Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. Released in 1939, it is the third short story in Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths and tells of an author who recreated the titular novel.
Characters[]
- The narrator
- Pierre Menard - a fictional mystic and author who pens a recreation of Don Quixote
- Madame Henri Bachelier
Plot[]
The story begins with a scathing criticism of one Madame Henri Bachelier's catalogue of Menard's works - dubbing it "falacious" and stating that "Menard's true friends regarded this catalogue with alarm, and even with a certain sadness." To rectify this, the narrator attaches a list of all of Menard's extant works (largely philosophical works written in French) before revealing Menard's greatest extinct work.
Menard decided to recreate Cervantes' seminal novel, Don Quixote. He did not wish to make another tale transplanting Quixote into the modern day but to recreate the entire novel sentence by sentence. Menard himself describes his work as a "theological or metaphysical demonstration". At first, Menard sought to emulate Cervantes but stopped doing it as it would be a "diminution" and that it would be more challenging "to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard."
The narrator describes Menard's Quixote as "more subtle than that of Cervantes" - removing "coarse" historical details and "local color" such as "Gypsies, conquistadors, mystics, and Philip the Seconds". Despite this, the narrator also says that Menard's style is more "archaic" and tinged with Menard's status as a foreigner to Spanish.
According to Menard, the novel Don Quixote has gone through a philosophical decay - becoming an "occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance and obscene deluxe editions," and due to this he "resolved to outstrip that vanity which awaits all the woes of mankind" by recreating Don Quixote of his own volition. After writing this version of the Quixote, the manuscript was burned. The narrator says of this that Don Quixote is nothing more than a palimpset that the handwriting of Menard can be viewed through. "Unfortunately," says our narrator "only a second Pierre Menard, inverting the work of the former, could exhume and rescusitate these Troys."
Works that mention this story[]
Fiction[]
- Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves features quotations from Menard's Quixote and the original Quixote.
Sources[]
- Wikipedia