29 pages • 58 minutes read
Jorge Luis BorgesThe Book of Sand
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Jorge Luis Borges
Borges (1899-1986) was known for his contributions to a variety of genres and literary styles. These include horror, fantasy, philosophical literature, postmodernism, and magical realism. (Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. “Jorge Luis Borges.” Britannica, 11 Jan. 2023). This literary style blends the fantastic and the real, presenting both elements as equally plausible and authentic. Although he had already been an influential short story author and poet in Latin America for decades, Borges became internationally recognized after becoming the co-winner (with Samuel Beckett) of the Formentor Prize in 1961. “The Book of Sand” and the collection in which it was published, which is also titled The Book of Sand, were written and published in the 1970s.
Borges began to lose his vision in his thirties and was blind by the mid-1950s. He frequently wrote about losing his vision, and the narrator of “The Book of Sand” comments on his own “myopia” in the story’s opening, noting that it may be the reason why the salesman’s “features” are “indistinct.” Questions of time, space, and literature in the story revolve around placement and sensory information, some of which Borges struggled to take in due to his blindness. Specifically, the fact that neither the narrator of the story nor the salesman can read the text in the Book of Sand relates to Borges’s own inability to see and read written words. The importance of the images in the text, such as the anchor and the mask, further displays the limitations of understanding both the book and its contents.
Many elements of the story parallel aspects of Borges’s life, such as the narrator’s former position working for the National Library, where Borges was previously the director. Additionally, Borges’s intense knowledge of literature and his multilingualism are reflected in the value placed on the Wycliffe Bible, an early and influential work of English literature, as well as in the narrator’s possession of versions of the text in multiple languages. At the same time, the origins of the Book of Sand outside Europe and Latin America and the presence of One Thousand and One Nights on the narrator’s shelf reflect Borges’s interests in Asian literatures and cultures, topics that recur in many of his short stories.
Reading the text with Borges’s personal history and intellectual interests in mind, the Book of Sand becomes a representation of the unknown, both physically—in the sense that it cannot be read by the characters of the story—and conceptually—as it comes from a culture that is foreign to both the narrator and the salesman. The end of the story, in which the narrator hides the Book of Sand in the National Library, serves a dual meaning: The narrator simultaneously expands the contents of the library for which he (and Borges) once worked and relinquishes his efforts to impose order and control on this text that reflects his inability to fully understand the world around him.
Historical Context: Argentina in the 1970s
Beginning in the 1950s, Argentina was embroiled in political conflict fomented by nationalistic and anticommunist movements under Juan Perón, who became the country’s president three times from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Peronism, which embraced populist ideas and rejected communist ideologies, spawned a variety of factions that fought for power in Argentina during the period that Americans know as the Cold War. The US and much of Western Europe clashed with the USSR and other socialist/communist countries for dominance across the globe. The Cold War inspired a number of conflicts, such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but it also had a profound impact on Latin America. The Cold War framework facilitated the rise of numerous far-right regimes in Latin America that opposed Marxism, particularly in the Southern Cone countries of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the 1970s and 1980s. These regimes were supported by the US, which feared that Soviet-style communism would spread from Cuba throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The most notable event in Argentine history from the 1970s is known as the Dirty War; after Perón’s death in 1974, his third wife, Isabel, replaced him as president but was quickly toppled by a military regime that controlled the country from 1976 until 1983. In the Dirty War, the military dictatorship fought against its own citizens, “disappearing” up to 30,000 of them (“Dirty War.” Britannica, 17 Feb. 2023). “The Book of Sand” was written and published just before this war began. Borges lived in the context of increasing political turmoil and violence that culminated in the Dirty War, and the divisions and conflicts of Argentina’s political landscape inform the meaning of “The Book of Sand.” He opposed the Perón government, which retaliated by moving him from National Library Director to poultry inspector. Likewise, the Dirty War and the conflicts leading up to it can be seen as direct results of postcolonialism and globalist politics, as the US and the USSR each pressured developing nations to align themselves with capitalism or communism, respectively.
The Book of Sand is essentially precolonial, as it is written in an ancient script, and its infinite pages imply infinite knowledge and wisdom. The introduction of ancient wisdom and order into a modern political environment contrasts with the conflicts of ideology and the increasing chaos of Argentina at that time. The infinite nature of the book, however, resists order and fixity; it resists being governed or constrained and highlights a multiplicity of meanings, in contrast to the rigid nationalist models that fought to dominate Argentina while Borges was writing the story.
Ideological Context: Postcolonialism and Orientalism
A key component of “The Book of Sand” lies in the postcolonial nature of Borges’s writing as an Argentinian in the 20th century. Argentina was a former colony of Spain, and its postcolonial texts reflect European and Eurocentric influences, including being written in a European language, Spanish. The most relevant postcolonial influence in this story is that of Orientalism, which is an ideological set of assumptions about the East, the “Orient,” or, more generally, distant nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Orientalism, as a contextual element in “The Book of Sand,” presents itself in the travels of the Book of Sand from India to Scotland and, finally, to Argentina. Orientalist thought, as discussed by Edward Said, generally exoticizes the East and often presents it as filled with a “primitive” mysticism, a racist belief that is grounded in false spirituality (Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979). To the Europeans, much of Asia and Africa possessed a mystical, esoteric quality of old gods and mysterious rituals. At the same time, these areas and their inhabitants were presented as either savage or backward or as mystically knowledgeable. That the Book of Sand comes from India roots it, conceptually, in that Orientalist framework, in which India is a land of dangerous—but enticing—mysteries.
The Book of Sand, though, travels through Europe to get to Argentina, mirroring the process by which Orientalism originally reached the colonies. Just as the Scottish salesman brings his mysterious Indian book to Argentina, he conceptually brings harmful stereotypes of Orientalism to the former Western colonies. That the narrator becomes obsessed with the book, only to end up finding it repugnant, reflects the trajectory of postcolonial European perceptions of Eastern colonies and peoples. Just as the Europeans fetishized the East while simultaneously belittling Eastern thought and belief, the narrator first embraces and then rejects the Book of Sand.
Related Titles
By Jorge Luis Borges
