Plot summary
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about Pierre Menard, a fictional eccentric 20th-century French writer and polymath. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of Menard's work.
Borges' "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation, and interpretation.
Argentine writer and critic Enrique Anderson Imbert includes in his book Reloj de arena (an anthology with works whose plots coincide with famous works published later) a story with content very similar to Pierre Menard. It was published sixteen years before Borges' story under the title Corputt, and its author is a Polish-American writer, Tupper Greenwald. The character in the story is a great admirer of Shakespeare, in particular King Lear . His dream is to write a drama as perfect as Lear. Close to death, he confesses to a colleague his ambition and adds that the night before he managed to finish the dream play. He takes out a manuscript from under his pillow and reads to his colleague the most important lines. The text he wrote and now reads coincides exactly with the text of King Lear.
Analysis
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a form of literary criticism, but through the medium of fantasy, irony, and humor. His narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-line identical to the original) to be much richer in allusion than Miguel de Cervantes' "original" work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602. Cervantes, the reviewer claims, "indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country". While Menard writes of the distant past ("the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope"), in Cervantes "there are neither bands of Gypsies, conquistadors... nor autos de fé ". In "The Library of Babel", Borges contemplates the opposite effect: impoverishment of a text through the means of its reproduction. In a pattern analogous to the infinite monkey theorem, all texts are reproduced in a vast library only because complete randomness eventually reproduces all possible combinations of letters.
Both stories deal with the difficulty of creating meaning or perhaps finding or determining meaning. In the case of Quixote, the meaning depends on reader-response and/or context of the work. In the case of "The Library of Babel", meaning is hard to find as any coherent works are rare. By implication the library contains all possible works. However, any work with apparent meaning is random and not the product of human action, and is therefore drained of meaning. In the case of Quixote, the human actions of writing and reading the work affect its meaning.
Borges wrote the story while recovering from a head injury. It was intended as a test to discover whether his creativity had survived the severe septicaemia that had set in after his head wound became infected. Following its completion, Borges was satisfied that his creativity remained and thus proceeded to write the rest of the stories that later made up the book El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. As so often in his writings, the story abounds in clever references and subtle jokes. His narrator/reviewer is an arch-Catholic who remarks of the readers of a rival journal that they are "few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised". According to Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, Menard is in part "a caricature of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry ... or Miguel de Unamuno and Enrique Larreta". [1]
Influence
In his foreword to P. G. Wodehouse's Sunset at Blandings , Douglas Adams recommended the story: "You should read Jorge Luis Borges's short story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote'. It’s only six pages long, and you'll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you." The foreword was reprinted in Adams's posthumously published collection of writings, The Salmon of Doubt .
In Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979) the character Silas Flannery tries to copy a "famous novel" to gain the energy from that text for his own writing, and finally he feels tempted to copy the entire novel Crime and Punishment . This technique was actually attempted by Hunter S. Thompson, who retyped the entirety of The Great Gatsby when he studied at Columbia University, prior to the writing of any of his major works.
John Hodgman claims to have made a "controversial shot-by-shot remake" of "Pierre Menard" in the "page-a-day calendar" portion of his book More Information Than You Require , on the date 4 December 1998. The joke references not only the recreation nature of the original short story, but also Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho , which was released on the same date.
City of Glass by Paul Auster seems to be an homage to Jorge Luis Borges. The character Peter Stillman Snr. is obsessed with the Tower of Babel (as in "The Library of Babel") and the character (as opposed to the author) named "Paul Auster" is writing an essay which discusses the "true" authorship of the Quixote.
The story is also referenced in the introduction to Roberto Bolaño's novel Distant Star , and along with "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" has a noticeable influence on his other works, particularly Nazi Literature in the Americas .
The story is referenced in the CD notes of Mostly Other People Do the Killing's 2014 album Blue, [4] which is an exacting replica of Miles Davis' famous 1959 album Kind of Blue .
The translator of the novel The Missing Shade of Blue (by Jennie Erdal) into Portuguese adopted the pseudonym Pierre Menard.
The novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov expands the concept of the 'frame narrative' of Borges' story, expanding this conceit into a novel-length structure in which a commentator appears, at first, to be simply analyzing the work of another character (a 1000-line poem, which the novel actually features) and doing so in good faith, before it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to separate the truth about the lives of the two characters from the manner in which the commentary begins to dominate and manipulate the meaning of the fictional author's text to tell the commentator's own story.
Much as the narrator of Borges' story offers a list of Pierre Menard's fictional publications, the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace contains a patience-testing list of the film credits of one of the characters, expanding the comedic possibilities of the structure of fictional references by offering both titles and sometimes-lengthy descriptions of the highly improbable (or downright impossible) films.
The story's suggestion that the reader's sense of the meaning of any text is contingent on how they attribute the text to its presumed author (since the reader attempts to interpret the text in terms of the author's life, works, beliefs, etc. for better or worse or on to absurdity, as the story ultimately suggests) is a prefiguring of the post-structuralist turn toward the de-centering of the author (that is, the de-centering of the author as ultimate authority or anchor of a text's meaning) as argued most famously by Roland Barthes in his 1967 essay "La Mort de l'Auteur" ("The Death of the Author") and by Michel Foucault in "What is an Author?"
The story is referenced in the episode "The Balance" on the cartoon program Justice League Unlimited . The episode originally aired on 28 May 2005. In the episode, members of the Justice League visit the Library of Tartarus where the fictional Menard's story is said to reside.
It is additionally referenced in House of Leaves , by Mark Z. Danielewski, where Pierre Menard is made out to be a real person and an example of "exquisite variation". In the novel, a footnote by Zampanó references Pierre Menard and his "variation" on the passage beginning "... la verdad, cuya madre es la historia [etc]".
Pierre Menard is credited as the author of a book which was adapted into the screenplay of the 2011 film A Low Life Mythology . [5]
The story is also referenced in TV show The Good Place , season 4, episode 13, "Whenever You're Ready", in a list of projects that character Tahani Al Jamil is working on in the afterlife. One of her projects is described as "Write "Tahani Al Jamil's 'Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" ' ".
In the HBO Series Los Espookys , season 2, episode 3, the character Tati decides to write a novel, which consists of transcribing an audiobook of Don Quixote .
Don Quixote, the full title being The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. It was originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. Considered a founding work of Western literature, it is often labelled as the first modern novel. Don Quixote is also one of the most-translated books in the world and one of the best-selling novels of all time.
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.
If on a winter's night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ("you") finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones. The book was published in an English translation by William Weaver in 1981.
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentine journal Sur, May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961.
"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
H. Bustos Domecq is a pseudonym used for several collaborative works by the Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares.
A fictional book is a text created specifically for a work in an imaginary narrative that is referred to, depicted, or excerpted in a story, book, film, or other fictional work, and which exists only in one or more fictional works. A fictional book may be created to add realism or depth to a larger fictional work. For example, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has excerpts from a book by Emmanuel Goldstein entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism which provides background on concepts explored in the novel.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is a fantasy short story written in 1935 by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In his autobiographical essay, Borges wrote about "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", "it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based."
Ficciones is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, originally written and published in Spanish between 1941 and 1956. Thirteen stories from Ficciones were first published by New Directions in the English-language anthology Labyrinths (1962). In the same year, Grove Press published the entirety of the book in English using the same title as in the original language. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" originally appeared published in A History of Eternity (1936). Ficciones became Borges's most famous book and made him known worldwide.
Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett.
Emir Rodríguez Monegal, born in Uruguay, was a scholar, literary critic, and editor of Latin American literature. From 1969 to 1985, Rodríguez Monegal was professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University. He is usually called by his second surname Emir R. Monegal or Monegal.
This is a bibliography of works by Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones (Fictions) in 1944. It was the first of Borges's works to be translated into English by Anthony Boucher when it appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948. In 1958 it was translated back into English by Donald A. Yates and published in Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Spring 1958. In 1962 this translation was included in the book Labyrinths.
Pierre Menard may also refer to:
Philosophy and literature involves the literary treatment of philosophers and philosophical themes, and the philosophical treatment of issues raised by literature.
"The House of Asterion" is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in 1947 in the literary magazine Los Anales de Buenos Aires and republished in Borges's short story collection The Aleph in 1949. It is based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and is told from the perspective of Asterion, the Minotaur.
"An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It was included in the anthology Ficciones, part one. The title has also been translated as A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain.
