Some years ago, the late Clive James wrote
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died in Geneva in 1986, near the end of a century which he had lived almost all the way through and done a great deal to shape.
This is nonsense. Borges had no power. He gained a cult following in the Sixties which peaked with Mick Jagger in the film 'Performance' which came out in 1970- but he and his ideas had no political influence or effect whatsoever. Still, you may say, he chose an side during the Cold War. But his doing so changed nothing in his country or in Latin America or anywhere else. Like Margarita Pracatan, Borges had taken familiar theological themes and pulp fiction settings and, as Clive said of the cacophonous Cuban singer, made them seem 'unfamiliar, new, and strange'.
If we now think of Latin American literature as central to the Spanish world, and of the Spanish world as a vitally renewed force in the world entire, it has a lot to do with Borges.
or Neruda or Paz but most notably because of Marquez.
As a twentieth-century master artist, he was celebrated even by nineteenth-century standards.
No. There was a small cult of Borges but it was confined to chaps who had been to Uni who were pleased that their boyish passion for Chesterton or Kipling was endorsed by a pucca intellectual. I came to Borges after reading a quotation from him in Foucault's unreadable and utterly insane 'the Order of Things'.
Famous on the scale of Tennyson, Kipling and Mark Twain, he was reported like a natural phenomenon, a human volcano.
Rubbish! Ordinary people can quote Tennyson and Kipling's verse and retain in their memory one or two witticisms from Twain. Pseudo-intellectuals, like me, might quote one or two lines from Borges but everybody understands that we are as thick as shit.
By the end of his life his every spoken word got into print: dialogues with Borges appeared in The New Yorker as fast as they were recorded in Buenos Aires.
There was a Borges cult. Also, he was careful to always say exactly the same thing. Bis repetita placent. We like, we are reassured by, what is repeated.
His dialogues and essays can be recommended as an easy way into Spanish, a language which every student of literature should hold in prospect, to the extent of an elementary reading knowledge at least.
No one should study literature. Why not study farting instead?
(Borges’s own, and much vaunted, knowledge of English was really not much better than that.)
He could read Carlyle. I can't. The guy was hella smart.
Once acquired, the Spanish language opens up a huge story, in which it will be found that Borges was not without rivals even in Argentina.
Borges kept telling us this. We didn't believe him.
His contemporary Ernesto Sabato, for example, wrote even better essays.
An ex-Communist, who had attended the International Lenin School, who was an MIT trained physicist. He was hella smart but turned to literature because of some personal crisis of values. He participated in the 1942 'amends to Borges' celebration which emphasized Argentina's connection to the Liberal West at a time when its own regime was perhaps rather pro-Axis.
Nor was the serene national treasure’s apparently detached political position regarded as beyond cavil by other Argentinian writers who admired his art but questioned his relaxation into international eminence while his homeland was in the grip of terror.
They knew the bloke had no power. He wasn't really a national treasure. He was a guy who had become the center of some sort of bookish cult on foreign campuses. But since Borges never got a degree, he wasn't a proper academic. Clive James is pretending the guy was Maxim fucking Gorki.
Before getting into all that, however, the beginner with Borges can find a seductive entrance to his enchantment through the short stories collected in Labyrinths (1962), which tranmsit his poetic magic irresistibly even through translation.
Especially through it. Borges is exotic and esoteric.
Borges on Writing (1974) is a painless introduction to the incidental prose. (As early as that year, his writings had been translated into twenty-one languages.)
That's how faddish cults work.
The accessibility of the story-teller is no illusion—as with Kipling, the stories go to the heart of his vision—and his essays and dialogues turn his vast learning into an intellectual adventure guaranteed to thrill the young, as he meant it to do.
Now Clive is pretending the bloke was Isaac fucking Asimov.
Before questioning Borges on the political role of his artistic stature, it is wise, as it were, to go crazy about him first.
No. Before questioning a person's 'political role' it is wise to ask if he every had any. Clive didn't. Rupert Murdoch did. Borges was like Clive. He was smart. He was entertaining. But he wasn't Tolstoy or H.G Wells.
But if he created a fairyland, he did not live in one,
Where else could he live? He was blind. His mind was his Empire. It had many treasures but also many terrors about which he wisely remained mum. Living with Mums can have that salutary effect. The truth is, re-reading him as I age, I become uncomfortably aware that though I have never encountered Borges, and never will, he had met me many times. Blindness was God's mercy upon him which he repaid by remaining reticent about people like me whom he could have skewered easily enough. Had he done so, he would have provided us with an identity, a banner under which to rally, the better to fuck up yet more of the world.
and even in the exalted last years of the blind icon there were voices among his countrymen ready to remind him that there had been times when he should have tried harder to use his ears.
When haven't there been voices reminding us that we are shit? Why haven't you had gender reassignment surgery this week? Don't you care about the plight of trans people? You are a fucking Nazi! I hate you, Mum!
'The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be “a patriot to heaven,”
Borges knew that, like Origen, some have made themselves eunuchs to get into that Kingdom.
and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be cosmopolitan,
It was what he was celebrated for in 1942
'this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.'
Borges made his stand during the Second World War. Then he realized what he had done was pointless. He wouldn't make the same mistake again. If the West was nice to him, he wouldn't bite the hand that fed him.
BY THE WHITE WHALE, of course, Borges meant Moby-Dick. He was often very approximate about the details of his enthusiasm for literature in English.
Nothing wrong in that. The guy hadn't been to Uni. What we can be sure of, is that he enjoyed reading Melville. He didn't do it to get a good grade.
But our attention should be on the argument.
No. Borges wasn't a political theorist. Still, he recognized that India was larger than the world.
It’s a pretty phrase, “a patriot to heaven,” and nowadays it can doubtless be tracked down “somewhere in” Moby-Dick by means of a search engine, without the necessity to re-read the actual text.
Clive had been to Uni. He did well there. Sad.
In the language of book-bluff, “re-read” is often a claim to have read something that one has merely dipped into or even skipped entirely, but there was a period of my early life which I did actually occupy with getting through Moby-Dick. Perhaps spoiled in childhood by the narrative flow of Captains Courageous, I found Melville’s ocean clung like tar.
That's odd. I thought it was okay. There was a Parsi bloke- the demonic Fedallah Harpooner- in it. I enjoyed pointing this out to the Parsi boy in our class.
I wish I could believe that it was a masterpiece I wasn’t ready for.
Clive's English was very good. Indian kids don't know English well enough to make fine distinctions. The passage from the sermon is- 'Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.'
I would have been delighted to pluck out from under the khadi dhotis of Congress Politicians their dicks and testicles and do them what those fuckers were doing to us with their forcible sterilization during Indira's Emergency.
Whoever said “Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds” was as wrong as he was funny,
My Mum once took me to a Veena concert given by some relative who was a high official at the UN. She too tried to explain to me why what we had heard wasn't horrible shite. She was wrong.
but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab’s contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can’t get started with even after you have finished reading them.
Maybe, if like Clive you are finicky about English prose style. But the action of the book is good enough for kids.
It’s not so much that I find his language contortedly and wilfully archaic: more that I find it makes a meal of itself, as if foretelling a modern critical age in which it is fated to be more taught than enjoyed.
What Clive doesn't get is that America back then didn't have a lot of Collidges. Peeps wrote they way they talked and if they weren't lawyers, their phrasing was Biblical when it wasn't blasphemous.
This idea of Borges’s, though—that the whole world is, or should be, our country—was encapsulated shinily enough to be picked up like a bead in his untiringly darting magpie beak.
Nonsense. Borges is referring to the Stoic notion of oikeiosis. The Sage has certain extra qualities which makes him a 'citizen of the world'.
So what I underlined was a quotation of a quotation, and I was wondering already if the idea, so attractive on the face of it to a displaced person like myself,
Australians in England weren't 'displaced'. They were admired and encouraged to be as Australian as possible. By the Eighties, all the kids were rushing home to watch 'Neighbors'. Come to that, we also eagerly watched Clive on TV. He may not have been Crocodile Dundee, but he was as witty as fuck.
was really quite right. Eventually it led me to the considerations that follow.
One of my exemplars, Witold Gombrowicz,
an expert on 'immaturity' who didn't get that the Latins have no need for neoteny or adolescent sehnsucht. Argentina was the wrong place for him to end up.
would have had good reason to accept the idea: but he didn’t, quite.
He hated Borges who, he thought was scheming to get the Nobel- which would have flattered his immature and adolescent country.
Exiled in Argentina during World War II, he was reluctant to regard himself as the incarnation of Polish literature,
because he was no such thing. He'd published one book on 'immaturity'.
but that was because he distrusted the whole idea of literature as a field of ambition, duty, or even of professional activity. After the war his forced exile continued, because he had correctly judged Poland’s Communist regime as being only marginally less lethal to creative life than the Nazi slaughterhouse that had preceded it.
Sabato too had the sense to run the fuck away from the Commies. Otherwise, he'd have ended up in a Gulag.
He was under continual pressure to represent the true, liberal Poland, but he didn’t believe in that either. He just didn’t like abstractions.
A mark of immaturity. Why can't everybody just fucking die already? Would that be too much to ask?
When it came down to it, however, he did not regard the land of his birth as an abstraction.
The guy was Polish. They are as patriotic as fuck.
He had all the qualifications of a world citizen, and often seemed to preach as one. But when finally cornered on the point he said there was a Poland, and that he, Gombrowicz, was it.
He died in 1969. Had his country been truly independent, you can bet he'd have returned and served it to the best of his ability.
Under extreme conditions of forced exile from political extermination, all the expatriated artists of the twentieth century seem to have reached a similar conclusion.
It was certainly convenient to do so.
Thomas Mann behaved as if he were the eternal Germany, Stravinsky as if he were the eternal Russia. In London, Freud was still Vienna. Even the most assimilated to their new conditions found that they could not entirely change their minds.
Unless they could or it was profitable to do so.
In America the possibilities were at their greatest to forget about origins and embrace world citizenship, just as long as American citizenship had been embraced first.
To be fair, this was perhaps even more true of London. Clive must have noticed it had become the center of the Arab media.
Yet it was remarkable how the opportunity, even when it was taken up, always seemed to leave a mental loophole that led home.
unless it didn't
On the set in Hollywood, Billy Wilder and Marlene Dietrich cracked jokes in German.
Because they were German. But there were plenty of people who took the trouble to forget their ancestral tongue.
It was world citizenship, but it was also a way of reminding themselves that the melting pot had not boiled down their souls, which had been formed elsewhere, in a place that was really a place.
Nope. American citizenship was not 'world citizenship'. You could be jailed or kicked out for 'un-American activities'.
“There are only two places where we feel at home,” Milos Forman once said on television: “Home, and in America.”
He wouldn't have been allowed in had be been a Commie.
Yet when Vaclav Havel visited the United States, Forman was one of the ringmasters for the new Czech president’s welcome, and in Forman’s excellent book of memoirs his lost country is perpetually rediscovered.
Clive was exiled from Australia because of his unorthodox views on kangaroos.
Philosophically, the idea of the world citizen goes back through Erasmus at least as far as Eratosthenes the Stoic, who said he saw all good men as his fellow countrymen; which was only one step short of seeing his country as dispensable. But the modern refugees from totalitarianism, having been compelled to dispense with theirs, found it hard to let go of the memory.
Clive was one such refugee. The kangaroos had taken against him because he had married a wallaby. Rupert Murdoch, several of whose wives have been kangaroos, charged Clive with being a fucking Pom who thought 'all kangaroos are from Melbourne'. Still, Clive never let go of his memories of the great sandy desert where he and his wallaby wife had honeymooned.
The politically exiled artists thus proved, under laboratory conditions, that the concept of the Weltbürger has its limits.
No. Some political exiles reinvented themselves and forgot all about their home country. Others learnt fucking Esperanto or converted to the Ba'hai creed. Apparently, they believe in World Government.
Borges was not in the same position. In 1979, when he wrote his homage to Victoria Ocampo (the founder of the cosmopolitan magazine Sur) in which this revealing passage appeared, the Argentinian junta was doing its obscene worst.
Otherwise the Commies, or the Peronists, would have been doing their obscene worst.
Surrounded by horror, either he hadn’t noticed or—a hard imputation, yet harder still to avoid—he knew something about it and thought it could be excused.
Clive joined the London Underground to battle against Thatcher who was doing her obscene worst to the Coal Miners. The plain fact is that the Junta wasn't being nasty to Borges or his pals. Still, if he managed to avoid getting the Nobel, he had done enough to cheat it out of yet more vanity.
But even if he was confident that the political Brahmanism he favoured
Indira was a Brahmin. So is Rahul. Political Brahmanism is found in India which has way too many Brahmins. Otherwise, there are Boston Brahmins. But they aren't noted for 'disappearing' vast numbers of Leftists. Borges was a Conservative who had picked a side in the Cold War because one particular side praised and petted him. Also he was making decent money for the first time in his life.
could be pardoned for imposing itself by extreme means,
Because the Junta was seeking to impose a Rawlsian State- right?
he might well have detected an incipient challenge to his conscience.
Fuck that. The dude was old and would die soon. Stuff the Junta got up to had nothing to do with him.
He had good reason—i.e., a bad reason but an urgent one—to suggest, if only to himself, that what was happening to his country was of secondary importance, because his first loyalty was to the world.
He said nothing of the sort. He was a young student in Geneva when the League of Nations was set up. He'd have looked a fool if he started pretending 'World Government' was possible.
But the world, not one’s country, is the abstraction:
both are abstractions. Do the Falklands belong to Argentina? Borges in a poem published in 1954 suggested that Argentina should not bother with it. Later he would say the Falklands war was a fight between two bald men over a comb. The truth was Britain found it worth protecting and Argentina still thinks it is worth having.
an ideal that means nothing if one’s first loyalties to truth, justice and mercy have been given up.
We have no loyalties to any such things.
The old man was pulling a fast one.
The old man was going through the motions. Victoria Ocampo was indeed cosmopolitan. Tagore- who was very famous when he was young- was greatly taken with her.
I read the book, and made my marginal note, in 1999. But it was the date on the article that tipped me off: 1979. A reprinted article should always carry its original date, but you can see why writers and editors should sometimes find it expedient to leave it out. Otherwise an apparently impeccable sentiment might stand revealed as an opportunistic stratagem, or at the very least as a sign of obtuseness.
Victoria had been good to Borges and other Argentinan writers. As she said, she had put more millions into literature than George Bernard Shaw had been able to extract. On the other hand, it truly is unforgiveable that Borges did not undergo gender reassignment surgery to show solidarity with trans people or, if he didn't like them, just to give the rest of us a laugh.
Self-exiled to Paris from his repudiated Romania,
it was Communist.
the fragmentary philosopher E. M. Cioran
who switched to French and did very well in that language
gushingly admired Borges’s world citizenship. On page 1,606 of Cioran’s monolithic Œuvres, we learn that the irresistible example of the Argentinian séducteur (“Everything with him is transfigured by the game, by a dance of glittering discoveries and delicious sophisms”) helped the Romanian philosopher to formulate the device on his own mental shield: “Not to put down roots, not to belong to any community.” But at the time Cioran said this (it was 1976), he was keen to give the impression that his native country had never meant much to him,
plenty of Romanian intellectuals felt that way.
while not keen at all to reveal that he had played a part in his native country’s unfortunate fascist past.
No. He had no power or influence. Eliade was more important. Ionesco was more famous.
(The nice way of putting it is that he had been close to the Iron Guard, and the nice way of putting it when it comes to the Iron Guard is that their anti-Semitism, by Hitlerite standards, was hit-and-miss, although not many people they hit got up.)
Romania was always somewhat sui generis. Ceaucescu was considered a liberal at one time and some Western leaders fawned over him.
Cioran had even better reasons than Borges for suggesting that none of the rough stuff had ever had anything to do with him.
It didn't. Neither the insomniac nor the blind scholar was capable of rough stuff. On the other hand, Clive James was famous for beating the shit out of Rupert Murdoch's kangaroos back during his days as a member of the London Underground.
Borges was never more than equivocally complicit in nationalist mania.
He wasn't complicit in shit.
Cioran, in that conveniently forgotten youthful period before he prudently took out citizenship in the world, had been in it up to the elbows.
No. He didn't matter in the slightest. His last book in Romanian was so bad his Mummy asked him to withdraw it. Fuck off to France and publish in French. People think I dropped you on your head when you were a baby.
It is interesting that he thought a spiritual alliance with Borges might help to wash him clean.
He had no such thought. Cioran's style has some affinities with that of Borges. Nothing wrong in advertising that fact. I often tell people that my blog is similar to Pornhub- just more explicit.
At this point there is a key quotation from Ernesto Sabato that we should consider:
why? Did Sabato have proof that Borges's secret identity was actually Che Guevara?
From Borges’s fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence. (Ensayos, p. 304)
Anyone could have written that about anybody. From Rishi Sunak's fear of the bitter reality of existence springs two simultaneous and complementary attitudes : first to play the part of the Prime Minister of the UK and, secondly, to stick like glue to his wife's billions. After the election, the couple will fuck off just like all the other non-doms. Who knows? Perhaps they will settle in India where his mother-in-law is now a legislator.
In Buenos Aires after World War II, there were two literary voices of incontestable international stature.
Nonsense! In 1950, Borges was elected President of the Argentine Society of Authors. Some French people started reading him in translation after about 1953. English speakers heard of him in the early Sixties. 'Labyrinths' became a cult classic. Mick Jagger's film 'Performance' came out in 1970. After that it was cool to pretend to have read it.
The main difference between them was that only one of them was known to possess it. The whole world heard about Borges. But to get the point about Sabato, you had to go to Argentina.
But that point was that the dude was as boring as shit.
Both inhabitants of a beautiful but haunted city, both great writers, and both blind in their later lives, Borges and Sabato were linked by destiny but separated in spirit: a separation summed up in this single perception of Sabato’s, which was penetratingly true.
It was nonsense. Borges wrote for magazines. Initially he told short tales of historical rogues. Then he started making stuff up. Strangely, he was better able to translate ideas from the new mathematics of Cantor into immaculately crafted short stories than guys like Bertrand Russell.
Sabato could have been a Communist Commissar or a professor of Quantum Physics. For some personal reason he chose to write misanthropic novels. But they weren't popular. Saying I prefer Sabato to Borges is like saying I prefer David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest' to Spiderman- No Way Home. People get that you want to seem smart. But you come across as an utter fool.
Borges did fear the bitterness of reality, and he did take refuge in an invented world.
Borges did like getting paid for publishing stuff. Also, he feared the sort of bitter reality he would experience if he took to challenging gangsters to knife fights. As for 'invented worlds'- writers get paid for making them hospitable to blokes like me. The fact is, at my age, there's only so much time I can spend jerking off.
When Gombrowicz called Borges’s virtuosity “iced fireworks” he was arriving independently at the same judgement.
No. He was saying Borges- like other Argentinians- was immature. Everybody was fucking immature. Why couldn't they all just drop dead already? Is that really too much to ask?
There are no iced fireworks in Sabato, whose fantastic novels were dedicated to including all the horrors of the real world, and raising them to the status of dreams, so that they could become apprehensible to the imagination, which would otherwise edit them into something more easily overlooked.
The point about our dreams is that we forget them quickly. Also, if you want to talk about them, you have to pay top dollar to some quack.
(His rationale for this process of saving reality from its own forgetful mechanisms is spread throughout his books of critical prose, but see especially El escritor y sus fantasmas.)
Like the Polish dude Clive mentions, Sabato was envious of Sartre who genuinely did have some political importance.
Sabato’s characteristic image is the tunnel.
What could be more boring? Clive, it is true, spent a lot of time lurking in tunnels when he was a secret agent of the London Underground.
The tunnel is the area of concentration for the dreams.
No it isn't. Dreams are the concentration of tunnels in an area except when concentration is the dream of the tunnel which has been tasked with calculating its own area in Imperial Units.
Most of the dreams we recognize all too clearly.
Clive was very smart. He knew Spanish and Russian. Then, we remember he fucked a wallaby. I may be as thick as shit, but even I know that wallabies have cooties.
He didn’t need to search very far in order to find the stimulus for them. All he needed was the recent history of Argentina.
Which, because he was a fucking Argentinian, he could not not fucking know. Still, it is entertaining to think of Sabato talking to Cioran about his dreams. The insomniac finally snaps and shoves something sharp up Sabato's tunnel. Inspector Clouseau investigates the crime. It turns out that Murdoch's kangaroos staged the whole thing because they were being paid by Ceaucescu. What? Shite like that happened all the time in the mid-Seventies.
In Sabato the reader is faced with that history often, but in Borges hardly ever.
Which is cool because either we are Argentinian and already know that history, or we don't and don't fucking care. Still, one could say Borges lifts the veil on the myth of 'White' Argentina. In the old days, provincial ladies, however aristocratic, spoke bad Spanish but good enough Guarani. Still, it was nice of him to pretend that his clever ancestors had got the Blacks to slaughter the Red Skins and vice versa.
In Borges the near past scarcely exists: in that respect his historical sense, like his Buenos Aires, is without contemporaneity.
I suppose, Clive means that Borges doesn't gas on about Peron. Still he did say some nasty things about the fellow in his 'Seven conversations with Fernando Sorrentinto' which could only be published after Peron was dead and his widow had been deposed. I suppose, like Ricardo Balbin, the perennial centrist Presidential candidate, Borges felt there was no alternative to a military coup. If the former stayed silent during the disappearances, what standing did Borges have to speak? What Clive is doing is like condemning Churchill for killing Nazis. Since Germany started the War, they and they alone were to blame. The Montoneros and the Castro supported ERP had started the shooting war. But for the military coup, the plan was for Tupamaros from Uruguay & Chilenan and Bolivian Communists to come to the aid of the Revolution.
His political landscape is a depopulated marble ghost-town remembered from childhood, spookily hieratic like the cemetery in Recoleta.
A Roman Catholic cemetery is bound to be 'hieratic'. If graveyards aren't spooky, what is? Borges doesn't have a 'political landscape' because he wasn't a political writer. On the other hand, Clive was often commended for his take down of Friedman's monetary theory.
Before he went blind he would still walk the streets, but usually only at night, to minimize the chance of actually meeting anyone.
Borges was very well-bred. Buenos Aires had a lot of illiterate shitheads like me who would have buttonholed the fellow and explained their own refutation of Einstein to him. He walked at night, because that way he got some exercise instead of an earful of ignorant twaddle.
In his stories, the moments of passion, fear, pity and terror belong to the long-vanished world of the knife fighters.
Sadly, Clive's Australia seems to have a lot of knife crime. That's what happens if you impose gun controls.
Death squads and torture are not in the inventory.
There were death squads. Borges describes a dude who hid for years in a cellar to escape Rojas's goons. Rushdie used this idea in 'Midnight's children'. It was foolish. British jails were nice and comfy and you could always get out by saying your Mummy was ill or you needed medical treatment.
The timescale ends not long after he was born. Why did he hide?
Like Kipling, Borges supplied a magazine market. Nobody wanted a book by Kipling about Swedish macroeconomic policy. They wanted stuff about jungle animals or tales of derring-do on the Northwest Frontier. Still, Clive raises an interesting question. Why do so few Australian novelists write about sex with wallabies? Must Sanjeev Sabhlok repair this omission single-handedly?
Probably because of artistic predilection, rather than human cowardice.
Clive did not tell us of his amorous adventures with wallabies because of his 'artistic predilection'. He wasn't cowardly at all and would frequently pick fights with Murdoch's kangaroos.
There are always artists who place themselves above the battle, and in retrospect we don’t regret their doing so.
Only a very few shitheads pretend that 'artists' have a social responsibility to undergo gender reassignment surgery every week so as to show solidarity with trans people and say 'boo!' to Neo-Liberalism.
In World War II, André Gide took no overt position about the Occupation, the biggest moral dilemma that France had faced since the Revolution.
If you country is defeated and occupied, you have no fucking moral dilemma. Either you live or you are killed. Fuck was a seventy year old supposed to do about the German army? He was elderly and infirm. He could not personally sodomize every last one of them.
Yet we would not want to be without his journals of the period.
Speak for yourself- or other poseurs like you.
Safe in Switzerland, Hermann Hesse said next to nothing about the biggest events of any twentieth-century German-speaking writer’s life: his dreamy novella Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey East) was the closest he ever came to making a comment on nationalist irrationality, and there was nothing in that skimpy book to which a Hitler Youth idealist could have objected.
The book came out in 1932. Hesse had an established market which he supplied because that was how he supported himself. It had nothing to do with Germany's economic condition or whether, as Keynes suggested, the country was doomed to starve unless it conquered land to its East.
Borges openly loathed Peron, but fell silent on everything that happened after Peron was ousted—
he was silent about Peron. Nobody thought he had anything very interesting to say about the dude just as nobody thought Clive was the man to ask if you wanted a takedown of Milton Friedman.
fell silent politically, but artistically came into full flower, an international hit even as his nation entered the tunnel of its long agony.
Borges began to attract international acclaim while Peron was still in power in the Fifties. He resigned from his post as head of the National Library when Peron returned in 1973. But Peron withdrew his support from the radical Montoneros before his death. His wife signed the order permitting the death squads to operate though the 'dirty war' had already started in 1974. Borges was 75 and blind. Fuck was he supposed to do? He knew what had happened in Chile. But everybody also knew what had happened in Cuba. It was a case of kill or be killed. We aren't speaking of Mrs. Thatcher trading barbs with Neil Kinnock.
Though it would be foolish for an outsider to quarrel with his enormous creative achievement—one might as well take a tomahawk to a forest
Tomahawks were used by the indigenous Americans to clear some forests for agricultural purposes and to provide timber
—there is reason to sympathize with those native Argentinians, not all of them Philistines, who can’t help feeling that it was an accumulation of trees designed to obscure the wood.
Very true. Similarly, Herman Hesses books caused many Jews to neglect to notice that they were being loaded into cattle trucks on the way to the gas chambers.
So much ancillary prose by and about Borges has been published since his death that it is a professional task to keep up with it all, but a casual student should find time to see Antiborges, a compilation of commentaries edited by Martin Lafforgue.
Why be a student, casual or otherwise, of spite or stupidity? I suppose there are books about the willful blindness of judges or others appointed to constitutional offices during the Dirty War. Those may be profitably read by 'students'. But why bother with 'commentaries' which complain that Borges wasn't Batman?
(The contribution from Pedro Organbide,
who joined the Montoneros who carried out the kidnapping and execution of prominent anti-Peronists. he went into exile in Mexico during the dirty war.
“Borges y su pensamiento politica,” is especially noteworthy.)
Borges never endorsed any regime. Organbide did endorse Peron's regime but Peron turned against the Montoneros because they were crazy. Still, Organbide came to his senses in Mexico and returned to live peacefully after democracy was restored. Castro explains that Mexico was the one country he and his goons weren't trying to destablize and plunge into Civil War.
The plain fact is that the Montoneros killed and tortured till they were killed and tortured. Thankfully, Mrs. Thatcher beat up Galtieri with her handbag and so Argentina could get rid of that bunch of sadistic clowns.
An instructive picture emerges of a visionary whose vision was impaired in more than the physical sense.
Reading this forces me to recognize that Clive was as stupid as shit. Sex with wallabies will do that to you unless, like me, you were fortunate enough to be born that way.
Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such.
The plain fact is that the Montoneros were a terrorist organization. They even killed Peronist labor leaders whom they considered 'right-wing'. Peron repudiated them but may have been changing his mind when he died. But they hated his wife- who it must be said was close to the right-wing José López Rega who organized death-squads- and thus one might say that 'the dirty war' was really a civil war within the Peronist ranks. The left insisted that Peron was actually left-wing while the right wanted to slaughter the leftists before they could slaughter them. Since Borges had no truck with any type of Peronism, though Pedro Organbide did, it is the latter not the former who was 'complicit' in the dirty war.
The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement.
No. It was crazy shit which prevented the country from remaining affluent.
He didn’t like the masses
whereas the masses were greatly miffed that he did not write the foreword to their own translations of Homer or Kalidasa
he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts.
No. He was a relatively poor man who made a little money by writing for magazines and giving lectures to society ladies. There were plenty of 'senatorial elitists' who owned vast agricultural estates. Borges didn't even have a College degree. But, he was well-bred.
When the junta seized power in March 1976, he took the view that they weren’t fascists at all, because the helots weren’t in the picture.
The Army got tired of killing the left-wing Peronists to keep the right-wing Peronists in power. Why not run the show themselves? If the CIA was cool with 'Operation Condor' why not get rich while stamping out Communist terror cells? The problem here, of course, is that 'Military Intelligence' is an oxymoron. The fools in uniform couldn't tell the difference between a rich kid indulging in 'radical chic' and an actual urban guerilla.
Most of the intellectuals of the old conservative stamp declined to cooperate with the new regime, and Sabato behaved particularly well.
Sabato had been an actual Communist. His Commission investigated the atrocities committed during the dirty war. However, Peronism continued to fuck up the Argentine economy.
(That a man as out of tune with the regime as Sabato should nevertheless have seen merit in the Malvinas adventure is a token of how indisputable the claim to the islands looked from the Argentinian side.)
To be fair, the Falklands have valuable natural resources. The Argentines didn't bargain on Reagan quietly helping Thatcher.
It need hardly be said that to behave well was not without risk: when everyone was aware of the hideous lengths to which the regime would go against ordinary people whose names meant little, there was never any guarantee that people of prestige would remain exempt. Fear took its toll in a fall of silence.
Clive does not recall the Montonero atrocities. He does not understand that the dirty war began as a civil war between the right and left Peronists. Thus, his opinion is worthless.
But there is no evidence that Borges ever felt the need to be afraid.
The Montoneros were crazy enough to kill him and anyone associated with him. If they could take control of the Fiat factory and set cars alight, then, in their fury against Capitalism, there was nothing they would not do. I suppose Borges occasionally visited the sort of nice hotels they enjoyed bombing. Why the fuck should he have stood up for those thugs? Let the Peronists slaughter each other or, if the Army prefers to do it, leave it to them.
His name and growing international renown were lent to the regime without reserve, either because he approved or—the best that can be said for him—because he was clueless.
He was also pally with Pinochet who helped Britain during the Falklands war. At least he didn't sign something convenient in return for the Nobel- which is what would have thrilled the Nationalists the most.
As the time arrived when not even he could claim blindness to the junta’s war against the innocent, lack of information was what he claimed as an excuse for his previous inertia. Signing the round robin of protest that signalled the end of the regime’s tacit support from the enlightened bourgeoisie—when their children were taken, they woke up—he said that he had not been able to find out about these things earlier. His impatient statement “No leo los diarios” (I don’t read newspapers) became famous among his critics
who hadn't noticed that the dude genuinely could not read newspapers- not that they gave much coverage to the dirty war- and thus was telling the truth. Still, Sabato got his moment in the Sun.
as a shameful echo of all those otherwise intelligent Germans who never heard about the extermination camps until it was all over.
Those who heard of them either thought it was a good idea or else a waste of money. Just smash in the skulls of people were they stand. No need to get fancy. The truth, of course, is that lots of Germans preferred to have a comfortable life running gas chambers instead of going to fight the Rooskies.
It was pointed out with some pertinence that his blindness had never stopped him finding out about all the literature in the world.
He had found out about it before he went blind. Later he had people read to him. It seems he didn't know Braille. There can be no doubt, that he would have been more productive if he could have read more.
There was a torture centre within walking distance of his house, and he had always been a great walker. It could be said that by then his walking days were over; but he could still hear, even if he couldn’t see.
How? There is a hospital within walking distance of my home. I can't hear the people shrieking there.
There was a lot of private talk that must have been hard to miss, unless he had wilfully stopped his ears.
What he would have heard was that the left Peronists were killing the right Peronists or vice versa. Later, the CIA helped the Army kill Commies and those who looked like maybe they might become Commies. But lots of stuff like that had happened in Latin America during the Cold War. The one thing Borges could be sure off. If his country went the way of Cuba, people like him would need to fuck the fuck off. That's why it was important to boost his sales in foreign markets.
He might well have done: a cocked ear would have heard the screams.
Right-wing Peronists, or wealthy people kidnapped by the Montoneros, too could scream.
In 1983, after the junta fell, he was finally forced into an acceptance of plebeian democracy, the very thing he had always most detested.
Rubbish! Borges was a vocal supporter of Hipolito Yrigoyen. Sadly, the Great Depression put paid to the career of a great democrat, a true man of the people and a remarkable politician. I suppose President Illia could be said to be Yrigoyen's heir. But he sided with the US against Cuba. Perhaps this was because of a Cuban backed insurgency in the province of Salta. Illia represented universalism & 'Krausist' idealism. Kraus was a pal of Schopenhauer who knew Sanskrit. I may mention that Octavio Paz (who did get a Nobel) was Mexico's Ambassador in New Delhi between '62 and '65. He instructed the Indians in the finer points of various Latin American political ideologies. Still, we believed Argentina was 'White' whereas Mexico had embraced a mixed racial identity. Thus even Illia wasn't really 'non-aligned'. Still, my point is Borges was associated with the tradition represented by Yrigoyen and Illia. True, Yrigoyen's grand-nephew- a human rights lawyer tortured and expelled by the Junta- was more left wing but, in India, we would have plenty of such people- e.g. Nandita Haksar. The problem with the human-rights guys was that any administration they favored still fucked up economically. They didn't really represent a real alternative rather than a retreat into virtue signaling solipsism.
A decade of infernal anguish for his beloved country had at last taught him that state terror is more detestable still.
Not if the alternative is crazy Maoists taking over and killing 'class enemies'.
It was a hard lesson for a slow pupil.
Fuck off! Borges knew what had happened in Cuba and, later on, what Maoists were getting up to during their Cultural Revolution. The fact is, even loyal Commies get slaughtered by the Beloved Leader because somebody has to take the blame for economic catastrophe. Borges could have learnt about all this from the ex-Communist Sabato. The plain fact is Alfonsin, as President, clashed with the Unions- which were Peronist. His regime ended in hyper-inflation. Menem, a Peronist, was a more effective 'Thatcherite' but Argentina's fundamental economic problem remained the same. Let us see if Milei can make a difference.
On an international scale, Borges can perhaps be forgiven for his ringing endorsement of General Pinochet’s activities in Chile:
His wife says the Nobel committee tried to strong-arm him into rejecting an Honorary Doctorate from Chile because this would be seen as an endorsement of Pinochet. Borges, being a gentleman, quite naturally said he now had a duty to go. I don't know if this is true. What is certain is that there was a genuine Communist threat to the bare existence of 'class enemies'. Borges was bougie. The Reds wanted to spill his blood and that of his elderly Mummy and anybody else related to him.
after all, Margaret Thatcher seems to have shared his enthusiasm, and John Major’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, now wears a medal hung around his neck by Pinochet without any visible sign of chest hair set on fire by burning shame.
Lamont didn't last long. Soros fucked him but good.
But within Argentina, there are some distinguished minds that have had to work hard to see their greatest writer sub specie aeternitatis without wishing his pusillanimity to be enrolled along with his prodigious talent.
Argentinians aint stooopid. They know their country always had some crazy leftists. Apparently some nutter tried to kill President Hoover- a guy who had save millions from famine.
Pedro Organbide,
who had been a nutty Montonero before running off to Mexico
fully sensitive to the eternal literary stature of Borges, was being restrained when he noted—with a sad finality it is hard to contest—that his tarnished hero’s behaviour was a living demonstration of how political elitism depends on ignorance.
His own behavior was that of a fucking nutcase. The Montoneros were evil cunts. The trouble is a lot of them were smart enough to run away. This meant that guys who hoped to collect their bonuses for killing Left Peronists, just grabbed anyone who looked like they might be Commies and 'disappeared' them.
There are not many great writers who oblige us to accept that inattention might have been essential to their vision.
All of them do. Homer was so fucking inobservant of the plight of slaves and lepers and guys who wanted, but couldn't get, gender-reassignment surgery that he composed the Odyssey and the Iliad. As for, Virgil, don't get me fucking started mate.
Jane Austen left the Napoleonic wars out of her novels,
but only because Fanny Burney had commanded Wellington's fifth infantry division. Jane once said to Fanny, 'I'm thinking of writing a sequel to 'Pride'. Elizabeth enlists in Blucher's Army and encounters George Wickham at Waterloo. George says something real sarky about Elizabeth's bonnet. She chops his nose off with a saber. What do you think? Too shlocky?' Fanny says, 'Fuck Waterloo. Just give us lots of scissoring and maybe some oral action. That's what sells nowadays. Look at Wordsworth.'
but we assume that she heard about them, and would have heard about them even if she had been unable to see.
Clive studied at Oxbridge. Thanks to his fancy education, he knew that blind people aint deaf.
Sabato’s blindness, unlike Borges’s, was confined only to the last part of his life, but it was complete enough. His ears, however, remained in good working order,
also his nose. He would often shout 'Oi! Borges you fucking fucker! You just farted!' but everybody would say it couldn't have been Borges. That dude was dead. Sabato remained suspicious. Many Argentinian writers of the period would pretend to be dead but would sneak into Sabato's parlor and fart vigorously. Seriously, the 'dirty war' wasn't Argentina's only problem.
and when the time came he was able to take on the cruel job of writing about the Disappeared—
He headed the Sabato Commission. Borges, who pretended to have died in 1986, would often sneak into the room and let out a 'silent but deadly'. That's the reason all them Argentinians hate Borges so much. I may mention, Borges often sneaks into my room and farts vigorously. Fascists are like that only.
the innocent people whose vanishing took so long to attract Borges’s attention.
For the reason I have given. Once you start sneaking around and farting vigorously, it is difficult to concentrate on anything else. Look at Vikram Seth.
