Examination of the work of Herbert Quain

Examination of the work of Herbert Quain (Spanish original title: Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain ) is a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges , which was part of the collection The Garden of Paths That Branch ( El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan ) and 1944 in its extension fictions ( Ficciones was published). The story is a “footnote to imaginary books” characteristic of Borges and describes in the guise of a critical essay the imaginary works of Herbert Quain, an imaginary figure , created between 1933 and 1939 .

content

Herbert Quain, an Irish writer, died in Roscommon . It does not seem surprising to the narrator , who was also in contact with Quain, that the obituaries in The Times Literary Supplement and in the Spectator were not extensive and benevolent, although Quain considered himself brilliant and always tried to surprise his readers with his books . So the brief examination of his work begins.

Quain's first book, The God of the Labyrinth , is quite long and was published in 1933 at the same time as Ellery Queen's novel The Siamese Twin Mystery , which is why it initially received little attention. Structured like a detective novel , the reader is only given the decisive clue after the classic resolution. He realizes that the detective is wrong and can solve the case himself after reading it again.

April March of 1936 is an even more unusual work. It consists of only a third part, and according to Quain, its branched structure is subject to the laws of the game, that is, “symmetry, arbitrariness and weariness”. The antichronic novel offers nine readings, each with a different style and ending, whereby the storylines, according to the narrator, have considerable differences in quality.

The 1938 comedy in two acts The Secret Mirror , in which the characters from the first act appear under different names in the second, is stylistically reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's epigrams . The plot of the second elevator runs parallel to that of the first, but the atmosphere is more oppressive. It turns out that the first act was just a fantasy of a character in the second act. According to the narrator, the play was often wrongly interpreted psychoanalytically.

In 1939 Quain published his most original and at the same time most difficult to access work, Statements , consisting of eight stories with a frustrating outcome. The narrator admits that he was inspired by this for his own narrative in his anthology The garden of paths that branch out.

analysis

“It is tedious and exhausting nonsense to write long books; to roll out a thought on five hundred pages, the perfectly adequate exposition of which takes a few minutes. It is better to proceed in such a way that one pretends that these books already exist and provides a résumé, a commentary. (...) Out of greater shrewdness, greater ineptitude, greater laziness, I have preferred to write notes on imaginary books. "

- Jorge Luis Borges : preface to fictions

Borges' story is a pastiche of a literary critical essay and thus a typical postmodern game for Borges with identities, with reality and with the expectations of the reader. That both Herbert Quain and his works are imaginary is not immediately apparent from the apparent essay. The result is a metaliterary reflection on the importance of authorship in the age of post-structuralism . This can also take on absurd or paradoxical traits, for example when Borges' creation Quain is declared to be the source of inspiration for a work by the narrator (a fictionalized Borges).

The comments on Quain's detective novel The God of the Labyrinth seem like a distillate of the novel reviews that Borges wrote for the weekly El Hogar in the late 1930s . Borges was one of the first writers at the end of classical modernism who was interested in the genre of the crime novel, which until then had often been regarded as trivial literature .

Quains April March is considered a conceptual forerunner of hypertext literature with its possibility of associative networking because of the non-linear structure that forces the reader to interact with the text .

Others

The protagonist of José Saramago's novel The Year of Death of Ricardo Reis reads Herbert Quain's The God of the Labyrinth on a boat trip from Buenos Aires to Lisbon .

literature

expenditure

• Ficciones , Rayo 2008, ISBN 978-0061565373
• Ficciones , Alianza Editorial 1987, ISBN 978-8420633121
• Stories: Universal History of Wickedness. Fictions. Das Aleph (Collected Works, Volume 5), Hanser 2000, ISBN 978-3446198784
• Fictions: Stories 1939-1944 , Fischer 1992, ISBN 978-3596105816

Secondary literature

• Horst-Jürgen Gerigk : Draft of a theory of the literary structure , de Gruyter 1975, ISBN 978-3110057683 (including a section on Borges' story)
• Eva Horn : The secret and its betrayal. About some figures in Borges , in: Renate Lachmann , Stefan Rieger (Ed.): Text and knowledge: Technological and anthropological aspects . Narr 2003, pp. 243-263, ISBN 978-3823357155
• Adelheid Schaefer: Fantastic elements and aesthetic concepts in the narrative work by JL Borges , Humanitas 1973, ISBN 978-3799702201

Web links

• Original Spanish text
• Essay The Crimson Hexagon. Books Borges Never Wrote by Allen Ruch (PDF; 201 kB)
• Essay The system and chance. To the parody of the detective novel by Jorge Luis Borges by Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus
• Script imaginary authors and imaginary books as part of the metal literature lecture at the University of Bochum (PDF; 117 kB)
• Script forerunner of the hypertext on paper as part of the digital literature lecture at the University of Vienna (.doc)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Script (PDF; 120 kB) for the metal literature lecture .
2. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus: The system and chance. To the parody of the detective novel by Jorge Luis Borges .
3. ↑ Script for the lecture on digital literature .
4. ↑ Chris Rollason: ( Memento of the original from November 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Literature as History: José Saramago's “O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis” .