Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts

1 Coming to Terms

13 1 Coming to Terms A few weeks ago my old friend Dick Lower sent me this huge pile of paper, saying that, as I am a voracious collector of curios and suchlike , perhaps I should have it. . . . How is a mere chronicler such as myself to transmute the lead of inaccuracy in these papers into the gold of truth? —Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master —that’s all.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of an obscure modern artist who decides to rewrite a passage from Don Quixote, the famous seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes. What makes this goal interesting, and more than a little crazy, is that Menard doesn’t want simply to copy or transcribe the Quixote but instead“to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” And to make matters even more difficult, he resolves to do so without referring back to the text of the Quixote or conducting any research on Cervantes. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, 14 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts and arriving thereby at the Quixote —that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. It’s an absurd project, to write as your own part of a book that has already been written by someone else, and one that the narrator of Borges’s story (who seems no less eccentric than Menard) admits was never completed. And yet, when the narrator rereads Don Quixote as though it were written not by Cervantes but by his friend, he finds that while the two versions are (of course)“verbally identical,”the one composed by Menard seems“almost infinitely richer”—since one is no longer reading a romantic novel from another time and place but a contemporary text written as if it were such a work. Why would someone write or read such an odd text? Well, as the narrator observes,“ambiguity is richness.” Projects Rereading Borges Read “Pierre Menard” with the aim of assessing my use of it here. What aspects of this short fiction do I emphasize? What do I gloss over or omit? How might you add to or counter my reading of Borges? There are few things harder to do than to explain a joke without seeming a bore, and I am aware that I have started this chapter by trying to do just that. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” offers pleasures to its readers that no summary can replicate, as Borges subtly and affectionately mocks the wild ambitions of writers, the pretensions of critics, and the backstage politics of the literary world. And certainly it’s hard to take either Menard or his friend and biographer as seriously as they take themselves.But even still,I think that for all its ironies, Borges’s story also hints at a theory of reading— Intertexts Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 88–95. Coming to Terms 15 which is that to understand a text you need, in a way, to rewrite it, to take the ideas and phrasings of its author and turn them into your own. Texts don’t simply reveal their meanings to us; we need to make sense of them. Like Menard, each of us comes at what we read through our own experiences and concerns, and so each of us makes a slightly different sense of the texts we encounter. We all write our own Quixote—at least to some degree. There is no such thing as a completely accurate and objective summary, a view from nowhere. All readings are interested (including my own here of Borges). But if you cannot be neutral as a reader, you can strive to be fair and self-reflective. This is why I find it helpful to think of the kind of rewriting in which you strive to represent the work of...