Chapter 15 - Borges and Popular Culture

Summary

Against a certain perception of him as a cerebral writer with sophisticated philosophical tastes, the focus of much of Borges’s life and work is the popular or even the vulgar: the gaucho code; the hoodlums/compadritos of Buenos Aires; pirates and gangsters; tangos; classical Hollywood movies, and so forth. Following his biography of dissolute poet, Evaristo Carriego, ’Man on Pink Corner’ features criminal low-lifes and is Borges’s first real story published in a book. The figure of the gaucho appears in certain canonical stories of the 1940s - ’The South’, for example. A poem from the early 1960s, ’The Tango’, indulges an urban nostalgia and is elegiac. Detective stories had an abiding appeal for Borges. And the cinema inspired him to collaborate on a number of screenplays, author reviews, and translate aspects of cinematic style into his fictions. Borges’s influence on filmmakers was profound and extensive.