Friends of Borges

Fervour of Borges

[ In the upper photo Borges in his Mother's room which, after her death in 1975 aged 99 years, Borges kept intact until his own death in 1986.]

Confessions to understand the Eros of Borges:

"... (Mother) She has always been a companion to me -especially in later years when I was blind- and an understanding and forgiven friend. For years, until recently, she handled all my secretarial work, answering letters, reading to me, taking down my dictation, and also travelling with me in many occasions both at home and abroad. It was she, though I never gave a thought to it at the time, who quietly and effectively fostered my literary career."
On Leonor Acevedo widow Borges, fragment from An Autobiographical Essay by Jorge Luis Borges (written near 1970 for The New Yorker with the assistance of Norman Thomas Di Giovanni.)

Below: Georgie & Adolfito(circa 1934)
an everyday lifelong "English" friendship

" ; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful"'
Two English Poems' by J L Borges, 1934

"II Samuel 2, 26 : I am distressed for thee, my brother, Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: to know thy love was to me most wonderful, passing the love of women."
'The intruder' by Jorge Luis Borges

"At times he (Shakespeare = the other, the self) would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered"'
'Everything and Nothing' by Jorge Luis Borges

"Hay un Borges personal y un Borges público, personaje que me desagrada mucho, quien suele contestar a reportajes y aparecer en el cinematógrafo y en la televisión. Yo soy el Borges íntimo, es decir: creo que no he cambiado desde que era niño, salvo que cuando era niño no sabía expresarme"
J L Borges

Borges entrevistado por Neustandt:... "agregó en voz baja: si llego a decir que quisiera ver a un hombre ¿sabe lo que dirían de mí...?".

Books & articles we recommend:

David Foster Wallace ravages Williamson's sychophantic "biography" "Borges: a life" [not his but a work to instigate a culte of his false widow Miss Kodama]: 'Borges on the Couch' [of Procuste]:
By DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
There's an unhappy paradox about literary biographies. The majority of readers who will be interested in a writer's bio, especially one as long and exhaustive as Edwin Williamson's ''Borges: A Life,'' will be admirers of the writer's work. They will therefore usually be idealizers of that writer and perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy. Part of the appeal of the writer's work for these fans will be the distinctive stamp of that writer's personality, predilections, style, particular tics and obsessions -- the sense that these stories were written by this author and could have been done by no other.* And yet it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire. And the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling usually is. In the present case, the Jorge Luis Borges who emerges in Williamson's book -- a vain, timid, pompous mama's boy, given for much of his life to dithery romantic obsessions -- is about as different as one can get from the limpid, witty, pansophical, profoundly adult writer we know from his stories. Rightly or no, anyone who reveres Borges as one of the best and most important fiction writers of the last century will resist this dissonance, and will look, as a way to explain and mitigate it, for obvious defects in Williamson's life study. The book won't disappoint them.
Edwin Williamson is an Oxford don and esteemed Hispanist whose ''Penguin History of Latin America'' is a small masterpiece of lucidity and triage. It is therefore unsurprising that his ''Borges'' starts strong, with a fascinating sketch of Argentine history and the Borges family's place within it. For Williamson, the great conflict in the Argentine national character is that between the ''sword'' of civilizing European liberalism and the ''dagger'' of romantic gaucho individualism, and he argues that Borges's life and work can be properly understood only in reference to this conflict, particularly as it plays out in his childhood. In the 19th century, grandfathers on both sides of his family distinguished themselves in important battles for South American independence from Spain and the establishment of a centralized Argentine government, and Borges's mother was obsessed with the family's historical glory. Borges's father, a man stunted by the heroic paternal shadow in which he lived, evidently did things like give his son an actual dagger to use on bullies at school, and later sent him to a brothel for devirgination. The young Borges failed both these ''tests,'' the scars of which marked him forever and show up all over the place in his fiction, Williamson thinks.
It is in these claims about personal stuff encoded in the writer's art that the book's real defect lies. In fairness, it's just a pronounced case of a syndrome that seems common to literary biographies, so common that it might point to a design flaw in the whole enterprise. The big problem with ''Borges: A Life'' is that Williamson is an atrocious reader of Borges's work; his interpretations amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism. You can see why this problem might be intrinsic to the genre. A biographer wants his story to be not only interesting but literarily valuable.** In order to ensure this, the bio has to make the writer's personal life and psychic travails seem vital to his work. The idea is that we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others. It works well on Kafka -- Borges's only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he's often compared -- because Kafka's fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka's psyche. But Borges's stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments†; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness -- ''to be incorporated,'' as Borges puts it, ''like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.'' One reason for this is that Borges is a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neoplatonist -- human thought, behavior and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding. Biography-wise, then, we have a strange situation in which Borges's individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal.
''Borges: A Life,'' which is strongest in its treatments of Argentine history and politics,†† is at its very worst when Williamson is discussing specific pieces in light of Borges's personal life. Unfortunately, he discusses just about everything Borges ever wrote. Williamson's critical thesis is clear: ''Bereft of a key to their autobiographical context, no one could have grasped the vivid significance these pieces actually had for their author.'' And in case after case, the resultant readings are shallow, forced and distorted -- as indeed they must be if the biographer's project is to be justified. Random example: ''The Wait,'' a marvelous short-short that appears in the 1949 story collection ''The Aleph,'' takes the form of a layered homage to Hemingway, gangster movies and the Buenos Aires underworld. An Argentine mobster, in hiding from another mobster and living under the pursuer's name, dreams so often of his killers' appearance in his bedroom that, when the assassins finally come for him, he ''gestured at them to wait, and he turned over and faced the wall, as though going back to sleep. Did he do that to awaken the pity of the men that killed him, or because it's easier to endure a terrifying event than to imagine it, wait for it endlessly -- or (and this is perhaps the most likely possibility) so that his murderers would become a dream, as they had already been so many times, in that same place, at that same hour?''
The distant interrogative ending -- a Borges trademark -- becomes an inquisition into dreams, reality, guilt, augury and mortal terror. For Williamson, though, the real key to the story's significance appears to be that ''Borges had failed to win the love of Estela Canto. . . . With Estela gone, there seemed nothing to live for,'' and he represents the story's ending all and only as a depressed whimper: ''When his killers finally track him down, he just rolls over meekly to face the wall and resigns himself to the inevitable.''
It is not merely that Williamson reads every last thing in Borges's oeuvre as a correlative of the author's emotional state. It is that he tends to reduce all of Borges's psychic conflicts and personal problems to the pursuit of women. Williamson's theory here involves two big elements: Borges's inability to stand up to his domineering mother,‡ and his belief, codified in a starry-eyed reading of Dante, that ''it was the love of a woman that alone could deliver him from the hellish unreality he shared with his father and inspire him to write a masterpiece that would justify his life.'' Story after story is thus interpreted by Williamson as a coded dispatch on Borges's amorous career, which career turns out to be sad, timorous, puerile, moony and (like most people's) extremely boring. The formula is applied equally to famous pieces, such as '' 'The Aleph' (1945), whose autobiographical subtext alludes to his thwarted love for Norah Lange,'' and to lesser-known stories like ''The Zahir'':
''The torments described by Borges in this story . . . are, of course, displaced confessions of the extremity of his plight. Estela [Canto, who'd just broken up with him] was to have been the 'new Beatrice,' inspiring him to create a work that would be 'the Rose without purpose, the Platonic, intemporal Rose,' but here he was again, sunk in the unreality of the labyrinthine self, with no prospect now of contemplating the mystic Rose of love.''
Thin though this kind of explication is, it's preferable to the reverse process by which Williamson sometimes presents Borges's stories and poems as ''evidence'' that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson's claim, for instance, that in 1934, ''after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges . . . came to the brink of killing himself'' is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason -- was the Flaubert who wrote ''Madame Bovary'' eo ipso suicidal? -- but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges's interior life: ''A poem called 'The Cyclical Night' . . . which he published in La Nacion on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of a personal crisis''; ''In the extracts from this unfinished poem . . . we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.'' Bluck.
Again, it is primarily because of Borges's short stories that anyone will care enough to read about his life. And while Williamson spends a lot of time detailing the explosive success that Borges enjoyed in middle age, after the 1961 International Publishers' Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett) introduced his work to audiences in the United States and Europe,‡‡ there is little in his book about just why Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is an important enough fiction writer to deserve such a microscopic bio. The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself.‡‡‡ His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.
And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it. This is why, for instance, it is so irksome to see Williamson describe ''The Immortal'' and ''The Writing of the God'' -- two of the greatest, most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever, next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O'Connor seem pallid and crude -- as respective products of Borges's ''many-layered distress'' and ''indifference to his fate'' after various idealized girlfriends dump him. Stuff like this misses the whole point. Even if Williamson's claims are true, the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant.

*Of course, Borges's famous ''Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote' '' makes sport of this very conviction, just as his later ''Borges and I'' anticipates and refutes the whole idea of a literary biography. The fact that his fiction is always several steps ahead of its interpreters is one of the things that make Borges so great, and so modern.

**Actually, these two agendas dovetail, since the only reason anybody's interested in a writer's life is because of his literary importance. (Think about it -- the personal lives of most people who spend 14 hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill rides to hear about.)

†This is part of what gives Borges's stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures' earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoetic), which quality in turn helps explain how they can be at once so abstract and so moving.

††The biography is probably most valuable in its account of Borges's political evolution. A common bit of literary gossip about Borges is that the reason he wasn't awarded a Nobel Prize was his supposed support for Argentina's ghastly authoritarian juntas of the 1960's and 70's. From Williamson, though, we learn that Borges's politics were actually far more complex and tragic. The child of an old liberal family, and an unabashed leftist in his youth, Borges was one of the first and bravest public opponents of European fascism and the rightist nationalism it spawned in Argentina. What changed him was Peron, whose creepy right-wing populist dictatorship aroused such loathing in Borges that he allied himself with the repressively anti-Peron Revolucion Libertadora. Borges's situation following Peron's first ouster in 1955 is full of unsettling parallels for American readers. Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina's working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950's. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later -- how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Peron and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism. Williamson's analysis of the slippery slope this decision put Borges on, and his account of the hatchet job that Argentina's leftists did on Borges's political reputation in retaliation for his defection (such that by 1967, when the writer came to Harvard to lecture, the students practically expected him to have epaulettes and a riding crop), make for his book's best chapters.

‡ Be warned that much of the mom-based psychologizing seems right out of ''Oprah'': e.g., ''However, by urging her son to realize the ambitions she had defined for herself, she unwittingly induced a sense of unworthiness in him that became the chief obstacle to his self-assertion.''

‡‡Williamson's chapters on Borges's sudden world fame will be of special interest to those American readers who weren't yet alive or reading in the mid-1960's. I was lucky enough to discover Borges as a child, but only because I happened to find ''Labyrinths,'' an early English-language collection of his most famous stories, on my father's bookshelves in 1974. I believed that the book was there only because of my parents' unusually fine taste and discernment -- which verily they do possess -- but what I didn't know was that by 1974 ''Labyrinths'' was also on tens of thousands of other homes' shelves in this country, that Borges had actually been a sensation on the order of Tolkien and Gibran among hip readers of the previous decade.

‡‡‡ Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, doubles -- so many of the elements that appear over and over in Borges's fiction are symbols of the psyche turned inward.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S most recent books are ‘‘Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity’’ and ‘‘Oblivion: Stories.’’
...published by The New York Times

La falsa viuda Borges criticó el libro con confidencias del autor a su entrañable compañero de toda la vida, Adolfo Bioy Casares, porque el volumen revela que el autor de El Aleph temía causarle enojos y se quejaba del carácter "extraño" de la señorita que hoy posee los derechos exclusivos de la millonaria explotación comercial de su obra: ...La afirmación aparece en el libro Borges (Destino), recientemente publicado por el albacea literario de Bioy Casares, Daniel Martino, que recoge los diarios de Bioy sobre su relación con Borges y ofrece la crónica de una amistad legendaria que ambos escritores cultivaron durante décadas... En el libro "Borges", Bioy Casares -fallecido en 1999- relata su larga amistad con Borges y apunta que su viuda "es una mujer de idiosincrasia extraña. Acusaba a Borges por cualquier motivo, lo castigaba con silencios; lo celaba (se ponía furiosa ante la devoción de los admiradores). Junto a ella vivía temiendo enojarla"... más en diarios La Nación

Pulse sobre la pantalla para ver y escuchar Adolfo Bioy Casares entrevistado por Bernardo Neudstadt.

"Crónicas Malditas" de la reconocida periodista Olga Wornat, Editorial Grijalbo 2005 [es importante comprar la edición completa, que también trae un reportaje sobre Adolfo Bioy Casares, porque la abreviada no tiene todos los reportajes de investigación]:
"Afuera llueve torrencialmente y adentro Epifanía Ubeda de Robledo, la mujer que compartió cuarenta años con Jorge Luis Borges, juguetea con la punta de su delantal de cocina. Tiene la mirada dulce y el cabello encanecido, recogido en la nuca. Ya no hay plantas que la esperen y tampoco departamento. De la casa del escritor, Fanny -como la conocen todos y como la llamaba su patrón- fue expulsada violentamente por indicación de María Kodama, la viuda*. ...lo conoció tanto como su madre y muchísimo más que María Kodama, la mujer que lo arrastró muy enfermo a Suiza, lo separó de sus amigos, se casó con él y se quedó con todos sus bienes. La misma que luego de morir Borges regresó a Argentina y en el invierno de 1986 echó a Fanny del departamento y la dejó en la calle, sin nada. Todo lo contrario a lo que había dispuesto Borges en un testamento que Kodama hizo desaparecer." ...fragmento del capítulo "La mucama de Borges" que puede leer en El Gatopardo pulsándo aquí [*viuda putativa, para más información leer el libro de investigación "La posesión póstuma de Borges", de Juan Gasparini]

With Borges by Alberto Manguel
Or how to learn to see from a blind master. In 1964 the adolescent Alberto Manguel was working during his school holidays at a bookshop. One day a customer invited him to come to his house, after his job, to read for him. That customer was Jorge Luis Borges ... the rest you may want to know is inside this well written book.
To know more also read the article on The Times and the interview by Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News

The world, by Jorge [Luis Borges]
Borges is famous as one of the key storytellers of our century, but above all he was the intellectual poet par excellence. But best read him in the original Spanish (or the available translations by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni]; be aware that translations of his Works in English are very bad since Borges death the 14th June 1986.
The last time I [Alberto Manguel] saw him [Borges] was in Paris, in the small hotel on the Rue des Beaux Arts that now carries plaques with the names of its two most celebrated guests: Oscar Wilde and Jorge Luis Borges. He was enjoying a period of travel to places he had always wanted to visit and now talked about them incessantly: to Egypt, where he had pocketed a handful of sand; to Iceland where, in a ruined church, he had recited 'Our Father' in Anglo-Saxon; to Japan, where he had discussed Buddhism with a Shinto priest. He was once again writing short stories in the fantastic vein that he had made his own in Ficciones and The Aleph.
Over dinner he told me the plot of the last fiction he was to write, 'Shakespeare's Memory', about a man who inherits the maze of Shakespeare's thoughts and recollections. It was never fully revised and should perhaps not have been published. In a brief poem written in the Fifties, he had observed that time doesn't like to reveal its endings: we don't know whose hand we've shaken for the last time, or what door we have closed for all eternity. I didn't know that after that dinner we would never meet again. Borges died in Geneva on 14 June 1986.
Vladimir Nabokov said that on first reading Borges he thought he had come upon a new and marvellous portico, but that behind the facade he found nothing. Poor Nabokov! What he took to be nothing is, in fact, everything or the possibility of everything: every story, every reflection, every thought and every event are all contained in what Borges called, in one of his best stories, the Library of Babel, the recipient of every book, past, present and future. What Borges offered his readers was a philosophy, an ethical system, a method (but these words are too mechanical) for the art of reading that is to say, for the craft of following a revelatory thread through the labyrinth of the universe.
Borges's own readings were uniquely illuminating and original. They shone light on unexpected corners of the text, and his comments were original not because he was the first to make them, but because he was the first to remind us that such perceptions existed. Listening to him read (or rather, since he was as blind as Homer, listening to him comment on the texts that were read to him out loud by readers such as myself) was always a revelation. He insisted that his readings were rediscoveries, and quoted Bacon quoting Plato (unwittingly) quoting King Solomon to prove it: 'So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.'
His acute observations colour the readings of even those who haven't read him, because they now form part of the way so many writers think and write, writers as diverse as Marguerite Yourcenar and Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and George Steiner, Salman Rushdie and Northrop Frye. His clear intelligence led him to define the essential ambiguity at the heart of every work of art, thereby granting readers permission to enjoy and yet not fully understand: 'The imminence of a revelation that does not take place,' he wrote, 'is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact.'
He observed that every writer creates his own precursors, thereby explaining the linked libraries that a soul-piercing book creates in the reader's memory. He told readers that they were, as much as himself, literary creators. He accepted the common feeling of bewildering unreality that at times pervades every reader and yet admitted the overwhelming knowledge that, despite it, our lives are horribly real ('Time is a tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger,' he admitted in 'A New Refutation of Time'. 'Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am that fire. The world, alas, is real and I, alas, am Borges').
He was a modest, profoundly ethical man who wished he could be braver and stronger, a man of action. He had no desire to be famous. He said that he longed for nothing but oblivion. He described in a short and extraordinary parable how Shakespeare, tired of being so many men, hoped to be nothing but one man, and how God, Shakespeare's Dreamer, mirrored his dream's despair in his own cosmic resignation. That mirroring was, for Borges, who hated mirrors, consolation of a kind. Above all, he believed, hope against hope, that it was our moral duty to be happy.
Since the first American translations of Borges, attempted in the Fifties by well-intentioned admirers such as Donald Yates and James Irby, English-speaking readers have been very poorly served. From the uneven versions collected in Labyrinths to the more meticulous, but ultimately unsuccessful, editions published by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, from Ruth Simm's abominable apery of 'Other Inquisitions' to Paul Bowles's illiterate rendition of 'The Circular Ruins', Borges in English must be read in spite of the translations. That one of the key writers of the century should lack an outstanding translator is indicative of how low 'foreign' literature lies in the estimation of English-language publishers. English-language readers have either to resign themselves to the old, barely serviceable translations, or submit to the new, barely serviceable translations by Andrew Hurley, Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico.
Hurley has no ear for the rhythms of Borges's language. 'Funes el memorioso' is for Hurley 'Funes, His Memory' which is both inaccurate and ugly. 'Hombre de la Esquina Rosada' becomes 'Man on Pink Corner', in inexplicable pidgin English. 'The Circular Ruins', whose perfect prose can be recited like a poem, begins felicitously in Hurley's rendition with 'No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night' and then sinks ignominiously with 'no one saw the bamboo canoe' and its inappropriate rhyme. A number of stories have been decently translated and are as readable as the best among the earlier versions, but mere readability is not good enough.
On what was to be our last night in Paris, Borges told me that, a few days earlier, he had attended a staging of Macbeth and that, in spite of the terrible performance, he had left the theatre 'shattered by tragic passion'. 'How curious,' he said, 'that Shakespeare's genius can even overcome the efforts of a bad actor.' Borges's genius will overcome Hurley's version, as it has so many others, and English-speaking readers, while waiting for the inspired translator of Borges, may have to resign themselves to the not impossible task of learning Spanish.
...by Alberto Manguel in The Guardian

The lesson of the Master: on Borges and his Work by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, published by Continuum Books where you can buy this book now or buy it at Foyles .
Di Giovanni, translator and writer, is also the author of the novel Novecento on which Bernardo Bertolucci's famous film about the rise of fascism, leading to the II World War, is based.

Visit the website of author and translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni where you can purchase copies of his books.

In Orbis Tertius you can listen Bertolucci's interview on BBC - Radio 3, speaking on Freud and Borges.

"From De Quincey, Borges had learned that Oedipus himself, and not the man in general, was the profound solution to the riddle. Blind Oedipus, Homer, Joyce, Milton, Borges: they form a five-in-one. Borges's mother died at ninety-nine, after many devoted years as her son's secretary. Urbane, ironic, beautifully mannered, Borges loses his composure only when Freud is mentioned to him. Let us honor Borges by attaching to him Oedipus the man rather than the complex. The genius of Borges, particularly his nonfictions, is to exemplify what is man: the subject and object of his own quest."
From "Genius : A Mosaic of 100 Exemplary Creative Minds" by Harold Bloom

The signification of Pycho's story to understand the case of Borges

"I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups..."
Alfred Hitchcock.

What do you think of Psychoanalysis?
Borges: "Psychoanalysis is the ob-scene face of science fiction."


..."Borges confessed many times that, as far as painting was concerned, he had always been blind. He also seemed deaf to music. He said he admired Brahms (one of his best stories is called Deutsches Requiem) but he rarely listened to his music. He remembered the music that accompanied certain films, but less for the music itself than for the way in which it assisted the story, as in the case of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho, a film he very much admired as “another version of the doppelgänger, in which the murderer becomes his mother, the person he has murdered”. He found this notion mysteriously appealing."
A fragment from the recent book "With Borges" by Alberto Manguel.

Related texts and interviews we invite you to read:

Click on the screen to watch and listen Hitchcock presenting Psycho

Script for Psycho
Oedipal nightmare by the writer Alan Vanneman
Welles influence on Hitchcock's film, both published in Bright Lights Film Journal
On Hitchcock by Camille Paglia
About Hitchcock, women and The Birds listen Camille Paglia interviewed in radio NPR
"The savage Id" by Camille Paglia and Michael Sragow in the review Salon.com
"All in the family" interview to Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell where she recalls working with her father, Alfred, on "Strangers on a Train" and "Psycho"; in the review Salon.com

Turn on the player to listen Psycho's prelude composed by Bernard Herrmann and performed by Danny Elfman.
Psycho musical score is followed by the poet Betina Edelberg interviewed by the Argentina National Radio about Borges and his Mother (with whom Borges lived all her life until she died at 99 years of age and he was 76 years old); thus Borges lived all his life under his mother's control extended later to other woman.