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Article Excerpt
Through a study of Borges's "El Evangelio segun Marcos" ("The Gospel According to Mark"), this essay examines two relationships: aesthetics and populism, on the one side, and technology and globalization, on the other. These examinations, however, do not form two separate discussions but a single contestation whose intermingled, moving parts generate not only "El Evangelio" but much of the Borgesian canon.
In "The Gospel According to Mark," Baltasar Espinosa, 33, travels with his cousin to the latter's family ranch, where he performs farm duties under the guidance of the foreman, a certain Gutre. Endowed with a "casi ilimitada bondad" (1068), Espinosa nonetheless has accomplished little. A non-graduate of the university, he won high school awards for rhetoric, has completed a promise to his mother to cross himself each night, prefers that others defeat him--enjoys loss--in arguments and when betting, and once punched a schoolmate for trying to force him to partake in a strike.
When his cousin returns to the city for a brief period, Espinosa stays behind. A destructive flood ensues; Gutre and his family are forced to move into Espinosa's dwelling. For Espinosa, discussions with the Gutres prove difficult. The family members are not merely illiterate. They can scarcely talk. Endowed with considerable regional know-how, the clan nonetheless seems incapable of simple verbal explanations. On the back pages of an English-language Bible, Espinosa locates a chronicle of the family line, one that ends in 1870, some 60 years before the Borges narrative takes place. Around that year, apparently, the Gutres ceased to be able write: "ya no sabian escribir" (1070).
The chronicle reveals that the Gutres, formerly the Guthries, immigrated to Argentina from Scotland, took positions as laborers, and intermarried with the indigenous. Not surprisingly, they have now lost their English. Quite surprisingly, they have lost much of their Spanish as well. The falling away of letters, as Guthrie becomes Gutre, combined with the end of the ability to write, signals the coming de-linguistification of the kin. Indeed, the Gutres, the colonized in Scotland turned colonizer in the New World, then into a hybrid brood in the backlands, seem to embody neither modern nor premodern man but the posthuman.
As the flood proceeds, Espinosa decides to read to the family. From among the few texts available, he selects Don Segundo Sombra. The choice proves unfortunate. The father states that he had once been a cattle drover himself. The wanderings of another cattle drover therefore provide little interest. Besides, he adds, cattle-driving is easy. Espinosa turns to the English Bible, reciting the text as a means to pass time, recall his once awarded rhetorical talents, exercise his translation skills, and conduct a sort of sociological experiment: he wants to see if they, the Gutres, understand anything, "si entendian algo" (1070). He begins to preach El Evangelio segun Marcos.
The Gutres, like children according to Espinosa, excitedly listen to repetition after repetition of this one gospel, passing on the reading of others. Espinosa speculates that the enthrallment results from a combination of a "duro fanatismo del calvinista" that the Gutres left behind in Scotland but still "llevan en la sangre," and the "supersticiones de la pampa" (1070). His belief in the family's "backwardness" is thus contradictory: the Gutres are both too religious ("backward" relative to modern reason) and not religious enough (superstitious: "backward" relative to modern religion). During an emergency, Espinosa uses simple medicine to cure the young daughter's lamb. Together with this gesture, the reading itself, the beard he has let grow, his thirty-three years, the habit of crossing himself, and a generous demeanor, Espinosa--apparently nominated a priori by the thorned crown (espinosa) that designates him--assumes the persona of Christ for the Gutres.
Yet the details that the Gutres gather, which lead them to conflate the protagonist and the Son of God, cannot have their source solely in the Gospel According to Saint Mark and/or in Espinosa's performance. For example, the family plainly hears echoes of the Old Testament flood in Espinosa's New Testament translation. Gauchos, the protagonist recollects, have such poor memories that they can confuse a distant history that took place in a foreign land with their own immediacy (1069). These particular gauchos, the Gutres, apparently summon up old tales from the Christian tradition which they "carry in their blood," mingling them with both superstitions of the pampa and the Book of Mark. They then map these sketches onto Espinosa's account and person, mixing narratives, hence one figure from the past (Christ) with another from the present (Espinosa).
One night, Espinosa dimly hears hammering in another part of the house, not sure if he is dreaming. (1) The Gutres' virgin daughter enters Espinosa's room, naked; Espinosa finds himself "forced" into a sexual relation. The next day the foreman asks Espinosa if it is true that Christ allowed himself to be killed, "se dejo matar" (1072), to save all men, including those who crucified him. Espinosa answers "Yes," though he is not sure; his own theology is fuzzy. The rain subsides. Espinosa is taken to a barn where, first spit on and insulted, he witnesses the outcome of the hammers: a constructed wooden cross, opening up across the firmament, primed for Espinosa's sacrifice.
Jacques Ranciere is the contemporary theorist who most comprehensively tackles the aesthetic and political issues that Borges sets before us in this fiction. In The Politics of Aesthetics Ranciere examines modernity as a function of an "aesthetic revolution" (his term), one headed by the institution of literature. In the paradigm that precedes this revolution, the Platonic-Aristotelian one, the arts are divided between good and bad, high and low ones. For Plato, cobbling is no less an art than philosophy; it is simply a lesser art. In the wake of the aesthetic revolt, conversely, the arts distinguish themselves from the crafts; the latter are not subordinate arts but non-arts. This distinction plays a key social role: it introduces the modern notion of class, splitting society into those who produce and access art and those who do not. Indeed, according to Ranciere, class status within capitalism, mobile rather than fixed, is not determined by financial wealth (for money can be lost, along with the status it brings) but by aesthetic sensibility. An "aesthetic education" discloses a higher sensibility which, while ingrained in the superior person, is unveiled solely by learning. Education, culture, and taste thereby separate thinker and worker, bourgeoisie and proletariat, as they also construct the very meaning of these categories.
In short, for Ranciere, the aesthetic revolution renames the bourgeois revolution--but, at the same time, also yields worker insurgency. An aesthetic education, we said, discloses the sensibility by means of which class differences construct and maintain themselves. Yet "sensible" people, whose education is...
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