Part 4

Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson

(Page 4 of 4)

There was, of course, no hope of turning back the tide of change. The new leaders of society-the great estancieros-rapidly developed a cosmopolitan outlook. Even though the Argentine economy depended overwhelmingly on British capital, it was France that set the style and tone for the beau monde that came into being in the course of the 1880s and 1890s. Men with pretensions to culture subscribed to the Revue des Deux Mondes to keep abreast of developments in Paris. At the Club del Progreso, which occupied the marbled halls of the Palacio Muñoa, champagne flowed liberally at sumptuous receptions, and its dining room served haute cuisine prepared by chefs brought over from France. The best families engaged French governesses so that their children might learn to speak French fluently. The ultimate cachet was reserved for those magnates who could afford to take their families, with maids, chauffeurs, and all, for a sojourn of several months in Paris, the Ville Lumière, the "City of Light."

By the end of the nineteenth century, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, almost as rich as the United States and incomparably richer than Spain, the old mother country. The criollos of the River Plate had good reason to be proud of their achievements, for theirs was one of the great postcolonial success stories. In 1910, the centenary year of the first revolt against Spain, the government chose to commemorate the birth of the nation with a series of extravagant celebrations to which distinguished foreign statesmen, scientists, writers, and artists were invited. But despite the official triumphalism, there remained unruly elements that threatened to disrupt the smooth progress to modernity envisaged by the elite. The Radical Party, for one, resented its exclusion from the fruits of office. In 1905 it had organized yet another uprising under its new leader Hipólito Irigoyen, the nephew of the founder Leandro Alem. A more dangerous threat to the status quo came from an emerging sector of society, the industrial workers, most of whom were immigrants who had brought with them political ideologies such as anarchism and socialism that had never been heard of before by the criollos. The first decade of the century saw an explosion of industrial action organized by the anarchist-controlled labor unions-in 1896 there had been 26 strikes in Buenos Aires, but by 1910 the number had shot up to 238. Strikes were a relatively new phenomenon in Argentina, and the ruling class became alarmed by the violence of these disputes. In 1909, just a year before the centenary celebrations, the chief of police of Buenos Aires was assassinated by a Russian-Jewish anarchist, an outrage that provoked a furious backlash from upper-class criollo youths of the newly formed Patriotic League, who unleashed the first pogrom in Argentina against the rusos, as East European Jews were called.

Argentina's tremendous economic advance stirred up anxieties once more about its national identity. By the early twentieth century, Buenos Aires was teeming with people of a bewildering variety of nationalities. Many of these foreigners would settle in Argentina, but others continued to migrate seasonally from Europe. Fears grew that such high levels of immigration would destabilize the country and might even swamp the culture and identity of the criollos. Had the nation lost its soul to foreign commerce? Were the Argentines in danger of becoming pseudo-Europeans or, worse still, some mongrel race with no inherent qualities of its own? What, indeed, did it mean to be an Argentine? The political establishment turned for an answer to its most famous poet, Leopoldo Lugones, who in 1913 delivered a series of lectures at the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires, which was attended by the president of the republic and several cabinet ministers. His subject was the significance of the gaucho in Argentine history. He argued that the political liberty of the River Plate had been won by the gauchos, who had formed the backbone of the patriot armies in the wars of independence. The gauchos had thus provided the foundation of the national identity, and José Hernández's Martín Fierro should be regarded as the national epic of Argentina because it expressed the essential spirit and character of the people of the River Plate as embodied in the gaucho. Lugones's argument contradicted Sarmiento's classic liberal thesis that the gaucho represented the barbarism of the pampas and must therefore be made to submit to civilization. But Lugones was involved in a new ideological operation-he was trying to offer the criollos a distinctive identity that would act as a bulwark against the waves of immigrants who were flooding the country. To this end he wanted to create a spurious continuity between the past and the present by rehabilitating the gaucho in the eyes of the millionaire ranchers who had actually thrown him off the land.

Lugones's insistence on the cultural supremacy of the criollos within Argentina was inherently reactionary and would shortly take him in the direction of fascism, for the social and political realities on the ground did not permit such an elitist vision of the nation; there were millions of people in the country other than the criollos, and they, too, would have to be accommodated in the Argentine self-image. Indeed, a few years after Lugones gave his famous lectures on the gaucho, the political voice of the masses who had been ruled out of account by Lugones made itself heard when the leader of the Radical Party, Hipólito Irigoyen, was elected president in 1916. There followed an upsurge of popular demands for reform, which the new president tried to satisfy by creating jobs and increasing public spending. His term of office, however, was plagued by high inflation and mounting industrial unrest, raising fears in the political establishment of a return to chronic instability. Irigoyen's successor in 1922 was a patrician landowner who attempted to steer the country back on its usual course of export-led growth under the control of the estancieros and foreign investors but a revolution of expectations had been unleashed among the urban classes and demands for political reform and a better distribution of wealth could no longer be ignored. When Irigoyen stood for the presidency again in 1928, there was another great upsurge of popular enthusiasm at the prospect of dismantling the conservative political machine once and for all. And one of Irigoyen's keenest supporters was none other than the twenty-eight-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who formed a group of young intellectuals within the Radical Party in order to campaign for the reelection of the great Radical champion of the people.

Borges's vision of the nation was directly opposed to that of Leopoldo Lugones. By this time Lugones was peddling a theory of Argentina as a social hierarchy in which the criollos must be accorded a preeminent position, guaranteed, if necessary, by military force. But Borges rejected this elitist nationalism and contested Lugones's interpretation of Martín Fierro as the epic of the criollos. In fact, in everything Borges would write about The Gaucho Martín Fierro, there would run an implicit argument against Lugones's mystification of the poem. It was not an epic, he would contend, not least because Fierro was hardly exemplary; he was a murderer and a deserter, and as such he had more of the contradictory qualities of a character in a novel than of an epic hero.

In 1928 Borges delivered an address to a group of young nationalists in which he argued that the criollos must "sacrifice" their pride in their ancestry for the sake of the greater honor of the nation:

In this house which is America, my friends, men from various nations of the world have conspired together in order to disappear in a new man, who is not yet embodied in any one of us and whom we shall already call an "Argentine" so as to begin to raise our hopes. This is a confederacy without precedent: a generous adventure by men of different bloodlines whose aim is not to persevere in their lineages but to forget those lineages in the end; these are bloodlines that seek the night. The criollo is one of the confederates. The criollo, who was responsible for creating the nation as such, has now chosen to be one among many.

Whereas Lugones wanted to fix the Argentine identity in the past, Borges had a dynamic vision of nationhood and urged his fellow criollos to look to the future. Independence, as he saw it, had been a revolt of sons against their fathers, an "act of faith" by the criollos in the possibility of being different from the Spanish. However, at the turn of the century, the realities of immigration had ruptured the criollo bloodline once again, and in order to persevere in the venture of building the nation, it was necessary to extend and renew the original act of faith so as to include all the people who had settled in Argentina since independence.

Borges held to this vision with extraordinary conviction, and it shows in the tropes he used-"bloodlines that seek the night," the "confederates" (or "conspirators," since the word conjurados admits either meaning in Spanish) aiming to create a "new man" in Argentina. The fact was that he had a personal stake in the question of national identity. His own ancestry was mixed-his mother was a pure criolla, while his father was half English-but the story of Argentina had so thoroughly permeated the consciousness of his family that he had come to regard the destiny of the nation as a wider mirror of his own.

Copyright © 2005 Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Edwin Williamson is the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish at Oxford University and a fellow of Exeter College. His books include The Penguin History of Latin America.