Borges and His Philosophy of Reading

February 22, 2007

The short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges offers a philosophy of reading. The story concerns the fictional Pierre Menard, a writer who was supposedly active in the first years of the 20th century. His grand project, as Borges explains it, was to re-write Don Quixote word for word.

That makes for an interesting thought experiment.. If you were to attempt to re-write word for word, say, a letter by Thomas Jefferson, what would you do? The obvious answer would be to cram oneself full of 17th and 18th century life.. to take up residence near Monticello and to read only the books that Jefferson read.. and in the same order. Your mind would start to move in ways that resembled those of Thomas Jefferson. Another more complicated method would be to find a way to re-write that letter as yourself—a man or woman living in the 21st century. Your work would consist of his words expressed in an ironic and archaic manner so that they express you thoughts.

That is the thought experiment.. and the story of Pierre Menard should be read not as a program, but a hypothesis. The imaginative strength of such a hypothesis is clear when the narrator remarks:

Shall I confess that I often imagine that he did complete it, and that I read the Quixote—the entire Quixote—as if Menard had conceived it? A few nights ago, as I was leafing through Chapter XXVI (never attempted by Menard), I recognized our friend's style, could almost hear his voice... [92]

Pierre Menard did not get very far on his re-write of Don Quixote, but just the idea of this project allows a reader to perceive something different in Don Quixote. It is as if you were handed the letters of Thomas Jefferson and told to read them as if Thomas Pynchon was the author.. or perhaps a Mormon. With that (false) knowledge, new things would surely leap out at you from the text. It would not be going too far to say that the experience of reading those letters would be made new.

This is exactly what Borges is applauding.. the radical re-reading of texts. We do not really need any cumbersome mechanism—like imagining the work of Pierre Menard. Simply by picking up a book a couple of centuries after its completion necessitates a new reading. The text will no longer be the letters of Thomas Jefferson, but the letters of Thomas Jefferson as read by somebody in America in 2007 with such and such intellectual commitments. The narrator of this story recounts some of the stages of Don Quixote:

The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene de luxe editions. [94]

Every book goes through this succession.. and each new reading torches the reading that it is replacing (which I think is the point being made by "The Circular Ruins").

This website is founded on the idea that historical readings of texts are possible.. and valuable. The old roads of other cultures and philosophies offer a way to escape some of the narrowness of our homogenized historical moment. In this sense we are not ready to buy into this gnostic philosophy of reading offered by Borges. We are also fascinated with the ways that texts get read and re-read as they make their way through history. Those creative new readings are just the sort of thing to excite the historian of the imagination. But there is nothing of the historian in Borges.. certainly not as he comes across in his Fictions. He would clearly prefer to live in the eternal present of the imagining mind.