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Borges and Politics

Author(s): Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Enrico Mario Sant and Carlos J. Alonso
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 55-69
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464739
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TEXTS/CONTEXTS
BORGES

AND

POLITICS

EMIRRODRIGUEZ 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.

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That Borges, at the age of almost eighty, should choose to play the role of
vieillardterrible 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 politicalopinions. To accept
those opinions as critical judgments, as if they were at the same intellectual level
as Borges' essays on literatureand 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 strictlya privateaffair.
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 historicalcontext 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' literarytexts, 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 approach should ground a profitable reading that is not scandalizing.
II
World War I is the context in which Borges' awakeningto political realitiestakes
place. This awakening happens not in Argentinabut in Switzerland,a neutralcountry
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 assured of a double neutrality. But Borges (or Georgie, as everyone called him then)
could not help being affected by the war. The greatest impactwas made by the works
of the German Expressionist poets which, along with Whitman's, he discovered,
towards 1917. In the Expressionistpoems the almost erotic furyof war is expressed in
fiery imagery. Some of the poets Georgie read will themselves be victims of the war:
ErnstStadler on the Western front; August Stramm in the Russianfields. Through
their poetry, the boy will live vicariouslythe 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 EuropeanYouth had Romain Rolland'sJean Christophe at
their bedside, and a pan-Europeanvision had become a sort of collective mirage. Not
only did Georgie write then some Expressionistpoetry 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 Expressionism over the other avant-gardemovements 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 Surrealismor Dada, which seem more frivolousto
me. Expressionismis more serious and it shows concern for a whole series of profound 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
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poets into pacifists. The millions of dead on both fronts-in that no-man's land
described in the novels of Henri Barbusse and ErichMariaRemarque-would turn
those warriorpoets, paradoxicallyenough, 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 majorityof 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 actuallybegins with filicide. The Expressionistpoets
were forced to fight in a war which became (like Viet Nam, which began as one of
France'slast 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 uniforms, handsome naval maneuvers and virile cavalrycharges. For the first time in
history, Europeanyouth was not being sacrificed (for the greater glory of the German, French or Englishempires) in remote colonial outposts: in 1914 they were all
being killed at their very doorsteps. Parricide,then, came as an inevitable reactionto
that slaughter of sons. The Expressionistpoets 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 Switzerland, but he was also prevented from participatingin this entire militaryadventure by his poor eyesight. Furthermore,a patricidalrebellion was particularlyimpossible 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 practitionerof 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 "Autobiographical 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 faithfullyimitated 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 virtuallydestroying itself before his
neutral eyes, Georgie found metaphors for his own intense and confused feelings of
filial loyaltyand incestuous love, the darkparricidalthrust 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 MauriceAbramowiczfor publication in LaFeuille, a Geneva
newspaper [Jorge Luis Borges, "Chronique des lettres espagnoles. Trois nouveaux
livres," LaFeuille (Geneva), August 20, 1919]. (Forthe occasion, Abramowiczserved
as a discreet copy editor for Borges' modest French.)' One of the three books
a 1975 visit to Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, I was able to see the original manu1 During
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 LaFeuille.

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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 carrying 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 upstarts . . ." 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 organized government. From his father Georgie had inherited a kind of philosophical
anarchy grounded more in Spencer than in Bakunin. The discovery of an Expressionist 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 anarchistand a freethinkerand in favorof


pacifism), written under the influence of Pio Baroja. Theiraim was to be
bitter and relentless, but they were, as a matterof fact, quite tame. I went in
for using such words as "fools," "harlots," "liars."Failing to find a publisher, I destroyed the manuscripton my returnto 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 RussianRevolution, the brotherhood of man, and pacifism. Threeor
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 undivided 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 affectionately 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, Francisco 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 proceeded to bore the group with the usual repertory of campaign rhetoric. Borges is

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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 Presidency. 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 suspicious of everythingfrom the outset, and hates verbalbombast so much that
he tolerates it in very few and praises it in none. Silence joined to fatalism
finds its proper incarnationin 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 greaterzest 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 enjoyed Irigoyen's reservedness and why, in his enthusiasm for old creoles, he even

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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 adversaries, 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 mediocre 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 ambassador 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

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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 developed 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 consciousness can be traced to comments that begin to show up more and more frequently 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," ElHogar (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 summarized 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

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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 preparations for the invasion of England. The title of the article is "Definition of the Germanophile." 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 Vespucci 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 Argentine 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'antisdmite. 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
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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 NaziSoviet 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, disgust, 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.

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63

V
Juan Domingo Per6n's rise to power was long and secretive. Only on October
did it become clear to everyone in Argentina that true power was not in the
1945
17,
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 FMlixLuna, El 45. Cr6nica
de un
decisivo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1971), p. 293]), and underargo
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 fiftyrone 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 appropriated 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 altogether Hitler's systematic hatred, his sado-masochistic madness) he was not wrong
about his Fascism. Precisely the Fascist methods of humiliation and manipulationanalogous 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 entailed. 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 moralcourage. 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 ArgentinianWriters),where
he read a brief text on the matter. Because it is so rare, I will quote it in its entirety:
HURRYUP-HURRYUP
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 unworthily, as a third-class assistant at a municipal libraryin the southern
suburbs. Fornine 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 BritishIsles; and the Nazis, driven
out of Berlin,sought refuge elsewhere. At some point of that unique afternoon, I valiantlysigned some democraticstatement; one day, or one month,
or one Platonic year ago, they summoned me to the municipal police station. Wonderstruck by such a brusque administrativeavatar,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 rectangularshape, ratherlaconic, of considerable
size, and it contained the interesting epigraph "Hurryup-Hurryup." 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

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1978

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suspect that memory and oblivion aregods who know full well what they are
doing. If they have misplaced the rest, and if they retain that absurdlegend,
some justification must support them. I formulateit thus: dictatorshipsfoster 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'smany duties. Do I have to remind readers of MartinFierroand Don
Segundo [Sombra]that individualityis 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 meeting 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 everybody 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 transporting....
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.

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67

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 accomplishments. 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 AngloAmerican 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 anonymously 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
would even imply a measure of
scruples. Still, all this would be acceptable-and
himself
in
his
indulged in a kind of political
poetic justice, since,
young years, Borges
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 antiSemitism (to which Julia Kristeva has devoted a crucial study). Neither does D'Annunzio'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.
EmirRodriguezMonegal teaches LatinAmericanliteratureat Yale. His latest book is Jorge Luis
Borges: A LiteraryBiography,published by E. P. Dutton.
-Translated

by Enrico Mario Santi and Carlos J. Alonso

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69

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