Borges, Second Edition: The Passion of an Endless Quotation

16. Fiction between Fraud and Farce: Parodies and Properties of the Name

SIXTEEN FICTION BETWEEN FRAUD AND FARCE Parodies and Properties of the Name Our songs will all be silenced—but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much. —Orson Welles The subject I studied was philosophy: I remembered that my uncle, without invoking a single proper name, had revealed to me its beautiful perplexities. —Jorge Luis Borges There is little novelty in affirming (or confirming) that with every day the world becomes more Borgesian. For decades it has been known that not only is Borges one of the greatest literary events of his century but also that major nonliterary events occur at the margins of Borges.1 Prophetic and provocative, “perhaps without intending it,” their speculations anticipate, among other advents, the progressive exhaustion of theories,2 the caducity or uselessness of taxonomies,3 the adequation of truth to the convenience of the chronicler,4 the indistinction of antagonisms5 —beyond the eventualities —the poetic and plural resonances that prevail over authority or the individual author, the multiplication of the wonders that technology sets in screens (they normalize in quotidian practice some of his most unbridled fictions ),6 the gradual and virtual disappearance of reality in its representation,7 the conservation of writings in books that fade away,8 cyclopean and virtual encyclopedias. In this world that Borgesializes itself almost unknowingly among limitless series of copies, the easiness of plagiarism thrives, alongside 183 184 BORGES infatuation with proper names, their insignificance or their renown, the vanity and variations of the vacuum. These are, without intending it, some of the most provocative predictions from Borges’s disconcerting imagination that, when crossed with Bioy Casares’s fictions and his insistent production of copies that menacingly abound, predisposes a reality that is to come, a reality that the present also confirms. Few writers achieved, as Borges did, the transformation of discontinuous fragments, the abstruse referentiality, the literal and suspect quotes, frank and apocryphal, always innumerable, copies as faithful as they are aberrant, in that fantastic revelation that his works hold in store. On the other hand, in spite of the uninterrupted preoccupation with mimesis and the ancestral antecedents of the topic, narrations that made an inaugural and contradictory universe out of copies were nothing common, as were those that did so out of the machines that produce and register them. Those inventions put to work by Bioy’s fantasy, a culture that sets up photographic and cinematographic revelations and the technological procedures that propitiate them, rendering the vicarious and infinite experience of a regime of copies without original. Hybrids are not lacking in his stories and, as with fables and chimeras, medical experiments oscillate between games of immortality and inhuman procedures, a cruelty no less cruel for being mechanical, one that engages the plot in a terror that knows no quarter. The bonds of their friendship are firm, their social and cultural affinities embrace, and, their works being so different and so happily opposed, the literary collaboration between the both of them, oftentimes extraordinary for its solidarity and durability, also consolidates itself through those coincidences. A close personal connection was established between those two writers who shared an animated and admirable vita literaria, as well as a doubtless celebrity.9 Borges and Bioy read the same books, they consulted the same encyclopedias, they frequented literary circles common to them both, they cultivated the same friendships and adhered to similar causes, without it ever instigating or insinuating any rivalry or redundancy between their writings, their affects, and their pronouncements. It is striking that that close-knit mutuality never gave rise to disagreements; to the contrary: “As dissimilar as we were as writers, the friendship fit because we had a shared passion for books.”10 It is as if they had convened a pact of precedence, but one free of ceremony, each one making room for the other, or even for a third person, both of them stepping aside in order to make room for Biorges. Neither one nor the other but the two of them, contracted into a civil and literary entity, with a proper name and proper identification. “Biorges” appears validated by the nominal rule coined by Emir Rodríguez Monegal11 and documented 185 FICTION BETWEEN FRAUD AND FARCE by Gisèle Freund, providing him, beyond just poetry, with full rights to the city. A previous series of photos, realized by Silvina Ocampo as if...