. That publisher, as you probably know, has always been his principal source of income."

Borges was also drawn to Arab literature, including the imaginary Arabic of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát and the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights and to mystical traditions, from Sufism to the Kabbalah. Though these works arrived via Spanish culture, he was also shaped by local influences. At least since the duel between Domingo Sarmiento's anti-caudillo and anti-gaucho tract of 1845, Facundo 'Civilization and Barbarism', and José Hernández's 1872 dialect masterpiece, 'The Gaucho Martín Fierro', Argentine writing has been tangled in political struggles between the city and the provinces, between liberal reform and caudillo independence, between the criollismo emphasis on Spanish ancestry and the cosmopolitan fact of the country's immigrant history.

Borges also knew Leopoldo Lugones, the poet who in 1913 delivered a series of anti-Sarmiento lectures at the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires. He argued that the wealthy criollos of Argentina should model their national identity on gaucho culture-a bizarre suggestion, since the rich estancia holders had thrown the native peoples and gauchos celebrated in Hernández's epic off their land. At odds with Lugones for much of his life, Borges eventually grew to admire him deeply. Even as the older poet's nationalism developed over time into outright fascism, Borges dedicated his book of poems El Hacedor (The Maker), from 1960, to him.

Another important early influence was his father's friend Evaristo Carriego, who died from tuberculosis at 29 and was a bitter enemy of Lugones throughout his short life. In 1930 Borges would write a set of biographical essays celebrating Carriego and his musical poetry drawn from the barrios of Buenos Aires. The varied 'Poems of the night' continually evoke not only Borges's blindness and reflections on death but also the lively world of Carriego. 'Street With a Pink Corner Store,' 'St. John's Eve,' 'Almost a Last Judgment' and other poems reveal the insomniac Borges walking the shadowy streets of Buenos Aires all night, bringing news of the dusk to the dawn.

A lifelong admirer of the philosophy of Berkeley and Schopenhauer, Borges had little time for either empiricism or the conventions of realism. As he continually drew on legends and referred to realities that may or may not be true, he also turned to dreams. They brought him the paradoxical certainty that they weren't true (except when they came true, as he so believed they so often did). He therefore particularly loved legends of dreaming, such as the story of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and awakens to find he is himself, and then wonders if in truth he is Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi. And he liked to cite the long poem 'The Conference of the Birds,' by the Persian mystic Farid ud-Din Attar. A group of birds traverse seven valleys in pursuit of the Simurgh, king of all birds. They gradually discover 'they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each one and all of them.' Themes of the inter-relatedness of all beings and all destinies, of the other becoming the self, seemed to both frighten and console Borges throughout his life.

Borges's fictional universe was born of his vast and esoteric readings of literature, philosophy, and theology. He saw man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort. Borges considered the central riddle as time rather than space. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times approached one another, then forked, broke off, were unaware of one another for centuries, yet embraced all possibilities that we can conceive of. The theological speculations of Gnosticism and the Cabala gave Borges the idea for many of his plots. In an interview he said that when he was a boy, he found an engraving of the seven wonders of the world, (one of which portrayed a circular labyrinth). It frightened him and the maze became one of his recurrent nightmares. "Almost instantly, I understood: 'The garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirms the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pên, he chooses (simultaneously), all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse time which themselves also proliferate and fork."

Another recurrent image is the mirror, which reflects different identities. The idea for the short story 'Borges y yo' was came from the double, who was looking at him - the alter ego, the other I. There is a well-known man, who writes his stories, a name in some biographical dictionary, and the real person. "So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue and a falling away. Everything winds up being lost to me and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man." It is undoubtedly this philosophical thinking which makes Borges' work so fascinating and pleasurable to read.