Pierre Menard's Quixote

For me, Borges’ short stories were a revelation: I had not realised the possibilities of the form until I’d encountered them. A characteristically Borgesian variant of the form is the fictitious essay, in which the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is blurred in a way which in itself acts as metafictional commentary. Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, for instance, is a review of Don Quixote by Pierre Menard.

It is at once a review of a book which exists (in that Don Quixote exists), and yet also of a book which does not exist (in that Pierre Menard and therefore his version of the Quixote is an invention). The setup is this: Menard sufficiently immerses himself in the details of Cervantes’ life and biography such that he is able, without ever consulting the original text, to replicate parts of the Quixote word-for-word. Despite the shared identity in the words of two Quixotes, Borges in his review responds differently to the two texts.

For instance, Borges provides us the following quote from Cervantes’ text:

…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.

alongside the following quote from Menard’s text:

…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.

Borges informs us that while Cervantes in the former quote is engaging in “mere rhetorical praise of history”, it is obvious that Menard by contrast in the latter quote cannot be understood literally. He highlights that Menard’s point should instead be interpreted in light of his contemporary William James’ pragmatism. History for Menard is not what happened, but what we believe to have happened.

Borges thus implicitly shows through his critique of the two Quixotes that the meaning of a text does not depend solely on the sequence of words and symbols of which it is comprised. Instead, it additionally depends on the meaning we as readers assign to that sequence. Borges, familiar with Menard’s biography, cannot help but alter his interpretation of the text accordingly¹.

An initial implication of Borges’ commentary might be this: a text has a potentially infinite number of meanings, for no two readers are the same. Indeed, we might recall Heraclitus, and acknowledge that given no person remains the same, even the same person reading a text twice will generate a separate interpretation. Accepting both Borges and Heraclitus, not only is no reader of a text the same, but because we are not the same person over time even our second reading is necessarily different to our first reading.

But consider a reader who, like Borges, is familiar with Menard’s biography. Will their interpretation too not reflect the facts of Menard’s biography? Or consider still a reader who has encountered Borges’ interpretation of Menard’s Quixote before reading it themselves: will their interpretation not be duly influenced by Borges’? Or consider again Heraclitus’ changing person, who though no longer the same as they once were still retains vestiges and memories of their former self. Is their reading not influenced by their previous one? And so the core question emerges: how many meanings can a text really possess?

Borges gestures towards these questions; I propose the following answer: a text requires a writer, without whom it could not exist and with whom it could have taken many possible forms, but took the one the reader encounters. Different versions might exist, edited over time by the same or different authors, and these new texts have both author(s) and prior versions. But the reader encounters a text, and because that text is comprised of a specific sequence of symbols and perhaps images, the reader is constrained in their possible interpretations. They must interpret the text before them. But they are free to interpret as they will within that constraint.

If the reader is familiar with the intentions and context of the writer, then this too is a form of constraint. The same can be said of the existing traditions of interpretation of a given text. Some readers are therefore more or less constrained than others, with the more informed typically being the more constrained – at least insofar as they wish to arrive at interpretation which is faithful to the author’s intentions. So, while the number of possible interpretations is large and impossible to count, the differences between them in practice are often small.

I do not think there is such a thing as a ‘correct’ interpretation, in that interpretations which would have been a surprise to the original author are a profound and vital source of creativity. I do believe that some interpretations are closer to the truth of how the author understood their text as they were writing it, which may not be the same as their later post-hoc rationalisation of it.