Edwin Williamson

BORGES AGAINST PERON: A CONTEXTUAL

APPROACH TO "EL EIN"

( ( T 7 1 fin" is possibly the least studied of all the stories in Borges's Ficcio-
J-jnes. It is at first sight a very slight tale in which Borges chose to alter
the ending of Jose Hernandez's classic poem El gaucho Martin Fierro (1872;
1879). Its kinship with "Pierre 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 "El fin" Borges re-writes the ending of the Martin Fierro. Both stories
call into question the unique authority of a literary classic and insinuate that
even the most revered of authors may in the end be not much different from
any other author, thereby exemplifying one of Borges's favourite themes, the
arbitrary or illusory nature of personal identity. The questioning of an author's
status as the sole originator of meaning also entails a severing of the text from
its context, for if the author is no longer a privileged authority, then the con-
text in which the work was written cannot be privileged either.
These ideas were a feature of Borges's writing well before Roland Barthes
declared the "death of the author,"' but, even so, Borges also held to a be-
lief 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."^ These rather conflicting positions
sprang from an ever-present tension that is evident at the 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."^ 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 the need to capture the self fully in his writing; in

1. See Roland Barthes, "La mort de I'auteur" [1968], (Euvres completes, vol. II, 1966-
1973 (Seuil: Paris, 1994), 491-495.
2. His earliest statement of this idea was in "Profesion de fe literaria," (1926):
"Toda literatura es autobiografica, finalmente. Todo es poetico en cuanto nos con-
fiesa un destino." See El tamano de mi esperanza, Seix Barral: Buenos Aires, 1993,
128. The quotation is from an interview with Ronald Christ in Faris Review 40
(1967), 155.
3. This idea was first discussed by Borges in an early essay, "La naderia de la person-
alidad," first published on August 1, 1922 in ?roa and later in Inquisiciones [1925],
Seix Barral: Buenos Aires, 1994, 93-104.

The Romanic Review Volume 98 Numbers 2-3 © The Trustees of Columbia University
276 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

middle age, his sense ofthe nuUity 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 the author.'' It is the work
of the middle period, especially Ficciones, El Aleph and Otras inquisiciones,
that has overwhelmingly attracted the attention of critics, but this period,
I believe, needs to be related to the 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 the
philosophical and theoretical dimensions of his writing.^
Borges himself contributed to the general blurring of context because of his
habit of adding stories, essays and poems to later editions of already published
collections. "El fin" is a case in point: it is now an integral component of Fic-
ciones, which first came out in 1944, but the story was actually published for
the first time in the 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 "El fin" chronologically, we can begin to appreciate its spe-
cial place in Borges's oeuvre: it was the very last to be written of the stories
collected in Ficciones and El Aleph, and he would not publish another story
for the next sixteen years. Thus, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" and
"El fin" were, respectively, the first and last in the range of stories that Borges
published in the 1940s and early 1950s, but even though the re-writing of a
canonical book is a feature the two stories have in common, the significance
of this re-writing is considerably different in the later story, and cannot be
properly understood unless "El fin" is seen in the context of Borges's opposi-
tion to the regime of Juan Domingo Peron.
Borges's choice of El gaucho Martin Fierro as the principal intertext for
"El fin" was deeply political, for this famous gauchesque poem had been a bone
of contention over the question of national identity since the early twentieth
century. At that time Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world
but economic success had attracted millions of immigrants and this huge in-
flux of foreigners raised anxieties about the national identity among the ruling
class, who feared that the traditional way of life of the criollos—Argentines of
Spanish descent—might be lost in the process of economic development. These

4. My biography, Borges: A Life, Viking: New York and London, 2004, includes a
critical study of the development of Borges's writing from his earliest known texts
until the last.
5. Two notable books that contextualize a selection of stories are: Daniel Balderston,
Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) and Arturo Echavarria, El arte de la jar-
dineria china en Borges y otros estudios, (IberoamericanaA'ervuert: Madrid/ Frankfurt,
2006).
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO "EL FIN" 277

anxieties were addressed in 1913 by Argentina's most famous poet, Leopoldo

Lugones, in a series of lectures delivered at the Teatro Odeon in Buenos Aires
which was attended by the political establishment, including the President of
the Republic and several cabinet ministers. Lugones's subject was the signifi-
cance of the gaucho in Argentine history. The gauchos, according to Lugones,
had provided the foundation of the national character; they had completed the
conquest of the pampas, which the Spanish conquistadors had been unable to
achieve, and had later formed the backbone of the patriot armies in the wars
of independence against Spain. Lugones then asserted that the long narrative
poem El gaucho Martin Fierro by Jose Hernandez should be regarded as
the national epic of Argentina because it expressed the essential spirit and
character of the people of the River Plate as embodied in the gaucho. These
Odeon lectures were incorporated in a book entitled El payador which was
published in 1916, the year of the centenary of Argentine Independence. The
prologue succinctly defines Lugones's ideological project: "El objeto de este
libro, es, pues, definir [. . .] la poesia epica, demostrar que nuestro Martin Fi-
erro pertenece a ella, estudiarla como tal, determinar simultaneamente, por la
naturaleza de sus elementos, la formacion de la raza, y con ello formular, por
ultimo, el secreto de su destino."* Lugones's interpretation of Martin Fierro
was to influence Argentine nationalism for many decades to come, giving it a
distinctly right-wing bent, for his insistence on the cultural supremacy of the
criollos over the immigrants was inherently reactionary, and it is no surprise
that by the 1920s he had espoused fascism and was advocating a theory of
Argentina in which the criollos were accorded a pre-eminent position which
would be guaranteed, if necessary, by military force.
In that same decade, however, there emerged a new type of cultural na-
tionalism which offered a direct challenge to Lugones's reactionary views.
It was conceived and championed by a young avant-garde poet called Jorge
Luis Borges, who in a series of essays later collected in a book entitled
El tamano de mi esperanza (1926), envisaged a national culture drawing not
on a nostalgic view of the gaucho and the pampas but on Buenos Aires, and
specifically on the city's peripheral barrios, popularly known as the orillas,
the "shores" of the great metropolis, where ordinary criollos lived cheek by
jowl with poor immigrants.'' The liminality of the orillas, straddling as they
did the pampas and the city proper, acquired a powerful symbolic meaning for
Borges: they represented a continuity between the past and the present, and
since they mediated the native and the foreign, he saw them as fostering the
creation of a new national identity. He even conceived of a project to write an
epic of urban life, based on the hybrid popular culture of Buenos Aires, whose

6. Leopoldo Lugones, El payador [1916], (Buenos Aires: Centurion, 1961) 16.

7. For a detailed discussion of Borges's criollismo in the 1920s, see Borges: A Life,
chapters 8-11.
278 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

representative hero would be the compadrito, a delinquent of the orillas who

had gained a reputation as a knife-fighter and whom Borges regarded as an
heir to the gaucho of the pampas.
The clearest expression of this optimistic vision of Argentina can be found
in a speech Borges made to a gathering of young criollo nationalists in 1928,
in which he urged them to look to the future instead of dwelling on the past:

Porque en esta casa de America, amigos mios, los hombres de las

naciones del mundo se han conjurado para desaparecer en el hom-
bre nuevo, que no es ninguno de nosotros aun y que predecimos
argentino, para irnos acercando asi a la esperanza. [. . .] El criollo
es uno de los conjurados. El criollo que formo la entera nacion, ha
preferido ser uno de muchos, ahora.'

By the late 1920s, then, there were two forms of cultural nationalism available to
Argentine intellectuals. On the one hand, there was Lugones's backward-looking
ideal of ethnic purity according to which the criollo was the only true representa-
tive of the nation. On the other, there was Borges's democratic criollismo seeking
to forge a synthesis of the rural and the urban, the criollo and the immigrant.
Borges was to abandon his version of criollismo by the early 1930s, owing
to certain personal and ideological difficulties which there is not enough space
to elucidate here.' However, in the course of that decade, the reactionary
nationalism advocated by Leopoldo Lugones would provide the basic cul-
tural ideology of Argentine nacionalismo.^" Borges, however, continued to
oppose the nacionalistas, both of the fascist and Catholic sort. Then in 1943,
a military junta which was strongly nacionalista in ideology, seized power
in a coup d'etat, and soon revealed its totalitarian inclinations by banning
political parties, dismissing the leaders of the labour unions, attacking Jewish
interests, and by refusing to join the Allies in the war against Nazi Germany.
In the cultural field the military junta proclaimed its mission to preserve
"the sacred interests of the nation" and to resist any attempts to subvert the
foundations of the "national identity."'' On the 18 June 1943, a decree was
issued condemning artists and intellectuals who showed insufficient interest

8. "Pagina relativa a Figari," Criterio 30, September 27, 1928. Reprinted in Jorge
Luis Borges: textos recobrados, 1919-1929, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1997) 362.
9. See Borges: A Life, chapters 9-18.
10. In order to avoid confusion with Borges's brand of cultural nationalism or crio-
llismo, I will use the terms nacionalismo and nacionalista to refer to the right-wing
form of Argentine nationalism which emerged as a considerable political force at the
end of the 1920s, and grew in militancy and influence in the course of the 1930s,
eventually becoming a major ingredient in the ideology of Peronism.
11. David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and
Its Impact, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 135.
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO " E L FIN" 279

in historical themes, by which was meant Argentine history as interpreted by

the nacionalistas.
Three years later, one of the leaders of the 1943 coup, Juan Domingo Peron,
emerged as a powerful caudillo, and in February 1946 he was elected president
of the republic. A few montbs after Peron's victory, Borges learned that he was
to be promoted from his modest job as an assistant in a municipal library to
a post as an inspector of poultry in the public markets.'^ Despite his lowly
position in the library service, he was at this time one of the most prominent
intellectuals in Argentina and a known public enemy of the nacionalistas, so
he took this "promotion" to be a punishment by the new administration for
his public opposition to the military junta and decided to resign his post at
the library. As a demonstration of their support for Borges, his friends in the
Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE) organized a dinner in his honour,
for which Borges wrote a speech attacking the Peronist regime in the most
uncompromising terms:

Las dictaduras fomentan la opresion, las dictaduras fomentan el

servilismo, las dictaduras fomentan la crueldad; mas abominable
es el hecho de que fomentan la idiotez. Botones que balbucean
imperativos, efigies de caudillos, vivas y mueras prefijados, muros
exornados de nombres, ceremonias unanimes, la mera discip-
lina usurpando el lugar de la lucidez [. . .] Combatir esas tristes
monotonias es uno de los mucbos deberes del escritor. ijHabre de
recordar a los lectores del Martin Fierro y de Don Segundo que el
individualismo es una vieja virtud argentina?"

It may be surprising, given his reputation nowadays as an ivory-tower intel-

lectual, to find Borges expressing himself in such strong terms on political
issues, even referring to the "duty" of a writer to combat dictatorsbip, for all
the world as if he were advocating litterature engagee. But extreme circum-
stances called for radical responses and Borges feared that Peron would turn
Argentina into a fascist-style corporate state.
That same month he published an essay in Sur called "Nuestro pobre in-
dividualismo" in which he argued that Argentines did not identify with the

12. See Borges's own account in "An Autobiographical Essay," in The Aleph and
Other Stories, (New York: Dutton, 1970) 244, and a fuller account in Borges: A
Life, chapter 20, 292-296.
13. Borges's speech was later published with the title "Palabras pronunciadas por Jorge
Luis Borges en la comida que le ofrecieron los escritores" in Sur 142, August 1946, and
with the title, "Dele, Dele" in Argentina Libre on August, 15 1946. It was reprinted in
Borges en "Sur," 1931-1980, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1999) 303-304.
280 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

State: "el argentino es un individuo, no un ciudadano."" This anarchic streak

in the national character was confirmed, he believed, by "una noche de la lit-
eratura argentina"—the scene in El gaucho Martin Fierro in which the police
sergeant Cruz is so impressed with Fierro's bravery that he decides to join the
outlaw and fight against his own men. According to Borges, this illustrated
the fact that it is the individual who fights against the forces of the State—"el
hombre que pelea contra la partida"—wbom Argentines tend to regard as
a hero, as in the case of famous "gauchos malos" like Martin Eierro, Juan
Moreira and flormiga Negra. He drew a political lesson against the naciona-
listas from these examples:

El mas urgente de los problemas de nuestra epoca (ya denunciada

con profetica lucidez por el casi olvidado Spencer) es la gradual
intromision del Estado en los actos del individuo; en la lucha contra
ese mal, cuyos nombres son comunismo y nazismo, el individual-
ismo argentino, acaso inutil o perjudicial hasta ahora, encontraria
su justificacion y deberes.'^

Why did Borges allude to the Martin Fierro in botb his SADE speech and
in "Nuestro pobre individualismo"? Having long abandoned the project of
writing an epic of Buenos Aires with the compadrito of the orillas as its hero,
he was to re-interpret the emblematic significance of the gaucho in order to
play the nacionalistas at their own game—whereas Lugones had seen Martin
Eierro, rather portentously, as embodying "el alma de la raza," Borges would
now cbaracterize him as a natural anarchist and the unwitting champion of
individual liberty against tbe State.
However, Borges at tbis juncture was experiencing severe difficulties in his
personal life and largely withdrew from his role as a public intellectual until
1950, when he was urged by friends to stand for the presidency of the SADE.'^
The years between 1946 and 1950 had proved a stressful time in Argentina:
the Peronist regime had gone a long way towards transforming the country
into a one-party state under the rule of a supreme leader—government control
had been extended over professional bodies and employers' organization, and
universities and scbools purged of known opponents; in 1949 a new constitu-
tion had been introduced granting extensive powers to the state and permit-
ting Peron, in effect, to rule for life. Borges decided to accept nomination
for the presidency of the SADE because, in his view, the society of Argentine
writers had become "one of the few strongholds against the dictatorship."^''

14. "Nuestro pobre individualismo," Sur 141, July 1946, and reprinted in Otras
inquisiciones, Ohras completas II, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1996) 36.
15. Ibid., 37.
16. For an account of these personal difficulties, see Borges: A Life, chapters 19-21.
17. "An Autobiographical Essay," 248.
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO "EL FIN" 281

All the same, he regarded the prospect with trepidation. In a letter to the art-
ist Attilio Rossi, he wrote that he did not feel cut out for such a public role,
since be detested any kind of authority and felt out of place at meetings and
social gatherings, but he felt he owed it to the SADE for having awarded Fic-
ciones a prize in 1945.'* Argentina was living through a time of barbarism,
he added, in which it was obligatory to praise Hitler and Mussolini, a time of
ignorance that was detrimental to the patria. As Borges resumed his role as a
public intellectual in 1950, his opposition to Peron would be accompanied by
more intimate reflections on the relations between art and power which were
to culminate in "El fin."
Borges was clearly fascinated by political power. In "La muralla y los li-
bros," an article he published in La Nacion on 22 October 1950 sbortly after
becoming president of tbe SADE, he marvelled at the strange ambition of tbe
Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who sought to keep out foreign influences by build-
ing the Great Wall of China and who attempted to abolish the past by ordering
the destruction of all books written before bim. To some extent, the essay may
be taken as an indirect attack on the xenophobic cultural policy of the Per-
onists at a time when Peron was trying to create a corporate state in Argentina
based on a certain interpretation of the past and a distrust of foreign influ-
ences on the country. But, curiously, the emperor's immense power led Borges
to meditate on aesthetics: "Que las dos vastas operaciones [. . .] procedieran
de una persona y fueran de algiin modo sus atributos, inexplicablemente me
satisfizo y, a la vez, me inquieto.'"' Tbe purpose of tbe essay was, in fact, to
"indagar las razones de esa emocion."
Borges rehearsed a number of "conjectures" as to the significance of the
Chinese emperor's dual endeavour. He wondered whether there might have
been "un proposito magico": Shih Huang Ti, it is said, forbade the mention of
death and sought the elixir of immortality, secluding himself in a palace with as
many rooms as there are days in the year—"estos datos sugieren que la muralla
en el espacio y el incendio en el tiempo fueron barreras magicas destinadas a
detener la muerte. "^° In tbe end, he could not arrive at a satisfactory explana-
tion of the "emocion" that Shih Huang Ti's dual enterprise aroused in him.
Perhaps it was the form itself of the emperor's ambition and not its meaning
tbat bad moved him: "Es verosimil que la idea nos toque de por si, fuera de las
conjeturas que permite. (Su virtud puede estar en la oposicion de construir y
destruir, en enorme escala.)"^' He then suggested that "Todas las formas tienen
su virtud en si mismas y no en un 'contenido' conjetural" (Borges's emphasis);

18. The letter was written in 1950 but is otherwise undated.

19. "La muralla y los libros," Otras inquisiciones in Ohras completas II, (Buenos
Aires: Emece, 1996) 11-13.
20. Ibid., 11-12.
21. Ibid., 12.
282 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

and implied that, by creating this form, the emperor might have been unwit-
tingly emulating tbe artist, for, as Walter Pater had observed, "todas las artes
aspiran a la condicion de la musica, que no es otra cosa que forma." By way
of conclusion, he attempted a general definition of art:

La musica, los estados de felicidad, la mitologia, las caras traba-

jadas por el tiempo, ciertos crepusculos y ciertos lugares, quieren
decirnos algo, o algo dijeron que no hubieramos debido perder, o
estan por decir algo; esta inminencia de una revelacion, que no se
produce, es, quiza, el hecho estetico.•^•^

The man of power, Borges would seem to have been suggesting, pursues the
same end as the artist—to find "barreras magicas destinadas a detener la
muerte," but art, in this respect, would be superior to political power inas-
much as it offers the promise of a "revelation" of some form or forms which
may lie beyond the reach of time. Even so, Borges could not overcome his
doubts about this view of art—the "hecho estetico" may offer a promise of
transcendence but it still remains "una revelacion, que no se produce."
As we can already observe in "La muralla y los libros," Borges's reflections on
power would lead him to explore the meaning of art, but as the political situation
grew more threatening, these reflections became more urgent and intense. In the
following months, the political temperature would rise sharply as the Peronist
movement mobilized its supporters to secure a victory for their leader at the
forthcoming presidential elections through strident propaganda in the media,
and through rallies and parades. But when it was revealed that Eva Peron was
terminally ill with cancer, the cult of "Santa Evita" reached a pitch of hysteri-
cal devotion. It was in this feverish atmosphere that Peron was re-elected to the
presidency by a landslide on November 11,1951, beating Ricardo Balbin ofthe
Radical party, by a factor of two to one, and reducing the presence of the opposi-
tion parties in Congress to a mere fourteen deputies. By the end of 1951, there-
fore, very little seemed to stand in the way of Peron's ambition to turn Argentina
into a state-controlled "Comunidad Organizada" under a supreme leader.
Borges's public response to Peron's great victory was an explicit attack on
the cultural pretensions ofthe regime. On 17 December 1951, barely a month
after the election, he gave a lecture at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superi-
ores entitled "El escritor argentino y la tradicion," in which he expressed
scepticism about the notion that the Argentine tradition lay in the genre of
gauchesque poetry.^^ This genre was as artificial as any other, since it had

22. Ibid., 13.

23. "El escritor argentino y la tradicion" was first published in Sur 232, January-
Eebruary, 1955, and later incorporated in the 1957 edition of Discusion. See Ohras
completas I, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1996) 267-274.
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO "EL FIN" 283

been created by educated urban writers and was quite different in language
and theme from the poetry created by genuine gaucbos. While conceding that
El gaucho Martin Fierro was one of the most enduring works created by the
criollos, he believed that it was not the Bible or canonical book of the Argen-
tines. He dismissed the idea that hterature must define itself in terms of its
national traits. The cult of local colour, in his view, was a recent European cult
which the nacionalistas ought to reject as foreign. The Argentine tradition, he
argued, was all of Western culture, and the Argentines had as much right to
that tradition as any of the inhabitants of the Western hemisphere.
As we have seen, Borges's new strategy against the nacionalistas was to
re-define the cultural significance of the gaucho in order to subvert Lugones's
interpretation of tbe Martin Fierro as the epic of the Argentines, and it was at
around this time that he began to work on a sbort critical study of Hernan-
dez's poem. He would point out in tbe prologue that in his youth it was read
for pleasure whereas now that it had become a classic, "ese calificativo se
oye como sinonimo de tedio."^'* Since the elevation of the poem to canoni-
cal status had actually put people off it, he claimed that his aim was simply
to "promover la lectura del Martin Fierro." In concise chapters he gave an
evaluation of the author and his work, highlighting those elements which he
regarded as especially effective in purely literary terms. Einally, after yet again
rejecting Lugones's definition of the work as an epic, he characterized it as a
novel, despite its having been written in verse: the eponymous protagonist was
too complex and multi-faceted to be the exemplary hero of an epic, he was
more like a novelistic character—he was a murderer, a brawler and a drunk,
but at the same time possessed a certain innocence and lived his life by an
admirable ethic of courage. And not only did he point out the generic inde-
terminacy of the Martin Fierro, he also drew attention to the open-endedness
of the narrative, citing the scene right at the very end of the poem in which
Eierro engages in a payada—a contest of song and guitar—with El Moreno,
the brother of a black gaucho he had killed in Part One. Eierro displays no
remorse for that murder and goes so far as to insult the memory of the dead
man. A knife-fight is about to take place but bystanders prevent it, so Eierro
rides off with his sons. Borges then observed: "Podemos imaginar una pelea
mas alia del poema, en la que el moreno venga la muerte de su hermano."^^
He concluded by declaring that Hernandez's poem had stood the test of time
largely because Martin Eierro was so convincing as a cbaracter: "Expresar
bombres que las futuras generaciones no querran olvidar es uno de los fines

24. First published as El "Martin Fierro," (Buenos Aires: Columba, 1953). See also
Ohras completas en colahoracion, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1991) 513-565.1 quote from
the Edicion Pocket, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1979) 8.
25. Ibid., 69.
284 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

del arte; Jose Hernandez lo ha logrado con plenitud."^^ As in "La muralla y

los libros," art is deemed to possess a certain transcendent value—one of the
ends of literature is the creation of individual characters who will endure in
the memory of future generations.
Borges would criticize the Peronist government in the public lectures he
gave in those years but these efforts hardly impinged on Argentine political
life, which in any case would assume a particularly virulent character as Eva
Peron approached death. Her speeches became increasingly aggressive and
there were rumours that she had secretly armed her supporters in case of a
coup d'etat. In her last speech on May 1,1952 she exhorted the masses to rise
up against the "oligarchy" in the event of any attempt to overthrow Peron.
The prospect of armed insurrections, and possibly of civil war, alarmed and
depressed Borges, but the truth was that throughout the period of Peron's rule
he felt rather powerless on the whole, as he would recall in an interview:

Yo sentia tristeza y de algun modo sentia tambien remordimiento,

porque pensaba que el becho de no hacer nada o de hacer muy
poco . . . jque podia hacer yo?: mencionarlo [i.e. Peron] en las
conferencias que yo daba, siempre con alguna burla (yo no podia
hacer otra cosa, yo no me sentia capaz de hacer otra )^^

His sense of helplessness is vividly evoked in "El puiial," a prose poem about
an old Spanish dagger which once belonged to his father and now lay in a
drawer of his writing-desk. Borges recalls the magnetic pull it exerted on him
as a boy: be fancied it would spring into action at the merest touch, as if it
had a will of its own: "Quiere matar, quiere derramar brusca sangre." The
dagger has been fashioned for a precise purpose—to kill, and in this sense it
is eternal: it is the same dagger that killed a man in Tacuarembo, as well as
"los pufiales que mataron a Cesar." And yet, for some reason, he cannot bring
himself to pick up the dagger; he contemplates it lying among the papers in
his drawer—drafts and letters, the products of the pen—and feels quite use-
less: "A veces me da lastima. Tanta dureza, tanta fe, tan impasible o inocente
soberbia, y los anos pasan, inutiles." A contrast is implied between tbe writer
and the man of action, prompting the question whether the writer might be
able to cross the line from writing to deeds. Or, put another way, could the
pen have the kind of direct impact on reality as the dagger?
Borges's disgust with his abject passivity would precipitate a critical change
in his thinking about writing and the role of the author. In the stories of Fic-
ciones and El Aleph, the figure of the author tended to be portrayed as little

26. Ibid., 82.

27. Fernando Sorrentino, Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges, (Buenos Aires:
Casa Pardo, 1973) 59-60.
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO "EL FIN" 285

more than a cipher, devoid of initiative or invention, for whom writing was
utterly divorced from experience and entailed the mere re-working of pre-
existent texts. The paradigm was Pierre Menard, whose re-writing of the
Quixote was described by Borges as a cynical enterprise of the most rarefied
nihilism: "resolvio adelantarse a la vanidad que aguarda todas las fatigas del
hombre; acometio una empresa complejisima y de antemano fiitil."-^* Yet, after
Peron's rise to power, Borges had publicly committed himself to combat what
he saw as the threat of a dictatorship, and as he actively engaged in the anti-
Peronist cause, trying to make an impact on politics by attacking the cultural
ideology of the regime, his political militancy came into contradiction with his
representation ofthe author in his stories. In a nutshell, would Pierre Menard
have bothered to oppose Peron?
The mounting pressure of events would drive Borges to contemplate a quite
different role for the author, and in the course of 1952 we find him becoming
fascinated by the duel as a literary motif, for the duel, as an extreme affirma-
tion of individual identity against a rival, condensed in a symbolic act tbe
political stance in defence of the freedom of the individual that Borges had ad-
opted against Peron. Indeed, he was even to entertain the notion that a writer,
if necessary, should emulate the anarchic spirit of the gaucho, for his hostility
to the Peronist regime had become so intense by now that he was beginning to
cast it in vividly personal terms, fantasizing about engaging his enemies man-
to-man in a knife-fight. He would give narrative expression to this fantasy in
a story called "El Sur" which he wrote some time in 1952. Juan Dahlmann,
who works at a modest desk job in Buenos Aires, finds himself stranded in a
tavern in the middle of the pampas, and when picked on by a group of ruf-
fians, he is unsure how to react until an old gaucho throws him a dagger. This
old gaucho is surely the embodiment of tbat recalcitrant individualism which
Borges in his anti-Peronist speech at the SADE dinner in 1946 claimed was an
old Argentine trait and the basis on which he was attacking the dictatorship.
Dahlmann takes up the dagger and prepares to confront the bullies, but the
story ends there, so the outcome of the duel is uncertain—will Dahlmann have
the courage or skill to defeat his persecutors? In any case, there are doubts too
about tbe reality of the duel itself, since Dahlmann may well have dreamt it
up while lying in hospital fighting for his life after an injury to his head, such
as the one Borges himself had sustained in an accident in 1938.
Yet while Borges may have been assailed by doubts about bis fitness to
act, the realities of politics were inescapable, given his position as president
of the SADE. When Eva Peron died on 26 July 1952, he received a visit from
two policemen, who asked him to put up a portrait of Peron and another
of Evita on the walls of the premises of the SADE so as to comply with the
government's decree that all Argentine organizations show an appropriate

28. "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote," Ficciones, in Ohras completas I, 450.
286 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

mark of respect. Borges refused, and for several weeks afterwards he was put
under surveillance by the authorities: a policeman sat in on his lectures, taking
notes, and he noticed that he was being followed by a detective. This experi-
ence may have been the stimulus for another story, called "El desafi'o," which
described a strangely masochistic determination to take up the dagger and
confront a threat from a more powerful opponent. An aging cuchillero called
Suarez (this was one of the surnames in Borges's mother's family), receives a
letter challenging him to a duel in a town in the province of Santa Fe but he
declines the invitation because he has to care for his aged mother (another au-
tobiographical allusion). Suarez's challenger nevertheless seeks him out on his
home ground, and a duel ensues. Doubting his ability to defeat his opponent,
Suarez allows himself to be cut on the left forearm and then, placing his boot
over it on tbe ground, wrenches off the whole of his left hand. Impelled by
the excruciating pain of this self-amputation, Suarez makes a desperate lunge
at his opponent and delivers the fatal thrust.
After the death of Eva Peron, the regime entered a crisis: the economic
situation was getting steadily worse and there was evidence of dissension
and corruption in the ruling circles, but since "Santa Evita" was no longer
available to distract the masses from these troubles, the government intensi-
fied its efforts to clamp down on an opposition that was becoming bolder as
the crisis grew deeper. In September 1952 the Peronist government forced the
SADE to close down; the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, one of the few
academic establisbments that had not been purged, and where Borges also
lectured, was forced to close too. On April 15, 1953, bombs were exploded
at a political rally in an attempt to assassinate Peron, and several people were
killed or injured. Peronist militants responded by going on tbe rampage in
Buenos Aires, setting fire to the headquarters of opposition parties and other
buildings, including the Jockey Club, the haunt of the upper classes. It was
against this background tbat Borges would make a desperate attempt to influ-
ence tbe course of events tbrougb his writing. We have seen how during 1952
he had become fascinated with the duel as a literary motif—in "El punal,"
Borges cannot bring bimself to pick up the dagger; in "El Sur," Dahlmann does
pick it up but the outcome of the duel is uncertain; in "El desafio," Suarez
wins the duel but at the cost of inflicting terrible damage on bimself.^' And

29. The fact that these three texts are contemporaneous and form a trilogy about dag-
gers and duels has been totally obscured by the vagaries of their incorporation into
Borges's ceuvre. "El punal" was not published until 1954 (see footnote 30 below), and
in 1964 was included in the collection of poems. El otro, el mismo; "El Sur" was first
published in La Nacion on February 8, 1953 and later added to the 1956 edition of
Ficciones; "El desafio," was first published in La Nacion on December 28, 1952 but
was added to the 1974 edition of Evaristo Carriego, a book first published in 1930.
I believe this example of the chronological confusion that often surrounds the publica-
tion of Borges's work shows that re-contextualization of his writing can offer valuable
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO " E L FIN" 287

I believe it was some time in 1953 (although the precise date is unknown)
that he decided to cross the hne between writing and action and make a stand
against Peron by coming as close as it was possible for a writer to act out the
duel that he had been fantasizing about in his stories: he took "El pufial" and
offered it for publication in La Nacion. It was turned down by the literary
editor, of course, for how could a national newspaper risk publishing a text by
Borges, a notorious enemy of Peron, that invoked "los pufiales que mataron
a Cesar," and portrayed a magic dagger that "quiere matar, quiere derramar
brusca sangre" ?^°
The rejection of Borges's provocative text by La Nacion demonstrated how
ineffectual had been bis efforts to make a direct impact on tbe political reality
of Argentina. Nevertheless, after his years of militant opposition to Peron,
he would not resign himself again to the extreme nihilism of an author-figure
like Pierre Menard, for if the proposition that one man was interchangeable
with any other was true, he would have to concede that he might himself
be interchangeable with Peron, and this, I believe, was unthinkable as far as
Borges was concerned. He would therefore seek to resolve the contradiction
between the very assertive stance in favour of the rights of the individual that
he had adopted as a public intellectual (one of the "duties" of the writer, he
had declared, was to combat dictatorsbip), and the theme of "the nothing-
ness of personality" that he had been cultivating in the stories of Ficciones
and El Aleph. Erom this point on, we find Borges re-assessing his ideas about
tbe nature of writing and attempting to re-invest tbe author with a degree of
creative autonomy and even a measure of authority over the reader.
Certain elements of this revaluation of artistic creation already existed in
"La muralla y los libros," published some three years earlier. Borges's medi-
tation on the formidable power of tbe Chinese emperor who built the Creat
Wall and burnt all tbe books had led him to the idea that the fundamental as-
piration of the emperor was to find "barreras magicas destinadas a detener la
muerte." In this respect, the emperor was no different from the artist—indeed,
his dual enterprise had produced an aesthetic response in Borges himself. Yet,
in so far as there was in art a certain openness to transcendence—the "hecho
estetico," according to Borges, was "la inminencia de una revelacion"—then
the artist might prove to be superior to tbe emperor in finding a "magic"
defence against the power of death.

insights into the development of his thinking and literary practice, as well as providing
a basis for establishing a dialectical relationship between writing and experience, as I
hope to have demonstrated in Borges: A Life.
30. Emir Rodriguez Monegal mentioned this incident in Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary
Biography, (New York: Dutton, 1978) 427—428, and observed that the explicit content
of this poem made it particularly dangerous for La Nacion to publish it. Rodriguez
Monegal himself published it on June 25, 1954, in the Uruguayan magazine Marcha,
of which he was the literary editor at the time.
288 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

In the latter part of 1953 Borges would explore further the transcendent
potentialities of art as a means of justifying the writer in relation to a politician
like Peron. On 20 September 1953 he published an essay in La Nacion called
"Dialogos del asceta y del rey" in which he compared the man of ideas with
the man of power: "Un rey es una plenitud, un asceta es nada, o quiere ser
nada; a la gente le gusta imaginar el dialogo de esos dos arquetipos."^' He then
described six versions of this "infinito dialogo": two from Ancient Greece, one
from India, two from China and,finally,one from Norse mythology. In each
case, a powerful king confronts an "ascete," usually a monk or a philosopber,
whose very indifference to power constitutes a challenge: "Bajo la superficie
trivial late la obscura contraposicion de los simbolos y la magia de que el eero,
el asceta, pueda igualar o superar de algiin modo al infinito rey." The "magic"
which gives the ascete the power to equal or overcome the "infinite king" is
the idea that both self and world are transient and illusory: "Los hechos y los
seres son momentaneos y ni siquiera podemos afirmar si son o no son." This
idea is, of course, similar to the Borgesian theme of the illusoriness of identity—
one man being equivalent to any man—but in "Dialogos del asceta y del rey"
it is endowed with a mystical quality, for the superiority of the ascete over the
king derives from some mysterious power which affords a deeper insight into
the nature of the universe than that to which the king can attain.
On October 11,1953, just three weeks after "Dialogos del asceta y del rey"
appeared in La Nacion, Borges published "El fin" in the same newspaper, a
story in which he would re-write the ending of the Martin Fierro in order to
provide it with the knife-duel which he thought was implied by the way Jose
Hernandez had brougbt his narrative to a close: "Podemos imaginar una pelea
mas alia del poema, en la que el moreno venga la muerte de su hermano."
The subtext of this story was, of course, political—"El fin" would be tbe cul-
mination of his long argument with Lugones and the nacionalistas over the
question of national identity as represented by tbe Martin Fierro, but it would
also be an attempt to justify thefigureof the author by developing the ideas he
had been exploring both in "La muralla y los libros" and "Dialogos del asceta
y del rey." Borges's aim in this story was therefore two-fold: first, he would
use the theme of the illusoriness of identity to subvert the nacionalistas' belief
that the gaucho embodied tbe essence of tbe Argentine people, but he would
also attempt the more difficult feat of endowing this theme with a positive,
transcendent significance in order to imbue it with whatever "magic" he, a
powerless writer, an "ascete," might be able to draw upon in order to counter
a seemingly "infinite king" Jike Peron.
"El fin" takes place in the tavern in the middle of the pampas where Mar-
tin Eierro and El Moreno held the payada at the end of Part Two of Jose

31. "Dialogos del asceta y del rey," in Jorge Luis Borges: textos recohrados, 1931-
1955, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1997) 302.
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO " E L FIN" 289

Hernandez's poem, and where we now find El Moreno playing his guitar as
he waits for Eierro to turn up once more so that they can finish the contest
between them with knives, in proper gaucho fashion.^^ Eierro duly arrives at
the tavern, the two men engage in their knife-duel and Eierro is killed. Borges
has ostensibly tried to bring the Martin Fierro to an end in the most definitive
way possible—by killing off the protagonist, but the last words of the story
are: "Cumplida su tarea de justiciero, ahora era nadie. Mejor dicho, era el
otro: no tenia destino sobre la tierra y habia matado a un hombre."^^ Hav-
ing killed Eierro, El Moreno has inherited the condition of his victim: he is
now a murderer and an outlaw, and he has nowhere to go; to all intents and
purposes, therefore, he has assumed his rival's identity—"era el otro." This
ending amounts to an attack on Lugones's interpretation of Martin Fierro as
an epic: in the first place, it brings the narrative to a climax by having Eierro
display his delinquent tendencies in fighting a duel (especially after having
advised his sons ro respecr the law and never shed blood), hardly the conduct
of an exemplary hero; secondly, it robs Eierro of his uniqueness by making
El Moreno assume, in effect, his victim's identity; and thirdly, it renders Jose
Hernandez's poem inherently unresolvable because its hero's fate will simply
be transferred to his rival who in turn will suffer a similar fate, leaving the
narrative itself lacking a final purpose. By blurring the identities of Eierro
and El Moreno, Borges was suggesting that it was pointless to see in Eierro
a quintessential symbol of "el alma de la raza," much less "el secreto de su
destino," as Lugones had proposed, since national identity was as uncertain
and fleeting as personal identity.
Borges thus contrived an ending to the Martin Fierro which exemplified his
familiar motif—one man is equivalent to any man. The nullity of personal
identity is illustrated in a different manner by a third character called Re-
cabarren who, unlike Martin Eierro and El Moreno, is wholly an invention
of Borges's. The fact that Recabarren was paralysed and losr his power of
speech the very day after the Eierros' payada with El Moreno may be taken to
represent the vanity of wishing to prove oneself through action, as in a duel, a

32. El gaucho Martin Fierro was published in two parts: Part I (1872) tells the story
of an innocent gaucho who is press-ganged into the army and then cruelly exploited
by his superiors. He deserts and, while on the run, becomes a "gaucho malo," murder-
ing a black gaucho in a bar-room brawl, amongst other crimes. He eventually seeks
refuge with the Indians of the pampas. In Part Two (1879) Fierro returns to Argentine
society but finds it hard to fit in. The narrative focus shifts to several new characters,
including Fierro's sons, who recount their experiences at length, hut the story closes
when El Moreno, the brother of the black gaucho killed in Part I, challenges Fierro to
a payada, which Fierro wins. However, since he has nowhere to go, Fierro rides off
with his sons, a homeless outlaw once more.
33. See Ficciones in Obras completas I, 518-520 (520). Subsequent page-references will
be included in the main text.
290 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

theme encapsulated in the bilingual pun latent in his name: "Recabar" means
"to ask for, to demand, to insist on," but in Recabarren, the word "recabar"
overlaps with the English word "barren," as if to signal that all our efforts to
master our destiny or discover a final purpose to our lives are futile.
A number of critics have suggested that Recabarren could be regarded as a
symbol of an author who invents the duel between Eierro and El Moreno. The
text offers support for this idea, for when Recabarren looks out of the window
of his room he sees a mere speck on the horizon which gradually turns into
the figure of a horseman: "La llanura, bajo el ultimo sol, era casi abstracta,
como vista en un suefio. Un punto se agito en el horizonte y crecio hasta ser
un jinete, que venia, o pareci'a venir, a la casa." (p. 518) It could well be that
the return of Martin Eierro is just a figment of Recabarren's imagination.
However, Recabarren-as-author has tended to be portrayed in very negative
terms: for John Sturrock, he is a "maker of fictions" who has "contradicted
the facts of Hernandez's poem and offended against its morality," indeed, he
is guilty of literary murder "because he has, in his high-handed way, killed
another writer's hero"; George R. McMurry sees "a possible identity" with
Borges himself in so far as Recabarren is a "detached creator of fictions"
who will trap Hernandez's hero in an "eternal labyrinth of fiction"; while for
Marta Spagnuolo he is "una imagen simbolica de un poder maligno que ya
esta guiando la historia a su desenlace tragico."^'' In this light, Recabarrren-
as-author could be regarded as an heir of Pierre Menard, and his "re-writing"
of Martin Fierro as little more than an attempt to invalidate the authority of
an Argentine classic, much as Pierre Menard had sought to "re-write" the
Quixote in order to dethrone Cervantes from his position as the great iconic
author of Hispanic letters.
However, I would argue that the role played by Recabarren is more positive
than that generally ascribed to him by critics. I believe Borges invented him
precisely in order to re-invest the figure of the author with a certain creativ-
ity in contrast to Pierre Menard's vacuous exercise in re-writing. To this end,
Borges used Recabarren to connect "El fin" with two hidden intertexts—"La
muralla y los libros" and "Dialogos del asceta y del rey." To begin with, the
paralysed Recabarren may be powerless to make a direct impact on the physi-
cal world but, paradoxically, he is possessed of a certain power to pluck a
dream out of the featureless void of the pampas. Just before the appearance of
Martin Eierro on the horizon, we are told of Recabarren: "El hombre postrado
quedo solo; su mano izquierda jugo un rato con el cencerro, como si ejerciera

34. John Sturrock, Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977) 42-44; George R. McMurry,/orge Luis Borges, (New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1980) 91; Marta Spagnuolo, "Para dar fin a una discusion sobre
'El fin' de Borges y posible comienzo de otra," Especulo. Revista de Estudios Liter-
arios, 30, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2005) 7. Online: http://www.ucm.
es/info/especulo/numero30/elfin.html.
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO " E L FIN" 291

un poder." (p. 518) Unlike Marta Spagnuolo, I do not believe that this power
is malign because it is described in the text as an epiphany:

Hay una hora de la tarde en que la llanura esta por decir algo;
nunca lo dice o tal vez lo dice infinitamente y no lo entendemos,
o lo entendemos pero es intraducible como una musica . . . Desde
su catre Recabarren vio el fin (p. 520).

There are, moreover, distinct echoes in this passage of Borges's concluding

reflection on the "hecho estetico" in "La muralla y los libros":

La musica, los estados de felicidad, la mitologia, las caras traba-

jadas por el tiempo, ciertos crepusculos y ciertos lugares, quieren
decirnos algo, o algo dijeron que no hubieramos debido perder, o
estan por decir algo; esta inminencia de una revelacion, que no se
produce, es, quiza, el hecho estetico.

Recabarren's witnessing of the duel between Fierro and El Moreno is expressed

in terms that are clearly meant to accord with Borges's definition of an aes-
thetic experience as an imminent revelation. (It also qualifies on three further
counts: it takes place in the evening twilight; in a special place—the pampas;
and it is associated with music.) But "El fin" is more optimistic about the
revelation. In "La muralla y los libros" we have "una revelacion, que no se
produce," but in "El fin" the passage ends by suggesting the possibility of
understanding the revelation: "o lo entendemos pero es intraducible como
una musica." This sense of an advance on Borges's earlier formulation is
strengthened by the statement that—after a strange ellipsis—follows the allu-
sion to music: " . . . Desde su catre Recabarren vio el fin." The use of "vio"
here is telhng, because Borges often employs the verb "ver" to convey a tran-
scendent experience. In the epiphanic vision of the pampas in "La guitarra"
of Fervor de Buenos Aires, or in the invocation of the mystical vision in "El
Aleph," the first-person account is repeatedly punctuated by the verb "vi."^^
The prose poem "Una rosa amarilia" of El hacedor offers the closest parallel:
"Entonces ocurrio la revelacion. Marino vio la rosa, como Adan pudo verla
en el Paraiso" (Borges's own emphasis).^^
Borges set out the process by which Recabarren exercises his power to con-
jure up the final duel in a way that enhances the impression of artistic creation
as analogous to a mystical experience. First, Recabarren is wakened by the

35. "La guitarra" appeared in thefirstedition of Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) but was
omitted by Borges in the edition of Fervor that was included in his Ohra poetica, Emece:
Buenos Aires, 1966, and then in all subsequent editions. For the passage in "El Aleph"
see Ficciones, Ohras completas I, 625-626.
36. See Ohras completas II, 173.
292 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

music of the guitar; he looks out of the window towards the pampas and sees,
or imagines he sees, Martin Fierro approaching the tavern; as the two gauchos
begin to fight, the great plains seem to communicate some ineffable message
that is likened to hearing music, and it is precisely at that point that Recabar-
ren suddenly "sees the end." Music twice intervenes critically in the process:
to initiate it and to clinch the final vision; and in both cases it is associated
with infinity—the infinite labyrinth traced by the sounds of the guitar, and the
infinite plains upon which Recabarren gazes; and each of these allusions to
infinity is followed by an ellipsis, as if to suggest a transition from one plane
of reality to another. Indeed, in neither instance is infinity presented as blank
or empty but rather as being pregnant with some kind of meaningful sound.
In "La muralla y los libros" Borges quoted Walter Pater to the effect that
"todas las artes aspiran a la condicion de la musica, que no es otra cosa
que forma." If music is nothing other than form, then the music played by
El Moreno on his guitar which wakens Recabarren at the very beginning of
the story will possess a form, and indeed, it is described as "una suerte de
pobrisimo laberinto que se enredaba y desataba infinitamente" (518); its
form is a pattern of winding and unwinding, convergence and dispersal, a
basic pattern of alternation that gives shape to the infinite labyrinth of sound.
And yet, could this form, slight though it is, apply to the vision of the duel
that Recabarren may have conjured up as he gazes into the corresponding
infinity of the pampas, an epiphany which is also compared to the experience
of hearing music?
Recabarren "sees the end," we are told, but this end is not a conclusive
end, for just as Borges believed that Hernandez's original ending of the poem
implied a future revenge duel beyond the frame of the poem, so too does
the ending of his own story imply another duel beyond the story, because if
El Moreno, having killed Fierro, "era el otro," then he, too, will eventually be
killed in a revenge duel: perhaps one of Fierro's sons will avenge his father's
murder in the way that El Moreno sought revenge for his brother's murder,
and this sequence could, in principle, be extended to infinity, with a kins-
man of El Moreno's (he has no fewer than eight surviving brothers, we may
deduce from Hernandez's poem) seeking revenge against another descendant
of Martin Fierro's, and so on from one generation to the next in an endless
series. Again, if El Moreno "era el otro," then Fierro's death is not conclusive
either—he lives on, but in and through El Moreno, and when El Moreno's
turn comes to be killed, he too will live on, but in and through his killer,
so individual identity as such is not definitive since it is neither fully extin-
guished nor fully preserved but transmuted through an alternating pattern in
the course of time.
Now this alternating pattern that affects the personal identity of the duel-
lists may apply on a larger scale to time itself. The sequence of duels creates an
alternation between nodes of action and stretches of inaction as time winds up
towards a duel and then unwinds again for another period of waiting until the
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO "EL FIN" 293

next duel, thus forming an intermittent pattern that brings to mind the infinite
winding and unwinding of the music that roused Recabarren from his slumber.
The two gauchos also refer to the payada that took place at the end of Part II
of Hernandez's poem as another kind of duel, which suggests a symmetrical
alternation between knife-duels and guitar-duels. In this way, the progression
implied by the ending of "El fin" may be conceived as a series in which one
duel would follow upon another, knives alternating with guitars, as each of
the contenders was killed in turn and replaced by a successor. One may even
imagine these alternations occurring at regular intervals, for in the brief dia-
logue between Fierro and El Moreno they refer three times to the seven years
that have elapsed since the previous encounter, and given the repetitions and
symmetries that already mark the progression of duels, the emphasis on this
specific time-span indicates a possibility that the encounters might occur every
seven years. These periodic inflexions of time, (especially if they were to occur
at seven-yearly intervals), would produce a beat, a pulse, a rhythm, indeed
a kind of music, playing over the blank infinity of the pampas and bringing
intimations that linear, successive time might not be what it seems.
Time in "El fin" is indeed something of a mystery. Most critics have as-
sumed that the duel between Martin Fierro and El Moreno took place seven
years after the payada in Part II, but Borges's references to chronology are
vague, if not confusing: Fierro apologizes to El Moreno for having made him
wait "una porcion de dias" (519) before turning up to fight the knife-duel,
and the black gaucho replies: "Me estoy acostumbrando a esperar. He espe-
rado siete aiios" (519). However, as they are about to engage in combat.
El Moreno alludes to "aquel otro de hace siete afios, cuando mato a mi her-
mano" (519). So, when did the action of "El fin" actually take place? Was
it seven years after the killing of El Moreno's brother in Part I (i.e. in 1879),
or seven years after the payada at the end of Part II (i.e. in 1886)? Marta
Spagnuolo has made a persuasive attempt to resolve this doubt by arguing
that the knife-duel in "El fin" takes place a few days ("una porcion de dias,"
in Fierro's words) after the payada (i.e. in 1879), when Fierro, who had left
with his sons at the end of Hernandez's poem, returns to the same tavern (i.e.
Recabarren's) in order to fight the duel which was implicit in the ending of
Part 11.^^ Still, the fact remains that virtually all critics of the story have read
the duel as taking place seven years after the payada in Hernandez's Part II,
and it is highly unlikely that a writer as painstaking as Borges would not have
been aware of the probability of such a misreading. I would suggest that even
though he may have scrupulously avoided infringing temporal verisimilitude,
he nevertheless blurred the time-frame of "El fin" so as to induce in the general
reader aflickerof doubt as to the precise chronology of the duel, thus adding
to the sense of mystery that surrounds time in "El fin," for if the duel keeps

37. Marta Spagnuolo, 2-6.

294 EDWIN WILLIAMSON

repeating itself over and over again throughout infinity, dates hardly matter
and it makes no difference whether Fierro was killed in 1879 or in 1886. In
any case, as far as Recabarren is concerned, time is an irrelevance or even an
illusion: we are told that he was "habituado a vivir en el presente, como los
animates" (519). (The use of "habituado" here adds to the impression that
the time-span between the payada and the duel was much longer than "una
porcion de dias.") Thus, the duel takes place on an indeterminate plane of
reality, either inside or outside Recabarren's mind, possibly in a state between
dreaming and waking, but to all intents and purposes, in a moment in time
that seems like an eternal present to Recabarren.
The paralysis that afflicted Recabarren the day after the payada converted
him into the kind of "ascete" that Borges described in "Dialogos del asceta
y del rey," for it cut him off from the world and confined him to a room that
was like a prison cell, with its one barred window giving out onto the im-
mense emptiness of the pampas. By portraying Recabarren as an ascetic figure,
Borges was implicitly re-creating the "infinito dialogo" between the ascete
and the king in the context of his own opposition to Peron. The nature of the
revelation experienced by Recabarren recalls the mystical insight that gave the
ascete the power to equal or overcome the mighty king: "Los hechos y los seres
son momentaneos y ni siquiera podemos afirmar si son o no son." He sees the
duel in which Martin Fierro meets his end, but it transpires that this end is
not an end, and Fierro's death is not a death, because events and persons are
transmuted into other guises (thus, "ni siquiera podemos afirmar si son o no
son"), and the duel itself will recur at intervals in an infinite progression that
modulates into a form of music.
So what, then, was the "magic" that Borges, through the ascetic Recabar-
ren, could set against the power of Peron, the infinite king? It was the abil-
ity of the artist, the author, to create forms that might act as "magic barri-
ers" against death and so achieve the goal that eluded the man of power. In
"El fin" Borges represented this intuition through Recabarren's vision of
Martin Fierro's climactic duel, for if a duel represents a supreme enaction of
the desire to assert identity and clinch a destiny (a metaphysical desire that
Borges would have shared with Peron and the nacionalistas), then the duel in
which Fierro is killed and yet survives in the guise of his killer, would become
eternalized, by dint of its recurrence to infinity, in a kind of Platonic form of
the Duel, enshrining the desire for selfhood as an undying reality that tran-
scends the passage of time. Recabarren's vision penetrates thefleetingappear-
ances of self and world to perceive in the very flow of time a kind of rhythm
or pattern which conveys a sense that time itself may be an illusion and hints
at some ulterior state of being in which the universal aspiration to overcome
death may finally be realized.
We can now appreciate just how different was the significance of Borges's
re-writing of the Martin Fierro from Pierre Menard's attempts to reproduce
the Quixote, for the latter wanted to "kill" Cervantes, as it were, but Borges's
 BORGES AGAINST PER6N: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO " E L FIN" 295

re-writing of Jose Hernandez's poem was a tribute to the power of his prede-
cessor's imagination. As Borges put it in his critical study: "Expresar hombres
que las futuras generaciones no querran olvidar es uno de los fines del arte; Jose
Hernandez lo ha logrado con plenitud." And in "El fin" Borges re-affirmed the
immortality of Martin Fierro by showing that even when he is killed in the duel
implied by the ending of Hernandez's narrative, Fierro does not finally die but
is transformed into a transcendent symbol, not of the "alma de la raza," as the
nacionalistas believed, but of the universal desire to defy time and death. We
have here the seed of an idea that Borges would develop in the coming years—
that an author may succeed in inventing a literary character who will achieve
"immortality" and, paradoxically, save his own creator from oblivion. Inter-
estingly, this idea was developed, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, through
a series of meditations on Cervantes and Don Quixote in what amounted to a
tacit repudiation of Pierre Menard's subversive enterprise.^*
Borges's search for a new understanding of the artistic process that might
rehabilitate the figure of the author would prove, in fact, to be long and dif-
ficult. The first stages can be observed in the poems and texts which he wrote
in the middle to late 1950s and collected in El hacedor (1960). As the title of
that book indicates, one of his major concerns in this period was to explore
the question of the possible redemptive value of writing. This led him to invent
the literary device of impersonating the great authors of Western literature—
Homer, Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare—in order to muse on their respec-
tive destinies and determine whether their finite, mortal selves might have been
redeemed by the literary immortality their works had achieved. Already in
"Arte poetica," one of the most beautiful poems in El hacedor, he expressed
the ends of poetry in terms that capture the sense that I have ascribed to
Recabarren's vision:

Convertir el ultraje de los afios

En una musica, un rumor y un simbolo,
Ver en la muerte el sueiio, en el ocaso
Un triste oro, tal es la poesia
Que es inmortal y pobre. [. . .]
Tambien es como el rfo interminable
Que pasa y queda y es cristal de un mismo
Heraclito inconstante, que es el mismo
Y es otro, como el rio interminable.^^

38. See "Jorge Luis Borges, lector del Quijote: o la exaltacion, muerte y resurreccion
(parcial) del autor," in Antes y despues del Quijote, Actas del Cincuentenario de la
Asociacion de Hispanistas de Gran Bretaiia e Irlanda (Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana,
2006) 129-147.
39. "Arte poetica," El hacedor, in Obras completas II, 221.
296 HDWIN

Lvfii s o , rhe r c x t s of /:/ baccdor w e r e snll gcncTiilly p e s s i m i s t i c a b o u t t h e jios-

sihihr\ ot r c d e n i p r i o n , b u r Horges w o u k i n o t r f s i g n h i n i s c h to t h e n i h i h s t i c
desp.iir r l u r w a s t h e hLilhnark o t his w o r k fVoiTi t h e I 93()s t o t h e e a r l y 195()s:
he w o u l d [H'rst'\cre in his arterTiprs ro r e v a l u e rhe i u i t h o r until in his last y e a r s
he e l a h o r a r e d a tjuasi-iiiystical t h e o r y o t w r i t i n g t h a t a p p e a r e d to o t t e r s o m e
k i n d ot s a l v a t i o n f r o m o b h v i o i i . " "
In tliis e s s a y 1 h a v e t r i e d t o s h o w t h a t , far t r o m h e i n g d i v o r c e d f r o m its
c o n t e x ! , l i o r g e s ' s w r i t i n g wa-, i m p e l l e d .xwd s h a p e d by e x p e r i e n c e . '"IJ t i n "
Itself e m e r g e d from his r e H e c n o n s o n art at a rime of a c u t e political crisis in
ArgeTitma t l i i r m g i^er('»n"s s e c o n d t e r m tit o f h c e . BorgeN's g r o w i n g s e n s e of
p o w e r l e s s n e s s t o affect t h e c o u r s e of politics e v e n t u a l ! ; fctrccLl h i m to r e c o g -
ni/.e t h e l i m i t a t i o n s ly'i t h e a r t i s t in r e l a t i o n t o t h e m a n of power., b u t it w^as t h e
iinyieldnig n a t u r e of his hostility t o Perini t h a t d r o v e h i m t o ^eek a justiHcation
for his lite as a w r i t e r h\' e x j i l o r i n g t h e t r a n s c e n d e n t p o s s i b i l i t i e s of a r t . T h u s a
c o n t e x t n a l a p p r o a c h t o "\\ t i n " s h o w s it t o be a pi^'ota! t e x t in Borges's (vurrc,
for It b r o u g h t t o a n e n d ihe cycle of s t o r i e s t h a t b e g a n w i r h t h e p u h l i c a f i o n
of " P i e r r e M e n a r d . a u t o r del Qmjotc'' \\\ 1 9 3 9 , a n d o p e n e d tlie w a y t o l h e
c o m p l e x v m d i c a t i o t i o t t h e role o f t h e a u t h o r t h a t w o u l d c h a r a c t e r i z e t h e t h i r d
a n d last p e r i o d of his career.

I'lurcrsily of ()xfnrd

40, f or a detailed discussion of this late theory ot Horges's and tlu- context in which n
\\Ms I'lahoiMicii. sec F>i>r'j^v<:: A / ite. chapters .^il-.i i.