Macedonio Fernandez
Encyclopedia
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
writer, humorist, and philosopher. His writings included novels, stories, poetry, journalism, and works not easily classified. He was a mentor to Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
and other avant-garde Argentine writers. Seventeen years of his correspondence with Borges was published in 2000. He also published poetry, including "Creía yo
Creía yo
Creía yo is a short poem in Spanish written in 1953 by Macedonio Fernández, which has much to say on the power struggle of the trinity of life occurrences, Life, Love, and Death...
" ("I believed").
Life
Macedonio (like UruguayUruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
's Felisberto Hernández
Felisberto Hernández
Felisberto Hernandez was an Uruguayan writer.-Background:Hernández was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. His father was from Tenerife...
, he is commonly referred to by his first name only) was the son of Macedonio Fernández, farmer and military officer, and Rosa del Mazo Aguilar Ramos. In 1887, he enrolled in the Argentine Colegio Nacional Central.
In 1891-1892, as a university student, he published in El Progreso, a series of critical essays on customs and manners later included in Papeles antiguos. Like his intimate friend Jorge Guillermo Borges (father of Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
), he was interested in psychology and in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
.
In 1897 he was granted a degree as a doctor of jurisprudence by the law faculty of the University of Buenos Aires
University of Buenos Aires
The University of Buenos Aires is the largest university in Argentina and the largest university by enrollment in Latin America. Founded on August 12, 1821 in the city of Buenos Aires, it consists of 13 faculties, 6 hospitals, 10 museums and is linked to 4 high schools: Colegio Nacional de Buenos...
. In this period, he wrote for La Montaña, a socialist daily directed by Leopoldo Lugones
Leopoldo Lugones
Leopoldo Lugones Argüello was an Argentine writer and journalist.-Early life:Born in Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, in Argentina's Catholic heartland, Lugones belonged to a family of landed gentry...
and José Ingenieros
José Ingenieros
José Ingenieros was an Argentine physician, pharmaceutic, positivist philosopher and essayist.He was born Giuseppe Ingegneri in Palermo , and graduated from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine in 1900...
. He was a personal friend of physician, journalist, politician, and writer Juan B. Justo
Juan B. Justo
Juan Bautista Justo was an Argentine physician, journalist, politician, and writer. After finishing medical school he joined the Unión Cívica Radical, later participating in the foundation of the Socialist Party in 1896, of which he was chief director until his death...
, with whom he maintained a correspondence. In 1898, he was admitted to the bar, and in 1899 he married Elena de Obieta, with whom he had four children (Macedonio, Adolfo, Maite, plus one)
In 1904 he published some poems in a magazine called Martín Fierro (not the more famous magazine of the same name
Martín Fierro (magazine)
Martín Fierro was an Argentine literary magazine which appeared from February 1924 to 1927. It was founded by Evar Méndez , José B. Cairola, Leónidas Campbell, H. Carambat, Luis L. Franco, Oliverio Girondo, Ernesto Palacio, Pablo Rojas Paz, and Gastón O...
published two decades later). In 1910, he obtained the position of public prosecutor in the Juzgado Letrado de Posadas, which he held for several years.
His wife died in 1920, and their children were left in the care of grandparents and aunts. Macedonio abandoned the profession of a lawyer. On the return of the Borges family from Europe in 1921, he renewed his friendship with his old friend, and also began a friendship with Jorge Luis Borges, at this time a young imagist
Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
poet.
In 1928 he published No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos, at the request of Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz
Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz
Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz was an Argentine writer, journalist, essayist and poet, friend of Arturo Jauretche and Homero Manzi, and loosely associated with the political group Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina .Scalabrini Ortiz was born in Corrientes, the son of the naturalist Pedro...
and Leopoldo Marechal
Leopoldo Marechal
Leopoldo Marechal was one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century.- Biographical notes :...
; the next year he published Papeles de Recienvenido.
En 1938 he published "Novela de Eterna" y la Niña del dolor, la "Dulce-persona" de un amor que no fue sabido, an anticipation of Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (published posthumously in 1967); in 1941 he published, in Chile Una novela que comienza, and in 1944 a new edition of Papeles de Recienvenido.
In 1947, Macedonio moved into the home of his son Adolfo de Obieta, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Macedonio and Borges
Macedonio 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 to be. In his later years, Borges made a point of naming Macedonio as an early influence whom, 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 SocraticSocratic method
The Socratic method , named after the classical Greek philosopher Socrates, is a form of inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas...
philosopher, specific to Argentina and constitutive of an Argentine mythic dimension.
Recent studies by Ana Camblong, Julio Prieto, Daniel Attala 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 nonexistence) 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 "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentine journal Sur, May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future...
" and Macedonio's campaign to transform Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
by turning it 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
Emma Zunz
"Emma Zunz" is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The tale recounts how its eponymous heroine avenges the death of her father. Originally published in September 1948 in the magazine Sur, it was reprinted in Borges' 1949 collection The Aleph....
" 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
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
and Bergson
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
), there is little question that the two Argentines developed some of their most characteristic and enduring ideas together, in conversation, throughout the 1920s. Macedonio appears explicitly in Borges's "Dialogue about a Dialogue," in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul.
The relationship between these two men began in earnest in 1921, when Borges returned to Buenos Aires with his family after their extended stay in Switzerland (and travels elsewhere in Europe), where he had completed his education. Borges's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, 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
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
principles of Élisée Reclus
Élisée Reclus
Élisée Reclus , also known as Jacques Élisée Reclus, was a renowned French geographer, writer and anarchist. He produced his 19-volume masterwork La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes , over a period of nearly 20 years...
. 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
Gran Chaco
The Gran Chaco is a sparsely populated, hot and semi-arid lowland region of the Río de la Plata basin, divided among eastern Bolivia, Paraguay, northern Argentina and a portion of the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, where it is connected with the Pantanal region...
, near the Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
n 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 practice, dismantled his household and, about the same time as he renewed his friendship with the now adult Jorge Luis Borges, embarked on a life as an idiosyncratic writer-philosopher.
Borges and other members of the generación martinfierrista
Martín Fierro (magazine)
Martín Fierro was an Argentine literary magazine which appeared from February 1924 to 1927. It was founded by Evar Méndez , José B. Cairola, Leónidas Campbell, H. Carambat, Luis L. Franco, Oliverio Girondo, Ernesto Palacio, Pablo Rojas Paz, and Gastón O...
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
Leopoldo Lugones
Leopoldo Lugones Argüello was an Argentine writer and journalist.-Early life:Born in Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, in Argentina's Catholic heartland, Lugones belonged to a family of landed gentry...
, 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
Florida group
The Florida group were a Buenos Aires-based avant-garde literary group in the 1920s, known for their embrace of "art for art's sake"...
of writers and artists. Borges was an active participant in Macedonio's intimate tertulia
Tertulia
A tertulia is a social gathering with literary or artistic overtones, especially in Iberia or Latin America. The word is originally Spanish, and has only moderate currency in English, in describing Latin cultural contexts....
s, 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 García) 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
Martín Fierro (magazine)
Martín Fierro was an Argentine literary magazine which appeared from February 1924 to 1927. It was founded by Evar Méndez , José B. Cairola, Leónidas Campbell, H. Carambat, Luis L. Franco, Oliverio Girondo, Ernesto Palacio, Pablo Rojas Paz, and Gastón O...
, 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
Donald Shaw (writer and professor)
Donald Leslie Shaw is a writer, literary critic and the Brown-Forman Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Virginia....
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.
Works
- 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)
- Poemas, with a prologue by Natalicio González. México, Guarania, 1953.
- Papeles de Recienvenido. Continuación de la nada (1944); Papeles de recienvenido y continuación de la nada (1989)
- Museo de la novela de la eterna (1967); (1995) ISBN 84-376-1379-5; (1982) ISBN 84-660-0090-9 ; ISBN 84-660-0089-5 (pbk.)
- No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos y otros escritos. Advertencia de Adolfo de Obieta. Buenos Aires, CEAL, 1967.
- Cuadernos de todo y nada. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1972. 2a. ed. 1990.
- Manera de una psique sin cuerpo (1973) ISBN 84-7223-542-4
- Obras completas (1974-1995) ISBN 950-05-0584-3
- Adriana Buenos Aires : última novela mala Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1974 (Obras completas, vol. V; Adolfo de Obieta, editor); (1998) ISBN 84-8307-127-4
- Teorías, Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1974 (Obras completas, vol. III; Adolfo de Obieta, editor); (1990) ISBN 950-05-0584-3
- Museo de la Novela de la Eterna; primera novela buena. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1975 (Obras completas, vol. VI; Adolfo de Obieta, editor)
- Relato : cuentos, poemas y misceláneas (1987)
- Poesías completas (1991) ISBN 84-7522-265-X
- Todo y nada (1995)
- Textos selectos (1999) ISBN 950-05-1181-9
- Macedonio : memorias errantes (1999) ISBN 987-97654-0-0
In English translation
- Macedonio : selected writings in translation edited by Jo Anne Engelbert (1984)
- The Museum of Eterna's NovelThe Museum of Eterna's NovelThe Museum of Eterna's Novel is an avant-garde experimental novel by the Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández. The book has been described as Fernández' masterwork....
(The First Good Novel) translated by Margaret Schwartz (2010) published by Open Letter Books
Correspondence
- Epistolario. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1976. (Obras completas, vol. II, Alicia Borinsky, editor).
- Correspondencia, 1922-1939 : crónica de una amistad with Jorge Luis Borges (2000) ISBN 950-05-1258-0
External links
- Macedonio.net, a site dedicated to Macedonio Fernandez. Most content is in Spanish, some in English or French. Roberto Bardini, Macedonio Fernández, RATACRUEL (e-zine)