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Jorge Luis Borges at his desk in the Buenos Aires National Library.
splendid irony of God" that had simultaneously granted him "books and the night."305
Borges worked at the National Library for eighteen years, until his retirement, and he enjoyed his post so much that he celebrated almost every one of his birthdays there. In his wood-panelled office, under a high ceiling studded with painted fleurs-de-lys and golden stars, he would sit for hours at a small table, his back towards the room's centrepiece—a magnificent, huge round desk, a copy of one that had belonged to the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau, that Borges felt was far too ostentatious. Here he dictated his poems and fictions, had books read to him by willing secretaries, received friends, students and journalists, and held study groups of Anglo-Saxon. The tedious, bureaucratic library work was left to his assistant director, the scholar Jose Edmundo Clemente.
Many of Borges's published stories and essays mention books that he invented without bothering to write them out. Among these are the many romances by the fictional Herbert Quain (the subject of an essaylike fiction), who varies one single plot in geometrical progression until the number of plots becomes infinite; the marvellous detective novel The Approach to Al- Mu'tasim, by "the Bombay lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali," supposedly reviewed by the very real Philip Guedalla and Cecil Roberts, and published by the equally real Victor Gollancz in London, with an introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers, under the revised title The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim: A Game with Shifting Mirrors; the eleventh volume of the First Encyclopaedia ofTlon, which Herbert Ashe received, shortly before his death, in a sealed and registered parcel from Brazil; the play The Enemies, which Jaromir Hladik left unfinished but was allowed to complete in his mind in a long, God-granted instant before his execution; and the octavo volume of infinite pages, bearing the words "Holy Writ" and "Bombay" on its spine, that (Borges tells us) he held in his hands shortly before retiring from his post as director of the National Library.306
The collecting of imaginary books is an ancient occupation. In 1532 there appeared in France a book signed by the apocryphal scholar Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of Frangois Rabelais) entitled The horrible and frightening
The Giant Gargantua created by Francois Rabelais.
deeds and accomplishments of the much renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsods, son of the great giant Gargantua.307 In the seventh chapter of the second book, the young Pan- tagruel, having studied "very well" at Orleans, resolves to visit Paris and its university. It is, however, not the learned institution but the Abbey of St. Victor that holds his attention, for there he finds "a very stately and magnifick" library full of the most wonderful books. The catalogue that Rabelais copies for us is five pages long, and includes such marvels as:
The Codpiece of the Law
The Pomegranate of Vice
The mustard-pot of Penance
The Trevet of good thoughts
The Snatchfare of the Curats
The Spectacles of Pilgrims bound for Rome
The Fured Cat of the Sollicitors and Atturneys
The said Authors Apologie against those who alledge that the
Gargantua
Popes mule doth eat but at set times The bald arse or peel'd breech of the widows The hotchpot of Hypocrites The bumsquibcracker of Apothecaries
The Mirrour of basenesse by Radnecu Waldenses
The fat belly of the Presidents
In a letter of advice sent to his son from Utopia, Gargan- tua encourages Pantagruel to make good use of his skills "by which we may in a mortal estate attain to a kinde of immortality." "All the world is full of knowing men," he writes, "of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries: and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato's time, nor Cicero's, nor Papinian's, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as we see at this day there is. . . . I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now, than the Doctors and Preachers were in my time." The library that Rabelais invents is perhaps the first "imaginary library" in literature. It mocks (in the tradition of his admired Erasmus and Thomas More) the scholarly and monastic world, but, more important, allows the reader the fun of imagining the arguments and plots behind the rollicking titles. On another of his Gargantuan abbeys, that of Theleme, Rabelais inscribed the motto Fays ce que voudra (Do As You Please). On his library at St. Victor he might have written Lys ce que voudra (Read As You Please). I've written those words over one of the doors of my own library.
Rabelais was born in 1483 or 1484, near the town of Chinon, not far from where I now live. His house was called La Deviniere, or The Soothsayer's House; its original name had been Les Cravandieres, after cravant, meaning "wild goose" in the Touraine dialect. Since geese were used to predict the future, the house 's name was changed to honour the birds' magical gift.308 The
house, the landscape around it, the towns and monuments even as far as the thin eleventh-century tower of Marmande that I can see from the end of my garden, became the setting for his gigantic saga. The success of Pantagruel (over four thousand copies sold in the first few months) made Rabelais decide to continue the adventures of his giants. Two years later he published The Very Horrific Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel, and several other volumes of the saga. In 1543 the Church banned Rabelais' books, and published an official edict condemning his work.
Rabelais could read Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic and several dialects of French; he had studied theology, law, medicine, architecture, botany, archaeology and astronomy; he enriched the French language with more than eight hundred words and dozens of idioms, many of which are still used in Acadian Canada.309 His imaginary library is the fruit of a mind too active to stop and record its thoughts, and his Gargantuan epic is a hodgepodge of episodes that allows the reader almost any choice of sequence, meaning, tone and even argument. It is as if, for Rabelais, the inventor of a narrative is not obliged to bring coherence, logic or resolution to the text. That (as Diderot would later make clear) is the task of the reader, the mark of his freedom. The ancient scholastic libraries took for granted the truth of the traditional commentaries on the classics; Rabelais, like his fellow humanists, questioned the assumption that authority equalled intelligence. "Knowledge without conscience," says Gargantua to his son, "is but the ruin of the soul."