Borges and the Politics of Form

Jose Eduardo Gonzalez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134825097
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Literature

Jorge Luis Borges-one of the most important Latin American writers-has also attained considerable international stature, and his work is commonly cited in a wide array of scholarship on contemporary fiction. Partly as a consequence of Borges' international identity, and partly because of a long-standing view in Borges criticism that his writing is principally concerned with abstract ideas, critics have been reluctant to address the question of politics in his writing Filling this critical gap, Gonzalez begins by rejecting the proposition that Borges withdraws from the "real," and provides a detailed analysis of the various political issues that Borges takes up in his essays and short stories. The author places particular emphasis on the turbulent questions that shaped Argentine social history during the period of Borges' output.

BETWEEN KRAZY KAT AND BATTLESHIPPOTEMKIN

After spending part of his youth in Europe, Borges returned to Argentina in 1921, where he quickly became the leader of a group of young avant-garde artists. By December of the same year when this group published the first edition of their new magazine Prisma, Borges had fully immersed himself in the intellectual life of Buenos Aires. It is possible that he read at the time some of the articles about film that Horacio Quiroga was publishing during the 1920s in magazines and newspapers such as El Hogar, Caras y Caretas, La Nation, and Atlántida. So much had cinema impacted Quiroga that as early as 1919 his interest in films was already beginning to influence directly his fictional writings (Dámaso Martínez 1297). In an essay entitled “Los intelectuales y el cine” (Quiroga 1216–18) and published in Atlántida in 1922, Quiroga comments extensively on an article that he found in the French magazine Clarté about how intellectuals have failed to understand film as a new art. He probably saw in this article a vindication of his own efforts to get Argentine intellectuals to treat this art seriously. For Quiroga, however, the reaction of most intellectuals towards film was understandable since, he argues, when a person goes to a movie theater, he or she is very likely to see a low-quality production. In this and in other articles (see “Las cintas mediocres—efectos de la super producción” [Quiroga 1213–14]), Quiroga blames the overproduction of films for the bad quality of most of the movies being made: “[la mediocridad de los films se debe] sin duda alguna a la super producción de estos últimos años que exige libretos y asuntos con urgencia febril” (1214).¹ A surprising statement when one considers it from the standpoint of today's massive production of films that now reaches quantities probably unimaginable in 1921. Obviously, Quiroga had problems understanding film as part of a culture industry phenomenon in which art is not only produced for the masses but also massively produced. In his article, Quiroga warns intellectuals that if they want to be able to appreciate the new art they will have to go frequently to the movie theater and they will probably have to watch an incredible amount of bad films before they can find one worthy of being called a work of art: “es menester que transcurra un mes entero—y tal vez un trimestre—, para hallar por fin un film que sea el exponente de este maravilloso arte” (1218).²

Of course, there is no evidence that Borges ever read this or any other of Quiroga's articles on film. In general, Borges never thought very highly of Quiroga's writings (Dámaso Martínez 1293 and 1301), whose fictional work he considered a bad imitation of Poe's. For the same reason it is surprising to discover that in 1939 Borges wrote a movie review in which he praised very highly an Argentine film that was based on some of Quiroga's short stories (Cozarinsky, Cine 66–7), calling it superior to many of the ones that Hollywood was producing during those years. Of course, the fact that his close friend Ulyses Petit de Murat was involved in the project probably had something to do with his favorable review of the film. In any case, even if the young Borges never read Quiroga's article “Los intelectuales y el cine,” the frequency with which Borges attended movie houses after his return to Argentina—as if he were following Quiroga's advice—was exceptional in an intellectual climate in which, as Quiroga points out, films were commonly despised as another manifestation of the emerging mass culture (Quiroga 1217). The young Borges went so frequently to see films during this decade that when one looks at the articles and film reviews that he published between 1929 and 1945, what is most impressive about them is the expertise that he acquired about pre-1929 films. A sheer amount of movie references, mostly to films from the silent period, clutter these texts. For example, his first review published in Sur in 1931 (although probably not the first one that he ever wrote; apparently he had published others in local newspapers before then), mentions twelve different films in a text that is less than three pages long (Coza-rinsky, Cine 30–2). In other words, Borges had become a perfect example of the “new” intellectual that Quiroga wanted to see: someone for whom movie going was an essential part of his intellectual life and not an occasional distraction. Borges himself underscores the difference between his attitude towards films and that of the “traditional” intellectuals in a 1936 review of Allardyce Nicoll's book, Film and Theatre:

Allardyce Nicoll, hombre versado en bibliotecas, docto en ficheros y absoluto en catalogos, es casi analfabeto en boleterias. Ha ido rara vez al cinematógrafo. Mejor dicho, hace pocos afios que visita cinematografos. De la época muda, de la epoca anterior a 1929, no sabe casi nada. De la actual, poquísimo. Sólo asi alcanzaremos a comprender, ya que no a perdonar o vindicar, la omisión de las obras y los nombres de Josef von Sternberg, de Lubitsch y de King Vidor. (Cozarinsky, Cine 49³)

On the one hand, Borges criticizes Nicoll for being the type of intellectual for whom going to the movies does not have the cultural importance that other intellectual activities do, while, on the other, he is also accusing Nicoll of having recognized only recently the status of film as art. For Borges, the defects of Nicoll's book come from the author not being able to make a genuine transition from the traditional to the “new intellectual” status. A reading of Nicoll's book would prove that Borges was not far from the truth in his characterization of the author as a “newcomer” to the field of film criticism. Nicoll's argument shows that he is judging films from the point of view of someone used to being in contact with high culture. Nicoll assigns himself the task of writing a book to defend film from those who consider it merely a manifestation of popular entertainment and not a “legitimate” form of art and he tries to accomplish this by asserting the artistic value of commercial film while, at the same time, pointing out the influence of commercialism on other forms of art such as Elizabethan theater (1–37). Yet in spite of the fact that he is trying to “elevate” film to the status of art, Nicoll also views film as a “developing” artistic form since it still has to produce works that are “as vividly arresting and as profoundly searching” as those created for theater (2). Although some of what are now considered masterpieces of early cinema had already been produced by the time that Nicoll is writing the book, his condescending attitude does not allow him to see this. The difference between Nicoll and Borges is not due to the former's shortsightedness, but to the fact that Nicoll feels the need to prove that film is a valid artistic medium, something that for Borges is never an issue.

Borges's interest in cinema was to a certain extent a reaction to the early attention that the film industry received in Argentina. In 1919, notes Beatriz Sarlo, Imparcial Film, the first magazine completely devoted to the film industry in Buenos Aires appeared, and in the following years others were soon going to begin publication: Cinema Chat and Hogar y cine (both in 1920), Argos Film (1922), Los heroes del cine (1923), Film Revista (1924) {La imaginación 29). That Borges became so early interested in the new artistic medium simply underlines the fact that the growing influence of mass culture was an important element of his aesthetic and ideological evolution. Although the relationship between Borges's interest in mass culture and the changes in his political ideology is an aspect of his work that I will address directly in my last chapter, it is necessary to notice that one of the problems with the existing studies on Borges and film is that the influence of the latter has always been analyzed in isolation from the emerging culture industry in Argentina. It is impossible not to see film in his work as related to his interest in other popular culture products, such as the adventure tale and the detective fiction. It was not by chance that when Borges wrote his stories in A Universal History of Infamy, cinema appeared mentioned in the preface to the book, alongside the names of Chesterton and Stevenson. Departing from previous studies on Borges's use of film, which traditionally focus on the influence of a specific technique (montage) or a film director (von Sternberg) I will study the function of cinema within a general Borgesean strategy to erase the boundaries between high and low culture. As in my preceding chapter on popular narrative, one of the central aims of my investigation will be to show how Borges tries to reproduce in his fictions the pleasure that one supposedly derives from entering in contact with commercial art.

Critics who have studied the influence of film on Borges's work have normally focused on how the technique of montage was decisive in the formation of his writing style. It has become almost a commonplace to say that Borges's fragmentary prose is somehow the result of his mimicking this technique in his stories (Cozarinsky, Cine 16; Christ 64). Let us turn our attention first to the two classical passages that form the basis of this theory of Borges's style as the literary representation of film montage. The first mention of cinema in his work in relation to writing appears as early as 1928 in a passage from his biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego in which, looking for the appropriate method to narrate the prehistory of the neighborhood of Palermo, its “mythological” foundation, Borges suggests that

Lo más directo, según el proceder cinematográfico, sería pro-poner una continuidad de figuras que cesan: un arreo de mulas viñateras, las chúcaras con la cabeza vendada; un agua quieta y larga, en la que están sobrenadando unas hojas de sauce; una vertiginosa alma en pena enhorquetadaen zancos, vadeando los torrenciales terceros; el campo abierto sin ninguna cosa que hacer; las huellas del pisoteo porfiado de una hacienda, rumbo a los corrales del Norte; un paisano (contra la madrugada) que se apea del caballo rendido y le degüella el ancho pescuezo; un humo que se desentiende en el aire. Así hasta la fundación de Don Juan Manuel. (1.105–106)⁴

But after giving us here a specific example of how to translate montage to literature, he does not employ the technique again anywhere else in the book. By being so precise about how montage could be employed as a narrative technique, he establishes a distance between the style that he is using in Evaristo Carriego and literary montage. The latter is a style that could be used by Borges if he wanted to, but it is not the one that he is employing to write the book. Of course, when critics argue that montage is the origin of the “fragmentation” in Borges's style, they are not referring to the style of such early books as Evaristo Carriego or Discusión but to his narrative fictions. They are mostly thinking of his “mature” paratactic style from the late 1930s on. This passage is then taken to be an experiment with prose that will bear fruits only later and has no connection whatsoever with the prose of Evaristo Carriego. And yet, when one looks carefully at his style in Evaristo Carriego, it is obvious that even if it does not have many of the features of his mature style, it still shows a certain “fragmentation” in it. Clearly, Borges is already beginning to eliminate causative links and replace them for a comma, a period or a semicolon.

Whatever the source of his parataxis is—its origin in the baroque style is something I study in detail in my next chapter—it has nothing to do with montage. In the passage quoted before, literary montage is thus not presented as a model or the origin for his narrative style, but as an artistic resource that fulfills a definite function within the text and that the author can easily employ because its fragmentation fits the already fragmented style that he is developing. I propose that Borges saw literary montage as a literary device and, like other literary techniques, this one is used with the purpose of creating an intended effect. I must explain that when I argue that Borges reduces montage to a literary technique, I am saying that instead of using montage to shape the form of the entire narrative, he has chosen to limit its usage to a very brief section and give it a specific function within the text. But what kind of effect is he exactly looking for when employing literary montage? From the citation above—where he uses it to narrate the mythical pre-history of Palermo—one can infer that Borges is employing literary montage to evoke a sense of “the epic.”⁵ I think that one can corroborate this by giving a quick look at how Borges uses the same technique—though more extensively—in A Universal History of Infamy. The same idea of presenting a series of images without connection among them that he mentions in Evaristo Carriego reappears in his 1935 preface to Infamy: these short stories, he says, “abusan de algunos procedimientos: las enumeraciones dispares, la brusca solucion de continuidad, la reduccion de la vida entera de un hombre a dos o tres escenas” (Obras 1.289).⁶ Even the general organization of his tales in Infamy, it has been suggested, reflects the influence of montage, “with subtitles that divide each story into a frame-like pattern” (Accaria-Zava-la 120).

There is no denying that montage had a strong influence in the composition of this book. One could even argue that even if montage was not the origin of Borges's paratactic style his experiments with it had the effect of intensifying an already fragmentary form of writing. The “tales of infamy” no doubt show more disconnection among their parts than anything that Borges wrote before or after them. But even if we accept describing this book as an experiment with film techniques, it has to be admitted that Borges probably realized that it was impossible to structure an entire story employing literary montage. For that reason, film techniques in Infamy are once again reduced to devices (“procedimientos”) that the author uses frequently but that do not interfere with, much less replace, the traditional linear ordering of the story. The epic intentions that we detected in Evaristo Carriego are present here too, since these are stories of adventures and, in some cases, such as in the opening paragraph of his rewriting of the legend of Billy the Kid, the connection with his use of montage to describe the epic origins of Palermo is very clear:

La imagen de las tierras de Arizona, antes que ninguna otra imagen: la imagen de las tierras de Arizona y de Nuevo México, tierras con un ilustre fundamento de oro y de plata, tierras vertiginosas y aereas, tierras de la meseta monumental y de los delicados colores, tierras con bianco resplandor de esqueleto pelado por los pájaros. En esas tierras, otra imagen, la de Billy the Kid. (Obras 1.316)⁷

But after this extremely visual or cinematic opening, the narrative abandons the literary montage technique and returns to a more “normal” or traditional narrative style. I have been arguing that Borges employs montage techniques to create a literary effect—which in these particular examples is an epic view of history—and that by turning montage into a literary device that can be employed by the author when he needs it, Borges incorporates film as part of his prose style. I will come back later in this chapter to this idea of assigning montage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• In Search of a Different Modernism
• Thinking as Pleasure: Borges and the Culture Industry
• Between Krazy Kat and Battleship Potemkin
• La peinture de la pensée
• The Other Face of Modernity: Borges as an Antifascist
• Works Cited
• Index