BORGES: TIME, MODERNITY, AND NOSTALGIA IN

EVARISTO CARRIEGO

by

FELICIA HAMILTON

A THESIS

Presented to the Department of Romance Languages

and the Robert D. Clark Honors College
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts

June 2016
 An Abstract of the Thesis of
Felicia Hamilton for the degree of Bachelor of Arts
in the Department of Romance Languages to be taken June 2016

Title: Borges: Time, Nostalgia, and Modernity in Evaristo Carriego

Mayra Bottaro

What is the purpose of nostalgia in literature? How does it respond to

modernity? And what is its function as a temporal tool? These are the driving questions

behind my research, which will focus on Evaristo Carriego, an early work by Argentine

author Jorge Luis Borges. This eponymous biographical work serves more to paint a

picture of Buenos Aires in development than to chronicle the life of the man himself.

Borges uses popular and historical mythologies to construct a mythic image of the

neighborhood Palermo during the early twentieth century. Because of this, the work is

often read as a "pre-text", that is, a history that the rest of Borges' writings would

reference. I aim to build on this, examining how this particular work creates

counternarratives to modernity. I propose an interconnectedness of time, modernity, and

nostalgia which enriches an understanding of Carriego through an analysis of Borges'

methods of constructing literary worlds in which there are multiplicities of dissonant

and converging iterations of time. Beyond simply reading and explaining Carriego as a

pre-text, I hope to draw broader conclusions about the impact of various iterations of

time in a modern and postmodern culture.

[i
 Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professors Bottaro, Southworth, and Balbuena, for helping

me to fully examine the specific topic and consider the various perspectives and

contexts related to this subject matter. I would first like to express my gratitude to

Professor Bottaro for having inspired me to go in this direction with my thesis. She has

been an indescribable help for more than a year and has taken significant time to

provide guidance as my research progressed from an amorphous idea to a more

articulated research topic.

Professor Southworth was also a great help in the articulation of the theoretical

material that I have used in this thesis, and she encouraged me when I was not sure if I

was going in the right direction with my research. I appreciate her time and guidance.

Professor Balbuena was my thesis prospectus leader and thus has seen my thesis

grow from a mere proposition into a full-length paper. I am grateful for her help in the

early stages and for her generosity in agreeing to be a part of my thesis defense team.

Finally, I would like to briefly thank those professors whose classes provided a

background for the material that I am now working with in depth: Jeffrey Librett,

Joseph Fracchia, and Timothy Williams stand out as three people who have greatly

influenced the way I think. They merit much more than a mere mention, but for lack of

space I will simply say that the way I think now has been indelibly shaped by my

interactions with them.

Finally, I will say thank you to my parents for always being willing to bounce

ideas around with me. Their patience has been an invaluable resource.

iii
 Table of Contents
Introduction 1
I. Colonial and postcolonial transformations 1
II. Cultural production and the elitism of progress 4
III. Writing from the Orillas 6
IV. Summary of Content: Biography and Myth 11
V. Review of the Literature on Evaristo Carriego 15
Modernity 22
I. Modernity: a useful critique or a constricting abstraction? 22
a) Historical time 26
b) West and non-west 27
c) The development of temporalities and modernity in Evaristo Carriego 28
Time 38
I. Temporal endlessness, spatial boundlessness 38
II. Aesthetics of eternity 39
II. Eternity as a counter- and sub-narrative of modernity 45
Time and nostalgia 48
I. “El truco” and the game of time 48
II. Nostalgia 50
a) Restorative and reflective nostalgia 53
Conclusion 64
I. Recapitulation: The significance of the connections between modernity, time,
and nostalgia 64
Bibliography 67

iv
 Introduction

I. Colonial and postcolonial transformations

Buenos Aires was founded twice. First established in 1536, the city quickly

sputtered out of existence due to a lack of supplies and the hostility of the local tribes. It

was reestablished 50 years later and began to slowly expand as a rural community and

port city. However, because it was still under the remote rulership of the Lima-based

Viceroyalty of Peru, Buenos Aires languished as an all-but-forgotten city in the

backwaters of the territory. Eventually this distance from the central government proved

to be an advantage, and the population continued to expand throughout the 18th century

as the city became a center for the contraband trade of materials such as cereal grains

and beef products. Other materials such as silver began to make their way into

circulation from mining towns in the Andean region, and the city found itself a bustling

town of 20,000 people in the mid-1700s.

In 1776, Buenos Aires was named the head of its own viceroyalty, Viceroyalty

of the Rio de la Plata--river of silver, after one of the most lucrative exports of the time.

Two military victories in 1806 and 1807 in which a local army pushed back British

forces marked a definitive moment in the establishment of an Argentine identity, and in

1810 the city cut ties with Spain. Six years later, the viceroyalty declared its

independence and Buenos Aires was established as the head of the United Provinces of

the Rio de la Plata.)

This period marked the beginning of the struggle between two parties,

Unitarians and Federalists. The areas surrounding Buenos Aires were reluctant to
consent to the centralist Unitarian government, and there was much clamor from the

Federalists, who desired more local autonomy. After the presidency of Unitarian

Bernardo Rivadavia ended in 1827, a series of Federalists took power, culminating in

the rule of the caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas the Restorer. Under his 17-year

dictatorship Buenos Aires took shape as the center of power for the region that was

roughly equivalent to the modern state of Argentina. During this period, the

“civilization/barbarism” dichotomy took rhetorical shape in unexpected new ways,

permeating cultural, social, and political currents from the mid-1800s onward. During

his exile in Chile, future president and writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento carefully

constructed specific ideological assignations to these two categories that were

articulated by the visible desire to align the future of the postcolonial nations with the

metropolitan ideals of modernization, progress, and Europeanization. Rosas’ bloody

rule was overthrown by an army in 1852.

The following years were marked by changes in land management and an

exponential increase in foreign trade and immigration. The huge number of European

immigrants that arrived to settle the countryside necessitated the development of

railways that connected Buenos Aires to the farther reaches of the ranching and farming

territories. This change took place fairly rapidly throughout the 1860s. Campaigns to

eradicate the indigenous people of the region had begun under Rosas and continued for

decades; the conflicts were exacerbated by the invasion of indigenous land by settling

farmers. The “Conquest of the Wilderness” in 1879 was the final move to annihilate and

push these peoples to the far edges of Argentine territory. The Argentine Rural Society

2
was established and the vast expanses of fertile, hospitable pampas were converted into

cattle ranches, which quickly became a major source of income.

The establishment of farms also led to the decline of the gaucho, which was the

name of the nomadic ranchers who tended roaming cattle in the Argentine pampas.

They were increasingly marginalized by the efforts of the government to “civilize” and

Europeanize the country, and most were forced into “peonage or military service”. 1

The civilization/barbarism dichotomy continued to significantly influence

national politics and culture, and Buenos Aires became ever more polarized from the

rest of the country as it developed into a wealthy cosmopolitan center. A huge influx of

European immigrants--particularly Spaniards and Italians--completely reshaped the

demographic between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was mostly, but not

entirely based on the need for workers; the government also encouraged European

immigration in order to intentionally change the racial composition of the country in an

effort to “civilize” it.

Buenos Aires of the early 1900s was an international symbol of wealth. Rapid

urbanization culminated in a city with a powerful modern infrastructure and a French

aesthetic. The city celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1910 with the opening of a

new subway system and a series of wide avenues. Throughout this period, the city

became a thriving center of high culture: art, music, theater, literature, and philosophy.

The Argentine literary scene continued to be profoundly influenced by the cultural

conflict evinced in the rhetorical articulations of civilization and barbarism. It was in

this climate that Jorge Luis Borges and his contemporaries lived and wrote.

1
Richard W. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 5.
3
II. Cultural production and the elitism of progress

“Argentine literature is the history of the national will” 2 and as such, it is

important to look at the conflicts that played out in literature as a background to reading

Borges’ work for its political, social, and cultural content. In describing the ideological

current of Argentine literature, Ricardo Piglia invoked the concept of the “other” (“el

otro”): the establishment of an other--in this case, the barbarian, the gaucho, the Indian

or the immigrant--aids in the creation of exclusionary social and cultural borders which

delineate national identity.

The previously mentioned dialectic of civilization/barbarism was a defining

feature of the literary scene as well as the political. Sarmiento, who was the seventh

president of Argentina (after the dictatorship of Rosas), wrote his Civilization and

Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (Civilización y Barbarie: Vida de Juan

Facundo Quiroga) while in exile in 1845 and molded his discussion on concepts

sketched out by Chilean Francisco Bilbao in his Chilean Sociability (Sociabilidad

Chilena), published in newspaper “El Crepúsculo” in June 1st, 1844. Sarmiento’s work

parallels the gaucho Facundo Quiroga with the caudillo Rosas, presenting a racially

stratified discourse that would come to define Argentine literature. It is much less a

biography of Facundo as it is a historicist’s attempt to explain the social and political

climate of a country through the life of one man. Sarmiento’s production is echoed in

the works of other Argentine intellectuals, such as Esteban Echeverría, who wrote “El

matadero” while holed up in an estancia located near Luián just before he fled to exile

2
David Viñas, Literatura Argentina y realidad política (Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1964).
4
in Montevideo. This short story characterizes the Unitarians and Federalists and their

assigned roles in society by the exiled intelligentsia: one upstanding, moral, possessing

European sensitivities; the other barbaric, savage, and charged with negative racial

stereotypes.

The epic Martin Fierro (1872), written by arguably the last writer of the

literatura gauchesca genre José Hernández, came to be known as the quintessential

work of Argentine literature. A poem written in the style and from the point of view of

the gaucho, Fierro is the paradigmatic example of the appropriation of the voice of the

disenfranchised gauchos by the lettered elites. This work is deeply integrated into

Argentine culture and identity and has been written about by almost all influential

authors from the country, Borges included.

Early in the 20th century and coincidentally with the Centennial celebrations of

the constitution of the first patriotic government in 1810, the gaucho would become

canonized as the symbol of the nation through the work of writers as Leopoldo

Lugones, whose historical novel La Guerra Gaucha (1905) would later become a very

successful film. The literary movement of criollismo, active between the end of the 19th

century and beginning of the 20th century, yielded a wealth of authors that used a realist

style to portray local scenes, language, customs, manners, especially of the lower and

peasant classes. This literature based on the country’s natural elements was mostly epic

and foundational and Borges’ earlier work is inscribed under its guise. Ricardo

Guiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra can also be said to be part of this trend. A novel about

the lingering shadow of the gaucho figure contrasts with Roberto Arlt’s chronicles of

5
the rapid development of Buenos Aires in his “Aguafuertes porteñas” (“Porteña

etchings”).

The mark of the 19th-century cultural and ideological conflict between

civilization and barbarism, unitary and federalist, gaucho/indio/mulato and European

urbanite, city and pampas, local and foreign, indelibly affected all Argentine literary

and cultural production. It manifested in separations such as the one between the Florida

and the Boedo group, the former favoring vanguardism and literary elitism while the

latter emphasized worker’s rights and characteristically socialist themes. But the

expression of identity through literature in the 20th century was far more complicated

than Sarmiento’s affirmation of the superiority of civilization: the complex issues that

arose due to the mechanisms of modernity, Eurocentrism, and conversely, the pull of

nationalism, are constructed and reconstructed in the works of Borges.

III. Writing from the Orillas

One can speculate a variety of reasons for which Borges chose to write about

Evaristo Carriego. The first of these is the compelling personal connection Borges felt

to Carriego’s life and work: a friend of Borges’ father, the poet was known to frequent

their Palermo household, bringing stories from outside. Carriego was a consummate

teller of romanticized tales of las orillas, the outskirts of Buenos Aires in which the

violent, albeit valiant culto de coraje—cult of courage—still lived. Borges was

fascinated by stories such as these: despite the fact that he grew up “behind a fence of

6
iron palings”, he imagined a “Palermo of the knife and guitar” that lurked just beyond

the garden. 3

Borges came from a privileged and well-rooted family. One of his grandfathers

was a colonel in the army; another one of his ancestors fought in the independence

wars. The Borges family lived in the neighborhood Palermo, which at the time of

Borges’ birth in 1899 had yet to be incorporated into the city’s spreading mechanisms

of progress. Carriego’s poetry speaks to the Palermo that Borges imagined during his

book-filled childhood; there was enough overlap between the lives of the two authors

that they experienced the same moment in space and time. Just as Carriego was deeply

influenced by the streets he roamed, Borges expresses a love of and intimate closeness

with his city of origin.

Borges, however, did not spend the entirety of his life in Buenos Aires. His

family moved to Switzerland during his adolescence and when he returned, he became

deeply involved in local literary circles, going on to become the founder of the Ultraist

movement. This style, which was marked by a prismatic fragmentation of reality as

opposed to direct representation, provided a way to structurally reconstruct Carriego’s

life. Borges saw in Carriego a man who captured something essentially Argentine. In

“El alma del suburbio” (“The soul of the neighborhood”) Borges pinpoints a passage

which exemplifies Carriego’s inside-out knowledge of his Palermo. His unapologetic,

yet somehow idealized portrayal of the city was appealing to both Borges and readers at

the time when Carriego was popular. It can be argued that Borges paralleled Carriego’s

vision of the city in his early nationally focused literature, presenting an equally

3
Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: E.P. Dutton,
Inc., 1984), 33.
7
subjective but modified picture of his surroundings. Borges, unlike Carriego, was a

famed rewriter: he modified not only his own work, but also the very history of Buenos

Aires and its most influential founding myths. He wrote a mythical history of Buenos

Aires (“Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”, in Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1923) and, in

“El fin”, chronicled the end of the legendary gaucho Martín Fierro. Carriego too is

subject to Borges’ heavy editing hand, and given the arguably significant ideological

connotations of his other rewrites, his take on Carriego’s life can also be seen as the

medium by which he conveys his vision of the world. As a starting point, Borges draws

from the similarity of their origins: both were men who inhabited an ambivalent,

indescribable space in time. Both writers are men who consider themselves orilleros,

writers from the orillas. 4 This place, which is timeless and not bound to any geographic

boundary, connects Borges and Carriego through space and time.

Carriego, according to Borges, was the “first observer of the outskirts of Buenos

Aires” 5 and played an integral role in the way that the outer slums came to be seen.

Though he praises the moments of truth and innocence found in the work, Borges is

also critical of the way Carriego painted the suburbs as gloomy and unfortunate:

Obviously, Carriego is somewhat responsible for our gloomy

impressions. More than anyone, he has dulled the bright colors of the
city’s outer edge; he holds the innocent blame for the fact that, in the
tango now, the wenches one and all go to the hospital and the hoodlums
are ruined by morphine. 6

4 “People who live there…think of themselves as men either of the country or men of the city, but never
as men of the outer slums. It was out of this ambivalent material that Carriego created his work.” Borges,
Carriego, 103.
5
Borges, Carriego, 162.
6
Borges, Carriego, 159.
8
Throughout the book, Borges reiterates that it was Carriego who created the pathetic

and afflicted past, for which readers have sympathy: “The general view, expressed both

orally and in writing, is that this inspiring of pity is the strength and justification of

Carriego’s work.” 7 Borges argues that Carriego misrepresents the quality of life of

people at the time, and that they were actually joyful and courageous to a fault. 8 In his

book, Borges does what he can to reestablish the culto de coraje—the joyful, lively

violence of the cult of courage—in the context of Carriego’s life and times:

What we have, then, is men who led extremely elemental lives, gauchos
and others from the River Plate and the Paraná, forging, without
realizing it, a religion that had its mythology and its martyrs—the hard
and blind religion of courage, of being ready to kill and to die. This cult
is as old as the world, but it was rediscovered and lived in the American
republics by herders, stockyard workers, drovers, outlaws, and pimps.” 9

In Borges, we see a mutation of the voice of the orillero in that he is caught at a time,

the era of the centenary in 1912, when Buenos Aires was in the throes of progress. He

favored Carriego as a poet because Carriego portrayed the orillas as a static reality

where the culto de coraje was a part of everyday life, not a remnant. Carriego, as a poet,

gives Borges a platform on which to address the question of the coexistence of past and

present.

Borges takes the poetry of Carriego and snippets of his life and fleshes them out

into a spatial and temporal map of his surroundings. Carriego is a kind of vehicle for

Borges to write his own history, and through the many essays and editions that went
7
Borges, Carriego, 91.
8
Borges, Carriego, 158. “The present-day tango, concocted of picturesqueness and labored lunfardo
jargon, is one thing; and the old tangos...are the invention of those who disbelieve in the hoodlum’s
bravery, of those who explain and set you right about it. The first tangos...still testify to the rollicking
courage of the outer slums.”
9
Borges, Carriego, 141.
9
into the final edition of the book, he constructed his past. Carriego is the pre-text

necessary for the establishment of himself as an author and the fictional history which

provides the background of the rest of his body of work. In writing a “biography” of

Carriego, Borges pens his own autobiography. In fact, it could be said that he is actually

attempting to write an autobiography of Carriego, using his own subjective experience

as a lens. He tries to both express the poet’s essence and convey his own voice and

experiences. There are moments in which the lines between Carriego and Borges

become palpably blurred, such as in this quote from “A Life of Evaristo Carriego”:

We who were from the center of the city listened to him utterly
enchanted, as if he were telling us tales of a far-off country.” Carriego
knew himself to be frail and mortal, but the endless pink-walled streets
of Palermo kept him going. 10

This quote connects the “we”, which includes Borges as listener, with Carriego the

storyteller and, in the end, the reader senses that it is really Borges who was kept alive

by the “endless pink-walled streets”. An author preoccupied with alternate

representations of space, time, reality and identity, it follows that Borges would apply

this same complexity in writing about himself, prismatically, with the voice and features

of another.

The moments in which the identities of the two men are blurred are characteristic

of the in-betweenness that Borges establishes and encourages. This in-betweenness can

be seen as a staging of difference: city vs. orillas, Borges vs. Carriego, timeline vs.

alternate timeline.

10
Borges, Carriego, 56-57.
10
IV. Summary of Content: Biography and Myth

The first words of what was to become Evaristo Carriego were written in the

margins and blank pages of Lisandro Segovia's Diccionario de argentinismos. 11 It was a

book carefully thought out for many years and published in waves: the first writings,

some of which had already been submitted to local newspapers, were submitted to a

competition and won the Second Municipal Prize in 1929. The first edition of the book

was published in 1930. The second, which was published in 1955, contained several

supplementary chapters, including “A history of the tango”, which served to “round

out” the work. 12

The book itself, although cohesive, is in no way a traditionally chronological

biography, and in this sense it can be said to continue in the tradition of Sarmiento’s

biography of Facundo. It is part vivid descriptions of Palermo, part literary analysis,

part subjective experience and part cultural anthropology. With chapters ranging from

“Palermo, Buenos Aires” to “A Life of Evaristo Carriego” to “Inscriptions on Wagons”

and “Stories of Horsemen”, Carriego “is really about Borges himself and about old-

time Buenos Aires.” 13 The beginnings of his fascination with the nature of time,

labyrinths, maps and intricately unreal realities can be seen in this biographical work.

The beginning of each chapter is marked by a passage that sets the tone.

Sometimes this is done by way of narrative, and sometimes it takes the form of an

11
Daniel Balderston, “Las variantes raleaban: Two versions of Evaristo Carriego”, Variaciones Borges
38 (2014): 81.
12
Denise Dupont. “‘Don Quijote’ and the pursuit of literary eternity in Evaristo Carriego”, Latin
American Literary Review 33 (2005): 115.
13 Borges, Carriego, 13.

11
explanation that helps the reader decode the rest of the chapter: for example, Chapter

III, “Heretic Masses”, begins with a clear reference to ultraism:

Every writer starts out with a naïvely physical idea of what art is. To him
a book is not an expression…but literally a volume, a prism with six
rectangular faces which is made up of thin sheets of paper. 14

The presence of these introductory sections contribute to an understanding of Carriego

as a myth or parable. These phrases or paragraphs direct the way the book is read,

shaping it as an allegory of the modern condition.

It is worth examining the structure of Evaristo Carriego because it is one of the

first indications that the biographical function of the book is only secondary. Just as it

was written in fragments, each chapter presents a different facet of Carriego’s life and

works. The list of chapters is as follows:

Prologue
I. Palermo, Buenos Aires
II. A Life of Evaristo Carriego
III. Heretic Masses
IV. Song of the Neighborhood
V. Possible Summary
VI. Complementary Pages
VII. Inscriptions on Wagons
VIII. Stories of Horsemen
IX. The Dagger
X. Foreword to an Edition of the Complete Poems of Evaristo Carriego
XI. A History of the Tango
Appendixes

14
Borges, Carriego, 65.
12
 Carriego and His Awareness of the City’s Outskirts
Foreword to an Edition of the Selected Poems of Evaristo Carriego

The first chapter, a lovingly rendered vision of Buenos Aires as it was during a

particular span of time, is a telling indicator of the way Borges himself felt about his

city of birth. It is not an establishment of a factually historical location, but of a space in

time: the era directly preceding and following the Argentine centenary in 1912. This is

followed by a chapter that loosely details some of Carriego’s life--mainly his patterns,

his beliefs, and his relationships. Borges places him in context with his ancestors and

contemporaries.

“Heretic Masses” and “Song of the Neighborhood” are chapters which explain

and analyze some of Carriego’s poems. As in the previous chapters, an important part of

these is context: for every stanza, Borges explains the social, cultural, and historical

connotations implicit in the narrative. These first four chapters are shot through with

numerous endnotes that explain Borges’ personal belief, and sometimes tangential

details that fill in background information.

“Possible Summary” neatly ties up the life of Carriego, his poetry, and his

legacy in roughly 2 pages. After this, Borges delves into in-depth background material.

The last several chapters are those which were published in 1955, some twenty years

after the original publication of the book. While the first half of the book shows how

young Borges “loved the man [Carriego], on this side idolatry” 15, the latter half presents

complex visions of the past of Buenos Aires and of Carriego himself, complicating his

15 Borges, Carriego, 195.

13
previous enthusiastic love for the city. This can be seen in passages such as that where

he decries the influence of tango on Argentine identity.

…Popular, or traditional, poetry can influence sentiments and shape

behavior. If we apply this thesis to the Argentine tango, we would find in
it a mirror of our daily lives and at the same time a mentor or model
whose influence is certainly malignant. The early milonga and tango
may have been foolish, even harebrained, but they were bold and gay.
The later tango is like a resentful person who indulges in loud self-pity
while shamelessly rejoicing at the misfortunes of others. 16

This contrasts with the uncritical presentation of tango as an unquestionable part of

enduring Argentine culture seen in Chapter I:

Of the Maldonado all that will remain will be…the two tangos that bear
the river’s name—an early one, which, being the stream’s contemporary,
made no fuss about it, and was only for dancing…the other, a plaintive
ballad-tango in the later style of the Boca”. 17

The 1930 edition of the book, from which the latter quote originates, was written before

Borges developed a more critical view of Argentine traditions and Buenos Aires itself.

In Carriego, the city is more of a character than the poet himself, and Borges’

enthusiasm, fascination, and love for his home as a young man is clear. This sentimental

attachment, though it does not disappear in the additions to later versions of the book,

takes on new dimensions as an ideological tool instead of an effusive expression of

admiration.

Some of his strongest cultural sentiments are conveyed in chapters such as

“Inscriptions on Wagons” and “Stories of Horsemen”, but unlike the eager fascination

conveyed in “Palermo, Buenos Aires”, these chapters are marked by the temporal,

16
Borges, Carriego, 146.
17
Borges, Carriego, 46.
14
spatial, and historical intricacy characteristic of later Borges. This complexity is

exemplified in passages such as this one:

“Time is the native Argentine’s infinite, and only, capital. We can raise
slowness to the level of immobility, the possession of space.” 18

And in “Stories of Horsemen”, Borges references Martín Fierro and hints at the way he

has become representational of the disappearing anachronisms of a simpler past:

The horseman vanishing into the distance with a hint of defeat is, in our
literature, the gaucho. 19

These chapters are also more openly biographical: though Borges does not

describe his life, he more clearly narrates his own personal relationship with Carriego,

his life and works, and the circumstances, legends, and people that influenced him.

There are elements of vindication and vilification of the poet, all part of the character

that Borges began creating in the 1920s. Evaristo Carriego is the medium by which

Borges sets his national stage, putting characters into play and telling stories so complex

that one easily forgets that they are seeing a facade.

V. Review of the Literature on Evaristo Carriego

Though Evaristo Carriego is one of Borges’ lesser studied works, it is

nevertheless the subject of various articles which delve into the multiple layers of

complexity that can be found in the book. Although there are not many full-length

scholarly articles that explore into the biographical work, it merits mention in a number

of books as a chapter or section of a chapter. Research on Carriego can, for the most

18
Borges, Carriego, 114.
19
Borges, Carriego, 123.
15
part, be separated into three categories: examinations of the book as a groundbreaking

work in the (re)definition of biography (Di Giovanni, Alonso, Jencke); analyses

explaining the significance of the two editions that were published (Di Giovanni,

Canala, Balderston); and studies of Carriego as it relates to the rest of Borges’ career

(specifically, themes found in his later work) and his life (Alonso, Dupont, Jencke,

Sarlo).

Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, whose English translation of Evaristo Carriego is

arguably the most complete and most widely disseminated, has dedicated a fair amount

of work to further analyzing the book. In a chapter in The Lesson of the Master which

also appears as the introduction of his translation, Di Giovanni explains the fragmentary

beginnings of Carriego and the ways in which it complemented (or perhaps countered)

an early, rare biography of Carriego by José Gabriel. 20 With reference to Borges’ life,

Di Giovanni briefly explains the way the later changes in the author’s ideologies

affected the second edition of the book, making it corrective in reference to what could

have been read as fervent nationalism in the first half. Similarly, in “Lecturas y

relecturas de un comienzo: sobre las ediciones de Evaristo Carriego”, Juan Tablo

Canala goes over the essays and works that were synthesized into the first edition of

Carriego, as well as the corrections that went into the second edition. He delves into

some of these changes at the sentential level. Canala expresses the importance of

looking at the suppression of the changes that reveals Borges’ desire to conceal the

20
“It would have been pointless for Borges in 1930 to have gone over the same ground as Gabriel in
1921.To be of value, another book on Carriego had to be different from, even a reaction against, the
previous one. If José Gabriel’s book could have all the facts and none of the essence of Carriego, Borges
would deliberately set out to write a book that, near enough, contained none of the facts and all of the
essence.” Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, “Evaristo Carriego: Borges as Biographer”, in The Lesson of the
Master: On Borges and His Work (Great Britain: Continuum, 2003), 96.
16
origins of his work and, in doing so, conceal his own ideological beginnings:

“Recordaba Borges con cierta turbacion durante la edicion de sus obras: ‘Estoy absorto

ante las inepcias que he escrito. Libros como Evaristo Carriego y Discusión no pueden

corregirse. Voy a publicarlos tal cual estan, con una notita desligándome’” (“Borges

remembered with certain discomfiture during the process of editing his works, ‘I am

overwhelmed by the ineptitudes that I have written. Books like Evaristo Carriego and

Discusión cannot be corrected. I am going to publish them so that, with a note, they will

become detached from me.” 21 22 Canala highlights what can be described almost as

embarrassment on the part of Borges that refers back to the corrective element

explained by Di Giovanni, in which Borges desired to cover up what might be seen as

youthful ineptitude or even a lack of critical analysis. The work of Di Giovanni and

Canala, however, does not address some of the more complex ways that Borges

visualizes and recontextualizes narratives of modernity.

In “Las variantes raleaban: two drafts of Evaristo Carriego”, Daniel Balderston

conducts an in-depth investigation into the literary genealogy of the work, beginning

with the scribbles that appeared in Diccionario de argentinismos and going all the way

to changes made in the second edition. Rather than focusing on the ideological meaning

of these changes, however, Balderston presents Carriego and its two “campaigns” as

“an eloquent testimony to Borges's capacity to construct a whole out of precarious

fragments, leaving the seams of his work visible, daring to write imperfect pages.” 23 It

is relevant to examine literary genealogies because they provide a concrete way to

21 Juan Tablo Canala, “Lecturas y relecturas de un comienzo: sobre las ediciones de Evaristo Carriego,”
Variaciones Borges 38 (July 2014): 99.
22
All translations aside from quotations from Di Giovanni’s translation of Carriego are mine.
23
Balderston, “Las variantes raleaban”, 81.
17
explain the changes made by Borges, a famous re-writer who chose every word he

wrote intentionally.

Reading Carriego from a different angle, Diego Alonso explores the dubious

historicity of Borges’ so-called biography in “Sobre la memoria y la historicidad de las

imagenes en Evaristo Carriego” (“On memory and the historicity of images in Evaristo

Carriego”). Alonso expands upon Borges’ dealings with what would be considered

factual, historical past, questioning whether it is necessary to speak of the past

empirically in order to establish truth. In looking at this facet, Alonso briefly presents a

view of the legitimacy of the modes of time established by Borges, including eternity, in

terms of writing about history. He challenges the necessity of establishing a factually

based past, explaining the ways in which an image-rich, memory based depiction of the

past is equally real, and which in fact enables the past to “lose its condition of

otherness”. 24 Time in Borges is an important and widely discussed theme which is

relevant to any work involving Borges and modernity. However, Alonso does not

explicitly connect his study to the idea of modernity or nostalgia.

Denise Dupont not only expands upon the idea of eternity, but establishes the

idea of Carriego as a pre-text in her article “Don Quijote and the pursuit of literary

eternity in Evaristo Carriego”: “I believe that [it] contains a guide promoted by Borges

to shape readers’ interpretations of his work…For example, the 1955 additions to

Evaristo Carriego serve as a pre-reading for the original work, carried out by the

24
“Dicho de otro modo: se incita a hallar bajo la luz de los recuerdos, ya restituidos en imágenes, la
secreta forma del tiempo donde el pasado pierde su condición de otredad.” Diego Alonso, “Sobre la
memoria y la historicidad de las imagenes en Evaristo Carriego”, Variaciones Borges 37 (2014): 81.
18
‘author’ within Evaristo Carriego itself.” 25 She deepens this analysis by looking into

the way the relationship between time and space undermines history in various ways,

and draws parallels between Borges as writer and Carriego as a character and Miguel

Cervantes as a writer and Don Quijote as a character. Dupont’s idea of a “pre-text” is

useful in placing Carriego in context with the rest of Borges’ work and looking at the

significance of the trajectory of his literary career.

Beatriz Sarlo also approaches some of the previously mentioned themes in her

book Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. Though she does not dedicate a

substantial portion of the book to Carriego, she does integrate portions of it into a more

holistic approach to his body of work. She develops the idea of the “pre-text” and the

role of Carriego as a foundation for the rest of his writing as well as a platform in which

Borges could create himself: “The character ‘Borges’ who writes this book is as much

an invention as Carriego”. 26 Beyond this, she says, Borges created the orillas in this

book, establishing it as a space in between the city and the pampas that is unique to his

literature. Sarlo’s view of Borges is broad and approaches many themes relevant to this

study, however, deeper connections to time and modernity in Carriego are not

specifically examined.

Guillermo Gaxiola dedicates a book of essays to addressing Borges and the

problematic of time. He presents a series of questions, namely: “What is the feeling of

time? Is time real or is it just a subjective construct by which we order our

25
Dupont, “’Don Quijote’”, 115.
26
Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge (London: Verso, 2006), 25.
19
perceptions?” 27 Though he does not answer these questions, he examines the ways in

which Borges forms and molds time in his work, explaining the ideas of eternity and

circular time. Gaxiola draws from Borges’ body of writings to explain and complicate

existing conceptions of time. This is useful in reading Borges as a whole, and provides

important background information when looking at Carriego as part of a larger thematic

arc.

Kate Jencke places Borges into context with Walter Benjamin in her book

Reading Borges After Benjamin. In the chapter “Evaristo Carriego and the Limits of the

Written Subject,” Jencke delves into the interplay between Borges and the self he

creates in Carriego, the façade of the author. She presents a fairly holistic review of

many of the themes often discussed in Carriego, in addition to drawing parallels

between this biographical work and another written prior to it about Walt Whitman in

which Borges analyzed “the possible relations between an individual poet, and a region,

era, or people.” 28 In the end, she denominates the book an “allegorical biography” in

which the “(non)mirror of language” profoundly challenges the reader’s, writer’s, and

subject’s identities. 29 This examination is useful in creating a launching point for further

investigation, and is one of the most complete works on Carriego itself.

There has been much research into Evaristo Carriego as a biography and Borges

as biographer, rewriter, and master of molding temporalities, but there is little

convergence in which Evaristo Carriego is examined in terms of its relationship with

27
Guillermo Gaxiola, Borges y el idealismo: un análisis sobre el tiempo (Guadalajara: Arlequín, 2012),
57.
28
Kate Jencke, “Evaristo Carriego and the Limits of the Written Subject”, in Reading Borges after
Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2007), 41.
29
Jencke, Reading Borges, 65.
20
time and the subjective temporality of memory. This is where I hope to expand upon

current scholarship on Borges: I propose an interconnectedness of time, modernity, and

nostalgia which enriches an understanding of Carriego through an analysis of Borges’

methods of constructing literary worlds in which there are multiplicities of dissonant

and converging iterations of time. Where a majority of research forgoes connecting

Borges to the historical and ideological currents of (post)colonialism and the installation

of modernity in Argentina, I propose that this is a fundamental connection for an

understanding not just of the aesthetics of time but also its function in Carriego.

21
 Modernity

The word “modernity” calls to mind newness and innovation. It is often related

to urbanization and technology: the development of cities, the filling of empty and

untamed land with buildings and the trappings of what is conceived to be civilization.

When this is explored, it reveals the incomplete and flawed traditional understanding of

modernity, which characterizes it as a product for exportation. This, therefore, implies a

spatial relationship. In exportation, there is a location from which the product originates

and a location where it is put into play as part of an economic game. Modernity as a

product is thought to originate in central locations; metropoles—such as European

cities—from which it is exported as a whole and instated in peripheral spaces. 30 This

articulation makes the concept of modernity a powerful one, justified as a model-myth

held up before colonized people by Western Europe, an identity to which the colonized

should aspire and should mimic, but could never quite master. 31

I. Modernity: a useful critique or a constricting abstraction?

Scholars have resorted to certain discourses of modernity to make many

different points in debates over past, present and future. It is usually employed as an

analytical category that defines a subject for scholarly inquiry. “Modernity” as a

category has been traditionally employed to represent a powerful claim to singularity in

the form of a long and continuing project of Western Europe. Positive discourses of

modernity have been produced in Western colonial and imperial environments to

30 Timothy Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, vol 11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1.

“Modernization continues to be commonly understood as a process begun and finished in Europe,
from where it has been exported across ever-expanding regions of the non-West.”
31
Homi Bhabha, “Of mimicry and man”, in The Location of Culture.
22
“tame” the rich diversity of human experience. In the tradition of Latin American

scholarship, a critique of modernity has centered on the articulation of “multiple

modernities” or “alternative modernities”. 32 The argument in these plural articulations

brings out the way in which non-Western peoples develop cultural forms that are not

mere repetitions of tradition but bring their own perspectives to progress. Some

contemporary postcolonial scholarship has offered a critique of the project of alternative

modernities on the basis that these projects tend to obscure the pervasive and powerful

force of modernity as a project of Western civilization and they normalize modes of

resistance that conform to narrative emplotments more attuned to earlier anti-colonial

struggles than our postcolonial presents. David Scott is critical of alternative

modernities as a denial of the constitutive force of the Western project of modernity

which futilely espouses liberation from the colonial circumstance as the end of an

unfinished teleology. 33

Frederick Cooper asks the question of whether “modernity” could be understood as

a condition (“something written into the exercise of economic and political power at a

global level”) or a representation (“a way of talking about the world in which one uses a

language of temporal transformation while bringing out the simultaneity of global

unnevenness, in which ‘tradition’ is produced by telling a story of how some people

became ‘modern’”) 34. With these questions in mind, then the follow-up would ask about

32
The idea of alternative modernities is proposed by scholars such as Julio Ramos, Carlos Alonso, and
Mary Louise Pratt.
33
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke University Press
Books, 2004).
34
Cooper, 114.
23
the specific nature of those conditions or about the subject that produces said

representation.

Two very important concepts underscore the idea of modernity: the assumption

of a naturalized historical time which is linear and the distinction between West and

non-West, otherwise iterated as the center and the periphery. 35 These ideas are

intimately connected to the construction of Buenos Aires and Carriego himself in

Borges’ book. A useful theoretical construction of modernity that allows for the

establishment of these connections comes by way of postcolonial scholar Timothy

Mitchell. In “The Stage of Modernity”, he proposes the exploration of two forms of

difference when it comes to modernity: the displacements opened up by the different

space of the non-West, and the ways in which this space is made to appear different:

To claim that the modern is always staged as representation is not to

argue that modernity is concerned more with image-making than with
reality. It is to argue that the colonial-modern involves creating an effect
we recognize as reality, by organizing the world endlessly to represent
it. 36

Mitchell claims that modernity is a staging of a double difference: reality as different

from image, and image as different from reality. And, he says, to call modernity a stage

would be erroneous, falling into the trap of describing modernity as the innate different

between locations and time periods:

35 Here it is fitting to mention the phenomenological idea of the Other: this is a term that
represents that which is not the self. In a broader sense, this can be used to talk about persons who
do not conform to hegemonic ideals or social norms. The Other could be loosely related to the
periphery, while the self could be seen as the center. This idea can be seen in Johannes Fabian’s
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Builds Its Subjects.
36 Mitchell, “Modernity”, 17.
24
 If modernity is not so much a stage of history but rather its staging, then
it is a world particularly vulnerable to a certain kind of disruption or
displacement. No representation can ever match its original, especially
when the original exists only as something promised by a multiplicity of
imitations and repetitions. Every act of staging or representation is open
to the possibility of misrepresentation, or at least of parody or
misreading. An image or simulation functions by its subtle difference
from what it claims to simulate or portray, even if the difference is no
more than the time lag between repetitions. Every performance of the
modern is the producing of this difference, and each such difference
represents the possibility of some shift, displacement, or
contamination. 37

This functions in Evaristo Carriego as the way in which the Buenos Aires that is

represented is a simulacrum of the original: it claims authenticity through impersonation

of Carriego while at the same time presenting the obvious paradox of being written

from the point of view of an author native to an environment that has long since become

postmodern. Carriego stages the difference between the past and the present and,

concurrently, the outskirts (the other) and the city.

Carriego stands out among the works of Borges because it is one of his most

transparent texts. That is to say, while his other stories and essays develop labyrinthine

and complex conceptualizations of time and space, Carriego is an early enough text that

these ideas have yet to be completely formulated (though in the chapters added in the

second edition, the problematics of time and space begin to emerge in a way that is

more characteristic of late Borges). The pull linear time is still felt, but Borges

challenges its universality and homogeneity through incorporating layers of time that

complement each other and, when disentangled, reveal the incompleteness of the

project of modernity. The relationship between time and space is still defined in a

37
Mitchell, “Modernity”, 23.
25
familiar West-centric way: there is a connection between the expansion of modernity

and the passage of time. Yet the cracks and inadequacies of a progress-oriented timeline

are revealed in the rhetoric of juxtaposed anachronism, and the falsehood of an all-

encompassing forward-marching linear narrative is challenged through the rhetoric of

repetition and moments of sameness. As Donnelly says in “Mirror of Time”, “Borges

undermines the continuity of space in time through eternal presentness...and denies

linearity through recurrent temporality.” 38

In order to explain how Borges diverges from the flawed iterations of space and

time characteristic of narratives of modernity, these two concepts, which can be seen as

structural components of a traditional understanding of the phenomenon, must be

acknowledged.

a) Historical time

Historical time is chronological—meaning it moves from the past to the present

in a linear fashion, tracing connections between events that place them all on the same

trajectory into the same future. This is the time that is measured by clocks and

calendars: it passes in the same units regardless of how its passing is perceived. It is

bound up with the system of capitalism and the idea of time as money. Because it is a

unitary measurement, it is also a structure which is based on a set of quantitative value

judgments. Modernity assumes the supremacy of technological development, capitalist

economies, and increasing distance between man and nature. Within this frame of

reference, the present is always superior to the past, and in turn, the future is superior to

38Jennifer Donnelly, “Mirror of Time: Temporality and Contemporaneity in the Work of Jorge Luis
Borges”, Contemporaneity 2.1 (2012), 81.
26
the present. This way of expressing history, or “historical time” 39 was created in and for

the west and claims universalism, despite being invented in Europe for Europe.

The temporality of modernity is explained by Walter Benjamin as being

“homogeneous empty time” 40: this is an expression of time as an empty space that is

filled with unitary events. It is meaningless in and of itself, and it is an essential part of

understanding capitalist progress. The unitary events with which homogeneous empty

time is filled are markers which create the illusion of progress. These markers, however,

are just categories that are filled and refilled with new types of technology, social

structures, and cultural trends. The refilling of categories creates the feeling of perpetual

newness, or eternal present. Thus this expression of time—homogeneous empty time—

takes a linear form. 41

b) West and non-west

The discourse of modernity becomes spatialized, but it is not

geographical. “Europe” or the “West” that modernity refers to is the tale/narrative that

imperialisms have told the colonized, where “the modern” continues to dominate the

stories that are told and is part of the known history, something that has already

happened elsewhere and which is to be reproduced mechanically or with a local content.

39 Timothy Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, vol 11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7.

40 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
41 In the same work (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”), Benjamin articulates a kind of time
that breaks with homogeneous empty time: this is Messianic time, which consists of moments in
which time is frozen. These moments are always immediately accessible from any point in time
and, unlike homogeneous empty time, are ultimately meaningful. Messianic time ruptures the
linearity of homogeneous empty time. It is qualitative, not quantitative, and thus defies the
chronological timeline of progress.
27
Modernity as a spatial phenomenon is “the belief that there were metropolitan foci from

which the modern emanated and through which its rippled and delayed expansion

across time and space would transform the material and cultural orders of societies that

languished in the outer confines of the system.” 42

An alternative mentioned by Mitchell which pertains to thinkers such as

Foucault is the idea of modernity not as an imposition of the West, but as a result of the

meeting of West and non-West. This conception of modernity as a result of the clash of

two supposedly separate entities relies on the assumption of initial difference between

West and non-West, and thus still falls into the trap of “European-centered dualism”. In

this vision, the idea of the West requires an “other” in order to be defined—and, in

requiring the definition of the other, necessitates a retroactively applied concept of

empire. Before the meeting of West and non-west, these categories did not exist:

“Europe’s sense of cultural identity was constructed in the business of colonizing and

getting rich overseas.” The West is always relative to something else. Europe was not a

Western empire until there was a constitutive other.

c) The development of temporalities and modernity in Evaristo Carriego

In the context of modernity, the idea of the West and its constitutive other

contains a temporal dimension within the linear chronology of progress. They are not

only central spaces in relation to peripheries, they are presents and futures in relation to

pasts. Non-west implies an anterior location on the timeline of progress. It is assumed

that any people with a different relationship to technology, time, production, or nature
42
Carlos J Alonso, “The Burden of Modernity”, Modern Language Quarterly 57.2 (1997), 227.

28
have fallen behind on an inevitable track towards progress. Not only does the non-west

exist in a peripheral physical location, it is also placed at a distance temporally. 43 If the

West and the non-west are juxtaposed in time or space, they are forcibly “othered” 44

(rhetorically in the case of Borges) by being described as “forgotten by” or “lost in”

time. 45

Modernity is based on the creation of a time-space relationship that is measured

by “progress”, technical advancement. Borges constructs his stage at precisely the

moment in which this relationship is articulated. The world of Carriego arises from the

juxtaposition of historical time and what could be called Messianic time, time which

defies unitary measurement.

It is at the conjunction of temporality and spatiality that Borges constructs the

world of Evaristo Carriego. The framework of the world Borges creates is that of

modernity. He expresses his idea of this time-space relationship and its variations in a

footnote to the first chapter:

I maintain—and I wish neither coyly to evade nor boldly to parade

paradox—that only new countries have a past; that is to say, an
autobiographical memory, a living history. If time is a succession of
events, we must admit that where more things are happening more time
is passing, and so it is on this inconsequential side of the world that time
is passing, and so it is on this inconsequential side of the world that time
is most profuse. The conquest and colonization of these domains—a

43
Johannes Fabian calls this “denial of coevalness” in Time and the Other.
44
That is, separated neatly into the categories established by the previously mentioned Eurocentric
dualism of progress.
45
“Thousands of days no longer known to memory, misty zones of time, waxed and waned, until, via a
number of individual foundations, we reach the Palermo of the eve of the nineties.... It is this Palermo of
1889 that I wish to write about.” This quote exemplifies the way in which Borges describes a time
resembling Benjamin’s homogeneous empty time: it is an ambiguous time-space bounded by the advent
of the mechanisms of progress--buildings and institutions. By describing the previous time as “misty” and
“no longer known to memory,” Borges implies an irrevocable distance--an “othering” of a past that is not
technically far from the present. Jorge Luis Borges, Carriego, 41.
29
 handful of fear-ridden mud forts clinging to the coast and watching the
curved horizon, the bow that shoots forth Indian raids—was so
indecisive that, in 1872, one of my grandfathers was to command the last
major battle against the Indians, bringing the sixteenth-century conquest
to a conclusion only after the middle of the nineteenth century. Be that as
it may, why resurrect the past? In Granada, in the shade of towers
hundreds of years older than the fig trees, I did not feel the passage of
time, but I have felt it in Buenos Aires on the corner of Pampa and
Triunvirato, today an utterly featureless place of English-style roofs,
three years ago a place of smoky brick kilns, and five years ago a jumble
of small pastures. Time—a European sentiment of a people with a long
past, and their very justification and glory—moves more boldly in the
New World. Young people, in spite of themselves, sense this. Over here
we are contemporary with time, we are brothers of time. 46

Borges begins with a statement that is, despite his supposed desire to avoid catering to

paradox, boldly in contrast with the traditional European idea of the flow of time and

history. 47 “Only new countries have a past,” he says, and this past is a product not of an

accumulation of many years, but of a concentration of events. He reinforces historical

time by emphasizing its quantitative and chronological nature, but also contradicts it by

implying that there is a lively interplay between moments in time. “Living history” is

the idea that time is not a static chunk of completed events, but the very relationship

between something that has happened, something that is happening, and something that

has yet to happen. The “new countries” Borges mentions are those which have not yet

frozen history in the past, those which are still in the process of establishing a narrative.

The unspoken opposite of this is the Old World, where the production of history is no

longer part of daily life (as in Granada, where Borges says he cannot feel time). Borges

46 Borges, Carriego, 42.

47 Tishale Tibebu, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 141-142. Hegel stated that the Americas, prior to
the arrival of the conquerors, was not only inferior to Europe in almost every way but also lacking
in a “true” history. Their history was “a purely natural culture which had to perish” with the arrival
of Christian Europeans. The traditional Hegelian conception of history is of a timeline that begins
with the instatement of Christianity and recognizably European tools of linear, capitalist progress.
30
seeks to portray the “new country” as a place where past and present are

simultaneous: the past is immediately present because it is being lived by every person

in every circumstance.

Borges further develops this seeming paradox by explaining that “where there is

a greater density of events, more time is passing”. This can, perhaps, be used to

complicate Benjamin’s ideas of homogeneous empty time and Messianic time. The idea

that a “greater density of events” equates the passage of time fits into the scheme of

historical time, or chronological empty time, because it fills time the way one would fill

a calendar. However, when this is taken in conjunction with the concept of a living

history kept alive by the interplay of moments, one cannot argue that Borges completely

caters to the traditional hegemonic expression of time. He states that he “did not feel the

passage of time” in Granada yet he did in Pampa and Triunvirato, implying that time in

the Old World has come to a stop--perhaps this could be said to be the eternal “now” of

Messianic time. However, Borges is not creating the dichotomy that Benjamin does in

his Theses, and he does not construct a vision of time as a meaningless space to be

filled. The passage of time, the speed at which history is being created, is palpable (and

meaningful) in a place which has changed rapidly and drastically within five years--and

most notably, it has moved ahead on the timeline of progress. Meanwhile, Granada

carries thousands of years of history, yet it is no longer alive or felt. The palpability of

time, its feeling, is vital to an understanding of Borges.

Time, according to Borges, is a “European emotion”: that is, it is something felt

by “people with a long past”. The description of time as a feeling as opposed to the

measurement of a factual entity suggests that Borges is willing to play with the

31
seriousness of a progress-oriented temporality. He contrasts this feeling of European

historical time with the way time is experienced presumably in Argentina: “we are

contemporary with time, we are brothers of time”, he says. The word “contemporary”

suggests an incomplete desire of keeping-up-with in a technological or cultural sense. In

his essay “What is the contemporary?”, Giorgio Agamben interprets the contemporary

as an experience of profound dissonance: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular

relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a

distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it,

through a disjunction and an anachronism.” 48 The contemporary, in this context, is not a

label of periodization; it is an existential marker. To be “contemporary” is to experience

a state of proximity with one’s own temporality. Furthermore, for Agamben, the

contemporary is he “who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its

light, but rather its darkness.” 49 In applying the idea of contemporariness as disjunction,

or coexistence of many contradictory or paradoxical entities, it can be seen that

Carriego functions on the juxtaposition of multiple concepts of time—namely capitalist

and non-capitalist, or homogeneous and Messianic.

In the context of Mitchell’s statement that the staging of modernity functions on subtle

structural differences, Borges’ text blatantly manifests modernity in the way it

mythologizes the past and plays with subjective temporalities.

48
Giorgio Agamben. “What Is the Contemporary?” in What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 41.
49
Agamben, “Contemporary”, 44.
32
 It stands to clarify how exactly this staging of dissonant times, namely past and

present, manifests in Carriego. Here the concept of survival as explained by Georges

Didi-Huberman becomes relevant:

Yet, he also discovered something even more overwhelming (which one

never notes in reading Frazer): the vertiginous play of time in the
present, in the present 'surface' of a given culture. Vertigo is first
expressed in the powerful sensation - in itself obvious, but its
consequences less so - that the present is woven with multiple pasts.50

Given this description, we can see Borges as a modern writer not because he espouses

the narrative of modernity, but because in Carriego he presents a staging of difference

in which the past exists contemporaneously with the present, surviving in the cracks of a

modern system. Didi-Huberman’s idea of survival as a “differential between two

contradictory temporal states” 51 can be seen particularly clearly in “Song of the

Neighborhood”, a chapter that Borges introduces with a passage that stages the

coexistence of the inexorable forward march of modernity and the enduring vestiges of

the past:

Nineteen hundred and twelve. Out toward the many stock pens of
Cerviño Street or toward the canebrakes and potholes of the
Maldonado—an area reduced to galvanized iron sheds, variously named
dance halls, where the tango was all the rage at ten cents a dance, partner
included—local toughs still tangled with each other…but for the most
part Palermo conducted itself in a God-fearing manner, and it was a
place of genteel poverty, like any other mixed community of immigrants
and native Argentines. By this time, the centenary of Argentine
independence was already as dead as its miles of blue bunting, as its
successions of toasts…its municipal illuminations against the rust-
colored sky of the Plaza de Mayo, and that other foretold illumination,
Halley’s comet, was an angel of air and fire to which the organ grinders

50
Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford
Art Journal 25.1 (2002), 63.
51
Didi-Huberman, “Surviving”, 62.
33
 sand the tango “Independencia” …Palermo joined the rush toward
foolishness. Sinister Art Nouveau architecture sprouted like a swollen
flower even as far out as the marshes…The bell of the movie
house…mingled with the tired clatter of horse-drawn wagons and with
the knife grinder’s whistle. 52

The juxtaposition of the post-centenary Palermo and its previous form, which still

bursts through the cracks of development, establishes the idea of “modern” as a

complex interweaving of multiple times in which the anachronisms of the past are part

of a temporal background layer. While the “bell of the movie house” signifies the

introduction of new technology, the “tired clatter of horse-drawn wagons” indicates that

Palermo has by no means experienced an even, homogenous transformation into a

developed area.

The concepts that Borges sets forth in these passages provide a peek into the

way that he structures relationships between time and space. Throughout the first

section “Palermo, Buenos Aires” he constructs a vision of the past interspersed with

images, anecdotes, and characters that are both part of the past and present. The places,

people and events which populated the past are still current. Time is a block of

transparent layers, each of which can be peeled back to reveal moments that are directly

related. In Evaristo Carriego Borges looks through layers of time to pinpoint the exact

event which is relevant to his narrative--he identifies the moments which shine through

progress-oriented historical time, which ironically proves its existence. The present in

Carriego is not shown as a transition between moments. Time reaches a standstill in the

experience of the present and instead of the “eternal past” presented as linear, there is a

rupture experience of particular moments which can be accessed, which implies a

52
Borges, Carriego, 82-83.
34
particular relationship of temporal experience. There are no lists or dates; there is a

construction of time from a structure based on the moment that conjures and explodes

particular epochs, lives, out of linear history. This is very close to a Benjaminian

conception of Messianic time, which is in itself a temporality that subverts the narrative

of modernity.

This is not to say that Borges vilifies the process of capitalist progress, because

he still carries out the work of modernity in his nostalgic separation of past and

present—this will be the topic of a later section. However, the creation of particular

eternal spaces—visceral descriptions not of events but of smells, sounds, feelings, and

sights—ruptures chronology. Borges does this often when speaking of the life of

Carriego: instead of painting his life in terms of its important events, he describes his

patterns, the things that “repeat him over and over in us.” 53 If he is repeated in the daily

actions of every person, then the distinction between past and present loses meaning.

The existence of the past in the present means that it is not past. This is a narrative

counter to the standard birth-to-death chronology. Instead of placing Carriego in a

temporal context and reinforcing historical time, Borges creates a narrative that

connects Carriego to the reader’s experience, spinning his poetry into intimate tales that

put into words something personal. For example, when presenting the poem “El

casamiento” (“The Wedding”), Borges says that “Carriego’s poem is a very skillful

expression of the features found at any humble festivity” 54—meaning Carriego captures

53 Borges, Carriego, 63.

54 Borges, Carriego, 98.
35
an essential aspect of the experience of living in Buenos Aires in his “immortal

stanzas.” 55

Evaristo Carriego is not so much a biography as it is a time warp, taking the

reader back in time to the poet’s era—or at least constructing a vision of the way this

era was. Warped time itself is both a reinforcement and reformulation of linear time. In

this aspect, Borges is still responding to the constraints of that historical time which is

seen to be so ubiquitous. But he is contorting this temporality by connecting non

simultaneous events, forcing simultaneity. The feeling of connectedness between

disjoint moments in time is partly constructed by Borges’ use of “vanishing images”, 56

snapshots that are a kind of magic mirror that allow the reader to be immediately

present at that particular time. The presence of the reader in the described moments is

facilitated by the use of present tense and, occasionally, images presented as exercises

in visualization:

Imagine a horse-drawn wagon. Imagine a big wagon whose rear wheels,

suggestive of reserve power, are taller than its front wheels and whose
native-born teamster is as hefty as the wood-and-iron creation on which
he rides, his lips pursed in absentminded whistling or, with paradoxically
gentle commands, calling out to his team…the driver’s seat [seems]
more thronelike, as if the wagon still had about it something of the
military character of chariots in the marauding empire of Attila. 57
Moments like these are intentionally guided so that the reader sees the image from a

particular perspective, which in this case leads to an understanding of a wagon and

wagon driver as powerful archetypes akin to historical legends such as Attila the Hun.

The reader can access Borges’ past through his or her own experiences and associations

55 Borges, Carriego, 85.

56 Borges, Carriego, 38.
57
Borges, Carriego, 113.
36
and memories: Borges states in the first chapter that “reality comes to us...through

memory, the essence of which lies not in the proliferation of facts but in the enduring

nature of particular elements.” 58 These are enduring vestiges, moments similar to

Messianic time, which together form the points on the constellation of Carriego, and are

fundamental to the counternarrative.

58 Borges, Carriego, 38.

37
 Time

I. Temporal endlessness, spatial boundlessness

Despite the fragmentary structure of Carriego, or perhaps because of it, Borges

establishes an overarching narrative of eternity, envisioning and constructing enduring

moments which enable immortality. This immortality, “which annihilate[s] the

supposed flow of time” 59 is literarily expressed by Borges by way of patterns and

repetitions. In breaking with a chronological flow of time, Borges means to restore

unity to the scattered remains of the past that exist contemporaneously with the

constantly mutating present, between the cracks of the façade it presents.

The dictionary definition of eternity is time without end or time that seems to

have no end, or is immeasurable. 60 There are two elements involved in this definition,

perception and quantitative measurement. Borges works with the perceptive aspect of

eternity: the way time feels (...“I did not feel the passage of time, but I have felt it in

Buenos Aires...” 61) and the way it manifests in thoughts, memories, and even identity.

Eternity is both a way to play with temporality and to use time as a tool for the

construction of ideas and perceptions, even ideologies. That which is eternal surpasses

the transience of quotidian human experience and enters the realm of myth and deities.

The varied concepts related to eternity—immortality, infinity, and memory—are all

involved in the preservation of something which is of utmost value. In Carriego, this is

the Argentine soul--or what Borges has construed to be the Argentine soul. To this end,

59 Borges, Carriego, 63.

60 Merriam-Webster. Eternity: time without an end, or time that seems to be without an end.
61 Borges, Carriego, 42.

38
he constructs Carriego himself as an eternal figure who inhabited a moment in time

which somehow surpasses all moments in time.

II. Aesthetics of eternity

In order to create these moments of timelessness which are so numerous in

Carriego, Borges employs a variety of rhetorical techniques which lend the book what

could be called an aesthetic, or feeling, of eternity. Some of these are structural, and

others are subtler.

A very obvious negation of time is presented in Borges’ avoidance of the

biographical dates of Carriego’s life. Though Di Giovanni says this is merely because

Gabriel had already provided these in an earlier biography, it is an arguably intentional

way to blur the temporal boundary created by birth and death dates. Borges states that

he thinks a non-chronological account of Carriego’s life is a more accurate way to go

about writing his biography:

I believe that a chronological account is inappropriate to Carriego, a

man whose life was made up of walks and conversations. To reduce him
to a list, to trace the order of his days, seems to me impossible; far better
seek his eternity, his patterns. Only a timeless description, lingering
with love, can bring him back to us. 62

There is something here about the way that chronology negates that which is eternal.

Providing beginning and end dates separates one from the flow of time, while ignoring

the biographical details of a life results in an archetypal depiction; the patterns that

make Carriego relatable to the reader are not given an end date. An archetype is by

nature relatable; this would mean that the archetype of Carriego would have a more

62 Borges, Carriego, 55.

39
enduring quality than a more faithfully biographical rendering because the reader would

be able to identify themselves in his life and live out “his eternity, his patterns.”

These patterns in Carriego’s life that I have described will, I know, bring
him closer to us. They repeat him over and over in us, as if for a few
seconds each one of us were Carriego. I believe that this is literally the
case, and that these fleeting moments of becoming him (not mirroring
him), which annihilate the supposed flow of time, are proof of eternity. 63

The repetition of patterns in which the essence of Carriego dwells not only keep him

alive in the present, but also keep the past alive. When Borges speaks of the annihilation

of the “supposed flow of time”—that is, past, present, and future as chronological and

separate events--he reaffirms the existence of time as always-accessible layers. When

one “becomes” Carriego, the passage of time is rendered unimportant. The same thing

happens when one plays truco and “becomes” an ancestral self. Borges describes how

this is possible: “His game is a repetition of past games—in other words, of moments of

past lives. Generations of Argentines no longer here are, as it were, buried alive in the

game. Following this thought through, it transpires that time is an illusion.”64

Repetition, which Borges further characterizes as “set formulas”, creates a kind of

timeline that one can enter outside the boundaries of linear time and live the same thing

that those who participated in said formulas did before them.

It merits mention that the previously mentioned passage is, itself, structured by

repetition:

The various stage of its aggressive discourse, its sudden turning points,
its flashes of intuition, and its intrigue cannot help but repeat

63 Borges, Carriego, 63.

64 Borges, Carriego, 112.
40
 themselves. They must, in the course of time, repeat themselves. For a
regular player, what is truco but a habit? Just look at the repetitiveness
of the game, at its fondness for set formulas. Every player, in truth, does
no more than fall back into old games. His game is a repetition of past
games—in other words, of moments of past lives. 65

This repetition of repetition seen in the words bolded above is indicative of a much

broader, structural pattern in which Borges repeats the same moments throughout the

book, or repeats previously used wording to a noticeable extent. He is especially fond of

writing and rewriting moments that seem to be the genesis of Carriego as an immortal

character, “what…he will be for all time.” 66 The irony lays in the fact that there were no

particular moments of Carriego’s life that immortalized him, because his name has been

forgotten by the majority of the population. These moments are times that appealed to

Borges, not to the public at large, though he makes it seem like the immortality of

Carriego’s work is universally acknowledged. The words “infinite, eternal, immortal”

ring throughout the book, informing the reader that Borges is presenting a timeless

vision of time and boundless image of space. To put it blatantly, Borges convinces the

reader that his subject is eternal simply by saying he is so, and this is reinforced by his

rhetorical techniques.

Sameness, also seen as indeterminacy and lack of definition, is another way that

eternity is conveyed rhetorically. It is also a feature of repetition, because the very

concept of repetition involves a factor that is the same across time and space: As

Jennifer Donnelly says, “Sameness disintegrates the possibility of movement from one

65 Borges, Carriego, 112.

66 Borges, Carriego, 128.
41
spatial-temporal condition to another, and therefore refutes the passage of time.” 67

However, the dialogue of sameness takes on new dimensions in the context of the

orillas. These are “that bare expanse where the land takes on the indeterminateness of

the sea” 68, a place in between the city and the pampas that somehow escapes the flow of

linear time. The orillas, as a feeling, extends throughout the whole book, manifesting as

haziness and ambiguity:

Thousands of days no longer known to memory, misty zones of time,

waxed and waned… 69
…the little window balconies of ordinary people opened onto days that
were all the same... 70
…there began to materialize from the dust a slumlike jungle of single-
story, unplastered dwellings. 71
[There] were a number of large rambling houses, each with a string of
patios one behind the other, yellow or brown houses with entranceways
in the shape of an arch—an arch repeated mirrorlike in the next
entranceway… 72
The protagonist is eternal, and the wary ranch hand who spends three
days behind a door that looks out into a backyard…is the same one who
with two bow, a lasso made of horsehair, and a scimitar was poised to
raze and obliterate the world’s most ancient kingdom under the hooves
of his steppe pony. 73

In these images, the reader can feel the sameness that Borges is trying to convey: the

houses he describes looks the same and, when seen together, form a “jungle”—a space

in which there are no extraordinary features; that is, each section of the space is enough

like every other that it does not merit notice. These are moments in space and time

67
Jennifer Donnelly, “Mirror of Time: Temporality and Contemporaneity in the Work of Jorge Luis
Borges”, Contemporaneity 2.1 (2012), 83.
68
Borges, Carriego, 45.
69
Borges, Carriego, 41.
70
Borges, Carriego, 43.
71
Borges, Carriego, 48.
72
Borges, Carriego, 44.
73
Borges, Carriego, 123.
42
which cannot be defined by description of outstanding characteristics or by quantitative

information. They are “misty zones of time” defined by their lack of definition. Lack of

temporal and spatial definition implies eternity and infinity.

The eternal presence of Carriego is ultimately important in Borges’ desire to lift

the historical past from the muck of time and re-shape it. This is because “those

adequate though hazy images of the pampa from on horseback, which are always in the

background of Argentine consciousness, must also have been present in Carriego.” 74

Carriego himself is a kind of vehicle for the past, and if he is, in a sense, a time traveler,

then he brings the past with him.

Both Borges and his characterization of Carriego exemplify the flâneur: the

observer of time and space, who by ambiguity and lack of identification with any

particular time or space is present in all. This character is a creation of modernity and,

more specifically, cities themselves. It is a character that springs from the myth of the

metropolis, which Benjamin explains in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”:

Benjamin's metropolis is one entwined with myth, a seemingly

paradoxical position in that, for many, modernity is seen as the obviation
of myth, the disenchantment of the world. For Benjamin the metropolis
is a form of dreamworld… The metropolis is enslaved by myth, a myth
that adopts new guises in the supposedly progressive, fashionable world
of the commodity. For Benjamin it is precisely the fetishization of the
commodity, the repetition of the 'nothing-new' within the fashion
industry, and the 'deception' of progress which constitutes and fuels the
'myth' of the metropolis. 75

74Borges, Carriego, 63.

75Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books,
1969)
43
This “repetition of the nothing-new” relates back to modernity and the idea of

homogeneous empty time, the meaningless refilling of categories. This concept is

further unraveled as the fueling of a myth of progress. The flâneur, paradoxically, is a

creation of the myth of progress yet is simultaneously detached from its rules. Cristian

Cisternas Ampuero expounds on the flâneur as a transcendent character in “Jorge Luis

Borges: El ‘otro’ flâneur”:

The figure visible behind these argumentations is that of the urban

itinerant who traverses the outskirts of the premodern city in search of
identities that will complement his...who perceives history and the flow
of spacetime in his intransferible internal dimension. 76

He “longs for infinity” 77 but does not seek to create it; perhaps he can be defined as a

“brother of time”—one who passes easily between non-synchronous layers. The flãneur

is so much a part of the temporal myth of modernity that its rules become all but

obsolete in his time-traveling.

Here the difference between the concepts of infinity and eternity becomes

clearer. While eternity is generally a temporal concept, infinity is more related to spatial

perception. Both of these are integral to Borges’ construction of Carriego and his

surroundings: it is the combination of eternity and infinity that forms the backdrop of

Carriego’s mythic history. The existence of the pampas, the grasslands of Argentina, as

infinite (boundless) and eternal (timeless) is necessary for Carriego’s (and therefore

Borges’) existence as a flâneur—that is, a mythic character which is perpetuated by

76 Cristian Cisternas Ampuero, “Jorge Luis Borges: El ‘otro’ flaneur”, Revista Chilena de Literatura
62 (2003), 80.
77 Ampuero, “Flaneur”, 80.

44
modernity but which simultaneously challenges its hegemony. 78 The timelessness and

boundlessness that is embodied by ambiguity and utilized by the flâneur can be seen in

the description of early Buenos Aires as missing “the other sidewalk”: “Sólo faltó una

cosa, la vereda de enfrente”. 79 The vision of looking from one city sidewalk out onto the

endless pampas provides profound insight into the idea of Buenos Aires, specifically

Palermo, as a simulacrum or façade. The idea of the “vereda de enfrente” or the

opposite sidewalk contains the idea of copying—the replication of modernity through

the doubling of sidewalks, which has not yet taken place—and that of the façade, the

visual of the city without any substance. The replication of modernity is the

enslavement of eternity and infinity, thus the origins of Buenos Aires as a city arise

from the ambiguity of the pampas and Palermo and its development entails the

fragmentation of unity.

II. Eternity as a counter- and sub-narrative of modernity

The previously mentioned concept of eternity as repetition, homogeneity, and

always-accessible moments located in different layers of time functions as a

counternarrative to the unitary passage of chronological time. The possibility of

preserving moments or reclaiming them exactly as they were upon first occurrence by

78 And yet Borges asserts in a footnote on page 87 that “to make of the cowhand an eternal traveler
across the pampa is a piece of romantic nonsense.” I would argue that this statement is
demonstrative of the ideological tendency to marginalize the gaucho. The flaneur is an elite
character who needs an urban background; Carriego has the background an education to be a
traveler of spacetime while the gaucho is a tool that, while he can be placed into any period of time
by the elite, cannot do this traveling of his own agency. A symbol does not have sovereignty; it is
what hegemony makes of it. This is what happened to the gaucho when he was co-opted by the
government for use as a national legend.
79
Jorge Luis Borges, “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”, in Fervor de Buenos Aires. 1923.
http://www.literatura.us/borges/fervor.html.
45
nature acts against the conception of time as a line that goes irretrievably into the future,

casting off events that can never again be experienced. Contrary to this, Carriego is full

of characters that exist eternally and locations that defy definition in terms of

modernity. “Days that were all the same” 80 can only be described in terms of the

relativity of spatial existence, not in terms of time passing. And Borges does go on to

refer to spatial features as “moments”. 81 This necessitates an understanding of the

overlap between space and time, in that spatially discrepant locations can be reconciled

through sharing time and temporally distant moments can be unified by space. When

Borges describes a particular physical space as a moment, he identifies it temporally

and acknowledges that it can never be the same in the chronology of time passing, but

also creates it as an accessible moment in a layer of time. The creation of overlap

between space and time allows one to flow indistinguishably into another in a kind of

mode of eternity.

However, the simple fact that Borges has established a way of “proving”

eternity and avoiding the trap of purely linear time does not disprove chronology. The

eternity of Borges is not the eternity found at the end of capitalist or religious

teleologies, nor can it be said to directly negate these categories. As Donnelly points

out, “Time is not temporally successive and...temporal succession is not unreal” 82 in

Borges’ works. In his iterations of Messianic time, Borges does not contradict historical

80 Borges, Carriego, 42. “Fig trees cast shadows over walls; the little window balconies of ordinary
people opened onto days that were all the same; the forlorn notes of the peanut vendor’s horn
explored the twilight. Atop the humbleness of houses it was not uncommon to see masonry urns,
crowned aridly with a cactus, a sinister plant which in the universal sleep of other plants seems to
belong to a nightmare zone...”
81 Borges, Carriego, 42. “There were also happy moments: the patio grapevine, the local tough’s
strutting step, the rooftop balustrade with the sky showing through.”
82 Donnelly, “Mirror”, 79.

46
time but expands upon it, “[revealing] linear history as a performance of time, but not

time itself.” 83 If linear time is a strip of paper, the temporalities found in Carriego are a

Mobius strip: not a negation of the existence or reality of the paper, but a contortion of

it, a warping. If, as Mitchell says, modernity “renders history singular by organizing the

multiplicity of global events into a single narrative”, then Borges restores multiplicity,

by way of a displacement or staging of difference. 84 This is not to the detriment of the

narrative of modernity, it is merely a complication--the establishment of paradox within

a time frame that demands absolute objectiveness regarding the unitary passage of time.

83 Donnelly, “Mirror”, 82
84 Mitchell, Modernity, 9.
47
 Time and nostalgia

Nostalgia, the sentiment of longing for a different time or place—or, more

accurately, longing for a different experience of a time or place, is the point at which

time and intention meet. Borges is not often thought of as a writer who conveys a

nostalgic point of view; in many contexts he is read from a dry and philosophical

perspective. However, in his restless rewriting, his seeking of new and different pasts,

his preoccupation with the simple violence of the knife fight, and his obsession with his

ancestry, a different kind of nostalgia can be seen. “What was Palermo like then, and

how beautiful would it really have been?” 85 This question, which he proposes in the

prologue, offers a glimpse of understanding into Borges’ intention in rewriting the past

with a certain degree of sentimentality. Time, to Borges, is a literary game, and its

feeling, “el sentir del tiempo”, is a piece on the gameboard.

I. “El truco” and the game of time

In the section “El truco”, which is an addendum to chapter 4, “Song of the

Neighborhood”, Borges expands upon the card game “truco”—a complicated game of

deception and bluffing. Within this addendum, Borges further elucidates his relationship

with and perception of time. Thomas McEnaney, who wrote about Borges’ poem “El

truco”, speaks to the way that Borges presents the game as a “particular aesthetic

response to the historico-political…Borges does not merely represent politics as

playtime. Rather, the historical allusion allows the Argentine poet to construct an

aesthetic system whose non-linear intertextuality provides a unique and specifically

85
Borges, Carriego, 33.
48
literary model for acknowledging the past’s intervention in the present.” 86 A key aspect

of time in Carriego is its malleability: time not existing as a chronological entity but as

the experience of a person or people. Specifically, in his dealings with past events,

Borges emphasizes that which is eternal, namely memories (images, events, places, and

sounds) and myths. It is an eternity in which the past overlaps with the present by

existing simultaneously in a subjective way (layered time can be experienced as such,

even if it cannot be described within the context of chronological history). Truco is the

embodiment of this vision of time; it is a manifestation of the vehicle by which vestiges

of the past, alternate timelines, are accessed.

“The dealer shuffles these little pictures [cards]” 87 and in doing so, somehow

shuffles images of time and space. When the game begins the players are transported to

a different world: “the players, turned suddenly into Argentines of old, cast off their

everyday selves. A different self, an almost ancestral and vernacular self, takes over the

game.” 88 Borges’ description implies a direct transformation of present into past. The

players become cultural archetypes, inhabiting the personalities of those who were

“buried in the game”. 89 Truco is somehow at the heart of what is most Argentine, and

thus carries all of the layers of the time that has past and all the people who have lived

to play it. It is a game riddled with tradition, or Borges might say that the game is

tradition: it is Rosas, it is the tango, it is

86
Thomas McEnaney, “In the Cards: Prophecy and the Gamble of Language in Borges’ ‘El truco’”,
Variaciones Borges 22 (2006), 141.
87 Borges, Carriego, 109.
88 Borges, Carriego, 109.
89 Borges, Carriego, 112.

49
 evocative as an anniversary. Milongas performed around a campfire or in
a saloon, the jollification at wakes, the threatening boasts of the
followers of Roca or Tejedor, escapades in the brothels of Junin Street or
in their progenitor on Temple Street are the human sources of the game.
Truco is a good singer, especially when winning; it sings down at the far
end of a street in the small hours from lighted bathrooms. 90

The chapter on truco is representative of an essential tenet of the way Borges portrays

time. It is that “time is an illusion”. 91 He is not trying to say that time is not passing and

things are not changing, but that it is like a veil that can be lifted to reveal a world that,

in a chronological sense, is long gone. Truco is a way to restore the idea of the past as a

whole, an all-encompassing world, and it removes the fragmented façade of modernity.

Nostalgia is the vehicle by which surviving images are accessed.

This recalls the importance of memory as a subjective vehicle for the past to

travel into the present—in other words, memory as the facilitator of what can loosely be

called Messianic time. The entire book is written in memories, both Borges’ memories

and memories he has constructed for Carriego in order to place him into context.

Beyond this, Borges begins to extend his memory-visions into the realm of the

universal—memories shared by all Argentines. It is in creating collective memories that

Borges begins to explore the sentiment of nostalgia.

II. Nostalgia

Though there can be individual and group nostalgia (and there is a wide overlap

between these two iterations), arguably the more forceful and impactful nostalgia is that

which is shared: with a friend, with family--or with a whole nation. In Carriego, Borges

90 Borges, Carriego, 110.

91 Borges, Carriego, 112.
50
lavishes paragraph after paragraph on the creation of images of the past which, if they

do not resonate personally with the reader, may resonate culturally (or vice versa). For

example, in the opening chapter he pays homage to a visceral symbol of both country

life and time past: “Specific reference comes down to us of a ‘dappled mule grazing in

the pastures of Palermo, at the edge of this city.’ I see the animal absurdly clear and tiny

in the far reaches of time, and I have no desire to add anything to it. Let this solitary

mule suffice.” 92 In a psychological study on nostalgia and imagery conducted by

William Havlena and Susan Holak, it was found that the consensus established

nostalgic images to be those which 1) were black and white, 2) were clearly identifiable

as belonging to the past, and 3) which carried a sense of the duration of memory, or the

quality that it would last “forever”. 93

The Buenos Aires illustrated by Borges in Carriego fits all three of these

findings. The idea of black and white, beyond its associations with antique photographs,

has the overarching connotation of simplicity. Black and white is often paralleled with a

view of the world as evil and good. Borges’ Buenos Aires is a city in a book of pop-ups

where the mundane is either glossed over or exaggerated to mythical proportions. This

mythologizing simplification is exemplified throughout the first chapter, “Palermo,

92 Borges, Carriego, 38.

93
William J Havlena and Susan L Holak, "Exploring Nostalgia Imagery Through the Use of Consumer
Collages", Advances in Consumer Research 23 (1996), 35-42.
“Certain image characteristics appear to convey nostalgia. Several subjects mentioned that black-
and-white photographs seemed more nostalgic than color images. Here, the feeling of age was the
primary determinant and was not linked to any emotional reaction or attachment to the subject of
the image. The participants also noted explicitly that age was a criterion for an image to represent
nostalgia. One group limited nostalgia to objects that were between twenty and forty years old or
were associated with that period, although these products might still be available or people might
still be alive. The relevance of childhood as a period for nostalgic memory was described by one
woman in talking about the inclusion of the word "Forever" in her collage: “I put that in, I think,
because a lot of the things that we remember as a child just keep going on for us forever, at least in
our lifetime they are meaningful to us.” (36)
51
Buenos Aires”, but is particularly pronounced in a fragment in which Borges describes,

in flashes, the “centuries-long encroachment of Buenos Aires upon Palermo”:

The best approach, if we were to adopt the techniques of filmmaking,

would be to present a continuous flow of vanishing images: a mule train
laden with wine casks, the less tame animals blinkered; a long, flat
stretch of water on which a few willow leaves float; a phantasmal
wandering soul high on his horse, fording flooded streams; the open
range, where absolutely nothing happens; the relentless hoofprints of a
herd of cattle being driven to the Northside stockyards; a cowhand
(silhouetted against the dawn) who dismounts from his spent horse to slit
its broad throat; smoke from a fire dispersing into the air. 94

Not only does this simplify a “centuries-long” process into a series of evocative and

poignant images, it also removes the complexity of human characters in favor of natural

and animal symbolism: the two figures of people that appear in this excerpt are that of a

“wandering soul” and a “silhouette”. If one were to research the foundation of Buenos

Aires and Palermo, a history of colonization, invasion, and violence would be found,

but Borges chooses not to portray this aspect. To analyze this given the classical

criticism of nostalgic histories, it can be seen as an “abdication of personal

responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming”. 95 However, it can also be seen as a method of

establishing history in a way that is archetypally memorable: compacting timeless time

into a few relatable images so it can be repurposed as a national symbol in order to hold

the place of the past which came before modernity. Yet Borges, with the multiplicity of

timelines that he proposes, does more than create an archetype of the past. He also

establishes points in time that are always accessible from any other moment in time—

the previously discussed Messianic moments--which seem to relate to the present in an

94 Borges, Carriego, 38.

95
Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents”, Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007), 9.
52
emotionally charged dialogue. The affective aspect of nostalgia has to do with a

subjectivization or idealization of points in time that are distant in the context of linear

chronology.

a) Restorative and reflective nostalgia

Nostalgia has been theorized in a variety of ways, but the most applicable

explanations and examples come from authors who have examined the emergence and

function of the sentiment in relation to modernities both in Europe and in places

colonized by Europe. Two iterations of the nostalgic sentiment have been proposed by

Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, a study of nostalgia as a tool for reclamation

and recreation. Beyond being simply a desire to return to a lost homeland or, perhaps

more accurately, a temporally distant homeland, Boym proposes that there are two

kinds of nostalgia that are expressed in the same “frames of reference” but are not used

to the same effect. 96 Because nostalgia involves a subjective perception and

presentation of time, it follows that there would be different tendencies and results

associated with different nostalgias. 97

Restorative nostalgia, according to Boym, is about the reconstruction and

reclamation of the “lost home”. 98 This is the nostalgia involved in the formulation of

96 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49.
97 I would add the disclaimer that Boym studies nostalgia in the context of Europe and thus these
iterations can be used only theoretically in reference to Latin America. The potential problematics
that arise from applying concepts originating in and referring to Europe will not be fully discussed
in this paper, but it is essential to be aware that no expression of temporality can be transplanted
directly. I do not intend to do this; I simply wish to use some of the framework proposed by Boym
to complicate the meaning of a tendency I have seen in Carriego.
98 Boym, Nostalgia, 41. “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the
lost home and patch up memory gaps.”
53
nationalistic fervor found in countries that have lost previous power or glory; 99 it relies

on symbols and myths and claims to be the truth. “Restorative nostalgia has no use for

the signs of historical time—patina, ruins, cracks, imperfections”. 100 That is, the process

of reunification with the object of nostalgia requires a memory untainted by human

error. Restorative nostalgia is a kind of “cure” for the “ache of temporal distance and

displacement” 101 that creates temporal continuity and so brings the sufferer of nostalgia

closer to the lost subject. The object of restorative nostalgia is to bring back the past,

either on a small scale or a large one--such as a nation.

The idea of restorative nostalgia also appears as a tool in anticipating and

preventing a loss. It can be used as the “justification of empire” 102 or the feeling which

leads to the establishment of violent and repressive regimes. The predictive nostalgia of

a potential future loss of power results in a present strengthening of nationalism and

political strictness, which are seen as preventative measures. Ian Duncanson states that

this is a tendency in colonial areas, where the regime imposed over the precolonial

society is always both reacting to homesickness (separation from the homeland) and

attempting to thwart any potential future loss of power. 103

99 This is seen in Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Culture of Defeat, which examines the rise of
nationalism in France, Germany, and the American South following their greatest defeats. The
reaction to loss in these places was to rebuild a positive cultural narrative based on a rose-colored
view of prior strength and prestige.
100 Boym, Nostalgia, 45.
101 Boym, Nostalgia, 44.
102 Ian Duncanson, “Nostalgia and Empire”, Griffith Law Review 21 (2012), 24.
103
Duncanson, “Empire”, 24. “Nostalgia for a misty, lost world purged of doubt represents a particular
sentimental elision of the frequently brutal racist experiences of local populations here. As Chakravarty
writes of the Raj, 'imperialism, by virtue of its very nature was insular, racist and arrogant', 'the empire in
India had a surly and unpleasant image', softened in European memories by 'warm accounts of the high
noon of empire as well as soulful descriptions of the interplay of light and shadow during its twilight
years'.9 In one of nostalgia's meanings, then (the more popular meaning, perhaps) it helps to create a
kindly if melancholic retrospect on a past - which on closer examination, or seen from the perspective of
54
 Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is preoccupied not with the reclamation

of what was lost but the memory of loss itself. It is about “individual and cultural

memory” and is the realm of those “who resist the pressure of external efficiency and

take sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars.” 104

In contrast to restorative nostalgia, reflective nostalgia embraces the imperfections and

the fragmentary aspect of human memory, because its office is with the personal (if not

individual) experience of the passage of time. Because it emphasizes the

phenomenological aspect of time, reflective nostalgia could be related to Messianic

time. It deals with the mental space created by loss, but does not seek to reunite the two

fragments by painting the past in simple, perfect, black-and-white terms. It is not

unitary, and it is an experience of the people as opposed to being a tool of nationalism,

used by those in power to achieve a political or cultural goal.

Both of these conceptualizations of nostalgia are useful in analyzing Borges and

his game of time. With his vivid and loving accounts of the pampas, the orillas, and the

violent tenor 105 of life during the period of Buenos Aires’ development, it seems that he

is trying to bring the past directly to the reader: not just as literature, but as a

the other of the vision, is ethically dubious- and casts an acceptably positive spell on oppressors. In the
imperial context, it also signals a national grief for lost greatness.”
104 Boym, Nostalgia, 49.
105 J Huizinga opens his book The Waning of the Middle Ages with a chapter titled “The Violent
Tenor of Life”, which details many of the ways in which medieval life still had “the colours of a fairy-
story” (7). All emotions, says Huizinga, were stronger due to the fact that medieval life involved a
direct conflict of man vs. environment and man vs. superiors. Huizinga’s arguably nostalgic
portrayal of life in the middle ages is yet another example of the way that pre-capitalistic, pre-
”modern” life is idealized, even mythologized. After all, how many archetypal stories do we have of
kings, queens, and courtly life? How often is this time period romanticized to the point of losing
historical accuracy? The legendary aspect of medieval life can be attributed at least in part to the
fact that it has been placed into a different realm of time. Borges similarly presents the Buenos
Aires of Carriego as belonging to a different, slower temporality--that of the past. He states this in
the second footnote of the first chapter
55
constructed memory in moments of Messianic time. But what sets these moments apart

from the “thousands of days no longer known to memory”? 106 Borges idealizes the past

and condenses the aspects which form the stage of Carriego into condensed utopian

moments: despite the fact that he has no reservations in stating the poverty of Palermo,

its plague of criminals and the violence which took place under Rosas, he lavishes

attention on the (sometimes grotesquely) picturesque and the archetypal. This

coexistence of beauty and ugliness, both presented in loving detail, is seen in passages

such as this one:

To the west ran dirt alleys that grew progressively poorer in the direction
of the setting sun. Here and there a railroad shed or a shallow pit where
agave grew or an almost whispering breeze abruptly heralded the pampa.
Or perhaps one of those small unplastered houses... 107

Borges not only constructs an image of the environment, but he also paints the

characters who populated his Palermo, telling their stories. The influence of the literary

pantheon from his childhood 108 is clear:

The hero of this reckless Odyssey was the classic gaucho on the run from
the law, this time betrayed by a character who was a vindictive cripple
but who had no equal with the guitar. The story, the bit of it I have
salvaged, tells how the hero managed to escape from jail; how he was
compelled to wreak his vengeance in the space of a single night; how he
vainly searched for the traitor; how, as he roamed the moonlit streets, the
exhausted wind brought him snatches of the guitar; how he followed this
trail through the labyrinths and the shifting of the wind; how he came to
the far-off doorway where the traitor was playing his guitar; how,
elbowing his way through the onlookers, he lifted the cripple on his

106 Borges, Carriego, 41.

107
Borges, Carriego, 45.
108
“…those who populated my days…were Stevenson’s blind buccaneer…, and the traitor who left his
friend behind on the moon, and the time traveler…, and the genie imprisoned for centuries in a
Solomonic jar, and the Veiled Prophet of Khurasan…” Borges, Carriego, 33.
56
 knife; how he walked away in a daze, leaving behind, dead and silenced,
both informer and telltale guitar. 109

The Palermo of his childhood imagination is the construction of a boy who grew up

aware of the legends regarding life outside the fenced-in house, but innocent to its

reality. The way this is expressed in the original Spanish is particularly telling: “Cómo

fue aquel Palermo, o cómo hubiera sido hermoso que fuera?” he asks (“What was

Palermo like then, and how beautiful would it really have been?”). 110 The use of

pluperfect subjunctive expresses a feeling of doubt, and furthermore implies the ending

of the possibility for something that never really was. This becomes important when

relating Borges’ tendency to rewrite history to an evocation of nostalgia based on

personal experience.

The “past” (those moments in time which are being accessed) is still

contemporary in Borges’ Palermo; it is in the air, the people, and the buildings.

Considering this, and the fact that Borges already established that his setting is based on

imagination, we see the use of applying the concept of restorative nostalgia. The

recollection of archetypal imagery is backed by an undercurrent of very pointedly

designed imagery that frequently highlights the advent of the institutions of modernity.

I have led the reader to imagine a vast open area covering many blocks,
and although the corrals themselves disappeared in the 1870s, that image
typifies the place, which was always taken up with large properties--the
cemetery, the Rivadavia Hospital, the prison, the market, the municipal
cattle pens, the present day wool-scouring sheds...all surrounded by the
abject misery of downtrodden lives. 111

109
Borges, Carriego, 44-45.
110
Borges, Carriego, 33
111
Borges, Carriego, 47.
57
Here is an example of the way Borges juxtaposes what could be considered “pre-

modern” 112 Palermo and its incarnation as a developed area. It is an attempt to create

continuity, thus uniting the past and the present not in a flow of time, but in a non-linear

meeting of temporally dissimilar locations. This is not the synchronicity of the non-

synchronous as described by Ernst Bloch; it is a celebration of that very layering and

the coexistence of multiple non-convergent but mutually accessible temporal spaces. 113

First he states the way he has directed the reader to imagine a “vast open area” and

continues by saying that “that image typifies the place”. This is paradoxical, because

“the corrals themselves disappeared in the 1870s.” The superimposition of an image

from the past over what presently exists is, as Borges would say, “proof” both of

eternity and of the power of nostalgia to allow for the coexistence of these two times.

Not only does he use present tense, suggesting that the image lives on, he also

intersperses the edifices of the past with those that still exist--such as the “wool-

scouring sheds” and the cemetery.

Another example of the juxtaposition of past and present is found in the

previously cited introduction to Chapter IV, “Song of the Neighborhood.” 114 This

passage speaks to the development of nationalistic fervor as a way to mark an era, or the

feeling of an era (“…the astrological jubilation of the centenary of Argentine

independence was already as dead as its miles and miles of blue bunting…” 115, and

beyond this, hearkens again to Didi-Huberman’s idea of survival, especially in the

112
I use this term not as a value judgment or as the assessment that a place needs to change, but rather as
a description of the nature of the infrastructure of a particular place at a particular time.

114
Found on p. 32 of this thesis and page 82 of Evaristo Carriego.
115
Borges, Carriego, 82.
58
context of nostalgia. The existence of indelible cracks in the façade of the modern

allows for enduring moments that carry the past into the present. “Admitting that the

present bears the mark of multiple pasts means, above all, to allow for the

indestructibility of an imprint of time, or times, on the forms proper to our present

life.” 116 Borges highlights the ways the past punctures the present, sometimes appearing

even as a dead body: “...local toughs still tangled with each other, and now and then a

man’s face got marked up or a dead hoodlum would be found at dawn, contemptuous,

with a slashed belly.” 117 The surviving image of the past still manifests as the knife

fights of the compadrito who kept the culto del coraje alive. This enduring liveliness of

the past could be considered anachronistic, but Borges stands to argue that the very

notion of anachronism is flawed: if something is happening in the moment, it is present,

regardless of what era it appears to characterize.

This excerpt, which explodes with local imagery and neatly presents the

haphazard existence of enduring traditions and habits between the cracks of modernity,

fits Boym’s description of restorative nostalgia as a method of addressing the

“wholeness and continuity” 118 of history which puts at ease the sufferer of nostalgia.

The fabrication of a linear flow reassures the sufferer that time is whole, and makes

fragments into a collage of archetypal images. In this case, the nostalgia felt is the

dissociation that results from the fragmentation of eternity (or homogeneity) into

unitary time, which manifests as the thin façade of difference between past and present.

Modernity resulted in the bounding of boundless time, spatially indicated by the

116
Didi-Huberman, “Surviving”, 63.
117
Borges, Carriego, 82.
118
Boym, Nostalgia, 45.
59
“haphazard centuries-long encroachment of Buenos Aires upon Palermo, which was at

that time little more than an ill-defined patch of marshy ground in the hinterland.” 119

Much of Borges’ staging of Carriego’s life and works is preoccupied with the

juxtaposition of the pre-historic, pre-modern space of Palermo with the advent of

technology and institutions. This is both a temporal and spatial wound, and nostalgia

serves to restore continuity and create a window through which the past and the

periphery are accessible.

Restoration of the past in any form, including accessing it through memory,

involves playing with modernity and its temporalities. Phenomenological time, the

framework of nostalgia, involves rapid movement in various temporal directions. This

experience contrasts with calendrical time, as it defies unitary progressive succession.

The contrast between the experience of the passage of time and the supposed reality of

its existence outside the sphere of feeling causes cognitive dissonance, confusion at not

knowing what is real. This is a fundamental aspect of nostalgia: making sense of time in

a way contrary to the unitary measurement of the hegemony; accessing memories in

such a way that they become eternal, mythic. Nostalgia could be described as an

emotional tool of time-travel. It is the term given to phenomenological time-travel

within the frame of reference of modernity, which functions on an implicit belief in the

truth of historical time. Nostalgia is a coping mechanism implemented almost

universally in societies that have experienced radical breaks in cultural continuity, such

as wars, violent colonization, and collective traumas. “The nostalgic desires to obliterate

history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space,

119 Borges, Carriego, 38.

60
refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.” 120

It is a denial of the passage of time, but also an acceptance: by characterizing nostalgia,

the chronology of time is reinforced, because otherwise an individual experience of the

past would be simply described as an experience of “now” and would not be seen as

symptomatic of separation from a moment in time.

The idea that Borges is creating continuity by breaking linearity, creating access

points into Messianic moments located in layers buried deeply in linear time, suggests

the need for a reconsideration of what restorative means in this context. In historical

time, restoration is a re-placement of moments into the temporal locations that they

correspond to: namely, past, present, or future. The sentiment of nostalgia can serve to

reinforce the distance between past, present, and future on a linear chronology.

However, if Borges is using nostalgia to create continuity, yet also expanding upon

linear time by breaking it into a multiplicity of temporalities, then the nostalgia

expressed is the emotional reformulation of the non-historical non-modern space of

Buenos Aires in the late 1800s and early 1900s. More than that, it is an attempt to

reconcile that non-modern space with the ethos of modernity. The non-modern is seen

in fragmented vestiges of the past, very alive but no longer whole. As seen throughout

the book, the formulation of a linear narrative out of two disjoint timelines often serves

only to create a sense of deeper fragmentation and dissimilarity, which is then

fabricated again into a narrative that is clearly a façade. It is a cinematic unification that

relies on imagery and the projection of supposedly collective understanding of the

120 Boym, Nostalgia, XV.

61
myths of the city, belying the dissonance of contemporaneity. I refer again to the

passage in which Borges describes history as though it were a film montage:

The best approach, if we were to adopt the techniques of filmmaking,

would be to present a continuous flow of vanishing images: a mule train
laden with wine casks, the less tame animals blinkered; a long, flat
stretch of water on which a few willow leaves float; a phantasmal
wandering soul high on his horse, fording flooded streams; the open
range, where absolutely nothing happens; the relentless hoofprints of a
herd of cattle being driven to the Northside stockyards; a cowhand
(silhouetted against the dawn) who dismounts from his spent horse to slit
its broad throat; smoke from a fire dispersing into the air. 121

To Borges, reality is fragmentary: it is “a stream of flashes punctuated by ironies,

surprises, and portents as strange as surprises.” 122 This reality is a product of the

multiplicity of timelines that complicate the modern condition. Unity, however, can be

found within individual images, which can reclaim a type of eternity in which

phenomenological time stops. These moments, which exist as fragments but provide

wholeness, are those which nostalgia enables access to.

The “reclamation” (and I say this with quotations because reclamation relies on

the truth of loss based on chronological progression, which I argue cannot be taken for

granted) of past moments through detailed and archetypal constructions of visceral

spaces, akin to memories, reinforces the idea that linearity can be subverted through

subjective perception. Thus nostalgia is not only a feeling, but also a mode of

expressing an experience of time.

The paradox of nostalgia serving a double function must be addressed as well.

Within historical time, nostalgia is an illness that prevents the sufferer from living in the

121 Borges, Carriego, 38.

122
Borges, Carriego, 38.
62
present, reducing him or her to a life of fantasies. 123 However, in the alternate timelines

constructed by Borges, nostalgia appears as a proof of the circular and eternal nature of

time. The same moment can be lived subjectively over and over, repeating itself in

endless circles, while at the same time the “now that flows” continues to make

history. 124 Nostalgia is the affective tool which enables the experience of wholeness and

eternity, isolating moments outside linear time which have slipped through the cracks of

modernity and still contain pieces of time lost to a historical chronology.

123 Boym, Nostalgia, XIV. “In the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable
disease, akin to the common cold...By the twenty-first century, the passing ailment turned into the
incurable modern condition.”
124
Boethius: Nunc fluens facit tempus, nunc stans facit aeternitatum. (The now that flows makes time, the
now that stands makes eternity.)
63
 Conclusion

I. Recapitulation: The significance of the connections between modernity, time,

and nostalgia

Modernity is a conceptual framework that describes a particular way of

establishing infrastructure (cities and transportation systems), economics (capital-based

economies and massive industry), and culture (a devaluing of traditional or indigenous

expression in favor of cosmopolitan European styles). Because of the way it is

structured, it results in value judgments that are based on a supposedly inevitable

teleology called progress, in which everything eventually acquires the trappings of the

“modern”. Modernity, the state of being modern, relies on the continual renewal of

categories which facilitates the illusion of an eternal present. Within Evaristo Carriego,

modernity manifests overtly as the city of Buenos Aires with its institutions, buildings,

streets, and the general rapidity of life. This book was written under the guise of

biography in order to chronicle the era in which Palermo, then part of the outskirts of

Buenos Aires, was in between pampas and city (both spatially and in terms of temporal

development).

The teleology of modernity has become so internalized with globalization and

the spread of capitalism that it often overruns alternate timelines and ways of being, for

example, the culto de coraje which Borges references in describing the ways the outer

slums were before Carriego “rewrote” them. The unitary and normalizing effect of

progress—that is, its inevitable ordering of time onto a chronological scale of inferior

past to superior future--forces the narratives of subjective and non-capitalist time into a

peripheral, almost invisible position. These temporalities, which are counternarratives to

64
modernity, involve the legitimizing of nonlinear movement both forwards and

backwards in time, as well as the expression of eternity. Eternity also subverts historical

time, because it defies the notion of arrival at an endpoint.

Borges’ text also shows the temporality of modernity: though the structure and

ethos of the book is fragmentary, it highlights the weight of the “forward motion” which

pulled peripheral areas like Palermo in the 1800s into the cosmopolitan whirlwind of

the city—the future. This temporality is countered by eternity, which appears as

moments that exist outside the frame of the passage of time. Eternity takes the form of

repetition, which denies temporal distance and establishes sameness between moments

that are separated on a linear timeline. There is an aspect of recollection to these

moments, which are called into the present by mentally and emotionally accessing a

time past.

Nostalgia has more than one function, as it is both an individual and a universal

experience. While it can be used to reclaim the past, or reflect on it, I argue that

nostalgia could actually be a tool for breaking the linearity of historical time. In the

context of Benjamin’s ideas of homogeneous empty time and Messianic time, nostalgia

has the potential to be seen as the emotional tool which allows moments of Messianic

time to puncture through the meaninglessness of homogenous empty time. Through

recollections and moments in which the past inhabits the present, in the way that Borges

describes Carriego repeating himself in the daily patterns of all of us, or the way that

truco players “take on” their ancestral, archetypal roles.

The articulation of nostalgia as a vehicle is dependent on the role of time as a

medium which can be traveled through in any direction. Borges allows for this

65
directional mobility within the context of modernity, which demands unitary forward

motion (progress). Evaristo Carriego is unique among the works of Borges because it

openly relies on the city of Buenos Aires as a structure. Many of Borges’ later works

lose this vernacular connection and take place in conceptual or imagined realms.

Carriego allows a reader of Borges to see the national context in which he was formed

as a writer and thinker, and to explore the beginnings of what would become complex,

“universal” themes in his later writings. It can be seen as a foundational history both of

Borges’ body of work and of himself as a person. His articulations of time and

modernity provide a lens through which emerging postcolonial thought can be viewed,

complicating the dichotomies of colonialism and modernity. Evaristo Carriego provides

a spatiotemporal model that weaves together fragmented pieces of history with

contemporary ideologies, all under the guise of biography. It is a mirror image of an

imaginary history of Buenos Aires that presents a linear vision of time and the advent of

progress, but also opens the door for a multiplicity of subjectively experienced

timelines.

66
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