CHALLENGES OF THE TEXT IN BORGES’S “TLÖN, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS” AND “PIERRE MENARD, AUTHOR OF THE QUIXOTE”

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between the author and the reader in two of Borges’s most representative fictions: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. In the first writing, the fictional reader and narrator Borges not only challenges the non-fictional reader to interpret correctly the various references that appear in the text, but he also invades his real-life world. In the second story, “Pierre Menard”, the fictional reader and narrator challenges the non-fictional reader again by claiming that two identical texts may acquire different values when they are attributed to two different authors living in different periods of time. By exploring these provoking texts, the article attempts to establish Borges’s own perspectives on “authorship” and “readership” starting from the premise that, in the Borgesian stories, the line between the reader and the author is blurred.