Learning My Sense of Humor
Reading Pierre Menard
This is one of those “I had to tell you that so that I could tell you this” moments.
I think it’s time to explain a critical moment in the development of my sense of humor. I have often been asked, “why are you like this?” and it is because of this: the short story “Pierre Menard” by Jorge Luis Borges.
The story of “Pierre Menard” is about a fictional author named Pierre Menard. What story is Menard writing? You might have heard of it at some point. It’s a book called Don Quixote. Yes, that’s right. The same book that 100 well-known authors rated as the best book of all time (which, whatever), the same book written by Servantes, is the book that Menard is writing.
And, already, we’re at the main point. This story is a massive “what if” in the most bookish, goofy, nerdy way possible.
Pierre Menard is shown trying to “re-write” Don Quixote as his own masterpiece. This is not done in a copyright infringement kind of way but more of like how musicians can cover other musicians songs and still have it be “their” work. Consider this basic premise: does re-transcribing a book make it your story? Generally, no. And that’s the humor.
Menard is even observed suffering in the same sense of a modern author, burning failed drafts in his project (failed drafts of copying a story!). The narrator even praises Menard for getting it right.
Check it out:
“It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
‘…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s councilor.’
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand writes:
‘…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s councilor.’
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding.”
I love this so much.
It has given me a full extra sense of experiencing the world. There is the world in which things are the way they appear, and then there is the world of “what if” that fully reconsiders things differently in their similarities (also when things happen, etc., etc.).
You now know me better than before.
More soon,
Trevor