David W. Bird Honorio Bustos Domecq, the Fictional Narrator And

BUSTOS DOMECQ AND THE PRAISE OF FOLLY David W. Bird onorio Bustos Domecq, the fictional narrator and author of Hthree collections of aesthetic essays and stories that bear his name, is a figment of the imagination, a simulacrum, a textual ghost. Nonetheless, Bustos Domecq has over time acquired an epistemological status to which few fictional beings can aspire; he has been promoted from character to pseudonym, and awarded several publications of his very own, independently from those men who first gave him a voice. As well, in a collection of short stories edited by Donald Yates, a piece by Bustos Domecq stands independently of both Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casa- res, each of whom is also represented in the book. The 1942 ap- pearance in Buenos Aires bookshops of a new book from Edito- rial Sur, Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, caused an immediate sensation: who is this new and previously unheard-from writer, Honorio Bustos Domecq? According to one of Bustos Domecq’s creators, Adolfo Bioy Casares, there were among the writers who formed Buenos Aires’ avant-garde a certain number whose sense of humor did not extend to the toleration of such parody, not even in jest (which was the idea of the collaborators Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges). A similar reception awaited Bustos Domecq’s second collection, Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, in 1967. Suzanne J. Levine, in her Guía de Bioy Casares, provides an “author’s auto- chronology” from Bioy’s own pen, in which he recalls that in 1942 “con el pseudónimo H. Bustos Domecq, publicamos con Borges Variaciones Borges 23 (2007) 70 DAVID W. BIRD Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi. Los amigos, la crítica, are not amused” (Levine 172). The 1967 reception of Crónicas de Bustos Do- mecq was similarly chilly: “Con Borges publico Crónicas de Bustos Domecq. Me pregunta, alarmado, un editor: ‘¿No me va a decir que ustedes están contra la vanguardia?’” (Levine 174). How should one describe the collection of his essays titled Crónicas de Bustos Domecq? Above all, what are the implications for our reading of the work? I will argue that the function of Bustos Domecq’s strange, sometimes deranged aesthetic sensibility is paradoxical, as well as symbolic of Borges and Bioy Casares’s sense of the unsatisfactory state of Argentine letters and the critics who ruled it during the time of publication. By a close reading of these collections, I will show that the function of the strange, paradoxical and even disordered aesthetic sensibilities are symbolic of the unsatisfactory state (to the authors, natürlich) of Argentine belles lettres and their reigning critical elite in the mid-twentieth century. Because I read Bustos Domecq (particularly in Crónicas) as a parodic symbol or emblem of the Argentine literary establishment, it seems logical to exam- ine him in terms of Ángel Rama’s theoretical construct, the letrado. This concept, elaborated in the Uruguayan critic’s 1984 book La ciudad letrada, identifies the letrado throughout Latin American history as the “man of letters,” whose essential or necessary char- acteristic, whatever the accident of his temporal status—priest, lawyer, Crown bureaucrat, etc.—is the unending preservation of his position of power and privilege. In Argentina, many letrados earned their livings working for the state or for one of the great newspapers of the day (a tradition handed down from the mod- ernistas at least). For Rama, many subsequent critics have missed something essential regarding the journalism that served the letrados as a mask in this era, suggesting that they must be seen not only as servants of Institutions but also as designers of cultural models (Rama 30). This formulation works very well as applied to Borges and Bioy Casares, given the crucial importance of writing in their works. The famous preoccupation with the consequences of a logocentric world is one of Borges’s most common themes. The artistic category that Bustos Domecq praises also finds echoes BUSTOS DOMECQ AND THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 71 in Rama’s work; the Uruguayan writes of the disjunction between real life and what he calls “the Document,” that is, those pages sa- cralized by the power of Writing, whatever their specific content. The most cogent point of Rama’s theory for our purposes, the one most applicable to the three Bustos Domecq collections, is that the producers of these Documents do not have to choose one pro- fessional category or another—it is the act of writing that creates the letrado, not so much the accident of writing poems or laws, novels or Crown reports. There are superficial or formal features that tend to characterize the letrado as well: Rama identifies the tendency toward an extreme linguistic conservatism exemplified by Simón Bolívar, who in 1830 was still using the second person plural in vosotros, which most linguists would now identify as a notable anachronism in Latin America (49-50). As Jaime Alazraki notes in his review of Crónicas published in 1967, Bustos Domecq also deploys a grammatically distinctive language—and a hilari- ous one, as one would expect in a parody: Un ejemplo de resabio novecentista, para más de un escritor de nuestro muy entrado siglo XX es todavía ‘recurso’ literario, es el empleo del enclítico que pareciera decirnos ‘ojo, me estoy almido- nando’: don Bustos escribe ‘fumólo’, ‘dijérase’, ‘congratulélo’ (casi un trabalenguas), etc.” (Alazraki 89) The Latin American enclitic was already losing ground when Ca- rrió de la Vandera wrote El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes in the late eighteenth century; Bustos Domecq uses it more even than the Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554. Rama and Borges are both writers noted for a certain demonization of writing in their work; it is my contention that Borges and Bioy Casares intend particularly in the 1967 work to parody the figure of the self-interested and self-preserving letrado as a banal figure who enables medio- crity and balderdash to thrive. Bustos Domecq is a multifaceted character in the three works that carry his name: in Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942) he serves as an extradiegetic pseudonym for the bicephalous author called by Hernández Martín “Biorges”, the collaborative voice of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; in Crónicas de Bustos 72 DAVID W. BIRD Domecq (1967) he becomes an intradiegetic writer of literary essays; and in Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq (1977) his character serves primarily as an intradiegetic narratee, similar in structure but different in implicit function to his role in the 1942 work. I intend in this essay to concentrate on the character of Bustos Do- mecq in Seis problemas and Crónicas, the texts that give us the most insight into his own contributions to the letrados’ continued occu- pation of scriptural power. A word on the genre of the texts. Seis problemas is indubita- bly a collection of short stories, narratively less innovative than works published by Borges and Bioy under their own names. While the works in Crónicas and Nuevos Cuentos are decidedly fictional, though, even the word so commonly associated with Borges—“ficciones”—does not quite describe Domecq’s writings all the time. The pieces in Crónicas de Bustos Domecq are cer- tainly narrative after a fashion: at the very least they adhere to Genette’s third definition of narrative, i.e. “an event that consists of someone recounting something: the act of recounting taken in itself” (Genette 26). In point of fact the work it most resembles within Borges’ own oeuvre is Prólogo con un prólogo de prólogos, itself a playful examination of fictive works. Serendipitously, while searching for a different term, I came across the perfect descrip- tor for this particular genre or subgenre: “causerie.” J. A. Cuddon defines the term as “denot[ing] an informal talk, essay, or article particularly on literary topics” (116). (While the term is most often associated with nineteenth-century writings like Saint-Beuve’s Causeries de lundi, Roland Barthes’ book Mythologies is a perfect example of more contemporary causerie.) Bustos Domecq, a fictional character, writes causeries on fictional works of art by other fictional characters. The consequent layers of fictional representa- tion permit a parodic twisting of the contemporary art scene in 1960’s Argentina—the era when the book was published—into a jocose satire of artistic and literary criticism as a genre. What we see in this narrative complex is the authors freeing themselves to parody everything in their text: the narrator is parodic, the topics are parodic, and the characters Bustos Domecq profiles are parodic. BUSTOS DOMECQ AND THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 73 In this way, by passing through layer upon Derridean layer of fictionalized voice, “Biorges” push their vision of the bizarre essential critical logos of late modern Argentina to the fore, purify- ing it through successive narrative filterings. Bustos Domecq is the ultraist critic par excellence; nothing can go too far for his tastes. As we shall see, the art he praises is similar in structure and goals to artistic experiments that have actually occurred, simply carried to the nth degree—as Umberto Eco laughs in one of his prefaces, “This is parody’s mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity” (5). The essay, by nature a “centered” text in that it serves (theoretically) to ex- pound an author’s sentiments or intellectual convictions, is here distorted by “centering” itself on a fictional voice—and not just any fictional voice, but a critical perspective so far gone into the aesthetic of the avant-garde that the artistic endeavors he most praises are, to the reader, exercises in semiotic lunacy.

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