The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim

 

It was in 1992. After reading Borges’ review of The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, I perused every publisher's catalog, trying to find a copy of this novel. Nothing! So, I eventually took the bus to the British Library, which then was still housed in the British Museum. I went to the central catalog searching back and forth; first under the letter “A,” then under “M,” in desperation even under “T.” Still nothing! I asked the lady at the front desk. She had no idea. I just couldn’t believe it.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) is arguably the most lucid of essayists, but he got me hooked on a short story of his – The Zahir. What is a “zahir?” “In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has scratched the letter ‘N T’ and the number 2; the date stamped on the face is 1929. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, whom the faithful have stoned to death; in Persia it was an astrolabe thrown into the sea by orders of Nadir Shah; in 1892, in the prisons of the Mahdi, it was a small compass a sailor kept wrapped in a torn shred of cloth from the same turban Rudolf Karl von Slatin had touched; in the synagogue in Cordoba, according to Zotenberg, it was a vein of marble on one of the twelve hundred pillars; in the Age of Ignorance it was the face of al-Moqanna, the Veiled Prophet.)” Notice the numerous “references” Borges has worked in into the story, each a red herring: “Philip Meadows Taylor – in ‘Confessions of a Thug’” – the “monographs of Barlach, and Zotenberg.”  I should have known. Instead I speculated about Moses’ burning bush, a constant cause of worry for God’s slowwitted servant. We are told that there can be only one “Zahir” at any given time. Or is all this erudition of the story’s protagonist just a figment, the obsession of a deranged archivist that makes him ransack the libraries for “evidence?

We are reminded of another character with a ludicrous fixation, a gentleman wearing a barber’s basin as his helmet and fighting the windmills of La Mancha.

It is a little known fact. The best mother of all modern novels and the father of literary escapism was published under the patronage of the Spanish Inquisition Inquisition. In 1608, Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas (1546 – 1618) was the Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain and President of the Supreme Council of the Inquisition. He granted the imprimatur for a second edition of the Don Quixote and he also granted the author a pension, the only regular income Cervantes was to receive in his final years.

The Grand Inquisitor did not lend his support out of human kindness alone. It was the final push in a truly quixotic campaign against the novels of knight-errantry. For the highbrows these productions offered easy opportunities to strike a hoity-toity attitude; the mystics wagged a warning finger from the vacuum above Mount Carmel, and the country curates crossed themselves over the pickled souls kept in glass bottles on the Moon. There was definitely a smell of sulfur in those books. The profanation of the mystery is a threat to religion. Where a sorcerer waves his wand, he trivializes the transubstantiation; the miracle is losing its luster. In 1553, the emperor with the jaw of an ass was sitting for his painter, the very expensive Titian in Venice. Between the sessions he issued a ban on the export of chivalrous romances to the West Indies. In other words, when the Don Quixote came out, Cervantes was flogging a dead horse, and he knew it. Yet for Charles V this was not about the code of chivalry and silly stories about damsels in distress, this was about hard cash. His financial advisor had whispered into his ear that the cargo space was better employed for crates of gilded mass-books and papal bulls. The bulls, two million and seventy thousand in number, for the dead and the living, were sent to Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Philippines. The monarch’s investment was three hundred thousand florins, but he sold for five million.

For us, of course, the Don Quixote has become this great paradigm of escapism. All fiction is escapist – no, I retract that – all good fiction is escapist. “Love itself,” says William Butler Yeats, “would be barely more than an animal hunger without Sappho having given it shape in her poetry before.”

Life, however, the real thing, this roving corsair under the Jolly Roger of a shitty diaper, has a way of catching up. In 1727, Jonathan Swift published Samuel Gulliver's account of his visit to the University of Lagado: “They spend the greatest part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the assistance of glasses far excelling ours in goodness. This advantage has enabled them to discover two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of the diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty one and an half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.” It took life some time – 151 years – before it succeeded to imitate fiction. The American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the two moons of Mars in 1877, pretty much to the specifications in Swift’s narrative.

The sourpusses, of course, in the name of common sense and “realism,” will give it the thumbs-down. “If unchecked,” Plato complained, "not law and reason, but pleasure and pain will be rulers in the state.” His “remedy” is to inflict more pain: star chambers, censorship, mandatory cadet schools, marching bands and the breeding of the blondest – Plato was the Nazi’s favorite Greek.

In the Post Rococo the intelligentsia was beginning to look for a Golden Age of reason, rationality and beauty, and they thought they’d found it in ancient Greece. Lord Elgin filched marbled reliefs from the Acropolis; the Greeks are still suing for their return. Lord Byron lost his life offering his unasked assistance to the Greek cause. Jane Austen must have noticed; the events were a topic in the drawing rooms. On the guillotine, French aristocrats kept sneezing into the basket – yet not without a memorable last line before the chop; the art of the epigram was on its peak, and it was written in blood. Bonaparte headed a most romantic expedition into Egypt while Admiral Nelson with coldblooded efficiency hammered the French fleet into oblivion at Abukir. Ms Austin’s novels reveal nothing of this. Her writing has the charm of dainty brushwork on old china, yet if it were for her, neither the Napoleonic wars nor the liberation of Greece may ever have happened. (I still recall the peculiar smell when I walked up the hill to the Acropolis – somewhat like a hefty ejaculation.) ­Jane Austen was a smart woman. She knew that the easy flow of a high empire-line tied directly underneath the tits, is infinitely more appealing than the butchest marbles in the British Museum. A perfect lure for lucrative marriages, and only in this sense, the French Revolution and Bonaparte seemed to be good for something. In “real life” Ms Austen was no prude.

When she published her first novel, Casanova was still writing his memoirs, and Napoleon, after a leer into the cleavage of the very pregnant Madame de Staël, threw away the keys to the Marquise de Sade’s confinement in a public institution. In her letters Jane Austen confesses to her fascination with Lord Byron and Mozart’s Don Juan. She knew all about “breeding” – one butler for the needs of two chambermaids, “but offspring is strictly out of the question.” In her novels she turned down this kind of talk – most of her readers were young ladies of the rising middleclass. In England, in Germany and in France, novels were a largely feminine affair, the installments eagerly awaited in the almanacs and quarterlies. Buying a book was still a lot of money. In Germany a certain Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763 – 1825) was too poor to purchase Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – in Bode’s translation – and borrowed the book from a public library.

Richter never returned the book and became a writer.

The Tristram Shandy was always on his desk – next to the manuscript he was working on – a treacherous model to follow, as the substance is all in the delivery and the story only an accident. But for the tastes of Richter this was right down his lane. “Every author,” Borges has noted, “is creating his own pedigree.” Richter was witty, enthusiastic, a certifiable tearjerker and master of the character portrait. Sterne’s novel is a book for the gents; too risqué for a giggle over the crochet. Instead the ladies just loved their Richter. He was kind and inoffensive and skirted the margins of “good taste.” His work, I dare say, is the largest repository of humorous characters anywhere in the universe of fiction. Now and then, however, Richter had the good sense of stepping out of the house, join the kids on the commons and fly a beautiful kite. The Logs of the Aeronaut Giannozzo is a gem, the apotheosis of pure escapism. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is now practically forgotten, even in his own country. Borges, who had read him, thought to detect a streak of cold and calculating artistry in Richter’s work. Speak of the pot calling the kettle black.

So, after I came home from the British Library, I absentmindedly began brewing myself an espresso – my first and last defense against Alzheimer. What had I been missing? I reached for Borges own memoir: Borges about Borges. I should have done this before.

Apparently I was not the first and only one who had fallen for the hoax. Borges admits to his borrowings “from Kipling,” and explains the references worked in into the text of The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, which include “a genuine Iranian mystic: Farid ud-Din Attar (1145 – 1221).” For the “fictional second edition” Borges introduces a real life publisher – Victor Gollancz – and attributes “the foreword” to a real life author – Dorothy L. Sayers. A neat touch; with glee, Borges noted, that in 1942, when the U-boots were still raiding the Atlantic, a friend of his had contacted London from Buenos Aires, trying to place at Foyles a telegraphic order of the book. It is really quite clever. Vladimir Nabokov has criticized the art of Borges for being "all porch and no house behind." That may be so, yet by merely summing up the highlights, The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim is not only a better story; it is the best novel Borges has never written. The author of Mashenka should have known: an excellent piece of ghostwriting on Nabokov’s part, the best thing Chekhov never wrote.

© – 1/19/2009 – by michael sympson, 1,900 words, all rights reserved