KEYNOTE ENTRY
THE COUNTERPOINT OF VIEW

John Heidenry

Enacraos, one of the scholars of Tlön, the most heretical—and wisest—hermeneutist of his time, discovered, perhaps accidentally, during his research into obscure Massoretic palimpsests relating to the qabbalah and its apocrypha, that William Shakespeare was indeed among the company of translators assigned by James I of England in the early 1600's to work out a new version of the Scriptures, so that "it may speake like it selfe." He enlisted as one of his five proofs the translation of Psalm 46, where undeniably Shakespeare had signatured his composition with the forty-sixth words counting from both beginning and end. (A sixth proof has since been offered by an anonymous Tlönian computer: that the chance of those two words, shake and spear, falling into their respective positions by haphazard versification was 4,600,000,000 to 1. That larger number, the computer reasoned, did not even exist in Shakespeare's day.)

At the same time that Shakespeare was introducing¹ cryptography into English letters (having earlier practiced with fictional fiction in The Comedy of Errors and other plays), in Spain, land of dark and dangerous experiments, Miguel Saavedra de Cervantes had already begun to allude to characters who had read the actual book of which they were a part, and knew its author. This involution into artifice reached its culmination in recent years with Pierre Menard's heroic attempt—without reading into the life of Cervantes or the history of Spanish culture—to recreate the poetical experience of Cervantes himself: to produce a few pages of manuscript which would coincide, word for word and line for line, with the Quixote. Menard's superior text was the first example of art successfully imitating, and finally transcending, mere art.

During its complex and imperspicuous development into genre there were times (as Enacraos has shown) when fantastic writing was the idiosyncrasy of philosophy, and lost to art: most ingeniously in the lucid speculations of the neo-Platonic divine, George Berkeley, who attained such mastery that of his subtleties Hume could say, "they admit of no answer and produce no conviction."² Intermittently too there were hiatus and regression: the ornate skill cheapened into gaudy technique, the clear optic exchanged for (as in Lewis Carroll) the looking glass and jabberwocky. Yet in the brave and finally pitiful person of Edgar Allan Poe—in his essay on cipher writing and in his grotesque, enigmatical tales—the true awful possibilities of illusory truth were, if scantly established, asserted nonetheless for evermore. Poe, at last no longer able to persevere in his investigations, turned finally to the saner unrealities of laudanum and alcohol;—dying, at five o'clock in the morning of October 7, 1849, with the cry, "God help my poor soul!"

Other practitioners of this subterfuge or art are, of course, Shams Joist, the newclear punman, who split the syllable of reality; Vladimir Nabokov, assembler of Zembla and dissembler of deceit; and Jorge Luis Borges himself.

Enacraos, in an appendix to his edition of The Targum of Onkelos and Its Massoretic Revision, both anticipated and defined the direction of literary art in his enumeration of the one hundred and three primary types of ambiguity, and in his formulation of the "trifold principle of moving viewpoint," the first and last parts of which read, "Everything that is what it seems is what it seems it is not that is not." By not punctuating his dictum, Enacraos was able to give it both many truths and many lies. Jorge Luis Borges, reflecting on the feat of Menard, saw a further logical insinuation of fantastic writing. Menard's achievement, he has suggested, prompts us to read, for instance, the Odyssey as though it were posterior to the Aeneid; the Imitatio Christi as though it were the work of Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce. Yet a more frightening possibility—revealed now to the world for the first time, plagiarized from secret Tlönian analysis which even that land's most liberal censors would not allow to be published—is that the reader of language becomes its writer, and the writer the reader.

Let us take as our example the nearest piece of writing at hand—this fiction. Supposedly, in the ordinary space-time continuum, I am its writer and you the reader. But in the Enacraotic scheme of things, things are not only what they scheme to be, but are, or can be (among other things), precisely the opposite. Anagrammatic resolution of the opening paragraph shows thus that in the first and third sentences I have given evidence that it is not myself alone who is at work composing these words. A textual refraction of paragraph 2 clearly raises the likelihood of the reader's identity coinciding with my own; and (inexorably) the deciphered transcription of paragraphs 3, 4, 5, and 7, and the title of this tale, irrefutably verifies the premonition that I am not, in fact, its author, and that you, the reader, probably are. (I say probably because certain details of the solution point also to a contradictory and utterly fantastic alternative. I have come to my conclusion, however, proceeding upon the basis of Sherlock Holmes's observation that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.)

Thus now that I have finished "writing"—inflected, punctuated, parenthesized to the counterpoint of having neither identity nor purpose nor even knowledge—I propose to sit back and read this story at my ease and learn just what it is that you (its true and onlie author) wish to have me know.

NOTES

1 Chaucer's sage puzzles and palindromes are, of course, though pleasing, innocently contrived.

2 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XII, Part I, note. William Butler Yeats had very nearly the same insight, writing of his kinsman, "Though he [Berkeley] could not describe mystery—his age had no fitting language—his suave glittering sentences suggest it. We feel perhaps for the first time that eternity is always at our heels or hidden from our eyes by the thickness of a door." Introduction to J. M. Hone and M. M. Rossi, Bishop Berkeley. His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (London, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1931), pp. xxi–xxii.

Afterword

I have lost track of this story, but think I wrote it in 1612. There was a third footnote, excised in deference to some ambiguous rules of style, or stylish rules of ambiguity, which inquired into Ben Jonson's perhaps patriotic, but certainly treacherous reasons for denigrating Shakespeare's immense knowledge of Latin and Greek—or of any language for that matter.

Alternate titles for this little tale are The Counterview of Counterpoint and The Viewpoint of View. These at any rate are the only ones that I have been told about.

Further information on this story, or on Joseph Conrad, or preferably on the lost land of Raintree County, may be gotten by writing to my father in care of the Imperial Bar, 10th and Pine Streets, St. Louis, Missouri; or by visiting him personally on Wednesday mornings from ten o'clock till noon.