Don Quixote, Author of Pierre Menard

Don Quixote, Author of Pierre Menard
by Silas Flannery
From La Repubblica / August 31, 1981

Don Quixote did not start out a writer. He was born a sportsman, or as Gorgeous J. Bliser recently put it, a sap. He grew up fond of aerobics and rabbit hunting, voluptuous women and poundcake. — A love affair with the purple satin binding of a George Sand novel changed everything. At the age of two hundred thirty-five, Quixote became Spain’s premiere collector of antique books. The rest, like Quixote's passion for ballroom dancing and Mozart, like his art deco parties and opulent furnishings — every shit on that golden toilet reported, every orgasm in the buffalo hide sheets a subject of tea time speculation — like his unfortunate encounter with the elephant that cost him his life, and yes, like the posthumous publication of Pierre Menard which I have set out to review, is self-evident; is history.

Pierre Menard is structured much like Quixote's earliest works: the Siamese twin protagonist, the dormant revolution, the Russian doll fugues are all in place. The fiction aficionado will be reminded of January Foxes, one of Quixote's more obscure environmental novels composed entirely of lippograms. The vast majority of readers who have come to know Quixote more for his literary prowess than his technical finesse will be inclined to fumble through his Rockefeller Trilogy, An Ontology for Book Arrangement in particular.

Menard is essentially a moral drama in which the values of Quixote's community of characters are laid out on the table like an elaborate Tarot deck, only so the keen reader may in due time observe that the cards are double-sided and the characters two-faced. I could briefly enumerate the plot, but it seems drastically beside the point. Quixote's novels have never been about plot. For a story you'll fare better reading one of the many biographies on the bibliomaniac himself, or even by skimming through Quixote's Resurrecting George Sand: A Phenomenological Pursuit, a project commissioned by the Royal Academy of Science that took no less than ten years and five hundred fold that many pages to complete.

With the recent passing of our friend Quixote, questions have been raised as to the loyalty of Sancho Panza: beloved friend, shrewd bookseller, and prestigious subject of the dedicatory remarks which preface Pierre Menard. Some, most notably a bitter Bliser, suspect that Panza sold books to the bibliomaniac for money. I am of the persuasion that Panza, for all his greater inadequacies, contemptuously admired the hobby of his friend. "Centuries chasing windmills and now he’s settled down to read books and break wind," the bookseller was once fond of remarking. It is my hope that in time dissenters will come to admire the monumental task of acquiring, on a daily basis, stacks of Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert, piles of Hugo, Nodier and Sainte-Beuve, shelves of Vigny, Duras and Solie; all reserved and set aside for the bibliomaniac Quixote.

How could Don Quixote afford his hobby? Few know. Then again, no one knows how he managed to outlive his children, his children’s children, his great-grandchildren, and so on down the line for sixteen generations either. An obscure millenary movement to which I'm sure some of you belong assumes Don Quixote to be a ghost. Visiting archaeologists in Madrid have concluded that Don Quixote is a figment of the Spanish imagination, something stewed up in the cultural cooking pot for ages, such that occasionally a bubble here or there rises to the surface and evaporates in the rich air of a warm afternoon. But not a single one of you – not even the archaeologists – can explain his appearances during the night!

I'm sure you're familiar to greater and lesser degrees with the urban legend that's been circulating of late. The myth of Don Quixote's ghost is told with some variation, but Conto Avalili does a fair job in Italiatta, his latest collection of folklore:

In the twilight hours, all the bibliophiles of Spain gather on their respective porches to admire the night sky, dreaming of expensive books and cheaper women. Palmart’s first printing of Edicts and Ordinances for Valencia, Granger’s Biographical History of England, letters from the Earl of Chesterfield to his son are in the stars. As it grows dark, the Vincentes and Patxots of the world dawn their nightcaps and retire, each bringing his personal stake in the fate of the cosmos safely to bed.

But the sleeping bibliophile never dreams – at least not of books. Behind the curtains, beneath a stack of periodicals, in the folds of the bed sheets, Don Quixote lies in wait, anxious to sniff out the dozing bibliophile’s Deepest Secrets and Darkest Desires. Tomorrow’s auction tips, the name of a locksmith who designed the mistress’s boudoir, the address of a summer chateau that hasn’t been used in years are in the stars.

In the evening and night hours, Don Quixote rouses a national literature from its slumber, stealing the twinkle from each participant’s eye. One by one.

Reading Pierre Menard reminds the reader that the novel, like folklore, and like Quixote himself, is temporal. In common parlance, for every act there exists a proper time and proper place. What I find so remarkable about Quixote is his mastery not of that concept, but of the consequent details. The minutia, brimming with errata and misnomer, will enthrall even the timid philanderer. To quote Bliser once more, the task for Quixote is to ensure that, by the end of the narrative, the poet has lost his bowels. This final piece of fiction is typical only in Quixote's rarefying accomplishment of that end. Some will resist such a tantalizing portrait (for glory or stupidity's sake we'll never know), but others will come to know and cherish Pierre Menard, perhaps even characterizing it as the penultimate Quixote novel of our time. The conversion will be slow in coming, but that it will happen is no less certain. Menard will earn your adulation. One by one.

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