The writer Herbert Quain is totally fictional, as far I can determine. I love it when Borges messes with your mind. In another story, he claims that a writer named Pierre Menard wrote the story of Don Quixote. Line by line, word for word. Yet original. How funny. Hilarious.
Borges reminds me of John Cage, the late avant garde composer and performer. Years ago, at UC Irvine, I saw Cage with his collaborator, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
When the show started, we wandered into a small theater on the campus, a theater-in-the-round, with steps leading up to a low stage. Music playing, very low, as I recall. As if in the background.
As we were sitting there, one by one apparent members of the audience got up from their seats, strolled casually up onto the stage, and began to dance.
It was wonderful. It messed with your mind, violating your expectations. Who was next? Was I expected to get up and dance? Is that woman next to me a secret dancer? Were we all secret dancers?
I loved it.
At one point, Cage was writing things down as he was playing the piano. He invited questions from the audience. Someone said, "What are you doing?"
Cage said, "I'm giving myself instructions and following them."
People laughed. He was making fun of the whole set-up, the audience, the third-wall convention, the act of performing, the status of being either a performer or audience member, the very act of creation.
I told my friend Tim about this, and he said, "I hate that kind of thing." Of course, as he told me one time, he was missing the point.
Watching was part of the art. The audience was part of the piece, as it always is, I believe.
Borges does the same kind of thing, making fun of the whole transaction, the whole creative process of writing, imagining, reading, recreating what is imagined.
By doing that, he sets us all above it somehow, so we can laugh at it and enjoy it and admire it, all at once.
Borges makes geniuses of us all.
-- Roger
Copyright © 2011, Roger R. Angle
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