A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

Faking it
The lesson of the master

“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave. “I didn’t write it, and

they can’t prove that I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”

“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the

matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d

have signed your name like an honest man.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12

ON 29 OCTOBER 1932, THE Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica printed the following announcement in the abominable style to which its readers were accustomed:

“Crítica will publish the most thrilling detective novel. Its plot is based on events that took place in Buenos Aires. From a real-life occurrence that some time ago deeply shook the public of this city, the author has constructed a moving story in which the mystery becomes denser and denser with every page of El enigma de la calle Arcos [The Riddle of Arcos Street]. Who killed the wife of Galván, the chess player? Or was it a strange form of suicide? How did the criminal vanish after committing the deed? How did the criminal leave the victim’s room without forcing a single lock? The pilgrimage of a chestful of jewelry. Beginning tomorrow, Sunday, in all our editions.”

The success of the serial, which appeared under the impossible name of Sauli Lostal, led to its publication in book form a year later. On 4 November 1933, an advertisement in the same paper announced that El enigma de la calle Arcos was now available for sale. “The first great Argentinean detective novel. It stands apart completely from the old models of the genre, grisly and lacking verisimilitude. Full of emotion and realism, of spine-tingling and interest, it is a true accomplishment. A thick volume with illustrations. And only 95 cents.” The book, published by the Am-Bass press, numbered 245 pages. The illustrator was Pedro Rojas, whose style, to judge from the cover, matched that of the writing.

It is very difficult to give an English-speaking reader a sense of the atrocious style. Let me try:

Moments later in the chamber adjacent to the guards’ office, Oscar Lara and Suárez Lerma—the latter enjoying still a few sips of mate — were conversing about the motive that had led there, on such an unsettled night, the journalist. It did not take long for the assistant to convey to him the facts that the other was jotting down with special care. They had just finished this task when the tinkle of the telephone bell was heard. The assistant Lara approached the instrument, unhooked the receiver, pressed it against his ear and between the police official and the person who had called there commenced the following dialogue, later reconstructed by the speakers themselves.

Thirty years after the appearance of the novel, in the magazine Filología, the critic Enrique Anderson Imbert published an article titled “A New Contribution to the Study of Borges’s Sources.” In it, Anderson Imbert suggested that Borges had used El enigma de la calle Arcos as the model for his “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (The Approach to al-Mu’tasim”), a fiction that purports to be the review of a detective novel of that name, written by the Indian lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali. According to Borges, the illustrated original was published in Bombay in 1932 and reprinted by Victor Gollancz in London two years later, with an introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission (“perhaps charitable” says Borges) of the illustrations.

Borges’s “El acercamiento a Almotásim” appeared for the first time not in a periodical (as did most of his pieces) but in a collection of essays, Historia de la eternidad (History of Eternity, 1936). The fact that it was published in a volume of nonfiction, in an appendix that carried the sober title “Two Notes” (the second “note” being an essay on “the art of insulting”), suggested to its first readers that Mir Bahadur Ali was a real person and that his book (under the respectable imprint of Gollancz) was available for purchase. Intrigued by Borges’s enthusiastic review, his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares ordered a copy from London. Unsuccessfully.

Borges’s text was to undergo at least two more incarnations. In 1941, he included “El acercamiento a Almotásim,” this time obviously as a fiction, in his collection of short stories El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). Three years later he included the whole of El jardín as the first section of what is perhaps his most famous volume, Ficciones; the second was called “Artificios” and comprised half a dozen new stories. Just to complicate things, in recent editions of Borges’s books (the Alianza edition, for instance), “El acercamiento a Almotásim” was excised from Ficciones and returned to its place in Historia de la eternidad.

On 13 July 1997, in an article published in the literary section of La Nación of Buenos Aires, the Argentinean short-story writer Juan Jacobo Bajarlía attempted to better Anderson Imbert’s guesswork and suggested that not only was El enigma de la calle Arcos known to Borges but that the master himself had written it. According to Bajarlía, the writer Ulises Petit de Murat (a friend of Borges’s in his youth) had revealed to him, in confidence, that Borges was the author of that forgotten detective novel, which, Murat told Bajarlía, Borges “had composed directly on the typewriter, allotting to it a couple of hours a day.”

One month later (17 August), the novelist Fernando Sorrentino published, also in La Nación, an answer to Bajarlía. Courteously, implacably, definitively, Sorrentino demonstrates the impossibility of such authorship. Offering factual, mechanical, ethical, and stylistic reasons, Sorrentino demolishes Bajarlía’s arguments. First, Borges never learned to type. Second, Borges never wrote a novel, a genre he many times dismissed, at least as far as his own talents were concerned. (“To imagine the plot of a novel is delectable,” he once said. “To actually write it out is an exaggeration.”) Third (and this is perhaps Sorrentino’s strongest point), the novel’s turgid style and infamous use of the Spanish language is so far removed from Borges’s careful prose styles (whether the intricate voice of his baroque period in the twenties and thirties or the sparer voice of later years) that it is impossible to imagine one man capable of both. “I believe that no one can write utterly in a style that is not his own,” Sorrentino reasonably argues. “Even someone proposing the most outrageous parody will end up, sooner or later, showing his own style between the paragraphs he concocts.” And he reminds us that, even on those rare occasions when Borges introduces an alien voice in his writing (as when he attributes an atrocious poem to his rival in the short story “The Aleph”), Borges’s own intelligence, humor, and subtle vocabulary shine through the execrable verses. For Sorrentino, there is no such thing as the perfect literary disguise.

Here we could add that Borges had an uncanny ear for ugly prose, and he mocked it mercilessly. Because of his prodigious memory, he could recite long snatches of horrible verse by writers famous and little known, and he parodied their speech (as Sorrentino points out) in several of his writings. One comic story, written with Bioy, “El Testigo” (The Witness), in which the two authors parody the worst of Argentinean speech, has as its epigraph Isaiah 6:5, without spelling out the quotation. I looked it up. It says, “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” Such literary consciousness is never present in El enigma de la calle Arcos.

Sorrentino ends with one final fact, devastating for Bajarlía’s argument: the identity of the obviously pseudonymous “Sauli Lostal.” On 27 February 1997, a certain Tomás E. Giordano published a letter in the newspaper Clarín of Buenos Aires, stating that after seeing an advertisement for a new edition of El enigma de la calle Arcos “by an author whose real identity remains unknown,” he felt compelled to clarify the mystery. According to Giordano, Sauli Lostal was the anagram of Luis Stallo, a gentleman with whom his father had established a brief commercial acquaintance, and who was not a man of letters but a businessman, a fairly cultured Italian who had settled in Argentina after traveling the world. “His restless spirit,” wrote Giordano, “strengthened by a relentless dedication to reading, compelled him to take part in 1933 in a contest organized by the then popular evening paper Crítica, in which readers were asked to find a more ingenious outcome for the novel Le Mystère de la chambre jaune [The Mystery of the Yellow Chamber] by Gaston Leroux, whose ending the newspaper found somewhat disappointing.” The result was El enigma de la calle Arcos. An investigation of the Buenos Aires phonebooks for 1928, 1930, 1931, and 1932 revealed the existence of a Luis A. Stallo living in the city during those years. In spite of these incontrovertible facts, the attribution of El enigma de la calle Arcos to Borges persists. Even Nicolás Heft’s otherwise impeccable Bibliografía completa of Borges, published in 1997 by Fondo de Cultura Económica, retains the attribution in its later editions.

El enigma de la calle Arcos is the most notorious but certainly not the only execrable text attributed to Borges. In 1984, for instance, the prestigious Italian magazine Nuovi argomenti, edited by Alberto Moravia, Leonardo Sciascia, and Enzo Siciliano (three of the most distinguished names of the Italian literary scene), published a story, “El misterio de la cruz” (The Mystery of the Cross), attributed to Borges. The accompanying letter said that the story had been written in 1934 and translated by the superb writer and translator Franco Lucentini, and that permission had been granted to publish it by Borges himself and by one of his Italian publishers, Franco María Ricci. In an open letter to the newspaper La Stampa of Turin, Lucentini denied ever translating the story, which, he said, not only does not resemble anything by Borges but also “seems to have been written by a semi-illiterate person.”

In 1989, the Mexican magazine Plural, founded by the poet Octavio Paz, published a poem entitled “Instantes” (Moments) supposedly written by Borges the year of his death. It was preceded by an unctuous commentary by a certain Mauricio Ciechanower, who noted that the piece was “pregnant with a masterly power of synthesis.” The poem is an idiotic feel-good meditation that would not be out of place on a Hallmark greeting card. It reads (in a literal and, in my mind, generous translation):

If I could live my life over again

I would try to make more mistakes in the next one.

I would not try to be so perfect,

I’d relax more.

I’d be more of a fool than

I’ve been, in fact I’d take very few things seriously.

I’d be less hygienic.

I’d run more risks, I’d travel more, I’d watch

More sunsets, I’d climb more mountains, I’d swim more rivers.

I’d go to more places where I’ve never been, I’d eat

More ice cream and less beans, I’d have more real problems

And fewer imaginary ones.

I was one of those people who lived sensibly and prolifically

Every moment of his life; of course I had moments of happiness.

But if I could go back I’d try to have

Only good moments.

In case you don’t know, that is what life is made of, only moments;

Don’t miss out on the present moment.

I was one of those who never go anywhere without a thermometer,

A hot-water bottle, an umbrella and a parachute;

If I could live again, I’d travel lighter.

If I could live again, I’d start to walk barefoot at the beginning

Of spring and carry on like that until autumn.

I’d take more rides on the merry-go-round, I’d watch more sunsets

And I’d play with more children, if I had another life in front of me.

But I’m 85 years old and I know I’m dying.

Three years later, a new translation of these verses, by Alastair Reid, who had previously made excellent translations of several pieces by Borges, appeared in the Queen’s Quarterly. No one objected.

Then, on 9 May 1999, the critic Francisco Peregil published in the newspaper El País of Madrid the following revelation: “The real author of the apocryphal poem is an unknown American writer called Nadine Stair who published it in 1978, eight years before Borges died in Geneva, when she was 86.” The text (as a piece of turgid poetic prose) appeared in the periodical Family Circus of Louisville, Kentucky, on 27 March 1978 and has since appeared, in a number of different versions, in all sorts of different places, from the Reader’s Digest to printed T-shirts.

No doubt since the beginnings of literature, all manner of writings have been attributed to famous writers for a variety of reasons: as an honest intent to restore the paternity of a text, as a dishonest intent to lend it prestige, as a sly device to lend fame to the text’s attributor. Borges himself, in one of his most celebrated stories, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” adds (ironically, of course) a further possibility to this list of intentions: to lend new life to a text, that is to say, a fresh reading, by considering it in a different and unexpected context. “To attribute The Imitation of Christ to Louis-Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce,” Borges asks at the conclusion of the story, “is that not enough of a renewal for these tenuous spiritual admonitions?”

I am not certain that this is what the false attributors had in mind when they decided to blame Borges for El enigma de la calle Arcos or Nadine Stair’s poem. In any case, whatever his accusers’ intentions, Borges’s suggestion merits exploration, since it may lend to the notion of “fake” a positive connotation that we usually deny it.

On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges left his house to fetch his friend Emma Risso Platero. He had invited her to dinner and was bringing her a present, no doubt a book. Since the elevator was not working, he ran up the stairs, not noticing that one of the freshly painted casement windows had been left open. He felt something graze his forehead, but didn’t stop to investigate. When Rissa Platero opened the door, Borges realized, because of the look of horror on her face, that something was seriously wrong. He touched his forehead: it was bathed in blood. In spite of first-aid treatment, the wound became infected, and for a week he lay in bed, suffering from hallucinations and high fever. One night, he found he wasn’t able to speak: he was rushed to the hospital for an immediate operation, but septicemia had set in. For a month, the doctors thought that he might die. In his autobiography, dictated in English, Borges himself described the events, which later served as the basis for a short story, “The South.” He writes: “When I began to recover, I feared for my mental integrity. I remember that my mother wanted to read to me from a book that I had just ordered, C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, but for two or three nights I kept putting her off. At last, she prevailed, and after hearing a page or two I fell to crying. My mother asked me why the tears. ’I’m crying because I understand,’ I said. A bit later, I wondered whether I could ever write again. I had previously written quite a few poems and dozens of short reviews. I thought that if I tried to write a review now and failed, I’d be all through intellectually but that if I tried something I had never really done before and failed at that it wouldn’t be so bad and might even prepare me for the final revelation. I decided I would write a story. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.”

“Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” appeared in the issue of the magazine Sur of September 1939. In this story, which appeared in the guise of a memoir contributed to a Pierre Menard Festschrift of sorts, Borges describes the apocryphal Menard’s attempt to write Don Quixote again: not to copy it, not to effect a pastiche. “His admirable ambition,” Borges writes, “was to produce a few pages that would coincide—word by word and line by line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” The story was hugely successful. One literary gentleman friend congratulated him but remarked that the effort was somewhat useless, since any truly cultivated reader would know all those facts about Menard.

Borges’s strategy is double-edged. On the one hand, he suggests (playfully, no doubt) that authorship is a casual, haphazard thing and that, given the right time and place, any writer might be the author of any text. The epigraph of his first book of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, written when he was not quite twenty-four years old, already announces: “If the pages of this book deign to consent one happy verse, may the reader forgive me the discourtesy of having been the first to claim it. Our nothings barely differ; it is a trivial and fortuitous circumstance that you are the reader of these exercises, and I their writer.”

On the other hand, Borges suggests, it is the reader who determines the nature of a text through, among other things, attribution. The same text read as penned by one writer changes when read as penned by another. Don Quixote written by Cervantes (cultured seventeenth-century scholar) is not that same Don Quixote written by Menard (contemporary of William James). El enigma de la calle Arcos attributed to Sauli Lostal is not El enigma de la calle Arcos attributed to Borges. No book is entirely innocent of connotations, and every reader reads not only the words on the page but the endless contextual waves that accompany his or her very existence. From such a point of view there are no “fakes,” merely different books which happen to share an identical text.

Borges’s own writings are full of such redemptive fakes. Among them, there are:

· Writers such as the already mentioned Mir Bahadur Ali and Pierre Menard, and others, such as the English eccentric Herbert Quain, author of infinite fictional variations of one ur-novel.

· Adulterated versions of scholarly sources, as in the “translations” collected in various volumes under Borges’s name. Here it may be useful to note that Borges’s first attempts at fiction were imitations of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, brief biographies which he wrote for the Revista multicolor de los sábados from 1933 on, and then collected two years later as A Universal History of Infamy. In these short texts, both sources and quotations used by Borges were transformed by him through interpretation and in translation. When the unspeakable Andrew Hurley translated A Universal History of Infamy in the abominable Viking edition of 1998, he attempted to “restore” the texts with ridiculous results. “I have used the English of the original source,” says Hurley. “Thus, the New York gangsters in ’Monk Eastman’ “ (one of the stories) “speak as Asbury quotes them, not as I might have translated Borges’ Spanish into English had I been translating in the usual sense of the word; back-translating Borges’ translation did not seem to make much sense.” Thus runs Hurley’s confession of ineptitude. Hurley obviously ignores that Borges called these stories “exercises in narrative prose.”

· Imaginary books carefully annotated, as in various sources given in his stories and essays, or quoted from, such as the unforgettable Chinese encyclopedia which imperturbably divides animals into “(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) those that are domesticated, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous beasts, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a vase, (n) those that from a distance look like flies.” And, of course, such mythical fake creations as the parallel universe of Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and the Library of Babel.

And yet, all these fictions are never gratuitous: they are necessary inventions, filling in gaps that the history of literature neglected to fill. The Chinese encyclopedia quotation provided Michel Foucault with the starting point for Les Mots et les choses. “The Library of Babel” (and Borges himself, under the name Juan de Burgos) needed to exist before Umberto Eco was able to write The Name of the Rose. Herbert Quain is the required precedent for oulipo. Menard is the obvious link between Laurence Sterne and James Joyce, and it is not Borges’s fault that France forgot to give him birth. We should be thankful to Borges for remedying such acts of carelessness.

Fake, then, in Borges’s universe, is not a sin against creation. It is implied in the act of creation itself and, whether openly recognized or adroitly concealed, it takes place every time a suspension of disbelief is demanded. “In the beginning was the Word” asks us to believe not only that “the Word was with God” but that “the Word was God,” that Don Quixote is not only the words read by Menard, but that he is also their author.

Life, which so many times provides us with fake representations, provided Borges himself with a perfect simulacrum of a Borgesian fictional device in which the reader imbues a certain text with the required perfection of an all-encompassing answer.

In April 1976, the second world convention of Shakespearean scholars met in Washington, D.C. The high point of the congress was to be a lecture on Shakespeare by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Riddle of Shakespeare,” and thousands of scholars fought like rock-band groupies for the privilege of occupying one of the seats in the largest hall available at the Hilton Hotel. Among the attendants was the theater director Jan Kott, who, like the others, struggled to get a seat from which to hear the master reveal the answer to the riddle. Two men helped Borges to the podium and positioned him in front of the microphone. Kott describes the scene in The Essence of Theatre:

Everyone in the hall stood up, the ovation lasted many minutes. Borges did not move. Finally the clapping stopped. Borges started moving his lips. Only a vague humming noise was heard from the speakers. From this monotonous humming one could distinguish only with the greatest pains a single word which kept returning like a repeated cry from a faraway ship, drowned out by the sea: “Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare …” The microphone was placed too high. But no one in the room had the courage to walk up and lower the microphone in front of the old blind writer. Borges spoke for an hour, and for an hour only this one repeated word — Shakespeare—would reach the listeners. During this hour no one got up or left the room. After Borges finished, everyone got up and it seemed that this final ovation would never end.

No doubt Kott, like the other listeners, lent the inaudible text his own reading and heard in the repeated word—“Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shake-speare”—the answer to the riddle. Perhaps there was nothing else to say. With a little help from ailing technology, the master faker had achieved his purpose. He had turned his own text into a resonant fake composed by an audience full of Pierre Menards.