I will explain here my reaction to the short story A celebration of the monster, by Jorge Luis Borges. A celebration of the monster depicts Argentinian youths who join the Perónist movement (the “monster” regularly evoked in the short story is most likely referring to Perón) as a band of erratic and chaotic people instead of proud patriots.

They constantly seek to sell the guns they were given to participate in the demonstration, they burn down the bus that was carrying them, they need an authoritative figure using constantly punishment to keep them in line and they end up killing a Jewish student for little reason before trying to sell his clothes covered in blood. All of this does not prevent the narrator from praising the Monster from time to time and the lack of faith the student had for the Perónist figure supposedly leads to the eventual murder.

I suppose Jorge Luis Borges expresses in this short story his skepticism of the Perónist movement, or perhaps more broadly of all populist movements. This collection of young, violent and uneducated people gathered for an event dedicated to the Leader cannot become a coherent group moved only by patriotism. I think this statement is made as an irony, given the generally humorous tone of the text, written in a vulgar and incorrect way to represent the crudeness of the characters.

As for the title, the name “monster” is always used in the text when the narrator refers to the Leader. It must be Perón and Borges explicitly writes that the story takes place in Argentina but there is no explanation in the story as for why the characters refer to a figure they obviously respect with such a term. Perhaps replacing the name with this very pejorative word is a way to both insult and anonymize Perón, so that the moral of the text can also apply to other populist leaders of Latin America? Furthermore, the eponymous celebration is perhaps not the speech of the Monster, which does eventually take place in the very last lines of the text, but the excited and chaotic behaviour of the protagonists when they arrive at their destination, going as far as committing a murder: this can be interpreted as the real celebration motivated by the figure of the leader.