retamar caliban (6 page)

Incorporated into what is called with a bit of unintentional humor the "free world,” our countries—in spite of our shields, anthems, flags, and presidents— would inaugurate a new form of not being independent: neocolonialism. The bourgeoisie, for whom Sarmiento had outlined such delightful possibilities, became no more than an vice-bourgeoisie, a modest local shareholder in imperial exploitation—first the English, then the North American.

It is in this light that one sees more clearly the connections between Sarmiento—whose name is associated with grand pedagogical projects, immense spaces, railways, ships—and Borges, the mention of whom evokes mirrors that multiply the same miserable image, unfathomable labyrinths, and a sad, dimly lit library. But apart from this, if the ‘‘American-ness” of Sarmiento is always taken for granted (although it is obvious in him, this is not to say he represents the positive pole of that “American-ness”), 1 have never been able to understand why it is denied to Borges. Borges is a typical colonial writer, the representative among us of a now-powerless class for whom the act of writing—and he is well aware of this, for he is a man of diaboloical intelligence—is more like the act of reading. He is not a European writer; there is no European writer like Borges. But there are
many
European writers—from Iceland to the German expressionists—whom Borges has
read,
shuffled together, collated. European writers belong to very concrete and provincial traditions—reaching the extreme case of a PSguy, for example, who boasted of never having read anything but French authors. Apart from a few professors of philology, who recieve a salary for it, there is only one type of person who really knows in its entirety the literature of Europe: the colonial. Only in the case of mental imbalance can a learned Argentine writer ever boast of having read nothing but Argentine—or even Spanish-language—authors. And Borges is not imbalanced. On the contrary, he is an extremely lucid man, one who exemplifies Marti’s idea that intelligence is only one—and not necessarily the best—part of a man.

The writing of Borges comes directly from his reading, in a peculiar process of phagocytosis that identifies him clearly as a colonial and the representative of a dying class. For him the creation par excellence of culture is a library; or better yet, a museum—a place where the products of culture from abroad are assembled. A museum of horrors, of monsters, of splendors, of folkloric data and artifacts (those of Argentina seen with the eye of a curator)—the work of Borges, written in a Spanish difficult to read without admiration, is one of the American scandals of our time.

Unlike some other important Latin-American writers, Borges does not pretend to be a leftist. Quite the opposite. His position in this regard leads him to sign a petition in favor of the Bay of Pigs invaders, to call for the death penalty for Debray, or to dedicate a book to Nixon. Many of his admirers who deplore (or say they deplore) these acts maintain that there is a dichotomy in the man that permits him, on the one hand, to write slightly immortal books and, on the other, to sign political declarations that are more puerile than malicious. That may well be. It is also possible that no such dichotomy exists and that we ought to accustom ourselves to restoring unity to the author of ‘ ‘The
Garden of
Forking Paths. ” By that I do not propose that we should find errors of spelling or syntax in his elegant pages but rather that we read them
for
what, in the final analysis, they are: the painful testimony of a class with no way out, diminished to saying in the voice of one man, “The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

It is interesting that the writing/reading of Borges is enjoying a particularly favorable reception in capitalist Europe at the moment when Europe is itself becoming a colony in the face of the ‘ ‘American challenge . ’ ’ In a book of that very title, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber explains with unmasked cynicism, “Now then, Europe is not Algiers or Senegal!”*
⁴
In other words, the United States cannot do to Europe what Europe did to Algiers and Senegal! I have bad news for Europe: it seems that, in spite of everything, they can indeed do it; they have, in fact, been doing it now for some time. And if this occurs in the area of economics—along with complex political derivations—the European cultural superstructure is also manifesting obvious colonial symptoms. One of them may well be the apogee of Borges’s writing/reading.

But of course the heritage of Borges, whose kinship with Sarmiento we have already seen, must be sought above all in Latin America, where it will imply a further decline in impetus and quality. Since this is not a survey, but rather a simple essay on Latin-American culture, I shall restrict myself to a single example. I am aware that it is a very minor one; but it is nonetheless a valid symptom. I shall comment on a small book of criticism by Carlos Fuentes,
La nueva novela hispanoamericana
{The new Spanish-American novel].

As spokesman for the same class as Borges, Fuentes also evinced leftist whims in his younger days. The former’s
El tamano de mi experanza
[The extent of my hope] corresponds to the latter’s
La muerte de Artemio Cruz
[The death of Artemio Cruz]. But to continue judging Fuentes by that book, without question one of our good novels, would be as senseless as continuing to judge Borges by his early book—the difference being that Borges, who is more consistent (and in all ways more estimable; Borges, even though we differ so greatly from him, is a truly important writer), decided to adopt openly his position as a man of the Right, while Puentes operates as such but attempts to conserve, from time to time, a leftist terminology that does not lack, of course, references to Marx. In
The Death of Artemio Cruz,
a secretary who is fully integrated into the system synthesizes his biography in the following dialogue:

“You’re very young. How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“When did you receive your degree?”

“Three years ago. But...”

“But what?”

“Theory and practice are different.”

“And that amuses you?”

“A lot of Marxism. So much that I even wrote my thesis on surplus value. ’ ’

“It ought to be good training, Padilla.”

“But practice is very different.”

“Is that what you are, a Marxist?”

“Well, all my friends were. It’s a stage one goes through.”
⁶⁵

This dialogue expresses clearly enough the situation of a certain sector of the Mexican intelligentsia that, though it shares Borges’s class circumstances and behavior patterns, differs from him for purely local reasons, in certain superficial aspects. I am thinking, specifically, of the so-called Mexican literary mafia, one of whose most conspicuous figures is Carlos Fuentes. This group warmly expressed its sympathy for the Cuban Revolution until, in 1961, the revolution proclaimed itself and proved to be Marxist-Leninist—that is, a revolution that has in its forefront a worker-peasant alliance. From that day on, the support of the mafia grew increasingly diluted, up to the last few months when—taking advantage of the wild vociferation occasioned by a Cuban writer’s month in jail—they broke obstreperously with Cuba.

The symmetry here is instructive: in 1961, at the time of the Bay of Pigs, the only gathering of Latin-American writers to express in a manifesto its desire that Cuba be defeated by mercenaries in the service of imperialism was a group of Argentines centered around Borges.
⁶⁶
Ten years later, in 1971, the only national circle of writers on the continent to exploit an obvious pretext for breaking with Cuba and culminating the conduct of the revolution was the Mexican mafia. It is a simple changing of the guard within an identical attitude.

In that light one can better understand the intentions of Fuentes’s short book on the new Spanish-American novel. The development of this new novel is one of the prominent features of the literature of these past few years, and its circulation beyond our borders is in large part owing to the worldwide attention our continent has enjoyed since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
⁶⁷

Logically, this new novel has occasioned various interpretations, numerous studies. That of Carlos Fuentes, despite its brevity (less than one hundred pages), comprehends a thoroughgoing position paper on literature and politics that clearly synthesizes a shrewd rightist viewpoint within our countries.

Fuentes is quick to lay his cards on the table. In the first chapter, exemplarily entitled “Civilization and Barbarism,” he adopts for openers, as might be expected, the thesis of Sarmiento: during the nineteenth
century
“it is possible for only one drama to unfold in this medium: that which Sarmiento established in the subtitle of
Facundo—Civilization and Barbarism.”
That drama constitutes the conflict “of the first one hundred years of Latin-American society and its novel."
⁶⁸
The narrative corresponding to this conflict comprehends four factors: “an essentially alien [to whom?] natural order,” which was “the real Latin-American protagonist”; the dictator on the national or regional scale; the exploited masses; and the fourth factor, “the writer,
who invariably stands on the side of civilization and against barbarism
''(11-12; my emphasis). This, according to Fuentes, implies “a defense of the exploited,” but Sarmiento revealed what it consisted of in fact. The polarity that characterized the 1900s, he continued, does not go unchanged in the following century. “In the twentieth century the intellectual himself is forced to struggle within a society that is, internally and externally, much more complex,”a complexity owing to the fact that these countries will be penetrated by imperialism, while sometime later there will take place “a revolt and upsurge... in the underdeveloped world. ’ ’ Among the international factors that must be taken into account in the twentieth century, socialism, is one that Fuentes forgets to include. But he slips in this opportune formula: “We have the beginning of the transition from epic simplism to dialectical complexity” (13). “Epic simplism” was the nineteenth-century struggle in which, according to Fuentes, “the writer [he means writers
like him]
invariably stands on the side of civilization and against barbarism,” that is, becomes an unconditional servant of the new oligarchy and a harsh enemy of the American masses. “Dialectical complexity” is the form that collaboration takes in the twentieth century, when the oligarchy in question has revealed itself as a mere intermediary for imperialist interests and “the writer” such as Fuentes must now serve two masters. Even when it is a question of such well-heeled masters, we have known since the Holy Scriptures that this does imply a certain "dialectical complexity," expecially when one attempts to make everyone believe one is in fact serving a third master—the people. Notwithstanding its slight omissions, the synthesis offered by the lucid Fuentes of one aspect of imperialist penetration in our countries is interesting. He writes:

In order to intervene effectively in the economic life of each

Latin-American country, it requires not only an intermediary ruling class, but a whole array of services in public administration, commerce, publicity, business management, extractive and refining industries, banking, transportation, and even entertainment: bread and circuses. General Motors assembles automobiles, takes home profits, and
sponsors
television
programs.
[14],

As a final example (even though that of General Motors is always valid) it might have been more useful to mention the CIA, which organizes the Bay of Pigs invasion and pays, via transparent intermediaries, for the review
Muttdo nuevo,
one of whose principal ideologues was none other than Carlos Fuentes.

With these political premises established, Fuentes goes on to postulate certain literary premises before concentrating on the authors he will study (Vargas Llosa, Carpentier,
Garcia
Marquez,
Cortazar,
and Goytisolo)
and
concluding with more observations of a political nature. I am not interested in lingering over his criticism per se but simply in underscoring a few of its ideological lines, which are, in any case, apparent: at times, this little book seems a thoroughgoing ideological manifest.

A critical appreciation of literature requires that we start off with a concept of criticism itself; one ought to have answered the elemental question, What is criticism? The modest opinion of Krystina Pomorska would seem acceptable. According to Tzvetan Todorov,

... she defends the following thesis: every critical method is a generalization upon the literary practice of its time. Critical methods in the period of classicism were elaborated as a function of classical literary works. The criticism of the romantics reiterates the principles (the irrational, the psychological, etc.) of romanticism itself.
⁶⁹

Reading Fuentes’s criticism on the new Spanish-American novel, then, we are aware that his ‘ ‘critical method is a generalization upon the literary practice of its time”—the practice of
other
literatures, that is,
not
the Spanish-American. All things considered, this fits in perfectly with the alienated and alienating ideology of Fuentes.

After the work of men like Alejo Carpentier, whom some profiteers of the “boom” have tried in vain to disclaim, the undertaking assumed by the new Spanish-American novel—an undertaking that, as certain critics do not cease to observe, might appear accomplished by now or “surpassed” in the narrative of capitalist countries—implies a reinterpretation of our history. Indifferent to this incontestable fact—which in many cases bears an ostensible relationship to the new perspectives the revolution has afforded our America and which is in no small way responsible for the diffusion of our narrative among those with a desire to know the continent about which there is so much discussion—Fuentes dissipates the flesh and blood of our novels, the criticism of which would require, before anything else, understanding and evaluation of the vision of history presented in them, and, as 1 have said, calmly applies to the schemes derived from other literatures (those of capitalist countries), now reduced to mere linguistic speculations.