🦋 The existence of genre
Borges opens his lecture on "The Detective Story"* with a brief argument that it is legitimate to talk about literary genres. He is responding to an assertion by Benedetto Croce in "his formidable Æsthetics", that "claiming that a book is a novel, an allegory, or a treatise on æsthetics, has more or less the same value as claiming that its cover is yellow and that it can be found on the third shelf on the left." Borges makes easy, playful work of advancing his argument, but he does not really bother to point out how off-base Croce's analogy is. I will do that, because I want to take issue with something Borges says later in the lecture, and I'd rather start out with an easy argument. The claims Croce is making about the book -- that it is yellow, that it is on the third shelf on the left -- are claims about a particular copy of the book. These are a different type of statement than claims about the book's genre, which refer to a class rather than to an instance of the class. That's all. The Stanford Encyclopædia of Philosophy says that it's "hard to find a figure whose reputation has fallen so far and so quickly" as Croce's, who fell quickly out of favor after the Second World War, and that his work is "full of the youthful conviction and fury that seldom wears well." Anyways -- so that's sort of a warm-up for my post later this evening where I'll be arguing that Borges gets it wrong when he is characterizing the manner of reading that signals detective fiction.
 * You can read the lecture online in Spanish at the blog of Theodoro  and his philosophical dog; the English translation is in Collected Non-Fictions. Theodoro notes that it was included as a prologue to the 1982 edition of Seis Problemas para don Isidro Parodi (detective stories by Borges and Bioy-Casares); I don't know if it was included in the translation of that book. (Google Books suggests that it was not.)
posted evening of Thursday, February 26th, 2009
➳ More posts about Borges oral
➳ More posts about Jorge Luis Borges
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