Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Daniel Balderston (essay date 1995)

Daniel Balderston (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: “The ‘Fecal Dialectic’: Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges,” in Borges Studies on Line. J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation. January 13, 1995, pp. 1–20

[In the following essay, Balderston suggests defense against repressed homosexuality as a motive for and motif in Borges's fiction.]

Near the end of a 1931 essay on the defects of the Argentine character, “Nuestras imposibilidades” [“Our Impossibilities”] in which he discusses the Argentine penchant for taking pride in putting one over on someone else (“la viveza criolla”), Borges writes:

Añadiré otro ejemplo curioso: el de la sodomía. En todos los países de la tierra, una invisible reprobación recae sobre los dos ejecutores del inimaginable contacto. Abominación hicieron los dos; su sangre sobre ellos, dice el Levítico. No así entre el malevaje de Buenos Aires,...

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