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.