Becoming Menard? Geopolitical Readings and the Authorial Subject in César Aira

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses César Aira’s critical engagement with Jorge Luis Borges’s masterful short story ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’. While there are few overt references to Borges’s story within Aira’s essayistic output, it will be shown that those that do exist are highly significant. Indeed, it will be argued that Aira’s literary process — developed at length and in detail across his critical work — is heavily indebted to ‘Pierre Menard’. Opening first with a reflection on Borges’s Evaristo Carriego, the article explores the ways in which Aira discusses Borges’s story in relation to the Duchampian ready-made, uncovers its importance within his analysis of exotic literature, and argues that Aira inverts Menard’s labour by shifting his focus from the act of reading to the act of writing in his re-creation of the story. In this way, it will be proposed that Aira advocates an a-personal process which nonetheless affirms a central place for the individual author, while simultaneously producing works of geopolitical significance. Ultimately, it will be shown that the story provides the inspiration for Aira’s conceptualization of the literary work as a temporal event, and the promotion of a formless marginality which undermines colonial taxonomies.