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Magical Realist Biographies: Jorge Luis Borges

284px-BorgesJORGE FRANCISCO ISIDORO LUIS BORGES 

Born:  August 24, 1899

Died:   June 14, 1986

A little known fact:

Jorge Luis Borges supported the purging of Peronists from the government and the dismantlement of the former President’s welfare state after the overthrow of President Perón in 1955. He sharply criticized the Communists for opposing these measures in lectures and in print—and this opposition to the Party led to the loss of his longtime love interest, Argentine Communist Estela Canto.

A much better known fact:

Juan Perón began transforming Argentina and ideological critics were dismissed from government positions in 1946. Authorities informed Borges that he was being “promoted” from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to inspector of poultry and rabbits at the municipal market, explaining, “Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?”  Borges resigned from his government post the following day.

 

Jorge Luis Borges’s most well-known books, Fictions (1944) and The Aleph (1949) are connected short story collections with multiple themes, ranging from dreams, labyrinths, fictional writers, philosophy, religion, God and infinity. He also contributed to philosophical literature, the fantasy genre, magical realism genre, poetry, and was a prolific essayist. On Writing is a recent collection of his best essays, reviews, articles, prologues, and capsule biographies.

 

The Borges family educated Jorge at home in Buenos Aires until the age of eleven in a bilingual environment in Spanish and English. His father gave up practicing law due to failing eyesight, and in 1914, moved to Geneva, Switzerland for treatment. Jorge earned his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918 and the family lived the next three years in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid.

 

Borges began his literary career in 1921 when he collaborated with fellow poets on “Ultra Manifesto” in which they advocated a new poetic movement in Spain—the avant-garde, anti-Modernist Ultraist literary movement.

 

On returning to Argentina in 1921, Borges published his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. From 1924 to 1933 he was very prolific and he founded several literary magazines. The editor of On Writing believes that the earliest reflection of his mode of story telling (ultimately labeled “magical realism”) was in his explanation of the interweaving of the marvelous with the everyday in “Stories from Turkestan” written in 1926.

 

At that time, he also began several important friendships with women:  Norah Lange, Victoria Ocampo, and Elsa Astete. Norah Lange was the darling of the Buenos Aires avant-garde; her home became the center of weekend literary salon. Borges was fond of Norah, but she took an interest in a literary rival of his and broke his heart for a time. Victoria Ocampo, was a writer, editor, and translator who promoted Borges’s writing through Sur, a literary magazine she founded in 1930. Elsa Astete was a 20-year old whom Borges met in 1928 and she engaged in a brief romance with Borges before suddenly marrying another man. Forty years later, however, Elsa Astete Millán became Borges’s first wife.

 

Borges was unable to support himself as a writer when his own vision began to fail in his early thirties. So, he began a career as a public lecturer and put political essays behind him for a while. His writing took new directions both in topics and his fundamental style.  He published another collection of essays, Discusión, in 1932 about a more recent, non-literary passion–the magical realm of cinema. 

 

His first short story was “Streetcorner Man,” inspired by the death of a compadrito and rendered with descriptive, gritty realism with a twist at the end. He published it under the pseudonym of “Francisco Bustos,”one of his ancestors, and the story was a tremendous success—much to his surprise and puzzlement for years afterward.  

 

In 1933 Borges began a series of sketches published together in 1935 as A Universal History of Infamy, taking characters and concepts from other published works and “re-inventing” them.  He blended fact and fiction, created mythical resonance, and created in many of the stories a surrealistic authenticity. Years later Latin American “magical realists” would cite Borges as the central inspiration for their work. However, in 1935 he was really only beginning the heart of his career when he wrote the prototype “Borgesian” story, “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” a review of a fictional novel. Today, literary critics such as Harold Bloom often characterize stories as either Chekovian or Borgesian. And Borges would explain the difference in terms of their views of causality.

 

Borges’ ailing father became completely dependent on his mother and Borges needed to find a source of steady income. So, in 1937 he found the position already alluded to as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané Branch of the Municipal Library, classifying and cataloging the library’s holdings—included some of his own work.  In 1938 he had a minor accident, sustaining a wound that ultimately became infected; he became ill and hallucinated for a week. Then, after an operation in the hospital, he developed septicemia and slipped between life and death for a month.

 

After those episodes, Borges’s stories increasingly mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery and he began to write political articles again—not supporting a single political system. He criticized broad trends of the age:  Anti-Semitism, Nazism, and fascism—and that caused him serious concerns when fascists came to power in the forties.

 

Being fired from his library post in 1946 proved to be a blessing because that situation forced him to find a position as a lecturer on American and English literature, traveling across Argentina and Uruguay. He was paid much better and he adapted well to the new life style well—though he could not conceal his disappointment in the direction taken by his country.

 

Then in 1955 he was appointed to serve as director of the National Public Library.  His stoicism was as resonant as his stories:  “I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness.” He was determined to make the library into a cultural center, starting a program of lectures and resurrecting the library’s journal. The following year he was appointed to the professorship of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

 

He was completely blind by his late fifties and he never learned braille. Scholars have suggested that as a result of his progressive blindness, he was prompted to create innovative literary symbols through his imagination.

 

In 1961 Borges earned international stature when he received the Prix International that he had to share with Samuel Beckett that year. His international standing was greatly strengthened later in the 1960s because his works became available in English and because of the Latin American Boom in literature that attended the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

 

Borges was a political conservative who dismissed Marxism and who also rejected the politics of cultural identity that was popular in Latin America for some time. As a universalist interested in world literature, he found himself totally out of step with Peronist Populist nationalism.  

 

When Borges traveled internationally, his personal assistant, María Kodama, a former student, often accompanied him. In April 1986, a few months before he died of liver cancer in Geneva, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay—a common practice of Argentines circumventing the Argentine laws regarding divorce. As his widow and heir, she gained control over his work and her administration of his estate resulted in commissioning of new translations by Andrew Hurley that have become the standard translations in English.

 

The philosophical term “Borgesian Conundrum” is the ontological question of “whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him.” Borges, in “Kafka and His Precursors,” posed this when he wrote about works written before Kafka’s:

 

“In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

 

Looking back, the critic Ángel Flores, “the first to use the term magical realism” for literature in 1955 (art critic Franz Roh used the phrase in 1925), calls the beginning of the movement the release of Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy in 1935. It is likely that Flores means the magical realism movement in Latin America since Kafka is central to the formulation of the Borgesian Conundrum and is referenced explicitly by several of the five leading novelists in the Latin American Boom while acknowledging their debt to Borges.

 

A FEW OF BORGES’S QUOTES

“If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.”

 

“To be in love is to create a religion whose god is fallible.”

 

“Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition.”

 

BORGES’ NOTABLE WORK

Fictions (1944), The Aleph (1949), Labyrinths (1962); Movies:  Invasión (1969), The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), The Others (1974)

 

BORGES’ AWARDS

Prix International (1961)

Jerusalem Prize (1971)

Edgar Allan Poe Award (Mystery Writers of America, 1976)

Balzan Prize (Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism, 1980)

Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca (1980)

Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1980)

Legion of Honor (France, 1983)

 

 

SOURCES

Jorge Luis Borges.  The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969.  New York:  E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970.

Andrew Hurley (trans).  Jorge Luis Borges:  Collected Fictions.

Suzanne Jill Levine (ed.) Jorge Luis Borges:  On Writing.  New York:  Penguin Books, 2010.

Edwin Williamson. Borges: A Life. New York: Viking, 2004. 

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_biography.html

 

Richard Perkins is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program.  He is working on an historical novel and is revising a collection of connected stories and a novella.  

 

 

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Kurt Vonnegut: Novelist, Essayist, Satirist, Black Humorist, Science Fiction Writer, Humanist, and Magical Realist

Vonnegut_image 4KURT VONNEGUT, Jr. 

Born:  11 November 1922  

Died:  11 April 2007

Little known fact:

When Kurt Vonnegut died, the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department in New York put their American flag at half staff and rang the fire bell used to honor fallen firefighting brothers. His name is still recorded in an old active fire-fighters roster.

 Better-known fact:

Vonnegut, while a prisoner of war, experienced the Allied firebombing of the city of Dresden in February 1945. The Germans pressed Vonnegut and other POW laborers into cleaning up the carnage, an experience that inspired his famous Slaughterhouse-Five and spawned central themes for at least six other works as well.

***

Kurt Vonnegut’s inclusion in this column stems from his novel Mother Night—a novel about shades of gray in loyalty and treason. He paints realistic settings and characters and there are momentary distortions (for the characters and the reader) in perceptions of events and people that are not decomposed or explained. He was a cross-genre writer whose early identification with science fiction resulted in sometimes labeling him a genre writer until critical acclaim for Slaughter House Five forced reconsideration of earlier work.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana to third-generation German-American parents from very successful families. Kurt, as a child of the Depression, saw the economic decline of his family and the emotional consequences of the surrender of a lifestyle that included servants and family vacations by steamer to Europe.

Vonnegut entered Cornell University, majoring in chemistry and working in a commercial operation as the Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut reversed his public anti-war stance after Pearl Harbor, dropped out of Cornell, and enlisted in the United States Army. 

Vonnegut prepared for duty as a member of a reconnaissance squad. He went home on leave for Mother’s Day weekend in 1944 to surprise his family, and his mother, struggling to adjust to middle class life, chose that Mothers’ Day to commit suicide. Mothers in his fiction tend to be morbid, crazy or suicidal according to his biographer and self-destruction is present in most of his works in some way according to well-established critics. 

Kurt fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was captured performing his scouting duties. His internment from December 1944 to May 1945 as a POW included another major formative experience alluded to above that colored his writing for more than fifty years.

After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, and wrote about their courtship in several short stories. He entered the University of Chicago to study anthropology and began to write for several magazines in the early 1950s. His first science fiction story was “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” for Collier’s Weekly. 

In the 1960s the Vonneguts lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where Kurt worked at a Saab dealership and tried to concentrate on his fiction. They had three children of their own and they adopted and raised three of his sister’s children after they lost their parents. He accepted a teaching position in the Iowa Writing Workshop at the point where he was about to give up writing in order to support his large family. The Vonneguts separated in 1970 and later divorced. Vonnegut and his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz, adopted and raised a child together.

According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the University of Chicago, having rejected his first thesis, accepted his novel Cat’s Cradle as his thesis and awarded him an M.A. in 1971.

Themes of strife, brutality, and spiritual loss developed in his first two novels, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, continue into Mother Night. In an interview at the University of Iowa after his arrival, he said this exploration of inner space was more personally disturbing to him because of his war experience combined with his German heritage.

The fictive world of Mother Night is the mind of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who is a successful writer and playwright in Germany before World War II, who, as the war approaches, rejects the notion he must take a moral stand. However, since a moral response is required once war arrived, Campbell finds a solution (offered by American intelligence services before the war started) in the dual allegiances required for espionage.

In unwinding this confessional story, Vonnegut provides us with a spy story, a revenge drama, a romance, and parodies of several other forms. The overall impact suggests an infinite number of connections of persons within a person and places within places as seen in the techniques of Jorge Luis Borges. The reader concludes that these convergences blur the edges between life and art—precisely the dilemma and the indictment of Campbell during and after the war. To be any more explicit here would be to ruin a perfectly good read about the relationship between what we imagine ourselves to be and what we become.

 

A FEW OF VONNGUT’S MANY NOTABLE QUOTES

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ . . . and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

“We must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

 

VONNEGUT’S NOTABLE WORK 

Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1962), Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973), Jailbird (1979), Dead-Eye Dick (1982), and Galápagos (1985). 

 

VONNEGUT’S AWARDS

Writers Guild of America 1960 — Script, 30 Minutes or Less in Program Length

Guggenheim Fellowship 1967 

Hugo Award 1973 — Best Dramatic Presentation Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) 

 

SOURCES

Richard Giannone. Vonnegut:  A Preface to His Novels. Port Washington, N.Y.:  Kennikat Press, 1977.

Charles Shields. And So It Goes:  Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. New York:  Henry Holt and Company, 2011.

http://www.avclub.com/article/15-things-kurt-vonnegut-said-better-than-anyone-el-1858/Robinson, Ryan, Modell, Murray & Gordon April 24, 2007.

  

Richard Perkins is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program.  He is working on an historical novel and is revising a collection of connected stories.  

 

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Magical Realism Biographies: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Perkins MR1 image_Yellowwp_med

 

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

            Born: 3 July 1860  

            Died: 17 August 1935

 

Little known fact:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the great niece of Henry Ward Beecher (clergyman and social reformer) and his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

 

Better-known fact:           

Gilman’s Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Relations (1898) became a best seller and made her one of very few commercially successful women writers.

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s inclusion in this column stems from her famous story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) because it is a frequently cited example of American magical realism produced before the Twentieth Century—particularly in debates in which magical realism is claimed as the domain of Latin American authors in the Twentieth Century.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Mary Fitch Westcott and Frederick Beecher Perkins, a librarian and writer. She was an intense promoter of women’s suffrage and argued in speech and print for women’s social and economic independence. She wrote a number of acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction including poems, plays, essays, critiques, short stories and novels still studied today for their relevancy.

Gilman attended the Rhode Island School of Design and subsequently taught art and designed greeting cards. She married a fellow artist, Charles Walter Stetson, in 1884 and had a daughter in 1885. Gilman entered a sanitarium in Philadelphia in 1887, suffering from depression and neurasthenia. Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell (alluded to in “The Yellow Wallpaper”) prescribed a `rest cure’ that discouraged physical or intellectual stimulation and emphasized living ‘as domestic a life as possible.’ After trying this oppressive regimen for three months, Gilman refused to continue, separated from her husband, and moved to California around 1888. She became involved with social reform and feminist groups, and her resulting national and international presence made her an historical figure as well as a literary figure.

In 1900, she married her cousin George Houghton Gilman, a lawyer in New York City. In 1932 Charlotte was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, and by 1934 she had moved back to California. Her husband died suddenly in 1934, and she died in late 1935 by a self-administered overdose of chloroform.

 

“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) is a first person narrative of the descent into madness of a young woman:

“There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!”           

 

In “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” fifteen years later, Gilman explains:

“When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.”

“Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and — begging my pardon — had I been there?”

“Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.”

 

When we consider a work of magical realism, what is actually happening in the Newtonian physics-based world is usually called into question, and the pivot of the story is often contingent on the acceptance or resolution of the ambiguity between one or more working perceptions inside individual characters and inside individual readers. Are there forces at work outside the sensory perception of humans?  Or is there just a lot of energy being expended resolving the differences in perception that is being formed in the mind as the brain processes the sensory inputs?  To have a “beholder” linger over such questions is one many writers and artists seek as objectives.

The concepts of the “beholder’s share” and the use of ambiguity in art and literature are well developed—along with the recent advances in the sciences of the mind and the brain—by Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel in The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present. These notions and this science are useful tools for decomposing magical realism.

In her article about why she wrote it, Gilman removes any ambiguity about her intent, reinforces her activist stances, and makes it clear she meant it to be disturbing enough to make readers linger over it.

“It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

 

GILMAN’S NOTABLE WORK

“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Relations (1898), Concerning Children (1900), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Suffrage Song and Verses (1911), The Man Made World or Our Androcentric Culture (1911), Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), With Her in Ourland (1916), His Religion and Hers in 1923, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935).

 

GILMAN’S AWARDS

In 1994 Gilman was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York.

 

SOURCES

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper,“ The Forerunner October 1913.

Eric R. Kandel. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York:  Random House, 2012.

http://www.online-literature.com/charlotte-perkins-gilman/C.D. Merriman. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman:  A Biography,” Jalic Inc., 2006. 

 

Richard Perkins is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program.  He is working on an historical novel and is revising a collection of connected stories and a novella.