Abstract:66 L HACEDOR, Jorge Luis Borges's two-page story about Homer, is a biography paradoxically devoid of biographical data. Names and dates-the elements that make up an individual's specificity-are missin...66 L HACEDOR, Jorge Luis Borges's two-page story about Homer, is a biography paradoxically devoid of biographical data. Names and dates-the elements that make up an individual's specificity-are missing. The Maker could be, and for that matter is, anyone. The reader identifies the character as Homer only when the Iliad and the Odyssey are mentioned at the end of the text: el rumor de las Odiseas e Iliadas que era su destino cantar y dejar resonando c6ncavamente en la memoria humana (Obras 2:160). Quite appropriately, the author's identity proceeds from his work. Dispensing with the contingent flow of events, the Borgesian biography typically condenses a human life into one symbolic moment of truth, in which the character undergoes a radical change of fate. In El hacedor, the realization and acceptance of his blindness turn the anonymous character into Homer, the mortal man into the immortal author. He encounters mortality, he turns his gaze inward, and from his intimate memories he creates a universal work of art. He thus achieves immortality through a confrontation with death. In El inmortal a man embarks on a journey in search of immortality, finds it at a climactic turning point, and then seeks death. Both stories are about Homer, and one, therefore, can serve as a clue to the other. In El Inmortal, the fictional biography becomes a voyage through literature; in El hacedor it is a platonic myth of literary creation. Both protagonists appear to be allegories of the whom Homer has come to epitomize. To this quintessential author, the Romantics added Shakespeare, to whom a similar cult was attached. Borges's own texts about Shakespeare, De alguien a nadie and Everything and Nothing, mirror his Homeric biographies, while they also address more explicitly the Romantics' magnification of theRead More
Publication Year: 1995
Publication Date: 1995-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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