Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1939

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Background

Authorial Context: Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born on August 24, 1899, to a well-educated middle-class family in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His mother was from a Uruguayan family of Spanish origin, while his father was of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent. Jorge Luis Borges demonstrated an aptitude for literature at an early age, translating a collection of children’s stories by Oscar Wilde into Spanish at age 10. His family was devoted to reading and writing; they lived in a large house with over 1,000 English-language volumes in their library.

The Borges family moved to Europe when Jorge was 14 and lived in a number of different countries for the next decade, returning to Argentina in 1921. He lived in Argentina for the remainder of his life, working as a writer for various literary magazines and founding a few journals himself. He also became interested in the philosophy of existentialism and began to explore existential questions in his writing, composing a number of stories exploring labyrinths, paradoxes, and impossible or fantastic events.

On Christmas Eve in 1938, Borges experienced a severe head injury and nearly died of infection during his treatment. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was written during his period of recovery as a test of whether his creativity as a writer had survived. Pleased with the outcome of the story, Borges published it in May 1939. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” contains many of the elements that distinguish Borges’s work, including a structural complexity, extensive analogies to other intellectual works, a playfulness with time, and an exploration of the nature of authorship.

Borges died in 1986 at age 86, having published more than 50 books of poetry, short fiction, essay, and literary criticism, as well as dozens of individual short stories and three screenplays. Borges is notable for focusing exclusively on short fiction, with his longest fictional work coming in at around 14 pages. He is widely regarded as a significant figure in 20^th-century Latin American literature.

Literary Context: Modernism and Postmodernism

In the early 20^th century, an artistic movement arose in the Western world called Modernism. Modernism came about as a response to the 19^th-century artistic movement of Realism, which attempted to depict the subject matter of art as truthfully and accurately as possible without any fantastical elements. Modernism, on the other hand, rejected Realism, instead striving to depict human experience using nontraditional storytelling that didn’t conform to such stringent guidelines. During the peak of Borges’s career, Modernism was dominant in the arts world, and he was contemporaneous with Modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust.

In the second half of the 20^th century, Postmodernism emerged as a response to Modernism. Just as Modernism spurned the tenets of Realism, Postmodernism became popular in response to Modernism. Postmodernism became its own distinct style, embracing experimental storytelling concepts. Postmodernists engage with deep ideas while they reject the concept that there is a single, universal truth. Postmodern writers incorporate techniques such as parody, metanarratives, intertextuality, magical realism, and humor.

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is often considered a transitional work between the narratives of Modernism and the fractured parody of Postmodernism. The story uses a nonlinear narrative, formal experimentation, and a focus on individual experience, which, in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is the text’s focus on the intentions and complications of Menard’s mind. The story still demonstrates Postmodernism, however, with its parody of the dense and obscure nature of literary criticism, its constant allusions to other works of literature, and the absurdity of its concept.