Borges Code-Reading Notes: Don Quixote

Well (expressing hesitation, etc.) ... the topic has not been missed. The object of this reading note is "Don Quixote" rather than "Don Quixote". I mean, it is the author of Borges' short story Pierre Maynard, not Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.

Although I have just finished reading Don Quixote, I feel that this book has a strong flavor of the times: as a pioneering work of modern novels, its value is unquestionable, but just because it is a pioneering work, almost all its artistic advantages, such as the vivid portrayal of the two protagonists and the skills of story unfolding, have been greatly inherited and developed by future generations in the next few hundred years. In other words, you can learn it without reading this book. Its creative contents, such as satirizing knight novels, describing Spanish folk customs at the beginning of17th century and promoting the humanistic spirit after the Renaissance, are of course important, but of little significance to modern readers-this is a treasure book of literary researchers, but it is probably just an ordinary joke book for ordinary readers.

Of course, I must read this book, because it creates a Don Quixote that will never be out of date (or conversely, it has been out of date since its birth, but it is because of this obsolescence that it is immortal), and because if I don't read it, I probably won't be able to understand the next Don Quixote.

As I said in my previous notes, when I first read Don Quixote, I had no idea what it was saying. A person copied Don Quixote, and then the "I" in the text read a different meaning from the original? After reading Don Quixote, I seem to have some feelings: Is it because Don Quixote is a work with a strong imprint of the times that Borges thought of reading it from another angle to remove its imprint?

This attitude is almost exposed in the last paragraph of the novel:

Maynard (perhaps unintentionally) enriched the basic art of serious reading through a new technique-deliberately confusing the era and the ownership of works.

It is what Borges wants to express in this article by linking an existing novel with a new author and a new background of the times and reading different connotations from it. ...

Really?

When I searched online for comments related to this article, I found a piece of news: Pablo Cachaxiang, a writer, did an interesting thing-he copied the original text of Borges' Alef, added his own words and wrote an article "Fat"

However, Borges' widow sued him for plagiarism.

Even in China, where intellectual property protection rules are extremely imperfect, it is undoubtedly illegal to copy the original text, but this time, many Argentine writers choose to defend this "plagiarist" because he "copied" Borges who "supported" this practice. They think that Kaqiaxiang's creation is a creative literary experiment.

Seeing the news, I laughed. At that time, I had an idea that Borges was shooting himself in the foot.

But after laughing, I thought: Is this really the case?

If Borges really just wanted to express this idea, why didn't he just copy Don Quixote, but created an article Don Quixote?

With this question, I opened the book at hand again.

I saw the beginning of this collection of short stories, and the author gave a brief introduction to every novel in the collection. The introduction to Don Quixote was written like this:

The fictional composition of Pierre Meinard, the author of Don Quixote, is determined by the fate of his protagonist. A list of my works attributed to him is not very interesting, but it is not groundless. This is a chart of his spiritual journey. ...

At this point, we can at least draw a conclusion: the last paragraph of the novel is by no means what the author wants to express, at least the attitude here has nothing to do with his "list of works"

Then let's take a look at the list of works at the beginning of the article.

The list is very long, and they are all fictional works similar to Don Quixote. We can't find such works to speculate on the author's psychology, in other words, we can only look at the title. But even so, for a person without a good education in literature and philosophy, a lot of names he doesn't know at all are enough to make him confused.

Faced with this string of gobbledygook-like words, I used a common trick in cryptography: counting the times the same words appeared-I almost wanted to give myself a high five when I thought of this method. This method is really suitable for authors who are good at building mazes with novels.

The statistical results are as follows:

"Poetry" 5 times;

"Leibniz" 3 times;

"Symbolize" twice;

"Chess" twice;

"Carl Valeri" twice.

The image of "poem" is easy to explain. Borges himself is a poet, but it is also the most difficult to explain, because poetry can cover everything, and it is difficult for us to find the hidden password of the author.

Leibniz is a mathematician and philosopher. I think everyone is familiar with his name, but may not be familiar with his achievements. Just mention two things. The first is the establishment of calculus (almost at the same time as Newton), and the second is philosophical monism.

In fact, "symbol" will not appear more than twice, because paolo valeri later mentioned the representative poets of symbolism and others admired by edgar allan poe, Malamei and Pierre Maynard. In fact, Borges is also an expert.

"chess" ... well, with all due respect, I can't find the connection between this picture and this article. I just listed it to prove that I did this statistical work.

As mentioned above, Paolo valeri is a symbolic poet, and his most famous work is Graveyard by the Sea mentioned in this article. There is a sentence in this poem, "The wind is blowing, so we should try our best to live", which was rewritten into a novel by Mr. Miyazaki Hayao and made into an animated film "The Wind is Blowing".

In addition, there is an item about Achilles and the tortoise in the list, which seems to have been mentioned only once, but it is not: Achilles and the tortoise are famous paradoxes put forward by the ancient Greek philosopher Zhi Nuo, which confuse infinity and infinity. After the birth of the basic concept in the calculus system established by Leibniz, the concept of limit was broken. At the same time, in The Graveyard by the Sea written by Valerie, Zhi Nuo's famous paradoxes "The Arrow Does Not Move" and "Achilles and the Tortoise" are also mentioned.

According to the above statistics, we should be able to roughly understand Pierre Maynard's mental journey, and then look at his creation.

First of all, it should be pointed out that Don Quixote is not a copy of the full text of Don Quixote. In fact, it only contains "the fragments of Chapter 9, Chapter 38 and Chapter 22 of Part I". Pierre Meinard's ambition is to write a chapter that coincides with Cervantes word for word. He rejected the method of "becoming Cervantes" because it is too simple to create a character and create in his capacity.

(Interestingly, we can clearly see that Borges, the real author of this article, used the method of shaping a character and creating in his capacity. Although Pierre Maynard did not create a Cervantes, Borges created a Pierre Maynard. )

Next, the "I" in the article shows us Maynard's works, Chapter 38, Don Quixote's Strange Talks on the Wuwen Line and Chapter 9, and makes different comments on the premise that Cervantes and Pierre Maynard are the authors respectively. Obviously, this is in line with the last paragraph of the novel.

But are we forgetting something?

Looking back, the content of Don Quixote is-

Chapter 9, 38 and 22 of Part One.

Yes, we didn't find this "fragment of Chapter 22" in the first place.

I can't help but think of Albert's hint about accuracy in A Garden with Branched Paths: "The answer is what is the only word that is not allowed in a chess riddle?"

I excitedly opened the twenty-second chapter of Don Quixote, looking for the mystery left by this talented maze architect.

This chapter is about Don Quixote's release of a group of prisoners. If you read this chapter, you must remember the prisoner who was tied with the most chains and the most dirt. He claimed to be writing an autobiography and said this:

My life is not over yet. How can I?

The moment I saw this sentence, I knew that this was the answer I wanted.

Why can you come to such a conclusion? Let's take a look at the keywords recorded in the last article:

"Poetry" 5 times-"Beach Cemetery" is a poem;

"Leibniz" three times-established calculus and solved the problem between Achilles and tortoise;

"Symbol" twice-The Beach Cemetery is a symbolic poem;

"Chess" twice-well, if this is to correspond to Albert's hint (set a riddle, the answer is "chess"), is it too far-fetched (but since Borges can hide the answer in another book, it is no problem to hide the hint in his other works), maybe there is an answer in this word that I have not found;

"paul valery" twice-the author of "Seaside Cemetery";

Achilles and the Turtle —— Linking Leibniz and the seaside cemetery.

Let's take a look at this poem, and all the clues clearly lead us to see it (symbolic poems are always difficult to understand, and my opinion is just a family statement):

In the poem, Yan Fei is the pursuer of "the arrow will kill me when it reaches", while the soul "bears multiple tortoise shadows" and Achilles "does not move, although he uses Scud"; In the next few paragraphs, the poet expressed his feelings of forging ahead with passionate style, urging Achilles and himself to "get up!" Invest in a sustainable future! "In this way, he described the positive attitude of" trying to live "even if people will die.

Combined with this sentence, "I haven't finished my life yet, how can I finish it?" Don't you see the strong desire in Don Quixote?

If this can't be proved, I have another proof, that is, the author mentioned in the introduction of this article at the beginning of the short collection that the fictional composition of this article is determined by the fate of the protagonist.

This sentence seems very confusing. If I hadn't dug here, I probably wouldn't have understood what he meant.

What does "The Fate of Heroes" mean? The article begins by saying that Pierre Maynard is dead. What is his fate?

Yes, his fate is death.

In other words, his life is over.

In other words, according to the answer to this riddle (my life is not over yet, how can it be over), it means that he is "finished".

This is the source of the fictional elements in this paper.

Am I a little evasive? Some people are getting confused?

As mentioned above, Borges used the method that Maynard thought was "too simple", that is, to create a character and create in his capacity. But in any case, the characters in the author's works are manipulated by the author himself, especially when the author expresses his attitude in this way. It can be said that this character is the projection of the author himself at this time.

Imagine if Maynard hadn't died, everything he did would have continued. So, what's the difference between him and Borges, the real author of this article?

It is because of his "death" that he "finished writing" that he broke away from the author Borges and became a fictional character written by others, which determined the "fictional composition" of this novel.

On the other hand, Borges, who was separated from the dead Maynard, is real. He is not dead, so he hasn't finished writing yet. He will live as passionately and hard as paul valery and continue to write until the day he dies.

The answer to this riddle-like novel is exactly what the author wants to shout out, expressing his love for life, creation and endless attitude.

I haven't finished my life. How can I finish it?