Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation by Silvia G. Dapía

Author:Silvia G. Dapía
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

MENARD’S CONTEXT OF PRODUCTION: JULIEN BENDA VS. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

In his brilliant study on Borges, Out of Context, Daniel Balderston provides us with decisive insights into Menard’s context of production, which certainly helps us understand the process of “transfiguration” that, according to Danto, turns two otherwise identical texts into two discernibly different works. Based on Menard’s first publications, which date from the late 1890s, and on his gravitation in symbolist circles, Balderston conjectures that Menard was born in the 1860s or 1870s. Thus, among Menard’s contemporaries, Balderston mentions Julien Benda and Paul Valéry, with whom Menard seems to have been in contact, as well as Maurice Barrès, Romain Rolland, Marcel Schwob, Paul Claudel, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Léon Blum, Charles Péguy, Colette, and Henri Barbusse (18). Menard is thus a member of the generation that witnessed Boulanger’s attempt to overthrow the Republic, the rapid growth of the Socialist Party and of nationalism, the Panama scandal, the infamous Dreyfus Affair—the Jewish army officer falsely accused of spying on behalf of Germany20—and venomous anti-Semitism.21 He also experienced “la Grande Guerre” (World War I) that literally destroyed an entire generation, and he was living through a period of capitalist economic contraction that would eventually lead to the Great Depression and World War II.

It is interesting to note here the reaction of French aristocratic salons to Jews as a consequence of anti-Semitism, particularly during the Dreyfus Affair and the consolidation of the generalized prejudice that all Jews were traitors. Marcel Proust, who, like Bernard Lazare,22 Anatole France, Georges Clemenceau, and Emile Zola, was part of the movement of intellectuals who supported Dreyfus, described those high society Parisian salons in his Remembrance of Things Past. To our surprise, he mentions the presence of Jews in those aristocratic Parisian salons. Does this mean that the aristocracy revised its prejudice against them? It does not seem so. They still believed that Jews were “traitors,” but they admitted Jews in their salons to combat their boredom—the worst disease of the nineteenth century’s aristocracy (Arendt 80).

Borges places his story against this background or, more precisely, against a parody of this background. Hostility to Jews, Free Masons, and Protestants is certainly suggested in his story, particularly by the narrator. Thus, through the narrator, we learn that the obituary of our unfortunate hero appeared only in the newspaper of his adversary—a Protestant newspaper that also has Jewish and Masonic readers. Yet the list of works attributed to Menard in this “enemy” newspaper is plagued with mistakes. Thus, when stating his intention to rectify the errors made in the published list of Menard’s works, the narrator does not miss the opportunity to express his contempt for the “deplorable readers” of that newspaper, who, he adds, are few and “Calvinist (if not Masonic and circumcised)” (Collected 88). In addition to anti-Semitic, anti-Protestant, and anti-Masonic sentiments, the narrator also shows aristocratic leanings. The narrator seems to feel comfortable with nobility circles such as that of the Baroness de Bacourt or the salon of the Countess de Bagnoregio.

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