Borges, Marechal, Clorindo Testa and the Thinking Bones: Genealogies of Argentine Infidelity

Argentine culture – there was a lot missing – contains many Episodes of paleontological uncertainty. A short story if we compare it to geological eras, but a very long story if we do not believe in it. It is also true that on the contrary This present is dominated by dinosaurs And the farce, before people disbelieved in the closest and most poetic beings with names that today mean nothing to a few. Before – what times were those – He messed around with megatheres and glyptodontsSuch as those who encountered Adam contributed to the prediction that the winds of the pampas would swallow up all attempts to civilize him. Some very strange mammals Who came to meet with Leopoldo Marichal and Clorindo Testa, and apparently with Ezequiel Martinez Estrada himself.

But fashions change and animals too Our era is now characterized by tyrannosaurs and their herbivorous relatives. Although it is rarely addressed in local literature, whether educated or illiterate, believers or non-believers – anyone – feels able to appropriate the colour, sound, cruelty, taste or pestilence.

There are also those who suggest looking at the world through their eyes because the universe, as is known, also belongs to them and in the 21st century, Any animal has the right to prove that it was a historical subject. Darwin said it already: worms move the earth, and give shape to the tracks which we know how to make.

In this case, let us go back a century, when Enrique González Toñón (1901-1943) published The spirit of inanimate things, A collection of stories about the lives and views of inert objects, which the narrator accesses through his X-ray vision applied, for example, to skeletons in a museum.

In 1927, the year these stories appeared, The fossil mammals of the pampas still enjoy the fame that the nineteenth century gave them.. To see it in all its splendor, you had to go to the La Plata Museum because the new building of the National Museum of Buenos Aires Bernardino Rivadavia, located in Centenario Park, has not yet been opened.

That is why the narrator takes the train and gets off in the forest of La Plata. To dialogue with a glyptodont and a saber-toothed tigerAnd the conversations that will be captured in “My Prehistoric Friend” and “The Skeptical Ismilodon.”

In the second, a pathetic, defeated and sad skeleton, the bloodthirsty pursuer of our distant and brutal ancestor, the famous tiger, asks his watcher not to try to shake him out of his silence: He does not believe in understanding between beings because his philosophical position is skepticism. It is difficult for him to believe in his existence: “I am a white lie of the paleontologist who invented me,” he tells him, anticipating those who today discover that these skeletons are the work of man and not something found in nature. Which should be a mandatory bibliography in history of science courses, González Toñón continues:

“Ever since they shut me up in this glass cell, and accused me of unspeakable crimes during my training in Pampean, I have begun to feel very bored. Searching for a painkiller, I have indulged in meditation. I believe that the Smilodon has as much right to the practice of philosophy as any professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, whose skeleton deserves the honor of living with us (…) I do not know, frankly, whether I am the Smilodon skeleton or a brilliant idea of ​​a paleontologist who, in a bad time, had the funny idea of ​​reconstructing me. However, accepting that I belonged to the Feld family, another doubt arose within me: Did he have every bone in its proper place? …and the bones…do they all belong to my skeleton (…) Every time he added a new piece of fossil, my astonishment increased, and I personally found the wise man’s naivety a little childish? Funny, but I admit that when I was calm, I was so impressed by his ability that I began to consider the possibility of my own existence.”

Gonzalez Toñón, we know, He laughed at the world and, above all, at the celebration of the Bambiraone who believes in the immortality of the present, or simply that it is necessary to believe in its existence.

But if we talk about infidels, No one exaggerated more than Borges, who, although he avoided excavations of the past and futureAn exception was made to a reference to glyptodonts in the 1941 article on “Creation and Omphalus” by Philip Henry Gosse (1857).

Gosse (1810-1888), a British naturalist and writer who was a contemporary of Darwin, proposed a solution to reconcile the age of the Earth according to biblical chronology with revealed geology and fossil finds in its strata. The name omphalos refers to the debate over whether or not Adam had a navel, since its presence implies whether or not there should be a navel.

Gosse suggested that when creation occurred there must have been a large number of apparently related events, which he described as “simultaneous,” but they are Such fossils and geological strata have never occurred. No one took him seriously, because, after all, God did not look like Gonzalez Toñón and did not waste his time on such jokes.

Borges, who never read Gosse, but rather read his son and his commentators, to illustrate these ideas He had no better idea than to go down the pampas and return to Loganthe site of the discovery of the first megatherium skeleton and the city where Florentino Amighino later grew up.

“Glyptodont skeletons still exist in the Logan Valley, but there never was a glyptodont,” says Borges. “This is the ingenious (and above all incredible) hypothesis proposed by Philip Henry Gosse for religion and science.”

For Borges, Gosse’s ideas had a certain elegance to them.This embodies the doubts of Bertrand Russell, who predicted that “the planet could have been created five minutes ago, with inhabitants remembering an illusory past.”

This means that perhaps, after all, Our museums are preoccupied with an imaginary past. But it is also evidence that helps us remember that we are all – not just Argentines – children of twentieth-century skepticism.