He is trying to write it as if for the first time , as Cervantes did when he originally wrote it. We bring our knowledge and awareness of a whole host of contextual details to a work of literature: the identity of the author, when they lived, when they wrote the text, and so on.
Jorge Luis Borges would have known about some of the most celebrated and most notorious literary forgeries and hoaxes in history. Clearly, we respond to these poems differently now, knowing they were written by an eighteenth-century schoolboy rather than a fifteenth-century monk. What, then, if we gave a reader Don Quixote — a reader who had never heard of either Cervantes or his novel — and told them it had been written by a twentieth-century French writer influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and French Symbolist poets of the nineteenth century?
That reader would doubtless respond to the novel differently. For a start, they would consider Don Quixote a work of historical fiction set in the seventeenth century, rather than a bona fide seventeenth-century work.
But what if we presented someone with Great Expectations and told them it was a new novel? For this model, critical theory is greatly indebted to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The title character of Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," a minor French Symbolist whose "visible works" can be "easily enumerated," undertakes a project which fundamentally questions the relation not only of a literary work to its text, but -- perhaps more importantly -- investigates the processes through which a work comes to be and who may lay claim to it.
Though in the end, Menard's project is unfinished, invisible, and, we are informed, impossible, it is nonetheless, from an intellectual point of view, an ambitious scandal: attempting to write the Quixote, a text which has already been written and has, as a context, itself. His labyrinthine fiction, according to Borges, was underappreciated in its time. His first work, the mystery novel The God of the Labyrinth , was notable for its false ending: the readers thought the mystery had been properly explained until the sentence in the last paragraph, "Everyone believed that the chess players had met accidentally," which prompted readers to review the story and arrive at an ending that the characters never discovered April March , another of Quain's novels, was similarly labyrinthine, exploring different possible timelines: the first chapter is an event common to all timelines, and chapters beyond that explore different timelines of events that could have lead to that point - three events preceding the common first event, and three even earlier events linked to each of those three events In this way, the novel is actually nine very different novels that end up in the same place.
The final surveyed work, Statements , reflect Quain's belief that everyone is a writer or potential writer, and that readers no longer truly exist The eight stories are designed so as to prefigure a good plot, but are then frustrated by the writer.
They compel the reader to think they have outsmarted the writer, yet all the while the frustration is of the writer's design. Borges boasts that he was able to extract his story The Circular Ruins from one of these stories The Rose of Yesterday , thereby unwittingly making Quain's point. Menard's story, which Borges recognizes as an absurd but justifiably absurd endeavor from the start, serves as a bold challenge to what constitutes the ownership or originality of an idea Suppose that two people, years apart, wrote the same verbatim story: would they truly be the same story, given that they were generated from different experiences?
Perhaps not to the author; yet it would do the reader well to remember that even given one author, a story is experienced differently by different readers. This perspective is almost certainly more relevant to the reader - though perhaps not more philosophically relevant - than the writer's inspiration. Menard's version is less reliant on local color, more skeptical of historical truth, and on the whole "more subtle than Cervantes's" But on a more general level, Menard's Don Quixote establishes and promotes revolutionary ideas about reading and writing.
As the narrator notes in the final paragraph, "Menard has perhaps unwittingly enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution" Following Menard's example, readers can interpret canonical texts in fascinating new ways by attributing them to authors who didn't actually write them.
Don Quixote and World Literature: Published in two installments in the early 17th century, Don Quixote is regarded by many readers and scholars as the first modern novel. Naturally, Don Quixote would have intrigued an avant-garde Argentine author like Borges, partially because of its impact on Spanish and Latin American literature, and partially because of its playful approach to reading and writing. The unauthorized sequel by Avellaneda is the most famous of these, and Pierre Menard himself can be understood as the latest in a line of Cervantes imitators.
Experimental Writing in the 20th Century: Many of the world-famous authors who came before Borges crafted poems and novels that are built largely of quotations, imitations, and allusions to earlier writings. In fact, the final sentence of the story refers to James Joyce by name. Oddly enough, this ingrained French background helps Menard to understand and re-create a work of Spanish literature. In the story, all of these things are attributed to the eccentric Pierre Menard.
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