Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 5

Group research projects produce conflicting finds; now individual, virtually spur-of-the-moment projects are preferred. The systematic production ofhronir(says Volume Eleven) has been of invaluable aid to archaeologists, making it pos- sible not only to interrogate but even to modify the past, which is now noless plastic, no less malleable than the future. A curious bit of information:hronirof the second and third remove-hronirderived from anotherhron,andhronirderived from thehronofahron-exaggerate the aberrations of the first; those of the fifth remove are almost identical; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh remove exhibit a purity of line that even the originals do not exhibit. The process is periodic: Thehronirof the twelfth remove begin to degenerate.

Sometimes stranger and purer than anyhronis theur -the thing produced by sugges- tion, the object brought forth by hope. The magnificent gold mask I men- tioned is a distinguished example.

Things duplicate themselves onTlon;they also tend to grow vague or "sketchy," and to lose detail when they begin to be forgotten. The cla.s.sic ex- ample is the doorway that continued to exist so long as a certain beggar fre- quented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

SaltoOriental, 1940

POSTSCRIPT----1947.

I reproduce the article above exactly as it appeared in theAnthology of Fan- tastic Literature (1940), the only changes being editorial cuts of one or an- other metaphor and a tongue-in-cheek sort of summary that would now beconsidered flippant. So many things have happened since 1940-----Allowme to recall some of them:

In March of 1941, a handwritten letter from Gunnar Erfjord was discov- ered in a book by Hinton that had belonged to Herbert Ashe. The envelope was postmarkedOuro Preto;the mystery ofTlon wasfully elucidated by the letter. It confirmed Martinez Estrada's hypothesis: The splendid story had begun sometime in the early seventeenth century, one night in Lucerne or London. A secret benevolent society (which numbered among its mem- bers Dalgarno and, later, George Berkeley) was born; its mission: to invent a country. In its vague initial program, there figured "hermetic studies," phi- lanthropy, and the Kabbalah. (The curious book by Valentinus Andrea dates from that early period.) After several years of confabulations and premature collaborative drafts, the members of the society realized that one generation would not suffice for creating and giving full expression to a country. They decided that each of the masters that belonged to the society would select a disciple to carry on the work. That hereditary arrangement was followed;after an interim of two hundred years, the persecuted fraternity turned up again in the New World. In 1824, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the mem- bers had a conversation withthe reclusive millionaire Ezra Buckley. Buck- ley, somewhat contemptuously, let the man talk-and then laughed at the modesty of the project. He told the man that in America it was nonsense to invent a country-what they ought to do was invent a planet. To that giant of an idea he added another, the brainchild of his nihilism5 'Buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist, and a defender of slavery: The enormous enterprise must be kept secret. At that time the twenty volumes of theEncyclopdia Britannicawere all the rage; Buckley suggested a systematic ency- clopedia of the illusory planet. He would bequeath to them his gold-veined mountains, his navigable rivers, his prairies thundering with bulls and buf- falo, his Negroes, his brothels, and his dollars, he said, under one condition: "The work shall make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ." Buckley did not believe in G.o.d, yet he wanted to prove to the nonexistent G.o.d that mortals could conceive and shape a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge in 1828; in 1914 the society sent its members (now numbering three hundred) the final volume of theFirst EncydopdiaofTlon.It was pub- lished secretly: the forty volumes that made up the work (the grandest work of letters ever undertaken by humankind) were to be the basis for another, yet more painstaking work, to be written this time not in English but in one of the languages ofTlon.That survey of an illusory world was tentatively ti- tledOrbis Tertius, and one of its modest demiurges was Herbert Ashe- whether as agent or colleague of Gunnar Erfjord, I cannot say. His receipt of a copy of Volume Eleven seems to favor the second possibility. But what about the others? In 1942, the plot thickened. I recall with singular clarity one of the first events that occurred, something of whose premonitory na- ture I believe I sensed even then. It took place in an apartment on Laprida, across the street from a high, bright balcony that faced the setting sun. Princess FaucignyLucingehad received from Poitiers a crate containing her silver table service. From the vast innards of a packing case emblazoned with international customs stamps she removed, one by one, the fine un-moving things: plate from Utrecht and Paris chased with hard heraldic fauna,..., a samovar. Among the pieces, trembling softly but perceptibly, like a sleeping bird, there throbbed, mysteriously, a compa.s.s. The princess did not recognize it. Its blue needle yearned toward magnetic north; its metal casing was concave; the letters on its dial belonged to one of thealphabets ofTlon.That was the first intrusion of the fantastic world ofTloninto the real world.

An unsettling coincidence made me a witness to the second intrusion as well. This event took place some months later, in a sort of a country general-store-and-bar owned by a Brazilian man in theCuchilla Negra.Amorim* and I were returning fromSant'Anna.There was a freshet on theTacuarembo;as there was no way to cross, we were forced to try (to try to endure, that is) the rudimentary hospitality at hand.

The storekeeper set up some creaking cots for us in a large storeroom clumsy with barrels and stacks of leather. We lay down, but we were kept awake until almost dawn by the drunkenness of an unseen neighbor, who swung between indeci- pherable streams of abuse and loudly sung s.n.a.t.c.hes ofmilongas- or s.n.a.t.c.hes of the samemilonga,actually. As one can imagine, we attributed the man's insistent carrying-on to the storekeeper's fieryrotgut.... By shortly after daybreak, the man was dead in the hallway. The hoa.r.s.eness of his voice had misled us-he was a young man. In his delirium, several coins had slipped from his widegauchobelt, as had a gleaming metal cone about a die's width in diameter. A little boy tried to pick the cone-shaped object up, but in vain; a full-grown man could hardly do it. I held it for a few min- utes in the palm of my hand; I recall that its weight was unbearable, and that even after someone took it from me, the sensation of terrible heaviness endured. I also recall the neat circle it engraved in my flesh. That evidence of a very small yet extremely heavy object left an unpleasant aftertaste of fear and revulsion.Apaisanosuggested that we throw it in the swollen river. Amorim purchased it for a few pesos. No one knew anything about the dead man, except that "he came from the border." Those small, incredibly heavy cones (made of a metal not of this world) are an image of the deity in certainTlonianreligions.

Here I end the personal portion of my narration. The rest lies in every reader's memory (if not his hope or fear). Let it suffice to recall, or mention, the subsequent events, with a simple brevity of words which the general public's concave memory will enrich or expand: In 1944, an investigator fromThe Nashville American unearthed the forty volumes ofThe First Encyclopaedia ofTlonina Memphis library. To this day there is some disagreement as to whether that discovery was acci- dental or consented to and guided by the directors of the still-nebulousOrbisTertius;the second supposition is entirely plausible. Some of the unbelievable features of Volume Eleven (the multiplication ofhronir,for example) have been eliminated or muted in the Memphis copy. It seemsreasonable to suppose that the cuts obey the intent to set forth a world that is nottoo incompatible with the real world. The spread ofTlonian.o.bjects through various countries would complement that plan... .

6.

6.

There is still, of course, the problem of thematerial from which some objects are made.

At any rate, the international press made a great hue and cry about this "find." Hand- books, anthologies, surveys, "literal translations," authorized and pirated reprints of Mankind's Greatest Masterpiece filled the world, and still do. Al- most immediately, reality "caved in" at more than one point. The truth is, it wanted to cave in. Ten years ago, any symmetry, any system with an ap- pearance of order-dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, n.a.z.ism-could spellbind and hypnotize mankind. How could the world not fall under the sway ofTlon,how could it not yield to the vast and minutely detailed evi- dence of an ordered planet? It would be futile to reply that reality is also or- derly. Perhaps it is, but orderly in accordance with divine laws (read: "inhuman laws") that we can never quite manage to penetrate.Tlonmay well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

Contact withTlon,thehabit ofTlon,has disintegrated this world. Spellbound byTlon'srigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to for- get, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels. AlreadyTlon's(con- jectural) "primitive language" has filtered into our schools; already the teaching ofTlon'sharmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has obliterated the history that governed my own childhood; already a fict.i.tious past has supplanted in men's memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain -not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacol- ogy, and archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics are also awaiting their next avatar.... A scattered dynasty of recluses has changed the face of the earth-and their work continues. If my projections are correct, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes ofThe Second Encyclopcedia ofTlon.

At that, French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the earth. The world will beTlon.That makes very little difference to me; through my quiet days in this hotel inAdrogue,I go on revising (though I never intend to publish) an indecisive translation in the style of Quevedo of Sir Thomas Browne'sUrne Buriall.

The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim

Philip Guedalla writes that the novelThe Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, by the Bombay attorney Mir BahadurAli,is "a rather uncomfortable amalgam of one of those Islamic allegorical poems that seldom fail to interest their translator and one of those detective novels that inevitably surpa.s.s John H. Watson's and perfect the horror of life in the most irreproachable rooming-houses of Brighton." Earlier, Mr. Cecil Roberts had detected in Bahadur's book "the dual, and implausible, influence of Wilkie Collins and the ill.u.s.tri- ous twelfth-century Persian poetFarid al-dinAttar"; the none-too-original Guedalla repeats this calm observation, though in choleric accents. In essence, the two critics concur: both point out the detective mechanism of the novel and both speak of its mystical undercurrents. That hybridity may inspire us to imagine some similarity to Chesterton; we shall soon discover that no such similarity exists.

The first edition ofThe Approach to Al-Mu'tasim appeared in Bombay in late 1932. Its paper was virtually newsprint; its cover announced to the buyer that this was "the first detective novel written by a native of Bombay City." Within months, readers had bought out four printings of a thousand copies each.

TheBombay Quarterly Review, theBombay Gazette, theCal- cutta Review, theHindustan Review of Allahabad, and theCalcutta English- man rained dithyrambs upon it. It was then that Bahadur published an ill.u.s.trated edition he t.i.tledThe Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim and coyly subt.i.tledA Game with s.h.i.+fting Mirrors. That edition has just been reprinted in London by Victor Gollancz with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers, but with the (perhaps merciful) omission of the ill.u.s.tra- tions. I have that book before me; I have not been able to come upon the first, which I suspect is greatly superior. I amsupported in this conclus...o...b.. an appendix that details the fundamental difference between the origi- nal, 1932, version and the edition of 1934. Before examining the work (and discussing it), I think it would be a good idea to give a brief general outline of the novel.

Its visible protagonist, whose name we are never told, is a law student in Bombay. In the most blasphemous way he has renounced the Islamic faith of his parents, but as the tenth night of the moon of Muharram wanes he finds himself at the center of a riot, a street battle between Muslims and Hindus. It is a night of tambours and invocations; through the inimical mult.i.tude, the great paper baldachins of the Muslim procession make their way. A Hindu brick flies from a rooftop nearby; someone buries a dagger in a belly; someone-a Muslim? a Hindu?-dies and is trampled underfoot. Three thousand men do battle-cane against revolver, obscenity against imprecation, G.o.d the indivisible against the G.o.ds. In a sort of daze, the free-thinking law student enters the fray. With desperate hands, he kills (or thinks he has killed) a Hindu. Thundering, horse-borne, half asleep, the Sirkar police intervene with impartial lashes of their crops. Virtually under the hooves of the horses, the student makes his escape, fleeing toward the outermost suburbs of the city. He crosses two railroad tracks, or twice crosses the same track. He scales the wall of an unkempt garden, which has a circular tower toward the rear. A "lean and evil mob of moon-coloured hounds" emerges from the black rosebushes. Fearing for his life, the law stu- dent seeks refuge in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder-some rungs are missing-and on the flat roof, which has a pitch-black hole in the center, he comes upon a filthy man squatting in the moonlight, pouring forth a vigor- ous stream of urine. This man confides to the law student that it is his pro- fession to steal the gold teeth from the cadavers theFa.r.s.eesbring, swaddled in white, to that tower. He makes several further gruesome remarks and then he mentions that it has been fourteen nights since he purified himself with ox dung. He speaks with obvious anger about certainGujaratihorse thieves, "eaters of dog meat and lizard meat-men, in a word, as vile as you and I." The sky is growing light; there is a lowering circle of fat vultures in the air. The law student, exhausted, falls asleep; when he awakens, the sun now high, the thief has disappeared. A couple of cigarettes from Trichinopolis have also disappeared, as have a few silver rupees. In the face of the menace that looms from the previous night, the law student decides to lose himself in India. He reflects that he has shown himself capable of killing an idolater, yet incapable of knowing with any certainty whether the Muslim possesses more of truth than the idolater does. The name Gujarat has remained withhim, as has that of amalka-sansi (a woman of the caste of thieves) inPalan-pur,a woman favored by the imprecations and hatred of the corpse-robber. The law student reasons that the wrath and hatred of a man so thoroughly despicable is the equivalent of a hymn of praise. He resolves, therefore, though with little hope, to find this woman. He performs his prayers, and then he sets out, with sure, slow steps, on the long path. That brings the reader to the end of the second

chapter of the book.

It would be impossible to trace the adventures of the remaining nine- teen chapters. There is a dizzying pullulation ofdramatis personae -not to mention a biography that seems to catalog every motion of the human spirit (from iniquity to mathematical speculation) and a pilgrimage that covers the vast geography of Hindustan. The story begun in Bombay con- tinues in the lowlands of Palanpur, pauses for a night and a day at the stone gate of Bikanir, narrates the death of a blind astrologer in a cesspool in Benares, conspires in the multiform palace at Katmandu, prays and forni- cates in the pestilential stench of the Machua bazaar in Calcutta, watches the day being born out of the sea from a scribe's stool in Madras, watches the evening decline into the sea from a balcony in the state of Travancor, gutters and dies in Hindapur, and closes its circle of leagues and years in Bombay again, a few steps from the garden of those "moon-coloured" hounds. The plot itself is this: A man (the unbelieving, fleeing law student we have met) falls among people of the lowest, vilest sort and accommo- dates himself to them, in a kind of contest of iniquity. Suddenly-with the miraculous shock of Crusoe when he sees that human footprint in the sand-the law student perceives some mitigation of the evil: a moment of tenderness, of exaltation, of silence, in one of the abominable men. "It was as though a more complex interlocutor had spoken." He knows that the wretch with whom he is conversing is incapable of that momentary de- cency; thus the law student hypothesizes that the vile man before him has reflected a friend, or the friend of a friend.

Rethinking the problem, he comes to a mysterious conclusion:Somewhere in the world there is a manfrom whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates; somewhere in the world there is a man who is equal to this brightness. The law student resolves to de- vote his life to searching out that man.

Thus we begin to see the book's general scheme: The insatiable search for a soul by means of the delicate glimmerings or reflections this soul has left in others-at first, the faint trace of a smile or a word; toward the last, the varied and growing splendors of intelligence, imagination, and good- ness. The more closely the men interrogated by the law student have knownAl-Mu'tasim, the greater is their portion of divinity, but the reader knows that they themselves are but mirrors. A technical mathematical formula is applicable here: Bahadur's heavily freighted novel is an ascending progres- sion whose final term is the sensed or foreapprehended "man called Al-Mu'tasim." The person immediately preceding Al-Mu'tasim is a Persian bookseller of great courtesy and felicity; the man preceding the bookseller is a saint-----After all those years, the law student comes to a gallery "at theend of which there is a doorway and a tawdry curtain of many beads, and behind that, a glowing light." The law student claps his hands once, twice, and calls out for Al-Mu'tasim. A man's voice-the incredible voice of Al-Mu'tasim -bids the law student enter. The law student draws back the bead curtain and steps into the room. At that point, the novel ends.

I believe I am correct in saying that if an author is to pull off such a plot, he is under two obligations: First, he must invent a variety of prophetic signs; second, he must not allow the hero prefigured by those signs to be- come a mere phantasm or convention. Bahadur meets the first obligation; I am not sure to what extent he meets the second. In other words: The un- heard and unseen Al-Mu'tasim should impress us as being a real person, not some jumble of vapid superlatives. In the 1932 version of the novel, the supernatural notes are few and far between; "the man called Al-Mu'tasim" has his touch of symbolism, but he possesses idiosyncratic personal traits as well. Unfortunately, that commendable literary practice was not to be fol- lowed in the second edition. In the 1934 version-the edition I have before me even now-the novel sinks into allegory: Al-Mu'tasim is an emblem of G.o.d, and the detailed itineraries of the hero are somehow the progress of the soul in its ascent to mystical plenitude. There are distressing details: A black Jew from Cochin, describing Al-Mu'tasim, says that his skin is dark; a Christian says that he stands upon a tower with his arms outspread; a red lama recalls him as seated "like that image which I carved from yak ghee and wors.h.i.+pped in the monastery at Tas.h.i.+lhumpo." Those declarations are an attempt to suggest a single, unitary G.o.d who molds Himself to the dis- similarities of humankind. In my view, that notion is not particularly excit- ing. I cannot say the same for another idea, however: the idea that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone, in search of a yet superior (or perhaps simply necessary, albeit equal) Someone, and so on, to the End-or better yet, the Endlessness -of Time. Or perhaps cyclically. The etymological meaning of "Al-Mu'tasim" (the name of that eighth Ab-basid king who won eight battles, engendered eight sons and eight daugh- ters, left eight thousand slaves, and reigned for a period of eight years, eightmoons, and eight days) is "He who goes in quest of aid." In the 1932 version of the novel, the fact that the object of the pilgrimage was himself a pilgrim cleverly justified the difficulty of finding Al-Mu'tasim; in the 1934 edition, that fact leads to the extravagant theology I have described. Mir BahadurAli, aswe have seen, is incapable of resisting that basest of art's temptations: the temptation to be a genius.

I reread what I have just written and I fear I have not made sufficiently explicit the virtues of this book. It has some quite civilized features; for ex- ample, that argument in Chapter XIX in which the law student (and the reader) sense that one of the partic.i.p.ants in the debate is a friend of Al-Mu'tasim-the man does not rebut another man's sophisms "in order not to gloat at the other man's defeat."

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce'sUlysses and Homer'sOdyssey continue to at- tract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of crit- ics. The points of congruence between Bahadur's novel andFarid al-dinAttar's cla.s.sicConference of the Birds meet with the no less mysterious praise of London, and even of Allahabad and Calcutta. There are other debts, as well. One investigator has doc.u.mented certain a.n.a.logies between the first scene of the novel and Kipling's story "On the City Wall"; Bahadur ac- knowledges these echoes, but claims that it would be most unusual if twoportraits of the tenth night of Muharram shouldnoiagree.... With greater justice, Eliot recalls that never once in the seventy cantos of Spenser's unfin- ished allegoryThe Faerie Queene does the heroine Gloriana appear-an omission for which Richard William Church had criticized the work. I my- self, in all humility, would point out a distant, possible precursor: the Kab-balist Isaac Luria, who in Jerusalem, in the sixteenth century, revealed that the soul of an ancestor or teacher may enter into the soul of an unhappy or unfortunate man, to comfort or instruct him. That type of metempsychosis is calledibbur.1 'In the course of this article, I have referred to theManttq al-tatr, orConference [perhaps "Parliament"] of the Birds, by the Persian mystic poetFarid al-din AbiHamid Muhammadben Ibrahim (known asAttr,or "perfumer"), who was murdered by the soldiers under Tuluy, the son of Genghis Khan, when Nishapur was sacked. Per- haps I should summarize that poem. One of the splendid feathers of the distant King of the Birds, theSimurgh,falls into the center of China; other birds, weary with the present state of anarchy, resolve to find this king. They know that the name of their king means "thirty birds"; they know that his palace is in the Mountains of Kaf, the mountains that encircle the earth.

The birds undertake the almost infinite adventure. They cross sevenwadis or seven seas; the penultimate of these is called Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims abandon the quest; others perish on the jour- ney. At the end, thirty birds, purified by their travails, come to the mountain on which the Simurgh lives, and they look upon their king at last: they see that they are the Sfmurgh and that theSimurghis each, and all, of them. (Plotinus, too, in the Enneads [V, 8, 4], remarks upon a paradisal extension of the principle of ident.i.ty: "Everything in the intelligible heavens is everywhere. Any thing is all things. The sun is all stars, and each star is all stars and the sun.") TheManttq al-tair has been translated into French by Garcinde Ta.s.sy,into English by Edward FitzGerald; for this note I have consulted Richard Burton's1001 Nights, Vol. X, and the Margaret Smith study ent.i.tledThe Persian Mystics: Attar (1932).

The parallels between this poem and Mir Bahadur Ali's novel are not overdone. In Chapter XX, a few words attributed by a Persian bookseller to Al-Mu'tasim are per- haps an expansion of words spoken by the hero; that and other ambiguous similarities may signal the ident.i.ty of the seeker and the sought; they may also signal that the sought has already influenced the seeker. Another chapter suggests that Al-Mu'tasim is the "Hindu" that the law student thinks he murdered.

Pierre Menard,Author of theQuixote For Silvina Ocampo

The visibleuvreleft by this novelist can be easily and briefly enumerated; unpardonable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated byMme.HenriBachelierin a deceitful catalog that a certain newspaper, whose Protestant leanings are surely no secret, has been so inconsiderate as to inflict upon that newspaper's deplorable readers-few andCalvinist(if not Ma- sonic and circ.u.mcised) though they be.

Menard's true friends have greeted that catalog with alarm, and even with a degree of sadness. One might note that only yesterday were we gathered before his marmoreal place of rest, among the dreary cypresses, and already Error is attempting to tarnish his bright Memory.... Most decidedly, a brief rectification is imperative.

I am aware that it is easy enough to call my own scant authority into question. I hope, nonetheless, that I shall not be prohibited from mention- ing two high testimonials. The baronessde Bacourt(at whose unforgettablevendredisI had the honor to meet the mourned-for poet) has been so kind as to approve the lines that follow. Likewise, the countessde Bagnoregio,one of the rarest and most cultured spirits of the princ.i.p.ality of Monaco (now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her recent marriage to the international philanthropist Simon Kautzsch-a man, it grieves me to say, vilified and slandered by the victims of his disinterested operations), has sacrificed "to truth and to death" (as she herself has phrased it) the n.o.ble re- serve that is the mark of her distinction, and in an open letter, published in the magazine Luxe, bestows upon me her blessing. Those commendations are sufficient, I should think.

I have said that thevisible product of Menard's pen is easily enumer- ated. Having examined his personal files with the greatest care, I have estab- lished that his body of work consists of the following pieces:

a)a symbolist sonnet that appeared twice (with variants) in the reviewLa Conque(in the numbers for March and October, 1899); b)a monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary from concepts that are neither synonyms nor periphrastic locutions for the concepts that inform common speech, "but are, rather, ideal objects created by convention essentially for the needs of poetry"(Nimes,1901);c) a monograph on "certain connections or affinities" between the philosophies of Descartes, Leibniz, and John Wilkins(Nimes,1903); d)a monograph onLeibniz'Characteristica universalis (Nimes,1904); e)atechnical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by eliminating one of the rook's p.a.w.ns (Menard proposes, recommends, de- bates, and finally rejects this innovation); f)a monograph on Ramon Lull'sArsmagna generalis(Nimes,1906); g)a translation, with introduction and notes, ofRuy Lopez de Segura'sLibro de lainvencion liberal y arte del jueG.o.delaxedrez(Paris, 1907); h)drafts of a monograph on George Boole's symbolic logic; i)astudy of the essential metrical rules of French prose, ill.u.s.trated with examples taken from Saint-Simon (Revuedes langues romanes,Montpellier,October 1909); j)areply to Luc Durtain (who had countered that no such rules ex- isted), ill.u.s.trated with examples taken from Luc Durtain(Revuedes langues romanes,Montpellier,December 1909); k)ama.n.u.script translation of Quevedo'sAguja de navegar cultos,t.i.tledLa boussole des precieux; l)a foreword to the catalog of an exhibit of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade(Nimes,1914); m)awork ent.i.tledLes problemes d'un probleme(Paris,1917), which dis- cusses in chronological order the solutions to the famous problem of Achilles and the tortoise (two editions of this work have so far appeared; the second bears an epigraph consisting of Leibniz' advice"Ne craignezpoint, monsieur,la tortue,"and brings up to date the chapters devoted to Russell and Descartes); n)a dogged a.n.a.lysis of the "syntactical habits" of Toulet(N.R.F., March 1921) (Menard, I recall, affirmed that censure and praise were sentimental operations that bore not the slightest resemblance to criticism); o)atransposition into alexandrines of PaulValery'sCimetiere marin(N.R.F.,January 1928); p)a diatribe against PaulValery,in Jacques Reboul'sFeuilles pourla suppressionde la realite(which diatribe, I might add parenthetically, statesthe exact reverse of Menard's true opinion ofValery; Valeryunderstood this, and the two men's friends.h.i.+p was never imperiled); q)a "definition" of the countessde Bagnoregio,in the "triumphant vol- ume" (the phrase is that of another contributor,Gabrieled'Annunzio)pub- lished each year by that lady to rectify the inevitable biases of the popular press and to present "to the world and all of Italy" a true picture of her per- son, which was so exposed (by reason of her beauty and her bearing) to er- roneous and/or hasty interpretations; r)a cycle of admirable sonnets dedicated to the baronessde Bacourt(1934); s)ahandwritten list of lines of poetry that owe their excellence to punctuation.

1.

'Mme.HenriBachelieralso lists a literal translation of Quevedo's literal transla- tion of St. FrancisdeSales'sIntroductiona la vie devote.In Pierre Menard's library there is no trace of such a work. This must be an instance of one of our friend's droll jokes, misheard or misunderstood

This is the full extent (save for a few vague sonnets of occasion destined forMme.Henri Bachelier's hospitable, or greedy,alb.u.mdessouvenirs)of thevisible lifework of Pierre Menard, in proper chronological order. I shall turn now to the other, the subterranean, the interminably heroic production- theuvrenonpareil,theuvrethat must remain-for such are our human limitations!-unfinished. This work, perhaps the most sig- nificant writing of our time, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I ofDon Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XXII. I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd; justifying that "absurdity" shall be the pri- mary object of this note.

2.

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I did, I might say, have the secondary purpose of drawing a small sketch of the figure of Pierre Menard-but how dare I compete with the gilded pages I am told the baronessdeBacourt is even now preparing, or with the delicate sharpcrayon of Carolus Hourcade?

Two texts, of distinctly unequal value, inspired the undertaking. One was that philological fragment byNovalis-number 2005 in the Dresden edition, to be precise-which outlines the notion oftotal identification with a given author. The other was one of those parasitic books that set Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet onLa Cannabiere, or donQuixote on Wall Street. Like every man of taste, Menardabominated those pointless travesties, which, Menard would say, were good for nothing but occasioning a plebeian de- light in anachronism or (worse yet) captivating us with the elementarynotion that all times and places are the same, or are different. It might be more interesting, he thought, though of contradictory and superficial exe- cution, to attempt whatDaudethad so famously suggested: conjoin in a single figure (Tartarin, say) both the Ingenious Gentleman don Quixote and his squire----- Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporaryQuixote besmirch his ill.u.s.trious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to composeanother Quixote, which surely is easy enough-he wanted to composethe Quixote. Nor, surely, need one have to say that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no inten- tion ofcopying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided-word for word and line for line-with those of MigueldeCervantes.

"My purpose is merely astonis.h.i.+ng," he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. "The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof-the world around us, or G.o.d, or chance, or universal Forms-is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole differ- ence is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the interme- diate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own." And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.

Initially, Menard's method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918-beMigueldeCervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote-that looked to Menard less challenging (and there- fore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixotethrough the experiences of Pierre Menard. (It was that convic- tion, by the way, that obliged him to leave out the autobiographical fore- word to Part II of the novel. Including the prologue would have meant creating another character-"Cervantes"-and also presenting Quixote through that character's eyes, not Pierre Menard's. Menard, of course, spurned that easy solution.) "The task I have undertaken is notin essence difficult," I read at another place in that letter. "If I could just be immortal, Icould do it."

Shall I confess that I often imagine that he did complete it, and that I read the Quixote-theentire Quixote-as if Menard had conceived it? A few nights ago, as I was leafing through Chapter XXVI (never at- tempted by Menard), I recognized our friend's style, could almost hear his voice in this marvelous phrase: "the nymphs of the rivers, the moist and grieving Echo." That wonderfully effective linking of one adjective of emo- tion with another of physical description brought to my mind a line from Shakespeare, which I recall we discussed one afternoon: Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk...

Why the Quixote? my reader may ask. That choice, made by a Spaniard, would not have been incomprehensible, but it no doubt is so when made byaSymbolistefromNimes,a devotee essentally ofPoe -who begat Baude- laire, who begatMallarme,who begatValery,who begatM. Edmond Teste.The letter mentioned above throws some light on this point. "TheQuixote? explains Menard,

deeply interests me, but does not seem to me-commentdirai-je?- inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without Poe's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n "Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!" or theBateauivreor the An- cient Mariner, but I know myself able to imagine it without theQuixote. (I am speaking, of course, of my personal ability, not of the historical resonance of those works.) TheQuixote is a contingent work; theQuixote is not necessary. I can premeditate committing it to writing, as it were-I can write it- without falling into a tautology. At the age of twelve or thir- teen I read it-perhaps read it cover to cover, I cannot recall. Since then, I have carefully reread certain chapters, those which, at least for the mo- ment, I shall not attempt. I have also glanced at the interludes, the come- dies, theGalatea, the Exemplary Novels, the no doubt laboriousTravails of Persiles andSigismundo,and the poeticVoyage toParna.s.sus.... My general recollection of theQuixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indif- ference, might well be the equivalent of the vague foreshadowing of a yet unwritten book. Given that image (which no one can in good conscience deny me), my problem is, without the shadow of a doubt, much more dif- ficult than Cervantes'. My obliging predecessor did not spurn the collabo- ration of chance; his method of composition for the immortal book was a bita la diable,and he was often swept along by the inertiae of the lan- guage and the imagination. I have a.s.sumed the mysterious obligation toreconstruct, word for word, the novel that for him was spontaneous. This game of solitaire I play is governed by two polar rules: the first allows me to try out formal or psychological variants; the second forces me to sacri- fice them to the "original" text and to come, by irrefutable arguments, to those eradications.... In addition to these first two artificial constraints there is another, inherent to the project. Composing theQuixote in the early seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary, perhaps even in- evitable undertaking; in the early twentieth, it is virtually impossible. Not for nothing have three hundred years elapsed, freighted with the most complex events. Among those events, to mention but one, is theQuixote itself.

In spite of those three obstacles, Menard's fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes'.

Cervantes crudely juxtaposes the humble provincial reality of his country against the fantasies of the romance, while Menard chooses as his "reality" the land of Carmen during the century that saw the Battle of Lepanto and the plays ofLope de Vega.What burlesque brush- strokes of local color that choice would have inspired in a MauriceBarresor a Rodriguez Larreta*! Yet Menard, with perfect naturalness, avoids them. In his work, there are no gypsy goings-on or conquistadors or mystics or Philip Us or autosda fe.Heignores, overlooks-or banishes-local color. That disdain posits a new meaning for the "historical novel." That disdain condemnsSalammbo,with no possibility of appeal.

No less amazement visits one when the chapters are considered in iso- lation. As an example, let us look at Part I, Chapter x.x.xVIII, "which treats of the curious discourse that Don Quixote made on the subject of arms and letters." It is a matter of common knowledge that in that chapter, don Quixote (like Quevedo in the a.n.a.logous, and later, pa.s.sage inLa hora de to- dos)comes down against letters and in favor of arms. Cervantes was an old soldier; from him, the verdict is understandable. But thatPierre Menard's don Quixote-a contemporary ofLa trahison des clercsandBertrandRussell-should repeat those cloudy sophistries!Mme. Bacheliersees in them an admirable (typical) subordination of the author to the psychology of the hero; others (lacking all perspicacity) see them as atranscription of the Quixote; the baronessde Bacourt,as influenced by Nietzsche. To that third interpretation (which I consider irrefutable), I am not certain I dare to add a fourth, though it agrees very well with the almost divine modesty of Pierre Menard: his resigned or ironic habit of putting forth ideas that were the exact opposite of those he actually held. (We should recall that diatribeagainstPaul Valeryin the ephemeral Surrealist journal edited by Jacques Reboul.) The Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (Moreambiguous, his detractors will say-but ambiguity is richness.) It is a revelation to compare theDon Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of MigueldeCervantes.

Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX): ... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, wit- ness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman"

MigueldeCervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, wit- ness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, themother of truth!-the idea is staggering. Menard, a con- temporary of William James, defines history not as adelving into reality but as the veryfount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not "what hap- pened"; it is what webelieve happened. The final phrases-exemplar and adviser to thepresent, and the future's counselor-are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in styles is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard- who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes-is somewhat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who em- ploys the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philo- sophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter-if not a paragraph or proper noun-in the history of philosophy. In literature, that "falling by the wayside," that loss of "relevance," is even better known. The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscenedeluxeeditions. Fame is a form-perhaps the worst form-of incomprehension.

Those nihilistic observations were not new; what was remarkable was the decision that Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to antic.i.p.ate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated his scruples and his nights "lit by midnight oil" to repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed. His drafts were endless; he stubbornly corrected, and he ripped up thousands of handwritten pages. He would allow no one to see them, and took care that they not survive him.

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