Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” by Jorge Luis Borges, is a short story that utilizes intertextuality and parody to explore themes of the Relationship Between Reader and Author, Visible Versus Hidden Work, and Finding Meaning in Literature. Borges’s writing is typically philosophical in nature, and frequently engages with the recurrent motifs of dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, archives, and the concept of infinity. Originally published in Spanish in the Argentine literary journal Sur, the story is written in the form of a piece of literary criticism about Pierre Menard, a fictional French writer who attempts to thoroughly immerse himself in the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes with the goal of recreating the novel, word for word, in the original 17th-century Spanish. This guide references the translation of this story by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions, a 1998 book that anthologized Borges’s most-studied stories.

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” employs the first-person point of view of an unnamed literary critic who is analyzing the works of Pierre Menard, a fictional early 20th-century writer. The critic opens this fictionalized essay with his reasons for composing it—the essay is framed as a correction to an incomplete and incorrect catalog of Menard’s works, written by Mme. Henri Bachelier. The critic then follows this by listing his own endorsements by various elite figures.

To complete his stated goal, the critic lists “the visible product of Menard’s pen” (Paragraph 3) to complete the full catalog of Menard’s body of work. This catalog consists of 19 distinct items, among them: a monograph on the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; an article on chess; a translation of a treatise by Spanish chess player and priest Ruy Lopez de Segura; incomplete drafts of a monograph on English mathematician George Boole; and a transposition of a number of French poems. In addition, the critic includes a footnote to this section, which enumerates a couple of the ways that Mme. Henri Bachelier erroneously added works to Menard’s catalog that didn’t actually exist.

Following this extensive and erudite list, the critic writes that he will now turn his attention to the unfinished works of Pierre Menard. In the world of this story, Pierre Menard is an established and respected author, and the critic contends that his unfinished works are “the most significant writing of our time” (Paragraph 23). The critic states that two different texts inspired the fictional essay: a minor work by German polymath Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, also known as Novalis, and a book about a famous historical figure transported to modern times.

The critic then dives into the main topic of his essay, which is an analysis of a work by Pierre Menard about the 1605 novel Don Quixote by Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes. The critic asserts that, while many scholars claim that Menard wanted to compose a different version of Don Quixote, in actuality he wanted to compose Don Quixote itself—not a copy of the original work, but an independent production which “coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (Paragraph 26). The critic reveals that he has been in contact with Pierre Menard, who sent him a letter stating his intention that his independently written Don Quixote should stand on its own, without the existence of previous drafts.

Following this, the critic explains Menard’s method for independently recreating Don Quixote. First, Menard planned to become Miguel de Cervantes by following the writer’s path in life. Menard figured he had to learn Spanish, convert to Catholicism, fight against the Moors and the Turks, and try to “forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918” (Paragraph 27). However, Menard ended up discarding this idea because to become a 17^th-century novelist living in the 20^th century would only diminish the work. Rather, Menard decided that the more interesting project would be to produce an accurate recreation of Don Quixote through his own experiences.

Despite the fact that Menard’s Don Quixote was never finished, the critic states that he often reads the original work as if Menard had conceived of it first. He also provides a description as to why Menard chose to recreate Don Quixote in the first place. He quotes Menard at length, who explains that he believes that some works are inevitable—as in, the world would not exist in the same way without them—and that some are contingent, which means that they do not inevitably rise in the society that created them. Menard goes on to explain that his choice to recreate Don Quixote was because his memories of the work were vague, and that by recreating the book word for word, he is undertaking a more difficult and momentous task than that of Cervantes.

The critic states that even though Menard’s work is unfinished, he finds his version of Don Quixote to be more subtle than Cervantes’s, despite the identical nature of the two texts. This subtlety arises from the context of the two works; Cervantes “crudely juxtaposes the humble provincial reality of his country against the fantasies of romance,” while Menard’s choice to set the work in Spain during the 16^th century while avoiding the exaggerated “local color” typical of such works allows him to reinvent the genre of historical fiction (Paragraph 31). The critic enumerates other ways in which the context of Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote makes it a more interesting piece of literature than Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; for instance, certain scenes which, by Cervantes, contained flat declarations of opinions, instead become ironic when written by Pierre Menard.

The critic quotes two passages, one each from Menard’s and Cervantes’s versions of Don Quixote. Despite the fact that the passages are word for word identical, he states that Menard’s passage is superior due to the societal context in which it was produced. Styles are also compared, with Cervantes’s writing style deemed superior due to its accurate portrayal of the Spanish of his time (Menard’s Spanish, on the other hand, is deemed artificial).

The critic then moves on to interpreting why Menard might have wanted to write Don Quixote. The critic suggests that because all works of literature lose relevance with the passing of time, Menard undertook this futile, impossible task to “anticipate the vanity that awaits all labors of mankind” (Paragraph 40). The critic quotes Menard, who explained to him that all people are capable of coming up with all ideas, and that this project was an attempt to prove this concept.

The critic ends his essay by discussing how Menard has changed how people read with his attempt at recreating Don Quixote from scratch, by reading any historical text as if it was produced in a later historical period. The critic contends that this method of reading can restore the interest of a reader who otherwise would not engage with these works.