Cosmopoetica Commonplace Book

from “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

I have said that the visible product of Menard’s pen is easily enumerated. Having examined his personal files with the greatest care, I have established that his body of work consists of the following pieces:

1. a symbolist sonnet that appeared twice (with variants) in the review La Conque (in the numbers for March and October, 1899);
2. a monograph on constructing a poetic vocabulary from concepts that are neither synonyms nor periphrastic locutions for the concepts that inform common speech, “but are, rather, ideal object ceated by convention essentially for the needs of poetry” (Nimes, 1901);
3. a monograph on “certain connections or affinities” between the philosophies of Descartes, Leibniz, and John Wilkins (Nimes, 1903);
4. a monograph on Leibniz’ Characteristica Universalis (Nimes, 1904);
5. a technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by eliminating one of the rook’s pawns (Menard proposes, recommends, debates, and finally rejects this innovation);
6. a monograph on Ramon Lull’s Ars Magna Generalis (Nimes, 1906);
7. a translation, with introduction and notes, of Ruy Lopez de Segura’s Libro de la invencion liberal y arte del juego del axedrez (Paris, 1907);
8. drafts of a monograph on George Boole’s symbolic logic;
9. a study of the essential metrical rules of French prose, illustrated with examples taken from Saint-Sumon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October 1909);
10. a reply to Luc Durtain (who had countered that no such rules existed), illustrated with examples taken from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December 1909);
11. a manuscript translation of Quevedo’s Aguja de navegar cultos, titled La boussole des precieux;
12. a foreward to the catalog of an exhibit of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade (Nimes, 1914);
13. a word entitled Les problemes d’un probleme (Paris, 1917), which discusses in chronological order the solutions to the famous problem of Achilles and the tortoise (two editions of this work have so far appeared; the second bears an epigraph consisting of Leibniz’ advice “Ne craignez point monsier, la tortue,” and brings ujp to date the chapters devoted to Russell and Descartes);
14. a dogged analysis of the “syntactical habits” of Toulet (N.R.F., March 1921) (Menard, I recall, affirmed that censure and praise were sentimental operations that bore not the slightest resemblance to criticism);
15. a transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valery’s Cimetiere marin (N.R.F., January 1928);
16. a diatribe against Paul Valery, in Jacques Reboul’s Feuilles pour la suppression de la realite (which diatribe, I might add parenthetically, states the exact reverse of Menard’s true opinion of Valery; Valery understood this, and the two men’s friendship was never imperiled);
17. a “definition” of the Countess de Bagnoregio, in the “triumphant volume” (the phrase is that of another contributor, Gabriele d’Annunzio) published each year by that lady to rectify the inevitable biases of the popular press and to present “to the world and all of Italy” a true picture of her person, which was so exposed (by reason of her beauty and her bearing) to erroneous and/or hasty interpretations;
18. a cycle of admirable sonnets dedicated to the baroness de Bacourt (1934);
19. a handwritten list of lines of poetry that owe their excellence to punctuation¹

This is the full extent (save for a few vague sonnets of occasion destined for Mme. Henri Bachelier’s hospitable, or greedy, album des souvenirs) of the visible lifework of Pierre Menard, in proper chronological order. I shall turn now to the other, the subterranean, the interminably heroic production– the oeuvre nonpareil, the oeuvre that must remain– for such are our human limitations!– unfinished. This work, perhaps the most significant writing of our time, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of Don Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XXII. I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd; justifying that “absurdity” shall be the primary object of this note.

¹Mme. Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction a lavie devote. In Pierre Menard’s library there is no trace of such a work. This must be an instance of one of our friend’s droll jokes, misheard or misunderstood.

***

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough–he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided–word for word and line for line–with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

“My purpose is merely astonishing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof– the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms– is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosopher’s publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.

Initially, Menard’s method was relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918– be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the possible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. 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 experiences of Pierre Menard. (It was that conviction, by the way, that obliged him to leave out the autobiographical forward to Part II of the novel. Including the prologue would have meant creating another character– “Cervantes”– and also presenting Quixote through that character’s eyes, not Pierre Menard’s. Menard, of course, spurned that easy solution.) “The task I have undertaken is not in essence difficult,” I read at another place in that letter. “If I could just be immortal, I could do it.” Shall I confess that he did complete it, and that I read the Quixote– the entire Quixote– as if Menard had conceived it?

***

It is a revolution to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of our time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of our time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth!– the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases–exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor– are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in styles is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard– who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes– is somehat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness.

Jorge Luis Borges
from: Collected Fictions

Entry Filed under: Borges, Jorge Luis • Fiction