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Abstract

Abstract:Throughout his extensive literary career, Jorge Luis Borges contributed to the study of Argentine gauchesca, the nineteenth-century genre about frontier life centered on the life of the gaucho. His essays “La poesía gauchesca” (1928) and “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (1932) criticized the hyperbolic praise nationalist scholars such as Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Rojas had bestowed upon José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872) on the eve of Argentina’s centennial celebrations at the turn of the twentieth century. In gauchesca, Borges saw problematic characters which prompted questions regarding what type of nation could result from the glorification of violence such as that found in gauchesca.As a result of his criticisms of the genre, Borges’s gaucho short stories “Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)” and “El Sur,” are understood as some of the last vestiges of gauchesca, and “El fin” as the coup de grâce that prompted the genre’s death. However, this article proposes a closer examination of these stories and essays to reveal that Borges ends a mode of reading gauchesca, not gauchesca itself, arguing that Borges ultimately offers a generic path forward for future writers of the genre.