50: By Pierre Menard
For its 50th iteration, “A Sharp Knife Is Safer” has its first guest author. Poet, translator, and logician Pierre Menard has only a passing familiarity with my original text, but over the course of several months he has rewritten it in his own voice.
Here, for reference, is my original:
In the summer between high school and college, I sold kitchen knives from a catalog. I couldn’t convince people to buy much, but I did convince myself these were the best knives at any price. I did get my mom to order a jackknife for my dad’s birthday. It came in the mail; the package was in the car as my mom drove me to the airport for a church missions trip. In the passenger seat I opened up the knife to demonstrate the safety mechanism, and in the attempt I sliced open my palm. Next summer I sold donuts from behind a counter.
I think by now we’ve all reached semantic satiation for that tired little story. So I’m honored and excited to give you Menard’s fresh take:
By Pierre Menard
In the summer between high school and college, I sold kitchen knives from a catalog. I couldn’t convince people to buy much, but I did convince myself these were the best knives at any price. I did get my mom to order a jackknife for my dad’s birthday. It came in the mail; the package was in the car as my mom drove me to the airport for a church missions trip. In the passenger seat I opened up the knife to demonstrate the safety mechanism, and in the attempt I sliced open my palm. Next summer I sold donuts from behind a counter.
Without changing a word, Menard has provocatively, even shockingly reinterpreted the text. So let’s unpack it a little.
At first, Menard tells me, he planned to write his version by recreating my own state of mind and letting thought flow to keyboard as I had. But given the autobiographical nature of the piece, Menard would first need to live the same experiences: to sell knives, reliably fail to attract a buyer, then cut himself on a jackknife bought by his mother for his father. To prepare for the final sentence, he would need to spend a summer working at a Dunkin’, Tim Hortons, or local bakery.
While Menard was ready for the commitment, other career obligations left time for only one run-through, and he feared his natural charisma would guarantee at least a few sales, including a full kitchen block set to his parents. Also he has a sugar allergy.
So Menard moved to plan B: to rewrite my story as a work of fiction, entirely from scratch, slogging through however many revisions until he arrived at the same work as my own, word for word.
Now, to head off the obvious criticism I’ll get in the NYRB and r/truecutlery, this was not an act of transcription. Menard, like most readers, demonstrated only a passing memory of my story, mundane as it is. His piece is an original creation with an original, superior meaning.
Take, for example, the first sentence of my “Knife”:
In the summer between high school and college, I sold kitchen knives from a catalog.
A dull statement of fact. It could be a line in a Wikipedia entry. Who, beyond my mother, could possibly care about my high school job?
Contrast with Menard’s opening line:
In the summer between high school and college, I sold kitchen knives from a catalog.
He invents a protagonist ex nihilo and immediately drops us in that peron’s point of view. (Note how this fictional character could be man or woman, whereas my “I” could only be myself.)
Now see the second line of my piece:
I couldn’t convince people to buy much, but I did convince myself these were the best knives at any price.
A cute self-deprecation, but nothing special. Anyone can mock their own teenage vanities. But consider this line from Menard:
I couldn’t convince people to buy much, but I did convince myself these were the best knives at any price.
What does this young salesperson look like? Where are they from? Such details, Menard tells us with his silence, are unimportant. By taking us instead into the mind of the protagonist, Menard not only turns our hero into an antihero, but challenges the reader to imagine themselves in the action too: don’t we all vainly value our own metaphorical kitchen knives?
Reaching not just in but out, Menard’s version subtly alludes to Willy Loman, Glengarry Glenn Ross, and Macbeth, while my little memoir stays stuck inside my own head.
The difference is most stark in the climax. Where I have—
In the passenger seat I opened up the knife to demonstrate the safety mechanism, and in the attempt I sliced open my palm.
—a clumsy recap of a personal crisis, one of those embarrassingly banal moments only retold “because it happened to me,” Menard has—
In the passenger seat I opened up the knife to demonstrate the safety mechanism, and in the attempt I sliced open my palm.
—a clever irony, maybe too tidy for realism, but still a powerful symbol of folly. Chekhov’s gun. King Saul’s sword. Count Dooku’s lightsaber. Unlike the original, Menard’s text is bursting with archetypal significance, during moments of calm and of sudden, visceral action.
It is illuminating to note that Menard is a French symbolist working in the early 20th century, which renders his facility with the English language all the more impressive, and makes his anticipation of “[driving] to the airport” breathtakingly prescient.
In every word, Menard has written a richer, more layered text than mine, demonstrating an empathy for the other, a gentle irony mixed with that empathy, and an impossible facility with language. Whereas I have written a diary entry.
It’s my greatest honor to have been the prosaic inspiration for Menard’s masterpiece, and I apologize that next week, you’ll have me back as your author.