Cidade imaginada: Buenos Aires na poesia de Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

This thesis studies, in the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, the city of Buenos Aires on the border between the material world and the imaginary world. The books, written in the 20s: Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923); Luna de Enfrente (1925); Cuaderno San Martín (1929) are the corpus of this research. In it, under the pulsing rhythm, in which the metropolis throbs, the writer affronts the modernizing everyday spatialization and interrogates times and spaces, through mytho-poetic elements. Thus, poetry, linked in myth and imaginary, in interdependency relationship, has the ability to endure old memories and break with the dominant instance of rational thought. Borges creates, in these works, a contrary atmosphere to logical conformism, and thus, the city of Buenos Aires is envisioned under the ruling of sensible and not exclusively from reason. Therefore, he rehabilitates, at the modernity pinnacle, the imaginary world and transforms the space of belonging, in a cultural and social texture that moves the aesthetic and symbolic processes. So, to highlight images that enhance this symbolic geography, we used the theoretical assumptions from Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary, of Gilbert Durand, Imagination Theory of Matter of Gaston Bachelard, the propositions of Octavio Paz and Beatriz Sarlo. For this analysis, it was used the revised and updated edition of the works of Jorge Luis Borges and for translation into Portuguese the Brazilian version was studied, consonant to the editorial assistance of Jorge Schwartz. The results revealed that Jorge Luis Borges spoke with the tradition and opened paths in symbolic- mythological terms to some „platenses' (inhabitants of the River Plate region) interlocutors. His breakage manifesto with the 'old' gave rise to an opposing writing to regionalism and nationalism. The author made the city the field of poetry, broke with the concepts, forms and materials of modernity, and through freedom of expression, revitalized poetry, myth and imaginary in the social impulse emergence of an elite project which he rejected. By showing the city of Buenos Aires poeticized through childhood recollections, Borges returned to the past and vitalized the hispano-criolla expressiveness that evanesced. However, he formulated it driven by reflection on universal issues such as the World, the Self/Other, God and the becoming. Now, in relation to the Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary, the three books studied showed the exposure of symmetrical symbolism of fleeing in face of time. The works are linked together by the Nocturnal Regimen of the Imaginary, consisting, either by reversing the affective value assigned to the faces of time, sometimes by seeking and finding a factor of stability in the temporal fluidity.