The Other Borges: Reflections on Making "Harto The Borges"

Jorge Luis Borges tumbstone, 1999

Behind the scenes of a documentary that became a Borgesian text itself—25 years later

Twenty-five years ago, when Jorge Luis Borges declared "I'm fed up with him" about his own public persona, he probably didn't imagine that this exhaustion would become the title of my documentary about him. "Harto the Borges" (2000) was my attempt to create something beyond traditional biographical filmmaking—a work that would mirror Borges's own literary techniques while revealing the man behind the myth.

As we mark the 25th anniversary of the film's release, I find myself reflecting on both the documentary's methodology and its enduring relevance in our current cultural moment.

A Documentary That Reads Like a Borges Story

What I aimed to create wasn't just a film about Borges, but something that would feel distinctly Borgesian in its methodology. I constructed what critic Horacio González called "an authentic congress of Borgesian deputies"—a collection of voices from writers, critics, and intellectuals who speak about Borges without necessarily listening to each other, yet somehow create an involuntary dialogue that reveals more about the man than any traditional biography could.

I centered the film around a 1979 television interview with Antonio Carrizo, but wove around it conversations with figures like Ariel Dorfman, Martín Caparrós, and Christian Ferrer. The result is a polyphonic portrait that mirrors Borges's own literary technique of multiple perspectives and unreliable narrators.

"The Other" Borges

The documentary's opening section brilliantly plays with language in a way Borges would have appreciated. The title "Harto the Borges" works on multiple levels: "harto" means "fed up" in Spanish, but it also suggests "mucho" (much), and phonetically approaches "heart of." Dorfman points out that "other" sounds like "otro" in Spanish, making this a film about "the other Borges"—the one who always escaped definition.

This isn't accidental. The documentary reveals Borges as someone who was "always escaping from himself and returning to himself," someone who "didn't want us to catch him, didn't want us to fix him." And perhaps most remarkably, it suggests he was "absolutely successful" in this project of perpetual escape.

The Mother's Voice and Literary Creation

One of the most fascinating revelations concerns Borges's relationship with his mother, Doña Leonor. The documentary shows how she wasn't just an influence on his work but an active collaborator. The famous line from "La intrusa"—"A trabajar hermano, esta mañana la maté" (Let's get to work, brother, I killed her this morning)—came directly from his mother's imagination.

When Borges told her he needed the perfect phrase for one brother to tell another that he had killed a woman they both loved, she said, "Let me think," and then in a different voice, as if the words had occurred to her in 1890s Argentina, she provided that devastating line. Critics have praised its economy as evidence of Borges's study of Kipling and Scandinavian sagas, but it came from someone who had read neither.

The Political Borges: No Easy Answers

Perhaps my most deliberate decision was refusing to sanitize Borges's political positions. I included his support for military dictatorships, his meeting with Pinochet, and his racist comments about Black people and indigenous populations. Rather than explaining these away, I allowed multiple voices to grapple with the contradiction between literary genius and political blindness.

Christian Ferrer offers a provocative interpretation in the film: that Borges's outrageous statements were part of a deliberate "intervention strategy" designed to provoke and "sow confusion among the common sense of Argentines." Whether this makes his positions more or less defensible is something I left for viewers to decide.

The Myth-Making Machine

The documentary reveals Borges as perhaps the most successful literary myth-maker of the 20th century. Mempo Giardinelli makes the startling claim that probably fewer than 100,000 Argentines have actually read Borges, despite his status as a national icon. This points to something Martín Caparrós identifies: "Everything he did in his life tends toward the construction of the Borges myth."

But here's the twist: Caparrós suggests that if this was Borges's goal, then actually reading him might be "almost an affront to him." The real Borgesian move, he implies, might be to "screw with Borges, don't pay attention to his mythologizing maneuver and read him, ruin his stew."

The International Perspective

Some of the most insightful observations come from non-Argentine voices. Ariel Dorfman, speaking from his experience as a Chilean exile, provides a particularly acute analysis of Borges's relationship to violence and his assertion that "there is nothing more Argentine than trying to dissolve Argentineness into a kind of universal and European concept."

Franco Lucentini's Italian perspective on why Borges never won the Nobel Prize is equally illuminating: the Swedish Academy simply doesn't understand writers like Borges, just as they didn't understand Valéry, Mallarmé, Poe, or Baudelaire.

A Living Literary Technique

What becomes clear from the documentary is that Borges didn't just write about multiple perspectives, unreliable narrators, and the impossibility of fixed identity—he lived these concepts. His public persona was itself a literary creation, as carefully constructed as any of his labyrinths.

The documentary's genius lies in recognizing this and responding with a form that matches its subject. Instead of trying to pin down the "real" Borges, it creates a space where contradictions can coexist, where multiple truths can be held simultaneously.

The Voice That Remains

Perhaps the most moving aspect of the documentary is its attention to Borges's literal voice. Throughout the transcription, there's a recognition that something essential about Borges can only be accessed through hearing him speak. Horacio González notes that "in voice there is destiny," and Borges himself insisted he could only understand Macedonio Fernández's writing when he read it "with his voice."

This creates a poignant irony: a writer obsessed with the written word who believed that writing was somehow incomplete without the human voice that brought it to life.

Why This Matters Now

In our current moment of simplified narratives and canceled complexities, "Harto the Borges" offers something I believe is valuable: a model for how we might approach difficult figures without either demonizing or sanctifying them. I allowed Borges to be brilliant and reactionary, innovative and prejudiced, universal and parochial—sometimes simultaneously.

This wasn't relativism or moral confusion on my part. It was recognition that human beings, even literary giants, contain multitudes that resist easy categorization. I believe Borges's greatest achievement might have been this very resistance to being pinned down, this insistence on remaining multiply interpretable.

The Borgesian Reader

My documentary ends where it began: with the recognition that every reading creates a new text, every interpretation reveals as much about the interpreter as the interpreted. We are all, in the end, characters in the ongoing fiction of Borges, contributing our own voices to that "congress of Borgesian deputies" that continues to meet whenever someone encounters his work.

In this sense, "Harto the Borges" doesn't just document its subject—it extends his literary project into the realm of cinema. I created a work that Borges himself might have written, if he had been a filmmaker instead of a writer. Perhaps that's the highest compliment any documentary about a literary figure can receive: to become, itself, a work of literature.

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The complete transcription of the documentary is available on Academia.edu. The document offers readers a unique opportunity to experience this film in written form, complete with correspondence between Borges and figures like Rafael Cansinos-Asséns and Macedonio Fernández. For those interested in the intersection of biography, literature, and cinema, it serves as both historical record and methodological study—a quarter-century later, the questions it raises about how we document complex intellectual figures remain as relevant as ever.