Tag Archives: Borges

Blituri, babazuf, skindapsos, tophlattothrattophlattothrat and other nonsense

This page Amusement is part of the nonsense series.Illustration: House of Nonsense (1911), one of Blackpool's funhouse attractions

House of Nonsense (1911), one of Blackpool’s funhouse attractions

 

This post is prompted by my reading of Umberto Eco’s “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence” in On Literature and finding the terms blituri,  skindapsos,  babazuf  and  tophlattothrattophlattothrat,  four early nonsense words.

In a different chapter, “Between La Mancha and Babel”  of that same On Literature, Eco claims  that Jorge Luis Borges invented the “exquisite Joyce – flavoured  calembour  whateverano  (which can be read as ‘what a summer’ and ‘whatever is summer’).

Perhaps that is correct.

However, I found the term whatever-ano (ah … the joys of Google Books) in Thomas De Quincey‘s essay “Orthographic Mutineers“:

adoptado by anybody-ini whatever-ano[1]

I admit, whatever-ano here has not the same wordplay-value; however, it has the same orthography (except for the hyphen) and perhaps Borges, who was a fan of Quincey, read it here first and in a case of cryptomnesia, “invented” it many years later.

Ah… (one of my favorite words of late it would seem), the anxiety of influence!.

“By Allah, this story is my story and this case is my case”

Currently reading  De Zahir.

I’m currently reading  De Zahir.

One sentence in “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges caught my attention.

“I remembered too that night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One Nights when Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to relate word for word the story of the Thousand and One Nights, establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it, and thus on to infinity…”

Marina Warner in Stranger Magic points to “Readings and Re-Readings of Night 602” by Evelyn Fishburn which identifies the night Borges refers to as the “Tale of the Two kings and the Wazir’s Daughters“.

“By Allah, this story is my story and this case is my case,” shouts the king when he finds out that Scheherazade is telling him his frame tale.

Again in the words of Borges (from “Magias parciales del Quijote“) in which he calls that night a “magic night among the nights”:

“The King hears his own story from the Queen’s mouth. He hears the beginning of the story, which embraces all the others as well as – monstrously – itself. Does the reader really understand the vast possibilities of that interpolation, the curious danger – that the Queen may persist and the Sultan, immobile, will hear forever the truncated story of A Thousand and One Nights, now infinite and circular?”[1]

This passage illustrates the concepts of infinite regress, the Droste effect and metafiction.