b) A monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of concepts which would not be synonyms or periphrases of those which make up our everyday language, “but rather ideal objects created according to convention and essentially designed to satisfy poetic needs” (Nîmes, 1901). I know such an affirmation seems an absurdity; to justify this “absurdity” is the primordial object of this note.² In his work there are no gypsy flourishes or conquistadors or mystics or Philip the Seconds or autos da fé. To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. (In fact, the final sentence of the story refers to James Joyce by name.) The title page of the 1605 Spanish text of Don Quixote. Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . (2020, August 27). But how could I dare to compete with the golden pages which, I am told, the Baroness de Bacourt is preparing or with the delicate and punctual pencil of Carolus Hourcade, One is that philological fragment by Novalis—the one numbered 2005 in the Dresden edition—which outlines the theme of a total identification with a given author, The other is one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebière or Don Quixote on Wall Street. e) A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess, eliminating one of the rook’s pawns. . Madame Bachelier has seen here an admirable and typical subordination on the part of the author to the hero’s psychology; others (not at all perspicaciously), a transcription of the Quixote; the Baroness de Bacourt, the influence of Nietzsche. The cliché “rereading the classics” turns out to be an unwitting truth. p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. This, then, is the visible work of Menard, in chronological order (with no omission other than a few vague sonnets of circumstance written for the hospitable, or avid, album of Madame Henri Bachelier). Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. ³ [I remember his quadricular notebooks, his black crossed-out passages, his peculiar typographical symbols and his insect-like handwriting. La obra. k) A manuscript translation of the Aguja de navegar cultos of Quevedo, entitled La boussole des précieux. The notion of a “definitive text” belongs to religion or perhaps merely to exhaustion. o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N. R. F. , January 1928). The Quixote —Menard told me—was, above all, an entertaining book; now it is the occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions, Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst. There are no traces of such a work in Menard’s library. (This conviction, we might say in passing, made him omit the autobiographical prologue to the second part of Don Quixote . the inevitable falsifications of journalists, an authentic image of her person, so often exposed (by very reason of her beauty and her activities) to erroneous or hasty interpretations, a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation, Introduction à la vie dévote of St. Francis of Sales, other than a few vague sonnets of circumstance written for the hospitable, or avid, album of Madame Henri Bachelier, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two, I know such an affirmation seems an absurdity; to justify this “absurdity” is the primordial object of this note, I also had the secondary intention of sketching a personal portrait of Pierre Menard. A obra visível que deixou este romancista é de fácil e breve enumeração. d) A monograph on Leibniz’s Characteristica universalis (Nîmes 1904). . Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. To glorify the occasional performance of that function, to hoard ancient and alien thoughts, to recall with incredulous stupor that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our laziness or our barbarity. It has been republished in numerous collections. Despite these two works sharing an identical text, many important artistic properties separate the two works. I am aware that it is quite easy to challenge my slight authority. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. The latter, naturally, declined that facility.) The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine): One might say that only yesterday we gathered before his final monument, amidst the lugubrious cypresses, and already Error tries to tarnish his Memory . The title character of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a poet and literary critic from France-and is also, unlike a more traditional title character, dead by the time the story begins. he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it, have resolved to do away with those stages.” In truth, not one worksheet remains to bear witness to his years of effort. m) The work Les problèmes d’un problème (Paris, 1917), which discusses, in chronological order, the different solutions given to the illustrious problem of Achilles and the tortoise. In vain have I tried to reconstruct them. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation. But “Pierre Menard” also shows how the art of appropriation can be taken to a comical extreme and does so without exactly lighting earlier artists; after all, Eliot, Joyce, and Duchamp all created works that are meant to be humorous or absurd. Menard’s Cultural Background: Despite his choice of Don Quixote, Menard is mainly a product of French literature and French culture—and makes no secret of his cultural sympathies. Hume identified our habitual idea of causality with the experience of temporal succession. But the Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is a library of works in prose and verse, from Chapman’s couplets to Andrew Lang’s “authorized version” or from Berard’s classic French drama and Morris’s lively saga to Samuel Butler’s ironic bourgeois novel. Menard—I recall—declared that censure and praise are sentimental operations which have nothing to do with literary criticism. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” is very similar to the posi-tion Roland Barthes later sets out in S/Z, where “both reading and writing are placed in a relation of equivalence by transforming the reading into re-writing,” which in turn leads to an “eternal present” (see Barthes 11-12). There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. 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. Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. I had the honor of meeting the lamented poet) has seen fit to approve the pages which follow. “I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.” Shall I confess that I often imagine he did finish it and that I read the Quixote —all of it—as if Menard had conceived it? Once that image (which no one can legitimately deny me) is postulated, it is certain that my problem is a good bit more difficult than Cervantes’ was. History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Object-texts are texts which become the locus of philosophical analysis, and seem to best represent a particular kind of aesthetic ideology. Impardonable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue which a certain daily, whose Protestant tendency is no secret, has had the inconsideration to inflict upon its deplorable readers—though these be few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised. The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. PIERRE MENARD, AUTOR DO QUIXOTE A Silvina Ocampo A obra visível que deixou este romancista é de fácil e breve enumeração. But that Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote—a contemporary of La trahison des clercs and Bertrand Russell—should fall prey to such nebulous sophistries! My obliging predecessor did not refuse the collaboration of chance: he composed his immortal work somewhat à la diable, carried along by the inertias of language and invention. Menard achieved this re-creation of the Cervantes text without really re-creating Cervantes's life. In vain have I tried to reconstruct them. https://www.thoughtco.com/pierre-menard-study-guide-2207796 (accessed January 26, 2021). Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes'. A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899). But how can we know now whether the statement “In a place of La Mancha, whose name I don’t care to remember, there lived not long ago a nobleman who kept a lance and shield, a greyhound, and a skinny old nag” actually proceeded from divine inspiration? He ascribes one work, Don Quixote, to two very different writers and in turn produces two different books composed of identical sentences. essential metric laws of French prose, illustrated with examples taken from Saint-Simon, A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain. These authorizations, I think, are not entirely insufficient. Quixote. Experimental visual artists such as Marcel Duchamp created “ready-made” artworks by taking objects from everyday life—chairs, postcards, snow shovels, bicycle wheels—and putting them together in strange new combinations. A short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which an acquaintance of the author, Pierre Menard, resolves to independently compose Cervantes' classic novel Don Quixote.Though the end product is identical to the original of several hundred years earlier, Borges provides a deadpan review in which he points out how much richer the new version is, quoting the same passages from each to … Borges situates “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in this growing tradition of quotation and appropriation. This disdain condemns Salammbô, with no possibility of appeal. Borges's procedure in "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" is the reverse. my reader will say. Penguin Books: 1998). Two editions of this book have appeared so far; the second bears as an epigraph Leibniz’s recommendation “Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortue” and revises the chapters dedicated to Russell and Descartes. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. the visible work that this novelist has left is quick and easy to list. It is therefore impossible to forgive the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue that a certain newspaper, whose Protestant tendencies are no Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, inverting the other’s work, would be able to exhume and revive those lost Troys . . . . . A monograph on “certain connections or affinities” between the thought of. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation. He's an editor at GradeSaver.com and ILEX Publications. Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst. And—such are the capacities of man!—the unfinished. How would you characterize the narrator of Borges’s story? For example, let us examine Chapter XXXVIII of the first pare, “which treats of the curious discourse of Don Quixote on arms and letters.” It is well known that Don Quixote (like Quevedo in an analogous and later passage in La hora de todos ) decided the debate against letters and in favor of arms. “Thinking, analyzing, inventing (he also wrote me) are not anomalous acts; they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. "Typical of Borges' style, the work does not fall neatly into the genre of narrative story or of essay it is a fictional essay. 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