non-romance, romance, #17: "Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges
an impossible undertaking
This is another entry in my Non-Romance Romance series, a monthly series where I talk about literature/film that is not typically classed as romances with romance as a framework. Now a monthly series!
Proof that no two siblings have the same parents is that last week when I said “this reminds me of Pierre Menard” to my sister, she had no idea what I was talking about. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the story of Pierre Menard. It feels like my mom was always bringing up this Jorge Luis Borges short story. Maybe her reference was tailor-made for me, precocious pre-teen poking around literature early and fascinated by works in translation.1 But he’s been with me a long time.
You can read the full story here; it’s only five pages long. But I’ll give a summary.
The conceit of the story is a memorial of a late polymath, Pierre Menard, written by one of his colleagues, presumably younger than Menard, reviewing his career. Menard’s published output is respectable, if scant, with fiction, poetry, translation and criticism all represented. But his unpublished work, his great work, possibly the greatest work of our time, according to the narrator, is “the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of Don Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XXII.” The narrator couches “I know such a claim is on the face of it absurd; justifying the ‘absurdity’ shall be the primary object of this note.”
The narrator goes on to describe how Menard came to this idea, of writing the Quixote himself, and his methodology. The story emphasizes over and over that Menard does not want to write a contemporary Quixote, he was wants to write “the Quixote.” Menard’s starting methodology is “simple:” “Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602-1918—be Miguel de Cervantes.”2 This, I feel, is the core of how the story is remembered, but in the next line, the narrator tells that Menard discards this method as “too easy.” “Too impossible!” a reader would incredulously respond, but the narrator counters again: “the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting.” So Menard chooses the interesting path.
The method he lands on is to continue being Pierre Menard, but to still come to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. Menard writes in a letter to the narrator “if I could just be immortal, I could do it.”3
The narrator goes on to analyze the Quixote, in the context of Menard’s project. First he reads chapters that Menard never attempted, and he finds himself recognizing his friend’s voice in the language, a blatantly absurd supposition. Then he looks at the chapters that Menard did “finish” and considers them as a literary work onto themselves, though they are identical to the ones written by Cervantes.
Chapter 9 of the first part of Don Quixote is one where Cervantes’ narrator steps out and discusses the sources of the tale and how upset he was to find that the story he was telling of a duel of Don Quixote and a Biscayan is cut short before the dramatic ending.
This distressed me greatly, because the pleasure derived from having read such a small portion turned to vexation at the thought of the poor chance that presented itself of finding the large part that, so it seemed to me, was missing of such an interesting tale. It appeared to me to be a thing impossible and contrary to all precedent that so good a knight should have been without some sage to undertake the task of writing his marvelous achievements; a thing that was never wanting to any of those knights-errant who, they say, went after adventures; for every one of them had one or two sages as if made on purpose, who not only recorded their deeds but described their most trifling thoughts and follies, however secret they might be; and such a good knight could not have been so unfortunate as not to have what Platir and others like him had in abundance. And so I could not bring myself to believe that such a gallant tale had been left maimed and mutilated, and I laid the blame on Time, the devourer and destroyer of all things, that had either concealed or consumed it.
Don Quixote, Chapter XI
The narrator then discusses the research process of discovering a text that would include the conclusion of this duel. The chapter serves to remind readers of the romantic, metafictional nature of the novel—the narrator is telling us a story that has been told before of the mad knight errant Don Quixote, complied from other sources.
The second full chapter that Menard translates is Quixote’s famous condemnation of letters in favor of arms and the narrator of the Borges short story spends quite a bit of time with this one. The narrator suggests this text is richer coming from an author who was a literary polymath, over a former solider like Cervantes, because of the contradictions held within. The narrator favors Menard’s Quixote who is a peer of Bertrand Russell and William James and exists in a historical novel, with the weight of modernity from the 18th and 19th on his archaic language.
The narrator suggests that the quotation “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” is merely rhetoric from Cervantes, but from Menard, the phrase suggests that “historical truth…is not what happened; but what we believed happened.” Rhetoric transform into philosophy in the new context. Borges is clearly lampooning the style of overwrought literary criticism here and calling into question how do we apply the context of a writing to a text, but there’s also earnest questions about language and authorship and the romanticism of an impossible task.
The story is delightful to read and reread. The angle that I’ve always been most interested in the earnest one.4 I’ve written before about translation and I seek out a lot of translated works or works in original languages that I don’t speak natively, but can stumble through with a dictionary. Menard’s attempt at sublimation as translation and the romance of an impossible task of translation made more interesting by the impossible methodology tickles me.
While Borges parodies literary criticism in the voice of the narrator of “Pierre Menard” and points out an absurdity inherent in formalism by cleaving a work from a context and giving it a new context, I think the story also lionizes Menard for being someone who “undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the onset.” Despite the output being essentially a useless endeavor! We already have a complete Quixote and even the narrator is able to read chapters that Menard never attempted and do the easier intellectual exercise of considering “what is Menard had been the one to write this one?” That would be a much simpler process than Menard attempting to divine the work from on high into a new original.
But Menard writes in a letter to the narrator “Thinking, meditating, imagining, are not anomalous acts—they are the normal respiration of the intelligence.” Menard’s impossible task reminds me of my favorite line in Moby-Dick: “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” The breath of Menard’s life is to think about this impossible process.
There’s a deep love in the story of the idea of someone taking on an impossible task and working towards it, despite the end goal being fruitless and illusive. Pierre Menard doesn’t become Cervantes, he becomes Don Quixote, tilting at windmills and insisting on chivalry when he is the butt of the joke and being taken advantage of, demanding a higher level of operation in the mundanity of his life. When the narrator extols Menard’s polymath CV at the beginning of the story, the implication is that he could have accomplished a lot more “visible product” if he had not focused so much on the invisible work of the Quixote. One way to interpret the story with the narrator being so unreliable that this invisible work is just not lost and then recreated by the narrator through documentation, but possibly never existed outside of Menard’s head.
Of course, while Menard’s task of writing the Quixote from scratch is the impossible task, it would laughably easy to recreate the text of the impossibly hard task: open any copy of Don Quixote—the narrator needs not to look at Menard’s drafts at all.
But Menard’s all encompassing attempts to surround, suffocate and reproduce the Quixote is a most extreme version of the romantic end goal of a semiotic simpatico. I’ve argued before that the defining feature of a romance novel, a “happily ever after” cannot mean “these two people are in a committed relationship” because there are too many counterexamples, including books marketed as genre fiction romance novels, that expand beyond that. I think the term of art “happily ever after” hews closer to something “we’re reached a partnered understanding and trust in each other’s languages.”
Romance readers may gripe about miscommunication, but so many of the best romance novels are about words slipping past each other, until they don’t anymore, or characters speaking to each other enough to land on a shared meaning. This does not have to look like literal misinterpretations, in the most hackneyed form of miscommunication “trope.” The impossible task that is rewarded in romance is trying to understand someone else’s language, external symbols of their internal feelings, and having that process be returned in kind.5
I also think there is romance is doing the impossible task the more interesting way, focusing on the process. When readers say “this could have been solved with one conversation!,” well, yes! But then it wouldn’t be a romance novel. What would be the arc of a romance novel where everyone’s prepared to have hard conversations immediately, where trust is giving immediately, where sympathy of language does not have to be earned?
I thought of Pierre Menard again because I’m taking Italian classes right now and this letter is going out on the anniversary of me starting them. Language learning feels like my lifelong impossible task, where process is more important than the end result. Accounting for breaks, I think I’ve spent close to 70 hours in the last year in Italian class and countless more working on my homework and doing supplemental studying.
I wanted to take Italian classes in part because I was tired of my stutter step method of reading books in Italian, generated from about a decade of independent study. I was embarrassed by how poor my speaking and listening skills were. The easy solution would be reading works in translation or using AI-supplemented translation products to translate anything. I have no Italian speakers in my life6 and I don’t even have a trip to Italy planned! But Italian class hurts my brain because I feel a different part of my brain being used, something that doesn’t activate in any other part of my life. This process here is what I value, nearly as much as my Italian improving.
Any sort of fluency, particularly for listening, still feels distant and like a foolish goal—when I listen to recordings of Italian speakers, I still find myself translating in my head. I wonder sometimes if my classmates, who seem to be able to listen to speakers and grasp meaning out of thin air, have a cognitive ability for this fluidity that I lack.
It’s quixotic for me to find romance in this sensation that feels like ramming my head into a wall. But it’s a year of Italian class and nothing in recent memory has made me happier than this weekly activity of practicing struggling to communicate. I deeply see the appeal of Menard dedicating his life to a mental, theoretical windmill that he even acknowledges is no giant. But he kept tilting anyway!
I’ve never actually finished Don Quixote, though I love the character. My dad read chapters of it to me before bed when I was maybe 11 or 12, but we had to stop because there were too many fart jokes for either of us to tolerate. I was a very reserved child.
I think one reason my mom told me about this story so young is that I became a vegetarian when I was 8 because I read that Louisa May Alcott was raised one. I didn’t eat meat for a decade after that.
This could have been an interesting angle for Twilight, but it goes unexplored! What novel should Edward have tried to recreate? Sound off.
Obviously.
That’s why All the President’s Men is a romance!
Though like Katharine Hepburn in Summertime, I am seeking them.
"Pierre Menard" was a major part of my undergraduate thesis (an analysis of a reference to the story in House of Leaves), but in all the times I read and re-read it, it never occurred to me to think of it as anything other than a (very effective) lampooning of the belief that the secrets to a text's meaning lie in its author's biography. The idea that there might be some earnest admiration for Pierre Menard hiding in there is an astonishing thought to me--I'm very excited to read it again with this new lens!
My jaw dropped when I first saw the title of this essay. I didn't think this series could cater more closely to my own personal interests than it did with the installment of the History of the Seattle Mariners. What a delight!
I told you about “Pierre Menard” because I wanted someone who could be as fascinated with the story as I was, knowing that someday your young literary brain would emerge in an adult who could write this comment.
I never talked to Julianna about it because she was never interested in literary wanderings. She liked true stories, and as much I want this story to be true, it is Ficciones.