The internet, which Borges did not live to see but certainly imagined, has introduced questions over intellectual property that most guardians of privately owned culture still refuse to acknowledge. It takes only a Google search to dig out Borges’s complete works – even the now infamous The Aleph, in many languages – without charge, and not always illegally. That in 2015, when everything is reproduced and available to anyone clever enough to perform a web search, someone can risk prison for a literary game brings into view the clear incongruities between contemporary culture and copyright laws. It seems unlikely that Katchadjian will actually end up in prison, but the implications of taking writers to court over creative acts are chilling. So it seems fair to conclude that the real issue in the Katchadjian case is not literary integrity but financial value, and it is not about protecting Borges’s oeuvre, as the plaintiff claims.
And forgery – Borges is, after all, also famous for his use and abuse of fake quotes and forged literary references. Those familiar with Borges’ oeuvre will recognise in “Pierre Menard …” the return of a number of his intellectual concerns: meta-literature, an obsession with reproducibility and the classics.
This was not a bank robbery or a plagiarised thesis but a literary experiment by an author renowned for his performative approach to literature.įor Borges, Menard’s Quixote is radically different to Cervantes’, even if they appear identical: how could an identical paragraph mean the same in 1605 as in the 1930s? Literature might be the endless repetition of the same topics but these are never received unchangeably. He did not just go after any canonised writer, he went for the writer of Pierre Menard and engaged him in Borgesian terms, adding 5,600 words to the original 4,000. Beyond Katchadjian’s artfulness or potential opportunism few would doubt the literary intention behind his attempt to play with Borges. This seems an excessive punishment for a literary gesture. If found guilty he risks spending up to six years in prison.
Last week the Argentine literary world was shaken by the news that Katchadjian has now been formally charged with the un-literary sounding crime of “intellectual property fraud”.
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