A Reader on Reading

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.