Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art, A Revised Edition

12. Borges as Argentine Author: And other Self-Evident (If Often Ignored) Truths

12 Borges as Argentine Author and other self-evident (if often ignored) truths I n a polemical essay first published in Salmagundi in 1980, George Steiner unfavorably compared the intellectual scene in the United States with that of Europe. And twice in that controversial piece Steiner referred incidentally to Borges, mentioning him in the same breath with European figures such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein , Webern, Joyce.1 The context and the tone were both highly flattering to Borges. Now, Borges was scarcely the focal point of Steiner’s reflections, and obviously the eminent critic would know that Borges writes not in Europe but from the remote latitudes of Argentina, in South America. Nevertheless, there is something symptomatic in George Steiner’s casually listing Borges in his European line-up. Behind such an offhand inclusion there lies a received idea, an established judgment that, in routinely seeing Borges as a European sort of artist, suggests either passive ignorance or willful disregard of his origins, life, and work as an Argentine. There is a neat political logic to the way in which this judgment emerged and became standard, even commonplace. On the one hand, the traditional, Hispanophile, Catholic old right could find nothing positive in Borges’s secular individualism, his attachment to liberal European values , his indifference to the culture of Spain, his skepticism, agnosticism, and philo-Semitism. On the other hand, the Latin American Marxist sectors have only begun to reconcile themselves to Borges’s taste for mental amusement, his love of metaphysics, his wholehearted defense of Western cultural values, his libertarianism, anticommunism, and Anglophilia. Finally , in the middle, are the educated Western (or Westernized) liberals who stand on Euro-American universalism, who live for the spiritual riches of the European past, and who profess a civilized and centrist, tolerant but skeptical attitude toward what they see as the extremes of left and right. Such liberals inevitably find in Borges a kindred spirit who treasures their own values and sees the world much as they themselves do—or at least as they did from 1940 to 1970. These differing perspectives, however, do have one thing in common: they all deny Borges any local roots, any Argentine preoccupations or content, any relationship with the national past or present. In so doing, they overlook entire blocks of elementary fact, such as Borges’s youthful years as a fervent literary nationalist, the reasons for his breaking away from nationalism after 1930, and the substantial amount of Argentine material still present in his later work as storyteller and as cosmopolitan. In order to address this issue I would like to do a number of things together. First, I will take another look at Borges’s fascinating volume of essays from 1926, El tamaño de mi esperanza (The Extent of My Hope), and then relate the book to the times during which it appeared. Next, I will briefly survey the political landscape of the 1930s and take stock of Borges’s writing situation in that decade. Finally, I will be taking one more bird’s-eye glance at the entire body of Borges’s major fictions, noting the Argentine and River Plate elements that, not withstanding Borges’s ‘‘Europhile’’ and ‘‘universalist’’ stance, are a significant part of his output as narrative artist. The Extent of My Hope is a remarkable gathering, in some ways typical for Borges, yet in other respects unique, distinctive.2 It exhibits his nowfamiliar ecumenicism, his interest in a wide range of European writings as well as in general questions of poetics and aesthetics. Among the book’s essays one finds a favorable review of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan; an appreciation of Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol; a speculative commentary on a well-known line of verse by Apollinaire; theoretical articles on the lexicon of poetry; a critique of rhyme, which in those days Borges actually deemed useless; and a rapid history of the subject of angels in literature. None of this is surprising—it is the Borges we all know today. But there is more. Borges, we might recall, had recently spent some time in Spain, where he had been keeping company with young avant-garde poets and intellectuals. And so, in The Extent of My Hope there are allusions to Medieval and Golden Age Spanish authors such as Góngora, Quevedo, Gracián, Lope de Vega, Juan de Mena, and Jorge Manrique; there is also a long study of Spanish ballads (romances) and the...