Borges and popular culture

The ‘greatness’ of Jorge Luis Borges is something of an invention of the 1960s and after, based on the reception, often through translation, of a relatively small body of work from the 1940s (most notably the stories collected in Ficciones and El Aleph [1944 and 1949]). It was in this decade that ‘Borges’ was created: the cosmopolitan, erudite, philosophical but ingeniously playful weaver of cerebral, labyrinthine, and slippery narrative puzzles. This version of Borges is hugely reductive, as there is a strongly referential dimension to his short fiction. This interest in reality rather than fiction and in the local as well as the cosmopolitan paves the way for an understanding of Borges’s deeply felt connection with what one might call popular culture. The focus of much of the author’s life and work is the popular or even the vulgar: the gaucho code; the exploits of Buenos Aires hoodlums; pirates, cowboys and gangsters; detective stories and other genre works; classical Hollywood movies; tangos; and so forth. This essay explores the notion of the orilla to investigate the ways Borges’s literary and other outputs constantly straddle opposing impulses: the rural and the urban, the local and the universal, the abstract and the referential, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the traditional and the modern.