ABSTRACT
During the early 1970s Borges started making controversial political statements in his interviews. He became well known for praising dictators such as Franco, Pinochet, and Viola in Argentina, for showing a lack of faith in democratic processes and for his attacks on the massification of culture. 1 It is then understandable that the perception that the general public had of him was that he was a “fascist” in political matters and an “elitist” in cultural ones. Critics who tried to defend Borges from these accusations often followed two different paths: either they argued that his literary work should not (could not) be explained taking as point of reference his political ideology or they pointed out that Borges wrote several antifascist texts during the 1940s, showing this as proof of Borges's antitotalitarianism. Readers were then sometimes asked not to use politics to interpret Borges's writings or to make a distinction between Borges's political opinions, expressed in his interviews, and his real political position found in the literary texts that he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s. The critic Jaime Alazraki represents the first position very well. For Alazraki, using politics or history to interpret Borges's work is useless since he only deals with philosophical or literary problems: “the typical Borgesian story aims not so much—like conventional fiction—at capturing a ‘slice of life’ as at advancing an argumentum theologicum or philosophicus” (Kabbalah 182; Alazraki's italics). On the other hand, in his article “Borges and Politics,” Rodríguez Monegal differentiates between Borges's political opinions and the political ideas found in his literary work (54). The political opinions that Borges expressed in his interviews are not to be taken seriously, according to the critic, and they are mostly the result of Borges's humor: his desire to play the “deadly game of vieillard terrible” (56; Rodríguez Monegal's italics). In this chapter I will try to study the evolution of Borges's ideology from the late 1930s, when he wrote his first fantastic tales, to the mid-1970s, when he produced his last collection of stories. I hope to be able to show that those political “opinions” that Borges was so fond of pronouncing in the 1970s are not unrelated to the ideology present in his fictional work and in his antifascist writings from the 1940s. On the contrary, the controversial opinions that Borges expressed in interviews late in life must be seen as the last stage in the evolution of an ideology.
