El hacedor o la paratopía creadora

Abstract

Throughout the 1950s, especially from 1955 onwards, Borges consolidated his status as the core of the Argentine literary field, by holding official positions (as the Director of the National Library, as a lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires) and by increasing his visibility in the public sphere, both national and internationally. El hacedor (1960) was the first book to be published after his canonization and, for that matter, it can be thought of as a way of reacting to a frequent problem for writers with a long-standing career, which is not often stated explicitly: how to keep on writing after reaching consecration? El hacedor focuses on building an authorship figure that recovers biographical information from his context, introducing and reframing it for the volume. These kinds of elements that participate simultaneously in the text and its context were called paratopic shifters by Maingueneau. Borges’ Blindness and Fame, two of the most recurring motifs of this work, operates precisely as paratopic shifters, for they create an unsteady ground that allows a de-centered position for the writer to stand on, a position where the highest power coexists with the greatest weakness. This paradoxical/paratopical locus of enunciation is what makes it possible for him to continue writing after accomplishing success.