Taming Ideas as a Thoughtful and Independent Reader
Having books and time to read is the intellectual equivalent of a stable full of robust horses capable of any journey at any pace. However, once one has set down her book, can she extract the author’s true intent and the book’s substance? Can she maintain her independent thoughts and opinions of the material? This is a balancing act of fidelity and independence on the part of the reader. If the reader fails to properly extract meaning and form her own opinion, she either wrongly ascribes her own view to the author or the author’s view to herself. Having misapplied her own faculties without sensitivity and autonomy, she is like the owner of a stable who is incapable of riding horses. We live in the age of relativity, where ideas are like wild mustangs: beautiful and majestic, but dangerous to handle when roaming in the wild. They must be bridled through comprehension and tamed through application.
Argentine author and literary genius Jorgé Luis Borgés demonstrates his master equestrian status over literature in his book Ficciones. Borgés specialises in life’s hidden absurdities with humorous precision, casting the bright light of truth upon them. Ficciones is a composition of fictional book reviews about books that never existed. Tongue firmly embedded in cheek, Borgés says:
“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.”
Reading self help or business books gives one this feeling. The theses of most could be summarized with a 1,500-word article, let alone a 400-page book. Complex literature or philosophy on the other hand? Could Anna Karenina have been compressed into a “perfect oral exposition in a few minutes?” This would take a thinker of at least equal prowess and literary dexterity with Lev Tolstoy himself.
Satire can be one of the most useful tools in compressing a dense message into an economy of words. It involves hyperbolizing the message as it careens to its ultimate logical conclusion. Humor is often its main vehicle of transport because it compresses one’s observation of the ambiguous and the absurd. When done well, it is done with depth of insight and brevity of message.
Borgés’ writing strikes his reader’s mind like a lightning bolt. As soon as you part the covers to begin reading, you are already savoring insights and ideas.
Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
One such startling idea that Borgés imposed upon my weak little 21st century brain is that art is not intended for private interpretation. In other words, authors write because they have something to say. Painters paint because they have something to show you. To willfully extract a meaning other than the author’s is to hijack the work itself and rewrite it. Any philosopher can make this claim – Plato’s dualistic construct basically leads one to this precept. It is, however, the lightening bolt of Borgés’ style that causes you to feel the imprint of this view without realizing it.
In his “review” of Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote, Borgés cuts through the joint and marrow of the idea before you begin reading it. In case “Pierre Menard” is unfamiliar, it is because he is a made-up character. The true author of Quixote is Miguel de Cervantes. The reader of this is immediately immersed in a fictional narrator’s eulogy of his friend, Pierre Menard, and without realizing it, you are already in the middle of an inside joke between Borgés and his readership.
The fictional narrator shares his incensed view that the memory of his diseased friend, Pierre Menard, in a “fallacious catalogue” of works in a newspaper authored by the fictional Madame Henri Bachelier omits certain great works of Menard, namely his authorship of Don Quixote. The reader, of course, already knows that Quixote was originally written by Miguel de Cervantes, and Borgés assumes this.
So how could Menard be attributed authorship of this work? Borgés reveals that Menard has re-written the work word for word and assumes attribution for this version of Cervantes’ work. With every drop of ink, the irony bleeds from Borgés’ pen. Below are some of my favorite quotes as examples of his concise ability to make his point:
“His admirable ambition was to produce pages that would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”
Borgés uses this rhetorical concept to paint for us an ironic picture of the idealistic (or perhaps Nihilistic) worldview and theory of art: reality (absolute truth) is a human construct and therefore no event, piece of art, or experience is tied to another. Idealism, then, asserts that none of Cervantes’ inspiration was rooted in absolute truth. If there is no absolute truth tying me to a 17th century Spanish author, my reading of his work is completely independent from his writing it. By reading the work and thinking I get anything out of it, I climb to the roof, but I kick away the ladder by cutting the fabric of reality that unites me to Cervantes.
“Like any man of good taste, Menard detested these useless carnivals, only suitable – he used to say – for evoking plebian delight in anachronism, or (what is worse) charming us with the primary idea that all epochs are the same, or that they are different.”
“These carnivals” are stories where characters are taken out of their original epoch and placed into another, such as putting “Don Quixote on Wall Street.” The narrator believes this tool is a cheap comedic method for pointing out the absurd similarities or differences between two epochs. An idealist can observe neither similarities nor differences between epochs because the very notion of adapting Cervantes to “today” would be a fallacy in an idealistic world. There is no fabric of truth uniting two events, so to delight in the absurdity of Quixote walking down Wall Street would be ridiculous. In a random universe where anything can happen and correlation is a mirage created by the human desire for meaning, why would it be ludicrous for Quixote to live in Red Hook, sip matcha lattes, and pick up women at a nightclub? At the same time, why would it be any more possible than anything else?
“The initial method [Menard] conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to re-embrace the Catholic faith, to fight against Moors and Turks, to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know that he arrived at a rather faithful handling of seventeenth-century Spanish) but rejected it as too easy.”
These are common methods used by investigative journalists, method actors, and authors whose works we praise as being “well researched.” The main satirical point is in forming his own meaning from the text, Menard throws away the very life experiences and personal identity that went into Cervantes’ text. The 17th century Spaniard had direct knowledge of the Kingdom of Maynila and the Eighty Years War (two historical events referenced in detail in Don Quixote) that Menard could not have had by himself. A 17th century Spanish-Catholic religious background would be quite a stretch for a 20th century, presumably protestant, Britton. The very events and life truths that influenced Cervantes could never had made their way from Menard’s mind to his pen, which is what makes this a brilliant illustration in the absurdity of a relative interpretation of literature.
Bridling Mustangs
To read is to adopt a mindset that truth must be mined. It must be harvested. It takes work. The work is in understanding the author’s background, motives, and perspectives. Then, it is about extracting the intended meaning from the text and humbly submitting yourself to it. From there, you must determine whether you want to live under its rule or build a tower to defend yourself against it. Shane Parrish’s Reading Guide is a great place to start.
Personally, I print out articles so I can take handwritten notes. I also write in the margins of all my books. I jot down ideas later to make sure I can logically restate them (you will find that you think you understand ideas before going to write them, where you quickly find yourself empty handed). I have a folder system where printed articles that are worth saving, re-reading, and savoring are stored. The rest are tossed in the recycle bin.
These are all tactics of dubious value. Perhaps the most important part, however, is your mindset toward truth. Borgés point serves as more than a cautionary tale against improper exegesis of literary text. It is a proverb to the thinker who abolishes absolute truth in favor of relativism. Absolute truth is our only objective means of de-privileging ideas against other ideas. In my article, Today’s Person of Faith: The Nihilist, I quote Edward Docx:
“If we de-privilege all positions, we can assert no position, we cannot therefore participate in society or the collective and so, in effect, an aggressive postmodernism becomes, in the real world, indistinguishable from an odd species of inert conservatism.”
Once in exile, absolute truth is unable to tame the wild horses all around us, and we are trampled underfoot. All are authors of Don Quixote, and at once, none are.
