#175 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote- Jorge Luis Borges
Ok, I found this odd at first, but its genius quickly
revealed itself. Writers writing about writer’s writing is always a
touch-and-go technique that can fall prey to gimmick and hackishness. However,
this was pretty amazing.
Borges imagines a fictional author, Pierre Menard penning a
re-write of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It wasn’t going to be a newly imagined or a
polished version, or even a sequel. He was going to re-write it word for
word…but as himself therefore giving it a fresh take.
“To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the
twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and
arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and
therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to
the Quixote through the experience of Pierre Menard.”
This is great literary satire, poking fun at meta concepts
and over-thought criticism and analysis. Such a great concept, it reads at
first like an academic piece. That kind of threw me off center until I saw what
he was doing. Then I wished it was longer. This passage I found laugh-out-loud
funny. I can picture some dusty, bookish, professor that looks like he shits
tweed say this at a pompous campus cocktail party:
“Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and
rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of
deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring
infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as
though it came after the Aeneid.”
Perhaps this is just funny to book nerds, but I found it
hilariously brilliant.
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