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La réfutation majeure
"D’aucuns ont entendu parler d’un livre intitulé Refutatio major, faussement attribué à don Antonio de Guevara*, dans lequel ledit Antonio prétend qu’il ne peut exister de Nouveau Monde, seulement des chimères & de malveillantes rumeurs & des inventions colportées par quelques intrigants. Ces mêmes personnes affirment que les raisons avancées par ledit Antonio sont fort déconcertantes."
Bonaventura d’Arezzo, Propos sur les ombres (1531)
Cette réfutation, majeure en effet, est la suivante : il n'existerait pas de Nouveau Monde, découvert par Christophe Colomb.
Celui qui avait exigé de se faire appeler "l’Amiral de la mer Océane" a-t-il découvert un nouveau monde ou a-t-il inventé l’Amérique ?
La Réfutation majeure, voici un livre qui réunit tous les livres : le livre d’aventure, la fresque historique, le récit satirique, le livre d’érudition, la somme philosophique, le libelle polémique, le traité de géographie, l’analyse politique.
Le corps principal du texte se présente sous la forme d'un longue lettre adressée - sous couvert d'anonymat - par Antonio de Guevara à Charles Quint, dans laquelle il réfute l’existence d’un nouveau continent avec des arguments qui vont des plus sérieux aux plus extravagants.
Dans une postface, le narrateur du roman se prend à douter de l’auteur de La Réfutation majeure. La lettre est-elle d’Amerigo Vespucci, de Jeanne la Folle ou d’autres encore ? Une coda vient clore le roman où diverses thèses sont évoquées : par exemple, des doutes quant au sexe d’Homère ou ceux à propos de la véritable identité de l’auteur des pièces signées Molière.
La Réfutation majeure vient avec une pertinente ironie nous rappeler la passion des hommes pour l’ignorance et l’éternelle opposition entre les dupes, les non-dupes, ou ceux qui se croient tels.
*Antonio de Guevara (1480-1548) fut le confesseur de Charles Quint, on lui doit un texte apocryphe attribué à Marc Aurèle.
Bonaventura d’Arezzo, Propos sur les ombres (1531)
Cette réfutation, majeure en effet, est la suivante : il n'existerait pas de Nouveau Monde, découvert par Christophe Colomb.
Celui qui avait exigé de se faire appeler "l’Amiral de la mer Océane" a-t-il découvert un nouveau monde ou a-t-il inventé l’Amérique ?
La Réfutation majeure, voici un livre qui réunit tous les livres : le livre d’aventure, la fresque historique, le récit satirique, le livre d’érudition, la somme philosophique, le libelle polémique, le traité de géographie, l’analyse politique.
Le corps principal du texte se présente sous la forme d'un longue lettre adressée - sous couvert d'anonymat - par Antonio de Guevara à Charles Quint, dans laquelle il réfute l’existence d’un nouveau continent avec des arguments qui vont des plus sérieux aux plus extravagants.
Dans une postface, le narrateur du roman se prend à douter de l’auteur de La Réfutation majeure. La lettre est-elle d’Amerigo Vespucci, de Jeanne la Folle ou d’autres encore ? Une coda vient clore le roman où diverses thèses sont évoquées : par exemple, des doutes quant au sexe d’Homère ou ceux à propos de la véritable identité de l’auteur des pièces signées Molière.
La Réfutation majeure vient avec une pertinente ironie nous rappeler la passion des hommes pour l’ignorance et l’éternelle opposition entre les dupes, les non-dupes, ou ceux qui se croient tels.
*Antonio de Guevara (1480-1548) fut le confesseur de Charles Quint, on lui doit un texte apocryphe attribué à Marc Aurèle.
240 pages, Paperback
First published August 20, 2004
2 people are currently reading
203 people want to read
About the author
Pierre Senges
36 books24 followersPierre Senges (born 1968, Romans-sur-Isère) is a French writer. His work includes fifteen books, often collaborations with illustrators, and over twenty-five plays for radio.
His books are sometimes noted for having a baroque style. They frequently combine erudition and invention Fragments of Lichtenberg or play with the relation between the true and untrue Veuves au maquillage and La réfutation majeure.
Senges' radio plays (fictions radiophoniques) have been produced by France Culture and France Inter. His many prizes include the Prix Wepler, the Prix SACD Nouveau Talent Radio in 2007, the Grand prix de la fiction radiophonique de la SGDL in 2008, the Prix du deuxième roman, the Prix Rhône-Alpes, and the Prix meilleure page 111.
His books are sometimes noted for having a baroque style. They frequently combine erudition and invention Fragments of Lichtenberg or play with the relation between the true and untrue Veuves au maquillage and La réfutation majeure.
Senges' radio plays (fictions radiophoniques) have been produced by France Culture and France Inter. His many prizes include the Prix Wepler, the Prix SACD Nouveau Talent Radio in 2007, the Grand prix de la fiction radiophonique de la SGDL in 2008, the Prix du deuxième roman, the Prix Rhône-Alpes, and the Prix meilleure page 111.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
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February 1, 2021'Jorge Luis Borges declared that “writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.” He sounds like he’s endorsing the SparkNotes of writing like those that exist for reading, and in truth the SparkNotes of Borges’ writing does ignite a conflagration in the mind, for it is compact and concentrated.
With Borges’ quote in mind, Pierre Senges is the ostensible fool who has taken it upon himself to expand rather than condense, to digress rather than focalize, to take a concept and write it to cum-depleted completion, and perhaps beyond.'
Read my full review here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/01/3...
I interviewed Pierre Senges here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/01/3...
With Borges’ quote in mind, Pierre Senges is the ostensible fool who has taken it upon himself to expand rather than condense, to digress rather than focalize, to take a concept and write it to cum-depleted completion, and perhaps beyond.'
Read my full review here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/01/3...
I interviewed Pierre Senges here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/01/3...
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February 10, 2017I know you've got your copy of Fragments of Lichtenberg by now and so you'll not know why you need this. This Minor Senges. You're asking yourself. But since you've not started in on Fragments just yet (it's shorter than I'd expected, some reason) you should do yourself the Major Favor of first picking up this Refutation. It's timely. Look folks ; there's nothing I like more than a Found Text. And even better, a found text from centuries past ; a kind of way=back machine. And no matter how way back this found text is, it's like you totally could've pulled it off the internet. Because what we have here is a thoroughly documented account of the total fraud perpetrated by Chistabol Columb, et al, regarding The New World. If you look at the facts, there is no such thing. Like there's not such thing as a Moon Landing. Like there is such a thing as WMD in Iraq. Like how Rump is a legit prez. (Q for you ; is the existence of a thing/event symmetrical with its non-existence? Not sure how these C=spiries work exactly). At any rate, The Major Refutation tells the Truth about what was actually discovered via all this hoopla. Don't miss it ; it is one of the Major Novels of '17, even given the existence of Lichtenberg--> and seriously folks, any list of Novels of '17 which don't feature one or t'uther of Senges, you can just tell that List to fuck off. Right here, this is what novels look like. (Best of '17).
December 31, 2016
The fake does not have the qualities of the true, it only appears to have them; yet, at the risk of pleading against mine own cause, I must admit that the efforts used by counterfeiters often merit`far greater attention [...] and admiration than their authentic models, which take no further trouble than to simply exist: resting on an embroidered cushion until the end of recorded time.This is a difficult book to describe: it is a book of fictional invention masquerading as historical artifact, further masquerading as scholarly treatise. It never flinches, it has not one single tell that it is anything but what it appears to be: a 16th century work, of questionable authorship, that methodically and systemically argues against the existence of the "New World".
Nothing about it is true, it is all invention, but even stating that gives me pause, so convincing is it's composition and presentation. A compelling work of artifice, which only make the forthcoming Fragments... all the more enticing.
February 12, 2017
I assume that everyone wishes literature were just vituperative rants saturated in scholastic detail, but devoid of characters, plot, and description. Voila. The Major Refutation, written by Antonio de Guevara to his confessee, Charles I of Ghent, later Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, reveals to us that the discovery of the New World was a fraud perpetrated by more or less everyone other than Antonio himself: the Catholic monarchs, the merchants, the slave-owners, the goldsmiths, the Jews (though Antonio understands that they're sinned against, rather than sinning), the explorers, and most of all Antonio's arch-nemesis, Peter Martyr. Essential: Bernhard writing in the 16th century.
Pierre Senges has done us the favor of translating it into French, and adding a scholarly epilogue on the many other great lost books and revelations of fraud in literary history. And then Jacob Siefring has done an excellent job putting Senges' French into English. The book is a wonderful take-down of the Age of Exploration, and therefore also of the New World supposedly discovered during that age, and therefore also of the 'Old' World that glutted itself on potatoes and tomatoes and gold and slaves. Since the Old and New Worlds are both as existent as they ever were, it's also eerily relevant.
The whole thing is worth reading, though I have more than a few questions for Siefring: in English, this really is like a more oratorical Bernhard; was the French more authentically 16th century? Are the anachronisms, winked at in Senges's epilogue, Senges's fault, or Siefring's, or intentional on one or both their parts?
But I have no questions about the worth of reading the book. The project itself, the skeptical assault on events we know to have been real, is genuinely discomforting. Readers of texts like this tend to pride ourselves on our skepticism and our doubting; here, the skepticism is gloriously productive of insults and scorn, and the insults and scorn are often well-deserved, but ultimately we, the readers, know that the skepticism was misplaced. Is ours, too, misplaced?
"When faced with a lie, every man thinks it his duty to pronounce the truth, and believes that he just as soon dissolves it, just as Christ with a single word drove off the demon, composed of sarcasm and sulphur; when faced with liars, every man yearns to crack open the safes of the secretaries and sift through the documents, because he eagerly awaits the triumph, tardy perhaps but nonetheless effective, of experts and jurists over boasters and sham sailors, bona fide bastards and speculators... truth has the disadvantage of being prudent, circumspect, and of keeping quiet as silence is its least impure form... and adumbration fails when it comes face-to-face with the lie, the lie being sprightly, performative, incontestable as a blemish, and possessing the authority of a tocsin or call to prayer."
On the one hand, you want to quote that to every Trump voter you meet. On the other hand, it was written by a man who was, sincerely or not, lying through his teeth.
Pierre Senges has done us the favor of translating it into French, and adding a scholarly epilogue on the many other great lost books and revelations of fraud in literary history. And then Jacob Siefring has done an excellent job putting Senges' French into English. The book is a wonderful take-down of the Age of Exploration, and therefore also of the New World supposedly discovered during that age, and therefore also of the 'Old' World that glutted itself on potatoes and tomatoes and gold and slaves. Since the Old and New Worlds are both as existent as they ever were, it's also eerily relevant.
The whole thing is worth reading, though I have more than a few questions for Siefring: in English, this really is like a more oratorical Bernhard; was the French more authentically 16th century? Are the anachronisms, winked at in Senges's epilogue, Senges's fault, or Siefring's, or intentional on one or both their parts?
But I have no questions about the worth of reading the book. The project itself, the skeptical assault on events we know to have been real, is genuinely discomforting. Readers of texts like this tend to pride ourselves on our skepticism and our doubting; here, the skepticism is gloriously productive of insults and scorn, and the insults and scorn are often well-deserved, but ultimately we, the readers, know that the skepticism was misplaced. Is ours, too, misplaced?
"When faced with a lie, every man thinks it his duty to pronounce the truth, and believes that he just as soon dissolves it, just as Christ with a single word drove off the demon, composed of sarcasm and sulphur; when faced with liars, every man yearns to crack open the safes of the secretaries and sift through the documents, because he eagerly awaits the triumph, tardy perhaps but nonetheless effective, of experts and jurists over boasters and sham sailors, bona fide bastards and speculators... truth has the disadvantage of being prudent, circumspect, and of keeping quiet as silence is its least impure form... and adumbration fails when it comes face-to-face with the lie, the lie being sprightly, performative, incontestable as a blemish, and possessing the authority of a tocsin or call to prayer."
On the one hand, you want to quote that to every Trump voter you meet. On the other hand, it was written by a man who was, sincerely or not, lying through his teeth.
February 2, 2018
This is what Borges would have been like as a maximalist—which is to say, instead of an eight-page story of commentary upon a sixteenth-century book of questionable attribution that posits the discovery of the New World as being both non-existent and a conspiracy, he would have written the entirety of the treatise in its period-correct (though with enough errant mistakes to make one occasionally question it) baroque and straight-faced style, appended it with commentary, and published it as a "found-text."
Senges, like Borges, can turn, seemingly on a dime, between disorienting erudition and striking emotional valency. He works to open up the world to the realm of fantastic possibility and speculation—even as an American reading this book refuting the land I sit on, it felt like a poetic move, a sci-fi move, especially as it is interpolated through the lens of Senges writing a sixteenth-century text in the twenty-first. There is no unified conspiracy of why the New World was created as a fake discovery, rather as an idea it is considered (as the table of contents puts it) "an opportune object, convenient to all." The competing conspiracy theories contradict, erase, and unify one another, just at the academic appendix creates cross-purposed authorship, even considering the harsh jabs at Amerigo Vespucci within the text as potential proof of his role as its producer.
It is a book that opens up the world to the possibility of conspiracy, that posits even those things solid enough to sit upon could be mere illusions of blind faith, and it is funny, and it is absurd, and it gives one pause before its jokiness and its dead seriousness alike. The text resists all attempts to corral it and neatly file it away, it strives in its extreme specificity of scope in both content and aesthetic appeal toward infinite implication and eternal return, to send its doubt trickling out of cracks in walls and its questions echoing down the long hallways of our interior life—as the author of Refutatio Major writes:
I dread those beings living in the harmony of review and synthesis, because in their profound understanding there resides a profoundly carceral instinct. [...] I curse those on whom nothing is lost and who, once they have turned a book's last page, are convinced they have done all that there was to do, & rejoice in that tautology, as they might at the fulfillment of a duty.
Senges, like Borges, can turn, seemingly on a dime, between disorienting erudition and striking emotional valency. He works to open up the world to the realm of fantastic possibility and speculation—even as an American reading this book refuting the land I sit on, it felt like a poetic move, a sci-fi move, especially as it is interpolated through the lens of Senges writing a sixteenth-century text in the twenty-first. There is no unified conspiracy of why the New World was created as a fake discovery, rather as an idea it is considered (as the table of contents puts it) "an opportune object, convenient to all." The competing conspiracy theories contradict, erase, and unify one another, just at the academic appendix creates cross-purposed authorship, even considering the harsh jabs at Amerigo Vespucci within the text as potential proof of his role as its producer.
It is a book that opens up the world to the possibility of conspiracy, that posits even those things solid enough to sit upon could be mere illusions of blind faith, and it is funny, and it is absurd, and it gives one pause before its jokiness and its dead seriousness alike. The text resists all attempts to corral it and neatly file it away, it strives in its extreme specificity of scope in both content and aesthetic appeal toward infinite implication and eternal return, to send its doubt trickling out of cracks in walls and its questions echoing down the long hallways of our interior life—as the author of Refutatio Major writes:
I dread those beings living in the harmony of review and synthesis, because in their profound understanding there resides a profoundly carceral instinct. [...] I curse those on whom nothing is lost and who, once they have turned a book's last page, are convinced they have done all that there was to do, & rejoice in that tautology, as they might at the fulfillment of a duty.
July 15, 2024
this is basically one of those books that borges would invent in order to write an erudite commentary story about, except that senges actually went and wrote the whole book and then also comments on it in the afterword. probably should end up on some kind of list of notable conspiracy fiction, since it's not really about the specifics of the new world being fake so much as seeing everything through the lens of conspiracy. some of the musing on the nature of dupes and dupery reminded me of the bits in f for fake where orson welles talks about all art as faking. fun stuff and i'm going to read more senges soonish probably.
May 10, 2021
My omnipotent, tenacious, and presumptive prince, understand this, before going any further: the invention in certain back rooms of a new world that I wish to locate more precisely (a world where new trees and immeasurable grasses grow, populated by ducks with pig's heads and imperfect sirens) would mean above all else designating the world we live in as the old world. Thus do these newly emerged lands, plotted on this side of the world, in the workshops of Isabella or the Bourguignons, aspire to render our continent odious, and ultimately unbearable, populated as it is since time immemorial by beggars, by thieves, administered by them in company with other managers and tenants who are robbers, horse-traders, pimps, scrape-pennies, fake priests who swore devotion to Madeleine after having seen one or the other of her miraculous breasts in a dream, judges deaf to misery, merchants meanly measuring their phials, school headmasters, cardinals burned at the Gates of Hell, renouncing their search for holiness, opting instead for the prelacy: in short, the whole litany of miscreants (a litany known to us all, which grows the more familiar with every passing year). There would be no other reason to postulate a new world than to render ours contemptible by comparison, and to incite us to flee from it, like a bunch of capuchin monkeys driven to leap off a burning raft, thereby drowning themselves, never to be heard of ever again, neither the monkeys, nor the rotting planks. (After the departure of the last aspirants, embarked for the other world, all this country will have left will be its terminal denizens, those who hold fast, inspired by the avarice of the tick, and stand their ground: not always the best companions, but for sure the most sedentary. In effect, the thieves leave, return, while the more timorous remain behind: the collectors of spoils have a nice cruise, the receivers hold down the fort.) [80–1]
🔈 Erik Honoré / Unrest
March 28, 2017
This is a richly layered examination of truth and doubt through the supposed "translation" of an anonymous Renaissance document that offers an extensive denial of the existence of the New World. Rich with satire, here is a suggestion that fake news is a long standing idea. For my full review see: https://roughghosts.com/2017/03/28/tr...
May 27, 2023
Good idea, theoretically, but it simply doesn't work. Boring as hell, and not even remotely funny.
October 4, 2023
Refuting Columbus' "discovery" of America and subsequent trips back and forth to Spain would have seemed pretty insane at any time since, but now with American politics' war over concepts of reality and facts about largescale social and natural phenomenon, maybe not? Like the politics of today, this refutation is a hatchet-job which brutalizes those who tell stories about the Americas, claiming that the diseases those returning to Europe brought home are venereal from whiling their time on islands full of prostitutes, to accusations of painting black slaves and inventing peoples from the Americas. See, its all very modern isn't it?
"everyone knows, anyways, that the alchemist's goal is to deceive his reader, that such a leading astray is regularly an end in itself, & that any attempt to curb that trickery would be vanity itself, with the reason being that the void of our existence waits for us on the other side of every enigma"
To present this so-described wet alchemy, Senges has pieced together centuries old tattered manuscripts from across Europe in multiple languages, stitching them together, then in the postscripts providing some context and analysis. It's a considerable piece of detective work and translation to present this weird and wonderful tale. - Or wait, is the supposed discovery of these fantastic tales also an invention? Senges makes potato eaters of us all.
"everyone knows, anyways, that the alchemist's goal is to deceive his reader, that such a leading astray is regularly an end in itself, & that any attempt to curb that trickery would be vanity itself, with the reason being that the void of our existence waits for us on the other side of every enigma"
To present this so-described wet alchemy, Senges has pieced together centuries old tattered manuscripts from across Europe in multiple languages, stitching them together, then in the postscripts providing some context and analysis. It's a considerable piece of detective work and translation to present this weird and wonderful tale. - Or wait, is the supposed discovery of these fantastic tales also an invention? Senges makes potato eaters of us all.
May 31, 2021
This is an incredible book. It's written in the form of a scholarly edition to a (fictitious) 16th-Century text that argues that the discovery of the 'new world' is, in fact, a conspiracy theory. The Major Refutation is both a 'found text' fiction and a strange entry in the history of utopian fictions (from Moore's Utopia to Calvino's Invisible Cities). It's sort of Gulliver's Travels in reverse. Senges does an exceptional job of placing the book in conversation with real history and genuine historical texts, but also uses the form itself to work in multiple directions in extremely subtle ways. This book deserves to be more widely read, but is also a truly weird work of fiction since it offers virtually none of the pleasures traditionally associated with the novel. It has the 'static' plot of a satire, but lacks any specific targets (which are usually scene as a requirement of satire). Great and truly strange!
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February 15, 2021A "game of attributions."
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