Bloodless Coup

By Paul Gray

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 Cesar Paladion, an imaginary novelist who followed the path of rigorous logic straight into absurdity. Since all writers, Paladion 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." Paladion, 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 Jose 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.

Borges' gnomic stories have, of course, earned him a worldwide following, and he and Bioy-Casares (a long time friend and disciple) are up to some thing a bit more ambitious than a parody of a hapless critic. The real target of their often uproarious gibes is modernism -- or the part of it that zealously pursues theories of "pure" form into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. The result, which Domecq never perceives, is invariably monstrous: novels and poems that can not be read, art that cannot be seen, architecture -- freed from the "demands of inhabitability" -- that cannot be used.

Donnish Humor. Things have not quite come to the unpretty pass that Domecq praises. But it is all theoretically plausible--and sometimes a bit more than that. Antarctic A. Garay earns Domecq's admiration by inventing "con cave sculpture"--i.e., setting up several pieces of junk and inviting spectators to contemplate the spaces between them.

Londoners were recently surprised and angered to discover a rectangular pile of stacked bricks exhibited in the Tate Gallery. With donnish humor and un failing intelligence, Chronicles of Bustos Domecq thrusts a rapier into such gargantuan posturing. As the enemies of sense and sensibility invade and occupy the citadels, Borges and Bioy-Casares are leading a bloodless coup.

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