Only a Jaguar-God Can Save Us: Borges, Heidegger, and the End of the World in “La escritura del dios”

Consideré que estábamos, como siempre, en el fin de los tiempos.

—Borges (Obras 1: 597)

Only a god can save us.

—Heidegger (“Only a God” 57)

Pero llegará el día en que lleguen hasta Dios las lágrimas de sus ojos y baje la justicia de Dios de un golpe sobre el mundo.

—Los libros de Chilam Balam de Chumayel (19)

In late 1981, Borges, decked out in a guayabera and straw hat and accompanied by María Kodama and a few friends, visited the ruins of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá. His vision problems notwithstanding, Borges was undeterred in his resolve to explore some of the most spectacular monuments to the former grandeur of Mayan civilization. One member of the party, Javier Wimer, recalled Borges’s visit to Mesoamerica like this:

En Uxmal nos alcanzó el crepúsculo. Borges preguntaba todo el tiempo por la apariencia, la antigüedad y el significado de las ruinas mientras tocaba y escrutaba las piedras a su alcance. [ . . . ] Cuando nos deteníamos en alguna sombra momentánea, palpaba las bases de los monumentos. Preguntaba y caminaba sin descanso.

(37)

Wimer went on to connect the dots between Borges’s personal experience of the ruins and his literary praxis:

El origen libresco de algunos viajes de Borges aumentaba su exigencia de concreción material. Pues Borges, sobreponiéndose a su ceguera y a su percepción literaria del mundo, requería de certidumbres físicas y no se contentaba con sucedáneos, con travesías imaginarias o con realizaciones simbólicas [ . . . ] sino que se empeñaba en comparar, en confrontar la idea que tenía de un lugar con el lugar mismo, el nombre de la ciudad con la ciudad nombrada.

(37)

Both the anecdote and Wimer’s interpretation are worth our attention. For one thing, the episode marks one of the few times that Borges encountered the Mesoamerican world in a personal and intimate way. Although indigenous themes and motifs in Borges’s work are notable mostly for their conspicuous absence, it should be observed that, in a number of poems composed subsequent to this visit, Borges managed to work in allusions to some of the most striking monuments of Mayan culture. While it would be a mistake to exaggerate the impact upon his oeuvre of this single moment of personal contact with Mesoamerica, neither should it be neglected.¹

At the same time, the image of Borges physically examining the ruins in an attempt to provide “concreción material” for his creative work recalls a long-standing—and far too often unfruitful—debate about the relationship between the historical and cultural particulars of his texts and the broader philosophical questions that they raise. It is perhaps unsurprising to note that one of the flashpoints in the secondary criticism concerns Borges’s best known text, “La escritura del dios,” set against an indigenous backdrop. The story’s depiction of Pedro de Alvarado’s imprisonment of the Mayan priest Tzinacán, the latter’s epiphanic decipherment of the message of the god in the spots of the jaguar, and Tzinacán’s final indifference to his own fate, has divided readers into two broad camps. On the one hand, some critics have argued that the story is best understood in terms of its philosophical content and have focused primarily on parsing its subtending intellectual armature, identifying in it strains of Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerian idealism, as well as echoes of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and even Hindu mysticism.² For many of these readers, the story’s Mesoamerican setting is of only secondary interest, serving mainly as a pretext for framing the real intellectual concerns of the story. Holloway, for instance, has made this point in an admirably explicit way: “the Mayan content of ‘La escritura del dios, ’” he says, “is only incidental, and to take it as the story’s ground and the aspect of the story in which its truth is to be found, is profoundly to misunderstand Borges’ art” (“Mayan Dream” 57).

An...