{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2035",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2035,
    "subject": "Readerly/writerly and Pierre Menard",
    "messages": 2,
    "voices": 2,
    "first": "1999-12-16T08:15:49+00:00",
    "last": "1999-12-16T19:47:21+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0633@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Straight",
        "address": "straight at email.unc.edu"
      },
      "date": "1999-12-16T08:15:49+00:00",
      "subject": "RE: (urth) Readerly/writerly and Pierre Menard",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Jim Henley wrote:\nThis came up before. But this seems a good place to adduce Borges' \"Pierre\nMenard.\" The narrator of that story claims that Menard's rewrite of\nCervantes produces a radically new text. But Borges makes it pretty clear\nthat the narrator of that story is a jerk, and maybe a fool. So..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Interesting.  What makes you read it that way rather than as Borges\nhimself narrating with his tongue firmly in his cheek? \n\n_The Imitation of Christ_ by James Joyce is still on my must-read-someday\nlist."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "Just because we can't  quantifiably have a 'correct' reading, it\ndoesn't necessarily  follow that we can't distinguish between 'good'\nand 'bad' readings."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "This is superb! I don't suppose you could manage to appear at the sacred\nwindows of every high school english class in the land, could you? It would\neliminate a host of sorrows."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I agree too, but would add that it makes sense only within a community of\nreaders that has decided on some criteria for 'good' and 'bad'.  Crowley's\n_Little, Big_ is almost certainly not intended as Christian allegory, but\nif Jim Jordan enjoyed reading it that way, I wouldn't insist that his\nreading was 'bad,' particulary if he wasn't arguing that his was the only\n'right' way to read it.\n\n-Rostrum"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0635@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jim Henley",
        "address": "jlhenley at erols.com"
      },
      "date": "1999-12-16T19:47:21+00:00",
      "subject": "RE: (urth) Readerly/writerly and Pierre Menard",
      "in_reply_to": "<urth-v0028-0633@digest.urth.net>",
      "reply_link": "subject",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "-----Original Message-----\nFrom: urth-errors at lists.best.com [mailto:urth-errors at lists.best.com]On\nBehalf Of Michael Straight\n\nOn Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Jim Henley wrote:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "This came up before. But this seems a good place to adduce\nBorges' \"Pierre\nMenard.\" The narrator of that story claims that Menard's rewrite of\nCervantes produces a radically new text. But Borges makes it\npretty clear\nthat the narrator of that story is a jerk, and maybe a fool. So..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Interesting.  What makes you read it that way rather than as Borges\nhimself narrating with his tongue firmly in his cheek?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "A fair question. Since I'm feeling under the weather I want to take the\nlazy man's way out and give the briefest of quotes followed by an appeal to\nextra-textual authority. In a sense, I will be relying on a theory of\nauthor construction akin to Foucault's, but like I said, I'm going to bed\nearly.\n\nIn the first paragraph, the narrator damns a newspaper that has published\nan account of Menard's oeuvre because its \"Protestant leanings are surely\nno secret.\" What's more, he sniffs that its readers are \"few and Calvinist\n(if not Masonic and circumcised).\" IOW, the narrator is a catholic\nreactionary. Borges hated his country's catholic reactionaries (for their\nanglophobia not least). More importantly, the narrator is an antisemite\n(\"Masonic and circumcised\"). And there's nothing Borges hated more than\nantisemitism.\n\nSo I can't see that the narrator is (WARNING: PROBLEMATIC WORD COMING!)\nintended as a version of Borges himself, or even someone the reader is\nsupposed to like much. And Borges' philosemitism and anti-antisemitism were\nso deep that I can't but see the passage as a rather large clue that we are\nnot to take the narrator's opinion on anything at face value.\n\nI suspect I could make a fuller case with more time and energy. In general,\nI think that Borges indeed \"invented postmodernism,\" but he did it as a\nwarning, not a prophecy.\n\nBest,\n\n\nJim\n *****************************************\n\"It ain't the knife thru your heart that tears you apart\n  it's just the thought of someone sticking it in\"\n              -- Graham Parker, \"Protection\""
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}