Borges Reports

In an afterword to Doctor Brodie's Report Borges writes about his creative process. It is clear that he holds to the older classical theory of having a genius which he leaves alone to her work. He does not attempt to guide her by a nagging intention.

Walking down the street or along the galleries of the National Library, I feel that something is about to take over in me. That something may be a tale or a poem. I do not tamper with it; I let it have its way. From afar, I sense it taking shape. I dimly see its end and beginning but not the dark gap in between. This middle, in my case, is given me gradually. If its discovery happens to be withheld by the gods, my conscious self has to intrude, and these unavoidable makeshifts are, I suspect, my weakest pages.

What then are we to say to the banal epiphany of the Brillo Box? At best I would describe it as craft work involving the careful application of paint and precise copying of a given model. We have forgotten that up to the 1950‘s whole studios were given over to the production of line drawings, illustrations and art work for mass media. Then and even now artisans known as monumental sculptors could knock out an angel reading in the book of life by hand in a few days. Socrates worked at that trade before he took up the contrarian gadfly business. In India long generations of artisans work at such crafts producing statuary in metal and stone for temples. They don’t claim to be artists though some of their ancient models have a refinement of form that is excellent.

I don’t claim to know much about art but I know what Arthur C. Danto likes. By sleight of definition he has brought respectability to the excesses of the exhibition catalog.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. Danto with notes by Pierre Menard

When I first read The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. Danto it was as the paper of 1974. Not being aware then that there was book of the same name with the same theme in an expanded form I thought that Danto should have read Borges’s work Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote(pub.1941). This would perhaps have modified his position that a true interpretation follows an understanding of the intent of the author of the work. As those of you who keep up know, Danto does in fact enlist Menard in his book. Even if you think that intent plays a minor part in the production of great art the question must be asked – has Danto actually grasped the intent of Borges and if he hasn’t, isn’t therefore his interpretation faulty?

Reading the story a few times and it is a masterpiece which eludes the definitive, some observations will I think stand. The voice is that of an effete aesthete who for reasons which are unstated is performing a scalpel job on Menard. He seems a Prufrock (1915) with extra added resentment. This is evident from the catalogue of the works and pomps of Menard which are in short; futile, otiose and doomed. The Quixote project then is the crowning achievement of sublime idiocy. The sere bise of irony blows steadily.

To this third interpretation (which I judge to be irrefutable) I am not sure I dare to add a fourth, which concords very well with the almost divine modesty of Pierre Menard: his resigned or ironical habit of propagating ideas which were the strict reverse of those he preferred.

There is a semi truth, a Menardian truth, to the view that quotation is not just that thing that is quoted but has the sheen of intention hovering ectoplasmically over it. The Brillo Box is an emanation in a subtle medium neither cardboard nor indeed plywood.

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?

(James E. Irby trans.)