Macedonio Fernández: Between Literature, Philosophy, and the Avant-Garde

Federico Fridman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501384233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

At Macedonio Fernández's funeral in 1952, Jorge Luis Borges delivered the following elegy: "In those years I imitated him to the point of transcription, to the point of devout and passionate plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, Macedonio is literature." This is the first book available in English that collects essays by the world's leading scholars on Macedonio Fernández, one of Borges's most important mentors and a still enigmatic thinker of the early 20th century. Macedonio's philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and experimental writing laid the foundations for Borges's own theoretical and literary matrix. Nonetheless, Borges helped shape a myth of Macedonio as a thinker who could not translate his oratorial geniality into written intelligibility. So, despite the centrality of Macedonio to Borges's thought, his work has remained almost unknown to English-speaking readers. Contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, that this myth reduces the complexities of Macedonio's life and creative process, as each chapter shines new light on his texts. Conceived as both a companion for new readers of Macedonio's writings and an invitation for specialists to revisit his work through new perspectives, essays in this volume provide extensive background and bibliographical references, as well as English translations of Macedonio's original texts. This collection seeks to serve as a catalyst for the continued discovery and rediscovery of Macedonio Fernández's texts and the ways they might help us to rediscover the singularities of our own present moment.

Part One

Life and Literature at the Edge

1

Jorge Luis Borges and Macedonio Fernández: History of a Literary Friendship

Mónica Bueno

But in this singular world of singularities, these ‘sworn friends of solitude’ are conjurers; they are even called to be conjurers by one of the heralds, the one who says I but is not necessarily the first, though he is one of the first in our twentieth century to speak this community without community.

Jacques Derrida. The Politics of Friendship.

Introduction

An author’s name embodies the name of his/her literature. It designates both an individual and a textual existence. In the Argentine literary tradition, however, the name “Macedonio Fernández” calls for another name: “Jorge Luis Borges,” and this name evokes the literary avant-garde scene in Buenos Aires during the 1920s. In this case, the names of these two writers also designate a mentor/disciple relationship with problematic axes of continuity and evolution that Borges subsumed and further developed through his writing. Consequently, the name of his mentor remains as a vague trail, a distant influence on his literary and intellectual production. Macedonio became something of a fictional character or, as Manuel Gálvez defined it, a “nonexistent gentleman.”¹

For a long time, Macedonio’s literature has been overshadowed by the myth that Borges built and conjured out of the former’s oral expression rather than his writing.² He admirably created the public image of his friend/mentor, but Macedonio laughed at such tributes. He emerged in the public literary scene of Buenos Aires thanks to his relationship with the group of young writers whom Borges met on his return from Europe in 1921. However, Macedonio had written and published since the turn of the century and had connections and dialogues with prominent intellectuals. Still, Borges talked and wrote frequently about Macedonio, about his singular figure and his exceptional attributes, and invoked him against the intellectual figure of Leopoldo Lugones who structured the cultural milieu at the time.³

Borges attempted to commit intellectual parricide by using the mask of another father, Macedonio, that Borges himself had crafted, although there existed a certain relational distance between him and the myth he projected.⁴ In this sense, he writes:

I inherited from my father the friendship and worship of Macedonio. Around 1921 we returned from Europe after a long stay. The bookstores in Geneva and a certain generous oral lifestyle that I had discovered in Madrid were very much needed at the beginning. I forgot that nostalgia when I met, or recovered, Macedonio.⁵

Nevertheless, as mentioned before, Macedonio found Borges’s praise of him amusing. In an autobiographical text that precedes the story “Cirugía psíquica de extirpación” (Psychic Surgery of Extirpation) published in the journal Sur in 1941, he creates kaleidoscopic images of his evanescent and fictitious ego. He writes:

I was born in Buenos Aires and in a very 1874 year. Not right away, but yes, soon after, I began to be invoked by Jorge Luis Borges, with so little shyness in his praise that as a result of the terrible risk he ran with this vehemence, I began to be the author of the best that he had produced. I was a de facto talent, by overpowering him, by usurping his work.⁶

He deconstructed the typical master/disciple relationship, while playing with the positions of their names and with the notion of intellectual property.

Macedonio, like Samuel Beckett or Michel Foucault, ruminated: What does it matter who speaks or who writes? Or, even better: Does anybody actually care who is speaking and writing? Macedonio always created fictions of himself and, joking about the place his friend had given to him, he embraced the idea of becoming a fictional character, which he thought was one of the highest achievements for any form of artistic expression. Borges acknowledged Macedonio’s complicity and in his own work decoded and transcribed fundamental premises of his mentor’s thought. And as he built and propagated the mythical figure of his friend, they both elaborated their concepts of literature, author, and fictional character.

On Characters and Authors

On May 22, 1897, the lawyer Macedonio Fernández presented his doctoral thesis entitled De las personas (On Personhood) at the University of Buenos Aires. In the Introduction, Macedonio justifies the subject of his research with the following words:

Many reasons invited me to choose the theoretical and positive study of Law and Social Sciences in spite of the insurmountable obstacles stemming from my obvious insipience, and behind which the vast problem enviously conceals its own solution; so great are they that from the very beginning they have limited my pretensions to only the conquest of a bit of light for my spirit, without any hope of increasing [the light] of those more interned in the legal world who have been able to appreciate up close the demands of a solution, and yet these [demands] were so attractive that, even with everything planned, they drove me to release my tenuous sail out into such a hazy sea in search of such a dubious shore.

The first of these [reasons] has undoubtedly been a driving force rather than a motive: the irresistible fascination that arduous problems, symbolized within concepts of inexhaustible content such as the notion of subject, exert on a speculative mind, but the most persuasive [reason] for one who is preparing to devote his life to the defense of the spirit of Argentine legislation …⁷

In consonance with his later fictions and theories, the thesis reveals one of the central pillars of Macedonio’s thought: the question of the self, which structures all of his work, constitutes it, and guided his literary and life experiments, which he practiced every day as he described them in his personal diary.⁸

In Papeles de recienvenido (The Newcomer Papers) (1930), Macedonio specifically addresses the question of the self as he writes a sort of autobiography. Rather than presenting an account of his life’s journey, he offers several fragments of biographies that overlap, communicate, and contradict each other. This multiplicity of life trajectories subverts the rules of the genre and mocks its proper definition. Macedonio writes: “Everything that the autobiographer affirms of himself is what he was not and wanted to be.”⁹ Fiction is the underlying foundational principle of every biography. Thus, in his essay he depicts five poses of a fotografiarse (what we would now call “taking selfies”), each one presenting a different image of himself. By using the first-person singular in this essay, Macedonio seems to announce his entry into a literary realm. And as he creates an innocent character who has no experience living in the city, ignores local customs and urban rites, and roams around Buenos Aires, but who is released from social conventions, he may have drawn a fine line between this subject and himself.

In the figure of this character, the Recienvenido (Newcomer), who later in the essay becomes El Bobo de Buenos Aires (The Fool of Buenos Aires), also converged Macedonio’s critical perspectives on the modern state, its juridical apparatus, and on the legal status of the person. Furthermore, he aimed to expose the absurdity that he saw in the legal code. Macedonio conceived this character as a literary device that escapes and cannot be recaptured by social constrictions and legal norms, which he thought regulated an individual’s social interactions. In the essay, Macedonio explores how to undermine the state and its juridical structure through a literary lens.¹⁰

Macedonio created an absurd character that represents the less-valued features of a human being: ignorance, stupidity, and incongruity. Nevertheless, as if he himself were this fictional character, he claimed that absurdity was the best way to define our collective life, and in his own life he cultivated a sort of nonexistent presence. Adolfo de Obieta, Macedonio’s son, writes: “I believe that my father has been the most natural and sincerely ‘different’ person I have ever met.”¹¹ What distinguished his singular way of being was his evanescence, his attempts to administrate a modest economy of his human existence and to project himself as a fictional character who only manifested his presence through subtle gestures, while his actual existence was constantly fading away and moving toward non-existence. According to Obieta’s depiction of his father’s unique perspective on the world and on himself, “he felt that humanity was suffocated by unnecessary things or by experiences that were lived senselessly, by twisted rules and deities that agonized, and by innumerable absences of necessary things and true faith.”¹²

Since Aristotle, the link between fictional character and actual person has been a starting point for the creative process of a literary figure. In his Poetics, Aristotle writes: “[though] the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent.”¹³ Edward M. Forster posits the following question: “[I]n what senses do the nations of fiction differ from those of the earth?” and concludes that from an empirical point of view, a person and a fictional character have nothing in common.¹⁴ However, there may be a relationship between the two based on similarity and identification, because a fictional character is constituted as a synecdoche and as the ethopoeia of a person. On the other hand, Jean-Philippe Miraux asserts that the character is an irreplaceable textual category in the novel and identifies its three basic functions: “a typological marker, a textual organizer, and an entity invested [with meaning].”¹⁵

As the fictional character stands in a fictional realm, it reaffirms the fictional plane on which the story is told, but it also retains a strong mimetic power. Nonetheless, as Barthes points out about Sade, there is a kind of literature that antagonizes with this form of representation: “[b]eing a writer and not a realistic author, Sade always chooses the discourse over the referent; he always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis: what he ‘represents’ is constantly being deformed by the meaning, and it is on the level of the meaning, not the referent, that we should read him.”¹⁶ Macedonio’s literature should be inscribed in this genealogy. For instance, in Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (The Museum of Eterna’s Novel) (1967) the mimetic condition of its characters emerges on the text’s surface, but they extend beyond the novel’s plot and escape from it. This disruptive power destabilizes the text’s border and erodes the notion of mimesis. As these characters participate in disconnected scenes, engage in dialogues with each other, as well as with an author and a reader who are also characters in the novel, they undermine the possibility of articulating a linear temporality or a specific narrational order.

It is interesting to consider that Macedonio anticipated Barthes’s idea that the writer is a modern character. In MNE, the author as a character has a proper role in the story and circulates through the spaces that he himself configures.¹⁷ This transmutation of the “I” from a first-person singular voice narrating a story to a fictional character that participates in it is akin to the magical transition that Macedonio experienced when he realized that he had become a literary author once Borges had started to define him as such. This passage or transmutation allowed him to discover that characters (either novelistic or dramatic) and authors could become elements of the work of art if they are used for the sole purpose of making the reader a character. He thought that in this way literature could expose the unnecessary constrictions of our social existence, release us from the burden of our previous forms of knowledge and from our own determination to continue bearing the weight of the world on our shoulders.

As Noé Jitrik has pointed out, in his literature the character itself expresses and organizes his theory of the novel.¹⁸ Macedonio called them “people of art” and assigned them a specific task: “to make the Reader a ‘character,’ incessantly attacking the certainty of his/her existence, through procedures that attempt to induce ‘characters’ to perform as ‘people’ in order to, by way of a counterattack, make the Reader a character.”¹⁹ The characters that dwell in his novel enjoy relative autonomy from both the text and from the author who conceives them. Macedonio gives them allegoric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Life and Literature at the Edge
• Part 2 Philosophy, Affects, and Politics
• Part 3 Metaphysics on the Move
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint