for John Ashbery
Two stories from the mid-1960s.
(1)
When I was an English major at Columbia, I took a creative writing course from Kenneth Koch, who changed my life. Actually it was a class in modern literature with some creative assignments. I have never met anyone who knew so much about modern literature. He assigned books we had never heard of, like Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, Pasternak's Safe Conduct, and Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro (which became my favorite novel and which I've taught for years; a student told me recently that Woody Allen likes it too, which makes perfect sense). He sent us out to review The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He had us read Borges's Ficciones and the latest issue of Art and Literature. And he told us stories. One of them dragged me into a labyrinth, made me part of it.
As a way of explaining "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" and "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," Koch told us that he had been sitting on a New York park bench with Borges when Borges said that the way one could tell that the Koran was an authentic document was that there were no camels in it. If someone had wanted to create such a book and then plant false, artificially aged documents that appeared to establish its existence in the 7th century C.E., that person would certainly have included some Arabic local color, such as camels. Koch wanted to show us how Borges could read even the Koran as a potentially false text and how the fact that there were no camels in it could prove the Koran was authentic if one was in a Borgesian mood.
At the time I was also taking a class in what was then called Oriental Humanities, and the assignment for that week was the Koran (trans. A. J. Arberry). I read it with Koch's Borges story in mind. There are two camels in the Koran.
The question is, did Borges know that? Koch apparently did not. If Borges did know about the camels, then he was doing an advanced Borgesian number on Koch and anyone to whom Koch might tell the story, expecting that someone who heard the story and knew there were camels in the Koran would have reason to doubt its authenticity. That was the trap that he set, and the story ends with my hearing the story, finding the camels, and wondering what I had been led to wonder. Or it ends today, with my writing this.
Because Borges may not have known about the camels. He could simply have been raising the issue that the Koran could be a faked and planted and falsely substantiated book. I don't know whether Koch was in on the joke (I never discussed this with him; I was mostly too intimidated to go to professors' office hours), and I don't know whether Borges knew he was setting a trap. I met Borges a decade later when he visited the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I got a chance to ask him about the paradoxical final sentence of "Borges and I" ("I do not know which of us has written this page"). He said there was no paradox and that "Borges and I" was a simple record of how he felt when he got mail addressed to Borges. So readers may have made up the ultimate Borges, the one who lays out labyrinths for careful readers, the one who knew Koch would someday have a student who would hear the story, read the Koran, and be convinced that its existence was a literary conspiracy, a student who never would guess that Borges might just have been careless and missed the camels.
from the archive; first posted April 21, 2013; the second of Bruce's stories will appear on the blog tomorrow