Borges / Perón. Indicios de una mitología nacional

Abstract

I track some clues of national myths by analysing narrative works (by Borges and some other authors), and sayings about Borges. focusing on how the irruption of Peronism is verified in Borges's narrative (and also in his public interventions and in what is said about his figure). I propose a change of scale: without trying to interpret the great constitutive moments, understanding them as origin myths, I try to build series, with quasi-mythical features, by relating brief syntagms that are repeated in different narrative units. Transversal elements, which go from one story to another. Phrases that are analysed taking the whole of Borges' work as a paradigm, and not just isolated stories. In the first place, I explore certain constants in some stories from the period 1945-54. Then I stop at a series of contemporary versions about a blind Borges who is helped by a young Peronist to cross the street. Thirdly, I question the issue of the appearance of literary oneiric tales about people with bird's claws, linking them to the moral dilemmas of the intellectual elite in the times of the first Peronism. While these sets have a lot in common with myths as they are successive reworkings of a narrative element, they could be approached with mythical analysis methods typical of structural anthropology. However, the material used differs from classical mythologies: a) by containing both oral and written variants; b) both literary and historical facts; c) they admit a verifiable chronological order. I therefore risk here a rather experimental methodological and theoretical exploration, albeit indebted to Lévi-Strauss. I conclude that in these two sets, the functioning of an ideological system can be verified, which is that of the Argentine national formation, with its tensions and crises.