CHRONICLES OF BUSTOS DOMECQ
by JORGE LUIS BORGES and ADOLFO BIOY-CASARES
Translated by NORMAN THOMAS Dl GIOVANNI
143 pages. Dutton. $7.95.
Since Bustos Domecq does not exist, Argentine Authors Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares had to invent him. Why? Because Domecq is the pure incarnation of the middleman between a world gone culturally haywire and the uncomprehending mass of mankind. His function: telling people why they should admire nonsense. This inept critic is a figure of Chaplinesque pathos: a tastemaker totally lacking in taste, a perpetual target of the avant-garde's custard pies.
Easy Vanity. As this collection of mock essays about mock artists amply demonstrates, no aesthetic theory is too lunatic for Domecq to explain and applaud. He takes up the cudgels for the late César Paladión, an imaginary novelist who followed the path of rigorous logic straight into absurdity. Since all writers, Paladión reasoned, borrow words and sometimes even phrases and lines from other writers, why not take this process as far as it can go? "Reaching into the depths of his soul," Domecq prattles, "he published a series of books that expressed him utterly—completely without overburdening the already unwieldy corpus of bibliography or falling into the all too easy vanity of writing a single new line." Paladión, in short, attached his name to the works of other authors, including The Hound of the Baskervilles and the original Latin rendering of De Divinatione. "And what Latin it was!" Domecq writes. "Cicero's!"
The critic is equally hysterical about another large-scale plagiarism: the Divine Comedy of Hilario Lambkin Formento. This nonbook is not a brazen, word-for-word theft, Domecq insists, but rather the best piece of descriptive criticism ever penned on Dante's masterpiece, since it is an exact replica of the original.
With self-important earnestness, Domecq ticks off a whole catalogue of such deluded poseurs. There is F.J.C. Loomis, whose dislike of metaphors leads him to compose—laboriously—one-word poems (Domecq explains that his "Beret" had a poor reception, "perhaps attributable to the demands it makes on the reader of having to learn French"). There is Santiago Ginsberg, a poet who assigns private meanings to public words ("mailbox," to him, translates as "accidental, fortuitous, incompatible with a cosmos"). Adalberto Vilaseco devotes his career to publishing the same poem under different titles. Forbidden by his religion from drawing likenesses of the world, Artist José Enrique Tafas carefully paints Buenos Aires street sights and then entirely blackens them with shoe polish. His prices vary according to the amount of work that went into the now invisible scenes.