Borges in Context: A Review of The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul

December 11, 2006

A favorite passage of mine from the essay "Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Perón":

The military like clean walls; and the walls of Buenos Aires are now whitewashed and bare. But here and there the ghostly political graffiti of old times show through the whitewash: the "Evita Vive"... friend mysteriously turned to enemy, now an unimportant part of dead Argentine history, the ghost of a ghost: all that dead history faint below the military whitewash. [397]

I like the sense here that history is something physically present. For all the odd idealism and fantasy behind Peronism.. which verged on the spiritualistic.. the marks of this political philosophy still found there way onto physical walls, and when a new regime came in, those walls were painted over, and undoubtedly new words—representing a new fantasy—found their way onto those walls.

Although Argentina is a surprising country in which to find Naipaul.. neither a Caribbean island nor an African country.. he once again explores the connection of abstract values to concrete life. A host of abstractions get interrogated and found wanting, from Peronism to machismo to heroic versions of history. Such abstractions inevitably mark society:

But politics have to do with the nature of human association, the contract of men with men. The politics of a country can only be an expression of its idea of human relationships. [391]

That should not be swallowed to quickly, for it expressly leaves out any external factors.. placing the success and failure of a society squarely on its own shoulders. But to the extent one would like to pursue this line of thinking (which surely cannot be wholly denied), Naipaul is a pleasing guide.

Borges tends to get a free pass when it comes to political context. The stories for which he is best known encourage that dissociation, concentrating on mental puzzles like endless libraries or books never written. Naipaul casts a cold eye on these stories:

Borges's puzzle and jokes can be addictive. But they have to be recognized for what they are; they cannot always support the metaphysical interpretations they receive. There is, though, much to attract the academic critic. [364]

That last line casts a bit of aspersion on the academics who enjoy getting lost in mind games. In their resolute cognitive abstraction the stories allow us to forget the context that surrounded Borges.

Naipaul's service to Borges (for whom he expresses admiration) is to place him in the middle of Argentina.. and to remind us that a large percentage of his work dwells on a questionable romantic past.. giving life to the city he loves. His great theme, on this reading, can be summarized:

Argentina as a simple mythical land, a complete epic world, of "republics, cavalry and mornings..." of battles fought, the fatherland established, the great city created and the "streets with names recurring from the past in my blood." [370-1]

That is a world which Naipaul slowly dismantles and dismisses.. another edition of historical fantasy.

But hold on.. what can we say about those fantastic stories? In this essay, those stories appear right alongside the tale of the man who bought a house in 1953 with a 6 percent loan from a bank, and in 1968, after currency devaluations, was paying only 12 cents a month to the bank. Then there is the tale of Eva Perón and her saint-like image.. and the return of her husband to power after 17 years in exile. And how about the tales of torture and the disappeared.. along with Naipaul's own surreal run-in with security men. Suddenly those tales acquire the context that they seem to so resist. They are another path of fantasy. Not that this makes them uninteresting, but perhaps they remain interesting for reasons that are hardly acknowledged by the academic cult of Borges. The intellectual fantasy of the stories mirrors the political fantasy that came to dominate Argentina.. that intellectual fantasy being as culpable as any other for the loss of realism.