Jorge Luis Borges and the second-hand narrators of El informe de Brodie (1970)

Authors

  • Umberto Luiz Miele Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236292

Keywords:

Argentine literature, Fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, Narrative Voice, Short Stories

Abstract

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) launched, in 1970, a collection of unpublished short stories, collected in El informe de Brodie. Defined since the Prologue as “direct and realistic” reports, they are distinguished from the “baroque and labyrinthine” ones of his previous short story collections (Ficciones [1944] and El Aleph [1949]) due to their local subject matter. The objective of this article is to analyze the role of the narrator in the short stories that review the writer’s work and some aesthetic and political-cultural positions of the past, while attempting to recover a voice that has been lost. Borges uses informant narrators and secondhand stories to fictionally elaborate stories that try to rescue this voice through second narrators who often clash with themselves or their sources.

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Author Biography

  • Umberto Luiz Miele, Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas

    Possui graduação em FFLCH-USP pela Universidade de São Paulo (1984) e Mestre em Letras pela Universidade Federal do Paraná (2022). Doutorando no PPG em Língua Espanhola e Literaturas Espanhola e Hispano-Americana na FFLCH-USP, atuando principalmente nos temas: Jorge Luis Borges, literatura hispano-americana, violência.

References

BORGES, Jorge L. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Emece, 1974.

BORGES, Jorge L. Obras Completas 3. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2021.

GILMAN, Claudia. Entre la pluma y el fusil. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003.

GRAMUGLIO, Maria T. El imperio realista. In: JITRIK, N. e Gramuglio, M.T. (org). Historia Crítica de la literatura argentina. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2002.

LOUIS, Annick. El testamento. Formas del realismo en El informe de Brodie. In: Jorge Luis Borges: politicas de la literatura, Pittsburgh, n. 6, p. 331-354, 2008.

LOUIS, Annick. Jornadas Borges. El informe Brodie, 50 años después. In: Centro Cultural Kirchener, 2020. Disponível em https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b6T8dXe6iw. Acesso em 23/02/2025.

PAULS, Alan. El factor Borges. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004.

SARLO, Beatriz. La literatura de crímenes. In: SAITA, S. (org). Escritos sobre literatura argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, p. 187-194, 2019a.

SARLO, Beatriz. Política, ideología y figuración literaria. In: SAITA, S. (org). Escritos sobre literatura argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, p. 329-354, 2019b.

Published

2025-11-08

How to Cite

Miele, U. L. (2025). Jorge Luis Borges and the second-hand narrators of El informe de Brodie (1970). Magma, 1(21), 215-222. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2448-1769.mag.2025.236292