SOURCE: “Don Quixote Rides Again!” in Romanic Review, Vol. 86, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 141–63.

In a recent article, “Once Is Not Enough?”, I argued that a book word-for-word identical with Cervantes' Quixote wouldn't be a new Quixote, numerically distinct from Cervantes', if it were produced in the manner described in Borges' short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Menard's novel would simply be Cervantes', I tried to show, although admittedly produced in a very odd way. But philosophical issues (such as the individuation of works of art) are one thing, literary interpretation quite another. In this paper I'll be offering a comprehensive interpretation of Borges' story and arguing, against a number of critics,¹ that “Pierre Menard” is philosophically correct, i.e., that the correct interpretation of Borges' story doesn't have Menard as the author of a new Quixote. Even more importantly, I'll be arguing that the story is an extremely penetrating one, with philosophical depths as yet unexplored, although its main interest, metaphysical and otherwise, lies in a direction other than the individuation of works of art. These being my main theses, let me also issue an advance warning that my approach is itself more than a little philosophical.

I

Given my purely philosophical examination of the duplicate Quixote case, the most direct way to approach Borges' story would be to ask, Why on earth would anyone ever reproduce Cervantes' novel in the way that Menard does? But the more indirect route, and the one I'll be traveling here, is to marshal evidence bit by textual bit, all the while proceeding with the aim of constructing a unified and comprehensive interpretation. That methodology begs no critical questions, as the first one evidently does.

Structurally, “Pierre Menard” has three parts. In the first, the setting, dramatic voice, and mode of narration are established; the main character, Pierre Menard, is introduced; the prevailing tone is set; and a number of themes are broached. The story is cast in the form of an elaborate literary obituary and memoir written by an unnamed friend and admirer of Menard. Supposedly, it's an official, formal assessment and appreciation of the great man, an intellectual and a figure of stupendous, even revolutionary, but unfortunately unknown, literary achievement. Superficially, the piece resembles the sort of literary honorarium found not so much in professional journals as in the self-appointed flagships of high art, i.e., in literary magazines with pretensions to high culture. We soon discover, however, that the narrator's assessment may be somewhat biased and skewed—that he may be, in other words, an unreliable narrator. His first few sentences show him to be patronizing and bullying, and within two paragraphs his political conservatism, hauteur, and condescending attitude toward any and all who don't share his convictions are made evident. After first taking an altogether gratuitous snipe at Protestants and Masons, he proceeds to name-drop a title or two, in order, he says, to establish his authority to write an assessment of Menard and his oeuvre, but actually to call attention to himself and his aristocratic connections. Moreover, his prose style is pretentious, bombastic, and affected, and smacks more than a little of the fourth-rate symbolist:

One might say that only yesterday we gathered before his [Menard's] final monument, amidst the lugubrious cypresses, and already Error tries to tarnish his Memory. … Decidedly, a brief rectification is unavoidable.

(Borges 36)

Clearly, this is not an assessment to be trusted. But even more clearly, and even more importantly, this is fiction, not nonfiction, despite the obituary/literary-memoir format. No piece of nonfiction would ever be as blatantly prejudiced, arrogant, or inflated as “Pierre Menard.” Moreover, given only what has been said so far, it's quite probably a parody of a certain kind of littérateur and literary document, and quite probably a story whose prevailing tone is ironic. If that is so, what we should be on the lookout for is exactly the opposite of what we see glittering brightly on the surface. In fact if that's the case, if we don't look any farther than the surface, we're liable to miss what the story is really all about. Taking the story to be an argument for the numerical distinctness of Menard's Quixote would be to be blind to the story's pervasive irony, in particular that regarding Menard's creative activity.

II

Part one of the story concludes with a slightly annotated list of Menard's “visible” work. From the list we learn that Menard is a very minor symbolist poet and an intellectual with a number of disparate, narrow, and highly idiosyncratic interests. Menard has published a sonnet and written a sonnet cycle “for the Baroness de Bacourt,” and has done extensive work in literary theory and criticism. In addition to writing “an invective against Paul Valery,” an invective which expresses “the exact opposite of his true opinion of Valery,” he has

written a monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of concepts which would not be synonyms or periphrases of those which make up our everyday language, “but rather ideal objects created according to convention and essentially designed to satisfy poetic needs.”

(37)

He's also examined the “essential metric laws of French prose,” as well as replied to “Luc Durtain (who denied the existence of such laws), [using] examples [culled] from Luc Durtain['s own work].” His other achievements include having fashioned a “determined analysis of the ‘syntactical customs’ of Toulet,” having translated Quevedo's Aguja de navegar cultos and Ruy Lopez's book on chess, Libro de la invención liberal y arte del juego del axedrez, and having transposed the maligned Valéry's Le Cimetiēre marin into alexandrines. But various obscure corners of philosophy were also peeking places for Menard. He composed work sheets for a monograph on George Boole's symbolic logic, and wrote “a monograph on ‘certain connections or affinities’ between the thought of Descartes, Leibniz and John Wilkins,” a monograph on Leibniz's Characteristica universalis, a monograph on Raymond Lully's Ars magna generis, and a book, Les problémes d'un probléme, on the different solutions to the problem of Achilles and the tortoise. Rounding out the list of Menard's “visible” achievements are a number of other odd items: “a technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess [by] eliminating one of the rook's pawns,” an article in which Menard “proposes, recommends, discusses, and finally rejects the innovation”; “a preface to the Catalogue of an exposition of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade”; “a ‘definition’ of the Countess de Bagnoregio, in the “‘victorious volume’ … published annually by this lady to rectify the inevitable falsifications of journalists”; and “a manuscript list of verses which owe their efficacy to their punctuation” (37–38).

The picture drawn here is both consistent and complete: Menard is a précieux, a turn-of-the-century decadent, a symbolist, and a snobbish cultivator of social connections. So far, then, he's a man rather like the narrator. But he's a decadent and symbolist of a rather more complex sort than the narrator, since he's also a poet and a very peculiar and desiccated academic as well. Moreover, while academics and poets are known for their eccentricities and narrow and peculiar interests, Menard's quantitative differences from other poets and academics in these respects make for a qualitative difference. For the list is little more than an extended catalogue of arrant academic twaddle, of intellectual pettiness without a point. It thus shows that Menard, unlike other poets and academics, has completely lost sight of what is truly important and interesting about poetry and intellectual matters, and thus lost contact with the real world, the world that gives poetry and academic matters their value in the first place. His, instead, is an autotelic universe, a universe circumscribed and defined by interests fabricated by his own exhausted intellect. His vitality, as a real man and a thinker, has diminished to the point that his studies are well-nigh useless, and he himself simply a curious life form, culturally speaking. No wonder Borges said that the list is “a diagram of [Menard's] mental history”² and thus that “il y a chez lui [Menard] un sens de l'inutilité de la littérature.”³ The theme that Barrenechea finds in so many of Borges' works, that of the writer as noncreative (46), is present in “Pierre Menard” from the start, in both the narrator's introduction and the catalogue of Menard's “achievements.”

III

The second part of the story is a description and explanation of what the narrator regards as far and away Menard's greatest accomplishment, invisible though it may be. “I turn now,” he says, “to [Menard's] other work: the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless. And—such are the capacities of man!—the unfinished” (38). Yes, such are the capacities of man that men don't finish their work. But small ironies such as this aside, what is perhaps the “most significant [work] of our time,” the narrator tells us, “consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two” (39). Menard has written a Quixote, or at least part of a Quixote, that is word-for-word identical with Cervantes' but not identical with Cervantes'. To say as much is to affirm an absurdity, the narrator admits, but Menard is capable of the absurd, capable of achieving the impossible.

Here, for the first time, another major theme is introduced, that of literary creation as necessarily an impossible task, a theme consistent with but stronger than the uselessness of literature. In addition, one of the themes hinted at earlier, the logical inseparability of the man of letters—whether reader or writer—from the literary work—whether fictional or nonfictional—is explicitly drawn out and underscored. For since Menard symbolizes the man of letters, literature and littérateur fuse in Borges' story: the man, Menard, has no more reality than the performance of the literary task. Indeed, he lives within the task, Borges tells us, since he lives within books alone. The written word eventually makes those who live by it part of it, Borges seems to say—probably not a little a propos of himself. As I'll try to show below in section XII, even this strong thesis will eventually need strengthening.

Menard was inspired by two very different sources to undertake his “impossible” task: a “philological fragment by Novalis [whoever he might be, if anyone at all] … which outlines the theme of total identification with a given author, [and] … one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Canebiēre or Don Quixote on Wall Street” (39). Literature draws upon literature, both in Novalis and in the parasitic book, and thus the theme of the autotelic nature of literature and the literary life, here again represented by Menard, is reinforced. Menard's life—literature's life—is not only essentially parasitic upon the extraliterary world; at its worst, in the terminal stages of its inevitable decline, it is parasitic upon itself, unable to draw inspiration from anything other than itself. The result is an anemic and decadent literature, both uninspired and uninspiring. In the case of Menard, in fact, the disease has spread even further: he was “inspired” by two pieces of literature, one a fragment of an essay, one probably a novel, which are themselves already parasitic pieces of literature, dependent for their existence on the prior existence of literature in general (the essay fragment) and specific literary works (the novel). Menard's undertaking, to replicate—“duplicate” would be more accurate—an already existent literary work, the Quixote, was itself inspired by two pieces of literature already parasitic on literature. Hence once again, but at a new level, the theme of the autotelic nature of literature—or, what is the same thing, Menard's autotelic world and the autotelic nature of his mind. But hence also a new thesis: this is a world in which, in the long run, the distinction between author and fictional character is only a nominal distinction, only a distinction of words—which, of course, is the only kind of distinction there could be in such a world.

IV

Following a statement of Menard's intended project, the narrator lets Menard speak for himself, quoting a letter he supposedly wrote him. “‘My intent is no more than astonishing,’” Menard wrote, “‘The final term in a theological or metaphysical demonstration—the objective world, God, causality, the forms of the universe—is no less previous and common than my famed novel. The only difference is that the philosophers publish their intermediary stages of their labor in pleasant volumes and I have resolved to do away with those stages.’ In truth,” as the narrator says, continuing the story where Menard left off, “not one worksheet remains to bear witness to his years of effort” (39).

This is parody once again, only this time concerning the inflated self-images of artistes and assorted defenders of the intellectual realm. It's also a send-up of the sort of Manifesto of Grand Artistic Purpose that self-righteous guardians of high culture are usually only too glad to issue. “Manifesto of Grand Delusion” would be more accurate in most cases, though, but especially apt in this one, because the parody and irony here are particularly pointed: whether he knows it or not, Menard's “famed novel” is famed for no other reason than that it is Cervantes'. I say this because (1) to intend to produce a novel word-for-word identical with one that already exists; (2) to use word-for-word identity with it as the standard for completion of your task; and (3) to rely, as Menard evidently did, on his memory of that novel in producing his text—for not only had he read Cervantes' book (admittedly, many years past), he had to look at Cervantes' text in order to make sure that his ‘rough drafts’ were indeed rough drafts (that is, not word-for-word identical with the relevant parts of Cervantes') and thus undoubtedly re-approached his job with some memory of Cervantes' text in mind—to do all of that is just to reproduce Cervantes' text in a very roundabout, strange way. Given the context, then, the irony is more pointed than a mere parody of the sort of person or document in question would otherwise be. Menard is a ridiculous figure not only because of his inflated self-image, self-congratulatory and self-satisfied manner, and pompous prose posing, but because his studious seriousness is put in the service of a logically impossible task. Again, this is the theme of literary creation as an impossible task, but again there is an enrichment: here the task really is literally impossible.

That, of course, didn't deter Menard. Various plans to accomplish his objective occurred to him. Rejected as too easy was to “know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes” (40). But since doing that is logically impossible, Menard's proposed modus operandi is, with an irony that is perhaps too heavy, hardly too easy: being numerically distinct people is logically impossible, just as squaring the circle, or writing a Quixote numerically distinct from Cervantes' while exactly duplicating the book, intending to so duplicate it, and checking your production for accuracy against it is. This, however, the unnamed narrator readily admits: “[But being Cervantes is] impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting” (40). That the method and task itself are impossible is conceded by the narrator, but being the spiritual kin of Menard, he rejects the plan because it's not interesting, not because it's not possible. That is the sort of solipsistic and autotelic universe that the narrator and Menard inhabit.

V

The plan that Menard decided upon was “to go on being Pierre Menard and to reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” “‘My undertaking is not difficult, essentially,’” Menard wrote to the narrator. “‘I should only have to be immortal to carry it out’” (40). But this self-absorbed posturing conceals yet another contradiction. Since it's impossible—physically, not logically this time—to be immortal, the “undertaking” is just the opposite of “essentially easy,” and Menard, like the narrator, is anything but rational for brushing aside the contradiction as of little moment. Besides, it's not at all clear that immortality would guarantee completion of the task. If the task is logically impossible (given Menard's methods), then eternity guarantees only never-ending frustration.

The narrator is not essentially different from Menard. He shares his delusions of literary grandeur, and prefers specious but personally satisfying rationalization to common sense. Again like Menard, he prefers a world of pleasant literary fantasies to one of cold literary—and literal—facts. “Some nights past,” he says,

while leafing through chapter XXVI [of the Quixote]—never essayed by him—I recognized our friend's style and something of his voice in this exceptional phrase: “the river nymphs and the dolorous and humid Echo.” This happy conjunction of a spiritual and a physical adjective brought to my mind a verse by Shakespeare which we discussed one afternoon: “Where a malignant and turbaned Turk …”

(40)

But to interpret passages not written by someone as if they were and to delight in the thoughts and emotions thereby evoked is to abandon hard, cold reality—including the hard, cold reality of literary interpretation—for a dream world of delicious delusions, and to do so, in this case, in an especially bizarre and fatuous fashion. For what the narrator is implicitly doing here is attributing a style to Menard and then reading Cervantes against the backdrop of that style. He is, in other words, reading Cervantes as a logically posterior writer and stylist. Philosophically speaking, this is worse than interpretation turned inside out. There is no logically independent style of Menard that can act as a backdrop, because no logically independent work of his exists. The only work there is is Cervantes'. Hence it is logically impossible to read Cervantes the way the narrator does, much less to savor, as he evidently does, that reading. Cervantes is not the logically posterior writer because there isn't, and couldn't be, any logically anterior one.

Icing for the cake here, adding to the perversity of the narrator's delight, is his aesthetic insensitivity. To quote Shakespeare's line “Where a malignant and turbaned Turk …” with approval is to love The Bard not wisely but too well. The line is undoubtedly one of the thousand that Jonson would have blotted, for the conjunction of the adjectives is anything but delicate or aesthetically subtle. Rather, it's ludicrous and unintentionally humorous, the literary kin, aesthetically speaking, of Dickens' famous line about leaving the room in a flood of tears and a sedan chair. Drawing attention to Menard's—really, Cervantes'—“exceptional phrase” regarding “dolorous and humid Echo” by comparing it with Shakespeare's blunder is to draw attention to its obvious defects, two of which, in addition to the one already hinted at in regard to the line from Shakespeare, are its decadent languidness and vapidity. Unlike Othello, the narrator is easily wrought, both logically and aesthetically; but like Othello, being wrought, he's perplexed in the extreme.

VI

Recovering from the listless digression regarding Menard and Shakespeare he's fallen into, the narrator asks, Why did Menard choose to re-create the Quixote? Why the Quixote rather than some other book? Menard himself provided the answer, the narrator tells us, in a letter he wrote him. The Quixote is “‘not … inevitable,’” he said there; it's “‘a contingent book; the Quixote is unnecessary. I can premeditate writing it, I can write it, without falling into a tautology’” (41).

This is simply philosophical confusion. Strictly speaking, as I've already argued, Menard can't write the Quixote at all—not without falling into a (logical) contradiction. In that sense, of course, he can certainly avoid “falling into a tautology,” contradictions being just the opposite of tautologies. But writing the Quixote—or anything else—and actually falling into a tautology? What would it be like to do that? What, in other words, does Menard mean by “tautology”? The context here is replete with philosophical terms, “contingent,” “unnecessary,” and “inevitable” among them, and that fact, in conjunction with Menard's documented philosophic interests and background, would make it seem that the term is also being used in a philosophical sense. Philosophically speaking, tautologies are logically compound statements which are truth—functionally true, that is, true under all assignments of truth values to their component parts. Tautologies in this sense are necessarily true, and therefore true in every possible or imaginable universe. They're not contingently true, not true in this but not every possible or imaginable universe. Menard's dichotomy of tautologies, necessity, and the inevitable on the one hand, and contingencies and what he can imagine the universe not containing—such as the Quixote—on the other, thus seems secure and well founded.

But it isn't, not really. Remember, in this sense a tautology is a statement, and no statement of the form “X wrote Y” or “Y exists,” where X is a person and Y a book, is truth—functionally true, or even analytically true (true solely in virtue of the meanings of the terms found in it). Every statement of either form couldn't be anything but non-tautologous, and thus contingently true, if true at all. There's simply nothing on the other side of Menard's implied contrast, then, no statement concerning the existence of a book or authorship that's tautologous. Consequently, the statements “The Quixote exists” and “Cervantes is the author of the Quixote” are non-tautologous, just as Menard has them. That's hardly enlightening or surprising, however, and the truth of Menard's claim, given the similar non-tautologous nature of all statements of the same form, thus provides no reason for choosing the Quixote over any other book.

But maybe this way of reading Menard, a technical and highly philosophical one, isn't the right way to read him. Menard does say that he can't imagine the universe without Poe's line, “Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!” or without the Bateau Ivre or the Ancient Mariner, and the statement “The Quixote exists” is supposed to contrast with them. But how? “Poe wrote the line ‘Ah, bear …,’” “The Bateau Ivre exists,” and “The Ancient Mariner exists” are one and all non-tautologous and contingent. But once again, so is “The Quixote exists.” And though it's easy to imagine the universe without the statement about the Quixote being true, it's equally easy to imagine the universe without the others being true as well, contrary to what Menard says. Besides, soon after making his remarks about the Quixote's being contingent and contrasting Cervantes' work with other “inevitable” ones, Menard goes on to say that “to compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable,” thus flatly contradicting himself (41). No master of logic he, Menard.

Perhaps, though, despite the philosophical context he himself has established, and despite his own philosophical interests and background, Menard doesn't intend “tautology” in a philosophical sense at all; perhaps he means it simply in its everyday sense, as a needless repetition of something, whether a statement, a question, a command, or whatever. Menard's main idea, then, would be that he wouldn't be needlessly repeating Cervantes in undertaking a new Quixote, though repeating him he would certainly be. Now, however, the notion of inevitability can come into play—and can come to Menard's rescue, even. “Inevitable” similarly doesn't mean necessary in any logical or causal sense, or any other sense common to philosophical discourse, Menard could say; rather, it means aesthetically necessary. Menard's claim would then be that he wouldn't be repeating Cervantes needlessly, in that he wouldn't be repeating him in an aesthetically unnecessary way. There's room, aesthetically speaking, for a new Quixote, Menard thinks, and that's why Cervantes' work is contingent—and that, in fact, is what he, Menard, means by “contingent”: aesthetic possibility. According to him, Cervantes' Quixote has made new aesthetic possibilities possible, including the possibility of a work word-for-word identical with it but numerically and aesthetically distinct from it. By way of contrast, the aesthetic possibilities of romantic literature have been exhausted, the death knell having been sounded by the decadents. That's why Menard mentions Poe's line, the Ancient Mariner, and the Bateau Ivre all in the same breath. No new aesthetic possibilities remain for romantic literature, for its successor has exhausted them all. Hence, for his crowning literary achievement the Quixote is perfect, while romantic literature not even possible.

While this generous interpretation of Menard is consistent with his remarks and, moreover, is in keeping with what we know of the man—I think in particular of the aesthetic sensibilities revealed in the catalogue of his “visible achievements”—it's as problematic as the others. The central difficulty is not so much the obviously vague and unexplained concept of aesthetic possibility as the claim that it's possible for Menard to create an aesthetically distinct Quixote but not an aesthetically distinct Ancient Mariner. Numerical distinctness may ensure aesthetic distinctness, but aesthetic distinctness—itself bound up with the concept of aesthetic possibility, it would seem—is predicated on the logically prior notion of numerical distinctness, and not vice versa. Thus aesthetic distinctness presupposes numerical distinctness, and so even on this interpretation of Menard's remarks, it must be possible for him to create a numerically distinct Quixote but not a numerically distinct Mariner. Even waiving the objection that creating the former isn't really possible in this case, why isn't the latter possible if the former is? If it's possible to create a new Quixote in the way Menard envisages, why not a new Mariner? He supplies no reason for distinguishing the cases as far as the individuation of works of art is concerned, and logically and ontologically they certainly seem on a par. That's a very good reason for thinking that they can't be distinguished. As far as the main issue is concerned, then, the conclusion that should be drawn is that if there is a reason for Menard's choosing the Quixote over every other book—and I think there is, and will be discussing it in due course—it has nothing to do with the argument Menard himself supplies, regardless of how generously it's interpreted. Instead, the passage about his choice of the Quixote should be read in light of what we already know about Menard himself. So read, it doesn't function philosophically, since its purpose isn't to provide us with insights on the nature of the aesthetic; rather, it functions literarily, so to speak, since its purpose is to deepen our understanding of the précieuse and provide yet another ironic fix on the pathetic, illogical, solipsistic, and academic, in the worst sense of the word, character that he is.

VII

The third major section of the story is partly a critical evaluation of Menard's Quixote, partly a panegyric of the man, and partly a theoretical reflection on the aesthetic lessons taught us by him. Panegyric and theoretical reflection are inextricably bound up with each other, however, and thus will be considered together below. Also, the third section is far and away the richest of the three, from a philosophical point of view, and so a fair amount of space will need to be devoted to it in order to do it justice. First, then, the narrator's critical assessment of Menard's magnum opus.

Having detailed how difficult it was to pull off the trick of writing a new Quixote at all, the narrator proceeds to argue that the new Quixote is aesthetically superior to the original. Menard's book is “more subtle” than Cervantes’, for instance, because Menard doesn't

oppose … to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his ‘reality’ the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. … He neglects altogether local color. This disdain points to a new conception of the historical novel [and] condemns Salammbô, with no possibility of appeal.

(42)

But even if Menard's were a new Quixote I doubt that it would be quite so easy to “condemn” Flaubert's novel. Salammbô's place in the historical record is a little too secure to be dislodged by any single event in the literary world, even the mysterious appearance of the Quixote (or a new Quixote). But the narrator's remark here is probably just critical hyperbole, not intended to be taken literally. He may just mean that Menard's achievement casts a new light on Flaubert's work, locating it in the historical development of the novel in an altogether new and unexpected fashion. To which the proper reply is, true enough—but only if Menard's book is indeed a new one. If it's not and the reader is intended to know as much, the narrator's remark will need to be reinterpreted in the context of the story as a whole. Independent evidence I've already marshalled in fact suggests all three: (1) that the novel wouldn't be a new one; (2) that the reader is intended to know as much; and thus (3) that the narrator's critical remarks should be understood ironically. We have a fairly complete mental history of Menard and a slightly annotated bibliography of his published work to draw upon in interpreting just what his literary capacities are, and we have something similar, first hand, in the case of the narrator, namely the evidence provided by his own prose in the story. All such evidence, from the first paragraph of the story onwards, suggests an ironic reading of the argument for Menard's greater subtlety.

So does the passage itself. For at least two reasons, to argue for Menard's greater subtlety on the basis of his having selected the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega as his “reality” is just the sort of nonsense that is an strong indication of irony. First, since Menard's overarching intention was simply to produce a text word-for-word identical with Cervantes', he didn't select, in the sense the narrator seems to have in mind, namely intend to write about, the land of Carmen. … Even if, as is very likely, Menard knew that the country and century depicted in Cervantes was the land of Carmen …, that doesn't entail that he intended to write about the land of Carmen. … (When I walk home from school, I know that my shoes will wear down a little bit, but that doesn't mean that I intend that they wear down a little bit.) On the contrary, the odds are very high that, wrapped up in his imitative task as he was, concentrating on reproducing Cervantes' text word-for-word, thoughts, much less intentions, respecting the land of Carmen … never crossed his mind. The narrator's saying that Menard selected the land of Carmen …, in the sense of intending to write about, is merely another instance of his abandoning a person in reality for a pleasant projection in a dream world.

Second, contrary to the narrator's suggestion, the “A selects B” construction is what contemporary philosophers would call referentially transparent. Roughly speaking, a sentence is referentially transparent if and only if co-designative terms can be substituted for each another in it salva veritate, that is, without change of truth value. If “Menard selected the land of Carmen” is true, and the land of Carmen … is Spain in the 17th century, then “Menard selected Spain in the 17th century” is true. So if Spain in the 17th century is the land and time that Cervantes selected and wrote about—which it certainly is—then Menard and Cervantes selected and wrote about the same land in the same century—they selected and wrote about the same thing, in other words. Thus philosophical analysis upholds the commonsense conviction that, despite the narrator's evident delectation, Menard can't be distinguished from Cervantes on the basis of what he selected to write about. The argument for Menard's greater subtlety is a sham, then, and the narrator merely spinning wheels in a fantasy land of his—and Menard's—own creation. The literary effect of this, given the immediacy of its impact and given the narrator's stilted and overly cultured means of expression, is pitched but merry irony. But the acme of irony is yet to come.

VIII

Before it does, though, an ironic flourish of a different sort is cleverly drawn. “It is well known,” says our bombastic narrator,

that Don Quixote … decided the debate [on arms and letters] against letters and in favor of arms. Cervantes was a former soldier: his verdict is understandable. But that Pierre Menard's Don Quixote—a contemporary of La Trahison des clercs and Bertrand Russell—should fall prey to such nebulous sophistries!.

(42)

But the nebulous sophistries are in the passage itself, not the Quixote—or even any Quixote, including, arguendo, the one written by Menard. If Don Quixote decided the debate in favor of arms, it certainly doesn't follow that Cervantes did, though the narrator asserts as much without argument. Considered per se, inferences from what a fictional character says to what the author of the fiction believes, are notoriously shaky and unreliable. More importantly, the inference the narrator makes here is facilitated by the fact that he identifies Cervantes and Quixote, and thus blurs the distinction between reality and fiction, a distinction he and Menard have been attacking, consciously or not, since the advent of their literary careers. As I'll try to show below, in the long run Borges himself is attacking the same distinction, though not unwittingly, and with deliberate literary and philosophical purpose in mind. Recognition of Borges' intentions in this regard is essential to understanding his overarching purpose in the story.

For the present, however, we need only note that the narrator's attempted removal of the barrier between fact and fiction, implicit in his identification of Cervantes and Don Quixote, is continued in his remark about “Menard's Don Quixote.” Even granting for the sake of argument that Menard's is not Cervantes' Quixote, the claim that his Quixote is a contemporary of Bertrand Russell is still, on many philosophers' views, simply a category mistake:⁴ the former is a fictional character, and thus in one logical category; the latter is a real man, and thus in quite another. That being the case, it's nonsense, strictly speaking, these philosophers would maintain, to regard the two as existing within the same time frame, and thus nonsense to regard them as contemporaries. Again, the narrator assimilates fact to fiction—or vice versa; it makes no difference within the bounds of the story itself. The concept of a category mistake being a much disputed one, however, the charge of nonsense probably shouldn't be pressed. Still, the narrator is far from off the logical hook. For even if comparing fictional characters and real people is sometimes possible, in this case the comparison remains logically egregious. Menard's Quixote is obviously not a contemporary of Russell: Russell was born in 1872; Don Quixote, even, by the narrator's admission, in Menard's “new” story, lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Rather, Menard's Quixote is a contemporary of Cervantes' Quixote. Since Menard, from what we can infer from the story, was born in approximately 1870, he and not his Quixote is the true contemporary of Russell. Once again—and irrespective of the contestable charge of a category mistake—there is a logical, indeed a metaphysical, confusion of the fictional and the factual, of character and author. The narrator identifies Menard with the fictional character he created, just as he previously identified Cervantes with the fictional character he created.

But the confusion is compounded and thus enriched here, in the second case, for Menard's Quixote is not only said to be a contemporary of Russell but of a book, La Trahison des clercs. The notion of a category mistake thus begs to be granted admission for the third time, but even if the request is again denied, the idea of people and books being contemporaries is an inherently odd one—until, that is, the idea is coupled with an understanding of the narrator's and Menard's persistent inability to distinguish fact from fiction. Given an open door between the two realms, the most natural comparison is with the door itself, namely a book. The supreme irony topping the whole thing off, of course, is that the conflation of the distinction between the real and fictional exists only within a piece of fiction itself, Borges' story.

But to return to the main issue: since the narrator's argument for an evaluatively important difference between the “two” Quixotes—a difference concerning the aesthetic quality of the passages favoring arms over letters—rests on a number of logical and metaphysical confusions, there is no good reason for thinking the two different in that respect. There is thus no difference that needs to be explained—and what the narrator does next is tender an explanation—and thus also no basis for thinking that the conclusion that he immediately draws from his “finding” concerning arms versus letters, the conclusion that Menard's text is “infinitely richer” than Cervantes', is anything but wishful thinking. Indeed, even if the narrator had made a good case for his claim respecting arms versus letters, the argument would still be poor a one, the inductive leap from a single piece of evidence to an outrageously strong conclusion respecting infinite richness being one of several light years.

IX

But the narrator has other arguments to offer. Compare, he says, the following passage from Cervantes:

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor …

with this one from Menard:

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor. …

(43)

Since Cervantes wrote in the 17th century, his passage is “mere rhetorical praise of history.” The passage from Menard, on the other hand, originating in the 20th century as it did, is “astounding.” Menard takes history to be the mother of truth, not “an inquiry into [truth's] origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future's counselor—are brazenly pragmatic” (43). Vast differences of an evaluative nature exist between the two books, then.

But it's hard to shake the feeling that the argument here is itself more sophistical than any of the “nebulous sophistries” found in the Quixote. The narrator telling us that two passages of very distinctive prose, passages which are word-for-word identical, differ radically in their aesthetic properties—that beggars comparison with Ionesco's psychotic professor telling his pupil that instead of saying “The roses of my grandmother are as yellow as my grandfather who was Asiatic” she is saying “The roses of my grandmother are as yellow as my grandfather who was Asiatic” (Ionesco 67). There has to be something wrong with the argument.

And there is. The imputed differences between the passages doesn't really depend so much on their being products of different time periods—though, admittedly, their being such could warrant interpreting them differently, even differently in aesthetically important ways—as on an equivocation in the narrator's reading of them. The crucial terms in both his glosses are “history” and, though only implicit in his reading of Cervantes, “truth.” Depending on why the narrator thinks that the passage from Cervantes is mere rhetorical praise of history—he doesn't tell us—the first and possibly the second of these terms are equivocated on.

One way to understand his claim about Cervantes is with “history” taken to denote those actual, concrete, (in the main) non-linguistic events and facts that occur or exist out there in the world. With “truth” being taken in its usual sense to denote a property of propositions, namely their correspondence with (again, in the main) extra-linguistic event or fact, history is the mother of truth in that events and facts are logically prior to, and the metaphysical determinates of, the correspondence relation. Events and facts make, metaphysically, true propositions true. The other way to understand his claim about Cervantes is with “truth” taken in its common and colloquial sense of knowledge: “truth” is what we know to be true, in the first sense of the term. “History,” then, understood in the sense just mentioned, would be the mother of truth in that our knowledge of what is the case would be logically and ontologically dependent upon the existence of those actual concrete events and facts out there in the world. “History” could even be taken in a second sense, in the sense of an oral or written record of history in the first sense of the term, and slightly weaker remarks of a similar nature would still hold good. Our knowledge of events and facts is dependent, as a matter of contingent fact, on “history” in the sense of an oral or written record. Any of these readings of Cervantes makes sense, but none will help the narrator escape the charge of equivocation.

The reason is that his reading of Menard takes “history” and/or “truth” in an altogether different sense (or senses). In claiming that Menard defines history as the origin of reality, and then going on to say that for Menard, historical truth—that is, history, in the first of the senses just identified⁵—is what we judge to have happened, the narrator gives evidence for his claim that Menard's remark is astounding, no mere rhetorical praise of history. Why is it astounding? Because Menard's passage is budding pragmatism: what we judge to have happened determines, ontologically, what did happened. That's what the claim that history is the mother of truth amounts to. But notice that “history” here has to be understood in terms of what we judge to be the case—basically, the written or oral record—and not extra-linguistic, out-there, concrete reality. “History,” then, is not to be understood in the sense that it probably should be in the passage from Cervantes, for there it had to do with extra-linguistic fact. Even on the reading of Cervantes on which “history” is taken as the written or oral record, an equivocation remains, since in his reading of Cervantes, “truth” has to be understood in the sense of knowledge, and the claim that history is the mother of truth read as a contingent claim which basically states that our knowledge of extra-linguistic events and facts is dependent, as a matter of contingent, causal fact, on the oral and written record. Obviously, the narrator means something much more philosophically significant than that in his reading of Menard, since he reads him as propounding a central tenet of pragmatism, that what is the case is determined by what we judge to be the case.⁶ An equivocation of some sort thus remains, no matter how the narrator's remarks are read, and no matter what argument is imputed him respecting his claim about Cervantes; and the most natural way to read him is with an equivocation on “history.”

“What of that, though?” someone might object. “What is pejoratively identified as an equivocation might be simply reading one passage one way and another another, that's all. Even if the two passages are verbally identical, that doesn't necessarily mean that the narrator misinterpreted anything. Said on one occasion, ‘I went to the bank’ might mean that I took a trip to the financial institution; said on another, that I headed for the local fishing hole. No equivocation there, just correct interpretation. Why isn't the narrator doing just the same thing? After all, Cervantes lived way back when, Menard at the turn of this century, and that seems to be the basis for his different interpretations. So what's really wrong with reading the passages as he does?”

In principle, this is a good objection—indeed, I've already agreed that two passages could be verbally identical yet differ markedly in meaning and aesthetic significance. I don't think that it'll do here, however. Without doing anything more than dipping my big toe into the murky waters of the theory of interpretation, I can at least say that the burden of proof lies on those who would give different readings to verbally identical texts. True, my critic and the narrator make some effort to shoulder that burden, since both mention the life-dates of our authors, and the narrator the pragmatism of William James. Mere passage of time doesn't ensure difference of meaning, however (else language would be extremely unstable, probably impossible), and even assuming that Menard's Quixote isn't Cervantes', the putative reference to James remains just that, putative, unless the passage in question can be tied to James in some way. If an allusion isn't clear from a passage, the usual way to establish its presence is to consult the surrounding verbal environment. Since Menard's prose is from first to last orthographically identical with Cervantes', though, no help from that quarter can be expected here. For the same reason, the passage from Menard actually has to understood in exactly the same way as the corresponding passage from Cervantes, a fact reinforced if the circumstances surrounding the production of Menard's work are considered. The equivocation charge, then, is not out of place. The narrator once again willfully interprets as he chooses, never bothering with such matters as consistency if it doesn't suit him.

A more important objection, at least to my way of thinking, concerns not the “whether” of my analysis, but the “why.” “Why make such heavy weather about it? Isn't it obvious that something's wrong, that his remarks are ludicrous? Why go on to explain the joke—for that is what it is—when it's obvious? That's just to kill it, and taking it in without detailed analysis is essential to appreciating it, and also essential to the story.”

Yes and no, on that last point. Many times jokes, like stories in general, have to be read with a pair of glasses, and not a microscope, when first encountered in order for the reader to be properly affected. Future readings and complete understanding, however, often require a painstaking analysis of elements whose nature and interactions aren't at all obvious, even if their effects are. Here, my aim is not only to explain what underlies our sense of the ludicrous in reading the narrator's remarks, but also to provide evidence for my more global thesis that the story is misunderstood unless read as ironic through and through. That last point is hardly obvious.

X

The narrator's last point respecting his critical assessment of Menard can be more briefly considered. According to him, there is a vast difference in style between Cervantes' and Menard's works. This time the advantage is Cervantes', however.

The archiac style of Menard—quite foreign, after all [since Menard is French]—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

(43)

But this is absurd. Menard steeped himself in the Spanish of Cervantes' time, and may well have written 17th century Spanish with ease—one suspects that he did, given his determination and seriousness. The fact that he didn't live in 17th-century Spain certainly doesn't entail, in and of itself, that his style is affected, any more than Cervantes' living in 17th century Spain entails that his isn't. In fact, even if Menard did write in the 20th century, and even if he, in contrast to Cervantes, didn't handle 17th-century Spanish with ease, that doesn't entail that his style was affected, and Cervantes' not. Psmith, a character in a number of P. G. Wodehouse's novels, handles the particular brand of English he speaks with ease, but his speech is affected nonetheless. And even if Psmith didn't handle it with ease but with great and grave difficulty, his speech would still be affected. People who have trouble expressing themselves don't ipso facto speak in an affected manner. The prominent factors that go into making speech affected include vocabulary, syntax, paragraph construction, and so on, such factors perhaps being relativized to (usually unstated) vocabulary, syntax, paragraph construction, and so on, that are taken as normative, i.e., taken as natural, not affected. Ease or difficulty of production and historical placement per se have nothing to do with it. A denizen of the 25th-century France who wrote the sort of English found in this paper wouldn't be writing in an affected manner.⁷ The narrator's argument concerning style is thus as shoddy as all his other arguments, and his delight in difference once again nothing more than demonstration of duncery. It is thus, in the context of the story's studied tone, further demonstration of Borges' superb irony, as well as his uncanny ability to parody prose that is itself affected. In this case, the result of the latter is an additional layer of irony, since because affectation here turns on itself, mocks and parodies itself, the narrator's apotheosis of Menard's “achievement”—duplicating another's exact words and claiming not just (numerical) difference but superiority—is itself a similar duplicative and dubious achievement: the prose of praise exemplifies the very affectation it denigrates. The narrator once again shows himself the spiritual kin of Menard.

XI

Praise of a man is a natural concomitant of praise of his achievement, and so Menard's alter ego proceeds to heap effusive praise on him. Beginning with the world-weary and intellectually dispiriting, if not condescending, remark that “there is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless,” and illustrating his dolorous thesis with a comment to the effect that the eventual fate of entire philosophies is to pass into mere paragraphs or names in a history of philosophy, the narrator thus eases into his true topic: Menard, the man who transcended such fin de siecle truths, the artist who truly did create ex nihilo—or almost, anyway. His praise of the man, however, is as odd and unintentionally condemnatory as his claims respecting his achievement. Menard

derived from these nihilistic verifications [a] singular … determination. He decided to anticipate the vanity awaiting all man's efforts; he set himself to an undertaking which was exceedingly complex and, from the beginning, futile. He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue. He multiplied draft upon draft, revised tenaciously and tore up thousands of manuscript pages. He did not let anyone examine these drafts and took care [that] they should not survive him. In vain have I tried to reconstruct them.

(43–44)

Taken seriously, this is praise that unwittingly damns both its object and itself. If all is for nought and Menard is deliberately imitating the universe, then he is deliberately pursuing nothing, and must be judged accordingly. Similarly, if the book he plans to write already exists and his aim is to repeat it, his task is indeed futile, as the narrator says, but not for any grand metaphysical reason having to do with the transient nature of all things. A much more mundane reason concerning actions which merely duplicate part of our intellectual history will do in this case. Sleepless nights, copious drafts, and efforts to cover one's artistic tracks are, in the light of the duplicative nature of Menard's task, its evident futility, and the lack of any artistic value of its end product, no grounds on which to praise the “artistic genius” behind them. Rather, they're good reasons to think that the so-called genius is mad, and that he prefers personally gratifying ego-projections to decidedly less gratifying encounters with reality. Ironically, the only fictional world Menard succeeds in creating is not one he himself would recognize, since it's the one he lives in, and mistakes for reality. The same goes for the narrator, of course. Thus the narrator's further remarks on Menard's creative efforts—

[the] “final” Quixote [is, or can be seen as] a kind of palimpsest, through which the traces—tenuous but not indecipherable—of our friend's “previous” writing should be translucently visible … unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, inverting the other's work, would be able to exhume and revive those lost Troys.

—reinforce previous themes (44). Ironically, even on the narrator's and Menard's own principles, nothing, neither the final Quixote nor the discarded drafts nor anything else, could be counted as a “Troy.” Nihilism doesn't allow that, and our two principals are, by their own admission (43), nihilists. In fact, of course, their entire philosophy of literature, whether of its creation (as with Menard) or its criticism (as with the narrator), is founded on a self-contradiction. Nihilism can be used neither as a theoretical support for artistic creation—there would be nothing to aspire to—nor as a theoretical underpinning for value judgments—all such judgments would contradict their philosophical foundation. The narrator's praise of Menard's work, and so also of Menard, thus undermines itself.

Last and probably funniest of all, however, is praise of Menard because he “enriched … the halting and rudimentary art of reading” by adding a new “technique” to the usual repertoire,

that of … deliberate anachronism and … erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le Jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure.

(44)

Menard not only created a masterpiece; he taught us something new about the nature of artistic creation, namely that it's futile, but that one can nonetheless accomplish great things by repeating extant works. The fact that the lesson is self-contradictory is of no moment, apparently. And Menard, we now learn, not only added to literature and to the fundaments of the theory of artistic creation; he also taught us something about the theory of reading and added to the fundaments of the philosophy of interpretation. Now when we read we can attribute what we like to whom we like, and proceed accordingly. “Deliberate anachronism” and “erroneous attribution”—this is such stuff as the new reading (proto-deconstruction?) is made on. But it is also such stuff as illusions are made on. Since the applications of this new technique are, as the narrator rightly says, “infinite,” what has really been issued is a crypto-invitation to make all interpretations equally valid, because all equally well founded. The fact that the theory thus undermines itself, because it allows itself to be read anachronistically, and with anyone as its author, ironically escapes the narrator's notice. It, too, like his theory of value, is built on a self-destructive premise. Thus nihilism in the evaluative realm meets its theoretical counterpart, anarchy, in the interpretive. The result is further immersion in the dream world of Borges' ironic tale.

XII

If the above is even roughly correct, Borges' story is a multi-leveled parody, thoroughly ironic in tone, and from first to last deadly serious in the way that only a sophisticated piece of humor can be. The very claim registered in its title, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” is a focal point for the pervasive irony found throughout. But there is another level of enveloping irony not yet explored. Three routes lead to it, one from the Quixote itself, one from an essay of Borges on the Quixote, and one from elements within the story itself.

Consider first the Quixote. The story of the Quixote is basically quite simple. Don Quixote, an otherwise sane man, has had his wits scrambled by an inordinate devotion to literature, in particular, romances of chivalry. He imagines himself to be called upon to roam the world in search of adventures, ill-fitted though he undoubtedly is for trying encounters of any kind. Initially luring Sancho Panza, his loyal and credulous sidekick, with the prospect of governorship of an island, Quixote proceeds to wander the countryside and seek adventures befitting a grand knight. In his distorted mind everyday objects are transformed into things threatening, romantic, or noble, and he is thus plunged into absurd misadventure after absurd misadventure, always with unfortunate consequences for himself. He is finally “rescued” when one of his old friends disguises himself as a knight, overthrows him, and requires him to refrain from chivalrous exploits for a year. Soon after returning to his village, however, Don Quixote falls ill and dies.

My thesis is that the story of Don Quixote is, mutatis mutandis, the story of “Pierre Menard.” Menard is the new Quixote, not the new Cervantes.

Consider now Borges' piece on the Quixote, “Partial Magic in the Quixote.” “The form of the Quixote,” Borges writes there, “made [Cervantes] counterpose a real prosaic world to an imaginary poetic world. … For Cervantes the real and the poetic were antinomies” (193). The same real and prosaic world is counterposed to an imaginary and poetic world in “Pierre Menard,” although in that world letters has won over arms, and the chief battleground is thus the page, not the plain. Just as, in Borges' words, “the plan of [Cervantes'] book precluded the marvelous [that is, the magical and the physically and logically impossible], [although] the latter had to figure in the novel, at least indirectly, as crimes and mystery [have to figure] in a parody of a detective story,” so, too, the marvelous, the physically or logically impossible, has to figure in a parody of artistic creation, literary criticism, and creative genius. Like Cervantes, Borges could not “resort to talismans or enchantments, but [rather had to] insinuate … the supernatural in a subtle—and therefore more effective—manner” (194). In his “intimate being,” Borges tells us, “Cervantes loved the supernatural.” So did he, Borges. He showed his love by eventually resolving the antinomy between the poetic and the prosaic, and doing so without contradiction. The resolution can be found, in fact, in “Pierre Menard” and other of his fictional works.

If “Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective and subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book,” so, once again, does Borges. But so, too, do Menard and the narrator! There are crucial differences between the cases, however. Menard and his Sancho Panza have no initial fix on the difference between reality and illusion, and act, like Quixote and his Sancho Panza but unlike Cervantes and Borges, in dead but parodic earnest. The one fictional pair mistake barbers' basins for helmets, the other minuscule and useless academic studies for intellectual achievements. Our authors, on the other hand, are fully cognizant of the difference between reality and illusion, but delight in deliberately blurring the boundaries between them. They do so in order to achieve a number of artistic effects and, always in the case of Borges, sometimes in the case of Cervantes, to explore certain logical and metaphysical problems. To cite one important instance: Cervantes explicitly introduces himself into the Quixote as a character, introduces the Quixote into the Quixote as a book, and, in one chapter, slyly, playfully, and ironically advances the idea that he is not the author of the Quixote. Parallels with paradoxes of self-reference, for instance, Bertrand Russell's concerning the class of all classes not members of themselves, immediately suggest themselves. Borges introduces himself into his Quixote more subtly. On my reading, “Pierre Menard” is a scaled-down mock heroic parable set in the 20th century, with Menard as the 20th century equivalent of Don Quixote. Borges occupies—at least initially—Cervantes' position in relation to the story. But that changes; he like Cervantes, enters into his own story as a character. How he does this is complex, so I hope that the explanation which follows does justice to its complexity.

Menard is a 20th century knight-errant, that is, an academic. He's thus a 20th century figure in a profession held in high esteem but also frequently the object of ridicule, the latter because of the well-known tendency of academics to foist their own particular brand of high falutin' and pretentious nonsense on other academics and unsuspecting members of the general public. Menard tilts at the windmills of erudition with learned-sounding but effectively pointless monographs and articles until he succumbs to his final and grandest delusion, that of writing a new book word-for-word identical with one he knows already exists, the Quixote. Here is the point at which Borges enters into the explanation. Borges is himself an academic par excellence and more than a little given to such fanciful, if not high falutin', nonsense as the denial of the existence of material objects. He's also and more than a little given to writing in a style that borders on the pretentious—as he himself well knows. Simply in rewriting, in a very transformed fashion, the Quixote as “Pierre Menard,” Borges undertakes a task parallel to that—artistically identical with that—of his protagonist. He introduces himself into the story, in other words, as his own failed author, Menard, in his attempt to create a new a story which is identical with one that already exists, one found in the Quixote. Unlike Cervantes, he identifies with his own very confused protagonist, all the while knowing that he's not him and doesn't suffer his delusions or mania. Yet, like Menard, he continues his efforts at creation, thinking all the while that all he's doing is repeating the work of another man. And, in a sense, he is. The laughable incidents, the grandiose scheme, the self-delusion, the misdirected attempts for the highest value that man can attain, the loyal companion, above all the parody and ironic tone—all are there in both Cervantes and Borges. Borges doesn't succumb to his Menard's delusion, of course, in trying to write a book word-for-word identical with Cervantes, but he comes as close as possible while managing to avoid stepping over the psychotic edge. Thus we see that Menard is Quixote, suitably modernized and intellectualized, and Menard is also Borges, suitably fictionalized and exaggerated. But since Borges himself is Cervantes, suitably modernized and intellectualized, Cervantes is Borges is Menard is Quixote. The antinomy between the prosaic and the poetic, the real and the magical, fact and fiction, is ultimately resolved by Borges, then, in thoroughly blurring the distinction between them: in essence, at the metaphysical depths, there is no difference between them, or at least none that is discernible by us. That is one of Borges' philosophical insights, an insight that is ontological in nature. A second is actually metaphilosophical and methodological. It's that one important way to write metaphysics is to write metaphysical fiction, and that one way to write metaphysical fiction is to write metafictional fiction. In this case, that involves writing fiction (“Pierre Menard”) about fiction (Don Quixote) that is, in the sense of the “is” of identity, the fiction written about. But if these are Borges' philosophical insights, he's also left us with at least three residual paradoxes to ponder and delight in. As might be expected, all are paradoxes of self-reference.

The first is that Borges pokes fun at himself—and all other creative artists, too, of course, Cervantes and Menard included—and yet understanding the folly of the creative endeavor requires simultaneously understanding that it is serious business, hardly folly, and anything but laughable. To get Borges' point we have to take him and his story seriously; but to get his point we also have to see that he and his story, and so by implication all authors and stories, are not to be taken seriously. Authors are self-deluded fools, and writing a worthwhile story an impossible task. But to understand that, we have to interpret the author as anything but a self-deluded fool and his story as anything but worthless.

The second paradox concerns the fact that proper interpretation of Borges' story requires us to realize that Menard's Quixote won't be numerically distinct from Cervantes'. Menard's Quixote simply is Cervantes', even though it's thought by him to be a new and important work. Much of the story's irony, and so worth, depends on the fact that Menard failed and had to: reproducing another's work while knowing it and using it as a standard for the creation of your own necessarily means that nothing new has been achieved, no new object of worth has come into existence. Yet if Borges created “Pierre Menard” by intentionally reproducing another's work, all the while knowing it and using it as a standard for the creation of his own, then on the grounds just mentioned, grounds implicit in Borges' story itself, Borges himself failed to produce anything new and valuable. In other words, if Borges' story is good, that is at least in part because Menard didn't create a new and valuable work; but on the same grounds that condemn Menard, neither did Borges create a new and valuable work. The novelty—numerical distinctness—and value of the story depend, internally, on grounds that, applied externally, condemn the story itself.

The third paradox is akin to the second but fully external. It's that “Pierre Menard” is an essentially parasitic work, well-nigh a reproduction of the essential features of Cervantes' Quixote. As such, it would seem to be the Quixote, or at least share its fate and have no value apart from it, no value not shared with it. But that's just not so. “Pierre Menard”'s existence is its own, and its value, as I hope to have shown, likewise its own. The paradox, quite simply, is how, contrary to the seemingly impeccable argument that duplication means identity, duplication can sometimes make for difference; or, equivalently, how Don Quixote can ride again, even though his spurs have long been on the rack.⁸

Notes

1. For instance, André Maurois, in his “Preface” to Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, p. xi. Maurois doesn't get the descriptive details of the story right, either.

2. Georges Charbonnier, El escritor y su obra (Veintiuno Editores, Mexico: 1967), p. 75; as reported by Gene H. Bell-Villada, p. 122.

3. George Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Jorge Luis Borges (Paris: 1967), p. 161; as reported by D. L. Shaw, p. 23.

4. The notion of a category mistake is explained in the first chapter of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind.

5. The term “historical truth” has to be read in the way indicated, or the narrator's claim respecting Menard's pragmatism would be baseless.

6. Since it might not be evident why such a doctrine is central to a philosophy known as “pragmatism,” I should add that on pragmatism, one of the central, and justifiable, determinants of what we believe is cognitive convenience. In addition, the pragmatist holds that in the long run it's impossible to draw a distinction between what we justifiably believe to be the case and what is the case. This doesn't mean that for a pragmatist anything goes, i.e., that we can judge anything we like to be the case and it thereby will be so. Experience sets relatively strict constraints on what we can justifiably believe, as do other factors, such as consistency and coherence. For the pragmatist, though, justifiable belief is underdetermined by all such factors, and that necessitates the use of an additional criterion. According to him, that criterion is cognitive convenience.

7. I hope.

8. My thanks to Walter L. Weber for his comments, dogmatic though even he admits they were, on an earlier draft of this paper.

Works Cited

Barrenechea, Ana Maria. Borges: The Labyrinth Maker. Trans. Robert Lima. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Bell-Villada, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction. Chapel-Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Books, 1962.

Ionesco, Eugene. Four Plays. Trans. Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958.

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson and Company, Ltd., 1949.

Shaw, D. L. Borges: Ficciones. London: Grant and Cutler, Ltd., 1976.

Wreen, Michael, “Once Is Not Enough?”. British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 30, no. 2 (1990):149–58.