Saving the Gutres: Borges, Sarmiento and Mark
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In one of his best-known short stories, El evangelio seg?n Marcos (El informe de Er odie, 1970) Borges mirrors several literary works, including Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's classic, Facundo: civilizaci?n y barbarie (1845), and Mark, the earliest recorded story of Christ's life (ca. 61-70 ad). The skilful interplay of these two textual frames of reference allows Borges to cast doubt on the likelihood that Argentinians will one day be delivered from the senseless violence brought about by repeated failures to understand themselves and one another. That Borges deliberately extends Sarmiento's presentation of civilization versus barbarism in El evangelio seg?n Marcos is easy to demonstrate.1 When Baltasar Espinosa, a medical student, thirty-three years of age, from Buenos Aires, spends Easter week of 1928 at his cousin Daniel's estancia in Junin, he is forced by rising floodwaters to temporarily share quarters with an untutored capataz and his two grown children. Descended from Scottish immigrants and Native Americans, the Gutres have lost touch with their European roots, and display many of the negative characteristics attributed by Sarmiento to gauchos: illiterate, inarticulate, and superstitious, they nevertheless know how to survive on the pampa.2 Espinosa, on the other hand, is a somewhat lazy city fellow, highly educated but ignorant of country ways.3 Beyond the juxtaposition of civilization and barbarism, however, Borges also mirrors Sarmiento's text by choosing sea, desert, and Old Testament imagery to describe the plains of Buenos Aires province. When the Salado River overflows its banks, we read that Espinosa pens? [en] la met?fora que equipara la pampa con el (129). The opening chapter of Facundo contains just such an image: [la pampa] es la im?jen del mar en la tierra; aguardando todav?a que se le mande producir las plantas i toda clase de simiente (27) .4 Sarmiento alludes further to the Bible when he compares the pampa to a Middle Eastern desert: ... hai algo en las soledades argentinas que trae a la memoria las soledades asi?ticas; alguna analoj?a encuentra el esp?ritu entre la pampa i las llanuras que median entre el Tigris i el E?frates (30). According to Sarmiento, wary travellers who cross the desolate plain in solitary caravans headed for Buenos Aires could just as well be Bedouins on their way to Baghdad, or its ancient counterpart,
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it