Dearth of the Author
As Alonso Quijano el Bueno has so singularly written, though Pierre Menard has said it better (or would have, had he finished his magnum opus):
"You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are flowing in upon you."I take this from el Bueno's translation of Fragment 12: Arius Didyne dans Eustèbe, Préparation évangélique, XV, 20, 2.
Pierre Mourier has glossed el Bueno to mean:
"Strictly speaking, no event is repeatable in all respects, nor is a repeated segment of the text quite the same, since its new location puts it in a different context which necessarily changes its meaning."Mourier's statement can be found on page 57 of his Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), which is a new edition of Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London & New York: Routledge, 1983), where the gloss appears on pages 56-57!
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 4:29 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Are you playing with my head?
Just being a pain in the brain and baffling everybody, I reckon.
Probably not everybody...
Jeffery Hodges
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I get the Pierre Menard part (I've read my Borges) and I get that Pierre Mourier is fictional . . . are citations of Mourier starting to appear in the real world, a la those objects from Tlon (forget what they're called) in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"?
Rimmon-Kenan, the true author of Narrative Fiction, cites Borges's essay on Pierre Menard in the sentence that follows the one that I attribute to Pierre Mourier.
As for Alonso Quijano el Bueno, that's the 'true' name of the fictional Don Quixote.
Heraclitus gets dragged in because, for one thing, Rimmon-Kenan cites him on page 44 of her Narrative Fiction but more so because of the similarity in meaning of the two statements quoted in my post.
I guess that you could blame it all upon Rimmon-Kenan -- or, more properly, upon me.
Jeffery Hodges
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