Borges, Menard, and the Perfect Impossibility

In a course entitled “the Impossibility of Literature,” the goal would be to engage critically with texts to discover what is impossible in literature, in an attempt to specify what readers understand literature to be. Framing a discussion with Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, the course could cover the impossibility of perfection. Borges’ short story would make the strongest case for the impossibility of writing the perfect text, particularly as it pertains to the literary realism.

Writing the perfect text in the realist style must conform to trying to capture a real event in the narrative (Oxford English Dictionary). Borges’ short story dissects writing a realist narrative and its potential to be perfect, particularly scrutinizing the fact that most realist narratives also intend to extract some meaning from the event depicted. The narrator never uses the term “perfect” to describe Menard’s the Quixote, but the meaning that Menard intends to ascribe to his version of the story instead ridicules the idea of a perfect realist text.

The meaning’s juxtaposition with passages from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha, which intends to serve as the real event a realist would capture, poignantly contradicts the realist narrative tradition. The story explains the process of writing a perfect replica of another text with a farcical attitude, due to the skepticism of accurately representing a history within another story. The use of Don Quixote de la Mancha captures the limitation of representing reality in Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, because instead of intending to capture a real life event, as is the case in most realism, Menard tries to capture an entire story, which is also an impossible feat.

The narrator in Borges’ story ascribes a meaning to Menard’s the Quixote, whose text is identical to that of Cervantes. But that meaning is not acknowledged in Cervantes’ version, suggestive of how a realist text may take only one meaning from an event that may have infinite implications. For example, the narrator’s commentaries on the passage about historical truth on page 43, evoke disparate analyses in the narrator even though it is the exact same text. The narrator states that Cervantes’ “enumeration is a mere rhetorical phrase of history,” while Menard’s version of the passage, “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” (Borges 43).

This disparity in the meaning ascribed to Menard’s text compared to Cervantes’ text demonstrates a difference in how the meaning is taken from a realist text over the original text or event. The two versions of the identical text have radically different effects on the narrator, which originates in the meaning that the narrator assigns to Menard’s version rather than Cervantes’ version. If both texts are the same, and there were to be no distinction between them, then the text would be a “perfect” portrayal of the events of Don Quixote’s adventures. Since this is false; the narrator discovers a meaning in Menard’s version that is not isolated or identified in Cervantes’ version; one of the two postulates must be false. Because Menard’s clearly articulated method was “to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard“, Menard in effect changes nothing about himself or the text he was codifying, and yet the narrator has a different reaction to both versions (40). Therefore, Menard’s cannot be a perfect written text of the Quixote and qualifies as a text for the course “Impossibility of Literature”.

Considering Don Quixote de la Mancha like a series of events in the life of Don Quixote on which a realist writer may base a story, in the express intent of bringing the event to life, clarifies the idea of isolating meaning from the real event and setting it to the written story. Extracting and refining a meaning from the infinite meanings an event may have is to fracture the story and the event into two distinct series of identical events: one refined by a representative analysis and the other composed of discarded meanings. The true genius of this juxtaposition lies in the actual meaning ascribed to the initial quote from Menard’s the Quixote: “historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened” (43). Historical truth is embodied in Menard’s Quixote, because the stories untold are not the histories people come to know and accept as the truth. Therefore, the actual events that have preceded and gone unrecorded, such as the discarded meanings that necessarily compose every history, pale in comparison to the meanings ascribed to the stories told. But for one to have more significance than another, they must differ. Neither the story unrecorded nor the one written can therefore be a perfect representation of the original event, which encompasses both stories.

The excerpt from Don Quixote de la Mancha on page 43 is implemented for another reason. It lends itself to the sense of contextualization in literature previously established in the novel. It suggests that even fictional stories, whose content has no truth in them at all, are shaped in the present by the past and the prospects for the future. This is established through the given context of the letter written to the narrator on “the 30^th of September, 1934”. In the letter, the narrator explains, that Menard states his writing the Quixote is comparable to a philosopher’s conclusion on the subjects of “the objective world, God, causality, the forms of the universe” (39). But an imperfect person cannot remotely have a true conception of such perfect ideas. An imperfect person with only a limited knowledge of time cannot possibly write a perfect text on a subject as perfect as objective history like realist literature aspires to do. How the story proceeds here is so clever, since at the same time, one can similarly argue that no writer can successfully capture the objective world. The fault is that she or he subjects it to his or her perceptual senses and tries to extract meaning from those perceptions. The original occurrence is therefore subjected to a context of time, place, and sensations from the writer’s perspective to the point that the written product cannot mirror perfectly that which the writer cannot possibly see or perceive.

Through Borges’ story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, students in the course “the Impossibility of Literature” can come to dissect the idea that writers cannot essentially capture an event in a story since they have already perceived it subjectively, and because the meaning ascribed to the story refines the scope through which the story is presented. Similarly, Borges may have intended many more meanings to be present in his short story, but even reading a story cannot be perfect.

 

 

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Labyrinths. New York, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2007. 36–44. Print.

Oxford English Dictionary. Realism, n. 23 August, 2016. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/158931?redirectedFrom=realism#eid>.

Stern, Grete. Borges in 1951. Wikimedia Commons. Web. 9 October 2016. < https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Jorge_Luis_Borges_1951,_by_Grete_Stern.jpg>.