Attempt 3478, June 9, 2071
7 April, 2009
Dear Sir,
It was with great sadness that I read last Thursday of the death of Terence Fuller, perhaps best known, certainly if the obituaries are anything to judge by, for his award-winning and mediocre television plays. His most interesting published work was no doubt the vulgar novella Scalpel, but even more interesting to his admirers, and the great cause of unhappiness for him, his family, and his friends in the last decade of his life, was a work that cannot be published under his name in most countries until the year 2056.
I was not close to Terence in the last years of his life, but it was I that during a lull in conversation one evening in 1997 introduced him to Jorge Luis Borges’s story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. I think that, on account of some unclear telling on my part, for some time he had the curious notion that it had been a true story, and by the time anyone disabused him of this (if they ever truly did), he was too deeply obsessed for the correction to have any curative effect. For the benefit of any of your readers that have not read Borges' tale: he writes of a Frenchman, the M. Menard of the title, who learns 17th century Castilian, and so immerses himself in Cervantes’s literary works and context that he eventually recreates, exact to the word, a chapter from Don Quixote that he had held back from himself.
Terence’s obsession was based on the following, incessantly self-posed, question: if it was an achievement to recreate exactly some small part of Cervantes’s masterpiece, how much greater an achievement to recreate the whole of the story that tells of that very re-creation? Perhaps your readers may think, as no few people said to his face, that this is a nonsensical idea, that even if M. Menard never existed, Borges had quite made his point without the bloodied ego and wasted time, not to mention the divorce, and nobody needed to make it again. I beg leave to show how much this is not the case, and of how much greater intensity is the ‘Fuller text’.
Here is a short extract from the Borges original:
It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):
…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 counselor.
This catalog of attributes written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, 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 counselor.
History, the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.
Borges, writing in the thirties, is merely taking on an assumed air of impartiality, to get across his point, a perhaps trivial one, that the reader’s knowledge of the author colours their reading. It is a question in search of a story. Terence wrote the same passage as follows:
It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):
…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 counselor.
This catalog of attributes written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, 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 counselor.
History, the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.
My God, what a difference! He is not writing for the sake of an idea, he is living the idea and in that living, he is writing it. A reader can no more separate Terence’s question from his writing than his friends could separate it from his daily existence. In working towards true, blind emulation, he found greater authenticity than any other author in history. Borges thought that Menard though that history is the very fount of reality, but Terence knew it, because Terence was bringing about the same confluence of history that Menard was attempting.
I will not belabour the point, as no doubt I have given you too much to edit already. I will trust to you, and to your readers, to keep Terence Fuller’s name alive with all the admiration and derision that should accompany it.
Yours &c.,
A. H――
B――, Sussex