T. Tenente's Ezine » Borges in Boston

A New Life?

Published on October 15, 2005 By TaBoo Tenente In

I've closed away nine years of social work, moved to Boston, enrolled in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Emerson, focusing on writing fiction.

I take three classes: a novel workshop, a nonfiction workshop, and a Latin-American Literature course. I've read through a lot of new material, some of which makes me cranky: Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (shame on me for enjoying the movie more than the book) and Little Children by Tom Perrotta (a smart smut-ist who claims to be a bleak realist--give me a break) to name a couple.

However, I just completed Jorge Luis Borges' entire fiction catalogue (his "real" fictions, anyway), and at the moment I'm musing about one particular story he wrote, called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".

Here's a breakdown of the story:

1) The author of the story is Jorge Luis Borges;
2) The 1st person narrator of the story is an unnamed literary critic, and the story takes the form of a commentary written on the life of Pierre Menard;
3) As mentioned, the story is about Pierre Menard, recently deceased: a french symbolist who has written many "visible works", critiques and commentaries on various philosophers, on chess, on symbolism, etc.;
4) Pierre Menard's final literary project was to write Don Quixote, and in the end, he succeeded in writing a couple chapters.

As many of you may know, Don Quixote was written many centuries ago by Miguel Cervantes. In turn, centuries later, the fictional character Pierre Menard intends to write Don Quixote, not a copy, not a modern version, but to write the story as if he were creating the story himself.

His initial attempt used this strategy: like Cervantes he would learn old Spanish, he would fight the Moors. He would forget hundreds of years of history. But soon Menard disgards this strategy, because he feel that it is too obvious, too easy. He admits that all ways of attempting his task are impossible; however, among all impossible ways, his initial strategy was the easiest.

So, instead, he sets out to write the story, maintaining his modern perspective. In the end, he is able to produce a couple chapters of the Quixote, which are textually identical to the "original".

As I mentioned, this story is written from the perspective of a literary critic. In his critique, he compares two passages, one from the original and one from Menard's version. Of course, textually they are identical, but the critique takes the stance that Menard's version is significantly more rich, more exciting . . . a more impressive creation, because his perspective has the span of contextual history that Cervantes, of course, could never have.

So you have the fictional author writing a "real" story, and he dies before he could ever complete his project. Of course he dies: in order to write the novel, he would have to re-write even the passages he had already written, because the meaning continues to change as time passes. Only an immortal could complete such a work.

Part of the nature of being Jorge Luis Borges, it seems, is discussing the endless circle of meaning. If all meaning changes from moment to moment, then where does OUR meaning come from? In his stories, the author loses his place as creator. the reader becomes part of the story itself, and from there, meaning is made--but as time moves on, the meaning will change, and the character created by the initial reading will be joined by the character of the second reading, and so-on, so-forth, infinity, infinity.

And Borges suggests that stories are only one, highly controlled forum where this corruption of meaning takes place--the most significant forum, of course, is life itself. When I think of me, because of the lapse in time, I am actually thinking about someone who is no longer me.

Huh.

TBT
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Comments

Moderateman

on Oct 15, 2005

looking forward to seeing your name in print, I am ordering a first edition hand signed by you. best always

a fan, elie

TaBoo Tenente

on Oct 16, 2005

thanks, mm, i'll make sure i reserve a copy . . .

of course, right now, all of the novels i've written are as fictional as all the novels borges pretended to have written.

tbt

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