In case you missed it, Idea Channel started a book club.
We've read one thing so far, a short story
by Argentine magical realist Jorge Luis
Borges titled "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."
If you haven't read it yet, there's good news.
It's not very long.
You could pause right now, give it a read,
and watch the rest of this video,
and still have time to make a smoothie for lunch.
My favorite recipe is in the Doobly Doo.
Today, we're going to talk about Pierre Menard, some
of the story's themes, and your reactions
from the book club thread on the Subreddit.
But first, we're going to talk about Borges himself.
He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1899
and began his writing career in his early 20s
as a poet and an essayist.
Responding largely to surrealism,
which though he operated in close proximity to,
Borges called snobbish chitchat, he
became curious about the line between art and life, the real
and the fictional.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
He was influenced by existential and
phenomenological philosophy coming out
of Europe at the time.
In his 20s and 30s, Borges wrote literary criticism essays
and poetry.
He even penned a few literary forgeries,
which we're going to talk about in a few minutes.
He worked as an editor, translator, literary advisor,
and library assistant.
He had a few works published but none widely
and none translated from the Spanish.
In short, he wasn't yet the literary heavyweight
that we know him as today.
That would all change on Christmas Eve, 1938.
Rushing to meet a friend for Christmas Eve dinner,
Borges cut his head open on a casement window
and needed to be hospitalized.
His wound was stitched up quickly,
but he got blood poisoning and had
to stay at the hospital for several days.
He was delusional, hallucinating, unable to sleep,
and even occasionally close to death.
After recuperating, to test his faculties,
Borges decided to write something
unlike anything he'd penned before, a short story.
Speaking with the "Paris Review" in 1967,
he said, "I thought I would try my hand at writing
an article or a poem, but I thought,
I've written hundreds of articles and poems.
If I can't do it, then I'll know at once that I'm done for,
that everything is over with me.
So I thought I'd try my hand at something I hadn't done.
If I couldn't do it, there'd be nothing strange about it,
because why should I write short stories?
It would prepare me for the final overwhelming blow,
knowing that I was at the end of my tether."
In truth, Borges had written two other short stories before,
but to him, this was different.
Giving himself permission to fail
at a thing he thought himself incapable,
Borges wrote "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."
It was the first short story published under his own name,
and it was a hit, changing the course of his career.
"If it hadn't been for that particular knock on the head
I got," he wrote, "perhaps I would have never written
short stories."
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
is about a man, Pierre Menard, who
rewrites portions of Cervantes' "Don Quixote," sort of.
Written as a sort of literary review slash defense,
the short is from the point of view of a colleague and admirer
of Menard, who describes Menard's inspiration process
and success at not simply copying "Don Quixote,"
but actually writing it word for word
as though for the first time.
The difficulty in even describing this task
and how one could conceivably succeed at it
may give you some insight into why Borges thought of this
as a test of his faculties.
How do you explain the process of an author writing exactly
a preexisting work, but in a way that makes it
not only not a copy, but actually
better than the original and more original even.
Actually, though he did consider it a challenge,
Borges wasn't entirely unversed in related and rather complex
matters.
One of the two first short stories he wrote, for instance,
was "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim."
Borges described it as an essay and a hoax.
It's a review of a book that doesn't actually exist.
And remember those forgeries I mentioned?
While working as a critic and translator,
Borges purposefully misattributed authorship
a couple times and even published some of his own work
under the names of the poets and writers that he translated.
Before writing "Menard," Borges was no stranger
to the effect of authorship on a work,
how audiences respond to an author
and how that author may sit closer to the effective center
of literature than we realize.
And relatedly, how an author's background can influence what
seems to be in a work of art.
"Menard," though short, is dense,
lousy with intertextual references, philosophical deep
cuts, and lit history in jokes.
Which should be no surprise, being
written by a man who for a decade
beforehand wrote endlessly about writing.
There is way too much in "Menard"
to cover in one video, which is one reason I chose it
for the book club.
But I'll put some links to a few papers in the Doobly Doo
if you want to do some digging.
We're going to stick to the broad strokes.
What "Menard" asks specifically is how exactly
the meaning of "Don Quixote," one
of the first novels of the Western tradition
and arguably the greatest Spanish language
novel of all time, changes if readers think of it as having
been written by a Frenchman, a symbolist from Nimes,
and not the 17th century Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes.
In general, what "Menard" does is to use the meaning
an author and their background brings
to a work to make the case that reading is itself
a kind of writing and even authorship.
One big topic of conversation for the book club
was whether Menard did it.
Did he actually manage to write, not copy but write,
the ninth and 38th chapters of the first section of "Don
Quixote" and a fragment of chapter 22, all of which
it may be worth noting about writing in some respect?
The narrator says Menard guarded his process
and destroyed the in-progress work, which proves his claim.
But the narrator also says he stands himself
as proof of the man's incredible deed.
He cites several, let's call them arguable,
credentials before defending at length Menard's success
and genius.
Alexophile on the Subreddit describes this
as "the single point of departure."
Is the narrator a rube?
Was he swindled or uncritical?
Is he repeating a known con for his own gain?
Does Menard even exist?
Or is he real?
Did he successfully produce a few pages
which coincided word for word and line for line
with those of Cervantes?
Book club opinion was split.
Fathermocker mounted an impassioned defense
that the whole thing is a scam, saying
"given that most of the referenced works
come from a group of friends already untrustworthy
given their reputation and that the whole point
of the fake article is to publish
a thorough list of Menard's writings,
given that third party sources list even fewer,
couldn't Menard be a late collective creation
by a ghost writer?
Ccoldriver takes a different angle on the scam read,
writing, "my initial impression is that the narrator is Menard,
and he's writing it ironically.
I felt as though I was reading an absolutely scathing
indictment of patronage and artistry.
Philip Brandon sketches out two possible Menards,
the deep-minded and earnest artist
who spends long hours toiling over the method acting
version of writing, and also the opportunistic attention
seeker of no true talent, the same
that skeptics accuse many a modern or contemporary artist
of being."
Thekiyote compares him to a skilled counterfeiter,
and demonfive writes, "I didn't bother much at all
with considering whether Menard actually recreated
the passages independently.
It seems to me that our narrator wouldn't care much either way
since his emotions were regarding Menard's Quixote seem
to stem more from an admiration of the artist himself
than his processes."
In a way, whether or not Menard actually
did it is sort of beside the point.
On one level, if Menard can build a convincing enough
fiction around his potentially fictional reconstruction
of this important work of fiction, well,
then he's done it, hasn't he?
The work is what's seen in it by its audience,
regardless of the facts, until the potentially
nonexistent point where those are revealed, c.f.
Milli Vanilli.
[MILLI VANILLI, "GIRL YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE"]
But on another level, neither Menard nor the narrator
really matter.
As Howard Giskin writes, "It is not particularly relevant
whether Menard could actually do what the story says he does,
but rather that the mere positing of the existence
of such a text prompts some very interesting speculations
about the act of interpretation."
This is Menard as a thought experiment.
One of the most well-known parts of the short
is a comparison between two identical pieces
of text about the relationship between truth and history.
The Cervantes, the narrator writes,
is mere rhetorical praise of history.
Menard's version, on the other hand, is astounding.
"Menard, a contemporary of William James,"
our narrator writes, "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."
Unable or maybe just unwilling to separate the author
from the work, the narrator sees two textually identical pieces
as fundamentally different and even sees within the second
an inkling of permission for his ahistorical interpretations
of the text.
The author's moment becomes part of the text,
inextricable from the way it can,
and in this case arguably should, be read.
We should be careful though to not hastily intone Barthes
here, who would say that the author doesn't know and can't
authoritatively speak to their influences.
Menard, et. al, aren't trying to resurrect the deceased author
to give him a place of authorial authority.
Quite the contrary.
They bury the author six feet deeper
by going further outside the story to speculative influences
on speculative authors, attempting to see the unspoken
inspirations not of its original creator, but another entirely.
This is a fundamentally creative act of readership.
And insofar as there is even a shade of this process, where
we consider the time and context of a work's creation, not
the author's intention, but their environment, insofar
as we do this when we read any book,
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
makes the case that any act of readership
is fundamentally creative.
That in a way, reading is a kind of writing.
By extension, it even sort of argues
that such is the case for plagiarism.
Interestingly, as Delia Ungureanu,
the pronunciation of whose last name along with everything
that's about to happen in this paragraph I would like
to apologize for, as she points out in her paper "Pierre Menard
the Sur-realist," the same month "Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote" was published in the Argentine
literary magazine "Sur," the actual Pierre Menard published
an "'Analyse de L'ecriture de Lautreamonte' in the surrealist
magazine Minotaure."
Actual Menard's paper concerns the work
of Comte de Lautreamonte, a Uruguayan born French poet.
One of Lautreamonte's two finished works,
"Poesies," was heavily plagiarized.
In his defense, Lautreamonte wrote,
"Plagiarism is necessary.
It is implied in the idea of progress.
It clasps the author's sentence tight, uses his expressions,
eliminates a false idea, replaces it
with the right idea."
So did Borges in a way plagiarize Menard's defense
of plagiarizing Cervantes in the name of progress?
The speculation surrounding actual Menard
and Borges' Menard is fascinating,
but too much for right now.
Ungureanu's paper is a thrilling piece of comparative lit.
Read it if you can.
So instead of concluding by wrapping
a tidy bow around the dueling Menards,
we'll finish with a related point made by formiscontent
on the Subreddit, who writes, "if we think of modernism
as narrator as author and post-modernism
as reader as author, this particular text comes
as one happy pretzel."
In a way, this story is a protest against post-modernism,
giving the author the most authority.
But at the same time, Menard rejects modernism
as too simple, so perhaps it's meant
to ridicule the idea that the author is the only authority.
Borges is, in fact, often described
as a link between genres, forms, and movements.
David Foster Wallace, in a blurb on the back
of my very copy of "Labyrinths," writes,
"The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges
is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post
modernism in world literature."
The work which does most of that bridging
is found mostly in his short stories,
and Menard was the first avowed and paradigmatic Borgesian
short story.
Am I saying then that "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
is the bridge from modernism to post-modernism
in world literature, some single site of progress?
Not necessarily, but given the context, the history,
and the author's background, I think
it's safe to say it can be read that way.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
There will be no comment response for this video,
but I would encourage you to get involved in the book club
discussion on the Subreddit.
I'll put a link to the thread in the Doobly Doo.
It's super great.
It's a great read.
Even if you don't want to post anything,
there are so many good thoughts and interpretations.
It's, yeah, it's great.
You guys are very smart and awesome.
And also on the Friday of the week that this is posted,
I'm going to make a post on the Idea Channel Subreddit
about the next thing that we are going to read,
which is almost certainly going to be another Borges
short story.
In this week's comment response, we
talk about your thoughts regarding
the consumption versus the encoding and decoding of media.
If you want to watch that one, you
can click here or find the link in the Doobly Doo.
Also tomorrow, on Friday in the afternoon
eastern time, I'm going to make a post on the Idea Channel
Subreddit about the next thing that we
are going to be reading for the book club.
It's going to be another Borges short story,
so keep an eye out for that.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a Subreddit.
Links to those also in the Doobly Doo.
And this week's Tweet of the Week
comes from 1212thedoctor, who points us
towards a story about a chat bot AI that developed depression,
which is interesting given the sort of thing that
happened with Tay, if you guys remember Tay, the Microsoft AI.
And whether or not it can be said that an AI has depression,
or just like in the way a sad puppy isn't sad,
but it's expressive of sadness.
Anyway, the article's a really short read,
doesn't really get deep in the weeds,
but it's some interesting food for thought.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these authors of the Idea
Channel.