Borges' cyclical history. Disjunction and repetition in Argentine politics

Abstract

Borges’s nuisance during the periods when Peronism occupies Argentine politics —from 1943-55 to 1973 and 1983— had an indirect impact on his literary work, that has garnered attention among academic critics since the end of the last dictatorship (Ludmer, Piglia, Sarlo, Panesi, Gamerro, Jarkowski, Kohan, Louis, Balderston). Contrary to the poetics of cosmopolitanism and reticence, Borges’s anti-Peronist stance crystallized into clichés, reinforced by aphorisms repeated in interviews, lectures, prefaces and poems: the dichotomy between Facundo and Martín Fierro, the analogy between Peronism and Rosismo, and his individualistic disdain for democracy. This article conceptualizes the poetic disharmony caused by Argentine politics, as evidenced in forms of disjunction, repetition, and correction that, in Borges’s cultural treatment of the canon, undermine the universality and fusion of opposites that consecrated his literature. In addition to contributing to the systematization of critical discourse over the past four decades, the focus on political enunciation in marginal areas of the work prevents the homogenization and aestheticization of the canon, and offers a non-binary assessment of Borges as both reader and object of reading.