A new author

My honors class this semester (alas, the last one...where has the time gone?) is dedicated to Twentieth Century culture. Going into it, I was - in my infinite, college-senior wisdom - thoroughly skeptical, resigning myself to a thankless five months of trudging through existential nihilism and general godlessness. While I can't say I personally enjoyed much of Kafka or Joyce, I'm glad for the experience, because I've been taught to at least appreciate them from an academic/artistic standpoint.

And then, after successfully finishing The Metamorphosis, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a generally-good attitude, I was rewarded by being introduced to Borges. He has been a pleasure to read.

Borges is enigmatic but precise, metaliterary (shamelessly stealing words learned in class) but playful, and has the ability to create a whole world within the space of a few pages. His sense of humor is the most sophisticated I have yet encountered....getting the joke feels like an accomplishment. 

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is my favorite piece thus far: Borges creates an imaginary author from the turn-of-the-century who sets out to recreate Cervantes' Don Quixote verbatim - without ever looking at the original. Poking fun at the ivory tower of literary criticism, Borges throws in a lot of nerdy humor, adopting the tone of an infatuated critic as he describes the "differences" between the two versions of the Quixote. This passage, besides being hilarious, reminds me of C.S. Lewis's critique of the "chronological snobbery" of modern academia. New=better:

Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)

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 counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a 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 astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases - exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor - are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid.

(Labyrinths, "Pierre Menard...", pp. 42-43)

After the heaviness of Kafka and the egotism of Joyce, Borges's lighthearted-yet poignant reflections on the literary life have been a breath of fresh air.

I admit defeat. The Twentieth Century wasn't all bad.