Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Api Files - Fictional Truth
Fictional truths
Clive James on Borges' political blindness during the dire 70's in Argentina:
In 1979, when Borges wrote his homage to Victoria Ocampo (the founder of the cosmopolitan magazine Sur) in which this revealing passage appeared, the Argentine junta was doing its obscene worst. Surrounded by horror, Borges either hadn't noticed or—a hard imputation, yet harder still to avoid—he knew something about it and thought it could be excused. But even if he was confident that the political Brahmanism he favored could be pardoned for imposing itself by extreme means, he might well have detected an incipient challenge to his conscience. He had good reason—i.e., a bad reason but an urgent one—to suggest, if only to himself, that what was happening to his country was of secondary importance, because his first loyalty was to the world. But the world, not one's country, is the abstraction: an ideal that means nothing if one's first loyalties to truth, justice, and mercy have been given up. The old man was pulling a fast one. At this point there is a key quotation from Ernesto Sábato, one of Borges' most talented peers, that we should consider:
From Borges's fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence.
In Buenos Aires after World War II, there were two literary voices of incontestable international stature. The main difference between them was that only one was known to possess it. The whole world heard about Borges. But to get the point about Sábato, you had to go to Argentina. Both inhabitants of a beautiful but haunted city, both great writers, and both blind in their later lives, Borges and Sábato were linked by destiny but separated in spirit: a separation summed up in this single perception of Sábato's, which was penetratingly true. Borges did fear the bitterness of reality, and he did take refuge in an invented world. Sábato's fantastic novels were dedicated to including all the horrors of the real world and raising them to the status of dreams, so that they could become apprehensible to the imagination. Most of the dreams we recognize all too clearly. He didn't need to search very far in order to find the stimulus for them. All he needed was the recent history of Argentina. In Borges, by contrast, the near past scarcely exists: In that respect his historical sense, like his Buenos Aires, is without contemporaneity. His political landscape is a depopulated marble ghost town remembered from childhood, spookily hieratic like the cemetery in Recoleta. Before he went blind he would walk the streets only at night, to minimize the chance of actually meeting anyone. In his stories, the moments of passion, fear, pity, and terror belong to the long-vanished world of the knife fighters. Death squads and torture are not in the inventory. The time scale ends not long after he was born. Why did he hide?
Clive James on Borges' political blindness during the dire 70's in Argentina:
In 1979, when Borges wrote his homage to Victoria Ocampo (the founder of the cosmopolitan magazine Sur) in which this revealing passage appeared, the Argentine junta was doing its obscene worst. Surrounded by horror, Borges either hadn't noticed or—a hard imputation, yet harder still to avoid—he knew something about it and thought it could be excused. But even if he was confident that the political Brahmanism he favored could be pardoned for imposing itself by extreme means, he might well have detected an incipient challenge to his conscience. He had good reason—i.e., a bad reason but an urgent one—to suggest, if only to himself, that what was happening to his country was of secondary importance, because his first loyalty was to the world. But the world, not one's country, is the abstraction: an ideal that means nothing if one's first loyalties to truth, justice, and mercy have been given up. The old man was pulling a fast one. At this point there is a key quotation from Ernesto Sábato, one of Borges' most talented peers, that we should consider:
From Borges's fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence.
In Buenos Aires after World War II, there were two literary voices of incontestable international stature. The main difference between them was that only one was known to possess it. The whole world heard about Borges. But to get the point about Sábato, you had to go to Argentina. Both inhabitants of a beautiful but haunted city, both great writers, and both blind in their later lives, Borges and Sábato were linked by destiny but separated in spirit: a separation summed up in this single perception of Sábato's, which was penetratingly true. Borges did fear the bitterness of reality, and he did take refuge in an invented world. Sábato's fantastic novels were dedicated to including all the horrors of the real world and raising them to the status of dreams, so that they could become apprehensible to the imagination. Most of the dreams we recognize all too clearly. He didn't need to search very far in order to find the stimulus for them. All he needed was the recent history of Argentina. In Borges, by contrast, the near past scarcely exists: In that respect his historical sense, like his Buenos Aires, is without contemporaneity. His political landscape is a depopulated marble ghost town remembered from childhood, spookily hieratic like the cemetery in Recoleta. Before he went blind he would walk the streets only at night, to minimize the chance of actually meeting anyone. In his stories, the moments of passion, fear, pity, and terror belong to the long-vanished world of the knife fighters. Death squads and torture are not in the inventory. The time scale ends not long after he was born. Why did he hide?
# posted by Lamb Mouton @ 12:11 PM 
