Borges, libros y lecturas: investigation and method

Abstract

Upon leaving his post as director of the Mariano Moreno National Library in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges appointed a clerk to package and identify the ownership of the works in his personal collection, with a number of them remaining in the institution and classified as an official donation made by the writer. This text examines the works belonging to the personal collection and listed in the Borges, libros y lecturas [Borges, books, and readings] catalogue. The complete process for identifying all of the books took place almost 40 years later, by means of the research behind the publication of Borges, libros y lecturas in 2010. The following text focuses on the care Borges took in framing his work and with his author’s legacy, even including countless jokes and enigmas meticulously woven into his biographical fiction. We depart from the idea that it would not be absurd to suppose that the collection donated by the author to the library does not so much constitute an act that was purely casual, contingent, and spontaneous, but rather a conscious move strangely planned by the author and in which he was invested. The inclusion of Latin American authors in Modernism and Romanticism and their appropriations of culturalist epistemological innovations by means of their Catholicism are examined by means of the aesthetic-expressive method, in which we outline paths to clinical observation with the observer’s participation.