The ease of posterity: Borges and Bioy Casares in the daily writing of a friendship

Abstract

This article analyzes how the writer’s figure is constructed in the diaries that Bioy Casares wrote during his forty years of encounters with Jorge Luis Borges. Following the notion of privacy in relation to the idea of friendship as a form of passion in Argentine culture, this paper analyzes the forms and the ways in which Bioy Casares presents unusual aspects of Borges as a person and as a friend. At the same time, one can observe in these aspects a figure of a writer, Borges, who created tension between the notions of orality and literacy.