Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Then there occurred what I cannot forget nor communicate. There occurred the union with the divinity, with the universe (I do not know whether these words differ in meaning). Ecstasy does not repeat its symbols; God has been seen in a blazing light, in a sword or in the circles of a rose. I saw an exceedingly high Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time. That Wheel was made of water, but also of fire, and it was (although the edge could be seen) infinite. Interlinked, all things that are, were and shall be formed it, and I was one of the fibers of that total fabric and Pedro de Alvarado who tortured me was another. There lay revealed the causes and the effects and it sufficed me to see that Wheel in order to understand it all, without end. O bliss of understanding, greater than the bliss of imagining or feeling. I saw the universe and I saw the intimate designs of the universe. I saw the origins narrated in the Book of the Common. I saw the mountains that rose out of the water, I saw the first men of wood, the cisterns that turned against the men, the dogs that ravaged their faces. I saw the faceless god concealed behind the other gods. I saw infinite processes that formed one single felicity and, understanding all, I was able also to understand the script of the tiger.
It is a formula of fourteen random words (they appear random) and to utter it in a loud voice would suffice to make me all powerful. To say it would suffice to abolish this stone prison, to have daylight break into my night, to be young, to be immortal, to have the tiger’s jaws crush Alvarado, to sink the sacred knife into the breasts of Spaniards, to reconstruct the pyramid, to reconstruct the empire. Forty syllables, fourteen words, and I, Tzinacán, would rule the lands Moctezuma ruled. But I know I shall never say those words, because I no longer remember Tzinacán.
May the mystery lettered on the tigers die with me. Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man’s trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one. This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me.
Translated by L. A. Murillo
Essays
The Argentine Writer
and Tradition
I want to formulate and justify here some skeptical proposals concerning the problem of the Argentine writer and tradition. My skepticism does not relate to the difficulty or impossibility of solving this problem, but rather to its very existence. I believe we are faced with a merely rhetorical topic which lends itself to pathetic elaborations; rather than with a true mental difficulty, I take it we are dealing with an appearance, a simulacrum, a pseudo problem.
Before examining it, I want to consider the most commonly offered statements and solutions. I shall begin with a solution which has become almost instinctive, which appears without the aid of logical reasoning; it maintains that the Argentine literary tradition already exists in the gauchesque poetry. According to this solution, the vocabulary, devices and themes of gauchesque poetry should guide the contemporary writer, and are a point of departure and perhaps an archetype. This is the usual solution and for that reason I intend to examine it at some length.
This same solution was set forth by Lugones in El payador; there one may read that we Argentines possess a classic poem, Martín Fierro, and that this poem should be for us what the Homeric poems were for the Greeks. It seems difficult to contradict this opinion without slighting Martín Fierro. I believe that Martín Fierro is the most lasting work we Argentines have written; and I believe with the same intensity that we cannot suppose Martín Fierro is, as it has sometimes been said, our Bible, our canonical book.
Ricardo Rojas, who has also recommended the canonization of Martín Fierro, has a page in his Historia de la literatura argentina that almost seems to be commonplace and is really quite astute.
Rojas studies the poetry of the gauchesque writers—in other words, the poetry of Hidalgo, Ascasubi, Estanislao del Campo and José Hernández—and sees it as being derived from the poetry of the payadores, from the spontaneous poetry of the gauchos. He points out that the meter of popular poetry is the octosyllable and that the authors of gauchesque poetry employ this meter and ends up by considering the poetry of the gauchesque writers as a continuation or enlargement of the poetry of the payadores.
I suspect there is a grave error in this affirmation; we might even say a skillful error, for it is evident that Rojas, in order to give the gauchesque poetry a popular basis beginning with Hidalgo and culminating with Hernández, presents this poetry as a continuation or derivation of that of the gauchos. Thus, Bartolomé Hidalgo is, not the Homer of this poetry as Mitre said, but simply a link in its development.
Ricardo Rojas makes of Hidalgo a payador; however, according to his own Historia de la literatura argentina, this supposed payador began by composing hendecasyllabic verses, a meter by nature unavailable to the payadores, who could not perceive its harmony, just as Spanish readers could not perceive the harmony of the hendecasyllable when Garcilaso imported it from Italy.
I take it there is a fundamental difference between the poetry of the gauchos and the poetry of the gauchesque writers. It is enough to compare any collection of popular poetry with Martín Fierro, with Paulino Lucero, with Fausto, to perceive this difference, which lies no less in the vocabulary than in the intent of the poets. The popular poets of the country and the outskirts of the city compose their verses on general themes: the pangs of love and loneliness, the unhappiness of love, and do so in a vocabulary which is also very general; on the other hand, the gauchesque poets cultivate a deliberately popular language never essayed by the popular poets themselves. I do not mean that the idiom of the popular poets is a correct Spanish, I mean that if there are errors they are the result of ignorance. On the other hand, in the gauchesque poets there is a seeking out of native words, a profusion of local color. The proof is this: a Colombian, Mexican or Spaniard can immediately understand the poetry of the payadores, of the gauchos, and yet they need a glossary in order to understand, even approximately, Estanislao del Campo or Ascasubi.
All this can be summed up as follows: gauchesque poetry, which has produced—I hasten to repeat—admirable works, is a literary genre as artificial as any other. In the first gauchesque compositions, in Bartolomé Hidalgo’s trovas, we already see the intention of presenting the work in terms of the gaucho, as uttered by the gaucho, so that the reader will read it in a gaucho intonation. Nothing could be further removed from popular poetry. The people, while versifying,—and I have observed this not only in the country payadores, but also in those from the outskirts of Buenos Aires—have the conviction that they are executing something important and instinctively avoid popular words and seek high-sounding terms and expressions. It is probable that gauchesque poetry has now influenced the payadores and that they too now abound in criollismos, but in the beginning it was not so, and we have proof of this (which no one has ever pointed out) in Martín Fierro.
Martín Fierro is cast in a Spanish of gauchesque intonation, and for a long while never lets us forget that it is a gaucho who is singing; it abounds in comparisons taken from country life; however, there is a famous passage in which the author forgets this preoccupation with local color and writes in a general Spanish, and does not speak of vernacular themes, but of great abstract themes, of time, of space, of the sea, of the night. I refer to the payada between Martín Fierro and the Negro, which comes at the end of the second part. It is as if Hernández himself had wanted to show the difference between his gauchesque poetry and the genuine poetry of the gauchos. When these two gauchos, Fierro and the Negro, begin to sing, they leave behind all gauchesque affectation and address themselves to philosophical themes. I have observed the same while listening to the payadores of the outskirts; they avoid using the dialect of that area and try to express themselves correctly. Of
The idea that Argentine poetry should abound in differential Argentine traits and Argentine local color seems to me a mistake. If we are asked which book is more Argentine, Martín Fierro or the sonnets in Enrique Banchs’ La urna, there is no reason to say that it is the first. It will be said that in La urna of Banchs we do not find the Argentine countryside, Argentine topography, Argentine botany, Argentine zoology; however, there are other Argentine conditions in La urna.
I recall now some lines from La urna which seem to have been written so that no one could say it was an Argentine book, the lines which read: “. . . The sun shines on the slanting roofs / and on the windows. Nightingales / try to say they are in love.”
Here it seems we cannot avoid condemning the phrase “the sun shines on the slanting roofs and on the windows.” Enrique Banchs wrote these lines in a suburb of Buenos Aires, and in the suburbs of Buenos Aires there are no slanting roofs, but rather flat roofs. “Nightingales try to say they are in love”: the nightingale is less a bird of reality than of literature, of Greek and Germanic tradition. However, I would say that in the use of these conventional images, in these anomalous roofs and nightingales, Argentine architecture and ornithology are of course absent, but we do find in them the Argentine’s reticence, his constraint; the fact that Banchs, when speaking of this great suffering which overwhelms him, when speaking of this woman who has left him and has left the world empty for him, should have recourse to foreign and conventional images like slanted roofs and nightingales, is significant: significant of Argentine reserve, distrust and reticence, of the difficulty we have in making confessions, in revealing our intimate nature.
Besides, I do not know if it is necessary to say that the idea that a literature must define itself in terms of its national traits is a relatively new concept; also new and arbitrary is the idea that writers must seek themes from their own countries. Without going any further, I think Racine would not even have understood a person who denied him his right to the title of poet of France because he cultivated Greek and Roman themes. I think Shakespeare would have been amazed if people had tried to limit him to English themes, and if they had told him that, as an Englishman, he had no right to compose Hamlet, whose theme is Scandinavian, or Macbeth, whose theme is Scottish. The Argentine cult of local color is a recent European cult which the nationalists ought to reject as foreign.
Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.
Perhaps I may be permitted to make a confession here, a very small confession. For many years, in books now happly forgotton, I tried to copy down the flavor, the essence of the outlying quarters of Buenos Aires. Of course, I abounded in local words; I did not omit such words as cuchilleros, milonga, tapia and others, and thus I wrote those forgettable and forgotten books. Then about a year ago, I wrote a story called “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”), which is a kind of nightmare, a nightmare in which there are elements of Buenos Aires, deformed by the horror of the nightmare. There I think of the Paseo Colón and call it rue de Toulon; I think of the villas of Adrogué and call them Triste-le-Roy; when this story was published, my friends told me that at last they had found in what I wrote the flavor of the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Precisely because I had not set out to find that flavor, because I had abandoned myself to a dream, I was able to accomplish, after so many years, what I had previously sought in vain.
Now I want to speak of a justly illustrious work which the nationalists often invoke. I refer to Güiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra. The nationalists tell us that Don Segundo Sombra is the model of a national book; but if we compare it with the works of the gauchesque tradition, the first thing we note are differences. Don Segundo Sombra abounds in metaphors of a kind having nothing to do with country speech but a great deal to do with the metaphors of the then current literary circles of Montmartre. As for the fable, the story, it is easy to find in it the influence of Kipling’s Kim, whose action is set in India and which was, in turn, written under the influence of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the epic of the Mississippi. When I make this observation, I do not wish to lessen the value of Don Segundo Sombra; on the contrary, I want to emphasize the fact that, in order that we might have this book, it was necessary for Güiraldes to recall the poetic technique of the French circles of his time and the work of Kipling which he had read many years before; in other words, Kipling and Mark Twain and the metaphors of French poets were necessary for this Argentine book, for this book which, I repeat, is no less Argentine for having accepted such influences.
I want to point out another contradiction: the nationalists pretend to venerate the capacities of the Argentine mind but want to limit the poetic exercise of that mind to a few impoverished local themes, as if we Argentines could only speak of orillas and estancias and not of the universe.
Let us move on to another solution. It is said that there is a tradition to which Argentine writers should adhere and that that tradition is Spanish literature. This second recommendation is of course somewhat less limited than the first, but it also tends to restrict us; many objections could be raised against it, but it is sufficient to mention two. The first is this: Argentine history can be unmistakably defined as a desire to become separated from Spain, as a voluntary withdrawal from Spain. The second objection is this: among us, the enjoyment of Spanish literature—an enjoyment which I personally happen to share—is usually an acquired taste; many times I have loaned French and English works to persons without special literary preparations, and these works have been enjoyed immediately, with no effort. However, when I have proposed to my friends the reading of Spanish works, I have evidenced that it was difficult for them to find pleasure in these books without special apprenticeship; for that reason, I believe the fact that certain illustrious Argentines write like Spaniards is less the testimony of an inherited capacity than it is a proof of Argentine versatility.
I now arrive at a third opinion on Argentine writers and tradition which I have read recently and which has surprised me very much. It says in essence that in Argentina we are cut off from the past, that there has been something like a break between us and Europe. According to this singular observation, we Argentines find ourselves in a situation like that of the first days of Creation; the search for European themes and devices is an illusion, an error; we should understand that we are essentially alone and cannot play at being Europeans.
This opinion seems unfounded to me. I find it understandable that many people should accept it, because this declaration of our solitude, of our loss, of our primeval character, has, like existentialism, the charm of the pathetic. Many people can accept this opinion because, once they have done so, they feel alone, disconsolate and, in some way or another, interesting. However, I have observed that in our country, precisely because it is a new country, we have a great sense of time. Everything that has taken place in Europe, the dramatic happenings of the last few years in Europe, have had profound resonance here. The fact that a person was a sympathizer of Franco or of the Republic dur
What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this question easily and that there is no problem here. I believe our tradition is all of Western culture, and I also believe we have a right to this tradition, greater than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have. I recall here an essay of Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the pre-eminence of Jews in Western culture. He asks if this pre-eminence allows us to conjecture about the innate superiority of the Jews, and answers in the negative; he says that they are outstanding in Western culture because they act within that culture and, at the same time, do not feel tied to it by any special devotion; “for that reason,” he says, “a Jew will always find it easier than a non-Jew to make innovations in Western culture”; and we can say the same of the Irish in English culture. In the case of the Irish, we have no reason to suppose that the profusion of Irish names in British literature and philosophy is due to any racial pre-eminence, for many of those illustrious Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley, Swift) were the descendants of Englishmen, were people who had no Celtic blood; however, it was sufficient for them to feel Irish, to feel different, in order to be innovators in English culture. I believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.