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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Answering for Borges
By Hisham El-NaggarBorges was born a century ago last month. And in more ways than one this writer, who narrowly missed being born in the twentieth century, has made the twentieth century his own.
Controversial even beyond his death in 1985, Argentine-born Borges is one of very few Latin American writers who not only became established as an author of international renown (an honour he shares with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Amado and Octavio Paz), but also exercised an enormous influence over at least two generations of writers well beyond the isolated, if fascinating, region to which he belonged.
Everything about Borges is open to debate. Was he a reactionary or, to the despair of the upper classes to which he belonged but whose affections he scorned, was he a closet progressive? To call him a revolutionary would, undoubtedly, be pushing it. Did he love his country, that coquettish, schizophrenic slumbering giant Argentina, or was he beholden to a cosmopolitanism which amounted, at times, to an adulation of Anglo-Saxonry? Was he a poet who also wrote masterly short stories, or a narrator who sometimes expressed himself in verse?
Borges himself would have found the controversies surrounding him silly. In his last years he is quoted as saying, probably not altogether sincerely, that he aspired to be forgotten. Perhaps he meant that he hoped his published works would continue to exercise their magic as the one who penned them faded into an elegant and mystery-ridden oblivion. After all, something similar happened to the author (or authors) of the masterpiece he loved most, A Thousand and One Nights.
He often used to say that his inspiration came primarily from A Thousand and One Nights and from the stories and poems of his fellow raconteur, Edgar Alan Poe. As a young Egyptian who dreamed of being a writer and who at a very early age was exposed to both sources of inspiration, I am immodest enough to admit that I empathise. And I might even add I have a slight advantage over Borges. After all, before I had a go at writing, I had the opportunity to read him.
I discovered Borges by accident during my second year at college. A friend of mine recommended him as an author of "the fantastic", about as good a description as any of an author who defies description. And I discovered him at roughly the same time I discovered Argentina, which though not the locale of his more famous stories remains somehow present in everything he wrote.
Now that I have re-read Borges and re-read him again (and in the original Spanish; my first foray into his works was through an English translation), I can see why the Argentina he evoked was at once real and elusive. Do not read Borges for local colour, I can safely advise readers who do not know him; his is not the picturesque realism of Latin costumbristas. But go to him to discover that other worlds are possible, are indeed ever-present. And if you are fortunate enough to live in Argentina as I now do, you will learn that, encoded like a cryptogram in the texts which cannot fail to enthrall a foreign reader, are subtle references which only one who knows Argentina can fully appreciate. The two texts coexist, giving the Argentine reader the opportunity to remember that, parallel to the magnificently imaginary worlds which a writer can recreate, there exists, perhaps most magnificent of all, a real one of immense complexity.
When I visited Argentina for the first time in 1989 and embarked on the love affair (with the country and its people) which led me to settle there six years later, I had to rethink all I had learned about Borges. I found that his countrymen admired him, were proud of him, held him in awe; but it would be stretching the truth to say they loved him as people love a national idol who belongs, first and foremost, to them, as we Egyptians love Ahmed Shawki, for instance, or Sayed Darwish.
The fact is Borges had no particular interest in being loved. His was the aristocratic self-assurance of a man who understood his country and was touched by its tragedy. But he disdained the sentimentalism which warms the heart of those who revel in tangos, as I admit I do. Above all, he had no use for patriotism.
"Two bald men fighting for a comb" was his description of the Falklands conflict. Quite a few critics -- none of them commanding much respect -- use this and other occasions to dismiss him as a vendepatria, a traitor to his country. It is, in fact, common knowledge that Borges was a long-time admirer of things British, though not necessarily of how the British have turned out of late. And there is no doubt that his profound erudition scorned national boundaries; he was equally at ease evoking Don Quixote, Martin Firro (an Argentine epic-hero), figures from Greek antiquity, German philosophy, and an imaginary French demi-monde.
Perhaps that itself was a projection of his "Argentineness". More than most inhabitants of the American continent (North or South), Argentines are conscious that their roots lie elsewhere. Cosmopolitanism is their answer to questions about their identity. Foreigners, especially those from distant countries, are a source of intense fascination to them.
The dead Borges is no less problematic in this respect than the living one; he now lies in the cemetery of Plainpalais in Geneva, apparently (at least according to his wife and long-time companion, Maria Kodama, an Argentine of Japanese decent) having insisted he did not wish to be buried in Argentina. This has given rise to a series of disputes between his wife and his relatives, and has caused Argentines to wonder: was he rejecting them, or was he reminding them that soil was not what mattered, nor indeed what constituted Argentina?
"We cannot realise ourselves [exclusively] through things Argentine," he said in El Escritor Argentino y la tradicion, "because their being Argentine is a matter of destiny, in which case we are Argentine by definition, or being Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask." A wordier, and more challenging, version of the popular English saying: "What do they know of English, those who only English know?"
Undoubtedly the most controversial thing about Borges was his apparent reluctance to speak out against the crimes of the junta which ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, under whom nearly 30,000 people "disappeared". Worse still Borges, together with a few other authors and artists, was invited to a dinner given by the Argentine dictator, Jorge Videla. Borges emerged from the dinner telling reporters that they could now rest assured that the country was being ruled by "gentlemen".
His most steadfast admirers insist that there was an element of impish irony in what he was saying. But it is a bit much to expect the public at large to dwell upon the subtlety of Borgean nuances. It would be more honest to recall that this bizarre episode occurred shortly after the armed forces took over, at which point a country used to rather less appalling dictatorships was not inclined to expect the worst. Furthermore, and this nobody can deny, Borges was too conscious of his upper-class origins not to welcome the removal from power of the "populist" and to him irretrievably corrupt Peronist government by a military caste which, after all, had so far not shown its worst face to a public clutching at straws.
It is equally certain that Borges later made various low-key statements suggesting that the junta was not so gentlemanly after all. Moreover, in 1980 and nearly blind, Borges took the decisive step of removing himself to Geneva, arguably the ultimate oasis for a writer who, after years of living through "exciting times", was craving boredom and quite expecting to die from it.
Perhaps Borges was too conscious that, like many of his countrymen, he had allowed himself to be deceived by the promise of a government which, using state terrorism, claimed to be reinserting Argentina in the First World. In a similar fashion, many of his countrymen had earlier been seduced by the promise of the populist, if hardly socialist, Colonel Peron. Perhaps Borges had reasons for preferring his writings to be remembered more and more and himself less and less. The Borges who inhabits fantastic worlds of his own creation is inevitably more inspiring than the Borges trapped in the real world.
It is ironic that, after a lifetime of open opposition to Peron Borges should find himself honoured by a Peronist government. The government, and through it Argentina, made the first attempt to claim Borges for his native country by minting a two-peso coin displaying his face. The new-found obsession with Borges reached such a peak that a cartoon character recently expressed surprise that the answer to a riddle was not "Borges", as "in the past few days every answer has been".
