Letters ✏️ Vancouver

J. Alfred & the Great White

I remember one class in particular: Old Rex was trying to explain the trajectory of the epic from Homer & Virgil to Cervantes & Joyce. He was trying to illustrate how the epic went from religion & myth to geography & realism, using the epic journey as a constant — or as what he called “a glowing lodestone in the watery deep.” Unwisely, he decided to drag in Jorge Luis Borges and his 1939 short story, “Pierre Menard: Author of Quixote.” This strange text confused the students utterly, and made it even harder to see the lodestone, drifting mysteriously as it had, from the Tiber & Thames to the Río de la Plata.

This was the follow-up lecture to his disastrous lecture on J. Alfred Prufrock, at the end of which Juniper gave a scathing appraisal of his epic pedagogy. As the students filed out of the room, Old Rex turned toward the window and said: “That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.”

Instead of making a clean break toward the beachhead of Ulysses, and heading for a glass of refreshing Guinness, Old Rex tried again, from a different angle, to tell us what he meant, to uncover the answer to the “overwhelming question.” Yet this attempt, mixed as it was with the metafictional escapades of a mad Argentinian, only dove the students deeper into what ought to have been the exclusive purview of the mermaids.

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I remember I was sitting next to Berry at the back of the room, one tiny speaker stuck in my left ear, listening to a playlist called Journeys Toward an Acid Rock. The playlist started with Cream’s “White Room” and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.” It then moved through whiter shades of pale, tangerine trees and marmalade skies, and ended with Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” The final song starts with a depressed state of mind, where You thought the leaden winter / Would bring you down forever (reminiscent of the white room with black curtains near the station … where the sun never shines), but then shifts radically: But you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun. Cream then takes you into a surreal, seductive, dangerous Mediterranean, where the colours of the sea blind your eyes with trembling mermaids, and where you see a girl's brown body dancing through the turquoise.

Trapped in the white classroom listening to the teacher go on about Eliot, Borges, and the crisis of meaning, I longed for the sky and open sea. I was even hoping to spot a mermaid, or at least a scantily-clad sunbather, off the starboard bow.

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I remember the long white room with black chairs as if I were now sitting on one of those chairs, instead of floating in the warm bath, drifting into the tepid waters of the Aegean. Apart from the black and white poster above the tap, and the black curtains on the other side of the room above the toilet, my bathroom walls are like the walls of that classroom: eggshell white.

In the distance, I hear the damp plodding of a lecturer’s voice. The man at the front of the room is dressed in a black frock. He has skinny arms and legs, and reminds me of J. Alfred Prufrock. Old Rex is explaining that at the beginning of Eliot’s famous poem, J. Alfred embarks on an epic quest for meaning. He implies that he's a modern-day Virgil who will lead us across dangerous straits, up from the depths of Hell, and safely through the mezzo del cammin of our lives. 

Yet J. Alfred can’t make it beyond his own insecurities and circumlocutions. He’s the embodiment of the Modern crisis of meaning. In the end, he knows he’ll never never get far on his epic journey. He can imagine mermaids singing to each other, but he knows they'll never sing to him. In the end, he imagines himself drowning, whether in the Thames or the Strait of Messina it isn’t clear.

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The epic scenario Eliot explores in Prufrock is already complicated enough, coming as it does after the Classical paganism of Homer & Virgil, the Medieval Christianity of Dante, and the early Modernism of Shakespeare’s rag, which is Classical and elegant, yet also organized horseplay, from the Old Norse rögg, shagginess, tuft, and which propelled Western culture with its playfulness into ages of reason and romanticism. Yet Old Rex decided to read Prufrock through the lens of his contemporary, the Argentinian Anglophile Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was an aficionado of Classical & Norse literature, a Modern symbolist, and a lover of etymology & obscure paradox. No doubt Old Rex believed these things would come in handy in trying to explain the muddle of the Modern Age. 

Borges also reached backward in time to the Babylonian world of sixes and towers of Babel. He refused to agree with the existentialists that being dwarfed by the unknowable universe meant that one was destined to become alienated. In the depths of time, and in the infinite layers of symbol and paradox, Borges suggests that we find ourselves. To him the world is an enormous Library of Babel, constructed in hexagons. From each hexagon, we can see the floors below and above, interminably. Interminably. Desde cualquier hexágono se ven los pisos inferiores y superiores: interminablemente. While poetry and philosophy may historically lead to Sartre’s alienation, they also lead to the Shakespearean rag, to the Romantics, the Symbolists, and the Infinite:

yo prefiero soñar que las superficies bruñidas figuran y prometen el infinito

I prefer to dream that the burnished superficialities manifest and promise the infinite

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I can barely hear a word Old Rex is saying because I’ve put the other little speaker into my right ear. I do, however, see the fringes of his black frock waving in the air. Old Rex is reading the first paragraph of Borges’ short story, which might also be called an essay, or a manifesto against the tyranny of literary determinism. 

I recognize some of the words as through a rectangular chamber in the sea. J. Alfred has the text in front of him and he’s writing every fifth word on the board. He's probably telling the class that in “Pierre Menard” Borges plays a clever metafictional game designed to make the reader think about what it means to read a text. In the convoluted style for which he's famous, Borges creates a narrator who comments on an imaginary French writer called Pierre Menard, to whom the narrator ascribes a number of ‘visible works.’ The narrator lists these from a) to s), and then ascribes to Menard an ‘invisible work,’ by which he means a partial re-writing of Don Quixote. 

The narrator tells us that Menard learned Spanish, immersed himself in the Spanish culture of the early 1600s, and then re-wrote parts of Don Quixote. He didn't write the text by remembering it (although he had a vague recollection) but rather by immersing himself in the times and spirit of Cervantes.

The narrator asserts that Menard’s invisible work is eternally heroic and transcends mere plagiarism. It enriches the original because of its simultaneous remembering and forgetting of cultural history from Cervantes’ time to that of Menard. One might call it, The Forgotten Remembrance of Things Past.

Borges’ essay is a clever way of suggesting that historical distance, combined with scholarly and imaginative interaction with the past, will enrich a reader’s response to a great work of literature. The essay also urges us to ask ourselves how our understanding travels from the past to the present. This can of course be applied to the work at hand: If we take the original text of Quixote as the starting point (A) and an understanding of “Pierre Menard” as the destination (B), how do we get from A to B?

The students are taking notes and sticking their hands into the air. Old Rex on the other hand isn't interested in the location of their arms. He hasn’t asked them a single question, unless one counts the rhetorical one he answered immediately. Instead, he’s leading them methodically, socratically, to Prufrock’s overwhelming question. But he still won’t allow us to ask, What is it? 

The students seem to be under the impression that they're here to submit to his methods and his explanations, as if they were sponges in a white box of space. Yet I suspect they're here for three entirely different reasons. First, they're here to explore a range of perspectives, not just to be coaxed toward the secret of one interpretation. Second, they're here to explain Borges to themselves by themselves. If Borges means anything, he means unnumbered corridors into the library, unnumbered passageways into the labyrinth, unnumbered dreamscapes into the circular ruin. Within any given space where knowledge might be found, there are innumerable points of view:

The stranger dreamed that he was in the centre of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. (“The Circular Ruins,” 1939)

If Borges means any one thing, he means that one can't reduce the complexity of the world to one thing. In celebration of this principle, I turn up the volume of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” which sucks up all the stray sounds in the vicinity, and throws them into the fusion of an enormous imploding star.

Third, the students are here to enter into Borges’ questioning of reality by questioning Borges himself. They don't have to praise Pierre Menard just because the Borgesian narrator does. Borges does not equal his narrator. They’re not compelled to lay a solemn black rose on Menard’s gravestone. They can if they want, but they can also raise him from his grave and make him answer a question or two. Lifting the heavy plates of movable type that sealed his fate, they are free to question Fate itself.

Pierre has been lying long enough in a white box, overseen by a preacher in a black frock. It's time to loosen the earth above him. It’s time to doodle in the margins. It’s time for the footnotes to creep higher and higher until the text disappears. In brief, it’s time for the Irishman’s wake. Footnotes are what happens to poetry when you can’t find its meaning.

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Above my bath is a Harry Clarke poster, wrinkled at the edges, with circles bouncing along the ferns and tree stumps of the forest. I draw the circles in my notebook, along the edges of my arguments, which are venturing downward as I try to remember what Old Rex was on about, with his obscure references to Edgar Allen Poe and the decadent symbolism of Aubrey Beardsley. I skip along the forest floor, above the tree roots that burrow inch by inch toward the inevitability of the inky grave.

The rhythm of the looping circles follows the rhythm of the voice that’s bopping from head to head down the narrow white corridor of the room. I hear the rhythm but not the meaning of the words, as if the meaning lay in the general form and not in the specifics of time and place, or in the specific correlation between sound and meaning. Yet don’t the literary theorists say that each word is subtly related to a slightly different word, and that the flux of meaning goes ever so slightly to a different meaning, in a train of thinking which leaves a particular station and could end up at any other station. The particular station is itself a mirage and the destination turns out to be a junction somewhere in the middle of nowhere, something like life itself. What is important is the sound of the rails as they click form one spur to the next, not the markers along the way.

So, before the sounds have a chance to form themselves into a particular meaning, I ride the concept of sound, not meaning, and transcribe the potential words into what I think Old Rex ought to say. Given the right circumstances, the train might go there anyway. In any case, I can't really hear what J. Alfred is saying since both earpods are firmly in my ears and Lucy has started to float diamond waves into my brain. The vibrato tinkling of a Lowrey organ (what I call a Malcolm Lowry organ) is inviting me to step into a boat that’s waiting on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. On the shore the roots of the trees reach into the river and flow slowly toward the sea.

The first thing I scribble into the margins, remembering the poster and following the ascent and descent of the bouncing bubbles, is subaquatic. A minute ago J. Alfred wrote subterranean on the board and spoke it out loud, as if Borges had really meant to write that word and hadn’t been thinking of a more appropriate word. Yet doesn’t subterranean imply Gutenberg’s grave, at the head of which lies a heavy plate, promising the freedom of moveable type, yet pressing ever-downward on the soul?

Anyone who has pondered the implications of the grave, or who has travelled with Poe down the fault-line of a manor into a mountain lake, or who has even just looked at Harry Clarke’s illustration of Poe’s “Premature Burial,” would know that Borges wrote subterranean because he was suffering from a head injury at the time he wrote “Pierre Menard.” Even if one has never been walled up like Ann Frank between shaking bedrooms in the House of Usher, this information is in all the anthologies. Even Wikipedia mentions Borges’ head injury. Yet what the literary historians leave out is what can be deduced from living in a time that has crumbled into the tarn. In such a place, invented facts are more valuable than pedestrian ones. Looking back at the ruins of Sodom, you can almost taste the salt.

But back to the facts. At the time Borges was writing “Pierre Menard: Author of Quixote” the city engineers were working on the subway, or ferrocarril subterraneo. The construction work created an intermittent yet continual hammering deep underneath Borges’ usually calm Café Richmond on Calle Florida (they were drilling and hammering all the way from Catedral to Tribunales, on what would become the D Line). This infernal pounding set up vibrations in Borges’ unconscious mind, and took the railcar of his thoughts down one track when he was really wanting to go up another.

This series of unfortunate events led him to write subterranean when he meant to write subaquatic. If Borges’ brain had been working properly — if the station of the metro had already been built and the commuters were pondering the petal faces on the wet black bough of the platform, instead of pressing the palms of their hands against their ears, trying to prevent a headache — Borges would've known that when people are six feet under the ground they're dead, but when they're six feet under the water they can swim. What's more, Pierre Menard never lived in the first place. How could he end up stuck forever under the ground? Pierre Menard is a fictional character, not an archetype like Hades or Ereshkigal. “Pierre Menard” is a short story, not a funeral dirge.

The choppy waves of J. Alfred’s voice surge above my head, cresting into chaotic spray as they collide with the white fan. The mist drifts downward and refreshes my senses, awakening me to the power of the sound of the waves that are flowing from my ear phones. I’m floating upward on the crests and dipping downward in the troughs. I’ve become brave Ulysses, rider of the undulating seas…

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Next: 🧚‍♀️ The Little Merman

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