‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’

‘Pierre Menard’ was written in 1939 as Borges was recovering from the head wound and subsequent septicaemia resulting from his accedent on Christmas Eve. Borges himself contributed to the mythology behind the story in his ‘Autobiographical Essay’. Fearing for his intellectual powers, and not daring to try to write a book review, he decided to write ‘something I had never really done before’ (Aut 243): a story. Thus the Borges-story writer was born, reborn from the near death experience. Of course, Borges had already written stories, and a rather similar exercise four years previously in ‘Al-Mu’tasim’. It is also seen by critics as the inspiration for a whole new critical understanding of intertextuality. Lafon shows how it inspired Genette, his ‘Utopies Littéraires’ and Palimpsestes, the Nouvelle Critique, and his own Borges ou la réécriture. It is (rightly) seen as a predecessor of Barthes's notion of the ‘death of the author’, and North American equivalents. In ‘The Approach’, Borges pretends to write a review and summary of a novel which he is in fact simultaneously inventing and writing himself. In ‘Pierre Menard’ an internal French narrator tells of his friend Pierre Menard who had somehow rewritten verbatim, not copied, two chapters and part of a chapter of a real novel written some three hundred and twenty years previously: Cervantes's Don Quijote.

It may be useful to start with the final paragraph of the story, which clearly explains the mechanism behind its writing: deliberate anachronisms and erroneous attributions. Borges attributes the Quijote to an early twentieth-century Frenchman, and imagines what it might mean coming from his pen and mind.