Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1939

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Themes

Relationship Between Reader and Author

One of the most interesting aspects of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is its exploration of the relationship between reader and author. One way of approaching literary criticism is to use a “reader-response” lens. A reader-response lens is used to evaluate the reader's reaction to a literary text as a substitute for the text itself. With this lens, what a text is cannot be separated from what it does. Readers actively make meaning out of the text instead of passively reading a predetermined narrative. This is in contrast to other schools of criticism which instead typically focus on the work’s content and form.

To that end, the very premise of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is designed to explore and test that focus. If the goal of the critic in writing this essay is to compare and contrast each version of Don Quixote, then the identical nature of the texts would make any sort of comparative analysis regarding the actual content and structure of the works impossible. However, it still allows for a type of reader-response criticism, since the historical context of the two works differs. Therefore, the centrality of the importance of historical context to a literary work, which is the position that the critic takes within the story, is reinforced.

In the final paragraph of the story, the critic writes that “Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution” (Paragraph 44). This admission brings the reader-response focus of his criticism into the light. Rather than analyzing Menard’s contributions to the world of writing, the critic instead focuses on Menard’s contributions to reading itself. That is, he has not changed writing so much as he has changed reading. In the world of this story, Don Quixote has already been written, so writing it again does not add much to the world of writing. However, reading a contemporary version of Don Quixote changes the historical context in which it is read, inviting interpretations that could not otherwise exist and therefore affecting the landscape and perspective of readers.

This consistent reflection on the impact of writing on readers demonstrates how literature is also dialogue. Our interpretations of various literary works would not be possible without comparing those works to each other. The very method of criticism that the critic employs from the outset engages in comparison; as the critic writes in introducing Menard’s Don Quixote, “Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’” (Paragraph 32). Critically analyzing a work of literature is, the story asserts, impossible without engaging that work in a dialogue with others.

Visible Versus Hidden Work

One of the primary concerns of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is that of visible versus hidden work. This distinction is developed within the very first sentence of the story; the critic starts off by saying that “[t]he visible oeuvre left by this novelist can be easily and briefly enumerated” (Paragraph 1). The idea that Menard has a visible oeuvre implies the existence of a second, hidden oeuvre, perhaps hidden by some sort of unavailability to the general public.

The critic declares that Menard’s visible accomplishments are “easily enumerated” (Paragraph 3). However, the list that follows is anything but easy; instead, the critic’s list is 19 items long, most of which contain obscure, dense references to other works. As with the Relationship Between Reader and Author, the critic is primarily concerned with how Menard’s work reflects a dialogue with other authors. The content of the list also reinforces this notion. Menard himself apparently focused heavily on translation, criticism, and response; the majority of the works listed seem to be types of direct responses to other works of literature. The density of the entries in this list, while being humorous, also demonstrates the limits of criticism. It seems impossible to fully engage with Menard’s work without engaging, as well, in all of the various works that he has interpreted and analyzed, a task that would be nearly impossible for anyone who is not a literary critic.

However, despite the importance of Menard’s visible work in pushing the critic to write this fictional essay, Menard’s hidden work is what the critic spends the latter half of the essay analyzing. The critic calls this hidden work “the most significant writing of our time” and an “interminably heroic production” (Paragraph 23). The critic views Menard’s unpublished work to be even greater than his published work, despite its unfinished nature.

This dichotomy sets up an interesting contrast in the way that the critic decides to interpret the two types of Menard’s work. The visible work, the published work that reflects and comments on the society and culture around it, is subject to being tainted by malicious actors; however, the hidden work, unpublished and unfinished, can be considered more significant due to how its hidden nature keeps it free from outside corruption.

This difference in approach between the two types of work also ties into the critic’s impetus for writing this piece in the first place: to correct the record of Mme. Henri Bachelier’s mistakes in cataloging the visible work. However, the critic spends the second half of the piece exclusively analyzing Menard’s hidden work, which shows the relative importance placed on the hidden work’s purity: It remains untainted by association with those who could misinterpret it.

Finding Meaning in Literature

The structure and perspective of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” raises a number of questions, one of the most central being: How do readers make meaning out of the literature they read? The critic takes a perspective on this meaning-making, which leans into comparative analysis, rather than purely interpreting the words on the page as they are.

The critic challenges the readership to make meaning out of comparing two identical texts without bringing in historical context, and values the meaning made from Menard’s Don Quixote above any of the works that Menard might have published during his lifetime. The critic’s analysis, though, consistently leans on the meaning generated by the difference in contexts between Menard’s and Cervantes’s times. For instance, when discussing the writing style of each author, the critic writes that “[t]he archaic style of Menard—who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes—is somewhat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness” (Paragraph 39).

One of these author’s writing styles is “affected,” and the other is written with “complete naturalness”—despite that both texts are identical on the page. This difference in evaluation of style, then, could have only come from the individual historical context of each book. “Death of the author,” therefore, cannot apply to Menard’s Don Quixote; it would be impossible to read both books and comparatively analyze them, because the only thing that can distinguish Menard’s Don Quixote from the original and thus lend it meaning is the historical context in which it was produced.