Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  El minche de esa rumi

  dicen no tenela bales;

  los he dicaito yo,

  los tenela muy juncales . . .

  El chibel barba del breje

  menjindé a los burós:

  apincharé ararajay

  y menda la pirabo.

  After such an example of unmitigated obscurity this miserable couplet in Argentine slang is almost limpid:

  El bacan le acanaló

  el escracho a la minushia;

  despues espirajushió

  por temor a la canushia.7

  On page 139 Dr. Castro mentions another book about the linguistic problem in Buenos Aires; on page 87 he boasts of having deciphered a rustic dialogue by Lynch “in which the characters use the most barbarous means of expression; only those of us who are familiar with River Plate jargons can understand them completely.” Jargons: ce pluriel est bien singulier. Except for Argentine slang (a modest dialect that no one dreams of comparing to the exuberant caló of the Spaniards), there are no jargons in this country. We do not suffer from dialects, although we do indeed suffer from dialectological institutes. Those organizations thrive on condemning each successive slang they invent. They have improvised gauchesco, based on Hernández; cocoliche, derived from a clown who worked with the Podesta brothers; vesre, taken from fourth-grade students. They have phonographs; before long they will record Catita’s voice. They are dependent on such rubbish; we owe and shall continue to owe those dubious riches to them.

  No less fallacious are “the serious problems of the spoken language in Buenos Aires.” I have traveled through Catalonia, Alicante, Andalusia, Castile; I have lived in Valldemosa for two years and in Madrid for one; I have very fond memories of those places, but I never noticed that Spaniards spoke better than we did. (True, they speak louder, with the aplomb of those who know no doubt.) Dr. Castro accuses us of archaism. His method is curious: he discovers that the most cultivated persons in San Mamed de Puga, Orense, have forgotten a certain usage of a certain word; he immediately decides that the Argentines should forget it, too. The fact is that the Spanish language suffers from various imperfections (a monotonous prevalence of vowels, excessive diversity of the words, inability to form compound words), but not the imperfection claimed by its inept defenders: difficulty. Spanish is very easy. Only Spaniards do not believe that: perhaps because they are dazzled by the charms of Catalan, Bable, Mallorcan, Galician, Basque, or Valencian; perhaps because of an error of vanity; perhaps because of a certain verbal crudity (they confuse the accusative and the dative, they say le mató for lo mató, they are usually incapable of pronouncing Atlántico or Madrid, they think that a book can bear this cacophonous title: La peculiaridad lingilistica rioplatense y su sentido historico ).

  On every page Dr. Castro abounds in conventional superstitions. He scorns Lopez and venerates Ricardo Rojas; he repudiates the tango and makes respectful allusions to the jácara; he thinks that Rosas was a leader of insurgents, a man like Ramirez or Artigas, and gives him the ridiculous name maximum centaur. (With better style and more lucid judgment Groussac preferred the definition “rearguard militiaman.”) He proscribes—and I believe rightly—the word cachada, but he accepts tomadura de pelo, which is not noticeably more logical or more charming. He attacks Latin American idiocies because he likes Spanish idiocies better. He does not want us to say de arriba; he wants us to say de gorra. This examiner of the “linguistic reality of Buenos Aires” says in all seriousness that the inhabitants of that city call lobster acridio; this inexplicable reader of Carlos de la Púa and Yacaré tells us that taita, in Argentine dialect, means “father.”

  The form of the book is no better than the content. At times the style becomes commercial: “The libraries of Mexico had books of high quality” (p. 49); “The customs . . . charged fabulous duties” (p. 52). Again, the continual triviality of the thought does not exclude the picturesque absurdity: “Then the only thing possible, the tyrant, appears; he is the condensation of the undirected energy of the masses, whom he does not lead because he is not a guide but rather a crushing force, a huge orthopedic apparatus that mechanically, bestially herds the disbanding flock” (pp. 71, 72). Sometimes the author attempts the mot juste: “ . . . for the same reasons that caused the marvelous grammar of A. Alonso and P. Henriquez Urena to be torpedoed” (p. 31).

  Devotees of Last Reason compose equine metaphors; Dr. Castro, who is more versatile in his errors, unites radio and football:

  The thought and the art of the River Plate region are valuable antennae for everything of worth and value; this intensely receptive attitude will soon become a creative force, if fate does not change the direction of the propitious signals. Poetry, the novel, and the essay have achieved more than one perfect goal there. Among the cultivators of science and of philosophical thinking in that area are names of the greatest distinction, (p. 9)

  Dr. Castro adds the indefatigable practice of flattery, rhymed prose, and terrorism to his erroneous and minuscule erudition.

  Postscript: On page 136 I read: “It is incredible that anyone seriously, without irony, would try to write like Ascasubi, del Campo, or Hernández.”

  I should like to quote the final stanzas of Martin Fierro:

  Cruz y Fierro de una estancia

  Una tropilla se arriaron,

  Por delante se la echaron

  Como criollos entendidos

  Y pronto, sin ser sentidos,

  Por la frontera cruzaron.

  Y cuando la habian pasao

  Una madrugada clara,

  Le dijo Cruz que mirara

  Las ultimas poblaciones;

  Y a Fierro dos lagrimones

  Le rodaron por la cara.

  Y siguiendo el fiel del rumbo,

  Se entraron en el desierto,

  No se si los habran muerto

  En alguna correria

  Pero espero que algun dia

  Sabre de ellos algo cierto.

  Y ya con estas noticias

  Mi relation acabe,

  Por ser ciertas las conte,

  Todas las desgracias dichas:

  Es un telar de desdichas

  Cada gaucho que uste ve.

  Pero ponga su esperanza

  En el Dios que lo formo,

  Y aqui me despido yo

  Que he relatao a mi modo,

  Males que conocen todos

  Pero que naides canto.

  “Seriously, without irony,” I ask: Who is more dialectal: the poet whose limpid verses you have just read, or the incoherent man who writes about an orthopedic apparatus that herds a flock, literary genres that play football, and torpedoed grammars?

  On page 122 Dr. Castro has enumerated several writers whose style is correct. In spite of the inclusion of my name on that list, I do not consider myself entirely unqualified to speak of stylistics.

  A Note on Carriego

  In these times we all see Evaristo Carriego in connection with the suburban locale, and we tend to forget that Carriego is (like the man about town, the little seamstress, and the foreigner) a creation of Carriego, just as the suburb in which we place him is a projection and almost an illusion of his work. Oscar Wilde thought that Japan—the images evoked by that word—had been invented by Hokusai; in the case of Evaristo Carriego, we must postulate a reciprocal action: the suburb creates Carriego and is recreated by him. Carriego is influenced by the real suburb and the suburb of Trejo and the milongas; Carriego imposes his vision of the suburb on us; and that vision changes reality. (Later, reality will be changed much more by the tango and the theatre.)

  How did it happen, how could the unhappy boy Carriego become the man he will now be forever? Perhaps if he were asked, not even Carriego himself could tell us. Without any justification except my inability to imagine things differently, I suggest this version:

  One day in 1904, in a house that is still standing on Honduras Street, Evaristo Carriego was rereading a book abo
ut the adventures of Charles de Baatz, Lord of Artagnan. He read it avidly, because Dumas offered him what Shakespeare or Balzac or Walt Whitman offers to others, a taste of the fullness of life; he read it sadly, because he was young, proud, timid, and poor, and he felt cut off from life. Life was in France, he thought, when the steel blades flashed, or when the Emperor’s armies overran the land, but here I am in the twentieth century, the too-late twentieth century, in an unimportant suburb of South America.

  As Carriego was thinking those thoughts something happened. The persistent strumming of a guitar, the uneven row of low houses seen through the window, Juan Murafia tipping his hat to acknowledge a greeting (the same Juan Murafia who, the night before last, left his mark on the face of Suarez the Chilean), the moon seen in the square opening of the patio, an old man with a fighting cock, something, anything. Something we cannot recapture, something whose content but not form we know, something quotidian and trivial and previously unperceived which revealed to Carriego that the universe (which gives itself completely in each instant, in any place, and not only in the works of Dumas) was in the present too, in Palermo. Argentina, in 1904. “Enter, for the gods are here also,” said Heraclitus of Ephesus to the people who found him warming himself at the kitchen stove.

  I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is. From the moment of the unknown revelation I have attempted to recreate, Carriego is Carriego. He is already the author of the verses which, years later, he will be permitted to invent:

  Le cruzan el rostro. de estigmas violentos,

  Hondas cicatrices, y tal vez le halaga

  Llevar imborrables adornos sangrientos:

  Caprichos de hembra que tuvo la daga.

  In the last line, almost miraculously, there is an echo of the medieval imagining about the marriage of the warrior to his sword, of the imagining that Detlev von Liliencron framed in other illustrious verses:

  In die Friesen trug er sein Schwert Hilfnot,

  das hat ihn heute betrogen . . .

  Our Poor Individualism

  There is no end to the illusions of patriotism. In the first century of our era, Plutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon; Milton, in the seventeenth, observed that God is in the habit of revealing Himself first to His Englishmen; Fichte, at the beginning of the nineteenth, declared that to have character and to be German are obviously one and the same thing. Here in Argentina we are teeming with nationalists, driven, they claim, by the worthy or innocent resolve of promoting the best traits of the Argentine people. Yet they ignore the Argentine people; in their polemics they prefer to define them as a function of some external fact, the Spanish conquistadors, say, or an imaginary Catholic tradition, or “Saxon imperialism.”

  The Argentine, unlike the Americans of the North and almost all Europeans, does not identify with the State. This is attributable to the circumstance that the governments in this country tend to be awful, or to the general fact that the State is an inconceivable abstraction.8 One thing is certain: the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen. Aphorisms such as Hegel’s “The State is the reality of the moral idea” strike him as sinister jokes. Films made in Hollywood often hold up for admiration the case of a man (usually a journalist) who seeks out the friendship of a criminal in order to hand him over to the police; the Argentine, for whom friendship is a passion and the police a mafia, feels that this “hero” is an incomprehensible swine. He feels with Don Quixote that “everybody hath sins of his own to answer for” and that “it is not seemly, that honest men should be the executioners of their fellow-creatures, on account of matters with which they have no concern” ( Quixote I, XXII). More than once, confronted with the vain symmetries of the Spanish style, I have suspected that we are irredeemably different from Spain; these two lines from the Quixote have sufficed to convince me of my error; they seem to be the secret, tranquil symbol of our affinity. This is profoundly confirmed by a single night in Argentine literature: the desperate night when a sergeant in the rural police shouted that he was not going to consent to the crime of killing a brave man, and started fighting against his own soldiers alongside the fugitive Martin Fierro.

  The world, for the European, is a cosmos in which each individual personally corresponds to the role he plays; for the Argentine, it is a chaos. The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize. In general, the Argentine does not believe in circumstances. He may be unaware of the fable that humanity always includes thirty-six just men—the Lamed Wufniks—who are unknown to one another, but who secretly sustain the universe; if he hears of it, it does not strike him as strange that these worthies are obscure and anonymous. . . . His popular hero is the lone man who quarrels with the group, either actually (Fierro, Moreira, the Black Ant), potentially, or in the past (Segundo Sombra). Other literatures do not record analogous events. Consider, for example, two great European writers: Kipling and Franz Kafka. At first glance, the two have nothing in common, but Kipling’s subject is the defense of order, of an order (the road in Kim, the bridge in The Bridge-Builders, the Roman wall in Puck of Pook’s Hill); Kafka’s, the unbearable, tragic solitude of the individual who lacks even the lowliest place in the order of the universe.

  It may be said that the traits I have pointed out are merely negative or anarchic; it may be added that they are not subject to political explanation. I shall venture to suggest the opposite. The most urgent problem of our time (already denounced with prophetic lucidity by the near-forgotten Spencer) is the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the individual; in the battle with this evil, whose names are communism and Nazism, Argentine individualism, though perhaps useless or harmful until now, will find its justification and its duties.

  Without hope and with nostalgia, I think of the abstract possibility of a party that had some affinity with the Argentine people; a party that would promise (let us say) a strict minimum of government.

  Nationalism seeks to captivate us with the vision of an infinitely tire some State; this utopia, once established on earth, would have the providential virtue of making everyone yearn for, and finally build, its antithesis.

  [1946] —Translated by Esther Allen

  Quevedo

  Like the history of the world, the history of literature abounds in enigmas. I found, and continue to find, none so disconcerting as the strange partial glory that has been accorded to Quevedo. His name does not appear on the lists of the world famous. I have made many attempts to discover why. Once, in a forgotten lecture, I thought I had found the reason: his crabbed pages did not encourage, even tolerate, the slightest expression of sentimentality. (George Moore has observed that sentimentality is the key to success.) On that occasion I said that a writer did not have to be sentimental to become famous, but that his work, or some aspect of his life, had to be marked by a certain pathetical quality. Neither Quevedo’s life nor his art, I reflected, was distinguished by the sentimental excesses that usually spell success.

  I do not know whether my explanation is correct. I should like to amplify it now, as follows: Quevedo, I believe, is inferior to no one. but he has not found a symbol that captures the popular imagination. Homer has Priam, who kisses the murderous hands of Achilles: Sophocles, a king who solves riddles and then is forced by the fates to resolve the horror of his own destiny; Lucretius, the infinite stellar abyss and the clashing of the atoms; Dante, the nine circles of hell and the Rose of Paradise; Shakespeare, his worlds of violence and music; Cervantes, the happy balance of Sancho and Quixote: Swift, his republic of virtuous horses and bestial Yahoos; Melville, the abomination and the love of the White Whale; Franz Kafka, his deepening and sordid labyrinths. No writer has attained universal fame without coining a symbol; but
that symbol is not always objective and external. Gongora and Mallarme are examples of the writer who laboriously creates a secret work; Whitman endures as the semi-divine protagonist of Leaves of Grass. But all that endures of Quevedo is a caricature. Leopoldo Lugones (El imperio jesuitico, 1904, p. 59) has observed that the most noble Spanish stylist has come to be identified as the prototype of the spicy anecdotist.

  Lamb said that Edmund Spenser was the poet’s poet. One would have to say that Quevedo is the writer’s writer. To like Quevedo one must be (actually or potentially) a man of letters; conversely, no one with a literary vocation can fail to like Quevedo.

  Quevedo’s greatness is verbal. To consider him a philosopher, a theologian, or a statesman (as Aureliano Fernandez Guerra attempts to do), is an error that may be justified by the titles but not the content of his works. His treatise entitled Providencia de Dios, padecida de los que la niegan y gozada de los que la confiesan: doctrina estudiada en los gusanos y persecuciones de Job is based on intimidation rather than reasoning. Like Cicero (De natura deorum, II, 40-44), he proves the existence of a divine order by the order observed in the stars, “the vast republic of lights,” and after dismissing that stellar variation of the cosmological argument he adds: “Those who absolutely denied the existence of God were few; I shall expose to shame those who were shameless: Diagoras of Melos, sur-named the Atheist, Protagoras of Abdera, disciples of Democritus, and Bion of Borysthenes, a disciple of the obscene and deluded Theodoras,” which is mere terrorism. In the history of philosophy are doctrines, probably false, that exercise an obscure charm on human imagination: the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of the soul through many bodies, the Gnostic doctrine that the world was created by a hostile or rudimentary god. Quevedo, merely a student of truth, is invulnerable to that charm. He writes that the transmigration of souls is “bestial foolishness” and “brutish folly.” Empedocles of Agrigentum said: “I have been a boy, a girl, a plant, a bird, and a mute fish jumping out of the sea”; in Providencia de Dios Quevedo notes: “The self-styled judge and legislator of that conglomeration was Empedocles, a man so foolish that he said he had been a fish and then was transformed into such a contrary and different nature that he died as a butterfly on Mount Aetna; and in full view of the sea, his former home, he cast himself into the fire.” Quevedo reviles the Gnostics as infamous, accursed, mad, and says they are inventors of nonsense (Zahurdas de Pluton, in fine ).