The World Literary Treasure Hunt: Argentina — David Sachs
Ficciones and The Aleph and Other Stories from Jorge Luis Borges; Hopscotch from Julio Cortazar; The Gaucho Martin Fierro and The Return of Martin Fierro from José Hernández
Pre-amble:
I’ve taken a travel year with my family, heading more or less East until we find ourselves back in Quebec (or prove the Flat-Earthers correct!) I’ve always liked to read something from the places I travel to, and I thought it would make a fun quest to explore the world simultaneously through the books of each country we visit. Like a literary Anthony Bourdain.
Of course, we can’t pretend to understand a culture from a few books; we aren’t going to catalyze a series of epiphanies and insights here… …no, OK, we can pretend. And pretending is fun. And cultures are different. Arts are different. Sensibilities and worldview differ. What a boring world it would be otherwise!
And if this project doesn’t turn up any cultural insights — which I’ll be honest, insights are pretty far between for me — it will still be fun. So let’s go.
{See last instalment from Peru, here.}
Amble:
Argentina and her literary champion were revelatory. When we started the trip, we had a general idea of what we would be doing in Colombia and Peru, but Argentina was a black box. We had chosen it to make our son feel part of the planning process: he’s a Messi fan.
And what the heck, why not? It turned out Argentina had an immense treasury to offer. Including, especially, Jorge Luis Borges: a writer whose stories one could imagine physically rivalling Argentina’s stupendous natural sights.
I can’t say Borges is my favourite writer of the trip, or even my favourite of South America (#TeamVargasLlosa), but he may be the most interesting, original, intelligent and powerful storyteller I’ve ever encountered. Borges. Wow. You have to respect an imagination and audacity like that. That’s magical realism!
Borges opened my eyes to what fiction, particularly short fiction, could be. His stories are often not stories at all, they are just concepts, imaginary worlds: imagine if….
Now, I look back on so many of the authors I’ve consumed over the years and realize they are all Borges children — from Kurt Vonnegut to David Foster Wallace to Douglas Adams. Writers who influenced me were influenced by Borges. More: Umberto Ecco, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Neil Gaiman. Some have acknowledged Borges’ influence, while others seem, in retrospect, impossible without him. I had always heard of Barth, but never felt enough momentum to read him until I began exploring more on Borge’s influence. Barth is most definitely a child of Borges, one who also admits how Borges expanded for him the realm of what is possible in storytelling (try The Night-Sea Journey for a great example).
“Reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is like discovering a new letter in the alphabet, or a new note in the musical scale.”- from a BBC.COM article
Borges is often called the godfather of Latin American Boom: First Borges, then the Boom. So, he is godfather of the two authors I’ve previously read on this trip, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa.
In Buenos Aires, the start of our Argentinian and my Borgean experience, we stayed in a small flat in a run-down area at the edge of Palermo. Buenos Aires is a sprawling megalopolis, but our neighbourhood and time here was peaceful; the tempo of Palermo itself seemed slow and of a different era. We spent our time homeschooling, exploring the neighbourhood, and buying cheap, great red wine at the corner store. I found an old boys rugby team to practice with. We saw a wonderful tango show*. The kids ran their first 1k race. I got my first ink. I tell you, Borges left a more permanent mark on me!
You Never Forget Your First Borges
I read The Aleph. The Aleph is one of Borges major short stories, the title story for his second collection (published 1949), and a many-layered tale of love, loss, art, and a spot on a basement staircase from which the entire universe can be seen.
Hooked after that, I went back to his first short story collection, Ficciones, published and expanded between 1941 and 1956.
One of his first stories stands as a flagpost on the fantastical territory he was staking out: in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the narrator recounts his accidental discovery of a vast, generations-old conspiracy to invent, and introduce into the ‘real world’, a false country: Uqbar. Most importantly, Uqbar and it’s fictitious Uqbarian culture were a Trojan horse for the insemination of the Uqbarian mythology, that of the planet Tlön.
The story’s narrator is one of the first to stumble upon the hidden references to Uqbar, a land supposedly adjoining Iraq, in obscure encyclopaedia and atlases. Failing to find corroborating sources for this unknown realm, he and a few friends follows the mystery for years before a major new reference source on Uqbar appears.
Ashe left it in the bar where, months later, I found it. I began to leaf through it and felt a sudden curious lightheadedness, which I will not go into, since this is the story, not of my particular emotions, but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. In the Islamic world, there is one night, called the Night of Nights, on which the secret gates of the sky open wide and the water in the water jugs tastes sweeter; if those gates were to open, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English, and had 1001 pages. On the yellow leather spine, and again on the title page, I read these words: A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. Volume XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was nothing to indicate either date or place of origin. On the first page and on a sheet of silk paper covering one of the colored engravings there was a blue oval stamp with the inscription: ORBIS TERTIUS. It was two years since I had discovered, in a volume of a pirated encyclopedia, a brief description of a false country; now, chance was showing me something much more valuable, something to be reckoned with. Now, I had in my hands a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sound of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds, and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments, all clearly stated, coherent, without any apparent dogmatic intention or parodic undertone.
As more and more references to Uqbar and the double-imaginary Tlön are discovered by others than the narrator, they impregnate themselves fully into the popular consciousness. Now just, read this. THIS is Borges:
The popular magazines have publicized, with pardonable zeal, the zoology and topography of Tlön. I think, however, that its transparent tigers and its towers of blood scarcely deserve the unwavering attention of all men. I should like to take some little time to deal with its conception of the universe. Hume remarked once and for all that the arguments of Berkeley were not only thoroughly unanswerable but thoroughly unconvincing. This dictum is emphatically true as it applies to our world; but it falls down completely in Tlön. The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Their language, with its derivatives-religion, literature, and metaphysics-presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moondle. The moon rose over the sea would be written hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or, to put it in order: upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling. (Xul Solar translates it succinctly: upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.) The previous passage refers to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (the eleventh volume has little information on its Ursprache), the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky or some other accumulation.
This is like reading a genius’ mushroom trip.
One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory. Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process. Another school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon. Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true. Another believes that, while we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else, and that thus every man is two men.
Borges invents for Tlön a fanciful, but somehow complete, mathematics. I remember in Calvin & Hobbes, the father messing with Calvin re black and white pictures.
More on Tlon:
The books themselves are also odd. Works of fiction are based on a single plot, which runs through every imaginable permutation. Works of natural philosophy invariably include thesis and antithesis, the strict pro and con of a theory. A book which does not include its opposite, or “counter-book,” is considered incomplete. Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the very oldest regions of Tlön, it is not an uncommon occurrence for lost objects to be duplicated. Two people are looking for a pencil; the first one finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but more in keeping with his expectation. These secondary objects are called hrönir and, even though awkward in form, are a little larger than the originals. Until recently, the hrönir were the accidental children of absent-mindedness and forgetfulness… …One curious fact: the hrönir of the second and third degree-that is, the hrönir derived from another hrön, and the hrönir derived from the hrön of a hrön-exaggerate the flaws of the original; those of the fifth degree are almost uniform; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form which the originals do not possess.
So much of Borges feels like this. As he progressed, he learned to better interweave more satisfying narrative with his imaginary rocket rides.
Borge’s fictional form was the short story. An art form he vastly enlarged. His stories are often told third hand, the supposedly central narrative seeming almost as an excuse to give grounding to the more and more baroque framing stories, which finally appear like a librarian’s bibliographical notes on the inner framing story. (E.g. Story-proper, told in summary or just partially, as part of a fictitious literary critique of that story, which literary critique is then described in bibliographic detail by an unnamed narrator, who is telling us the circumstances under which he discovered this critique and what he thinks of it.) Borges takes a good story and makes it great by telling it in the most unexpected fashion. It’s like he takes a regular turkey sandwich, a quality turkey sandwich, and he adds dijon mustard and spicy eggplant, but he adds them on the outside of the bread. And it’s served by an alien, who, in a surprise twist, is the narrator’s mother. These are stories that should be narrated by John Malkovich or Christopher Walken.
Everything is meta, to the point where you feel like Borges is actually writing you reading the story and you wonder if you exist at all!
Sometimes Borges gets bogged down in almost unbelievably tedious cataloguing of bibliographic details as part of the framing story. I certainly had to fight to get through some of the stories. It almost feels like he’s making fun of you with this bullshit. You’re like, can he actually think someone wants to read this? Is he putting me on?
Thankfully, they’re not all like that. The Garden of Forking Paths is one of the stories that get it right: that tell an actual coherent story, through which Borges can play his intellectual riddles within riddles, in such a way that we WANT to read the story, not just from intellectual curiosity but because we are enjoying the story. (Even when he fails, it seems like dry non-fiction: you aren’t enjoying it, but you continue because you feel driven to learn what the writer is trying to give you).
Another is The Story of the Warrior and the Captive, a wonderful tale of a German warrior who came to destroy and pillage Rome, but who, when confronted with its beauty, achievements and splendour, far beyond his comprehension, dies defending it.
Imagine him a worshiper of the Earth, of Hertha, whose covered idol went from hut to hut in a cow-drawn cart, or of the gods of war and thunder, which were crude wooden figures wrapped in homespun clothing and hung with coins and bracelets. He came from the inextricable forests of the boar and the bison; he was light-skinned, spirited, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe, but not to the universe. The wars bring him to Ravenna and there he sees something he has never seen before, or has not seen fully. He sees the day and the cypresses and the marble. He sees a whole whose multiplicity is not that of disorder; he sees a city, an organism composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, amphitheaters, vases, columns, regular and open spaces. None of these fabrications (I know) impresses him as beautiful; he is touched by them as we now would be by a complex mechanism whose purpose we could not fathom but in whose design an immortal intelligence might be divined. Perhaps it is enough for him to see a single arch, with an incomprehensible inscription in eternal Roman letters. Suddenly he is blinded and renewed by this revelation, the City. He knows that in it he will be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he also knows that it is worth more than his gods and his sworn faith and all the marshes of Germany.
He uses this to frame a twist on the story from the frontiers of Argentina, of a British women kidnapped and then assimilated into a native tribe.
Borges is much more than a trickster or world-builder. He has immense range. He tells complex psychological thrillers, like Emma Zunz. One story tells of the minotaur in the labyrinth, from the point of view of the minotaur, not realizing it is a monster.
Deutsches Requiem is brilliant. A searing, haunting memoir of an unapologetic Nazi concentration camp official, one versed in philosophy and literature, charged with the guarding and extermination of one of his own favourite poets. (Search for it here, RIGHT NOW. I’ll wait.)
Borges’ works reflect Schopenhauer and Shakespeare, Kafka and Goethe, Berkeley, Nietzche and Spengler, Catholic theologians, Jewish Cabalists and the Koran. Borges is just obscenely loaded with ideas. Like this:
Throughout the Earth there are ancient forms, forms incorruptible and eternal; any one of them could be the symbol I sought. A mountain could be the speech of the god, or a river, or the empire or the configuration of the stars.
Imagine that! A god writing his message in mountains or empires, a message meant to be decoded. Now that’s an idea! And what’s more, maybe it’s true. Maybe WE are Her message. Perhaps She is OURS.
Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges is quoted as saying in the introduction to Labyrinths; it is a mirror that makes the reader’s features known.
Leaving Buenos Aires, On The Wings of Borges
In the grip of Borges collections, Ficcones (8/10) and El Aleph (8.3/10), we travelled to the northernmost reaches of the country to see the spectacular be-jungle-d Iguazu Falls. This is where we first got the inkling: Argentina’s physical beauty is big, bold and beautiful. It is eye-popping. It is SO much like Borges. {You may be wondering why the A/A- ratings for such powerful works. The answer is, as I’ve explained above, the masses of boring bullshit Borges tends to throw in between the layers of his stories. Some of his works are just pure, spectacular gems. Others are really gems hidden in a haystack, written on one particular stick of hay.}
A half dozen ribbons of water tumble from the sky along the winding jungle paths through the national park, and then the motherload, a massive horseshoe falls stretching into Brazil, so powerful, beautiful and nuanced as to make each prior sight seem irrelevant. Again, like…
Patagonia and Her Hero, Martin Fierro
From Iguazu Falls, we crossed the length of the country to the Patagonian town of El Calafate.
Patagonia — a name that touches you, one loaded in our popular subconscious. It means something, or plays on some specific nerve ending, setting off visions or feelings, like Texas or the Amazon or the Himalayas. Patagonia! I see mountains, cowboys, red wine and tango and vast empty plains.
El Calafate, in fact, reminded me a lot of Banff back in Canada, a timber-framed tourist village with luxury spas and low-rent hostels, brew pubs and outdoor activity centres, and shops full of local-beast-stuffed-animals and gourmet chocolates, framed by an alpine backdrop. We visited stunning glaciers, rode horseback in the frigid air, and ate exquisite paella and lamb, chicken and beef asado in the home of new friends. Parilla barbecue huts are common in Argentina. In the extreme weather of deep-south Patagonia, our hosts had built theirs in a kind of playroom-garage, with games, and a TV for watching rugby, and a six-foot wood-grill vented through the roof. Here, they entertain family and friends with weekly Sunday feasts. We were very lucky to be invited to what was possibly the meal of the year!
From nearby El Chalten, we spent our days in incredible alpine hikes. The kids survived a frigid 8-hour epic trek. It was grey and blizzardy all day, and we wondered at the point of it all, but we were rewarded for our stubbornness with a suddenly clear sky at the final viewpoint, with vistas of glaciers and the towering peaks of Chile beyond. It was a karmic, athletic and aesthetic victory. I may have had to carry one or two of the kids for the last hour or so back down to the village.
In Patagonia, I began the great late nineteenth-century epic poem The Gaucho Martin Fierro, and the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, no, I mean, The Return of Martin Fierro, by José Hernández.
“I believe that Martín Fierro is the most lasting work we Argentines have written.”
Jorge Luis Borges
From an Argentina tourism website:
Martin Fierro, an epic and “gauchesque” poem which has turned into one of the iconic master pieces of Argentine literature: a must in school programs. Its author, Jose Hernandez, was born in the province of Buenos Aires, in 1834. He was a devoted poet and journalist, exiled for having supported the wrong side during the civil war faced in the first decades of independent Argentina. He wrote about the Conquest of the Desert, and the forced recruitment of gauchos to exterminate the native people….It was such a great success [I assume the tourist website means the book, not the genocide] that people would gather around to recite it at meetings. It has also been declared one of the most relevant Spanish American works.
I loved this work. The hero’s story felt tragic, adventurous and frighteningly common; there was a nobility to it that was dirty and sad rather than glamourous. It felt honest.
Here I come to sing to the beat of my guitar: because a man who is kept from sleep by an uncommon sorrow comforts himself with singing, like a solitary bird. And whoever may be listening to the tale of my sorrows — know that I never fight nor kill except when it has to be done, and that only injustice threw me into so much adversity. And listen to the story told by a gaucho who’s hunted by the law; who’s been a father and husband hard-working and willing — and in spite of that, people take him to be a criminal.
Martin Fierro (8/10) hangs over all Argentina. It has been quoted in public speeches by the current Pope. It is fundamental to the national culture and consciousness. Perhaps analogous to Don Quixote in Spain, or Huckleberry Finn in the U.S.? Les Mis? Can any readers supply other works of art so baked into their national psyches?
The juxtaposition of Borges and Martin Fierro seems an indicator of something about the Argentinian character: there is a sophistication and formality here, a fondness for intellectual play and a lack of shame in intelligence, akin to French culture, but married to the frontier roughness, big-spirit, and machismo of the American West or rural Spain.
That first feeling was very much evident in the next book.
Return to the BOOM: Cortazar
Finally, I returned to the BOOM, our old friend, the Latin American Boom, and Julio Cortazar’s famed work, Hopscotch. To be honest, I had never heard of Cortazar or Hopscotch. Turns out, they’re big. I went into it with no idea of the time it was written or Cortazar’s place in the South American pantheon. In fact, don’t tell anyone about what’s coming next, because people really love Cortazar.
So!
Beginning as a tale of an Argentine ex-pat in boho Paris, Hopscotch immediately seemed a cheap knock-off of Jack Kerouac, or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, or Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris. But especially Kerouac. It was almost an unfunny parody. Sentences that go on for pages; dollar-store, name-dropping, first-year-university-stoner philosophical ramblings; and chapter after chapter listing each song played at the party and each party-goer’s reactions and thoughts for each musical phrase or lyric.
I would have dropped this book by chapter three, still vaguely describing the protagonist and his girlfriends so-boho relationship. But I plugged on for you, for you.
There are times in Hopscotch where, if you really force yourself to focus, some of these run-on sentences are fun. But I just can’t focus that hard, page after page of stream-of-consciousness with no periods or paragraphs.
If all this, the predawn tapioca starting to stick to the skylight, La Maga’s so sad face as she looked at Gregorovius looking at La Maga looking at Gregorovius, Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, Babs who was crying again, hidden from Ronald who was not crying but who hid his face in the sticky smoke, the vodka transformed into a truly saintly halo, Perico the Spanish ghost up on a stool of disdain and Pavlovian stylistics, if everything were able to be extrapolated, if everything just did not exist, if he were there just so somebody (anybody, but he at the moment, because he was the one who was doing the thinking, in any case he was the one who knew that he was really thinking, eh, Cartesius, you old fuck), so that somebody could extract from all that was going on by striving and biting and especially by delving, it was hard to say how but by delving down to the very dregs, that out of all this there might pop up some grasshopper of peace, some cricket of contentment, that a person might be able to enter any gate and come into any garden, an allegorical garden as far as the others were concerned, just as mandalas are allegorical for everyone else, and in that garden he would find a flower and that flower would be La Maga, or Babs, or Wong, but described and describing itself, reconstituted outside their appearances among the Club, back to what they were, emerged, dawning, at best this all might be just a nostalgic view of the earthly paradise, an ideal of purity, except that purity had come to be inevitably the product of simplification, the bishop moves, rooks move, the knight jumps, pawns fall away, and in the center of the board, big as anthracite lions the kings remain flanked by the cleanest and last and purest of their armies, at dawn the deciding lances will be crossed, fate will be served, peace will reign. A pureness as of coitus between crocodiles, not the pureness of oh Mary my mother with dirty feet; a pureness of a slate roof with doves who naturally shit on the heads of ladies wild with rage and radishes, a pureness of … Horacio, Horacio, please.
Make of that what you will.
So you read in a fog and then wake up in the middle of some metaphor or allegory where everyone at the party is a flower or chess piece or toilet paper brand on a shelf at the supermarket and, like the Talking Heads…
By chapter 28 we get our first really well-carved dramatic scene, although it makes the protagonist even more unattractive: the usual gang of idiots is at a party at the chief boho couple’s apartment. The boyfriend, and gradually the rest of the gang, realize the girlfriend’s baby, which has been sick for days, is dead in his crib. And they all attempt to carry on the usual drinking and banter with this incredible tension underlying it as they wait for the mother to understand what they all will do:
Now we shall have fifteen minutes of chain reactions which no one will be able to avoid, no one, not even by thinking that next year, at this very same hour, the most exact and detailed memory will not be capable of changing the output of adrenalin or saliva, the sweat on the palms of the hands
Finally, after that all hits the fan, and the break-up and the descending into some real muck, the protagonist escapes back to Argentina. The story turns here, and becomes a bit more readable. The characters almost sweet. Another kindle note: 200 pages in and genuine lightness and likeability
During his reading hours, which were between one and five o’clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature.
Then, the experimentalish: after fifty or so chapters, culminating in an actual story-like climax, there are the bonus non-linear chapters! Yay! Somehow we are meant to start over, and read the books in a wholly new order (proscribed at the end of each chapter, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with just one option), but now incorporating thirty or so new chapters. The new stuff seems to be mostly more random wordy meditations on the meaning of life… and meaning of meaning. Because there wasn’t enough of that in the first 56 chapters. This is basically the second string meditations, the stuff that couldn’t be shoehorned into the story itself.
OK. As much as I mock Cortazar’s self-indulgence, he does have the guts and memory and skill to bring his youth and its drama to life in spots. The ability to take those tiny moments or periods of our life that seem so epic at the time, but that we can never tell of, for fear of rendering them embarrassing and small. He remembers, and he tells them, and they work. Anyway… 5.5/10.
And finally, there is this:
Stopping in front of a pizzeria at 1300 Corrientes, Oliveira asked himself the great question: “Must one stay in the center of the crossroads, then, like the hub of a wheel? What good is it to know or to think we know that every road is false if we don’t walk with an idea that is not the road itself? We’re not Buddha, and there are no trees here to sit under in the lotus position.
I read this line on the flight out of Argentina the day after a final dinner of pizza on Corrientes! Probably within a few blocks of Cortezar’s pizzeria. In a city of 16 million people counting suburbs, this is a mystical coincidence. Mystic pizza.
*when a ‘national’ cultural exhibition is chiefly performed for tourists, is it really a part of the national culture?
Originally published at http://davidsachs.com on July 5, 2019.
© David Sachs 2019
