Liar/Lair Lair/Liar

I pulled ‘lair’ from my brainstorming bag a while back but mistakenly typed it as ‘liar’ and then quickly corrected it. The two are obviously related in terms of deceptiveness and hiding truths. I guess lies constitute appropriate hiding places too. But are there good lairs and good liars or even necessary lairs/liars? What lies do I hide in my lair? Or when does lair become liar? When does ones identity become that of ‘the liar’? What’s the tipping point?

Obviously this is a big part of DQ where we simultaneously know and don’t know who the author is, where there is a false version of the story which DQ himself feels he must work against – it hovers over him like (dare I say) a b a d o m e n. So he goes to Barcelona instead of Saragossa just because the false version has him go to Saragossa and he doesn’t want to do what the false storyteller claims he does. The story has gotten ahead him of somehow yet he still feels he can alter the course of events ‘after the fact’ because ‘the fact’ is a fabrication, a lie. And he does. Yet it is in Barcelona that he is undone. Do we cheer for the underdog then? Do we wish that DQ had gone to Saragossa as the story said? And is the person who can confidently say that Cervantes is the author of DQ the one who has not read it? (or ‘redit’? – does it mean ‘reward’?)

They asked him whither he meant to direct his steps. He replied, to Saragossa, to take part in the harness jousts which were held in that city every year. Don Juan told him that the new history described how Don Quixote, let him be who he might, took part there in a tilting at the ring, utterly devoid of invention, poor in mottoes, very poor in costume, though rich in sillinesses.
"For that very reason," said Don Quixote, "I will not set foot in Saragossa; and by that means I shall expose to the world the lie of this new history writer, and people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he speaks of."
"You will do quite right," said Don Jeronimo; "and there are other jousts at Barcelona in which Senor Don Quixote may display his prowess."

Was it better for him (and for you and for me) to be laughed at in Saragossa than to go to Barcelona and be tricked and defeated and have the story wind down to its end?


These are clearly some of the questions that Borges picks up on in his “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. The question of authorship that Cervantes throws into disarray is at the centre of all of this. Should Borges really be trying to tie things down? Or is that what he's really discussing in the story? How many authors of the Quixote are there wandering with us through the spring rains with the lilacs shining/unable to disguise their show and their scent? How many quotations from an author constitute authorship here on the blog? Can I cobble together a construction of Borges and Cervantes and Scott (where everyone, it seems, is ‘in disguise’) and the copyright holder of the Brainstorming Ball and the OED and blithely identify this text as one of my own making? Are we wandering readers ever wandering alone? D&G might say that we’re not wandering at all that we are just part of a rhizomic-pack-in-process, an assemblage, a multiplicitity of readers and words and real men and men-of-our-dreams.

CODA

All the sad young men/sitting in the bars/knowing neon lights/missing all the stars.