Apuntes para una Lectura del Quijote de Pierre Menard

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

“…Following another line of enquiry, critics such as Holzapfel (1977), Agheana (1982), Rabell (1993), Woof (1999), Castillo (2003), Dopico Black (2011) and Roberto González Echevarría (2020), have considered the Cervantine inspiration and pre-text of Borges's ficción. Several features of the Quixote combine to provide a template for 'Pierre Menard', including i) the presence of a narrator or narrative persona who oscillates between a sympathetic and an ironic perspective on the character and adventures of the knight errant of La Mancha; ii) a model and, indeed, a whole poetics, of reading, exemplified by both Alonso Quijano and, then, by Don Quijote himself; iii) 'a sophisticated game about authorship' (González Echevarría 147); iv) the origins of the narrative of Don Quixote in a text composed in Arabic by one Cide Hamete Benengeli; v) the translation of that text into the contemporary Spanish language by a fellow of mixed race and ethnicity identified simply as 'a morisco aljamiado'; and vi) a conception of literature as intertextuality (Rabell, especially, finds a copybook illustration in Chapter XXV of Cervantes's novel, which she identifies as a precursor of the view of 'la literatura como fenómeno intertextual' professed by Borges and Menard) (Rabell 204).…”