Paul de Man Research Papers (original) (raw)

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.