SOURCE: “Vestiges of Empire: Toward a Contrapuntal Reading of Borges,” in CLA Journal, Vol. XLII, No. 1, September, 1998, pp. 103–17.

In the following essay, Pennington relies on the historical and social contexts surrounding Borges's “The Ethnographer” to elucidate the text.

This essay takes as a point of departure the Borges short story titled “El etnógrafo,” found in Elogio de la sombra (1969) and classified in the general category of Borges's later prose. In addition to commenting on its literary structure, I will examine its application to the world outside the text: the milieu from which the structure sprang. That is, rather than a strictly literary interpretation centering on the important narratorial silences and the denial of the text, this discussion will include observations on cultural and historical referents in the text. It is hoped that, in the end, the literary and the socio-historical will be seen as equally significant in...