The idea of borderlines, of existences lived on the margins, informs this work throughout and in many different ways. The borders might be geographical, imaginary, psychological or based on issues around gender, they take many forms, but they are crucial to the thinking involved; and I believe that the first of these ideas, geography, is implicated in all of them.

The three writers whose work is analysed here are from the River Plate region in the southern cone of South America. Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–1994) is from Uruguay and Manuel Puig (1932–90) and Luisa Valenzuela (b. 1937) are from Argentina. Both of these countries have largely, though not wholly, European populations. People who are, and at the same time are not, European, and it is these populations that are central to the works of all of the writers.

This idea of being and not being is in itself a kind of metaphorical marginality, and indeed writers from this region, by virtue of this position, enjoy a particularly privileged view of Western society, in which they act as both participants and outsiders.

Borges captures this idea in an essay called ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’[The Argentine writer and tradition], where he compares the situation of the Argentine writer with that of Jewish thinkers in Western culture who: ‘actúan dentro de esa cultura y al mismo tiempo no se sienten atados a ella por una devoción especial’ (p. 160) [act within that culture and at the same time do not feel tied to it with any particular devotion]. He goes on to say: ‘Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, estamos en una situación análoga; podemos manejar todos los temas europeos, manejarlos sin superstición, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene, consecuencias afortunadas’ (p. 161) [I believe that Argentines, in fact South Americans in general, are in an analogous position; we can use all of the European motifs, use them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have and indeed has had fortunate consequences].