Borges, Pierre Menard, Rhizomaticity and the Simulation of Palimpsestic Writing

1. Borges, Pierre Menard, Rhizomaticity and the Simulation of Palimpsestic Writing

2. Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote shares with Tlön, Uqbar, OrbisTertius several central aspects in the construction of the text, fundamentally the doubling of writing: that of Borges and Pierre Menard, where both simulate to tell story that it never gets told; and the creation of a world that is generated from pure discursivity. • The text is divided in two sections, as indicated by Borges himself: one is the visible (1962: 45-48) work of Pierre Menard, and the other is inconclusive work (1962: 48-55). • The first part is a catalogue of Menard’s library and the second letters by Menard addressed to Borges.

3. a) The Visible Work • It is difficult to understand what is the function of the visible work of Pierre Menard in this story. • The visible work seem to be what Pierre Menard read, worked on, rather that his own production. • The first work is a sonnet published in the literary journal, La Conque. • The second is a quotation which functions as a metafictional, self-reflexive comment on the production of “ideal objects” (1962: 46).

4. a) The Visible Work • The quotation does not specify the author or where it was published; only the date of place of publication is given: Nimes, 1901. • The next entry refers to “certain connections or affinities” like with John Wilkins. • Let us remember what Borges says about Wilkins:

5. a) The Visible Work • In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the em­peror; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) in-numerable ones; (k) those drawn a very fine camel's-hair brush; (1) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies. (1999: 231) • The connection obviously is with rhizomaticity and therefore random connectivity.

6. a) The Visible Work • Then, there is no structural connection between the visible and the invisible work of Menard, except a connection of randomness that will provide the basis for the latter. • The list (from A to S) of the catalogue is as heterogeneous and random as Wilkins’ enumeration. Borges’ enumeration shows a great diversity of works, revealing a diversity of readings typically Borgesian. • For instance, Ramón Lull’s Ars Magna Generalis, or RuyLópez de Segura’s Libro de la invención y arte del axedrez, or George Boole.

7. a) The Visible Work • Ramon Lull (1232-1315) was a writer and philosopher born into a wealthy family in Palma, Mallorca in the Balearic Islands of Spain. • Around 1275, Lull designed a method, which he first published in full in his Arsgeneralis ultima or Ars magna (1305)), of combining attributes selected from a number of lists. • It is believed that Lull's inspiration for the Ars magna came from observing Arab astrologers use a device called a zairja. • A zairja was a device used by medieval Arab astrologers to calculate ideas by mechanical means.

8. Lull

9. a) The Visible Work • It used the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet to signify 28 categories of philosophic thought. • By combining number values associated with the letters and categories, new paths of insight and thought were created. • The work was intended as a debating tool for winning Muslims to the Christian faith through logic and reason. • Through his detailed analytical efforts, Lull built an in-depth theological reference by which a reader could enter in an argument or question about the Christian faith. • The reader would then turn to the appropriate index and page to find the correct answer.

10. a) The Visible Work • The Saint-Simon entry is incorrect, since the Revue des langues romanes was published for the first time in 1975 by the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, France, and there is no publication before that date. • Henri de Saint-Simon died in 1825. So is the next citation, that of Luc Durtain, a French writer who died in 1959 and Carolus Hourcade is a fictional character, and the attribution of Les probèmes d’un problème is false; both the writer and the work do not exist, as it is also the case of Jacques Reboul’s Journal for the Repression of Reality. • Finally, neither the Countess of Bagnoregio nor the Baroness de Bacourt exist. The catalogue ends with a misleading citation:

11. Saint Simon

12. Ruy Lopez de Segura

13. Luc Durtain

14. Madame Henri Bachelier also list a literal translation of a literal translation done by Quevedo of the Introduction à la vie dévote of Saint Francis of Sales. In Pierre Menard’s library there are no traces of such a work. She must have misunderstood a remark of his which he had intended as a joke. (1962: 47) • This ending announces the actual writing practice of Pierre Menard, who wants to write another Don Quixote but one that “would coincide –word for word and line for line-with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (1962: 49). • According to Borges, the visible work has been presented in “chronological order” (1962: 48). • Which chronological order he refers to, is unknown.

15. This visible work, in fact, does not contain any useful information, and we end the section still not knowing which were the “omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue [...]. (1962: 45), and what is the point, if any, to the visible work of Pierre Menard.

16. b) The Inconlusive (invisible) Work • The inconclusive (invisible) work of Menard, is an attempt to write an exact replica of the master work by Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, an attempt that never takes place, and only provides Borges with a pretext to create a simulation of a story. • Neither Borges’ story gets written nor Menard’s: both are a pure act of simulating writing a story. • We remain with a pure linguistic and metalinguistic act:

17. b) The Inconlusive (invisible) Work • I will pass over to that other part, which is subterranean, interminably heroic, and unequalled, and which is also-oh, the possibilities inherent in the man!- inconclusive. This work, possibly the most significant of our time, consists of the ninth and thirty-eight chapters of Part One of Don Quixote and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter. I realize that such an affirmation seems absurd; but the justification of this “absurdity” is the primary object of this note.* (1962:48) • First of all, Menard’s enterprise is described as “the most significant of our time”, which really points to Borges’ own introduction of what we have called Post-modern literature.

18. b) The Inconlusive (invisible) Work • Thus, the comment is similar in character to the one at the beginning of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, pertaining the uniqueness of Bioy Casares’ novel. • Secondly, this ‘most significant’ work has to do with three sections of Cervantes’ famous novel. • Borges declares the absurdity of the enterprise, but is about this absurdity that he will write about: the impossibility to (re)-write Don Quixote. • Then Borges proceeds to clearly state Menard’s project:

19. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • He did not want to compose another Don Quixote- which would be easy- but the Don Quixote. • It is unnecessary to add that this aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. • His admirable ambition was to produce pagers which would coincide- word for word and line for line- with those of Miguel de Cervantes. (1962: 49).

20. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • The “absurdity” referred above is expressed in this quotation: • the project is doomed from the beginning since Menard’s act of writing is only a palimpsestic simulation of Don Quixote, that is, his activity dies in the very gesture of inscription. (Barthes) • This impossibility is reiterated by the fact that “[...] not one page of a rough draft remains to bear witness of this work of years” (1962: 49).

21. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • The draft is non existent since it was never written. • Here Borges moves away from his own narration of Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote, and leaves the narrative space to Menard, and he, Borges would limit himself to make comments (on this imaginary book), comments which constitute the failed narration. • In want follows, Borges, would outline the “method” used by Menard in order to write the Don Quixote.

22. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • This outline provides further proof as of why Menard’s attempt was aporistic: • writing the Don Quixote that “coincides- word for word and line for line-” with the original, but a Don Quixote that it is not a copy or transcription of the original! • What Borges is pointing out, is the impossibility to re-write past writings and leaving it intact.

23. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • He is not talking about a form of intertextuality, that in itself always alters the ‘original’ to make it say different things; • he is talking about a replica, a tracing instead of adecalcamonia in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 12). • This is further confirmed by the following comment:

24. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: • […] to know Spanish well, re-embrace the Catholic faith, to fight against Moors and Turks, to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. (1962: 49) (Lepanto war: October 7, 1571) • What is it stated is the impossibility to go back in time: in order for Pierre Menard to (re)write Don Quixote he not only should and must become Cervantes, but also be immersed in Cervantes cultural period.

25. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: • […] to know Spanish well, re-embrace the Catholic faith, to fight against Moors and Turks, to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. (1962: 49) (Lepanto war: October 7, 1571) • What is it stated is the impossibility to go back in time: in order for Pierre Menard to (re)write Don Quixote he not only should and must become Cervantes, but also be immersed in Cervantes cultural period.

26. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • An alternative possibility is to resort to intertextuality, that is, a radical alteration of the original text, but this alternative was rejected by Pierre Menard when he declares that [...] Menard detested these useless carnivals, only suitable –he used to say- for evoking plebeian delight in anachronism [...] (1962: 48). • Thus, the only alternative that remains is simulation. • If a writing of the past is used, and copy exactly as it was, it is written in the present, and therefore its meanings inevitably change.

27. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • A good example to this problem is provided by Umberto Eco when he describes the following situation: • I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly. (1984: 67-68)

28. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • The man can only use the words of the love declaration as an intertext but not the same words as if they were pronounced for the first time. • This is the same situation for Pierre Menard, except, as we stated above, he refuses intertextuality. • Thus, “Any insinuation that Menard dedicated his life to the writing of a contemporary Don Quixote is a calumny of his illustrious memory” (1962: 48) since the attempt is “merely astonishing” (1962: 49). Menard admits that his is futile, absurd, in spite

29. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • [...] (that he arrived at a rather faithful handling of the seventeenth-century Spanish) but rejected it as too easy! Rather because it was impossible, the reader will say! I agree, but the undertaking was impossible from the start, and of all the possible means to carrying it out, this was the least interesting. (1962: 49). • Furthermore, Menard recognises that his attempt is simply impossible, since “[He] would have to be immortal in order to carry [the project] out” (1962: 50),

30. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • and Borges quite readily, in a metafictional note, admits, with respect to the project, that: • “Shall I confess that I often imagine that he finished it and that I am reading Don Quixote– the entire work– as if Menard had conceived it?” (1962: 50).

31. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • Borges acknowledges that in fact is of no importance if Menard accomplished or not his project, since • Several nights ago, while leafing through Chapter XXVI ­–which he had never attempted– I recognized our friend’s style and, as it were, his voice in this exceptional phrase: the nymphs of the rivers, mournful and humid Echo. This effective combination of two adjectives, one moral and the other physical, reminded me of a line from Shakespeare which we discussed one afternoon. (1962: 50). • Borges is referring here to arch-writing, that is, the trace (in the sense of Derrida, 1974) of previous writings.

32. b) The Inconclusive (invisible) Work • This comment is similar to the one we found in “Kafka and His Precursors”, he provides us with an excellent example of writing as trace, arche-writing: • I once premeditated making a study of Kafka's precursors. At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoneix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a few of these here, in chronological order. (1964: 199)

33. What Borges recognises, as well in Pierre Menard, is precisely the trace, the arche-writing, since what he identifies from Menard is his “voice”, his “habits” in literatures of the past; it is not the past recognized in the present (Menard) but the present recognised in the past. • This is the basic Borgesian position: everything has already been written and said, therefore the only option a writer has is to “write notes, upon imaginary books” (1962: 17) as he is actually doing in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. In addition, Menard also recognises that: • “To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century is almost impossible” (1962: 51).

34. Borges provides a demonstration of this possibility when he states: • The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness.) It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine): • ... la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. • [... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.]

35. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “ingenious layman” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history, Menard, on the other hand, writes: • ... la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. • [... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.]

36. History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clause –example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future– are shamelessly pragmatic. (1962: 53) • Borges recognises that both text are identical, however, he finds profound differences between them. The reason is simple: • Cervantes wrote in a moment when History was acquiring the power of Truth, and this power will culminate in the XIX century historiography.

37. So, for Cervantes to connect Truth to History has indeed the appropriate position, but for Menard, a postmodern writer avant la lettre this is out of the question. • For him, the real, and therefore, History is only a verbal construction, an other form of fiction, and this is why History is, on the one hand, the origin of reality, since reality is only a discursive construction; • on the other hand, and because of this origin, History is what we make it to be and not what really took place. • What the quotation also implies is that a text from them past placed in a new cultural context signifies something else.

38. At the end, what we find in Borges own text, is what he attributes to Menard’s attempt: • “I have thought that it is legitimate to consider the “final” Don Quixote as a kind of palimpsest, in which should appear traces -tenous but not undecipherable- of the “previous” handwriting of our friend” (1962: 54). • The text ends with a metafictional comment, pointing what he, Borges, has being doing with the text and with the reader: • Menard (parhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions.

39. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Eneid and to read Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. Would not the attributing of The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce be a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels? (1962: 55) • This act of reading is, in fact, the very source of the text as production, as a network of infinite texts which inscribe the very notions of arch-writing, trace and différance, making Borges the very first Post-Modern writer and thinker. • END • References • Borges, Jorge Luis. (1999). “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins”. In Jorge Luis Borges. Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Books. 229-233. • Borges, Jorge Luis. (1964). Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Preface by André Maurois. New York: A New Directions Book. • Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1983). “Rhizome”. In Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. • Derrida, Jacques. (1974). Of Grammatology. • Eco, Umberto. (1984). Postcripts to The Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. • Roa Bastos, Augusto. (1987). I the Supreme. Translated by Helen Lane. New York: Vintage Books.