Jorge Luis Borges is such a towering figure of world letters, and his stories so universal, that it is easy to forget that he wrote from a specific national and historical setting. Written in a neofascist age, “The Gospel According to Mark” is a parable of fascist loomings and evil as stupidity.
Borges’s short story “The Gospel According to Mark” emerged from dark times for Argentine democracy. Successive Peronist and military regimes kept Borges’s beloved Argentina under authoritarian rule by molding a seemingly-exhausted European fascism into new forms of populism, propaganda, and identity politics.* The story is quintessential Borges in many ways. It dramatizes classic Borges themes, such as encountering one’s double, the disastrous encounter with the Other, and the perilous-but-intimate relationship between civilization and barbarism. These dualities are often a grotesquely-mirrored self, just as fascism grotesquely mirrors democracy.
“The Gospel According to Mark” can be read as a parable, a story that illustrates some deeper, abstract truth or moral lesson. It begins with the predisposition for misapprehension between self and Other, between freethinkers and ideologues, between educated elites and regular folks. It ends as a parable of evil as stupidity, and the fascist impulse within.
In the story, a Buenos Aires medical student with liberal ideas (a “freethinker”) spends the summer in the countryside among simple, rural folk.** The family he lives with is described in a line that is classic Borges: “The Gutres were three: the father, an unusually uncouth son, and a daughter of uncertain paternity.” What is typical Borges about this description is how a single sentence can tell a story in itself, and the reader is never quite sure which small detail or unexpected adjective might be a telling detail…and which just a fascinating sidenote. The father is foreman of the ranch, and their family surname, Gutres, suggests “good folk.” The protagonist’s name is Baltasar Espinosa, a clear allusion to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, whose deterministic, rationalist philosophy emphasizes the moral and psychological dimensions of individual liberty.
Espinosa is acclaimed for his “capacity for public speaking,” while the Gutres are analphabets—literally and symbolically illiterate. So, when Espinosa begins to read to them aloud from his own translations of the Gospel of Mark, they are soon mesmerized by the power of his speech and by one particular story in the Gospel. A flood cuts off the ranch from contact with the outside world, isolating Espinosa and the Gutres both socially and intellectually. Without giving away too much too soon, suffice it to say that in addition to conveying a sense of fatalistic doom, the story viscerally conveys “how the story ends” when a critical mass of people allow themselves to be ruled by myth, symbolism, and primal emotions.
The Specter of Fascism
The descent of civilization into rule by myth, symbol, and primal emotions is just how historian Robert Paxton characterizes fascism in his landmark study by that name, The Anatomy of Fascism. It is more than coincidence that when “The Gospel According to Mark” was published in 1970, Borges had long been living under successive dictatorial regimes that—despite bitterly opposing each other—shared an authoritarian sensibility for ruling. Argentina’s most famous (and infamous) president, Juan Perón, was a populist demagogue who gained power through a cult of personality, and stayed in power by rewriting of the Argentine Constitution in 1949 so that he could remain president for life. Norman Thomas di Giovanni’s English translation of “The Gospel According to Mark” places the story squarely in this political context by informing readers in a headnote that, “For his opposition to the regime of Colonel Juan Perón, Borges was forced to resign his post as a librarian and was mockingly offered a job as a chicken inspector.”**
It took a military coup to oust Perón from power (twice), but the military dictatorship simply replaced Perón’s regime with their own. Both regimes turned to the fascist playbook of weaponizing nationalist mythology and social identities to get the common people to vote against their own interests. These tribalist tactics manipulate the deep psyche of individuals and the nation, which explains why otherwise good people are capable of utter moral depravity and willful ignorance under fascist regimes.
Returning to the “The Gospel According to Mark,” Espinosa continues to indulge the provincial ignorance and superstitious beliefs of the Gutres. Indeed, Espinosa romanticizes them somewhat, as they embody the gauchos (South American cowboys) of legend. We begin to see glimmers of Espinosa’s own profound ignorance too. The third person, omniscient narrator gives the reader early warning signs, including ghosts of fascisms past: knowing what isn’t so as a “case of bad memory,” and the dangers of being “isolated etymologically.” Most foreboding of all, we are told that Espinosa is 33 years old, which the discerning reader soon realizes was the age of Christ when he was crucified.
Despite these ominous signs, Espinosa’s “natural complacency” keeps him in inexcusable ignorance, impelling him further and further down a dangerous path that the reader begins to sense—with eerie presentiment—will lead to cataclysmic doom. Espinosa’s perilous lack of awareness mirrors the Gutre’s ignorance, and the reader begins to see Gutre père as Espinosa’s double: a provincial reflection of the unperceiving urbanite’s own indefensible stupidity.
The story unfolds with fatalistic inevitability toward its inevitable conclusion. Fatalism is a major theme in Borges, who was deeply influenced by Spinoza’s conception of free will and necessity. The premonitions of some bad ending get stronger as the story progresses:
The next day began like the previous ones, except that the father spoke to Espinosa and asked him if Christ had let Himself be killed so as to save all other men on earth. Espinosa, who was a freethinker but who felt committed to what he had read to the Gutres, answered, "Yes, to save everyone from Hell."
Gutre then asked, "What's Hell?"
"A place under the ground where souls burn and burn."
"And the Roman soldiers who hammered in the nails—were they saved, too?"
"Yes," said Espinosa, whose theology was rather dim.
The final lines of the story are chilling, if not unforeseen:
Espinosa understood what awaited him on the other side of the door. When they opened it, he saw a patch of sky. A bird sang out. A goldfinch, he thought. The shed was without a roof; they had pulled down the beams to make the cross.
Rather than understanding the Gospel as a story of self-sacrifice made in the mythic or historical past, the Gutre’s take it as a mandate to sacrifice (to crucify) an outsider. Needless to say, this misinterpretation clearly contradicts the universalist message of Christian humanism.
Though the violent act they are about to commit is atrocious, the story does not demonize the Gutres, whose very name is a play on “good.” Nor is religion itself to blame. Though a freethinker, Espinoza also takes meaning from religious rituals and symbolism:
His father, who was a freethinker (like all the gentlemen of his day), had introduced him to the lessons of Herbert Spencer, but his mother, before leaving on a trip for Montevideo, once asked him to say the Lord's Prayer and make the sign of the cross every night. Through the years, he had never gone back on that promise.
Of course, the same rituals and symbolism (such as a flag) can mean different things to different groups of people. As a freethinker, Espinosa does not share the fanatical beliefs of the Gutres. And, to be clear, it is only when the Gutres’s fanaticism crosses over from misguided belief into violence that it becomes evil.
Espinosa is partly to blame for his tragic fate: for having stoked primal passions and social mania through rousing symbolism; and for his obliviousness as the Gutre’s general ignorance morphed into extremist beliefs and fanaticism leading to violent actions. As for the Gutres, the deep roots of their fanaticism and cultish behavior are not a simple matter of rural folks having less formal education than their town-dwelling counterparts—for they still have the ordinary human capacity to reason and to know right from wrong…and killing in the name of religion is surely wrong. Rather, the deep psychological root of it is that they are so receptive to the idea of sacrificing a scapegoat for the promise of their own salvation.
Susceptibility to fanaticism and bad ideas is in our blood, so to speak: “They lacked any religious faith, but there survived in their blood, like faint tracks, the rigid fanaticism of the Calvinist and the superstitions of the pampa Indian.” Likewise, the roots of fascism and Us vs Them thinking are “in our blood,” as every “blood and soil” sloganeer knows.
Evil as Stupidity
Which is to say, fanaticism and evil as stupidity are immanent properties of human existence. Immanence is a master theme and philosophical idea in Borges’s worldview. That which is immanent is contained entirely within the system or thing itself. It is inherent. The Other is inherent in the self. Barbarity is inherent in civilization. And, in “The Gospel According to Mark,” the specter of fascism is inherent in democracy.
And so it was in Borges’s Argentine experience: the populist roots of fascism are immanent within the people themselves, inherent to all modern democracies. Inexcusable ignorance lets evil through the door in “the Gospel According to Mark.” But is a special kind of stupidity that turns spiritual and tribal intuitions into an unthinking cult. Namely, the surrender of intellect, moral judgment, and personal responsibility to a symbol or idea. This is evil as stupidity.
Similarly, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “theory of stupidity,” mass complicity with Nazi ideology was a kind of “stupidity,” a refusal to think critically for oneself.*** For the German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident, stupidity is not about one’s education level, or even the proliferation and influence of propaganda. Rather, stupidity is a social mania: the intellectual and moral stupidity that arises when we surrender independent thought and moral judgment to propaganda, manipulative ideologies, and tribal political identities. Stupidity of this sort leads to willful ignorance, a refusal to discern truth from lies, right from wrong. The antidote to evil as stupidity is for “the people” to think for themselves, rather than letting an ideology or a demagogue do their thinking for them.
As Borges was about to publish the “The Gospel According to Mark” in 1970, Argentina’s Dirty Wars were looming on the horizon. In the years shortly after its publication, human rights and countless human lives would be sacrificed in the name of political ideology and factional affiliation. Military dictatorship would be followed by populist regime, then another military dictatorship. Both authoritarian camps would rally a passionate base of supporters through nationalist myths and symbols. Incalculable numbers of Argentine people would be kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared in acts of state-sponsored terror—sacrificed for having the wrong views or political affiliation.
To be clear, myth, symbolism, and ideology are merely the vehicles of authoritarian regimes. Evil is what a tyrannical government and its supporters do, rather than whatever ideology it asserts.
Much evil was done. And afterwards, to justify their atrocities, the perpetrators of evil fell back on fatalistic arguments, claiming to have acted in the name of God, nation, or necessity. Borges’s parable of the ever-present fascist impulse, the latent fascism within, had become prophetic.
Borges’s cautionary tale went unheeded in its time. Its deeper lesson on the perils of intellectual and moral abdication went either ignored or misapprehended. The question is, how do we read the parable today?
*Translated from English to French by Roy Caldwell.
**I am using the Norman Thomas di Giovanni translation of Borges to English, which is widely-preferred by littérateurs because of di Giovanni’s close collaboration with the author. Story quotes are translated from English to French by Roy Caldwell.
French readers might want to try the Françoise-Marie Rosset translation of the story in Le Rapport de Brodie, traduit par Françoise-Marie Rosset (éditeur Gallimard 1972; Folio 1984).Itwas Édicions Gallimard (publisher of Marcel Proust and Paul Valéry) who in 1951 first published Borges’s Ficciones in translation. The catalyst of the French translation introduced Borges to a global audience, and culminated with Borges winning the 1961 Prix Formentor, which launched him to international fame.
***Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison(1951). Writings compiled after his imprisonment and execution by the Nazis.
