Borges against Perón: A Contextual Approach to “El fin”

Abstract

fin is possibly least studied of all stories in Borges's Ficciones. It is at first sight a very slight tale in which Borges chose to alter ending of Jose Hernandez's classic poem El gaucho Martin Fierro (1872; 1879). Its kinship with Menard, autor del Quijote is not hard to see: Pierre Menard sets out to re-write Cervantes's Don Quixote word for word, whilst in fin Borges re-writes ending of Martin Fierro. Both stories call into question unique authority of a literary classic and insinuate that even most revered of authors may in end be not much different from any other thereby exemplifying one of Borges's favourite themes, arbitrary or illusory nature of personal identity. The questioning of an author's status as sole originator of meaning also entails a severing of text from its context, for if author is no longer a privileged authority, then context in which work was written cannot be privileged either. These ideas were a feature of Borges's writing well before Roland Barthes declared death of author, (1) but, even so, Borges also held to a belief that there was an expressionist, autobiographical basis to all writing, including his own, and even in old age he would insist that the stories were about me, about my personal experiences. (2) These rather conflicting positions sprang from an ever-present tension that is evident at very core of his work between a desire to discover and affirm a destiny, a true self, and a horror of what he called the nothingness of personality. (3) The fluctuations between self and non-self varied in intensity according to circumstances, both personal and political, but they help to define three broad periods in his career: in his youth he believed passionately in need to capture self fully in his writing; in middle age, his sense of nullity of personal identity tended to predominate; and in old age he returned to a more positive, though much attenuated, belief in selfhood, and sought to recover a creative role for author. (4) It is work of middle period, especially Ficciones, El Aleph and Otras inquisiciones, that has overwhelmingly attracted attention of critics, but this period, I believe, needs to be related to earlier and later periods in order to arrive at a fuller and more finely-differentiated understanding of Borges's aims and achievements. The contextualization of his work is an essential element in this process, and in this essay I hope to demonstrate that a contextual approach can generate new perspectives and new readings without detracting from philosophical and theoretical dimensions of his writing. (5) Borges himself contributed to general blurring of context because of his habit of adding stories, essays and poems to later editions of already published collections. fin is a case in point: it is now an integral component of Ficciones, which first came out in 1944, but story was actually published for first time in newspaper La Nacion on 11 October 1953, and was only added to Ficciones in its second edition, which appeared in 1956. However, once we situate fin chronologically, we can begin to appreciate its special place in Borges's oeuvre: it was very last to be written of stories collected in Ficciones and El Aleph, and he would not publish another story for next sixteen years. Thus, Menard, autor del Quijote and fin were, respectively, first and last in range of stories that Borges published in 1940s and early 1950s, but even though re-writing of a canonical book is a feature two stories have in common, significance of this re-writing is considerably different in later story, and cannot be properly understood unless fin is seen in context of Borges's opposition to regime of Juan Domingo Peron. Borges's choice of El gaucho Martin Fierro as principal intertext for fin was deeply political, for this famous gauchesque poem had been a bone of contention over question of national identity since early twentieth century. …