Reading the blood

Literatos y excéntricos: los ancestros ingleses de Jorge Luis Borges.

Martín Hadis

Ed. Sudamericana, 2006

Douglas Adams’ The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens the day Arthur Dent’s house is going to be knocked down. The leader of the demolition team is a Mr. L. Prosser, “a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr. L. Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.”

Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami, thought for a while that he too belonged in the Khan family: in early June 2006 he received the results of a genetic test that proved he was the first descendant of the Mighty Khan ever found in the US, but two weeks later a second test proved that he lacked the specific Y-chromosome mutation passed on by the Mongolian Emperor. As it turns out, 8% of all men in Asia (i.e. 1 in 200 men worldwide) have Genghis Khan blood, slightly watered down since the XI century.

What do these facts signify? What’s in a bloodline? Genetics and biology have taken care of the physiological side of the answer, cultural anthropology has studied the social implications of kinship, and psychology has tried to systematize the psychic imprints left by parents and other relatives. How about the literary implications of heredity? Is there a literary pedigree which sheds light on a writer’s work?

This hypothesis supports Literatos y excéntricos, Martín Hadis’s latest work on Jorge Luis Borges. The book presents a thorough and accurate research on the life and times of Borges’s English ascendants on her father’s mother’s side (the Haslam family). An impeccable effort in biography, this book’s title promises a collection of “scholars and oddballs”, and that it most certainly delivers: preachers, teachers, one of the leading experts on and collectors of human skulls, booksellers, the author of “A Domestic Guide for Cases of Insanity”, a Buenos Aires Herald collaborator and, finally, Frances Haslam, Borges’s grandmother, who came to Argentina to marry Colonel Francisco Borges.

The English influence in Borges was extraordinary, in a literary, intellectual and personal dimension. A famous critical dictum by Ricardo Piglia states that Borges has a dual lineage, and that his works find a synthesis for a clash of two ancestries: the conqueror, warlike criollo blood of the Acevedos and the Borges; and the more intellectual English blood of the Haslams. Yet, the construction of heredity (especially in someone like Borges, who worked and reworked the notion of lineage throughout his writings) goes beyond the bloodline, and most of the facts collected in this book, by Hadis’s own account, would have been news to Jorge Luis Borges himself: he made several references, in his works and in interviews, to his British family, but he rarely got the specifics right and his recollections never went beyond his great-grandfather. Does the historical truth matter more than what Borges knew (or thought he knew, or convinced himself that he knew) about the past of his family? Do History’s facts outweigh identity as a construct?

Jorge Luis Borges grew up among the books of his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, and those books (most of them English) were in turn a legacy of Fanny Haslam, Jorge Guillermo’s mother and Jorge Luis’s closest direct link to England. Fanny herself played an important role in the upbringing of Jorge Luis. Without those books and those influences he wouldn’t have felt a literary calling at such an early age, and that he was the first to admit (even boast). How much of his love of literature was due to this sum of facts and how much was of his own doing, and how much of his ancestry beyond Fanny Haslam transpired into the miracle that was his writing, are questions that this book tries to answer by sheer force of hard facts (a shibboleth of Hadis’s career in science?), but what should be Hadis’s strongest statement becomes the weakest link. Throughout the book Hadis tries to set parallels between the lives of Borges and that of his antecessors, but seldom transcends the coincidental or the genetic (Borges’s blindness, for instance, comes from this side of his family). The second half of the book, in which Hadis weaves a genealogical interpretation of Borges’s writings and ideas, is less rigorous than the biographies and prone to leaps of faith, something which renders it more interesting on some accounts (it is the most personal and passionate writing in the book) but not as convincing and conclusive as the writer would have it be.

Literatos y excéntricos accomplishes a hard task: it is close to impossible these days to strike on such a vast, fertile expanse of borgeana which remains virgin, and this work could easily become the standard of its kind (so far, it is the only one of its kind). It is clearly a labour of love, and every page exudes a thorough knowledge of all things Borges and a zeal for detail that prove the many years of hard work taken for its preparation. Some Borges readers will certainly find it illuminating, and anyone with a serious interest in the writer should consider it a must-read. What L. Prosser and Thomas R. Robinson would say about it, alas, we will never know.

Publicado en el suplemento On Sunday del Buenos Aires Herald el 2 de julio de 2006