Macedonio Fernandez

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952) was an Argentine novelist, humorist, and philosopher. He was a mentor to Jorge Luis Borges and other avant-garde Argentine writers. Seventeen years of his correspondence with Borges was published in 2000. He also published poetry, including Creía yo.

[edit] Works

• Adriana Buenos Aires : última novela mala (1998) ISBN 84-8307-127-4
• Adriana Buenos Aires : última novela mala (1974)
• Correspondencia, 1922-1939 : crónica de una amistad with Jorge Luis Borges (2000) ISBN 950-05-1258-0
• Epistolario (1976)
• Macedonio : memorias errantes (1999) ISBN 987-97654-0-0
• Macedonio : selected writings in translation edited by Jo Anne Engelbert (1984)
• Manera de una psique sin cuerpo (1973) ISBN 84-7223-542-4
• Museo de la novela de la eterna (1967)
• Museo de la novela de la eterna (1995) ISBN 84-376-1379-5
• Museo de la novela de la eterna (1982) ISBN 84-660-0090-9 ; ISBN 84-660-0089-5 (pbk.)
• No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos; arreglo de papeles que dejó un personaje de novela creado por el arte, Deunamor el no existente caballero, el estudioso de su esperanza (1928)
• Una novela que comienza (1941)
• Obras completas (1974-1995) ISBN 950-05-0584-3
• Papeles de Recienvenido. Continuación de la nada (1944)
• Papeles de recienvenido y continuación de la nada (1989)
• Poesías completas (1991) ISBN 84-7522-265-X
• Relato : cuentos, poemas y misceláneas (1987)
• Teorías (1990) ISBN 950-05-0584-3
• Teorías (1974)
• Textos selectos (1999) ISBN 950-05-1181-9
• Todo y nada (1995)

Macedonio and Borges

Macedonio (like Uruguay’s Felisberto Hernández, he is commonly referred to by his first name only), was Jorge Luis Borges’s most important Argentine mentor and influence. The relationship between the writers, however, was far more complex than Borges or his contemporaries represented it. In his later years, Borges made a point of naming Macedonio as an early influence who, in the exuberance of his youth, Borges imitated “to the point of plagiarism.” At the same time, Borges denied that Macedonio possessed any literary talent or importance, reinforcing the long-held perception of the older man as a kind of local Socratic philosopher, specific to Argentina and constitutive of an Argentine mythic dimension.

In fact, recent studies by Ana Camblong, Julio Prieto and Todd S. Garth, among others, indicate that Macedonio’s literary impact on Borges was far more profound and enduring than Borges ever admitted, and that Borges went to great pains to hide this influence. Many of the most fundamental concepts underpinning Borges’s fiction come directly from Macedonio. These include the questioning of space and time and their continuity; the confusion of dreaming and wakefulness; the unreliability of memory and the importance of forgetfulness; the slipperiness (or inexistence) of personal identity; the denial of originality and the emphasis on texts as being recyclings and translations of prior texts; and the questioning and commingling of the roles of author, reader, editor and commentator. These influences extend to thematic material. Such themes include the conceit of an alternative, fictional dimension, elaborated anonymously in collaboration, that invades the known, tangible world (Borges’s “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Macedonio’s campaign to transform Buenos Aires by turning into a Novel, a component of his Museo de la Novela de la Eterna); and the hermetic world of immigrant working girls who must negotiate the city on their own, secret terms based purely on instinct and passion (Borges’s “Emma Zunz” and Macedonio’s Adriana Buenos Aires). While it is evident both men were inspired by ideas they read in the works of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophers (specifically Schopenhauer and Bergson), there is little question that the two Argentines developed some of their most characteristic and enduring ideas together, in conversation, throughout the 1920s.

The relationship between these two men began in earnest in 1921, when Jorge Luis returned to Buenos Aires with his family after their extended stay in Switzerland, where Borges had completed his education. Borges’s father, Jorge senior, had been a close companion to Macedonio and attended law school with him. Upon graduating law school, Macedonio, the elder Borges, and companion Julio Molina y Vedia hatched a plan to found a utopian colony based on the anarchist principles of Eliseo Reclus. This plan apparently never went beyond an exploratory visit the three made around 1897 to a plantation the Molina y Vedia family owned in the Argentine Chaco, near the Bolivian border. During the years prior to 1921, Macedonio married, started a law practice and went about raising a family. This idyll came to an end when Macedonio’s wife, Elena de Obieta, died suddenly in 1920. Macedonio then shuttered his law practiced, dismantled his household and, about the same time as he renewed his friendship with the now adult Jorge Luis, embarked on a life as an idiosyncratic writer-philosopher.

Borges and other members of the generación martinfierrista were drawn to Macedonio as a mentor and figurehead who could serve as an anchor to the nascent Buenos Aires avant-garde and a foil to Leopoldo Lugones, leader of the modernista movement of a generation earlier. Macedonio made noteworthy, if infrequent, contributions to the literary gatherings of the ultraísta movement and the related “Florida” group of writers and artists. Borges was an active participant in Macedonio’s intimate tertulias, both in Buenos Aires bars and cafés and in a shack Macedonio sometimes borrowed on a friend’s ranch outside the city. He also was one of the collaborators in Macedonio’s burlesque campaigns for the presidency of the Argentine Republic (in 1921 and again in 1927), episodes which apparently gave rise to the analogous fictional campaign in Museo. In addition, Borges was responsible for urging Macedonio to publish at least one of the two book-length works printed in Macedonio’s lifetime, No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos, in 1926.

The relationship between Borges and Macedonio appears to have begun to deteriorate around 1927 or 1928, when correspondence (published and analyzed by Carlos Garcia) indicates a rift between them. This is also about the time that Borges made his famous break with the avant-garde and pronounced the death of Argentine ultraísmo, essentially forcing the closure of its most important publication, the little magazine Martín Fierro, after its sixteenth issue. The two events may not be coincidental. From 1927 onward, Borges not only started to write, publish and promote his characteristic short fiction (beginning with Hombre de la esquina rosada), he aggressively renounced his prior aesthetic production and put considerable energy into burying it forever. A number of sources (Donald Shaw in particular) suggest that Borges began to regard most of his early writings, and the ideas behind them, as potentially pernicious, especially in the hands of nationalists. Supporting this notion is the fact that many of Borges’s stories in which Macedonio’s influence is most evident imply a warning against concepts and principles Macedonio represented—absolute relativism; the priority of thought, emotion and imagination over a nominal existence; and the implicit heroism of a hermetic existence.