Text, Work, Interpretation: Some Implications of the Menard Case

Authors make assumptions about the fitness and adaptability of their "materials" -such things as multiplicity or simplicity of sentence structures, techniques for making action appear simple or complex, techniques for achieving depth or shallowness of character, detailed or spare descriptive language, and so on -to their aims. But, in this paper I show that this reasonable notion of what is involved in authorial intentions is not only at odds with, but is actually obscured by, conceptions of authorial achievement that must be presumed in the standard discussions of the ontology of art that have employed Borges's story. Keywords: ontology of art; works of art; adaptability of fit.

Danto credits Borges with a brilliant insight into the identity of works of literature in his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” namely, posing the problem of the indiscernibility of these works. Yet, when it comes to the solution to the problem, Danto favors a solution which is very different from that of Borges, although at first one might think it is not. Whereas Borges emphasizes the author, Danto emphasizes the reader. Both views, I shall argue here, are misguided. The solution lies in emphasizing the work of literature, rather than the author or the reader, for it is there that one can find what distinguishes works of literature from works of philosophy.

The task of the main character of J.L. Borges' short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is not very difficult, indeed, Pierre Menard decides to re-write word by word Cervantes' Don Quixote. However, he presumes to accomplish this undertaking not merely by coping the novel, but rather by reproducing it as if the Don Quixote naturally arose through Menard's subjectivity and creativity. The French character does not intend to write an adaptation of Miguel Cervantes, a sort of “Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebière or Don Quixote on Wall Street” (Borges, 48), since being a man of good taste he considers adaptations mere anachronisms. “He did not want to compose another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself . [...] [H]e did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line -.” (Borges, 48. Emphasis by Borges). In order to achieve his goal Menard presupposes two possible alternatives: “[k]now 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.” Or “go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” (Borges, 48-49). Menard, obviously, opts for the latter. J.L. Borges describes the singular work of this fictional French literary critic and symbolist poet, as a sort of encomium, a critical review that attempts to re-establish what Borges calls the “subterranean” work of Menard. The form adopted by Borges is the first element that destabilizes the reader's mind, since Borges starts to play with the plausibility of the references that he uses for his paradoxical review; he merges fictitious characters with prominent figures of literary and philosophic history as Paul Valéry, Bertrand Russel or Leibniz. The parodic intent of the story towards the literary critique is evident through out the entire narration, e.g. the ironic reference to the “unforgettable vendredis” hosted by the unlikely Baroness de Bancourt. The continuous shifting between narrative and literary critique, fictitious and veritable, plausible and contradictory, creates an infinite web of references that merges into Borges' labyrinthian writing, whereof Pierre Menard represents the first victim. The density and the strict bond between content and form inherent Borges' writing has allowed, over the years, the proliferation of numerous critical readings on Pierre Menard..., that have attempted to give a plausible interpretation of this short story through different perspectives and disciplinary fields, such as literary criticism, history, philosophy or psychology. Borges' subtle narrative capacity of creating stories whereof is impossible to discern if an element is central or peripheral and to separate the content from the form, creates a sort of illogical dynamic of plausible and contradictory entities that allows the coexistence of diverging and, occasionally, oppositional theories. The embracing nature of Borge's Pierre Menard... is identifiable also in Walter Benjamin's short essay The Task of the Translator. Indeed, this theoretical text has begotten several rereadings, wherein numerous thinkers exposed their interpretations, that, as with Menard, occasionally resulted as contrasting theories. Benjamin's and Borges' texts share the possibility of allowing the dynamic tension between contraries, in fact they both tend to ground their own existence on their multiplicity; paradoxically they feed on the tensions that derive from their interpretation. As Pierre Menard..., The Task of the Translator constantly creates a series of inter-textual and extra-textual references that render it ineffable in its entirety. Moreover, also in Benjamin's text the content and the form through which it has been expressed, appear absolutely inseverable so that the purpose pursued by the author could be accomplished. It succeeds in rendering possible the coexistence of contradictory element, for instance “the text is full of tropes, and it selects tropes which convey the illusion of totality. It seems to relapse into the tropological errors that it denounces.” (De Man, 30) Hence, this communal embracing nature of both texts onstitutes the root cause of their permanence or their “afterlife” as Benjamin calls it. Since they are texts which reflect on the aesthetic production of a work of art, on the nature of art itself, hence upon themselves as writing expressions, they envelop the reader/critic who is occasionally attracted and rejected by them. Therefore, I presume that they both own the features that Benjamin identifies in the original work, c'est-à-dire contain[ing] the law governing the translation: its translatability.” (70) Simultaneously, their originality is not affected by the act of translation because “[j]ust as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original not so much from its life as from its afterlife.” (Benjamin, 71) Besides the conceptual contiguity of these works, I reckon that these two text could be analysed next to each other for these particular and communal aesthetic features. Hence, by defining Pierre Menard as the translator of the Quixote, I will attempt to explain why although his “subterranean” work slightly touches Cervantes' Don Quixote, he diverges form the Spanish novel to reach different meanings; “[j]ust as a tangent [that] touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity.” (Benjamin, 80). In the first section of this essay, I will briefly resume Benjamin's The Task of the Translator, while in the other two sections I will concentrate my analysis on Borges' text.

The Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017

ABSTRACT: The differences and difficulties found upon doing literary research are analyzed. The fact that researchers also interpret is highlighted as well as the need for sufficient time and freedom to do their research. The use of adequate selection criteria, the subjectivity and intuition of the exegete, as well as the use of concepts such as respect for the literal meaning (Umberto Eco) and the analogy of proportion (Inger Enkvist) are proposed as appropriate guidelines for establishing renovated, but systematic reading of texts. Keywords: literary theory, hermeneutics, research strategies, reading.

I would like to take the opportunity of our present theme, 'Old Challenges / New Horizons', not to report on any very particular aspect of my own research, but to offer some thoughts on issues which seem to me important for the nature and future of English literature as a discipline, on the basis of my experience as a scholar and teacher of English literature in the English university environment. Some of my observations and concerns no doubt relate specifically to the United Kingdom, and they might at least satisfy some of the curiosities you may have about the odd ways in which we British do things. Some of my observations however may have larger and European resonances. I speak as one who professes the discipline of English literature, but I shall be exploring areas where language studies have much to offer, and where the cooperation of literary and language expertise might well, it seems to me, be profitably explored. I am a scholar of the long eighteenth century, and both a practising and a theorising textual editor, and many of my examples, but not all, come from that period and that field. We are all of us familiar with the notion that English literature is chronically a discipline in crisis. In some ways that might seem an odd notion. The subject remains, throughout the world, intellectually vibrant and productive, and recruits well in a competitive world. Nevertheless, English literature has surely experienced, over the last three decades, a greater degree of internal methodological contest than any other. Self-examination is healthy; nosce teipsum. A continuous and unremitting state of self-questioning however has led, many believe, to a radical loss of disciplinary confidence and identity. The theory explosion of the seventies and eighties deconstructed many old certainties about texts and their understanding. The hermeneutics of suspicion have led many to read texts not for what they say, but for what they allegedly conceal. The notions that texts might be read for their avowed meanings, or that authorial intention might be a credible voucher of meaning, or that meanings might be in any sense determinable, fractured under these pressures. In a field of English literary studies in which I have a strong personal investment, textual editing and explanatory annotation, many theorists argued that not only the meaning of words, but the printed texts in which they appeared, were radically unstable. In the extreme case some theorists went on to assert that any pretence not only to credible textual editing, but to any kind of credible textual interpretation or explanation, or indeed to English itself

Journal of Pragmatics, 1991

Students of commonication from many disciplinary angles wdi fiad the book a readily available resource base. In spite of some vexing typographic errors, the volume is highly recommended for its comprehcnsive coverage. References

2020

The interpretation of a reading is a dialogical act, a meeting place of different voices that converge in the reader’s mind. Among those voices, are the ones that the reader recognises in the work itself—characters, narrator, author—as well as the others that he invokes and whose origin lies in previous experiences and knowledge—his own voices, voices of close people, voices of other authors and characters, etc. All of them model the thoughts and decisions of the reader and guide him in his interpretation and understanding of the work. But those voices do not always live in harmony and can be in conflict, confronted, opposed. It is in this dialogical dynamic where the most central voices that integrate others become especially relevant since the final interpretation of the reader will depend on them. The study we present aims to offer an integral and comprehensive explanation of the process of literary interpretation based on a review of the dialogic perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin (...

2017

The article is devoted to the problem of approaches to the interpretation of the text. It highlights the viewpoints of both Russian and foreign scholars on the text analysis to promote readers’ relevant assessment and interpretation. The authors research the text from the view point of genre, history, context and individual aspects. They maintain that due consideration of the work from different angles is the cornerstone of a comprehensive analysis.

Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2022

Literature has been philosophically understood as a practice in the last thirty years, which involves "modes of utterance" and stances, not intrinsic textual properties. Thus, the place for semantics in philosophical inquiry has clearly diminished. Literary aesthetic appreciation has shifted its focus from aesthetic realism, based on the study of textual features, to ways of reading. Peter Lamarque's concept of narrative opacity is a clear example of this shift. According to the philosophy of literature, literature, like any other art form, does not compel us to engage realistically with it. Against this trend, this paper argues for the distinction between two kinds of opacity, defending textual opacity as a necessary condition for literary opacity. In this sense, examples in literary criticism properly illustrate not a peripheral role of meaning in literary appreciation, but arbitrariness in interpretation, which involves semantic concerns. So the assumed interest in the specifi c ways in which literature embeds meaning in fi ctional narrative works.