“Perhaps the country couldn’t be made great” — but so what?
V.S Naipaul met Jose Luis Borges and had a chat about Argentine politics
In the summer of 1972 V.S Naipaul wrote a piece for the New York Review which I found as difficult to digest as I did enlightening when I eventually got around to reading it. It was on the recommendation of a colleague who I regard highly and though I initially objected he won me over. Writing is a craft he said, and Naipaul is a master of his craft, so however he uses his gift, there is surely something that can be learnt. I still thought he was a self-hating bigot, bitter for reasons I couldn’t quite understand but I gave it a shot. I mean why not? I’m locked down for hours everyday.
The article was titled The Corpse at the Iron Gate and was largely a mixture of reflection, reportage and essay about Juan Domingo Perón, Argentina’s now late dictator told through a sort of dialogue with the great Argentine author Jose Luis Borges. Peron is a political figure with such a remarkable story that Borges himself conceded he could “never write” a tale so absurd.
Perhaps he couldn’t, and though I doubt that, Peron really is something. He was born into a lower middle class family in 1895, joined the army before leading a group of conspirators who overthrew the civilian Argentine government in 1946. Always cunning and strategic, Peron accepted a modest position as minister of labour in the cabinet where he worked with his beautiful wife Eva Duarte to build coalitions among the workers. He eventually built up a base seduced by his promises and enchanted by his nationalism that was powerful enough to propel him to electoral victory.
Peron succeeded it seems to a degree in ameliorating the conditions of workers, but he grew authoritarian and corrupt and was later overthrown in a military coup in September 1955, the same year Eisenhower became the first president to appear in colour on TV.
Towards the end Peron turned the art of government into pure spectacle, which prompted the pope himself, weighing in on God’s behalf, to take action by excommunicating Peron in the summer of 1955. He joined a pantheon of other political figures that the Catholic Church cut ties with including Fidel Castro, Napoleon and Henry VIII. Peron would then flee to Paraguay and then settle in Spain which is where Naipaul picks the story up.
Naipaul’s fascination with this story isn’t misplaced. Peron ruled Argentina between 1946 and 1955 having spent seventeen years after his reign in exile in a suburb in Madrid called the Iron Gate. He emerged from his isolation in exile once more and was now dictating “peace terms to the military regime in Argentina”. Despite his record, Peron still had many loyal supporters who’d changed their minds on his initial period in charge.
Removing Peron, who himself was elected peddling lofty dreams, was meant to be the silver bullet for the problems he’d apparently created — and the list of them isn’t short. But when he was ousted little changed. “My anxiety was that some clever man would have take over,” Peron wrote from Panama a year after he was overthrown.
That clever man never came, and Naipaul, in his characteristically pitiless tone, threw scorn on all his successors:
“Now, after eight presidents, six of them military men, Argentina is in a state of crisis that no Argentine can fully explain. The mighty country, as big as India, and with a population of twenty-three million, rich in cattle and grain, Patagonian oil, and all the mineral wealth of the Andes, inexplicably drifts. Everyone is disaffected. And suddenly nearly everyone is Peronist.”
Its not unusual for people to feel nostalgic during periods of uncertainty. I’ve spent much of the last year in lockdown, reminiscing about the good old days when we were free to come and go as we please. But this kind of nostalgia is pretty benign. When wedded to politics however nostalgia can be a dangerous force and Naipaul picks this up:
“They begin to remember that the dictator had a vision of the country’s greatness, and that he was a strong man; they begin to remember that he had given much to the poor”
Having heard my fair share of similar eulogies of a past political greatness, Naipaul, the obsessive post-colonial pessimist that he was, touched a nerve in the following passage:
“Like many dictators, he hadn’t begun badly. He had wanted to make his country great. But he wasn’t himself a great man; and perhaps the country couldn’t be made great”
Naipaul’s cynicism and often brutal honesty shine through here and these remarks shouldn’t come as a surprise from a man who once said “hate oppression. Fear the oppressed.” I don’t need to adjudicate on Peron’s record here, but Naipaul goes to the heart of the post-colonial dilemma. The need to break decisively with the former colonial master, whilst successfully charting a new course. But if that new course doesn’t yield fruit then who is to blame?
One evening Naipaul went to meet Borges again. Borges told him that Argentina’s history is the story of its separateness from Spain. How does Peron fit into that Naipaul inquired. “Peron represented the scum of the earth,” Borges continued, but given the country’s search for its own identity Peron gave expression to something uniquely Argentine, he was “an Argentine of today.” In other words, though Borges will admit he’s scum and almost certainly took the country off track, he’s Argentine scum and thats better than a Spaniard.
Originally published at https://noenchantedpalace.substack.com.
