Borgesian modernism and the Argentine tradition
By Sarah Crooks
The essential quality of Modernist literature is reflexivity. Therefore, the creation and identification of a truly ‘modernist’ work necessitates a paradox; the modernist author must make conscious the previously unconscious direction of poetic tradition, transforming their work into a palimpsest, which is simultaneously timeless and novel.
In what we often think of as classic modernist texts, this reflexiveness is generally Eurocentric in scope. The arc of European literary development – preserved, canonised and given the appearance of stable continuity and development – seemed to many, more complete, more identifiable, and perhaps therefore more able to contrast and balance its non-European counterparts. On the American continent, the so-called ‘New World’, in which pre-colonial indigenous literary tradition had largely been destroyed, and independence from the old European powers had only recently been won, the tension between the novel and the traditional became more acute. How can a burgeoning national consciousness define itself through literature in a cultural climate which demands both scepticism of fixed national identity and conscious artificiality?
The essential quality of Modernist literature is reflexivity
Borges’ 1951 essay, The Argentine Writer and Tradition, addresses this area of post-colonial modernist discourse. Borges rejects both the retreat of Argentine writers into Spanish literature and the reductionism of attempting to create an Argentine mode entirely disconnected from Europe’s canon. Though this essay provides a crystalised manifesto of intent, the tension between a burgeoning national identity and modernist scepticism has been explored throughout Borges’ corpus. The collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, or A Garden of Forking Paths, published some ten years earlier, contains three short stories which engage in this same dialogue, prefiguring, contextualising and perhaps demonstrating Borges’ vision of a both Modernist and Argentine tradition.
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is perhaps the most directly meta-textual of the three. The narrative takes the form of a pseudo-review of what the narrator deems “the most significant writing of our time”; Don Quixote’s ninth and thirty-eight chapters, “and a fragment of Chapter XXII”, re-written perfectly by Pierre Menard, a 20th-Century Frenchman.
In many ways, Menard and his ironically quixotic quest can be seen to parallel the popular discourse of the Argentine writer’s struggle for self-definition against European tradition. Menard’s cultural, chronological and spatial distance from the giant of the Spanish cannon enables him to enrich the text with new and arguably greater meaning, without reduction to mere repetition or tautology.
Nevertheless, the representation of the narrative through the medium of a literary review – and a polemic one at that, whose experiences and convictions interject constantly – undercuts the work with a deep irony. For all Menard’s “years-long labour” and thousands of discarded drafts, it is the insights the reviewer projects onto the “interminably heroic production”, informed by the time and context of his own Modernist milieu, which give the materially identical text its new layers of meaning. His judgement of the original Quixote’s comparative mediocracy is similarly informed by Cervantes’ antiquarianism, the reviewer’s own “sense of time”. This begs the question, is the development of poetic tradition a mere matter of perspective, then?
The mode of reading the nameless reviewer accredits to Menard – “the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution” – is explored more conceptually in Tlön Uqubar Orbius Tertius. Through its philosophy of extreme subjective idealism, the world of Tlön rejects the notion of tradition and literary progress in its entirety, perceiving reality, thus art, as a “heterogeneous series of independent acts”. This philosophy has the eventual effect of all literature being treated and analysed as the corpus of a single author “who is atemporal and anonymous”, entirely outsourcing meaning to the reader, who becomes interchangeable with the author.
Modernism and the construction of an Argentinian tradition, then, are not opposed but rather intertwined. The Argentine writer’s simultaneous inheritance of and distance from European tradition enables the inherently Modernist conjunction of reflexivity and revision
If this is the natural conclusion of Menard’s literary vision, a mode of reading in which meaning is applied and reapplied so freely to the material and chronological substance of a text, how can any work define meaning at all, much less a coherent identity? A narrative containing “all its imaginable permutations” ends nowhere, a philosophy containing both “thesis and the antithesis” concludes nothing. When Buckley, Tlön’s architect, declares his work will “make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ”, he doesn’t simply refer to an enlightenment-esq break from the tradition proceeding him, but a break from the Alpha and Omega, the objective temporality, the beginning and end which collective identity and national tradition necessitates.
The Library of Babel gives this chaos of meaning form. Oppressive in both its repetition and its impossible vastness, the library’s infinite variations on the twenty-two letters of the alphabet drives its residents to concoct various philosophies in order to glean meaning from a seemingly meaningless world.
Those who believe that the library physically ends after a point, much as those who would limit the Argentine subject to mere “local colour”, or narrow imitation of Spanish literature which proceeded it, are “absurd”, lacking an understanding of literature’s fundamentally universal scope.
The speaker eventually concludes; “The Library is unlimited but periodic”. The suggestion that meaning and identity within literature is constructed by temporality affirms the inevitability of a national literature. The matter, Borges claims, becomes one of determinism; a “sense of time”, not merely an individual’s unreliable “sense of time” but the temporal awareness of an entire culture, is what locates meaning within a text. Modernism and the construction of an Argentinian tradition, then, are not opposed but rather intertwined. The Argentine writer’s simultaneous inheritance of and distance from European tradition enables the inherently Modernist conjunction of reflexivity and revision which had and would continue to be exemplified in both Borges’ work and Argentina’s national literature.
Image Credit: Grete Stern (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
