English Science History BORGES

22:17, 23:16 timestamps. I hear ((patient)) and ((Bloomdian term)), which, I think, do not fit into this context. About the second one I cannot even say what it can mean.

MELVYN BRAGG: Do you think it had any influence on what he wrote about, and the way he wrote about it?

EVELYN FISHBURN: It must have done. I mean, as you said before-- everything and that he wants-- said something about a man, thinks that he is writing about this, that and the other, mountains, and rivers, and whatever. And in the end it’s the 22:17 ((patient)) labyrinth, that he has traced, are the lines of his own face. But can I just say something because it causes a lot of misunderstandings with the hoaxes, and Edwin is quite quite right when he said-- talks about the hoaxes, and this is something that is important in his work, because it appears so often, but not quite as often as we think. I’ve done a lot of work on illusion in Borges, and I’ve always found that although he uses the allusion counter-culturally he might say somebody wrote something that they didn’t write, but the person is right to give it an air of veracity. On the whole you can see why-- what it is that he is setting up. And on the whole there aren’t that many allusions that are false, the vast majority of them are apposite allusions, which he then creates an interplay between what he has misquoted. He creat- -- he reads-- this reads creatively in 23:16 ((Bloomdian term)), what he has misquoted and he is applying it. And, I think, that is where a lot of the inventiveness of his work resides.

You can listen to the programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_comm...