Macedonio Fernández

It is believed that he is a descendant of the Macedonio family of Naples, Italy who claimed descent from the Macedonian dynasty of Eastern Rome and Philip II of ancient Macedonia.

At the same time, Borges denied that Macedonio possessed any literary talent or importance, reinforcing the long-held perception of the older man as a kind of local Socratic philosopher, specific to Argentina and constitutive of an Argentine mythic dimension.

Such themes include the conceit of an alternative, fictional dimension, elaborated anonymously in collaboration, that invades the known, tangible world (Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Macedonio's campaign to transform Buenos Aires by turning it into a novel, a component of his Museo de la Novela de la Eterna); and the hermetic world of immigrant working girls who must negotiate the city on their own, secret terms based purely on instinct and passion (Borges' "Emma Zunz" and Macedonio's Adriana Buenos Aires).

The relationship between these two men began in earnest in 1921, when Borges returned to Buenos Aires with his family after their extended stay in Switzerland (and travels elsewhere in Europe), where he had completed his education.

Upon graduating law school, Macedonio, the elder Borges, and companion Julio Molina y Vedia hatched a plan to found a utopian colony based on the anarchist principles of Élisée Reclus.

Macedonio then shuttered his law practice, dismantled his household and, about the same time as he renewed his friendship with the now adult Jorge Luis Borges, embarked on a life as an idiosyncratic writer-philosopher.

Borges and other members of the generación martinfierrista were drawn to Macedonio as a mentor and figurehead who could serve as an anchor to the nascent Buenos Aires avant-garde and a foil to Leopoldo Lugones, leader of the modernista movement of a generation earlier.

This is also about the time that Borges made his famous break with the avant-garde and pronounced the death of Argentine ultraísmo, essentially forcing the closure of its most important publication, the little magazine Martín Fierro, after its sixteenth issue.

From 1927 onward, Borges not only started to write, publish and promote his characteristic short fiction (beginning with "Hombre de la esquina rosada"), he aggressively renounced his prior aesthetic production and put considerable energy into burying it forever.

A number of sources (Donald Shaw in particular) suggest that Borges began to regard most of his early writings, and the ideas behind them, as potentially pernicious, especially in the hands of nationalists.