#24 Fri (7/15/22) - Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo

 From Amazon:

Jorge Luis Borges is the hero of this literary whodunit by one of Brazil's most celebrated writers. Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the center of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee's theory of the "Eternal Orangutan," which, given all the time in the world, would end up writing all the known books in the cosmos. Verissimo's small masterpiece is at once a literary tour de force and a brilliant mystery novel. 

 

From Publisher's Weekly:

Brazilian author Verissimo's delightful novel simultaneously caricatures the complicated codes that comprise detective stories and spins a whodunit of paternity, academic intrigue, 16th-century occultism and orangutans. The action occurs at the annual meeting of the Israfel Society, an eccentric organization devoted to the study of Edgar Allan Poe, which Vogelstein, a sheltered teacher and translator, decides to attend in the hopes of meeting his hero, Jorge Luis Borges. When Vogelstein discovers the unlikable Rotkopf, another conference attendee, stabbed to death in front of a mirror, it falls to Borges and Vogelstein to solve the crime. Is the murderer Professor Ikisara, who was angry at having to travel to Buenos Aires for the conference and at having been trampled, twice, by Rotkopf during the welcoming cocktail party? Just as suspicious is Oliver Johnson, the humiliated butt of an elaborate scholarly joke perpetrated by the victim. But maybe it was Hastur, "a malign spirit" rising from the Necronomicon, a list of every evil being on Earth. Will the amateur sleuths uncover the motive and the murderer, or will they accuse someone based on potentially fruitful "literary possibilities"? Borges claims that one "write[s] to remember," but Verissimio (The Club of Angels) demonstrates that one also writes to pay homage, to provide pleasure and to have fun. (May 31)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

 

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This was a short novella which yielded quite a few interesting morsels. I read it in about a day.

 

The quote in the title, "Eternal Orangutans," possibly apocryphal, but here attributed to Dr. John Dee, the court astrologer and physician to Queen Elizabeth I:

 

“Dee’s Eternal Orang-utan, equipped with a sturdy quill, enough ink and
an infinite surface to cover, would end up writing all the known books, as
well as creating its own original works. Though these, as you might
imagine, would be of dubious quality. It was because of the danger
constituted by the Eternal Orang-utan that, around 1585, Rudolf II managed
to gather together in his library in Prague representatives of the three main
gnostic philosophies: the Christian Apocrypha, born out of a supposed
Second Book of Esdras not included in the Bible, the Judaic Kabbala, and a
third strand, even more ancient and obscure, that had its origins in the
magic lists of the library in Assurbanipal, which included the
Necronomicon ‘invented’, according to Johnson, by Lovecraft.”

“Lovecraft being a notorious modern example of the Eternal Orang-utan
in action, because he invented a truth that already existed.”
“Precisely. We must not forget that, in 1585, Herr Gutenberg’s terrible
creation had already been in existence for more than a hundred years, books
had become popularised and the Eternal Orang-utan had at its hypothetical
disposal not only all of eternity, but also movable type, with which to play
at putting together vowels and consonants. This had increased the risk of
the esoteric language being deciphered by mistake, or of someone
stumbling upon the secret vocabulary of the Universe that the occultists
were looking for and upon the power that this would bring. With the
proliferation of writing, there was an increased risk of coincidence without
which, of course, nothing in History can happen.”

 

 The poem, Israfel is alluded to throughout, but is never explicitly declaimed. It is used as part of a practical joke; 

In one of his letters, he had told me how he had poked fun at Johnson’s mania for discovering hidden meanings in everything by sending him, anonymously, an interpretation of Poe’s poem about the angel Israfel. He claimed that if the poem was read in a mirror, it would reveal a kabbalistic code. Johnson had been so thrilled by the discovery that he had quoted it in one of his articles.... “He said that there are two versions of the poem, the second shorter than
the first, with a few lines removed. If placed in sequence in front of a
mirror, the lines that were cut from the first version would reveal an
apocalyptic message in Hebrew, once the vowels were removed. That was
the apocryphal discovery that Rotkopf sent to Johnson, signing it with a
false name, knowing that Johnson would swallow it. That was what he was
planning to use to discredit Johnson during his talk.”

 

I took a look at the original as it appeared when first published in 1831 and the more recent texts, and could only find one line that appeared in the original and not in the subsequent versions.  The line reads:

— Stay! turn thine eyes afar!—

This is, or was the line immediately after "Where the Houri glances are"

Nine lines were added later. Eight lines had minor changes.

 

"Borges" in his epilogue concludes:

According to the epigraph to Poe’s poem “Israfel” – the sweet-voiced angel from the Koran – if you remove the vowels from the name and reverse the consonants, you get LFRS, the neo-Zoroastrian Tetragrammaton. With other vowels inserted, it would become the name of a malign god that might be spoken out loud before the time was right. 

 

Other apocryphal texts, namely the actual The Second Book of Esdras, are referenced:

 

“Taking part in this, so to speak, summit in King Rudolf II’s library in
1585 were the adherents of an occultist strand of Christianity, the
‘Apocrypha’, whose key text was the Second Book of Esdras, expurgated
from the Bible, which, in turn, was one of the basic texts in the Kabbala.
Pico della Mirandola, who wanted to bring the Renaissance Church and the
Kabbala closer together in order to combat secularism, went so far as to
allege that the text proved that, in its most primitive form, Judaism was
Trinitarian and foresaw the advent of Christ. As far as one knows, the
Kabbala was withdrawn from the black conference arranged by Rudolf II,
but John Dee managed to maintain the alliance between the philokabbalist
Church of the ‘Apocrypha’ and the Necronomicon strand, whose origins
probably lie in Egyptian hermeticism, pre-dating even Akhenaten. The
Israfel Society is Christian. Its conferences, which are always held either in
Stockholm, Baltimore or Prague – North, West and East – equate to a sign
of the cross, to the sacred triangle. Urquiza may be an even more
conservative Christian than people think and belong to the ancient occultist
tradition of the Church, which has never emerged from the shadows, and
which is willing to collaborate with any group that formed part of the black
pact in Prague, in order to protect its codes and its secret powers.”

 

“At the conference in Prague, the Christians of the ‘Apocrypha’ and the
Jews of the Kabbala were unable to agree because the Jews would not
accept the Christian interpretation of the Second Book of Esdras, according
to which primitive Judaism acknowledged Jesus and the Trinity, thus
allowing an approximation between Church and Kabbala. In the dispute,
both sides had accused each other of treachery. The Christians accused the
Jews of having betrayed Jesus, and the Jews accused the Christians of
having betrayed their own mother, that is, Judaism, out of which they had
been born. This was a dispute that had already been going on for 1,500
years and which continues today, in secret, between the Kabbala and
Christian gnosis.”

 

 Other literary games of false attribution appear, as stated by "Borges":

 "We all have ambitions to be sorcerers. Johannes Trithemius, a famous cryptographer
from the time of Maximilian I, invented an ancient historian called Hunibaldus to lend
credibility to some of his theories about Germany’s past. So convincing was he that
Hunibaldus was included as an entry in an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as if he
really had existed, until the deception was uncovered and he was purged from the next
edition. Johannes Trithemius is my idol. I tried, but never managed to get a single one of my
false historical figures or invented authorities into an encyclopaedia, even for ten minutes."

 

 "Borges" refers to an actual story of his which was published in Mistério Magazine that came out in 1948.  No further details provided.  I can find nothing on Misterio Magazine, but this seems to fit the bill:

Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Garden of Forking Paths." In: ELLERY QUEEN'S 

MYSTERY MAGAZINE. q. New York: Lawrence E. Spivak / 

The American Mercury, Inc., August 1948 (volume 12, number 57). 

Octavo, pictorial wrappers, stapled. The first story by Borges published in English. 

"El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan," translated here by Anthony Boucher 

as "The Garden of Forking Paths " (from EL JARDIN DE SENDEROS QUE SE BIFURCAN, 1942), is "a meditation on the splitting of space by time not many 

universes removed from SF tales involving Jonbar Point moments." - SFE (online). 

The Boucher translation has never been reprinted. Wrappers a bit dusty and tanned, 

pulpy text paper tanned, a very good copy. (#158847).

 

The narrator, relates:

I ... at the time and, amongst other things, had done a few translations
for Mistério Magazine, produced in Porto Alegre by the old Globo
publishing house. The magazine printed translations of stories that appeared
in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and, once, I translated a story by a
certain Jorge Luis Borges, of whom I – an anglophile and americanophile
already obsessed with Poe – had never heard. I thought the story was
dreadful, confused and lacking in excitement. It wasn’t clear at the end who
the criminal was, and the reader was forced to draw his or her own
conclusions. I decided to improve it. I added a few lugubrious Poe-like
touches to the plot and a completely new surprise ending that belied
everything that had gone before, including the author’s account of events.
Who would notice these changes in a translation into Portuguese of a
translation into English of a story written in Spanish by an unknown
Argentinian who should be grateful to me for adding a bit of extra blood
and inventiveness to his text?