Rewriting Dante to Parody Lugones: Borges’s “The Aleph”

In Chapter 5 I examine Borges’s famous story “The Aleph,” which, I argue, is not only a parody of the Divine Comedy, but also a subtle critique of Leopoldo Lugones in the figure of Carlos Daneri, a pedant whose poetics the protagonist (Borges) despises. This chapter evidences how Borges’s rewritings of Dante are in direct dialogue with those of Lugones. Borges uses Dante primarily to parody Lugones’s pedantism and also his nativist nationalistic views expressed in El payador. This chapter evidences that Borges’s re-writing Dante became a clever way to weigh in on the discussions involving Argentine literature, much in the same way that in Dante’s day lyric poetry was a vehicle for debating the phenomenology of love with poet friends and rivals.