Borges, History, and Copyright

My two favorite writers are Kafka and Borges. There was a time I could read Kafka fairly well in the original, but never Borges, which I have always regretted, since while Kafka in the original adds (for me) a certain baroque dimension, I have always imagined (or is it the other Patry?) that Borges in the original would add a beauty and set of associations that will always elude me. In yesterday's blog, I had in mind too Borges 1939 short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." In this story, Borges begins by describing Menard's oeuvre (after first noting Mme Henri Bachelier's "deceitful catalog in a certain newspaper, whose Protestant leanings are surely no secret"). There are 19 works listed in chronological order, including, Borges writes: "a diatribe against Paul Valery, in Jacques Reboul's Feuilles pour la suppression de la realite (which diatribe, I might add parenthetically, states the exact reverse of Menard's true opinion of Valery; Valery understood this, and the two men's friendship was never imperiled").

Borges spends most of his time attacking the "insinuation" that Menard devoted his life to writing a "contemporary Quixote." Borges states that "Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough - he wanted to compose the Quixiote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided - word for word and line for line - with those of Miguel de Cervantes."

This process would, of course, far exceed that mentioned by Learned Hand in independent creation of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Menard never finished, but what he did finish was line by line identical to Cervantes' work. Yet, the narrator opines that "Menard's fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes'." One passage is quoted from Cervantes:

"truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness to the past,
exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor."

Here is Menard's version:

"truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness to the past,
exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor."


Although the passage is identical in both, the narrator declares that Cervantes' version is "mere rhetorical praise of history," while with Menard's, he states: "History, mother of truth! - the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard is not 'what happened'; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases - exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor - are brazenly pragmatic."

Borges here pokes fun at many things, including some of the theories of history noted in yesterday's blog, as well was literary criticism. But in a turn of events that Borges himself no doubt anticipated, a pompous, tendentious, unreadable, post-structuralist "discussion" of the Menard short story by William Plank inadvertently makes best another of Borges' points in that story: "there is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless."