Borges and the hermeneutics of the novel

Abstract

Jorge Gracia has described Borges’s short story titled “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (henceforth PM) as a work that “in particular seeks to address a set of very interesting and even profound philosophical questions,” and suggested that “[it] is a literary work and text rather than a philosophical one” on the grounds that “literary works are distinguished from philosophical ones in that their conditions of identity include the texts they express. Moreover, literary texts are distinguished from philosophical ones in that they express literary works.” Certainly, Borges’s short story on the topic of Don Quijote is not short of sophistication, both philosophical and literary. In the long history of Cervantean and Quixotic re-accentuations, PM stands out as one of the most suggestive and intricate texts ever produced. It has been the source of countless interpretations and critical readings. Nadia Lie, for instance, has studied and highlighted the role of the reader; Roberto González Echevarría has emphasized the relevance of the context in which it was written; and Enrique Sacerio-Garí has studied Borges’s intellectual world and how it shaped this short story. Those and other readings (e.g., by Aguilar, Black, Efron, Matthews, Olea Franco, and Rodríguez Luis, among many others) have repeatedly underlined and praised the formidable complexity of this text. In this chapter, I would like to discuss one central aspect of PM’s literary sophistication: its understanding of Don Quijote as a text that has been mimicked and re-accentuated throughout the centuries and yet remains always, in its entirety, meaningful to readers of all epochs. My reading of Borges’s text will accordingly submit that, while the fourcentury history of imitations and emulations of Don Quijote is rich in titles of quality, Borges believed that Cervantes’s opus magnum has remained perennially a contemporary masterpiece of timeless significance.