Pierre Menard: reader-creator

Abstract

The writer Jorge Luis Borges reproduces in his artifice "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" (1939, originally) the concept of palimpsest and establishes through this a poetics of reading (Monegal), executed by its own author. Menard becomes an archetypical character who ironically emulates the writing of the precursors recovering the interstices of the past, that is to say, the return to the tradition, work executed by Borges and the well-known poet Haroldo de Campos and his synchronic poetic. There is a disintegration of time and space in the writing of this artifice, and Menard becomes an illustrative example that outlines the literature as a set of interrelated fragments. The notion of author is abolished, according to each epoch the text will be read in a different way: the conditions of receipt of a text do not depend on the author but on the experience of the reader. Borges announces through this text the infinite character of literature.