He dreamed it throbbing, warm, secret. It was the size of a closed fist, a darkish red in the dimness of a human body still without a face or sex. With anxious love he dreamed it for fourteen lucid nights. Each night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it, but limited himself to witnessing it, to observing it, to correcting it now and then with a look. He felt it, he lived it from different distances and from many angles. On the fourteenth night he touched the pulmonary artery with a finger and then the whole heart, inside and out. The examination satisfied him. For one night he deliberately did not dream; after that he went back to the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set out to envision another of the principal organs. Before a year was over he came to the skeleton, the eyelids. The countless strands of hair were perhaps the hardest task of all. He dreamed a whole man, a young man, but the young man could not stand up or speak, nor could he open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamed him asleep.
In the cosmogonies of the Gnostics, the demiurges mold a red Adam who is unable to stand on his feet; as clumsy and crude and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams wrought by the nights of the magician. One evening the man was at the point of destroying all his handiwork (it would have been better for him had he done so), but in the end he restrained himself. Having exhausted his prayers to the gods of the earth and river, he threw himself down at the feet of the stone image that may have been a tiger or a stallion, and asked for its blind aid. That same evening he dreamed of the image. He dreamed it alive, quivering; it was no unnatural cross between tiger and stallion but at one and the same time both these violent creatures and also a bull, a rose, a thunderstorm. This manifold god revealed to him that its earthly name was Fire, that there in the circular temple (and in others like it) sacrifices had once been made to it, that it had been worshiped, and that through its magic the phantom of the man’s dreams would be wakened to life in such a way that—except for Fire itself and the dreamer—every being in the world would accept him as a man of flesh and blood. The god ordered that, once instructed in the rites, the disciple should be sent downstream to the other ruined temple, whose pyramids still survived, so that in that abandoned place some human voice might exalt him. In the dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.
The magician carried out these orders. He devoted a period of time (which finally spanned two years) to initiating his principle into the riddles of the universe and the worship of Fire. Deep inside, it pained him to say goodbye to his creature. Under the pretext of teaching him more fully, each day he drew out the hours set aside for sleep. Also, he reshaped the somewhat faulty right shoulder. From time to time, he was troubled by the feeling that all this had already happened, but for the most part his days were happy. On closing his eyes he would think, “Now I will be with my son.” Or, less frequently, “The son I have begotten awaits me and he will not exist if I do not go to him.”
Little by little, he was training the young man for reality. On one occasion he commanded him to set up a flag on a distant peak. The next day, there on the peak, a fiery pennant shone. He tried other, similar exercises, each bolder than the one before. He realized with a certain bitterness that his son was ready—and perhaps impatient—to be born. That night he kissed him for the first time and sent him down the river to the other temple, whose whitened ruins were still to be glimpsed over miles and miles of impenetrable forest and swamp. At the very end (so that the boy would never know he was a phantom, so that he would think himself a man like all men), the magician imbued his disciple with total oblivion of his long years of apprenticeship.
His triumph and his peace were blemished by a touch of weariness. In the morning and evening dusk, he prostrated himself before the stone idol, perhaps imagining that his unreal son was performing the same rites farther down the river in other circular ruins. At night he no longer dreamed, or else he dreamed the way all men dream. He now perceived with a certain vagueness the sounds and shapes of the world, for his absent son was taking nourishment from the magician’s decreasing consciousness. His life’s purpose was fulfilled; the man lived on in a kind of ecstasy. After a length of time that certain tellers of the story count in years and others in half-decades, he was awakened one midnight by two rowers. He could not see their faces, but they spoke to him about a magic man in a temple up north who walked on fire without being burned. The magician suddenly remembered the god’s words. He remembered that of all the creatures in the world, Fire was the only one who knew his son was a phantom. This recollection, comforting at first, ended by tormenting him. He feared that his son might wonder at this strange privilege and in some way discover his condition as a mere appearance. Not to be a man but to be the projection of another man’s dreams—what an unparalleled humiliation, how bewildering! Every father cares for the child he has begotten—he has allowed—in some moment of confusion or happiness. It is understandable, then, that the magician should fear for the future of a son thought out organ by organ and feature by feature over the course of a thousand and one secret nights.
The end of these anxieties came suddenly, but certain signs foretold it. First (after a long drought), a far-off cloud on a hilltop, as light as a bird; next, toward the south, the sky, which took on the rosy hue of a leopard’s gums; then, the pillars of smoke that turned the metal of the nights to rust; finally, the headlong panic of the forest animals. For what had happened many centuries ago was happening again. The ruins of the fire god’s shrine were destroyed by fire. In a birdless dawn the magician saw the circling sheets of fíame closing in on him. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he realized that death was coming to crown his years and to release him from his labors. He walked into the leaping pennants of flame. They did not bite into his flesh, but caressed him and flooded him without heat or burning. In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he understood that he, too, was an appearance, that someone else was dreaming him.
Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote,
To Silvina Ocampo
The visible body of work left by the novelist Pierre Menard is easily and briefly listed. Inexcusable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a misleading checklist which a certain newspaper that makes no secret of its Protestant leanings has had the insensitivity to thrust upon its unfortunate readers—few and Calvinist though these be, when not Freemason or circumcised. Menard’s true friends looked on this checklist with alarm and even a certain sadness. Only yesterday, in a manner of speaking, did we gather among the mournful cypresses at his final resting place, and already Error creeps in to blur his Memory. Unquestionably, some small rectification is in order.
It is all too easy, I realize, to challenge my meagre credentials. Nevertheless, I trust that I shall not be disallowed from citing the names of two eminent patrons. The Baroness of Bacourt (at whose unforgettable vendredis it was my privilege to come to know the late-lamented poet) has been kind enough to grant approval to the pages that follow. The Countess of Bagnoreggio, one of the most refined minds of the Principality of Monaco (now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her recent marriage to the international philanthropist Simon Kautzsch, a man much vilified, alas, by the victims of his disinterested activities), has sacrificed “to truth and to the death” (her own words) the aristocratic reserve that so distinguishes her, and in an open letter published in the review Luxe she too grants me her approbation. These patents, I believe, should suffice.
I have said that Menard’s visible work is readily listed. After careful examination of his private papers, I find that they contain the following items:
a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (the second time with variants) in the review La Conque (March and October, 1899).
b) A study of the feasibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of concepts that are neither synonyms for nor circumlocutions of those that shape our everyday speech “but ideal objects created by consensus and inten
ded essentially for poetic needs” (Nîmes, 1901).
c) A study of “certain connections or affinities” in the thinking of Descartes, Leibniz, and John Wilkins (Nîmes, 1903).
d) A study of Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis (Nîmes, 1904).
e) A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by removing one of the rook’s pawns. Menard sets forth his case, elaborates, argues, and in the end rejects his own innovation.
f) A study of Ramon Lull’s Ars Magna Generalis (Nîmes, 1906).
g) A translation, with a foreword and notes, of The Book of the Free Invention and Art of the Game of Chess by Ruy López de Segura (Paris, 1907).
h) The draft pages of a monograph on George Boole’s symbolic logic.
i) An examination of the basic metrical laws of French prose, illustrated with examples from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October, 1909).
j) A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December, 1909).
k) A manuscript translation of Quevedo’s Aguja de navegar cultos, entitled La boussole des précieux.
l) A foreword to the catalogue of an exhibition of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade (Nîmes, 1914).
m) Problems with a Problem (Paris, 1917), a book discussing in chronological order the solutions to the well-known paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. To date, two editions of this book have appeared; the second bears in an epigraph Leibniz’s advice, “Have not the slightest fear, Mr Tortoise,” and amends the chapters on Russell and Descartes.
n) A dogged analysis of Toulet’s “syntactic usage” (Nouvelle revue française, March, 1921). Menard, I recall, held that censure and praise are sentimental activities which have little or nothing to do with criticism.
o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s “Cimitière marin” (N.R.F., January, 1928).
p) An invective against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul’s Pages Towards the Suppression of Reality. (This denunciation, if I may digress, is the exact reverse of his true opinion of Valéry. Valéry knew this, and the old friendship between the two men was not imperiled.)
q) A “definition” of the Countess of Bagnoreggio, included in the “triumphant tome”—the words of another contributor, Gabriele D’Annunzio—published annually by this lady for the purpose of correcting the inevitable falsehoods of the gutter press and of presenting “to the world and to Italy” a true portrait of her person, so often exposed (by reason of her beauty and conduct) to over-hasty misinterpretation.
r) An admirable crown of sonnets for the Baroness of Bacourt (1934).
s) A handwritten list of verses whose effect derives from their punctuation.9
The above, then, is a summary in chronological order (omitting only a few woolly occasional sonnets inscribed in Madame Henri Bachelier’s hospitable, or greedy, album) of Menard’s visible work. I shall now move on to his other work—the underground, the infinitely heroic, the singular, and (oh, the scope of the man!) the unfinished. This oeuvre, possibly the most significant of our time, consists of chapters nine and thirty-eight of the first part of Don Quixote and of a fragment of chapter twenty-two. I am aware that my claim will seem an absurdity, but to vindicate this “absurdity” is the principle object of the present essay.10
Two texts of differing value inspired Menard’s undertaking. One was that philological fragment (number 2005 in the Dresden edition) in which Novalis outlines the notion of total identification with a particular author. The other was one of those derivative books that place Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet in the Cannebière, or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like any man of good taste, Menard loathed such pointless masquerades, since all they were fit for, he said, was to amuse the man in the street with anachronisms or, worse still, to bewitch us with the infantile idea that every historical period is the same or is different. What seemed to Menard more interesting—albeit superficial and inconsistent in execution—was Daudet’s famous attempt to combine in one character, Tartarin, both the Ingenious Knight and his squire. Anyone who suggests that Menard dedicated his life to writing a modern-day Don Quixote defiles Menard’s living memory.
Pierre Menard was not out to write another Don Quixote— which would have been easy—but Don Quixote itself. Needless to add, he never envisaged a mindless transcription of the original; it was not his intention to copy it. His ambition, an admirable one, was to produce a handful of pages that matched word for word and line for line those of Miguel de Cervantes.
“Only my aim is astonishing,” he wrote to me from Bayonne on the thirtieth of September, 1934. “The final term, the conclusion, of a theological or metaphysical proof—about, say, the objective world, God, causation, platonic forms—is just as foregone and familiar as my well-known novel. The one difference is that the philosopher gives us in pretty volumes the intermediary stages of his work, while I have chosen to destroy mine.” In fact, not a single draft page remains to bear witness to Menard’s many years of toil.
The first method he devised was relatively simple. To learn Spanish well, to return to the Catholic faith, to fight the Moor and Turk, to forget European history from 1602 to 1918, to be Miguel de Cervantes. This was the course Pierre Menard embarked upon (I know he gained a fair command of seventeenth-century Spanish), but he rejected the method as too easy. Too impossible, rather! the reader will say. Granted, but the scheme was impossible from the start, and of all the impossible ways of achieving his aim this was the least interesting. To be in the twentieth century a popular novelist of the seventeenth century seemed to him a belittlement. To be, however possible, Cervantes and to come to Don Quixote seemed less exacting—therefore less interesting—than to stay Pierre Menard and come to Don Quixote through the experience of Pierre Menard. (This conviction, let me add, made him leave out the autobiographical prologue to the second part of Don Quixote. To have retained this prologue would have been to create another character—Cervantes—and would also have meant presenting Don Quixote through this character and not through Menard. Naturally, Menard denied himself this easy way out.) “In essence, my scheme is not difficult,” I read in another part of his letter. “To carry it through all I need is to be immortal.” Should I confess that I often find myself thinking that he finished the book and that I read Don Quixote—all of Don Quixote—as if it had been Menard’s brainchild? A few nights ago, leafing through chapter twenty-six, which he never tried his hand at, I recognized our friend’s style and voice in this fine phrase: “the nymphs of the streams, the damp and doleful Echo. . .” This effective coupling of a moral and a physical adjective brought back to me a line of Shakespeare’s that Menard and I talked about one evening:
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . .
But why Don Quixote? our reader will ask. For a Spaniard such a choice would have been understandable; not, however, for a Symbolist poet from Nîmes, an ardent follower of Poe, who begat Baudelaire, who begat Valéry, who begat Edmond Teste. The letter quoted above sheds light on the point. “Don Quixote,” explains Menard, “interests me deeply but does not seem to me—how can I put it?—inevitable. While I find it hard to imagine a world without Edgar Allan Poe’s interjection,
Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!
or without the ‘Bateau ivre’ or the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ I am quite able to imagine it without Don Quixote. (Of course, I am talking about my own ability and not about the historical resonance of these works.) Don Quixote is an incidental book; Don Quixote is not necessary. I can therefore plan the writing of it—I can write it—without the risk of tautology. I read it from cover to cover when I was about twelve or thirteen. Since then, I have carefully reread certain chapters—those that for the moment I shall not try my hand at. I have also delved into Cervantes’s one-act farces, his comedies, Galatea, the exemplary novels, the all-too-laboured Travails of Persiles and Segismunda, an
d the Voyage to Parnassus. My overall recollection of Don Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and lack of interest, is much like the hazy outline of a book one has before writing it. Given this outline (which can hardly be denied me), it goes without saying that my problem is somewhat more difficult than the one Cervantes faced. My obliging forerunner, far from eschewing the collaboration of chance, went about writing his immortal work in something of a devil-may-care spirit, carried along by the inertial force of language and invention. I have taken upon myself the mysterious duty of reconstructing his spontaneous novel word for word. My solitary game is governed by two contradictory rules. The first allows me to try out variations of a formal or psychological nature; the second makes me sacrifice these variations to the ‘original’ text while finding solid reasons for doing so. To these assumed obstacles we must add another—an inbuilt one. To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was reasonable, necessary, and perhaps even predestined; at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it is well-nigh impossible. Three centuries, packed with complex events, have not passed without effect. One of these events was Don Quixote itself.”
In spite of this trio of obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Don Quixote is subtler than that of Cervantes. Cervantes sets up a crude contrast between the fantasy of the chivalric tale and the tawdry reality of the rural Spain he knew, whereas Menard chooses as his reality the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What picturesque touches would this not have suggested to a Maurice Barrès or a Dr Rodríguez Larreta! Menard, with complete unselfconsciousness, avoids the least hint of exoticism. We find in his work no gypsydom, no conquistadores, no mystics, no Philip II, no burnings at the stake. He does away with local colour. This disdain hints at a new treatment of the historical novel. This disdain is an outright condemnation of Salammbô.
The Garden of Forking Paths Page 4
