by Ilan Stavans
Carlos Fuentes features aspects of El Quijote in his magnum opus Terra nostra and, to a lesser extent, in his thriller The Hydra Head (1978), about the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, in retrospect Fuentes (aside from Borges) might be the Latin American man of letters most devoted to El Quijote. In 1976, he published Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura, a book-long essay on El Quijote that looks at the novel as a critique of reading. In English, the piece appears in Fuentes’s collection of essays Myself with Others (1990). In it, and in subsequent speeches and introductions, Fuentes portrayed Cervantes’s novel as a tool that fosters democracy and fights intolerance because it is constantly making a critique of itself and “it wants to make real what history forgot.” Fuentes particularly loved the self-referentiality in it. “It is a narrative,” he argued, in which “we read a book about a man who reads books and then becomes a book about a man who knows that he is being read.” This, in his view, is liberating in that it announced not only that characters are as real as people but that reading is an activity that has no boundaries:
When Don Quixote enters the printing shop in Barcelona and discovers that what is being printed is his own book, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, we are suddenly plunged into a truly new world of readers, of readings available to all and not only to a small circle of power, religious, political or social.
There is also Roberto Bolaño, whose episodic road novel The Savage Detectives, about two Mexican hooligans, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, looking for a long-forgotten mythical female poet, might be read as a rewriting, in structure as well as in style, of Cervantes’s masterpiece.
Unlike manifestations of Quijotismo in Spain, none of these artifacts have been used by others as a tool to explain, and even transform, reality—that is, as the source of an ideology. The one that does, and unquestionably the most important rethinking on this side of the Atlantic—and, as it happens, the shaping of a fresh ideological approach—is Borges’s influential story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”
On Christmas Eve 1938, at age thirty-nine, Borges had an accident. As he was walking up a staircase in Buenos Aires, on his way to return a copy of The Arabian Nights, he smashed his forehead against an open window frame. The impact was severe. But he didn’t pay attention to his bleeding head. He proceeded to his destination. It was only when the owner of the book heard Borges’s knock and opened the door to his apartment that Borges saw the wound and realized how serious it had been. Soon thereafter, Borges lost consciousness. The episode served as inspiration for his autobiographical story “El sur.”
Until this point, Borges was known as an avant-garde, cerebral poet as well as a book and film reviewer. His work was published in intellectual journals, although he wrote columns and features in women’s magazines. It was on his poetry that he placed his bet to fame. The accident changed things.
Borges convalesced at the hospital. He feared his mental faculties, his capacity to remember, had been diminished. To test himself, he wrote a short story: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” It was not his first (in 1933, he had authored “Hombre de la esquina rosada”), but it was his most ambitious to date. Published in Victoria Ocampo’s journal Sur in 1939 and included in the volume Ficciones, released in 1944, it is among the most influential stories of the twentieth century. It is also among Borges’s most famous stories, which is no small feat given the reputation of many others, such as “The Library of Babel,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Circular Ruins,” and “Death and the Compass.”
As it turned out, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” didn’t only prove the soundness of Borges’s mind; it revolutionized our understanding of the crossroads where history and reading meet. And it offered fresh insight into the centrality of Cervantes’s novel in the Hispanic world, and into the reconfiguration of Spanish culture as it continuously plays itself out in the Americas.
In truth, to call this a story is somewhat deceitful. Although a substantial portion of the content is fictional, Borges presents it as an essay, or perhaps a book review. In the story, the narrator (who may be the author himself, or not) sets out to analyze the work—the words—of a fictional late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French Symbolist novelist, Pierre Menard. The narrator focuses on Menard’s single most original contribution, as well as the most “absurd”: the rewriting, though not the copying, of chapters IX and XXXVIII of the First Part of El Quijote.
As the narrator tells us, Menard “did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself.” That is, he wanted to write it exactly as Cervantes had written it the first time around, not a single word of it different. The key term is rescribir, to rewrite: Menard does not copy Cervantes’s novel word by word; he creates it all over again, meaning that, without a copy in front of him, he faithfully composes precisely the same text of 1605.
Not really. Borges’s story is built on a Platonic concept of literature which suggests that masterpieces past, present, and future are intrinsic, universal features of Nature that exist before and after they become tangible to readers. The act of writing down is simply the human endeavor that unveils universal features, making them visible. (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” begins with a discussion of the difference between Menard’s visible and invisible work.) Furthermore, those masterpieces, like Don Quixote, exist in spite of, and separate from, their creator. This means that if Cervantes was able to retrieve it, someone else might be able to do the same. Or, to use electronic jargon, Menard could download the classic, just as it had been downloaded more than three hundred years prior.
But who uploaded it, then? Menard’s idea invokes an Emersonian concept of authorship: all individual writers are but transient, expiring aspects of a single Universal Mind, whose attributes summarize and encompass all the individualities available. In other words, that abstract Platonic Writer of Writers is the true and sole original author, and earthly incarnations (Cervantes, Menard, you, and I) are but scribes through whom the Universal Mind communicates its content.
In what is perhaps the most inspiring section of the piece—and of Borges’s entire career—the narrator announces (in my translation, which incorporates a quote from the Ormsby rendition) this:
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, First Part, chapter IX):
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.
Composed in the seventeenth century, composed by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, instead, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.
History, mother of truth; the idea is astonishing. Menard, a contemporary of William James, doesn’t define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, isn’t what happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final causes—example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future—are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in styles is also vivid. Menard’s archaic style—he is, in the end, a foreigner—suffers from a certain affectation. This isn’t the case of his precursor, who uninhibitedly handles the current Spanish of his time.
The words are identical, yet the meaning is different. Borges’s story offers a double critique: of originality as an artistic objective (nothing human is really original, only the Universal Mind), and of the act of reading (the exact same quote is understood quite differently depending on the time in which it is framed).
This suggests that Don Quixote is a fixed text but that no two readers of it look at it the same way, for individuals bring to the material subjective views. The novel, therefore, is not one but many—as many as the readers who interpret it and, as in the case o
f Menard, the writers who attempt to rewrite it.
But if there are so many classics, products of a Universal Mind, that have inspired countless interpretations, why does Menard choose to rewrite Don Quixote? “Two texts of unequal value inspired this undertaking,” the narrator states. “One is that philosophical fragment by Novalis—the one numbered 2005 in the Dresden edition—which outlines the theme of a total identification with a given author.” That is, Menard identifies completely with Cervantes, to the point of becoming his doppelgänger. “The other is one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on Le Cannobière or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like all men of good taste, Menard abhorred these useless carnivals, fit only—as he would say—to produce the plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthrall us with the elementary idea that all epochs are the same or are different.” Menard is insistent on avoiding such anachronisms.
Menard could have chosen another Iberian literary landmark: El Cid, The Lazarillo of Tormes, or La Celestina. However, these books are contingent on the Spanish tradition, but they are not superior to it; that is, they are part of history, not above it. El Quijote is the ur-text, the fountainhead, the book that gives legitimacy to this tradition. One could imagine Spanish letters without La Celestina; but Spain itself, as concept and reality, would not exist without El Quijote.
There is another relevant question worth asking: Why does Borges make Pierre Menard a Frenchman? Why not a Spaniard rewriting the contemporary Spanish ur-text? That—to quote Menard again—would have been too easy, since the very definition of tradition is “the transmission of customs or beliefs from one generation to another within a particular context.” In their writing, all German writers, consciously and otherwise, respond to Goethe.
By placing Menard out of the Spanish-language cultural orbit, the story not only reflects on individual ways of reading; it is about modernity as a fractured condition. To rewrite Don Quixote, Menard needed “to know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turks, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.” The narrator adds that “he attained a fairly accurate command of 17th-century Spanish.” He almost needed to cease being French and become a Spaniard.
The fact that Borges insinuates that a Frenchman—and, let us remember, France was idealized by Iberians and Hispanic Americans during the Modernista period at the end of the nineteenth century—might become the author, for example, the conduit, the proprietor of the most important Spanish book ever written, is unquestionably humorous. It also suggests a radical metamorphosis akin to the one undergone by immigrants: a person from one culture can become a full-fledged member of another. The suggestion is stunning. Latin America, after all, is a habitat shaped by an assortment of foreign cultures.
So do classics have a nationality? Do they belong to a particular nation? I argued earlier that classics are the mythology around which nations come together. That, certainly, is the case of Cervantes’s novel, around which an entire civilization was built. But it could also be said that, regardless of their origin, classics are part of a universal reservoir without particular ownership. They’re owned by everyone and no one. Hence, El Quijote—in Cervantes’s delivery—is only accidentally Iberian, just as Faust is fortuitously German.
No Spaniard could have come up with such a declaration. Moreover, no Spaniard or Frenchman could have written “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” It could only have been a Latin American, for the region (like Africa, the Middle East, and other former colonies) is known as a manufacturer of copies, duplicates, and rewrites. Only an Argentine could dream of making unoriginality original.
Therein lies my theory of Menardismo: the capacity to be inventive in a landscape where most of what is considered authentic comes from abroad. The history of the Spanish-speaking world is the history of its lack of originality. As Cervantes’s novel was published, the empire went into a period of political, economic, and cultural decline from which it is finally emerging. Science had come from the outside and wasn’t a native by-product. In contrast, the arts have been an essential, ongoing feature of Latin American cultures. And those arts are derivative in nature. Menard gives Latin American artists permission to copy others with such savvy that the results are original.
The number of Menardistas in Latin America, particularly in the literary realm, is substantial. From the “Boom” writers of the 1960s (Julio Cortázar, García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others) to the McOndo generation of the 1990s and beyond (Jorge Volpi, Andrés Neuman, Juan Villoro, and so on), the desire to reuse foreign genres and themes in order to reinterpret, to revamp them, runs deep.
For instance, the iconography used by the Catholic Church in the New World mixes aboriginal elements of pre-Columbian religions. Likewise, the socialist revolutions in Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, and other countries in the region show the way a political theory is infused with autochthonous elements to create an original fusion. The examples are truly endless. Think of the way chocolate was first cultivated in the Americas, and then repackaged in Europe, only to be once again reinvented as a culinary delicacy in Mexico. Or the canción de protesta, the ballads that emerged as part of the Cuban Revolution, which are seen as adaptations of the chants of the French troubadour and other foreign forms into the local reality. The drive to be original in unoriginality, the instinct not to be constrained by the psychological role of the subaltern, is in the air people breathe, in the way they bow to imperial powers.
The historical impact of Quijotismo and Menardismo has taken forking paths. Whereas the former, a reaction to Spain’s collective depression after the Spanish-American War, pushed the country and its satellites into a soul-searching process that resulted in an unrealistic view of its standing as a post-imperial power in the modern world, the latter was a liberating force allowing people to turn the colonial mentality on its head.
7
SHAKESPEARE’S QUIXOTE
Did Cervantes know of Shakespeare’s work? How about the other way around: did Shakespeare read El Quijote?
For years it was believed that Shakespeare and Cervantes died the exact same day: April 23, 1616. But this is inaccurate because Spain was already living under the Gregorian calendar at the beginning of the seventeenth century, whereas England still followed the Old Style Julian calendar. This means that Cervantes died a day before Shakespeare.
Cervantes was Shakespeare’s elder by seven years. His imagination is centrifugal, moving away from its center, wandering around a topic, whereas the Bard’s is centripetal, contracting rather than expanding, pulling itself toward a gravitational core. The novelist was a soldier before he became a writer. He left Spain for Italy and, on his way back, was taken prisoner in Algiers. In contrast, the playwright went from his hometown Stratford-on-Avon to London, only one hundred miles away. He never ventured farther than that, in spite of the fact that several of his plays are set in other domains, including Italy (Two Gentlemen of Verona [between 1589 and 1592], Romeo and Juliet [1597], The Merchant of Venice [1605], and, in part, Taming of the Shrew [1593] and Coriolanus [between 1605 and 1608], among others), Denmark (Hamlet [between 1599 and 1602]), and a Caribbean island (The Tempest [1611]).
Shakespeare included a number of Spanish characters in his plays. Cervantes’s interest in England appears to be minimal, although he sets the plot of one of the Exemplary Novellas, called La española, or La española inglesa, in Elizabeth I’s England. Despite their differences, there exists a peculiar link between the two authors, what might be seen not as a debt of one to the other but as a borrowing of sorts.
In one of the episodes in the First Part of El Quijote, the knight-errant and his squire come across a disheveled character called Cardenio in the Sierra Morena. Sometime later, they listen to a priest relate the story of two characters, Cardenio and Lucinda, to a group assembled in the inn of Juan Palomeque. In the story, Cardenio, in a state of depression, living half
-naked behind trees, describes his love for Lucinda and how he asked her father for her hand in marriage. But before her father even answered, Cardenio postponed the arrangement, having been asked by Duke Ricardo for his services. Soon a third character is introduced in the story, the conniving Don Fernando, who is the son of Duke Ricardo. Cardenio tells how Don Fernando, who read Cardenio’s love letters and other writings to Lucinda, took advantage of him by usurping Lucinda in marriage. The story continues beyond the inn as Sancho and other characters in El Quijote find Cardenio again in the Sierra Morena. He describes how Lucinda secretly told him she wasn’t ready to marry Don Fernando, yet he heard her say, “I do,” in the ceremony, which pushed him to despair.
Cervantes adapted the story from an episode in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. As mentioned previously, paying tribute to one’s predecessors by reworking their plots was not uncommon during the Renaissance. Over the centuries, criticism has been made that the episode has little to do with the rest of the narrative in El Quijote: Cardenio, Lucinda, and Don Fernando don’t show up anywhere else in the novel. For some, this intrusion is a sign of Cervantes’s laziness (he probably had the novella written down already) and carelessness (he didn’t make any effort to integrate it into the whole). But others praise it as a tale within a tale in the tradition of The Arabian Nights.
Interestingly, Shakespeare collaborated with English dramatist John Fletcher (1579–1625) on at least two plays, Henry VIII (published in 1623) and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Fletcher authored about fifteen plays of his own and collaborated on others with several contemporaries. One of those collaborations was called The History of Cardenio. It was staged in the Royal Palace in 1613. The script was lost, however, and no one seemed to have known what the play was about.
Then in 1994, Charles Hamilton, a handwriting expert who specialized in lost manuscripts, suggested that the play had been retitled The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, which survives in manuscript form and whose authorship has been attributed to various Jacobean playwrights such as Thomas Goffe, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and—yes!—William Shakespeare. While using characters with names different from those in the Cardenio story of El Quijote (Lucinda becomes Lady, Fernando becomes Tyrant, and so on), the plot of the five-act play, according to Hamilton, is basically the same. He attributed it to Shakespeare, basing his thesis on a comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s style.