Turning the Tables on Aristotle: A Pierre Menardian Reading of ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article undertakes an in-depth analysis of Borges’s use, or rather misuse, of Aristotelian rhetoric and style in ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’. The narrator of ‘Pierre Menard’ creates a series of contradictions by overturning traditional modes of persuasion in order to guide the reader to an understanding of a preferred type of reader, namely one who subjects the text to a Pierre Menardian reading. While the notion of engaging in a Pierre Menardian reading of Borges’s landmark text may appear to be absurd and ironic, in a quintessentially Borgesian fashion, it is this very element that leads the reader to a more profound understanding of the text. A Pierre Menardian reading requires the reader to contemplate both Cervantes’s immortal Quijote in its appropriate socio-cultural conditions and Menard’s Quijote of the 20th century, as well as the narrator’s contradictions that we read in his essay/story and the version by Madame Henri Bachelier that he undermines in his account. Only through intertextual analysis can the reader achieve a heightened understanding of any number of elements, including the characters, the narrator, the author, the reader, the text itself, authorial intent, the construction of a text, the function of fiction, literary criticism, literary theory, and the role of time, history, and tradition.