EC

 Chapters are ordered by their levels of importance (ie chap 1 is most important etc)
– is about Palermo and Borges and Evarista Carriego
 Starts with ‘yo crei’ – I thought – uncertain memory
 Then learn he was brought up in an enclosed house that was fenced off – mentions
he lived surrounded by books so used them as his escape – things going on ot=utside
were distant to him, he imagined what was going on and one thing that fuelled his
imagination was his reading – an author he particularly liked was Stevenson, the
author of treasure island
 Ends with rhetorical questions – speculation of what was going o outside of his
house
 Borges also spends time in exile in Europe when he was 14 (returned at 21) – spent
his formative years in Europe – big gap in hi time in BA, hence his feeling of being an
outsider, separate – means he has to draw as much from his imagination as he does
from his memory, as he doesn’t really have much of a memory
 Borges draws from imagination to construct his writing – had a highly developed
imagination as a child which he then drew in as a writer
 Chapter 1 – a history of Palermo, Borges giving it an identity by drawing on memory
(popular memory – memories of the people living there, but also personal memory)
also draws on some written sources eg. Paul Groussac
 Focus on the origins on Palermo – originates from an ‘hacienda’ – a private estate
(land monopolised by a wealthy few who would take land and force the native
American/Indians who lived there to work the land)
 We are told Palermo was founded by a Sicilian man, alludes to the more
contemporary waves of migration – Palermo located on the ‘periphary’ – the
outskirts of BA – a microcosm for BA and Argentina
 Later discusses the importance of poetry aswell as memory for capturing memory –
memory and images in a concentrated form
 Borges in a digressive, impressionistic, poetic way – lots of detail, but not
systematically building up or providing a descriptive account of what it is he is trying
to say, fragmented impressions/images – the readers build up the pictures
themselves
 Don Juan Manuel de Rosas – a gaucho who became a general in the federalist army,
became a dictator, the ruler of BA and the pampas surrounding it – became the
dictator of Argentina in 1935 (known as the first Latin American dictator)
 Referred to as ‘el padre mitologico’ – suggesting history has become fictionalised –
memory and myth – fictional accounts of what has happened in the past – rather
than telling us about the history, he is telling us about how the history/past has been
remembered (because drawing on memory and imagination) not just facts
 Rosas was a moderniser – wanted to construct and urbanise – brought in cartloads
of ‘black earth’ – to make roads – the development of infrastructure (modernisation,
urbanisation) – all in the early-mid 19th century
 ‘Orillas’ – shorelines/banks - peripheral modernity – space on the outskirts, on the
periphery, inbetween urban settlement and rural community – ‘una moneda de dos
caras’ – the duality of Palermo, having 2 sides (not just one thing) – also alluding to
how Palermo was fought over by the federalists (gauchos from the provinces
 surrounding BA) and the centralists (people from BA, influenced more by European
culture
 images of violence and bloodshed
 then gives us a string of dates and factual info – he rushes over it – not interested in
the facts – wants to put across feelings, his memories
 amongst the dates he just quickly slips in a reference to ‘los Carriego’ – he is more
interested in writing about the Palermo of 1889 here
 footnote – Borges often buries important and interesting comments in footnotes –
says countries like Argentina have a living history – historical events happen very
quickly because they are modernising at a fast pace – catching up with
modernisation in Europe – time seems to pass more quickly in these countries (the
capital cities of these countries) – modernisation doesn’t develop as extensively in
rural areas as it does in capital cities (past seems very present because of the fast
pace of change)
 says Palermo is a ‘despreocupada pobreza’ – a poor area, but the people weren’t
worried about being poor, they didn’t mind because they had a sense of community,
belonging to their barrio – they were all poor so why worry? Virtually no class
differences
 but as time goes on the differences between classes become more apparent – class
margins emerge –
 ‘los caserones… pg 22) Spanish style houses with patios and arches – original/early
Spanish settlers
 but says despite the class differences, people would take the chairs out of their
houses and sit outside and chat amongst neighbours – sense of community,
conviviality
 nostalgic writing about how things used to be
 introduces the figure of the gaucho (people who travelled to BA in search of work)
 returns to notion of las orillas – discusses the sense of space on the other side of the
orillas which is the pampas – describes it almost like a sea (of grass) – BA is
positioned on te banks of a huge estuary – given the idea of an expanse of water
meeting the expanse of grassland – big space that hasn’t yet been built on – evoking
a sense of freedom (mentions horse running freely)
 this positive image of the pampas is nostalgia – the space is now being ‘imprisoned’,
‘reduced’ because it is being built on
 ‘una frontera’ – frontier, boundary – orillas – periphery – Palerma as a border
 ‘tejas anglicantes’ – English style tiles – suggesting European influence against
referencing immigration
 then discusses tango and tango songs – evoking gaucho – origin of tango is gaucho
folk song called milonga – gauchos are remembered through the songs (referencing
that the gauchos are dying out as a distinct cultural group) – they migrate to BA and
then assimilate, lose their identity as gauchos – later refers to them as ‘compadritos
muertos’ – remembered through tango
 talks of how the barrio ‘era una esquina final’ – constantly building up the image of
Palermo as an outlying, peripheral district
 ‘no solo de peleas, esa frontera era de guitarras tambien’ – this wasn’t just an area
of conflict and violence, but an area of art and poetry (double sided coin, duality)
death and life
  ‘recuperados hechos’ – borges trying to recover/recuperate the past told from the
point of view of memory (which is subjective) – runs the risk of being forgotten
 at the end he talks of BA using the present tense, as opposed to Palermo in the past
tense – Palermo is a microcosm of BA – memory also gives a sense of consolation,
healing – filling the absence created by forgetting or not knowing about the past
 he is full of nostalgia, but by remembering the past, his nostalgia/sense of emptiness
doesn’t have to undermine him or the reader – replacing the emptiness with a sense
of fulfilment

Borges Evaristo Carriego recap

 Chapter 2 – repetition of word recuerdos

 Highlighting of ‘criollismo’ (seen through character of Evaristo)
 Mother Italian, father of Spanish descent – ‘el criollo’ – mestizaje – ‘cultura de
mezcla’ arising due to immigration – equates with Carriego (although not a first gen
immigrant, he is indirectly/2nd/3rd generation immigrant – also a migrant – so EC
personifies the cultura de mezcla
 Borges trying to give a sense of time passing – a modernist writer – dealing with the
term and it’s complexity and contradictions – the period of modernity is
characterised by change/synonymous with change
 Peripheral modernity – pocketed change
 Chapter 4 – a sense of faster paced change – we are taken into early 20th century