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“Reach the Quixote
by Alissa Nielsen
Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
New Directions Publishing, 1964
Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet be a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.
-Jorge Luis Borges from “Partial Magic in the Quixote”
Jorge Luis Borges took a particular interest in time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality, philosophy, and identity. He was a writer who explored, within the confines of story, those whom he was influenced by (Dante, Cervantes, Kafka, Wells, Kipling, Schopenhauer) while simultaneously understanding that he too influenced readers. Borges writes about story within a story -- he turns the story inside out, examines from above and below, probing the real and surreal. What is so compelling, to me anyway, about Borges' writing is his relentless passion to put order to things, especially with the understanding of identity through character.
In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” Borges protagonist Menard wants to write Don Quixote, not by copying, but by becoming Cervantes. “The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk. Forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes” (40). Like in Don Quixote where the protagonist Alonso Quixano has read so many stories of chivalry that he descends into fantasy and becomes convinced he is a knight, so too does Menard (and Borges)embark on a new world of imaging himself as Cervantes.
In Borges essay “Partial Magic in the Quixote” he states, “Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality; Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective and the subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book” (194). In the story “The Circular Ruins” Borges plays with the objective and subjective worlds in a creepy Kafkaesque way. The protagonist's goal in this story is to dream a man into reality. Borges is very particular with description of his character, “He was a silent boy, sallow, sometimes obstinate, with sharp features which reproduced those of the dreamer” (47). Every night, when Borges' character goes to sleep, he dreams of body parts. “On the fourteenth night he touched the pulmonary artery with his finger and then the whole heart, inside out. The examination satisfied him”(48). In the end Borges' character does in fact create the boy from his dream into reality. But the terror soon sets in, “he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another” (50).
In the essay, “Borges and I” he explores his identity as author, as person and as character, though it is unclear which is the narrator. “The other one, the one called Borges is the one things happen to...I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature and this literature justifies me...Little by little I am giving everything over to him...I do not know which of us has written this page” (146-147). Borges tries to put order to his existence (as a human, as a writer, as a character) while also trying to create order to those who came before him and those who will come after him. “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conceptions of the past, as it will modify the future” (201).
In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” Menard continually uses the phrase “reach the Quixote.” But what does it mean to “Reach the Quixote”? I'm going to be bold here and try to actually answer this. First a writer must be driven passionately by influence (reading and then copying, plagiarizing, what have you), second she must genuinely become “character”(not like Menard or Alonso Quixano, who simply copy, but like how Borges' character of “The Circular Ruins”dreams his boy into reality) and third she must understand that “what is good belongs to no one, but rather to the language and the tradition”(246).
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