POST MODERNISM
~ Since individual responses tend to differ from one another and change over time, postmodernist thought is skeptical of explanations that claim to be valid for all human groups, cultures, or times. Instead, it encourages the exploration and comparison of individuals' subjective responses to a given poem, painting, or other cultural product. It examines the role that language, power, and motivation play in the formation of ideas and beliefs. It is skeptical about the accuracy and usefulness of describing people or things in terms of sharply defined either/or categories (male/female, straight/gay, white/black, imperial/colonial). It examines how people's social relationships to one another, such as their relative power or place in a hierarchy, affect how they see the world and how they use their knowledge of it. It emphasizes constructivism, idealism, pluralism, relativism, and scepticism.
PIERRE MENARD, AUTHOR OF THE QUIXOTE - Jorge Luis Borges
The first part of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” introduces the reader to both the tone and the narrator, both of which are scholarly. The narrator, a French academic, seeks to correct the erroneous and incomplete catalog of the work of an author named Pierre Menard that had been compiled by a Madame Henri Bachelier. The narrator proceeds to enumerate a list of Menard’s “visible” works, which include poems, a number of scholarly works on philosophical and literary topics, a translation, a catalog preface, and other minor academic works.
The narrator then shifts to his primary topic: Menard’s “subterranean, interminably heroic, and unequalled” work, which the narrator feels is “possibly the most significant of our time.” This work consists of “the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One of Don Quixote and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter.” Justifying the apparent “absurdity” of this statement, the narrator explains, is the purpose of this “note.” Menard did not want to produce another Don Quixote, but the Don Quixote, the narrator stresses. At first, Menard considered recreating the events, circumstances, and cultural surroundings of Miguel de Cervantes’s life in order to “become” the author and therefore be able to create the Quixote again; later, he abandoned this approach as “too easy.” He decided that to remain Menard and still compose the Quixote would be a more arduous and therefore more rewarding undertaking.
The narrator never explains exactly how Menard succeeds in composing these fragments, and instead analyzes Menard’s text. The narrator quotes at length from a letter of Menard’s in which he explains that he chose theQuixote because, as a Frenchman, the book was not prominent in his literary education. The project of rewriting theQuixote is “considerably more difficult” than was the project of writing the novel in the first place, for in Cervantes’ time the work was “perhaps inevitable,” but in Menard’s time it is ”almost impossible.”
The majority of the last half of the section is taken up with an explanation of why the Menard Quixote is “more subtle than that of Cervantes.” Where Quixote simply “indulges in a rather coarse opposition” between chivalry stories and realistic descriptions of seventeenth-century Spain, Menard sets his story in the distant past, yet avoids describing his fictional setting with trite, stereotypical details of gypsies and the Inquisition. A discourse delivered by Don Quixote holding that arms were superior to letters is explicable in the Cervantes text by the fact that Cervantes himself was a soldier, but in the Menard Quixote the idea is distinctly more subtle and ironic. Cervantes’ meditation on history is mere rhetoric while Menard’s is clearly a reaction to the ideas of William James. The narrator concludes by evaluating the impact of Menard. His Quixote has enriched contemporary literature by its technique of “deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions,” and the narrator recommends applying Menard’s technique in order to “improve” many classic works of literature.
CRITICISM:
The author here focuses on the works of Pierre Menard, the said so author of the Quixote which is very opposite to the original work of Cervantes. For instance, "indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country". While Menard writes of the distant past ("the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope”), in Cervantes “there are neither bands of Gypsies, conquistadors... nor autos de fe.
so in short, Pierre Menard here is the cause of the questions, or what the queries of the readers about what really is true about the authorship, interpretations and appropriation.
