Pierre Menard, author of the Lord of the Rings by Jorge Luis Borges
Any insinuation that Menard dedicated his life to the writing of a contemporary Lord of the Rings is a calumny of his illustrious memory. He did not want to compose another Lord of the Rings - which is easy - but the Lord of the Rings 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 J.R.R. Tolkien.
The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know English well, teach at Oxford, fight briefly in the war, forget the history of the world between 1974 and the present, be J.R.R. Tolkien. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know he attained a fairly accurate command of early twentieth-century English) but discarded it as too easy. Rather as impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twenty-first century, a popular novelist of the twentieth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Tolkien and reach the Lord of the Rings seemed less arduous to him - and, consequently, less interesting - than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Lord of the Rings through the experiences of Pierre Menard.
“The Lord of the Rings,” Menard explains, "interests me profoundly, but it does not seem to me to have been - how shall I say this - inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without the interjection of Edgar Allan Poe, “Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!” or without the Ancient Mariner, but I know that I am capable of imagining it without the Lord of the Rings. (I speak, naturally, of my personal capacity, not of the historical repercussions of the works.) The Lord of the Rings is an accidental trilogy; the Lord of the Rings is unnecessary. I can premeditate writing, I can write it, without incurring a tautology.
My problems are undeniably considerably more difficult than those which Tolkien faced. My affable precursor did not refuse the collaboration of fate; he went along composing his work a little a la diable, swept along by inertias of language and invention. I have contracted the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work.
To compose the Lord of the Rings in the midst of the twentieth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that fifty years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings - among them, to mention only one, that same Lord of the Rings."
In spite of these obstacles, the fragmentary Lord of the Rings of Menard is more subtle than that of Tolkien. The latter indulges in a rather coarse opposition between good and evil in the imaginary land of Middle Earth; Menard chooses as “reality” the land of America during the century of Bush and the “War against Terror”.
Equally vivid is the contrast in styles. The archaic style of Menard - in the last analysis, a foreigner - suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary English and extraordinary Elvish of his time.
There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless. A philosophical doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a noun - in the history of philosophy. In literature this ultimate decay is even more notorious. “The Lord of the Rings,” Menard once told me, “was above all an agreeable book; now it is an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, and obscene deluxe editions. Glory is an incomprehension, and perhaps the worst.”
