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131 The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges Alberto Moreiras Life is but a walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more —Macbeth Act V, Scene 5 Paul de Man said that Borges’s essays were just like PMLA essays, except that they were “a great deal more succinct and devious” (124). As proof of succinctness and deviousness de Man quoted the comment Borges made on Enno Littmann’s German translation of Arabian Nights: “Incapable, like George Washington, of telling a lie, his work reveals nothing but German candor [probidad ]” (qtd. in de Man 124). A literal and honest translation ends up yielding a literal and unimaginative world. Borges would have liked to learn of his extreme like-mindedness in these matters with Sherlock Holmes, for whom “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact” (Conan Doyle 72). The somewhat alarming conclusion this juxtaposition permits is that PMLA essays, or their cousins, are the more deceptive the more honest and less devious they are; and, therefore, the less devious the more devious. Let us take PMLA-style essays on Borges: the critical effort of the last fifty years and more would depend one devious or deceptive way or another on “the ordering presence of a villain at the center” (de Man 124). But villains, when their villainy becomes explicit, end up revealing their fundamental candor. Is it not notorious candor to say “for Borges the literary exercise was a revealer of our possibilities. His literature speaks to us of what we are and cannot be, of failure, tragedies, uselessness . A literature that unconceals fragility, loss, fatigue” (Scarfó 83; my translation)? Or to say: “Borges defines the centrality of memory in the search for the crystal of memory and of his uncertain meaning, his dubious refractions ” (Pimentel 164; my translation)? Nothing is more deceptive than the obvious . Thus, nothing more treacherous. Alberto Moreiras 132 “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” comes to be written when “the date of the first centenary . . . was approaching” (Borges 143). It is true that the narrator means Fergus Kilpatrick’s death, not Borges’s birth, but the association is hardly avoidable today. The story narrates Ryan’s story, who tells Kilpatrick ’s story and imagines or reveals in it a rare mimetic conspiracy: Kilpatrick signs a traitor’s death sentence. His comrade James Alexander Nolan suggests “a way to turn the traitor’s execution into an instrument for the emancipation of the country [patria; this is a bad mistranslation in this context] (145).” “Thus the teeming drama played itself out in time, until that August 6, 1824, in a box . . . draped with funereal curtains, when a yearned-for bullet pierced the traitor-hero’s breast. Between two spurts of sudden blood, Kilpatrick could hardly pronounce the few words given him to speak” (145–46). The identity of the traitor and the hero becomes undecidable, but Ryan must decide. “After long and stubborn deliberation, he decided to silence the discovery. He published a book dedicated to the hero’s glory” (146). The villain is at the center of this story by Borges, but he is also at the margins, since Ryan becomes a villain through his probity (and upright in his villainy). Ryan learns the truth and persists in falsity, in the name of a higher truth. Or conversely: Ryan learns a falsehood and persists in the truth. Nothing more deceptive. But Ryan is placed at the site of the critic, at the site of the PMLA contributor or of his Argentine cognate. Near the date of the first centenary, how can we avoid a meditation on the enigmatic relation between Borges and criticism that is prefigured in “Theme” as a step into, or a passage towards, undecidability? To advance into undecidability is, however, always a decision. And every decision is a cut into truth. Paul de Man’s essay was published in 1964, at the very beginning of the internationalization of Borges’s writing. It is important to remember the central aspects of de Man’s exegesis, also to the extent to which it has rarely been surpassed : “the artist has to wear the mask of the villain in order to create a style” (124); “whatever Borges’ existential anxieties may be . . . they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits” (124); “the world [of his short stories] is the representation, not of an actual experience , but...

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