In the world of art, there's hardly a stickier issue than that of appropriation, that is, artists incorporating preexisting works into their creations with minimal change from the original.
Nearly everybody will acknowledge Andy Warhol's silkscreens count as his own art, for example, Andy's Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, but where do we draw the line?
What if, as in this Borges tale, a man living in Bayonne, New Jersey in the 1930s by the name of Pierre Menard writes out Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote word for word and claims he's the author of the novel? My response: Good luck finding a publisher, Pierre!
This Borges tale also touches on the ways in which we approach books and read books. Let me share three examples -
Stephen Powelson of Amherst, Massachusetts memorized all of Homer’s Iliad in the ancient Greek. It took Powelson sixteen years to accomplish this astonishing feat.
Peter G. Beidler, professor emeritus at Lehigh University, is one of the foremost scholars of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. I recall meeting with Beidler in his office where all the books on his floor-to-ceiling bookcase (over 800 books) covered one subject: Geoffrey Chaucer.
Martin Levin wrote book reviews for The New York Times from 1958 to 1985. Levin usually reviewed three or four books a week. Estimates of the total number of books Levin reviewed during that 27 year period run from anywhere between 3,000 and 4,000. However you count, that's a lot of books!
As a dedicated book reviewer myself, I'm more like Martin Levin than Powelson or Beidler. My speed isn't nearly as fast as Levin's but I review a good amount of books during any given year.
Of course, I could review less and concentrate on one book, rereading and studying it carefully over months or maybe years. But I doubt if I could stick with it for more than a month or so - I lack that scholar/specialist temperament. My preference is diversity, reading many books by many authors spanning an entire range of types, genres and subjects. A clear benefit of reading many books - I can write about each one, something I especially enjoy.
Back on the Borges tale. The narrator tells us, "He (Pierre Menard) did not want to compose another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line - with those of Miguel de Cervantes."
What are we to make of Pierre Menard's intention?
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