Vote for the Winner of the SU Rant Contest

[All-American]

Send my $1 prize, in yoHIO's name (John R. Bastard) to:

Cathy Coyer, Treasurer
attn: Southern Ohio Pigeon Association
4003 Whitestone Ct.
Dayton OH 45416

or


Ohio Donkey 4-H group
3500 Utica Rd
Lebanon OH 45036


Your choice, AA.

Oh, come on! You've got to give a speech!

Speech! Speech! SPEECH! SPEECH!!

[wuapinmon]

Oh, come on! You've got to give a speech!

Speech! Speech! SPEECH! SPEECH!!

I will not indulge in the fallacy of authorial intention that T.S. Eliot criticized when he said, “the poet has not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (42). Neither will this investigation engage in what W.K. Wimsatt termed the Affective Fallacy because I will not concern myself with a view of literature based on its putative emotional effects on the reader. Rather, my interest lies in the imaginative producer role taken on by the receiver of a text (38-9).

In the late 1960s in his Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, Hans Robert Jauss said the following:

Literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject, but also through the consuming subject--through the interaction of author and public. (15)

He argued that neither process was independent from one another and that the “historical essence of the work of art lies not only in its representational or expressive function but also in its influence” on the (reading) public (15).
In order to properly delineate the argument on which I base my reading, I must first reckon with Roland Barthes’s landmark essay, “The Death of the Author.” In his text, Barthes attacks the Classic focus of the “writer as the only person in literature,” claiming that “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). Barthes saw the language of a text as a fabric of quotations drawn from “innumerable cultures of centre” rather than from one individual (the Author’s) experience (146). He further argued that a text’s unity lies in its destination rather than its origin (148). The essential meaning of a text, then, according to Barthes, would depend on the impressions of the reader rather than the intentions, biography, or psychology of its author. Michel Foucault seems to agree with Barthes when he writes that the role of the author will eventually disappear and the “one who spoke” will no longer seem as important as the answers to these questions:

What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?... And behind all these questions, we would hardly hear anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? (138)

After reading the essays by Barthes and Foucault it follows that an individual could easily be convinced of the separation of the historical author from his or her text. They would argue that this is because our perceptions of the author might unduly influence our reading of it as belonging to that author instead of allowing the reader to arrive at his or her own understanding of the symbols in work.

Mikhail Bakhtin closely associated God with the author. He argued that the silencing of the authoritative discourse of God Himself in modern literature is echoed in the prose fiction author’s tendency to hide his or her own voice in their creations (Coates 23-24). He believed that the modern age had “no room for the direct word” and viewed irony as having entered “all the languages of the modern times” and as a “special kind of exchange for silence” (119). Yet, this silencing did not signify to him the death of God, nor of the author:

We find the author ... in every work of art ... but we never see him as we see the images he depicts. We feel him in everything as the pure representing origin (the representing subject), but not as the represented visible image.

(qtd. in Coates 124)

For Bakhtin, God would inhabit the same position for mankind. His existence is unprovable, unknowable, but whose “existence is nevertheless felt in the world, particularly in the human world, since man is His partial image” (124). God, like the author, would not be dead; his presence could be felt in the spaces between words.

Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, feels that the author may “very well be dead” but that “it is possible to argue that this position of discursive authority [the author] still lives on, because it is encoded into the enunciative act itself” (77). She cites Foe by Coetzee as an example when a narrator finds herself at the mercy of both Daniel Defoe and Coetzee himself. The novel’s dynamics makes Hutcheon worry that just like the narrator, “so too the receiver of any text could be seen to be at the mercy of an agent provocateur/manipulateur, the producer. This is the postmodern ironic and problematizing play of enunciation and context” (78).

In an effort to recuperate the author, Jorge García postulates that if a monkey were to type “FIRE!” on a typewriter there are several incompatible meanings that could be attached to the text (“shoot!,” “careful,” “bring water quickly”). He claims that “Context is essential for meaning and a typescript that lacks context must essentially lack meaning” because:
“…for entities to acquire meaning and become signs, and for signs to compose texts, they must be picked and endowed with meaning in certain arrangements at some point in history. Otherwise they are no more than the entities they are. Texts outside history are not texts. (179)

He adds that texts “need historical authors” because one without an author is without history “and texts without history are texts without meaning” (179-80). He concludes ultimately that the imposition of the Author’s Proper Name on a text and the limitations that that knowledge causes are “not necessarily bad and, consequently, neither are the limitations that the consideration of its author may impose” because they may add to our understanding of the text (184).

Alexander Nehemas sees the author and writer as two distinct entities and says that the writer owns the work as one might own property, meaning that the work can be taken from him--as when someone rewrites or translates a text. The author however “owns a work as one might own one’s actions. Their works are authentically their own” an idea that Gilles Deleuze credits to Nietzsche’s theory of the truthful man and the forger (Deleuze 134-38, Nehemas 113). According to Deleuze, the artist is neither of the two, but is “the creator of truth” because “truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New” (146-47). Owning one’s actions and one’s thoughts leads me to my final conclusion concerning the corollary between a God and his or her creations and an author and his or her created characters: The Gnostic Reader.

[wuapinmon]

Pierre Menard was a French scholar whose true talent was hidden by the complexity of the task he undertook. The impossible task commonly appears in many of Borges’s works; the task before Monsieur Menard easily falls into that description because Menard himself claimed that in order to accomplish his goal, “Me bastaría ser inmortal” (OC I 447). Immortal here signifies never-dying; given infinite time Menard could accomplish his desire. “Bastaría” carries the connotation that immortality would be sufficient, but I perceive there an inference that being omnipotent would be the easiest path to the Quijote.

The narrator explains that Menard did not wish simply to compose a contemporary Don Quijote, nor did he wish to rewrite the novel:

El método inicial que imaginó era relativamente sencillo. Conocer bien el español, recuperar la fe católica, guerrear contra los moros o contra el turco, olvidar la historia de Europa entre los años de 1602 y de 1918, ser Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard estudió ese procedimiento (sé que logró un manejo bastante fiel del español del siglo XVII) pero lo descartó por fácil. ¡Más bien por imposible!, dirá el lector. De acuerdo, pero la empresa era de antemano imposible y de todos los medios imposibles para llevarla a término, éste era el menos interesante. Ser en el siglo XX un novelista popular del siglo XVII le pareció una disminución. Ser, de alguna manera, Cervantes y llegar al Quijote le pareció menos arduo por consiguiente, menos interesante que seguir siendo Pierre Menard y llegar al Quijote, a través de las experiencias de Pierre Menard.

(OC I 447)

Obviously, his plan and goal seem impossible. There were no Turks for him to fight against, to lose the use of his hand against, no Barbary Pirates to kidnap him and hold him for ransom. He would have had to have recuperated his Catholic faith. And, the most prominent stumbling block in his path was his French birth. Not only did he not speak Spanish, he would have had to have learned to affect 17th Century Spanish and then strive to understand fully the politics and social life of the time period.

Menard is a likeably pathetic failure of a scholar; the lists of his other works enumerated in the story are a parody of esoteric scholarship. That someone so lacking in originality would attempt to produce perhaps the most famous novel in the Western World bespeaks Borges’s intent to profane the quasi-sacred nature of canonical literature, a recurrent theme in his works (as discussed in Chapter One). When the narrator suddenly recognizes the voice of Menard in a passage of what he thought was Cervantes’s Quijote, he is lending his own interpretation of the text to the process of production, as does every reader. Borges here attempts to show how canons can fall easily when the past is revisited with irony, to show how easily substandard scholarship can convincingly be defended in the name of artistic expression and effort.

According to René de Costa, when “Pierre Menard” was published in Sur, it was not listed as a story. You can almost still hear Borges and Bioy snickering to each other as they realized just how many readers took it seriously, one of whom even claimed to “know all about Menard” when speaking with Borges (49-52). If we analyze the story in the moment of its first publication in Sur, the line between fiction and non-fiction blurs. It would have been titled “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” and would have had “por Jorge Luis Borges” printed at the beginning of the “article.” It now would read more like an essay, and as such, we might not perceive the textual voice as belonging to a narrator, but to the named author: Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, the story never explicitly says that Borges is the one speaking. No identification is given. Nevertheless, the confusion caused in Sur’s readers when they assumed that the textual voice belonged to Borges (in spite of the somewhat petulant tone in the first part of the story) has been well documented by de Costa. If the reader assumes by the narrative style and information given by the narrator of the story that Menard existed, that Borges knew and corresponded with him, and that that is how the writing came about, then an existential dilemma could erupt once the reader becomes aware of the fictional nature of the story; this surely happened to some people when it was published in El jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan three years later. If both the narrator and Menard are fictions, then the reader too might be fictitious, just as Don Quijote had read his own story in the second half of the novel. As I previously quoted, Borges, in “Magias parciales Del Quijote” spells out, in no uncertain terms, the nature of this nightmare for the reader:

¿Por qué nos inquieta que Don Quijote sea lector del Quijote y Hamlet, espectador de Hamlet? Creo haber dado con la causa: tales inversiones sugieren que si los caracteres de una ficción pueden ser lectores o espectadores, podemos ser ficticios. En 1833, Carlyle observó que la historia universal es un infinito libro sagrado que todos los hombres escriben y leen y tratan de entender; y en el que también los escriben.

(OC II 47)

The doubt of skepticism invades the reader of “Pierre Menard” as he/she realizes that Borges is insinuating that all existence in literature, even that of the reader, depends on the effort of the producer, who may in turn be a reader.

Fragments of Menard’s version of the Quijote, when compared with the original Cervantes text, are indistinguishable by the words used, but the narrator claims that the Menard text is infinitely richer. He notes that Menard does not fall into the trap of local color (447). While Cervantes easily uses the Spanish of his day, Menard shows an amazing ability to work in 17th Century Spanish archaic style (448). The narrator finally questions whether Menard secretly succeeded in accomplishing his goal, because the other day he was reading the Quijote and a passage struck him as definitely being in Menard’s style. In trying to contextualize the postmodern, Hutcheon discusses how intertextuality and the process of reading lead readers to examine art, and thus life in a different way (77). When the narrator suddenly recognizes the voice of Menard in a passage of what he thought was Cervantes’s Quijote, he is lending his own interpretation of the text to the process of production. As Julian Barnes has said:

Life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours.

(166)

The same novel read at different times by an individual will never compare to the original (Lefkowitz 75). So, in the fictional text about Menard’s version of the novel, we already see Borges putting the concept of the individual’s reading into the plot of his story. As a reader of Menard’s text, the narrator is a receiver too, and Hutcheon cautions, “[…] the receiver of any text could be seen to be at the mercy of an agent provocateur/manipulator, the producer. This is the postmodern ironic and problematizing play of enunciation and context” (78). So too are Borges’s readers at the mercy of some unknown producer as they read his story, for the style is such that the fake book review could be perceived as real. And yet, the reader still somehow can exercise control over Menard, over the Quijote, and over even the narrator. The reader’s thinking process depends on the text as the initiator of the kernel of the idea, but once implanted the idea blossoms and grows (or oftentimes withers) into other ideas and a personalized mental text.

While the Modernist movement sought to transcend the present and history, Postmodernism sees history as a lesson able to teach something about the present. By doing so, it gives value to history, yet at the same time “it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge” (Hutcheon 89). Umberto Eco has said, “The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited, but with irony, not innocently” (“Postscript” 530). Irony must be present in a postmodern text, because to assume that any producer of history concerned themselves with the margins of history is naiveté. Only through irony can the lessons of the past make sense in a world free of innocence and anything “foreign.” Postmodern fiction explores the intertextual nature of history to develop and investigate the irony of the past in a new context because only through texts does mankind know anything about the past (Menard would assert that anything we claim to “know” is merely what we believed happened). By combining many voices (texts) into one whole, “It uses and abuses those intertextual echoes, inscribing their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony” (Hutcheon 118).

[JohnnyLingo]

At least you used paragraph breaks.

[Babs]

This is an outrage. I demand a congressional hearing.

[wuapinmon]

I miss this CUF.

[TripletDaddy]

I miss this CUF.

your fault.

[All-American]

I miss this CUF.

I've been busy.

[wuapinmon]

your fault.

Pathetic.

[YOhio]

Pathetic.

He is, isn't he? So pathetic.

[wuapinmon]

He is, isn't he? So pathetic.

He could have kept quiet if he didn't want to talk about it. He could've expressed a shared lament over what we've lost as we've grown. He chose to blame me.

[SeattleUte]

We need more women. Babs gone has been a blow.

[Donuthole]

We need more women. Babs gone has been a blow.

Pig.