The Borgesian Garden: Luis Fernando Verissimo, Chico Buarque and Luis Aguilar Monsalve

At the end of twentieth century and the beginning of the twentieth first century had come into view some Latin American writers that could not avoid the influential literature of earlier decades. Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most prominent authors from the first and second half of the XX century has been the main source of influence in the latter generation of writers. In this study I explore the text of three writers from Brazil and Ecuador, and question how they overcome Borges’ influence and how they find their own poetical voice as well. Throughout the examination of the narrative as a construction of fictional time/space, we can identify a new trend of using virtual geometrical figures to study the relation of time and space in the narrative. In the analysis of Luís Fernando Veríssimo’s novel O jardim do diabo, we find through one of Harold Bloom ratios in the study of The Anxiety of Influence, the technique that the Brazilian author exercises to seek his own path in the world of fiction. I applied the term Tessera, from Bloom, as a token to construct the geometrical virtual image (Hypercube) of the time/space in the narrative. In addition I revised Chico Buarque’s novel, Budapeste, and I utilized Bloom’s third ratio, call Kenosis, to find the representation of the space in the storyline as a second geometrical virtual image (Tetrahedron). For the analysis of Luís Aguilar Monsalve short fiction I constructed a geometrical virtual image of the Cylinder by using Bloom’s sixth ratio, Apophrades or the return of the dead. By using the geometrical images to explain the relation time/space in the narrative, a new method of literary text revision could bring a fresh radiance to the explanation of the fictional world as a fourth dimension time/space relation. There is such a connection between XXI century narrative and the visual world that a critical study of the written text cannot be detached from the visual manifestations of the literary world