In 1939, the hyper-influential Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges first published “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. A tongue-in-cheek parody of a literary analysis, this fiction discusses the works of an imaginary Frenchman who attempted to re-write Miguel de Cervantes’s classic 1605 novel Don Quixote, line by line, word for word, identical to the Spanish original. He initially wanted to become Cervantes himself, to “know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turks, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.” However, this approach Menard soon dismisses as simultaneously too easy and too impossible–but then, this project of rewriting the Don Quixote was always impossible, so he opts instead for the most impossible approach of all: to reproduce Don Quixote as though it were written by Pierre Menard, a 20th century Frenchman, himself.

The result, says Borges’s cheeky narrator, is that “Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes'”; he quotes for example from the original Quixote Part One, Chapter Nine, “. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.” In the hands of Cervantes, says the narrator, this line is a mere “rhetorical flourish,” whereas in Menard’s hands, it becomes a William Jamesian conception of history intriguingly re-categorized as not “an inquiry into reality but as its origin” and so forth.

This playful story is of especial interest to us here at Ships of Hagoth, as we also seek to go about “playfully reinterpreting anything we like through an unapologetically LDS lens” (which we have already done, by the way, with Pixar’s Soul, the Velvet Underground’s Heroin, Mark Z. Danielewski, Fugazi and Bomb the Music Industry!, Deleuze and Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, The Good Place, Catch-22, Futurama, and Catcher in the Rye, just for starters). Indeed, it is an approach that many of us in the Church have already taken just on our own: how often has William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” been cited by our own Gospel Doctrine manuals as an evidence for the pre-mortal existence? How many eager young LDS English majors have read John Milton’s Paradise Lost as anticipating the felix culpa of the second Article of Faith and Temple endowment ceremony? But our goal here is not to smile at this approach, not to chuckle good-naturedly at the folly of youth, but rather to lean into it, own it, to rev this engine and see what it can do. As Borges himself writes at the end of his fiction, “This technique [of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions], with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid […] This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure.”

Are we not also concerned with the infinite–particularly an infinity of inexhaustible combinations and applications spreading and seeping and unfolding across Eternity? What better place to prepare for Eternity than here? Are we not already in Eternity? Rather than fruitlessly argue how much of, say, the Book of Mormon is indebted to 19th century scriptural phraseology, how about we (just for fun) read 19th century scriptural phraseology as a direct response to the Book of Mormon–or to even read it as though it were a direct response to The Book of Mormon on Broadway? What new textures might we uncover, what new valences and resonances? What if we read Joyce’s labyrinthine Ulysses as not only a riff on Homer’s Odyssey, but on the Urim and Thummim? What if, when James Baldwin writes, “The Bible is not a simple or a simple-minded book, and it is not to be reduced to a cowardly system of self-serving pieties”, he was not only talking about the Bible but also the Restored works; how might we read our own scriptures differently? What if we read Borges himself as though he lectured at BYU (which he did, incidentally)? What if we really did take seriously the idea that Wordworth was intuiting the pre-mortal existence, even if only “through a glass darkly”? Might this also prove (in Borges’s words) “a sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions?”