Menard Stands Alone

Borges and I have never agreed with each other. Same with Kafka. The puzzling thing is that I've loved other authors who either influenced them or were influenced by them (such as Macedonio Fernández, Georges Perec, and Ferenc Karinthy), and I came into Kafka and Borges wholly expecting to love them. I studied both in college too, but that still didn't help. (Actually, the best insight into Kafka I've ever gotten was from an anthology about the Iron Curtain called The Wall in My Head.) So when I heard that our Non-Structured Book Club was going to be doing an extracurricular Borges reading, I initially opted out and chose to simply read everyone's posts instead. But then I found myself intrigued by what was being said about "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," so I decided, why not? Maybe I should give Mr. Borges another chance.

"Menard" is written in the form of an article from an academic journal. The author/narrator was a friend of the late Pierre Menard, a French literary critic, and is utterly infatuated with what he perceives to be Menard's brilliant project involving Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Menard wanted to write it himself. Not copy it. He wanted to somehow channel Cervantes and compose the Quixote word for word. As Menard explained it:

When I was ten or twelve years old, I read it, perhaps in its entirety. Later, I have reread it closely certain chapters, those which I shall not attempt for the time being. I have also gone through all the interludes, the plays, the Galatea, the exemplary novels, the undoubtedly laborious tribulations of Persiles and Segismunda and the Viaje del Parnaso . . . My general recollection of the Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, can well equal the imprecise and prior image of a book not yet written. Once that image (which no one can legitimately deny me) is postulated, it is certain that my problem is a good bit more difficult that Cervantes' was. My obliging predecessor did not refuse the collaboration of change: he composed his immortal work somewhat à la diable, carried along by the inertias of language and invention. I have taken on the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work.

Menard rejects the idea of literally becoming Cervantes by forgetting all the history of Europe since 1602, fighting the Turks as Cervantes did, and so forth on the grounds that such a thing would be impossible. Of course, he acknowledges that the whole undertaking is impossible, but of all the ways of going about it, that would be the least interesting.

Borges's imaginary academic nevertheless believes that Menard's endeavor was quite successful, even perceiving his friend's signature style in certain passages of the Quixote which are completely identical to those of Cervantes. He claims to recognize the influence of Shakespeare and further praises Menard's mastery of a foreign language and alien dialect (Renaissance Spanish) compared to Cervantes's advantage of writing in his own native tongue. Why, it's astounding, he goes on, that Menard was able to ignore the work of William James and, like Cervantes, proclaim history to be the origin of reality instead of an inquiry into reality! In short, the narrator is arguing that Menard's word-for-word duplicate of the Quixote is richer, deeper, and a grander achievement than Cervantes's original.

As Emily notes in her post, Borges brings up a multitude of questions surrounding context, subjectivity, and perspective. Although the two texts are identical, the copy is held to be superior because its reader (the author of the article) was able to locate more meaning in it. In other words, he examined the copy as an artifact of the environment in which it was produced: the early twentieth century, presumably in France, as opposed to Spain in the late 1500s. Since the narrator views this Quixote as having arisen entirely in the mind of Menard, it's like a copy without an original.

It was then that the heavens opened, a light shined down, and Borges started to make sense.

I'm a big fan of Ghost in the Shell, a (post)cyberpunk Japanese franchise that began with the Ghost in the Shell manga by Masamune Shirow and has since expanded to include two manga sequels, three acclaimed anime films, and a popular anime television series. Like The Matrix, which it greatly influenced, GitS is deeply concerned with postmodern philosophy and social theory. The title of the TV show, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, refers to a concept developed over the first season. The "stand alone complex" is basically a "phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort." For example, say a building catches fire and burns down. While accidents like that happen all the time, depending on the greater context of the time and place in which said building was located, people can get it into their heads that the fire was the work of an arsonist motivated by whatever political or religious ideology is currently making news (i.e. Islamic terrorism). Several malcontents then get on the imaginary bandwagon and commit their own acts of arson in the name of Allah. A chain of spontaneous order is then created out of the chaos of society, politics, media, and random accidents. But the copycats have no original.

And then I realized I was doing the exact same thing as Borges's fictional academic! I was anachronistically analyzing an older text ("Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges) from the perspective of someone familiar with literary and philosophical ideas that would not be developed until decades after said text was written. "To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?" Menard's disciple asks. (I like Emily's translation better: ". . . a sufficient renewal of those faded spiritual warnings?") Just as Cervantes's position regarding the power of letters v. arms could not possibly have been influenced by Nietzsche (as Menard's completely identical passage is claimed to have been), Borges could not possibly have written "Pierre Menard" with any knowledge of Japanese cyberpunk anime.

And thus: the meaning of a text is ultimately subjective, as the reader's response always occurs within the context of the reader's knowledge and experience, which may be completely and utterly different, especially given the passage of time, from those of the author.

I get it! I like Borges now!

My Borges edition, incidentally, has an introduction by William Gibson, whose Neuromancer trilogy is widely regarded as the origin of the cyberpunk genre. I knew I was onto something.



It's the audio from the Matrix: Reloaded trailer with images from GitS: SAC, starring Togusa as Neo, Motoko Kusanagi as Trinity, and Daisuke Aramaki as Morpheus.

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The Non-Structured Book Club is reading three short pieces by Borges for the month of May. Our schedule is as follows:

May 7: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
May 14: "The Library of Babel"
May 21: "The South"

This week's participants were:

Claire
Emily
Nicole
Richard
Rise
Sarah

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Stray Sentences

Antwerp
By Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
78 pages
New Directions
April 30, 2010





All I can come up with are stray sentences, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences. Desolation must be something like that, said the hunchback. "All right, take him away" ...

Roberto Bolaño wrote Antwerp some twenty-five years ago during the Barcelona phase of his global wanderings (as fictionalized in The Savage Detectives). In the preface, he explains that he wrote Antwerp for himself as a collection of loose pages that he would play around with and reread from time to time. He finally decided to publish it in 2002, having previously felt that any publishing house would simply slam the door in his face.

At this stage in his life, Bolaño says he was still reading more poetry than prose. As such, Antwerp is best thought of as a series of loosely-connected prose poems. The setting is a dreamscape where odd little phrases and fleeting visions drift in and out of Barcelona's abandoned lots and empty houses. There are several references to a woman with no mouth or a whole corridor of them. Disembodied clapping is occasionally heard. Along with Bolaño's consistent use of the present tense, it is as though we are viewing either a slideshow or a disjointed film sequence.

"Reality is a drag." I suppose all the movies I've seen will be useless to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be useful, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies. Scenes of an empty commuter town, old newspapers blowing in the wind, dust crusted on benches and restaurants.

We glimpse a hunchback living in the woods, an ephemeral Englishman, fragments of the itinerant life, a campground, and a drug-dealing teen who fucks narcs. There's not much plot to speak of beyond several reappearing characters and references to a dead body and a detective looking for someone.

But there is still that sense that hidden forces are at work here, akin to what Bolaño would later expand upon in 2666. The gritty and violent sex scenes, the murder, allusions to homelessness and unemployment, and the looming presence of law enforcement clearly form a pattern, although what this means exactly is never developed. We are watching a drama unfold through a hazy screen and we're not quite sure what it is that we're seeing. Overall, Antwerp is an unusual, half-formed little book. Still, it has its appeal, especially to Bolaño fangirls like me who love his cryptic atmospheres. It is best read alongside The Savage Detectives and 2666, as the three works seem to compose a loose trilogy. According to Publisher's Weekly, Roberto Bolaño is apparently "doomed to have all of his scribblings published" (they didn't like this book) but that's just fine with me.

A big thanks to Frances for sending me this ARC as a surprise along with her extra copy of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo! I will be reading that next.

Love for Lovecraft

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. ~ from "The Dreams in the Witch House"

The Internet is notorious for causing vast amounts of time to go to waste. From LOLcats to Cracked.com to Oddee, legions of blogs and websites exist solely to capture the attention of the generation with a famously short attention span. Most of them, of course, are pure brain candy. But every once in a while you find something worthwhile, something that actually nourishes your mind while keeping it properly entertained.

Behold: the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft, courtesy of Project Gutenberg Australia.

Fizzy Thoughts was (un)lucky enough to score an interview with the Great Old One, the dread Cthulhu who waits dreaming in the horrible sunken city of R'lyeh. Apparently he's a pretty decent guy and Lovecraft ruined his reputation. But then again, that's what they tried to convince us about the Mi-go too, and then I found out they stole Professor Akeley's brain. In all fairness, however, I do think that Cthulhu, being concerned about his public image and all, should be informed of Bentley Little's shameless pilfering of his legend for that godawful piece of trash The Return. Or is the Mogollon Monster more of a Yog-Sothoth ripoff? Oh well, either way, I think Dean Koontz's copyright lawyer is an even more terrifying prospect.

So anyway, I've wasted ungodly amounts of time reading Lovecraft nonstop. Is it really obvious?

OMG, cute, cuddly Cthulhu toys! WANT!

One Epic to Rule Them All, Part Trois

'Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'

'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'


So much WIN! I love that part. There was a prophecy that the Witch-king of the Nazgûl ("Ringwraiths") could not be slain by any man. So he was killed by a woman and a hobbit (Merry). It is a true Crowning Moment of Awesome.

So anyway, here I am, almost a week late for the conclusion of the Lord of the Rings read-along, which began in January with The Hobbit and which I didn't even know about it until my initial post for The Fellowship of the Ring. My timing was pure coincidence. I hadn't planned on reading the other two books so soon but was encouraged to do so by the news that other bloggers were reading them too. I found that I loved The Two Towers even more and was equally wowed by The Return of the King. With the trilogy complete, I would like to extend my thanks to Theresa of Shelf Love for introducing me to the read-along.

The Return of the King continued with several of the themes established in the previous volumes: nostalgia, environmentalism, metafiction (an epic about epics), good v. evil, and dark v. light. I would like to talk about that last one.

My issue is not that Tolkien's entire cast is white - after all, LOTR was inspired by European mythology. It would be rather odd to open a novel about a world based on feudal Japan or ancient China and find that most of the characters are non-Asian. And I don't know the history of the dark-light dichotomy frequently used in Western discourses on good/evil, so I couldn't tell you if it's found in other cultures or if it predated extensive European contact with other peoples. But I feel compelled to discuss something that bothered me about LOTR, much as I otherwise enjoyed it.

As I noted briefly at the end of my last post on The Two Towers, Sauron's human allies are described as 'dark,' 'swarthy,' and 'black.' One, viewed up close by Sam in TTT, has 'black plaits of hair' and a 'brown hand.' According to Merry, the evil Men he and Pippin saw in the Ent's battle with Saruman were mostly 'dark-haired' and several even had 'goblin-faces, sallow, leering, squint-eyed.' Actually, he concludes, they resembled orcs. Now compare that to Faramir's glowing description of their allies the Rohirrim as 'tall men and women, valiant both alike, golden-haired, bright-eyed, and strong; they remind us of the youth of Men, as they were in the Elder days.' He goes on to explain that the Rohirrim may be related to one of the Three Houses of Men to which also belonged the legendary Númenóreans, who are also considered the High Men or Men of the West. In the middle are the Men of the Twilight, and on the bottom there are the Wild Men, or the Men of Darkness.

Orcs are also 'black.' In one of his letters, Tolkien further characterized orcs as ". . . squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." The "Racism in Tolkien's Works" article on the Tolkien Gateway website, while admitting the insensitivity of his words, tries to argue that Tolkien's disclaimer of "to Europeans" is an acknowledgment of his own cultural bias, while "degraded and repulsive versions" means that he is not referring to actual "Mongol-types." I'm not buying it. You can't take a blatantly racist statement and then try to explain it away by nitpicking certain phrases. The fact still remains that Tolkien sees his agents of evil as having physical characteristics associated in the real world with people of color, even referring explicitly to Asians (using a now-archaic term).

(Peter Jackson, meanwhile, made sure that the armor and symbols utilized by the human villains in the movies bore no resemblance to those of any real-life culture.)

Tolkien vehemently denied any racism and I don't think LOTR's racially problematic aspects were something he did on purpose, just as I don't think Stephenie Meyer intended for Twilight to be quite that sexist. Sometimes our prejudices and misguided beliefs just manifest themselves unconsciously. I personally was able to look beyond LOTR's trouble spots and enjoy the story, or maybe that's just white privilege talking? To this day, fantasy as a whole remains pretty whitewashed and the problem of "dark v. light" has not gone away. According to Tami, an African-American fan of contemporary urban fantasy, the speculative nature of the genre freely invites a re-imagination and restructuring of society, yet most authors simply end up reproducing the hierarchies and biases of the real world. She goes on:

. . . [T]he aforementioned series feint at subverting mainstream beauty standards--heroines may be ginger-haired, rather than blonde, short rather than statuesque, and much is made of their supposed physical "imperfections" (Rachel Morgan's curly hair and freckles, Merry Gentry's large breasts). But important female characters are generally white (or white identified in the case of Anita Blake), slim and young. And paragraphs are spent on the description and worship of their pale skin and its beauty. (The villains in Hamilton's Merry Gentry series delight at threatening to mar the heroine's pure, white skin.) Whiteness becomes fetish. Darkness is often equated with menace.

The Lord of the Rings, of course, is a tradition-bound tale set in a land based on medieval England and inspired by the legends of bygone eras. It is not, for example, True Blood, in which we are asked to imagine, based on real-life civil rights movements, what would happen if vampires were to "come out of the coffin." LOTR, like other works of high fantasy, can be thought of as an "old story." It recalls the grand myths of the past and relies on timeworn tropes such as the heroic journey, larger-than-life feats of strength and daring, fantastic creatures, and the threat of evil outsiders intruding and invading the homeland.

Beyond the environmental message (most old epics and romances such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depict nature as dangerous and untamed), LOTR is really not a modern book. Tolkien said very clearly that he did not intend for it to be allegorical. As such, while writing LOTR I don't think he ever had to consider the new issues of race, identity, representation, and feminism that were coming to the forefront of his own era. I am not saying that LOTR is innocent or naive or superficial. It is a powerful achievement that deals with the universal themes of friendship, loyalty, courage, death, and heroism. But it also looks back to a more "glorious" past, before, as Elrond put in Fellowship, 'in the wearing of the swift years of Middle-earth the line of Meneldil son of Anárion failed, and the Tree withered, and the blood of the Númenóreans became mingled with that of lesser men.' In short, LOTR really doesn't engage those new questions that arose in the twentieth century. Tolkien simply does not seem to have had any reason to challenge his own assumptions on race (and gender - female characters don't have much of a role, other than Éowyn, Galadriel, and maybe Shelob). And that shows in his books, unfortunately.

Did that make any sense? This whole thing is a complicated matter and I think a better-read Tolkien fan could probably quash me here. What's your opinion? Am I pulling stuff out of the air or am I making a good argument? Discuss!

Lastly, this month's host, Maree of just add books, had some mid-month questions for us. Of course I'm only just getting to them now:

If this is your first time reading LOTR, how are you finding it? Are you falling in love with Middle Earth?

Yes, this is my first time. I had long disdained the genre of fantasy, finding it silly and cliché-ridden. I mean, I like Gothic literature and God knows most of that borders on self-parody, but I never, ever saw myself willingly reading a book about elves, dwarves, wizards, and magic. But then came the LOTR movies, which I absolutely loved. It took me a couple of years, but I eventually decided to pick up The Fellowship of the Ring and see how compared to the film version (which I saw three times while it was still in theaters). Truly amazing. Of course, LOTR paved the way for Todd Newton's The Ninth Avatar, which I reviewed recently for Trapdoor Books. That was my second fantasy read.

How do you feel, when you close the end of the last part; after Sam's words on the last page? Are you sad it's over, nostalgic? Looking for your next read already?

Sam's words were perfect. 'Well, I'm back.' It was fitting that The Return of the King does not have a stereotypical fairy-tale ending. Certainly, everyone is quite happy, but as I noted in my post on The Two Towers, the trilogy as a whole has a very elegiac tone. There's a sense that something is ending and something unknown is beginning. The Elves are departing, the Ents mourn the loss of the Entwives, and there are recollections of an earlier, grander time. In fact, I think it was Sam who best represents the character of Middle-earth. He is a humble hobbit sent from his rustic home in the Shire into the great unknown on a dangerous and seemingly hopeless mission. He is a rural gardener forced to face down the legions of a Dark Lord. And yet, through it all, Sam accepts his responsibility out of friendship and loyalty to Frodo, keeping hope alive by musing about the great tale that will immortalize their deed. Sam, to me, represents innocence. Not in a childlike way, but as a kindly little hobbit who values the simple things in life and will fight to the end to see goodness, happiness, and love preserved for the coming generations. The ending of TROK is bittersweet. The good guys win, but Frodo is irrevocably damaged by his experiences and must leave with the Elves.

What's your favourite scene in ROTK?

Éowyn! (See above.)




Also, click here for some Arwen awesomeness that, sadly, was not in the book.

Update: I really hate to bring up Twilight again, but I just found this great two-part post covering similar issues in Stephenie Meyer's portrayal of vampires and werewolves. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

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Other LOTR read-along participants:

Beth Fish Reads
Clare
Maree
Theresa

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Wordless Wednesday

It's been quite some time since I've done a Wordless Wednesday. In preparation for my final LOTR post, which is almost a week late, here are some funny pictures! (The last one is by Mreaper on DeviantArt. It's a Deathwing from World of Warcraft.)

New Feature

I have seen the LinkedWithin widget on several other blogs (most notably chaotic compendiums and Womanist Musings) and thought it was a neat idea. It's always encouraged me to lengthen my visits by bringing up other related posts that I may also enjoy. Earlier today Caitlin was kind enough to advise me on how to install it. So here it is, TBICB's newest feature!

The website says that the recommendations will improve over the next few hours as their algorithm completes its crawl through my blog archives. For the time being, it's mostly displaying my Dewey Read-a-Thon posts and my two recent reviews for Ergo and The Ninth Avatar.

Let me know what you think!

Update: It's about 15 minutes later and already LinkedWithin has gotten better! But, good Lord, some of those old posts of mine are so embarrassing. . .

Also, I've removed the LibraryThing widget from my sidebar. LinkedWithin made it redundant and the last thing I want is a cluttered blog.

Teaser Tuesday

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
Page 71 - He was still disentangling himself from MB and perhaps had as yet no fresh offences to report. On the face of it, he was making a new new life, starting again.