Chronicles Of Bustos Domecq (1979) - Plot & Excerpts
I found the book in a dusty used book shop and was halfway through before I smacked my forehead and realized that it is perfect accompaniment reading for articles on Borges’s widow’s case accusing Pablo Katchadjian of plagiarism for elaborating on The Aleph by adding about 5,600 more words to Borges’s original text. (I realize several of these articles must discuss the very same thing, but not the ones I happen to have stumbled upon.) Because the very first profile of imaginary artists in this collection describes how ‘Cesar Paladion’ published thirteen books in the early years of the 20th century, with titles including The Pathfinder, Emile, Egmont, She, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Fabiola, and The Georgics, with coincidentally the exact same texts as works with the same titles by other, perhaps better known, authors. At his death he was working on The Gospel According to St Luke. Now the ‘author’ of these profiles, the eponymous Bustos Domecq, claims that this is absolutely not plagiarism, but instead:Paladion’s methodology has been the subject of numerous critical monographs and doctoral theses, making any new discussion here superfluous. Let us concern ourselves, however, with a few main points. The key has been given us, once and for all, in Farrel du Bosc’s authoritative study The Paladion-Pound-Eliot Line (Paris: Vida de Ch. Bouret, 1937). As du Bosc has stated definitively, quoting the words of literary critic Myriam Powell-Paul Fort, it is a case of “amplification of units.” Before and after Paladion, the literary unit that writers took from the common tradition was the word, or at most, the stock phrase...a copious fragment from the Odyssey opens one of Pound’s Cantos, and it is a well known fact that the work of T. S. Eliot admits lines from Goldsmith, from Baudelaire, and from Verlaine. But Paladion, in 1909, had already gone further. He annexed, so to speak, a complete opus, Herrera y Reissing’s The Abondoned Parks .Domecq’s position on this appropriation is based on:….the delicate scruples and unswerving rigor that Paladion always brought to the arduous task of poetic creation…That is, Paladion never went beyond what he felt were his own capabilities, when he decided what to ‘write’.So if Borges and Bioy-Casares set out to, one presumes, make a profit and have some fun with these send-ups of aesthetic movements and the sacredness of the text, wouldn’t they have had a good laugh and read with interest with Katchadjian has done with The Aleph?I loved these intricate jewels of satires, with their wordplay and creative extension of experiments in performance art, minimalism, etc. Often the art that Domecq celebrates is in what is missing: the nonexistent written text that the ‘author’ trusted to future oral tradition; the empty space between mediocre plaster casts or between buildings and sky; the post-card scene that a Muslim painter has painted then blacked out, leaving only the title to distinguish it from his other blacked-out paintings. Maybe my favorite is the writer (Tulio Herrera) of works in which most words are removed from first drafts until only cryptic limns of the content remain. Thus, Ogre lives no roof at allis all that’s left of:Ogre of Crete, the Minotaur livesIn a house of its own, the labyrinth.I, on the other hand, poor and unwell, Have no roof over my head at all.And, in a description of what there is of Herrera’s novel:The two women are engaged in a hardfought competition, resolved by the administration of massive doses of cyanide in a spine-tingling scene that Herrera elaborated with the patience of an ant, and that, naturally, he left out. Another unforgettable cameo [the arsenic was unnecessary]…This scene, which crowns the novel, had been planned by Herrera with an excessive array of details, but, so as not to have to leave it out, he never actually wrote it.Another favorite is the outcome of a conference on whether History is art or science. The attendees vote that History is an act of faith, and that every nation can have the history it wants by forsaking facts and claiming its wished-for, if counter-factual, outcomes to wars and colonization.Lurking on every page are hidden jokes. In The Multifaceted Vilaseco, the portrait opens: Pens of the highest order—the crème de la crème of the Sexton Blakes of criticism—have flocked to spread the word…. Wikipedia informs us that Sexton Blake was a ‘fictional detective who appeared in many British comic strips and novels throughout the 20th century. He had enemies named Zenith the Albino, Dr. Huxton Rymer, and Leon Kestrel, the Master Mummer, who I imagine must have appealed greatly to Borges.There is no introduction to this edition (other than the one written by Borges and Bioy-Casares in the name of Gervasio Montenegro, a recurring character in the profiles), so I don’t know how the two went about working together. Judging by the style, however, I suspect that they penned profiles independently. Some show the convoluted phrasing of Borges, where one has to read a sentence three times, once for each dependent clause, and others a more straightforward approach which presumably is the mark of Bioy-Casares. A lot of fun on many levels. Enjoy!
Alas, I was knee-high to a grasshopper when I read this. In fact, I was in my mother's womb. How on Earth did I smuggle the bk in? Maybe I was inside somebody else's mother's womb. Whatever the case, I'm using the time elapsed as an excuse for not remembering much about this. Nonetheless, I remember being disappointed by it. It seems that it makes fun of "modernism" in the usual kindof so-called 'conservative' way. Not that "modernism" can't stand to be deflated but it's all a matter of what one is posing as supposedly better to it. I don't recall being impressed by this bk's alternatives. Maybe there weren't any.
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