#28 Tues (7/19/22) - Quijotismo and Menardismo from Ilan Stavans' Quixote, the novel and the world

I received the copy of Cervantes y el Quijote by J.L. Borges from the Illinois Library yesterday.  Spent several hours tracking down all of the pieces included in this collection.  Many of the obvious choices were available in English in other collections (Pierre Menard, etc).  I had all but one of the poems in English already, but many of the essays were from Argentinian magazines and to my knowledge were not translated yet.  While I work on that, here is an excerpt from Ilan Stavans Quixote, which I read in a day and a half:

 6 Quijotismo and Menardismo

Another doctrine in the Hispanic world derived from Cervantes’s novel
is Menardismo, which is an outgrowth of Borges’s famous story “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this tale, written in the style of a book
review, a nineteenth-century French Symbolist dreams of rewriting—not
copying, but rewriting word by word—El Quijote. And he succeeds in his
task: Cervantes’s original and Menard’s rewriting, when shown side by
side, are identical; yet they are also different because the meaning of the
words used by Cervantes and Menard has changed from the early
seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. The unnamed narrator in
Borges’s story then argues not only that the two versions should be seen as
having the same aesthetic value but also that they are—and here is Borges’s
most astonishing, inventive point—equally original. And the narrator makes
the case that, as Menard’s effort shows, the only way to read literature is
contextually. By using Menard as an endorser of derivative art as authentic,
Borges therefore announces that the former colonies known today as the
Spanish-speaking Americas, while arriving late to the banquet of Western
civilization, are as original in their derivative culture as Europe is.

On Christmas Eve 1938, at age thirty-nine, Borges had an accident. As
he was walking up a staircase in Buenos Aires, on his way to return a copy
of The Arabian Nights, he smashed his forehead against an open window
frame. The impact was severe. But he didn’t pay attention to his bleeding
head. He proceeded to his destination. It was only when the owner of the
book heard Borges’s knock and opened the door to his apartment that
Borges saw the wound and realized how serious it had been. Soon
thereafter, Borges lost consciousness. The episode served as inspiration for
his autobiographical story “El sur.”
Until this point, Borges was known as an avant-garde, cerebral poet as
well as a book and film reviewer. His work was published in intellectual
journals, although he wrote columns and features in women’s magazines. It
was on his poetry that he placed his bet to fame. The accident changed
things.

Borges convalesced at the hospital. He feared his mental faculties, his
capacity to remember, had been diminished. To test himself, he wrote a
short story: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” It was not his first (in
1933, he had authored “Hombre de la esquina rosada”), but it was his most
ambitious to date. Published in Victoria Ocampo’s journal Sur in 1939 and
included in the volume Ficciones, released in 1944, it is among the most
influential stories of the twentieth century. It is also among Borges’s most
famous stories, which is no small feat given the reputation of many others,
such as “The Library of Babel,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Circular
Ruins,” and “Death and the Compass.”

As it turned out, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” didn’t only
prove the soundness of Borges’s mind; it revolutionized our understanding
of the crossroads where history and reading meet. And it offered fresh
insight into the centrality of Cervantes’s novel in the Hispanic world, and
into the reconfiguration of Spanish culture as it continuously plays itself out
in the Americas.

In truth, to call this a story is somewhat deceitful. Although a
substantial portion of the content is fictional, Borges presents it as an essay,
or perhaps a book review. In the story, the narrator (who may be the author
himself, or not) sets out to analyze the work—the words—of a fictional
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French Symbolist novelist,
Pierre Menard. The narrator focuses on Menard’s single most original
contribution, as well as the most “absurd”: the rewriting, though not the
copying, of chapters IX and XXXVIII of the First Part of El Quijote.
As the narrator tells us, Menard “did not want to compose another
Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself.” That is, he wanted to
write it exactly as Cervantes had written it the first time around, not a single
word of it different. The key term is rescribir, to rewrite: Menard does not
copy Cervantes’s novel word by word; he creates it all over again, meaning
that, without a copy in front of him, he faithfully composes precisely the
same text of 1605.

Not really. Borges’s story is built on a Platonic concept of literature
which suggests that masterpieces past, present, and future are intrinsic,
universal features of Nature that exist before and after they become tangible
to readers. The act of writing down is simply the human endeavor that
unveils universal features, making them visible. (“Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote” begins with a discussion of the difference between Menard’s
visible and invisible work.) Furthermore, those masterpieces, like Don
Quixote, exist in spite of, and separate from, their creator. 

This means that if
Cervantes was able to retrieve it, someone else might be able to do the
same. Or, to use electronic jargon, Menard could download the classic, just
as it had been downloaded more than three hundred years prior.
But who uploaded it, then? Menard’s idea invokes an Emersonian
concept of authorship: all individual writers are but transient, expiring
aspects of a single Universal Mind, whose attributes summarize and
encompass all the individualities available. In other words, that abstract
Platonic Writer of Writers is the true and sole original author, and earthly
incarnations (Cervantes, Menard, you, and I) are but scribes through whom
the Universal Mind communicates its content.

The words are identical, yet the meaning is different. Borges’s story offers a
double critique: of originality as an artistic objective (nothing human is
really original, only the Universal Mind), and of the act of reading (the
exact same quote is understood quite differently depending on the time in
which it is framed).

This suggests that Don Quixote is a fixed text but that no two readers of
it look at it the same way, for individuals bring to the material subjective
views. The novel, therefore, is not one but many—as many as the readers
who interpret it and, as in the case of Menard, the writers who attempt to
rewrite it.

But if there are so many classics, products of a Universal Mind, that
have inspired countless interpretations, why does Menard choose to rewrite
Don Quixote? “Two texts of unequal value inspired this undertaking,” the
narrator states. “One is that philosophical fragment by Novalis—the one
numbered 2005 in the Dresden edition—which outlines the theme of a total
identification with a given author.*” That is, Menard identifies completely
with Cervantes, to the point of becoming his doppelgänger. “The other is
one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on
Le Cannobière or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like all men of good taste,
Menard abhorred these useless carnivals, fit only—as he would say—to
produce the plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthrall
us with the elementary idea that all epochs are the same or are different.”
Menard is insistent on avoiding such anachronisms.

==================================================

*that philosophical fragment by Novalis—the one numbered 2005 in the Dresden edition:

Fishburn and Hughes: "The pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a mystical German Romantic poet and novelist. In Heinrich von Ofterdinger (1802, posthumously) Novalis presents in terms of a medieval allegory the message that the true meaning of the world, the poet's 'blue flower', is to be sought within oneself. The Fragments is a collection of aphorisms expressing the new Romantic theory. In number 2005 of the Dresden edition Novalis writes: 'I demonstrate that I have really understood a writer only when I am able to act in the spirit of his thoughts, and when I can translate his works and alter them in various ways without detracting from his individuality.' This belief in the essential presence of an author in his text contrasts with Pierre Menard's claim to be able 'to reach the Quixote' through his own experience, thus dispensing with the original authorial voice." (142)