464
PARTISAN REVIEW
capital, they are concerned with history. Or more accurately, with the
writing of history.
There is another text, besides Fernando Portuondo's, to be read
between the lines of
View of Dawn in the Tropics.
It
is Borges's
A
Universal History of Infamy,
published for the first time in 1935.
In
that book, Borges applied to history a parodic reduction, exaggerating
the importance of trivial events, seeking out its characters not among
the heroes but among the supporting players of history, recording not
fame but infamy. For him, the rhetorical exercise implicit in his
parodies was a means of disguising a larger intent: to invest with
historical or documentary "reality" the unreality of his characters,
many of them actual people but seen from a fictitious perspective (as,
for example, the Implausible Imposter, Tom Castro) or almost entirely
fictitious (like the Masked Dyer) but decked out with narrative finery
from some orienta l "history." Whatever the case, Borges exploded
History through parody (infamy) and hyperbole.
But
he was up to
other things as well.
Not only did he relativize the historical event by assuming a
different perspective but he also introduced, implicitly, a notion which
would later become central to an interpretation of his work as a whole:
the notion of conjecture. Since an event belongs to History only when
it gets recorded, or written down (this is what separates the historical
event from one that isn't), the writing itself becomes History. There is
no History but the recorded.
This axiom makes it understandable why, for Borges, History is
conjectural.
If
every historical text is
a
text, then there is not one
History (which would postulate the existence of a final, single,
canonica l text) but rather a series of written texts. Each one of them
offers a possible version of what ac tually took place in reality. Each one
of them only exists as conjecture.
View of Dawn in the Tropics
does not attempt to reconstruct the
History of Cuba, a task which has been taken on, among others, by
Fernando Portuondo.
It
attempts something more modest: to recon–
struct the process of the writing of Cuban History.
History says: "The colored people began to nurture among them–
selves the goal of imitating the Haitians. The insurrections of the
blacks in the sugar mills were more and more frequent, but they
lacked unity and leadership."
Legend has it that the largest uprising was crushed in time because
the governor himself found out about it when, during his rounds, he
heard some blacks talking in a hut outside the town walls.
