Where Tigers Are at Home (70 page)

“And you would be going down the wrong road … insofar as you would be confirming something of which you are already sure, even before having examined your hypothesis as what it must remain until the end : a
hypothesis
. Although I’m not clear
about the reasons, I have gathered that you don’t like this poor Jesuit very much. Every time you talk about him, it’s to criticize him for something, in general terms for not having been Newton, Mersenne or Gassendi … Why would you want him to be anything other than himself, Athanasius Kircher? Take a look at La Mothe Le Vayer, for example, a free thinker, a skeptic after your own heart. Now there’s a nasty piece of work for you! He denied his fine ideas ten times over, out of ambition, out love of power and money. Newton, Descartes? Look closely and you’ll see that they’re not as pure as the history of science, the new
Legenda Aurea
, would have us believe. As soon as you are interested in something or someone, they become interesting. It’s a truism. The converse is also true: you decide someone’s a rogue and he’ll become one in your eyes, as sure as eggs are eggs. It’s autosuggestion, my friend. All of history is nothing but this self-hypnosis in the face of the facts. If I could persuade you, by putting on an act, that you had swallowed a bad oyster, you’d be sick, physically sick. I don’t know who or what put it into your head that Kircher was contemptible, but that’s what has happened and nothing will make you change your mind as long as you haven’t identified the process that has led you to ‘somatize’ this result.”

“You are laying it on a bit thick, Doctor,” Eléazard said, slightly ill at ease. “History is what really happened. Kircher didn’t decipher the hieroglyphs, though he thought, or gave the impression that, he had. No one can maintain the opposite without being looked on as a crank. Most of the scholars of his day suspected that was the case before there was any actual proof. Today it’s a fact.”

“True, my friend, true. But why do you go on about it? If you pick out that failure, it’s simply to provide grist for another mill: you want to prove that Father Kircher was a forger. That’s where you move into a fantasy world, in this relentless determination to
show that his reputation is based on fraud. You quoted Ranke, I have another for you. Read Duby again: the historian, he says, is a dreamer forced—”

“Forced by the facts not to dream, despite his propensity to do so!”

“No, my friend: forced to dream in the face of the facts, to plaster over the gaps, to replace of his own accord the missing arm of a statue that only exists in his head. You’re dreaming up Kircher at least as much as he dreamed himself up, as much as we all dream ourselves up, each in his own way …”

“Perhaps,” Eléazard said, refilling their glasses in a state of agitation, “but when my imagination copies out the best pages of Nobili or Boym without quoting them, as he does in his
China Monumentis
, it is still downright plagiarism and it is not to his credit. What do you make of that? Surely you’re not going to justify this regular pillage?”

Dr. Euclides took a sip of cognac before replying. “His plagiarism is unworthy of him, I agree. My initial reaction is the same as yours, but I am aware that in that I am following contemporary convention … The crux of the problem is the creative act itself, the fact that one cannot conceive of it without having recourse to imitation.”

“But imitation is not, nor has it ever been simply copying a text, it —”

“Please, let me try to explain. Voltaire and Musset were extremely scathing about plagiarism—I seem to recall that you have a certain admiration for the first of those, haven’t you?”

“That is true,” Eléazard confessed, without having the least idea where his old friend’s argument was leading.

“Voltaire gave out complete poems by Maynard as his own; as for Musset, you remember his ‘I loathe plagiarism as much as I loathe death; my glass is not big, but I drink out of my own
glass’? He borrowed scenes from Carmontelle! Whole scenes, apart from the odd comma! Compare his
Le Distrait
with Musset’s
On ne saurait penser à tout
and you’ll see what I mean. You want more examples? Take Aretino: the whole of his
History of the Goths
is translated from Procopius, using a manuscript of which he thought he owned the only copy … Machiavelli? The same scenario with his
Life of Castruccio Castracani
where he puts the
Apothegms
of Plutarch in the mouth of his hero … Ignatius Loyola? Have a look at Cisneros’s
Spiritual Exercises
and you’ll be surprised …”

“Ignatius Loyola!” Eléazard exclaimed.

“Not word for word, but very much ‘inspired by,’ which wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d acknowledged his debt, as La Fontaine did with Aesop, for example.”

“In that last case it’s a reworking. And I’m sure you’ll agree that La Fontaine is somewhat superior to the original as far as the form is concerned.”

“Got you there!” Euclides said, wagging his finger at him with a mischievous look. “It’s exactly the same whether you’re plagiarizing someone’s words or ideas. The whole history of art, and even of knowledge, consists of this assimilation, taken to greater or lesser lengths, of what others have tried out before us. No one has been able to avoid it since the beginning of time. It’s not worth commenting on, except to say that our imagination is limited, which we’ve always known, and that books are only made with other books. Pictures with other pictures. We’ve been going round and round in circles since the very beginning, round the same pot, the same mess tin.”

“I’m not that sure … But anyway, what’s to stop some people from putting quotation marks when they use other people’s work? Apart from the desire for fame, the aspiration to pass for something they aren’t?”

“Just think about it a bit. When Virgil uses a line from Quintus Ennius as if it were one of his own, and he did it several times, whether you like it or not … No, sorry, it’s not going to work with that example. Let’s take that sentence from Ranke you quoted just now instead:
History is what really happened
. You had the good grace to make a pause and to indicate by your intonation that it wasn’t something of your own. Right. Now I could interpret your tone because we’ve been friends for years, but someone else could have assumed that you had just produced that definition yourself. And yet you don’t consider yourself a plagiarist.”

“That’s unfair, I knew that you were familiar with it!”

“Agreed, but that’s not the point. How often do we go down that slippery slope? My own quotation from Duby, for example. I’ve never read the book it’s taken from. I don’t even know if I’ve seen it quoted somewhere or just heard it said as coming from him. Perhaps he never even wrote it; that often happens with the kind of maxim that’s on everybody’s lips without anyone bothering to check the source. A rumor, when it comes down to it, nothing but a rumor. Just think, no conversation would be possible at all if we had to justify every one of our words.
History is what really happened …
Can you be sure no one wrote or spoke that banal little formulation before Ranke? To be able to use a single sentence without quotes, our memory would have to contain everything that’s been said since back in the mists of time! The search for whoever originally coined a phrase would be infinite, it would simply result in silence. To get back to Kircher: why should one not have one’s doubts about the authors he plagiarizes as well? Who can guarantee that Mersenne himself didn’t rob some student of his discoveries? Where do the quotation marks stop? If I write: History is what really disappeared, have I the right to claim it as my own property, or should I write:
History is what really
disappeared, with a footnote to render unto Ranke that which
is Ranke’s? We might as well put every word in the dictionary in quotes, every one of their possible combinations, for even when I produce them, I can’t be certain that they aren’t already there in billions of books I’ll never read. You see what I’m getting at, Eléazard: the important thing is the universal gray matter, not the individuals who, by chance or consciously, become owners of it.”

“Well, well,” said Eléazard in astonishment, “for someone who doesn’t feel in form … You must admit you’re going a bit far. I can’t believe you attach so little importance to literary or artistic property.”

“There’s the rub, my friend. There was a time when neither books nor products of the mind in general brought in anything at all for their authors. Court proceedings against pirated editions only start with industrial mercantilism. You don’t find that strange?”

“But fame and glory, Doctor? The glory enjoyed by a Virgil or a Cervantes, by an Athanasius Kircher, ‘the man of a hundred arts,’ the ‘genius’ revered by everyone?”

“ ‘Rome that I hate, and will ever so remain, Rome for whose sake my lover thou hast slain!’ Perhaps you know who wrote that?”

“Corneille, of course,” Eléazard replied, feeling such an elementary question was almost an insult.

“No he didn’t, my friend, he didn’t. It was Jean Mairet, a poor fellow who ought to have been grateful to Corneille for having plagiarized him; it’s only thanks to this that he’s still mentioned in a few learned commentaries. Even if he had taken action against the thief, it would have done nothing to change the unfortunate truth: his tragedy was poor, Corneille’s a success. Two or three borrowings are not enough to bring glory; it’s clear that certain garments are far too large for the scribblers who fashion them. Let’s be serious, shall we? Plagiarism is necessary! And even that
simple assertion isn’t by me, it’s from Lautréamont:
we follow an author’s words closely, we use his expressions, we delete a mistaken idea and replace it with a sound one …
Which he put into practice himself by shamelessly correcting the maxims of Pascal or Vauvenargues.
Poetry should be made by all
, he writes a bit further on. It’s not the words themselves that are important, it’s the things they modify around them, the things they set off in the mind that receives them. And the same for all the rest, Eléazard. Beethoven plagiarizes Mozart before becoming himself, as Mozart had done with Gluck, Gluck with Rameau, et cetera. Inspiration is just a nice word for imitation, which is itself just a variant of the word plagiarism. ‘Stealer of slaves’ as the Greek has it but also stealer of fire, a springboard to the stars.”

Shaken by the reference to Lautréamont, Eléazard had lowered his guard. Dr. Euclides strung together a series of comparisons from the fine arts, invoking Aristotle and Winckelmann: Poussin had reproduced a Roman fresco, which had since disappeared, to make the background to one of his paintings, for a long time Turner had desperately tried to rival Poussin, Van Gogh copied Gustave Doré, Delacroix and Japanese prints; as for Max Ernst, he quite logically ended up cutting out others’ engravings to re-compose them in his own style. Picasso, Duchamp, there was no one true artist who had not, at least at the beginning, nurtured his talent with pastiche, parody and plagiarism …

Close to a technical knockout, Eléazard made a desperate attempt to slip Euclides’s punches: ‘You’re not playing fair, Doctor, and you know it. I can see what you’re getting at, but there’s a clear difference between the acknowledged admiration of one artist for another and the fraud of appropriating part of his work. I can’t see what’s wrong with one painter imitating another to learn the craft, we’re in agreement on that. Except that it has nothing to do with plagiarism. Is that even possible in painting?
Do you seriously think that nowadays you could paint a glass of water on top of an umbrella without being immediately accused of having plagiarized Magritte?”

“You like Magritte?”

“A lot, yes.”

“All the worse for you …”

Euclides stood up with a haste that had a touch of irritation. Eléazard watched him as he scrutinized his bookshelves, muttering to himself, his face right up against the books. “There you are,” he said, coming back to sit down with a little pile of books he kept on his knees. He put a big catalog of Belgian painting on the table “Find
The Man with the Newspaper
, please.”

Eléazard knew the painting in question: a man was warming himself beside the stove while reading his newspaper. The same image was repeated in the three other compartments of the painting, the same stove, the same window and the same table, but without the figure.

“Done,” he said with a hint of condescension.

Euclides handed him another volume, clothbound this time. “Now would you be so good as to find the article ‘Stove,
Ideal
incandescent fuel with flue.’ ”

Smiling at the old man’s eccentricity, Eléazard first of all glanced at the title—Bilz:
The Natural Method of Healing—then
at the polychrome cover, embossed as on the old
Collection Hetzel
books. On it a young woman was bathing in her beneficial rays two young children, who were sitting in the middle of nowhere. Eléazard noted the art nouveau style of the decoration and leafed through the book to find the entry suggested by the doctor: SELF-ABUSE; SINGING IS CONDUCIVE TO HEALTH; SPIRITS, LOW; SPITTING BLOOD; STAMMERING, how to cure in children; STAYS, see: “Women diseases of”; STIFF NECK; STOMACH WEAK AND SICKLY; STOVE: (“Ideal”) incandescent fuel stove with flue.

At once his intrigued amusement turned to amazement. Without leaving him time to react, Euclides placed his finger on his lips. “Not now, I beg you,” he said wearily, “we’ll continue this conversation another time. I’m sorry, but I have to lie down for an hour or two.” Nevertheless, he insisted on accompanying him to the door. “Give my best wishes to Kircher,” he said out of the corner of his mouth and putting on the most serious of expressions, a pretense that almost made his friendly mockery disagreeable.

When she woke up early in the afternoon, Loredana had some difficulty gathering her memories. The rhythms of the
macumba
were still sounding a vague echo behind her headache. What had happened at the end of the ceremony? How had she managed to get back to the hotel? Alfredo’s face had shut off her memory like an iron mask. The grubby light filtering through the venetian blinds seemed to be impregnating her clothes, scattered all over the room, with gray mold. Her will was urging her to get up, to get away from feeling the suffocation and sadness that marked her awakening, but her drowsiness pushed her far back toward the faint swirls of frayed dreams.