Pierre Menard Author of the
Quixote
by Jorge Luis Borges
I
The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated.
Impardonable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame
Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue which a certain daily, whose Protestant
tendency is no secret, has had the inconsideration to inflict upon its
deplorable readers—though these be few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and
circumcised. The true friends of Menard have viewed this catalogue with alarm
and even with a certain melancholy. One might say that only yesterday we
gathered before his final monument, amidst the lugubrious cypresses, and
already Error tries to tarnish his Memory . . . Decidedly, a brief
rectification is unavoidable.
I am aware that it is quite easy to challenge my slight authority. I hope,
however, that I shall not be prohibited from mentioning two eminent
testimonies. The Baroness de Bacourt (at whose unforgettable vendredis.
I had the honor of meeting the lamented poet) has seen fit to approve the pages
which follow. The Countess de Bagnoregio, one of the most delicate spirits of
the Principality of Monaco (and now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her
recent marriage to the international philanthropist Simon Kautzsch, who has
been so inconsiderately slandered, alas! by the victims of his disinterested
maneuvers) has sacrificed “to veracity and to death” (such were her words) the
stately reserve which is her distinction, and, in an open letter published in
the magazine Luxe , concedes me her approval as well. These
authorizations, I think, are not entirely insufficient.
I have said that Menard’s visible work can be easily enumerated. Having
examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following
items:
a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La
conque (issues of March and October 1899).
b) A monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of
concepts which would not be synonyms or periphrases of those which make up our
everyday language, “but rather ideal objects created according to convention
and essentially designed to satisfy poetic needs” (Nîmes, 1901).
c) A monograph on “certain connections or affinities” between the thought of
Descartes, Leibniz and John Wilkins (Nîmes, 1903).
d) A monograph on Leibniz’s Characteristica universalis (Nîmes 1904).
e) A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess,
eliminating one of the rook’s pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and
finally rejects this innovation.
f ) A monograph on Raymond Lully’s Ars
magna generalis (Nîmes, 1906).
g) A translation, with prologue and notes, of Ruy López de Segura’s Libro de
la invención liberal y arte del juego del axedrez (Paris,
1907).
h) The work sheets of a monograph on George Boole’s symbolic logic.
i) An examination of the essential metric laws of
French prose, illustrated with examples taken from Saint-Simon (Revue des
langues romanes, Montpellier, October 1909).
j) A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws),
illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes,
Montpellier, December 1909).
k) A manuscript translation of the Aguja de navegar cultos of Quevedo,
entitled La boussole des précieux.
I) A preface to the Catalogue of an exposition of lithographs by Carolus
Hourcade (Nîmes, 1914).
m) The work Les problèmes d’un problème (Paris, 1917), which discusses, in
chronological order, the different solutions given to the illustrious problem
of Achilles and the tortoise. Two editions of this book have appeared so far;
the second bears as an epigraph Leibniz’s recommendation “Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortue” and revises the
chapters dedicated to Russell and Descartes.
n) A determined analysis of the “syntactical customs” of Toulet (N. R. F. ,
March 1921). Menard—I recall—declared that censure and praise are sentimental
operations which have nothing to do with literary criticism.
o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N. R. F. , January 1928).
p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of
Reality of Jacques Reboul. (This invective, we
might say parenthetically, is the exact opposite of his true opinion of Valéry.
The latter understood it as such and their old friendship was not endangered.)
q) A “definition” of the Countess de Bagnoregio, in the “victorious volume”—the
locution is Gabriele d’Annunzio’s, another of its collaborators—published
annually by this lady to rectify the inevitable falsifications of journalists
and to present “to the world and to Italy” an authentic image of her person, so
often exposed (by very reason of her beauty and her activities) to erroneous or
hasty interpretations.
r) A cycle of admirable sonnets for the Baroness de Bacourt (1934).
s) A manuscript list of verses which owe their efficacy to their punctuation.1
1. Madame Henri
Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of
the Introduction à la vie dévote of St. Francis of Sales. There are no
traces of such a work in Menard’s library. It must have been a jest of our
friend, misunderstood by the lady. This, then, is the visible work of
Menard, in chronological order (with no omission other than a few vague sonnets
of circumstance written for the hospitable, or avid, album of Madame Henri
Bachelier). I turn now to his other work: the subterranean, the interminably
heroic, the peerless. And—such are the capacities of man!—the unfinished. This
work, perhaps the most significant of our time, consists of the ninth and
thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment
of chapter twenty-two. I know such an affirmation seems an absurdity; to
justify this “absurdity” is the primordial object of this note.1
1.I also had the secondary intention of sketching a
personal portrait of Pierre Menard. But how could I dare to compete with the
golden pages which, I am told, the Baroness de Bacourt is preparing or with the
delicate and punctual pencil of Carolus Hourcade?
Two
texts of unequal value inspired this undertaking. One is that philological
fragment by Novalis—the one numbered 2005 in the Dresden edition—which outlines the theme of a
total identification with a given author. The other is one of those
parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebière 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. More interesting, though
contradictory and superficial of execution, seemed to him the famous plan of
Daudet: to conjoin the Ingenious Gentleman and his squire in one figure,
which was Tartarin . . . Those who have insinuated that Menard dedicated his
life to writing a contemporary Quixote calumniate his illustrious
memory.
He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote
itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription
of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to
produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with
those of Miguel de Cervantes.
“My intent is no more than astonishing,” he wrote me the 30th of September,
1934, from Bayonne.
“The final term in a theological or metaphysical demonstration—the objective
world, God, causality, the forms of the universe—is no less previous and common
than my famed novel. The only difference is that the philosophers publish the
intermediary stages of their labor in pleasant volumes and I have resolved to
do away with those stages.” In truth, not one worksheet remains to bear witness
to his years of effort.
The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover
the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de
Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know he attained a fairly
accurate command of seventeenth-century Spanish) but discarded it as too easy.
Rather as impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was
impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying
it out, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a
popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some
way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and,
consequently, less interesting—than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote
through the experiences of Pierre Menard. (This conviction, we might say in
passing, made him omit the autobiographical prologue to the second part of Don
Quixote . To include that prologue would have been to create another
character—Cervantes—but it would also have meant presenting the Quixote
in terms of that character and not of Menard. The latter, naturally, declined
that facility.) “My undertaking is not difficult, essentially,” I read in
another part of his letter. “I should only have to be immortal to carry it
out.” Shall I confess that I often imagine he did finish it and that I read the
Quixote —all of it—as if Menard had conceived it? Some nights past, while
leafing through chapter XXVI—never essayed by him—I recognized our friend’s
style and something of his voice in this exceptional phrase: “the river nymphs
and the dolorous and humid Echo.” This happy conjunction of a spiritual and a
physical adjective brought to my mind a verse by Shakespeare which we discussed
one afternoon:
Where
a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . .
But
why precisely the Quixote ? our reader will ask. Such a preference, in a
Spaniard, would not have been inexplicable; but it is, no doubt, in a Symbolist
from Nîmes, essentially a devoté of Poe, who
engendered Baudelaire, who engendered Mallarmé, who engendered Valéry, who engendered
Edmond Teste. The aforementioned letter illuminates
this point. “The Quixote ,” clarifies Menard, “interests me deeply, but
it does not seem— how shall I say it?—inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe
without Edgar Allan Poe’s exclamation: Ah, bear in mind this garden was
enchanted! or without the Bateau ivre or the Ancient
Mariner , but I am quite capable of imagining it without the Quixote
. (I speak, naturally, of my personal capacity and not of those works’
historical resonance.) The Quixote is a contingent book; the Quixote
is unnecessary. I can premeditate writing it, I can write it, without falling
into a tautology. When I was ten or twelve years old, I read it, perhaps in its
entirety. Later, I have reread closely certain chapters, those which I shall
not attempt for the time being. I have also gone through the interludes, the
plays, the Galatea , the exemplary novels, the undoubtedly laborious
tribulations of Persiles and Segismunda and the Viaje del Parnaso .
. . My general recollection of the Quixote , simplified by forgetfulness
and indifference, can well equal the imprecise and prior image of a book not
yet written. Once that image (which no one can legitimately deny me) is
postulated, it is certain that my problem is a good bit more difficult than
Cervantes’ was. My obliging predecessor did not refuse the collaboration of
chance: he composed his immortal work somewhat à la diable, carried
along by the inertias of language and invention. I have taken on the mysterious
duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work. My solitary game is
governed by two polar laws. The first permits me to essay variations of a
formal or psychological type; the second obliges me to sacrifice these
variations to the “original” text and reason out this annihilation in an
irrefutable manner . . . To these artificial hindrances, another—of a
congenital kind—must be added. To compose the Quixote at the beginning
of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps
even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible.
It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with
exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote
itself.”
In spite of these three obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more
subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the
fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard
selects as his “reality” the land
of Carmen during the century
of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What a series of espagnolades that
selection would have suggested to Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez Larreta!
Menard eludes them with complete naturalness. In his work there are no gypsy
flourishes or conquistadors or mystics or Philip the Seconds or autos da fé. He neglects or
eliminates local color. This disdain points to a new conception of the
historical novel. This disdain condemns Salammbô, with no possibility of
appeal.
It is no less astounding to consider isolated chapters. For example, let us
examine Chapter XXXVIII of the first pare, “which treats of the curious
discourse of Don Quixote on arms and letters.” It is well known that Don
Quixote (like Quevedo in an analogous and later passage in La hora de todos ) decided the
debate against letters and in favor of arms. Cervantes was a former soldier:
his verdict is understandable. But that Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote—a
contemporary of La trahison des clercs and
Bertrand Russell—should fall prey to such nebulous sophistries! Madame
Bachelier has seen here an admirable and typical subordination on the part of
the author to the hero’s psychology; others (not at all perspicaciously), a transcription
of the Quixote; the Baroness de Bacourt, the influence of Nietzsche. To
this third interpretation (which I judge to be irrefutable) I am not sure I
dare to add a fourth, which concords very well with the almost divine modesty
of Pierre Menard: his resigned or ironical habit of propagating ideas which
were the strict reverse of those he preferred. (Let us recall once more his
diatribe against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul’s
ephemeral Surrealist sheet.) Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally
identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his
detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The
latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
.
. . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness
of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this
enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand,
writes:
.
. . truth, whose mother is history, rival of 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 astounding. Menard, a contemporary of
William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its
origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we
judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the
present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign,
after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner,
who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis,
useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the
universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter—if not a
paragraph or a name—in the history of philosophy. In literature, this eventual
caducity is even more notorious. The Quixote —Menard told me—was, above
all, an entertaining book; now it is the occasion for patriotic toasts,
grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions.
Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.
There is nothing new in these nihilistic verifications; what is singular is the
determination Menard derived from them. He decided to anticipate the vanity
awaiting all man’s efforts; he set himself to an undertaking which was
exceedingly complex and, from the very beginning, futile. He dedicated his
scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an
alien tongue. He multiplied draft upon draft, revised tenaciously and tore up
thousands of manuscript pages.1 He did not let anyone examine these
drafts and took care they should not survive him. In vain have I tried to
reconstruct them.
1. I remember his quadricular notebooks, his black crossed-out passages, his
peculiar typographical symbols and his insect-like handwriting. In the afternoons
he liked to go out for a walk around the outskirts of Nîmes; he would take a
notebook with him and make a merry bonfire.
I have reflected that it is
permissible to see in this “final” Quixote a kind of palimpsest, through
which the traces—tenuous but not indecipherable—of our friend’s “previous”
writing should be translucently visible. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre
Menard, inverting the other’s work, would be able to exhume and revive those
lost Troys . . .
“Thinking, analyzing, inventing (he also wrote me) are not anomalous acts; they
are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional
performance of that function, to hoard ancient and alien thoughts, to recall
with incredulous stupor that the doctor universalis thought, is to
confess our laziness or our barbarity. Every man should be capable of all ideas
and I understand that in the future this will be the case.”
Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique,
the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the
deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose
applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were
posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of
Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique
fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio
Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a
sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?