monegal borges and politics

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Borges and Politics Author(s): Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Enrico Mario Santí and Carlos J. Alonso Source: Diacritics, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 55-69Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464739Accessed: 10-03-2015 17:32 UTC

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TEXTS/CONTEXTS

BORGES AND POLITICS

EMIR RODRIGUEZ MONEGAL

Criticism has almost totally ignored Borges' political works. On the other hand, his political opinions-those that are so avidly transcribed by the press of at least three continents-have been excessively cherished. The confusion has been such that the following dichotomy has been

publicly established: Borges the writer is a genius; Borges the political man, an idiot. Borges himself has encouraged these facile categories by stating, time and again, that he knows nothing about politics (which does not keep him from making all sorts of political statements in the same breath); that he has never read a newspaper (though his opinions keep cropping up in newspapers the world over); that his skepticism about political matters is so radical that he thinks the less government the better (which has not prevented him, recently, from praising three particularly notorious regimes: Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile and Videla's Argentina). His friends have grown tired of telling him not to talk about politics and to refuse to be interviewed on the subject, of warning him that those who ask him about politics only wish to set him a trap. He knows all this, he agrees and he smiles.

diacritics/December 1978 55



That Borges, at the age of almost eighty, should choose to play the role of vieillard terrible is understandable, though not justifiable. We can respect the right of others to hold unpopular opinions. Which of course doesn't mean we have to share them. What should not be allowed, however, is for critics to rely on that facile dichotomy and judge Borges solely on the basis of his political opinions. To accept those opinions as critical judgments, as if they were at the same intellectual level as Borges' essays on literature and aesthetics; to use Borges' statements to the press to propose a reading of his politics (or what's worse, of his ideology) is to fall prey to the deadly game of the vieillard terrible. Whatever reasons Borges may have to play that game, or whatever pleasure he may derive from it, is strictly a private affair. Such a rationale does not hold (ought not to hold) if our object of study is Borges' political works, which are more plentiful than one would expect.

These political texts (as all political texts) are closely linked to a specific context and therefore require a knowledge of the events that were shaping Argentina and the West at the time Borges wrote them. Because Borges' biography and its immediate historical context is just now beginning to be researched, it is only natural that, among the various topics related to his work, this one has been the most neglected. While today we seem to enjoy a level of study that does justice to the complexity of Borges' literary texts, we cannot say the same about the study of their ideology. Commonly read out of context or examined in the light of theories that allow for a better definition of the critic than of Borges himself, these texts ought instead to be inscribed within the circumstances that gave rise to them. This ap- proach should ground a profitable reading that is not scandalizing.

II

World War I is the context in which Borges' awakening to political realities takes place. This awakening happens not in Argentina but in Switzerland, a neutral country located precisely in the very heart of wartime Europe. Borges was fifteen years old when he and his family settled in Geneva in the summer of 1914. Here he spends a long season which he will later call the "age of drizzle" [Exposici6n de la actual poesia argentina (1922/1927), ed. Pedro Juan Vignale and C6sar Tiempo (Buenos Aires: Minerva, 1927), p. 93]. As an Argentine living in Switzerland Borges was as- sured of a double neutrality. But Borges (or Georgie, as everyone called him then) could not help being affected by the war. The greatest impact was made by the works of the German Expressionist poets which, along with Whitman's, he discovered, towards 1917. In the Expressionist poems the almost erotic fury of war is expressed in fiery imagery. Some of the poets Georgie read will themselves be victims of the war: Ernst Stadler on the Western front; August Stramm in the Russian fields. Through their poetry, the boy will live vicariously the experience of war.

In articles later published in Spain and in anthologies compiled for Ultraist magazines, Georgie not only introduced and analyzed Expressionist poetry, but also identified himself with what he called "a brotherhood of poets." At the time both his early essays and his poetry were influenced by that noble concept. Those were the years when all European Youth had Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe at their bedside, and a pan-European vision had become a sort of collective mirage. Not only did Georgie write then some Expressionist poetry in Spanish; he also shared in the movement's faith and, above all, in its youthful ideology. In an interview with James E. Irby in 1962, Borges defined his former preference for German Expres- sionism over the other avant-garde movements in unequivocal terms: "In Geneva, where I spent the years of World War I (. . .) I became acquainted with German Expressionism, which for me already contains all the essentials of what came afterwards. I like it so much more than Surrealism or Dada, which seem more frivolous to me. Expressionism is more serious and it shows concern for a whole series of pro- found questions: magic, dreams, religion, and Oriental philosophies, the hope for a universal brotherhood . . ." ["Encuentro con Borges," Revista de la Universidad de Mexico 16 (1962), p. 6]. It is precisely this hope that will determine, at the deepest level, Georgie's adherence to Expressionism. The war experience turned the best

56



poets into pacifists. The millions of dead on both fronts-in that no-man's land described in the novels of Henri Barbusse and Erich Maria Remarque-would turn those warrior poets, paradoxically enough, into the champions of the brotherhood of men. In the most brutal of ways they discovered that the toll of war is always paid by the innocent, that the sons, not the fathers, are the victims strewn on the battlefields. Expressionism (along with the rest of the avant-garde movements) is often simply regarded as the rebellion of the young against official conduct, as the radical conduct of the majority of its poets; seldom, if ever, is the origin of that conduct and rebellion mentioned. Parricide, Oedipus' tragic knowledge, is only the second stage of a conflict which actually begins with filicide. The Expressionist poets were forced to fight in a war which became (like Viet Nam, which began as one of France's last colonial adventures) one of the worst filicidal catastrophes in history.

Suddenly and in the midst of a society that considered itself cultured, the Belle Epoque, a whole generation was massacred and on such a scale as to make the ancient Aztec rituals look like a suburban get-together. Europe was showing the world the obscene contents hidden behind the facade of parades in elegant uni- forms, handsome naval maneuvers and virile cavalry charges. For the first time in history, European youth was not being sacrificed (for the greater glory of the Ger- man, French or English empires) in remote colonial outposts: in 1914 they were all being killed at their very doorsteps. Parricide, then, came as an inevitable reaction to that slaughter of sons. The Expressionist poets were the first to call attention (in the days of a heavily censured press) to the genocide being carried out on the glorious battlefields of France, Austria, Poland and Russia.

Discovering all this must have come as a shock for Georgie. Not only was he protected from such carnage by both an Argentine passport and residence in Swit- zerland, but he was also prevented from participating in this entire military adven- ture by his poor eyesight. Furthermore, a patricidal rebellion was particularly impossible in his case for a very personal reason: his was the most generous and tolerant of fathers. A friend to his son and a convinced practitioner of the theory that children are the ones that educate their parents, Don Jorge was not only so modest that he would have liked to have been invisible-as Borges himself has told in his "Au- tobiographical Essay" [The Aleph and other Stories, ed. and tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in collaboration with the author (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), p. 206]- but because he never interfered in his son's decisions out of a conviction that it was better to let him make mistakes and learn from them than to be docile to paternal authority. Clearly, such a discreet father could not help but elicit the most complete devotion. Instead of rebelling, Georgie faithfully imitated him.

But all this did not prevent Georgie's rebellion, masked under filial devotion, to show up in symbolic ways. Thus, when the Russian Revolution breaks out, Georgie will write several poems that Borges will never dare collect in his complete works. They are still there, though, in the magazines where he published them, as documents of his enthusiasm at the age of eighteen or nineteen. These are the years when Georgie discovers the violence of both war and sex, both the brotherhood of poets and the kinship of flesh. Lost in a world that was virtually destroying itself before his neutral eyes, Georgie found metaphors for his own intense and confused feelings of filial loyalty and incestuous love, the dark parricidal thrust barely masked by the early poetry, in the imaginary experience of war. In a parallel mode, one of his first articles, if not in fact his very first, was a review of three Spanish books which he sent from Spain to his friend Maurice Abramowicz for publication in La Feuille, a Geneva newspaper [Jorge Luis Borges, "Chronique des lettres espagnoles. Trois nouveaux livres," La Feuille (Geneva), August 20, 1919]. (For the occasion, Abramowicz served as a discreet copy editor for Borges' modest French.)' One of the three books

1 During a 1975 visit to Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, I was able to see the original manu-

script of this review and was also given valuable information about it by Dr. Abramowicz. I am grateful to Professor Donald A. Yates for letting me have a copy of Borges' original text as published in La Feuille.




reviewed was Pio Baroja's Momentum catastrophicum. Written at the time of Baroja's anarchist peak, the book directs an impious attack against the hypocrisy of powerful nations which practice a domestic policy of cautious liberalism at home while carry- ing out imperialistic practices abroad. Writing after the Allied victory at the time when the Treaty of Versailles was allowing France, England and the United States to

guarantee the existence of their world empires for several more years, Baroja speaks out in favor of peace, and dedicates a somewhat dubious note of praise to Woodrow Wilson: "Marcus Aurelius of the great republic of trusts and sewing machines, the sole apostle and referee of international disputes, the flower of successful up- starts . . ." In his review, Georgie applauds Baroja explicitly. An ideological affinity may well have motivated his selection of this book for review. Both writers (the young Argentine and the irascible Basque) believed in peace and distrusted or-

ganized government. From his father Georgie had inherited a kind of philosophical anarchy grounded more in Spencer than in Bakunin. The discovery of an Expres- sionist brotherhood and the impact of the Soviet Revolution could only awaken that latent anarchy. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the two books Georgie wrote at the time (though he would never actually publish them) should have been strongly tainted by an anarchist ideology. Evoking these times in his "Autobiographical Essay" Borges himself sums up his themes and outlooks:

In Spain, I wrote two books. One was a series of essays called, I now wonder why, Los naipes del tahur (The Sharper's Cards). They were literary and political essays (I was still an anarchist and a freethinker and in favor of pacifism), written under the influence of Pio Baroja. Their aim was to be bitter and relentless, but they were, as a matter of fact, quite tame. I went in for using such words as "fools," "harlots," "liars." Failing to find a pub- lisher, I destroyed the manuscript on my return to Buenos Aires. The second book was entitled either The Red Psalms or The Red Rhythms. It was a collection of poems--perhaps some twenty in all--in free verse and in praise of the Russian Revolution, the brotherhood of man, and pacifism. Three or four of them found their way into magazines-"Bolshevik Epic," "Trenches," "Russia." This book I destroyed in Spain on the eve of our departure. I was then ready to go home. [p. 223].

III

Toward the 1920's politics will once again engage Borges' complete and undi- vided attention. Once settled in Argentina, and devoted (at first) to the propagation of the Ultraist movement and then (almost immediately after) to its destruction,

Borges tested his first weapons, in 1927, around domestic Argentine politics. Along with a group of poet friends who, like him, were loyal contributors to Martin Fierro, the Ultraist magazine, Borges founded a Committee of Young Intellectuals to support Hip6lito Irigoyen as a candidate for President. According to an almost forgotten chronicle of the times written by Ulyses Petit de Murat in 1944, what moved the

young group to support Irigoyen was the belief that "the Mole" (as he was affection-

ately called) hadn't the slightest chance of getting reelected since his enemies were

intentionally tampering with the ballot boxes ["Jorge Luis Borges y la revoluci6n literaria del Martin Fierro," Correo Literario (Buenos Aires), January 15 and February 1, 1944]. For them, the whole thing was interesting because it was a lost cause. Behind the movement were Petit de Murat himself, Borges and a young Argentine poet, Fran- cisco L6pez Merino, who committed suicide the following year and to whom Borges would dedicate two very personal poems. Soon other young intellectuals joined the

group: Francisco Luis Bern~rdez, Leopoldo Marechal (both Catholics), Enrique and

Raul Gonz~lez Tutf6n (leftists). In his chronicle, Petit de Murat tells of an anecdote

that conveys Borges' own attitude towards the campaign. One day the group went to visit Irigoyen's headquarters, where they were greeted by his Manager, who pro- ceeded to bore the group with the usual repertory of campaign rhetoric. Borges is

58



reported to have turned to Petit and to have asked: "Che, when did you say we're

getting the pies wrapped in sinecures?" Not all the young intellectuals were willing to support lost causes. The board of

Martin Fierro, for example, which prided itself upon its political neutrality, published a statement in one of its issues [44-45, (August 31-September 15, 1927)] disavowing any ties with the Committee and restating its neutrality in very strong terms. The reaction did not please Borges or Petit, and they both submitted their resignations as members of the board. A more radical reaction against the Committee came from the editors of Claridad, a leftist newspaper. In its April 1928 issue they published a poem attributed to the Committee's members that included the following prayer to

Irigoyen:

Undoer of old and rotten regimes, when in the end you reach the desired confines of the great presidential hall, heed our prayers, understand our gestures and give us consulates, chairs and other jobs, Oh genial and unequalled Man!

The poem was signed by the members of the Committee. Obviously, nobody believed it was authentic. The newspaper's intention to expose through slander the Committee's venality was all too obvious. And yet, after a fifty-year span, the entire situation was actually reversed by a curious turn of events. For in opposing the Committee, Claridad was in effect also opposing Irigoyen's candidacy to the Presi- dency. This meant that it was against the only really popular caudillo that had risen out of Argentine politics in recent years. While the supposedly alienated bourgeois intellectuals that made up the Committee were defending a populist candidate, the Socialists of Claridad appeared to be in line with the worst reactionary elements of

Argentine society that saw in Irigoyen a threat to their class privileges and to their own happy accords with international economic interests.

On the other hand, Borges, who neither needed nor wanted a sinecure (his benefactor continued to be Don Jorge Borges), admired the true leader in Irigoyen. Some three years before this whole affair, he had expressed his opinion, at once political and allegorical, about Irigoyen's significance for Argentina in an article he would later collect in Inquisiciones ["Queja de todo criollo," Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Proa, 1925)]. One must add that when Borges first wrote the article "the Mole" was not yet in power so it was not the hope for an appointment that moved him to this praise:

In my opinion, the creole is a wag by nature, disillusioned and suspi- cious of everything from the outset, and hates verbal bombast so much that he tolerates it in very few and praises it in none. Silence joined to fatalism finds its proper incarnation in two great leaders who embraced the soul of Buenos Aires: Rosas and Irigoyen. The former, despite his exploits and uselessly spilled blood, was dearly beloved by the people. The latter, despite official masquerades, is always governing us. The meaning which the people always recognized in Rosas, understood in Roca and admire in Irigoyen is the scoff of theatricality, or its exercise in a burlesque sense. In countries of greater zest for life than ours, famous leaders show themselves thoughtless and clowning, while here they are reserved and almost wan. [p. 132]

Borges' words synthesize a whole theory of criollismo. For Borges that essential trait (which he had sought to capture in his first three volumes of poetry and his first three books of essays) had nothing to do with the criollismo dripping from tango lyrics, already contaminated by Galician or Italian melancholy. This is why he en- joyed Irigoyen's reservedness and why, in his enthusiasm for old creoles, he even




found virtues in Rosas, the arch-enemy of his own forebears. At a moment when

everyone took pleasure in comparing Irigoyen to Rosas as a way of proving their common arbitrariness, their despotic indifference to the rights of their political ad- versaries, Borges' article emptied out that argument by showing how both men

displayed the roots of a criollismo which scorns ostentation and is founded upon silence.

Borges' passion for Irigoyen died out once "the Mole" won the election ... against all odds. Instead of claiming his place in the sun, he soon became a critic of the government. He had plenty of reasons. While in his first term "the Mole" had effected a number of political reforms, making good use of the economic prosperity brought about by the booming meat and wool prices during World War I, in his second term Irigoyen was not only old and cantankerous, but faced an economic

picture that had deteriorated considerably both in Argentina and abroad. No sooner had Irigoyen taken office for the second time than he was forced to face the repercussions of the Wall Street crash on the Argentine economy. Surrounded by medio- cre advisors, his own peculiar distrust made worse by old age, Irigoyen ended up alienating even his best friends. By 1930 even his closest supporters were ready to

accept any forced solution to the problem. A bad cold turned out to be the excuse to force him out of office. General Uriburu soon took over the government.

Borges' reaction to the military coup is documented in a letter he wrote then to Alfonso Reyes, whom he had befriended when the Mexican writer had been ambas- sador to Buenos Aires ["Jorge Luis Borges A Alfonso Reyes," Jorge Luis Borges ed. Dominique de Roux and Jean de Milleret (Paris: L'Herne, 1964), p. 56]. In it he displays a literary irony, but he reveals his disillusionment with both "the Mole" and the military. Although he (like many at the time) was terribly misinformed about the army-he believed, for example, that all officers were honest-his appreciation of

Irigoyen had not entirely disappeared. What hurt Borges most was the loss of the mythology that Irigoyen had fostered while in office. It also hurt him (and with

60



thorough understanding of the implications) that the new regime should be intent on controlling public opinion and on only allowing "Independence under Martial Law" (in Borges' own ironic words). His letter to Reyes evidences his intuition of the

budding Fascism that would take over Argentina soon thereafter. Borges completed his judgment in a later article, collected in Discusi6n [Buenos Aires: Gleizer, 1932]. Writing on the subject "Our impossibilities," and sketching an account of the ills of the Argentine people, Borges ends his indictment with the following words: "An

imaginative poverty and rancor define our own share of death. The former is de-

veloped in a most appropriate article by Unamuno, 'Imagination in Cochabamba'; the latter, the incomparable spectacle of a conservative government, which is forcing the entire republic to join the ranks of Socialism for the sole purpose of annoying and troubling another middle-of-the-road political party. I've been an Argentine for

many a generation; I unhappily deliver these complaints" [p. 17]. The political moralist which Borges had become is clearly delineated in this text.

IV

World War II and its widespread preliminary struggles in Europe prompted Borges to enlarge his list of political works. Some of the first signs of a new con- sciousness can be traced to comments that begin to show up more and more fre-

quently in his critical texts dating from the 1930's. At the time, Borges had already launched a career as a professional journalist in order to supplement his extremely meager income. It is true that as long as Father was alive he could provide food and

shelter, but the latter's pension from his recent retirement had barely made it

through the crisis of 1929. For this reason, the young Borges began to increase his contributions to paying newspapers, though the pay was small: La Naci6n and La

Prensa, above all; Critica (where he was in charge of the literary section for a couple of years) and Sintesis. As of 1936, and for a period of two and one half years, Borges took charge of the "Foreign Books and Authors" column in El Hogar (The Home), an

Argentine ladies' journal. It is precisely in this most unexpected of places that Borges will wage an anti-Fascist political campaign.

It is impossible to survey here all of Borges' contributions to this campaign; it will suffice to point out some of its most salient aspects. His main attacks were directed against Fascism in its two versions: the Italian one (which for Borges, as for

many in Europe, seemed particularly ridiculous) and the German one (which he

correctly saw as the more sinister of the two). Although there are a few attacks

against Marinetti (who visited Buenos Aires in 1936 as a delegate of Fascist Italy to the P.E.N. Club Congress), the majority are diatribes against the Nazification of German culture. For example, on May 30, 1937, Borges wrote a brief review of a German school text that told school children to beware of the "Semite threat." In addition to

transcribing some of its many horrible statements, Borges tells his readers that the

book, entitled Trau Keinem Jud Bei Seinem Eid, was published in Bavaria, that it was

already in its fourth printing and that it had sold 51,000 copies ["Libros y autores

extranjeros," El Hogar (May 20, 1937), p. 26]. In the same month he published a second review of the same book in Sur, in which he developed his arguments and sum- marized and translated some of the book's grossest anti-Semitic passages. His conclusion is the following: "What can one say about a book like this? Personally, I find it repugnant, less for Israel's sake than for Germany's own; less for the insulted community than for the insulting nation. I don't know if the world can do without German civilization. But I find it shameful that it should be corrupted with teachings of hatred" ["Una pedagogia del odio," Sur 32 (1937), p. 81]. What offends Borges the most about German anti-Semitism is the utter stupidity, the aggression against all the cultural values that had made Germany famous. He will find that same stupidity (repeatedly deplored in his writings in El Hogar and Sur) among his own fascist countrymen. For while Borges had learned German and devotedly studied German philosophy and literature, the Argentine Nazis of the time only admired Hitler's awesome power. To explode this viewpoint Borges wrote two important texts. One




is fairly well known: "Deutsches Requiem," a short story collected in The Aleph (1949), that transcribes the monologue of Otto Dietrich zur Linde, director of the Tarnowitz concentration camp, on the eve of his execution at the hands of Allied forces. Less well known in its original Spanish is an article Borges published on the first page of El Hogar in its issue of December 18, 1940, when Hitler's war machine had already destroyed Poland and had completed the great offensive on the Western front which in fifteen days overran the Anglo-French army, and had begun prepara- tions for the invasion of England. The title of the article is "Definition of the Ger- manophile." The first sentence already locates, neatly and brilliantly, the Borgesian view of things:

The implacable detractors of etymology reason that the origin of words does not show their present meaning; its defenders counter that it shows, always, what they don't mean now. It shows, namely, that pontiffs are not

bridge builders; that miniatures are not painted in minium; that ice is not the stuff of crystal; that the leopard is not a hybrid of panther and lion; that a candidate is not always white-washed; that sarcophagi are not the opposite of vegetarians; that categories are not weak caterpillars; that Amerigo Ves-

pucci did not discover America and that Germanophiles are not devotees of Germany" ["Definici6n del german6filo," El Hogar (December 13, 1940), p. 3].

Borges is leading up to the observation that Germanophiles (or at least Argen- tine ones) are indeed uninterested in Germany. He notes that he has often argued with them about Germany, only to learn that they can never recognize the names of Holderlin, Schopenhauer or Leibnitz, and that their interest in that country centered around only one fact: that Germany was an enemy of England. His article goes on to point out other paradoxes about the Argentine Germanophile: "He is anti-Semitic as well: he would expel from our country an entire German-Slavic community in which German last names predominate (Rosenblatt, Gruenberg, Nierenstein, Lilienthal) and that speaks a German dialect: Yiddisch or juedisch" [ibid.]. An imaginary though still typical dialogue allows Borges to complete his portrait-which, incidentally, already anticipates the arguments Sartre would use later in his own Portrait de I'an- tisdmite. The dialogue begins with a discussion of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) that was so unfair to Germany. Borges and his interlocutor agree that the winning nation

ought to have put aside thoughts about oppression and revenge. But they disagree when the Germanophile concludes that now that Germany has won it has a right to destroy its enemies: "My prodigious interlocutor reasoned that the injustice which had formerly afflicted Germany authorizes it in 1940 to destroy not only England and France (why not Italy, too?), but also Denmark, Holland and Norway, which are all

entirely innocent of the crime. In 1919 Germany was mistreated by its enemies: that all-powerful excuse now rationalizes burning, ransacking and conquering all the nations of Europe, and maybe of the whole world. . . . Such reasoning is monstrous, as you can see" [ibid]. To Borges' objections, the imaginary interlocutor responds with a panegyric of Hitler. One last paradox closes their dialogue:

I discover, every time, that my interlocutor idolizes Hitler, not despite the bombs and the devastating invasions, not despite the machine guns, the accusations, or the lies, but because of all these customs and instruments. Evil, atrocities, make him happy. German victory is not important to him; all he wants is the humiliation of England, the burning of London. He admires Hitler, in the same way he admired yesterday Hitler's precursors in the Chicago underworld (. . .). The Hitlerist is always a man of rancour, a secret and sometimes public adorer of a villainous "liveliness" and of cruelty. He is, for want of imagination, a man who postulates that the future cannot differ from the present, and that Germany, triumphant until now, cannot begin to

62



lose. He is the cunning man who wants to be on the winning side. It may be that there is some justification for Adolf Hitler; I know that there is none for the Germanophiles. [ibid.]

By publishing this article on the first page of El Hogar, Borges was perpetrating a

political act that had its repercussions, a few years later, when power in Argentina was seized by an army officer who (without himself being a Nazi) surrounded himself with Nazis. Even at the time when the article was published, at the time of the fall of France and of the Luftwaffe's siege of England, when Hitler's submarines seemed determined to strangle the last of their enemies (Stalin was protected by the Nazi- Soviet Pact of 1938), an attitude like Borges' was going against the grain of Argentine society, Catholic to the point of anti-Semitism, and against the Argentine government, Fascist in its feel for class values, in its economic links to Mussolini's Italy and its resentment against British imperialism. But Borges had never sought popularity. On the contrary, by the age of forty-one he had already begun to cultivate political unpopularity. In the Argentina of the 1940's that unpopularity had a name: to be an antifascist.

One last important piece from Borges' anti-Nazi dossier is "A Comment on

August 23, 1944," which celebrates the liberation of Paris. The essay is well known because it was later included in Other Inquisitions (1952) [English tr. Ruth L. C. Simms, Introduction by James E. Irby (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964) pp. 134-136]. Besides conveying surprise at "the physical happiness I experienced when

they told me that Paris had been liberated" [author's italics, p. 134]. Borges records other, more unexpected surprises, one of which is to notice that many of Hitler's

supporters had themselves become enthusiastic about the liberation. It seems useless to him to try to reason with Germanophiles about the motives behind that sudden change. Those "siblings of chaos" [p. 135] ignore all the deep motives of their own conduct, as Borges points out. Towards the end of the text, and after

recalling a passage from Shaw's Man and Superman on the subject of the unreality of Hell, Borges discovers the key to such enigmatic behavior: it lies in a day which is "the exact and detested opposite" of the one he evokes: the fourteenth of June, 1940, when Nazi troops entered Paris:

A certain Germanophile, whose name I do not wish to remember, came to my house that day. Standing in the doorway, he announced the dreadful news: The Nazi armies have occupied Paris. I felt a mixture of sadness, dis- gust, malaise. And then it occurred to me that his insolent joy did not

explain the stentorian voice or the abrupt proclamation. He added that the German troops would soon be in London, that any opposition was useless, that nothing could prevent their victory. That was when I understood that he too was terrified. [p. 135]

After such a discovery, Borges' conclusion is quite elegant, in the sense that mathematicians use the term to describe the brief solution to a complex problem:

Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hells. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish for it to be triumphant. I shall venture this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is collaborating blindly with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must not have been unaware that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules. [author's italics, pp. 135-136]

The year after Borges' prophecy was published in Sur Hitler died amid the ruins of his own bunker, and a dark, smiling colonel took over the reins of government in Argentina. For Borges, a new stage in his fight against Nazism was about to begin.




V

Juan Domingo Per6n's rise to power was long and secretive. Only on October 17, 1945 did it become clear to everyone in Argentina that true power was not in the hands of President Farrell but in those of his War Minister and Secretary to the

Ministry of Labor. On that day the largest public demonstration seen to date in Buenos Aires demanded and obtained Per6n's return to the post from which he had been ousted eight days earlier as a result of a conspiracy. The government had to yield, Per6n stepped out onto the balcony of the Casa Rosada to greet his loyal supporters and a scream of victory ("the greatest collective orgasm ever heard on Plaza de mayo," according to an imaginative historian, [see FMlix Luna, El 45. Cr6nica de un

argo decisivo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1971), p. 293]), and under-

lined what was already evident: Argentina had a new Rosas. Per6n had done what

Irigoyen had never managed: the Colonel's return to power allowed him to fix the elections of February 24, 1946. With the help of the army, the police and the labor unions (the latter's only partial help) the Colonel got a marginal victory, only fiftyr- one percent of the vote. But it was enough. The forty-nine percent that were set

against Per6n included not only the bitterest right-wing, but also the left-wing which saw in him no more than a Fascist demagogue, a Populist leader who had appro- priated many Socialist ideas for his own political advantage. For his own reasons, Borges became part of that immense minority.

Through statements made to La Plata, a Montevideo newspaper, on October

31, 1945, one can see that Borges' total opposition to Per6n stemmed from a belief that he was a Nazi. Although at the time Borges acknowledged the legitimacy of

many of the social reforms Per6n had proposed, he condemned outright the wave of hatred that the new leader had fostered. In that sinister pedagogy, Borges recognized the same symptoms he had denounced earlier in Germany and Italy. He also

pointed out that Argentine intellectuals were already fighting against the regime and that under such unusual circumstances the only possible democratic solution was to turn power over to the Argentine Supreme Court and then call for truly free elections. However, in his statements Borges was clearly pessimistic about a rapid return to democracy.

He was justified in holding such a view. As is well known, Per6n never gave up power to the Supreme Court; instead, he manipulated labor unions with promises and actual benefits; with the help of the State Police he cracked down on his political enemies; he granted immunity to Nazi-Fascist groups, and he formally assumed power. Meanwhile, Borges signed as many petitions as he could lay his hands on.

Peron's revenge against Borges was slow in coming, but when it did it matched his

generosity. While Borges was wrong about Per6n's being a Nazi (he lacked al-

together Hitler's systematic hatred, his sado-masochistic madness) he was not wrong about his Fascism. Precisely the Fascist methods of humiliation and manipulation- analogous to the laxative techniques that Mussolini used against his enemies-were the ones that Per6n used against Borges and his family.

By then, Borges had been working for about eight years as an assistant librarian in the "Miguel Can6" municipal library. That was his only income. Father's pension barely stretched to cover expenses. It was thus simple enough for Per6n to take

revenge against Borges for signing those petitions. In August, 1946, Borges was sent official notice of his promotion to the rank of inspector of chicken and rabbit coups at the municipal marketplace on C6rdoba Street. Borges himself has given an ironic summary of the episode in his "Autobiographical Essay": "I went to City Hall to find out what it was all about. 'Look here,' I said, 'it's rather strange that among so many others at the library I should be singled out as worthy of this new position.' 'Well,' the clerk answered, 'you were on the side of the Allies . . . what do you expect?' His statement was unanswerable; the next day, I sent in my resignation" [p. 244]. Perhaps out of embarrassment, Borges does not explain what the promotion en- tailed. The new job had an obviously allegorical meaning: chickens and rabbits are tame, almost cowardly animals, perennial butts of the grossest machismo jokes in

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Argentina. But if Borges was afflicted with poor eyesight and was not at all athletic, he did have an uncommon moral courage. He resigned his position and immediately accepted a testimonial dinner in his honor from SADE (no connection to the famous Marquis: Sociedad Argentina de Escritores; Society of Argentinian Writers), where he read a brief text on the matter. Because it is so rare, I will quote it in its entirety:

HURRY UP-HURRY UP

One day, or one month, or one Platonic year ago (so infestive is oblivion, so insignificant the event to which I will refer) I worked, though un- worthily, as a third-class assistant at a municipal library in the southern suburbs. For nine years I went to that library, nine years which in my memory will be one single afternoon, one monstrous afternoon during which I classified an infinite number of books, during which the Reich devoured France, and the Reich did not devour the British Isles; and the Nazis, driven out of Berlin, sought refuge elsewhere. At some point of that unique afternoon, I valiantly signed some democratic statement; one day, or one month, or one Platonic year ago, they summoned me to the municipal police sta- tion. Wonder struck by such a brusque administrative avatar, I went to the Prefectory. There they confided to me that such a metamorphosis was in punishment for having signed certain statements. While I was receiving the news with due interest, I was distracted by a poster that spruced up the solemn office. It was of rectangular shape, rather laconic, of considerable size, and it contained the interesting epigraph "Hurry up-Hurry up." I can't remember my interlocutor's face, I can't remember his name, but until the day I die I shall remember that slovenly inscription. I'll have to resign, I repeated as I went down the stairs; but my personal destiny mattered less than that symbolic poster.

I don't know to what extent the event I have invoked is a parable. But I




suspect that memory and oblivion are gods who know full well what they are doing. If they have misplaced the rest, and if they retain that absurd legend, some justification must support them. I formulate it thus: dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude; dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy. Hotel clerks mumbling orders, effigies of caudillos, prearranged "long live's" and "down with's" walls embellished with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline substituting for lucidity .... To combat such sad monotonies is among the writer's many duties. Do I have to remind readers of Martin Fierro and Don Segundo [Sombra] that individuality is an old Argentine virtue? I also want to tell them how proud I am of this bounteous evening and of this active friendship. ["Dele-Dele," Argentina Libre (Buenos Aires, August 15, 1946), p. 5]

Among the speeches delivered at the same event the most important was that of Leonidas Barletta-a Communist writer who was a former member of the leftist Boedo group, archenemies of Borges' Martin Fierro movement-who at the time was president of SADE. Barletta praised Borges for standing up to the regime and for

refusing to be silent. His first words are explicit enough: "We have gathered around this table to vindicate, in the person of Jorge Luis Borges, all Argentine writers, who have been attacked because of their defense of culture. His work and his conduct merit supremely the emblem that our affection and our admiration bestow upon him" ["Desagravio a Borges," ibid]. For the left, which would fight against Per6n for a whole decade, Borges (the exquisite, the paradoxical Borges) had suddenly become a symbol of intellectual resistance against the regime. It was a strange role for as ironic a man as he, but Borges played it with utmost simplicity. This way it became clear that Per6n had made the wrong choice, since otherwise he would have been able to find among his supporters a worthy inspector of chicken and rabbit coups.

A couple of years later the Peronist government would find yet another way of

humiliating the Borges family. On September 8, 1948, a group of ladies hald a meet-

ing on Florida Street to sing the national anthem and to distribute anti-government pamphlets. It was in the afternoon and soon a number of people had congregated at the site. The police soon arrived to break up the meeting and began arresting the leaders of the ladies' group, arguing (correctly) that they had failed to obtain a

meeting permit. The judge found the protesters guilty and sentenced them to a month in prison. Among the ladies were Borges' sister and mother, Norah and Doria Leonor Azevedo de Borges. Because the latter was sixty years old, she was put under house arrest. In his conversations with Richard Burgin, Borges has talked about the incident:

Borges: She is a remarkable woman. She was in prison in Per6n's time.

Burgin: Per6n put them in prison? Borges: Yes. My sister, well, of course, in the case of my mother it was

different, because she was already an old lady-she's ninety-one now-and so her prison was her own home, no? But my sister was sent with some friends of hers to a jail for prostitutes in order to insult her. Then, she somehow smuggled a letter to us, I don't know how she managed it, saying that the prison was such a lovely place, that every- body was so kind, that being in prison was so restful, that it had a beautiful patio, black and white like a chessboard. In fact, she worded it so that we thought she was in some awful dungeon, no? Of course, what she really wanted was for us to feel, well, not to worry so much about her. .. . Afterwards she told me- but this was when she was out of jail-she said that, after all, my grandfather died for this country, my great-grandfather fought the Spaniards. They all did what they could for the country. And I, by the mere fact of being in prison. I was doing something also. So this is as it should be. [Richard Burgin, Conversa-

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tions with Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), pp. 118-119].

They spent the entire month in jail, though it could have been a much briefer period had the ladies agreed to bow down and ask Evita Per6n to speak on their behalf.

Borges also tells of this aspect of the incident:

Burgin: How long was she (Norah) in prison? Borges: A month. Of course they told her that if she wrote a letter she would

be free at once. And the same thing happened to my mother and sister, her friends and my mother answered the same thing. They said, "If you write a letter to the Senora you'll get out." "What Sehora are you talking about?" "This Sehora is Sethora Per6n." "Well, we don't know her, and she doesn't know us, it's quite meaningless for us to write her....

Burgin: It was a horrible time.

Borges: Oh, it was. For example, when you have a toothache, when you have to go to the dentist, the first thing that you think about when you wake up is the whole ordeal, but during some ten years, of course, I had my personal grievances too, but in those years the first thing I

thought about when I was awake was, well, "Per6n is in power." [p. 120]

To endure Per6n, to survive, that was Borges' main problem during those years. But instead of spending those years in dignified silence (as Eduardo Mallea, another

Argentine writer, would do), or on his knees (like many others) Borges spent them

speaking out. In the occupied city that Buenos Aires had become, Borges continued to speak out until one day he was able to wake up and learn of Per6n's downfall. Or rather, that they had made him fall. He was able to learn (although surely it no longer mattered) that the Macho, as his supporters were fond of calling him, had given up fighting at the last minute and had taken refuge, discreetly enough, in a Paraguayan destroyer, no doubt in order to inspect the chickens and rabbits they were trans-

porting.... The Liberation (as it was then called) brought Borges many rewards of a political

nature [Cf. Jean de Milleret, Entretiens avec Jorge Luis Borges (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967), p. 82]. He was named Director of the National Library, in 1956 he was awarded the National Literature Prize, he was applauded for having been one of the few who had not yielded or had kept silent during the Per6n years. From then on, Borges ceased to be the marginal, independent writer who espoused anarchist ideas, to become an official writer, a conservative, the representative of an oligarchy that prefers any kind of government to the free play of democracy. Personal circumstances had a strong influence upon his political choice. As of 1956, owing to his increasingly poorer vision, doctors forbade Borges to read or write. Thus he had to

rely, more than ever before, on his mother for all intellectual activity, and above all, for information about politics.

At the age of seventy, Mother was an extremely active woman who hardly looked fifty. Actually, she was beginning to look like her son's own wife, a confusion she hardly encouraged but which pleased her enormously. Borges' affiliation with the Argentine Conservative Party at the time stemmed from the influence of Mother, of Norah and of his circle of very conservative friends. Although he may have once stated, as a way of lessening his commitment, that being a conservative was a form of skepticism [Cf. de Milleret, pp. 220-221], his choice of parties would commit him to a cause which is not only lost but also unworthy of being found. As of 1956, then, Borges' political opinions stops having anything to do with Argentine, or for that matter, world political reality. Those opinions are the symptoms of a loss of contact with a complex and ever-changing reality in a man whom blindness has isolated from the world of everyday events: the world of politics.




VI

Today it seems obvious that Borges (like the majority of his fellow Argentines) was wrong in making such negative judgments about Per6n's many accomplish- ments. They were never aware, for example, that, despite his demagoguery and his lack of respect for due democratic process, Per6n was responsible for updating Argentine legislation dealing with both social reform and the protection of workers'

rights. Neither were they aware that Per6n had been right in opposing Anglo- American capitalism, although his reasons might have been thoroughly corrupted by an avarice that made him amass an enormous fortune. That is, Borges saw in Per6n the Fascist, the demagogue, the torturer and the pillager. He was not able to see at all the other side of his truly charismatic personality, one which, in a sense, turned out to be a carnivalesque precursor of Fidel Castro's. But if Borges was not able to

recognize Per6n's positive side, neither were the liberals who surrounded him, nor the leftists (the young parricidas or the old aparatchiks) who were waging battle on other fronts. Only upon his second grab for power did it become clear to everyone that there was another Per6n. But for Borges it was already too late. Apart from the countless allusions to Per6n in his poems, short stories and essays, the main text he wrote against him was a story, written in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares, titled "Monsterfest." Dated November 24, 1947, its manuscript circulated anony- mously for some time around the River Plate area. It was only published after Peron's downfall, and even then under a pen-name and in Montevideo, in the literary section of Marcha during the time I served as its editor [H. Bustos Domecq, "La fiesta del monstruo," Marcha (September 30, 1955), 20-23; English tr., Suzanne Jill Levine with Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alfred J. MacAdam, Fiction 5 (1977), 2-5]. Narrated in a baroque language that carries to an extreme the lunfardo dialect of some of Bustos Domecq's characters, the story is about a stupid and venal man who tells of his participation in demonstrations in honor of Per6n. All of the story's sordid details bare out Per6n's demagogic arrangement of "spontaneous" demonstrations in support of his regime. With its display of savage humor, the story would merely turn out to be an exercise in the grotesque mode were it not for its violent ending-which turns out to be based on fact. Before getting to the Plaza de Mayo, the demonstrators run into a young Jewish intellectual whom they try to force into singing Peronist

slogans. But because he does not do it to their satisfaction they kill him on the spot. Although infrequent, incidents such as this actually occurred in Per6n's Argentina, especially during the time when he was in control of the police and in the process of

consolidating his power. Among his occasional allies there was a certain group, the Nationalist Alliance, of Nazi affiliation, that turned Jewish persecution into a favorite

pastime. Per6n himself often publicly condemned these incidents but he never had the assassins punished. Although he was not a Nazi, he kept those bulldogs in reserve.

Borges was technically wrong, then, in believing that Per6n was a Nazi. But he was not at all wrong in seeing that Per6n gave encouragement to Argentine Nazis. Because of this, because he was essentially right, being wrong about the details could be of no great concern to him. As he has said in his stories, and especially in "Emma Zunz," the circumstances might have been false, but the crime was real. For the political moralist that Borges ultimately is, Per6n's guilt lay there. There was no

way to compromise, as Borges never did, with the smiling villains of Argentine history.

VII

If Borges had only written about politics, this article would probably end here. Subsequent to 1956, and with very few exceptions (an occasional poem about Israel, for example) Borges has not published anything on an explicitly political theme. On the other hand, Borges has not stopped granting interviews to discuss topics of current interest, and he has given his opinions on as many political events as his

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interviewers have broached. Even while denying his credentials, he has not stopped talking about such matters with the perversity of a vieillard terrible that has grown with the years. His statements have fed the fire and by now even those who for years tolerated the worst dictatorships (Franco's for example) think they have the right to take offense at Borges' support of Pinochet or his cheers for Nixon. Those without sin should cast the first stone: unfortunately, Borges' critics have no such evangelical scruples. Still, all this would be acceptable-and would even imply a measure of

poetic justice, since, in his young years, Borges himself indulged in a kind of political terrorism by crucifying an elder poet like Lugones-if only the politics of Borges' texts were read responsibly. That is, it would all be acceptable if Borges' critics, so

visibly militant on the left of the political spectrum, would actually study the ideology of his texts instead of just adding solemn glosses to his casual opinions. They would find not only that Borges has written more about politics than is usually believed, but that his whole oeuvre has a political ideology.

We would obviously need more than just a survey of political opinions to be able to analyze the ideology of the text we call Borges. A text's ideology (as Marx and

Engels knew long ago) does not necessarily coincide with the ideology explicitly espoused by its author. In his preface to the Comddie Humaine, Balzac declared himself a Catholic Monarchist. But fortunately his picture of French society in the first half of the 19th century is free of all those pious fictions. The same thing occurs with D'Annunzio's Fascism (brilliantly analyzed by Paolo Valesio) or C61ine's anti- Semitism (to which Julia Kristeva has devoted a crucial study). Neither does D'An- nunzio's work defend bourgeois society, preserver of family and State, of good manners and private property, nor does C61ine's defend the Nazi ideal of a society based on discipline or on the fervor of a political mysticism for a Germanic superman. As a text, D'Annunzio is an apostle of corruption and decadence; C61ine, a

party to chaos and the absurd, riddled by a piety that can only be expressed in the forms of insult and anger. Borges' work (the text we call Borges) does not pretend to

preserve bourgeois society; rather it denies it altogether. It is not in favor of the

family, or of good manners, but of the total extinction of reality, of time and space, the individual and his illusions of power: all as illusory as everyday reality. Such a

negative world, such a radical heterotopy (in Foucault's terms) cannot be limited to a Fascist regime, be it Franco, Pinochet or Boss Videla. Borges' edifying enemies, those respectable pater familiae who desire stable and strong governments to assure a better future for their children, are the ones who support totalitarian regimes, the ones who lower their heads when men like Per6n or Franco are in power. On the other hand, Borges the enfant terrible/vieillard plus que terrible keeps on writing against mirrors and copulation. His is not the world of the Fascio, but the Malthusian world of nothingness.

Emir Rodriguez Monegal teaches Latin American literature at Yale. His latest book is Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography, published by E. P. Dutton.

-Translated by Enrico Mario Santi and Carlos J. Alonso




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