A Reader on Reading

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.