“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was published in 1939 in the journal Sur. Borges was thirty-nine. He was not yet blind, not yet famous, still an Argentine writer publishing in local magazines that few people outside Buenos Aires bothered to read. And he wrote, in a short story of just a few pages disguised as an obituary notice, one of the most radical ideas anyone has ever had about what it means to read.
The premise needs to be handled carefully because it sounds like a joke and it is one, but not only. Pierre Menard is a twentieth-century French writer, a minor symbolist, author of a visible body of work that the narrator catalogues with the pedantic thoroughness of an academic who mistakes exhaustiveness for importance. Monographs on Leibniz, on the game of chess, on metrics, on Valéry. A respectable and forgettable output. But Menard has an invisible body of work, and that is the one that matters: the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote, and a fragment of the twenty-second.
He did not copy them. Did not transcribe them. Did not paraphrase them. He wrote them. He arrived, through his own lived experience, his own accumulation of reading and reflection, at the exact same words Cervantes had written three centuries earlier. Word for word. Comma for comma.
And Borges, maintaining a poker face that holds from the first line to the last without cracking once, argues that Menard’s text is superior to Cervantes’.
The famous example. Borges compares a passage from chapter nine of the Quixote. In Cervantes’ version, the narrator calls history the mother of truth. Borges points out that coming from Cervantes, a lay wit of the seventeenth century, the idea is a rhetorical compliment to history, very nearly a commonplace. But coming from Menard, a contemporary of William James and Bertrand Russell, the same phrase becomes something else entirely. After pragmatism, after the crisis of objective truth, to say that history is the mother of truth is no longer a conventional tribute. It is a bold philosophical claim, almost ironic, charged with a scepticism Cervantes could not have possessed because the intellectual conditions for that scepticism did not yet exist.
Same words. Different meaning. Not because the words changed but because the person writing them is someone else.
That is what the story says, and it is an idea that, once you grasp it, changes the way you read everything after.
It’s worth pausing on what Borges does not do, because what he doesn’t do is part of the genius.
He doesn’t explain the idea. Doesn’t formulate it as a thesis. Doesn’t say “the meaning of a text depends on its context of production and reception,” which is the academic version of what he’s saying and which is lethally dull. What he does is invent a fictional situation in which the idea proves itself, without any need for argument. The reader doesn’t receive a proposition. The reader receives an experience: the experience of reading the same text twice, attributed to two different authors, and discovering that it genuinely sounds different. You don’t need anyone to convince you. You feel it.
That is Borges’ advantage over the theorists who arrived at similar conclusions decades later. Reader-response theory, the Constance School, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, all of that came much later and says, in essence, that the meaning of a text is not fixed by the author but is actualised in each act of reading, that the reader is a co-creator of meaning, that a text is a score performed differently by every age. This is correct. And it is what Borges said in 1939, in a story that is also funny, which is something that cannot be said of any article produced by the Constance School.
What “Pierre Menard” discovers, or invents, or demonstrates, depending on how you want to look at it, is that reading is a form of creation. Not in the soft, flattering sense of “every reader interprets in their own way,” which is a banality. In a strong sense: every reading produces a new text. The Quixote read by a Spaniard of the seventeenth century is not the same Quixote read by an Argentine of the twentieth. Not metaphorically. Literally. Because meaning does not reside in the words. It resides in the relationship between the words and the mind receiving them, and since no two minds are alike and no two epochs are alike, no text is ever identical to itself.
This has a consequence that is dizzying if you follow it all the way through: there is no such thing as a text. There are as many texts as there are readings. Cervantes’ Quixote is not one book but millions, as many as the people who have read it, and each of those millions is legitimate, and none is definitive, and Cervantes himself holds no interpretive privilege over his own work, because Cervantes, when rereading his own text, was already someone other than the man who wrote it.
Borges doesn’t say all this explicitly in “Pierre Menard.” He doesn’t need to. The story implies it, and implications are more powerful than declarations because the reader discovers them alone, which is always the best way to discover anything.
There is another layer to the story that gets lost if you focus only on the philosophical idea, and it is the comic layer. “Pierre Menard” is very funny. Funny in a dry, restrained, perfectly calibrated way, which is how Borges is funny when he decides to be.
The narrator is a pedant. A man writing Menard’s obituary with the solemnity of someone certain he is making literary history and who fails to notice that what he is describing is absurd. He lists Menard’s visible works with a seriousness that is comic precisely because of its seriousness: articles on Descartes, on the possibility of enriching chess by eliminating a pawn, on an alexandrine poem that reverses chronological order. Titles that sound plausible and are exquisitely ridiculous, presented as though they were meaningful contributions to human thought.
That tone, the tone of the scholar who doesn’t know he’s being funny, is one of Borges’ most brilliant formal inventions. It lets him say radical things with a straight face. It lets him be profound without appearing solemn. And it gives the reader what is one of reading’s finest pleasures: the realisation that you are reading something considerably smarter than it first appears.
The irony in “Pierre Menard” works on several levels at once. It is a parody of academic literary criticism, with its tendency to find depth where there is none and miss the depth that’s actually there. It is a joke about originality, because Menard produces something absolutely original, a text no one has written before, that turns out to be word-for-word identical to a text that already existed. It is a meditation on literary vanity, on the gap between the work and the reputation, on the possibility that a writer’s most important achievement may be something nobody recognises as his.
All of this coexists in a handful of pages without any one level getting in the way of the others. It is like one of those clockwork mechanisms where every part serves multiple functions: the joke is the philosophy, the philosophy is the parody, the parody is the confession, and the confession is the joke.
Every time you read something, you are Pierre Menard. The text is the same. You are not. The book you read at twenty and reread at forty is the same book and a different book, because you are someone else, and your otherness transforms words that haven’t changed. The Quixote read by someone who knows nothing of chivalric romance is a different book from the one read by someone familiar with the novels Cervantes was parodying. The Bible read by a believer is a different book from the one read by an atheist. Not better or worse. Different. Because meaning is not in the ink. It is in the space between the ink and the eyes.
Borges came up with this idea in 1939, in a Buenos Aires literary journal, dressed up as an obituary for a writer who never existed. The Germans took thirty years to reach the same place by a different route, armed with theoretical apparatus, specialised terminology, conferences, and academic publications. Borges did it in a short story that also makes you laugh. There is something in that which confirms the story’s own thesis: sometimes, the same content expressed differently by different people at a different moment yields radically different results. Reader-response aesthetics as an academic discipline is a respectable contribution to literary thought. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is a masterpiece. They say the same thing. They are not the same.