Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Eliot Weinberger (essay date 1999)

Eliot Weinberger (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: “Missing From the Library: The Uncollected Borges,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5029, August 20, 1999, pp. 12-13.

[In the following essay, Weinberger, editor of Borges's Selected Non-Fictions, discusses Borges's uncollected texts and deplores the absence of well-edited editions of the published works.]

Although there are many places where one might enjoy being a living writer, there seem to be only two countries where one would want to be a dead one: Germany and France. Theirs are the only societies where it is generally believed both that a great writer is worthy of a monument, and that the proper monument to a great writer is a reliable and comprehensive edition of his or her works.

The United States, in this regard, was a complete disaster until Edmund Wilson's campaign for an American version of the French Pléiade led, in the 1980s, to the creation of the Library...

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