Chekhov’s Mistess

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote

I picked up a copy of the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote earlier today, and haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet. I’ve read several translations of Don Quixote before, but that was years ago, and my memory is fuzzy, so I’m looking forward to reading it again (and having a pile of translations on hand for easy comparison).

In the meantime, I’d like to reacquaint you with Jorge Luis Borges. Borges wrote a short story called Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. (The link will take you to the full text of the story, as translated by Anthony Bonner.)

In the story, Menard set out to write Don Quixote again, from scratch – not to write another Quixote, but to write the same Don Quixote. Not to copy the Quixote, but to actually compose it again, the same book by a different author and in a different historical and cultural context.

At first, Menard thought to recreate the experiences of Cervantes in order to undertake his project. But in the end, “to be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him to be less arduous – and consequently less interesting – than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.”

Bud Parr wrote an interesting post about how the thread of conversation throughout literature played a part in his decision to read the Quixote. Several readers here have shown an interest in discussing the historical context in which Cervantes wrote, which strikes me as fascinating. From this we can try to understand what Cervantes intended in writing Don Quixote, and how the book would have been interpreted by readers around the time it was written.

Still, what an author writes is not always what he meant to convey. And sometimes, what an author turns out to have written and the applications and connections it can bear are at least as interesting as what he intended. As it turned out, Borges’s narrator in Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote informed us that “the text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.” Accordingly, I intend to read Don Quixote out of context.

I’m not precisely sure what I mean by that, nor do I promise to stick with it come what may, but we’ll see how this goes.

Now! I shall distract you by pointing you towards the Quixotic Windmill Project that will be taking place at Burning Man this August. Their plan is to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote by building three 20’ tall windmills out in the desert, and then charging at them with fiery lances and burning them to the ground. I can’t attend, since I’ll just have taken the NY bar exam and should probably start being a lawyer at around that time, but I’m looking forward to seeing the photos.

comments

There’s a great variation on this by Borges-worshipper Stanislaw Lem. In a story called “Bitistics,” he describes computer programs that, when fed in the collected works of an author, produce the works that the author could have written had they lived longer and wrote more. But the quality of the generated works varies, depending on how much more the author “had to say” beyond their written works. So in Lem’s version, a new, revelatory Tolstoy novel contains great insights into Tolstoy’s earlier work, but a new Dostoevsky novel is redundant and flat.

    – David Auerbach (04/09  at  11:51 AM)

i am reviewing John Ramage’s new book, 20th C. AMERICAN SUCCESS RHETORIC: HOW TO CONSTRUCT A SUITABLE SELF for JAC. in SUCCESS RHETORIC Ramage indexes “Pierre Manard” (42), suggesting that Borge’s narrator means to “replace a clearly unsavory Menard in the affections of his wealthy and singularly gullible patrons...” making “Pierre Menard” a bit of advertising, or rather an ironic dig at advertising. compared to the “advertising” (of an ethics) by Cervantes’ Quixote, this sort of advertising is not at all to be feared principally because it is so transparently what it is--self serving, blatantly hyperbolic… the difference (the safety feature) being the obvious addition of the warning noise of the unreliable narrator, that is, the especially overt and easily marked ethos that activates the critical function of “the reader” directly addressed.  hence the conventionality of Cervantes’ Hero is an unclear (as unmarked) but more present danger. Menard’s reanimator (like Humbert Humbert, is preferable (because marked), but Borges treatment, and his deconstructive rhetoric, would likely have been more effective if the narrator had remained unreliable, but in such a way as to blunt the reader’s critical function, not heighten it; disappear, not drop his pants and fire off a rocket. this would have required more of a committment on Borges part, but would likely have caused a more profound short story and one that truly does resist closure and is, as Ramage would say, infinite.

    – mckenzi (03/29  at  12:51 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 05, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:2
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