Collection: Historia universal de la infamia

Overview
Jorge Luis Borges’s 1935 collection gathers brief, hybrid narratives that masquerade as biographies of criminals, impostors, pirates, assassins, and fanatics. Drawing on newspaper clippings, travelogues, dime novels, and obscure chronicles, the pieces refashion “true” episodes into literary miniatures. The result is a mock-encyclopedia of villainy whose erudite voice delights in ambiguity, where fact is rearranged with audacious precision until it becomes legend. It is Borges’s first book of prose fiction, the matrix of his later inventions, and an anatomy of how stories, and reputations, are made.

Scope and Structure
Most of the collection consists of seven portraits of infamous figures distributed across continents and centuries. A Mississippi swindler promises freedom to enslaved people only to sell them again; an English butcher impersonates a missing aristocrat and seduces a nation’s credulity; a Chinese corsair queen commands vast fleets and imposes a maritime law; a New York gangster industrializes petty crime; a Japanese courtier’s insolence provokes the vendetta of the forty-seven rōnin; a laconic gunman kills with chilling detachment; a veiled heresiarch in Merv proclaims a counterfeit revelation. A final Buenos Aires tale adds local bravado and knife-fighting to the volume’s global gallery. Borges appends a bibliographic confession that acknowledges the book’s method: deliberate paraphrase, condensation, and reinvention.

Style and Method
The prose affects the calm authority of scholarship but wields it for mischief. Dates, aliases, street corners, and ship names pile up until they feel irrefutable; then a sudden metaphor, a paradox, or an ironic twist exposes the stagecraft. The pieces move with brisk economy, compressing whole lives into a handful of charged scenes. Borges practices an art of creative larceny: appropriating sources, heightening what is suggestive, omitting the dull connective tissue, and recasting the remainder in a baroque, epigrammatic idiom. The mock-documentary apparatus, notes, sources, categorical tones, becomes part of the fiction.

Figures and Episodes
Lazarus Morell, the “atrocious redeemer,” engineers a predatory scheme that exploits the hope of emancipation; his rise and fall map a riverine America where philanthropy shades into fraud. Tom Castro (Arthur Orton) convinces admirers and lawyers that he is Sir Roger Tichborne returned; the comedy of his imposture becomes an essay on collective desire and the charisma of error. The Widow Ching transforms piracy into governance, negotiating amnesties and codes while presiding over a floating empire. Monk Eastman, with his pigeons and prizefights, turns New York’s ward politics into a machinery of intimidation, revealing the bureaucratic face of thuggery. Kotsuké no Suké’s petty cruelty triggers a ritual vengeance whose austerity outshines his offense, a moral geometry that Borges admires and suspects at once. Bill Harrigan, a killer without grievance, acts with austere emptiness, a man whose fame is the residue of unmotivated acts. Hákim of Merv, “the veiled one,” fuses theater and theology, proving that authority often rests on costume and choreography as much as doctrine.

Themes
Identity proves porous: impostors invent the people they impersonate, and societies help them by longing for certain narratives. Evil appears less demonic than procedural, a matter of method and rhetoric. The book probes the border between record and romance, implying that all history contains an irreducible fictional quotient. There is a fascination with codes, pirate ordinances, samurai honor, gangland rules, whose elegance can sanctify brutality. Repetition and translation underwrite authorship: to retell is to write, and to plagiarize well is to create.

Significance
The collection inaugurates the quintessential Borgesian stance: playful yet exact, skeptical of facts yet obsessed with their arrangement. It anticipates Ficciones and El Aleph in its use of apocrypha, labyrinthine references, and sly moral paradoxes. Beyond cataloging scoundrels, it studies the mechanics by which reality is narrated into myth, a universal history not of crime as such but of the stories that make infamy endure.