‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’: Contexts, Antecedents, Lines of Enquiry

Abstract

‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ has displayed remarkable creative and critical resilience since making its first appearance in May 1939, in the Buenos Aires cultural review, Sur (number 56). Clearly one of Borges’s favourites, and regarded by many as his first fully-fledged ficción, the story was reprinted without changes in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941) and in Ficciones (1944), where it would occupy second place in the table of contents, after the no less canonical, but subsequent ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’—published in Sur in March 1940. The dedication of a special number of the house-journal, Variaciones Borges, to the latter in 2003 set a precedent for the monographic study of a single ficción by Borges, providing a template for the current volume and a stimulus to other groups of scholars to follow suit. A glance at the existing bibliography on ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ (hereafter and normally, ‘Pierre Menard’) confirms the story’s multidisciplinary variety and appeal. Literary history and literary theory including questions of authorship and reading; the study of language and of translation across boundaries of time and space; philosophy (especially, epistemology and aesthetics), are foremost amongst the disciplines that frame the witty and iconoclastic pages of ‘Pierre Menard’ and supply the vocabulary and frames of reference for some of the most learned and insightful readings of Borges’s story. The Cervantine novel, literary interpretation, and the contemporary French cultural milieu are just a few of the topics that, if expanded on, might provide the basis for an exhaustive list of subjects dealt with in ‘Pierre Menard’. The trouble with such an exercise is that it would likely run the risk of replicating the laborious catalogue of the ‘visible’ work of Menard articulated in the third paragraph of Borges’s story. Taking a different path, this introduction opts, first, for a selective review of the most important contexts surrounding the writing and the aftermath of publication of ‘Pierre Menard’; thereafter, it traces some antecedents of ‘Pierre Menard’ in Borges’s prose output of the nineteen thirties; and, it reviews some of the lines of critical enquiry that have shaped understanding of ‘Pierre Menard’, thereby providing some context for the essays that make up this special number of Romance Studies.