Chris Moss on Psychoanalysing Argentina

Tell me about Doctor Brodie’s Report by Borges.

Well, many of his books are very psychoanalytic and full of mirrors, labyrinths, tigers and alter egos. He always had a sense of being shadowed by another self. Borges is famous for his metaphors and conundrums but the stories in this book are much less allusive and somehow more complete than those in some of the other, better known, collections. These are all about Buenos Aires and feature duals, mythical figures, places with patios and grilled windows, and are full of a sense of his native Palermo. He sets ‘The Gospel According to St Mark’ out in the province – in the Pampas – another region he loved to imagine. Borges’s fiction amounts to a metaphorical universe and he evokes a place I dream of visiting when I’m homesick for Buenos Aires.

He was a strange man, Borges, a bookish man and an Anglophile and possibly a virgin for many years. When he was around in the 1930s and 40s he was the ugly, clever one in the city’s literary circles, and was not successful with women. He was not a typical Argentine man – anti-Peronist, Anglophile, an original in Buenos Aires. If you put him on the couch he’d probably…well, he’d probably tell his stories again.

They sound very Jungian with all the symbols.

Yes, he’d probably be the one for the Jungian couch, though Argentina is much more Freudian/Lacanian. In some ways the symbols are slightly crude and they do recur again and again and again. Lots of people have tried to copy him. In fact, I’m reading a Martin Amis book now [The Pregnant Widow] with a scene set in a bathroom with mirrors that reflect beauty back infinitely – it’s straight out of Borges, a fact I know Amis would readily admit. He’s a big Borges fan.

Infinity beguiled him and the metaphor of the labyrinth expresses that. Of course, that comes from Greek classical literature but I think it might also be a simple way of articulating the grid-like layout of Buenos Aires, a city surrounded by the infinity of the Pampas, an urban labyrinth. He doesn’t write strictly topographically about Buenos Aires but distils it into a metaphoric landscape.

Tell me about Esteban Echeverria’s The Slaughterhouse.

This is actually a short story and is usually published in collections. It was written in 1839 but was censored and not published until much later. I should say that this year, 2010, is Argentina’s bicentennial, but it wasn’t an easy road to peace for Argentina and this story was written in the middle of the struggle, by a liberal Argentinian educated in Europe and in opposition to the country’s first dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas. It’s an allegory of those times. An educated liberal is murdered by mixed-race gauchos and black women and some critics say that the visceral, physical terminology used to describe the murder is more like rape than murder.

Are you one of those people?

I think penetration is mentioned more than it needs to be and the atmosphere is almost festive, yes. You have to remember that Argentina is one of the biggest meatpacking nations in the world and the sense of that goes beyond cows to the humans too. It’s a carnal nation with a history based on slaughter – that’s why the theme is so important. The violence, butchery and slaughter as rape are metaphors for Argentina. There was a 1960s film called Carne and there is a character in it called Delicia who is raped by a fellow butcher in a slaughterhouse and, if I remember rightly, she is actually raped in a carcass and someone says; ‘Meat upon meat.’ This butchery as rape is something in Argentinian culture, the concept of meat as a woman’s body. Meat is more than meat there. If you were a psychoanalyst and your patient mentioned meat you’d be straight off to read meat histories. The English eat it on a Sunday and get on with it, but not in Argentina.

So death is a way of life. Slaughter a means of survival, of reproduction almost?

It was the most significant thing in terms of the development in Argentina. Barbed wire came later – and was how the new white European landowners controlled land – the people, the gauchos and the Pampas. All the processes were butchery – first murder the inhabitants and replace with cattle. Then pen up the gauchos, control nature, slaughter the cattle. It’s all murder, fencing, restriction. And lust: I mean, Argentinian for a tenderloin steak is lomo, the same word for a woman’s thighs. ‘Nice lomo.’

X-ray of the Pampa by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada.

Argentina has a strong history of historical essentialism, books that try to find the essence of a country. I suppose England is doing it a bit now too, with Jeremy Paxman and Andrew Marr. This one is about what we do with the infinite empty space that we have inherited as a country. Most of the population of Argentina is concentrated in Buenos Aires and the second city, Córdoba, and there is too much emptiness, wildness and emptiness, wilderness in a Biblical sense. It’s a place to go to question things, to return from. Estrada is thinking about roads, canals, railways – how do we penetrate the great interior. In South America there is a continuous plain of emptiness from the Pampas to Patagonia, and in Argentina this huge expanse failed to get populated and no great riches came from large expanses of it. Since the 1920s Argentina has gone from, I think, the eighth richest country in the world to the 22nd or 23rd, and that statistic hides all sorts of social divides and poverty. It has all this land but that raises the question – what do we do with it if we don’t exploit it? How will this nothingness, this nada affect us? It’s a beautiful word in Spanish, nada, nothingness. The great unknown, the great empty space. Abroad we think of Argentinians as gauchos but in Buenos Aires they’re always really keen to remind you that theirs is a world city. The mistake of Buenos Aires in a way is that it is an island in empty plains with no connection to its heartland. In an infinite horizon there is nowhere to put your goals. There aren’t even any trees in the Pampas. Someone said to me that the infinite horizon gives you an infinite reach and vision, but it hasn’t really done that in Argentina.

I suppose Melanie Klein would say that Argentinians have perhaps failed to internalise a good object and are projecting the potential of menacing emptiness, or an internalised bad object, on to the Pampas so that the Pampas represent a fear of annihilation, of not being held or fed by a loving parent.

That could be right. But don’t get me on to Argentinians and parents… and, of course, the irony is that the pampas do feed the city-dwellers. They just prefer to distance themselves from the wide-open horizon.