The anti-Peronist ideology of rhetoric in Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, 1943--1955 (Argentina)

The political trajectories of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar as public figures have been well documented through their often outspoken declarations in essays and interviews. This dissertation analyzes textual responses to the Argentine populist movement, Peronism (1943--1955), found in these two authors' fiction of the period, much of which has been considered apolitical. Following Paul de Man's theory of a generalized rhetoric, Ernesto Laclau contends that the dynamics involved in the attainment of a political hegemony are structurally coterminous with the operations that articulate and assert power in fiction. The traditional form of allegory has been called authoritarian because of the monolithic control it seeks to hold over meaning; the power structure of this type of allegory mirrors that deployed in a totalitarian political situation. Both Borges and Cortazar have evoked authoritarian allegory in their work to denounce the general abusive power of such rhetoric, a criticism which, when brought to bear specifically upon themes characteristic of their contemporary historical situation, permits them to engage the mechanisms of Peronist hegemony.; Chapter One shows how Borges, first, in his esthetic and political essays of the period, asserts a common mode of (metaphorical) thought in a subject that interprets traditional allegory and one that lives under a totalitarian regime, both fascist and Peronist, and second, dramatizes this mentality in his overtly political "El milagro secreto" and " Deutsches Requiem." Chapter Two demonstrates how Borges's "Emma Zunz," in repeating the critique of this mentality in a uniquely Argentine setting, more subtly intimates the threat that Peronist rhetoric represents for the free-thinking individual. Chapter Three analyzes Cortazar's published work of the period, the short stories of Bestiario, often considered a case of the neo-fantastic, as a general critique of how even a vacuous rhetorical structure can usurp characters' autonomy. Chapter Four turns to Cortazar's most unambiguous and complete statement on Peronism, the posthumously published novel, El examen, where the author uses the power of myth to dramatize the seduction by which an empty rhetoric homogenizes society.