Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and the Near East of Jorge Luis Borges

• In Event: Orientalism Decentered: An Inside and Outside Look at the Periphery in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Abstract

Throughout his writing, Jorge Luis Borges refers to a variety of Orientalist texts, from Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khayyam to Rudyard Kipling’s exotic depictions of India; however, what he does not openly acknowledge, but does allow to diffuse through his work, is the influence of Argentine writers, rather than European, and their skewed relationship to Orientalism. This paper studies Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s troubled relationship to Orientalism, both in his many comparisons of gauchos and Oriental peoples in Facundo: civilización y barbarie, as well as his Viajes’s accounts of France, where he found himself outside European society, and Algeria, where he surprisingly attempted to fit in. Then my paper traces Sarmiento’s preoccupation with the gaucho and the Oriental in Borges in an analysis of Ficciones’s “El Sur”. Juan Dahlmann is a mirror not just of Borges but also Sarmiento, traveling through the pampas he does not know except through his readings (the same as Sarmiento), with A Thousand and One Nights by his side. Dahlmann’s fatal obsession with reading, especially of these alternative, and later altered, spaces of pampas and Orient, deposits him in Scheherazade’s framed story with its countless, blurred, dreamlike fantasies with high-stake adventures. This analysis reveals the shared peripheral space of the pampas and the Orient as less real than imagined, even dreamt. These overlapping geographies question the centrality of the European canon and its written word, giving Argentine fiction the power to articulate its own alterity.

Author

• Allison E White, Tulane University