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of the Quixote,” describes, in the voice of a (fictional) bibliographical scholar, the attempt of a (fictional) French novelist to write Cervantes’s Don Quixote. “He did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”23 The scholar-narrator quotes from a long letter he received from his friend Menard: “To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself.”24 Nevertheless—or perhaps we should say therefore—the critical admirer asserts that “Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’.” He thus sees artful irony in certain details of the text, like Don Quixote’s preference of arms over letters: “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!” Where other critics have tried to explain this away, as, for example, “(not at all perspicaciously) a transcription of the Quixote” the scholar suggests that a more plausible explanation “(which I judge to be irrefutable)” was “the influence of Nietzsche,” to which he adds one further suggestion: Menard’s modesty led him, whether by irony or by resignation, to propagate ideas that were the opposite of the ones he believed.25

It’s easy to see what fun Borges had, especially when he produced (still in the persona of the scholar-friend) what is claimed to be a devastating comparison between the two texts—texts that, on the page, look (to the uninitiated) exactly alike:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

… 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.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

… 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.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor—are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.26

This is brilliant as well as comical, and speaks directly to the point. Read through the lens of the present, labeled “pragmatic” because James was a pragmatist, the text of version two (Menard) is compared to the text of version one (Cervantes). Knowing that Menard is a twentieth-century French speaker, we see the foreign and affected tinge in language we previously thought graceful and straightforward. Viewed from the vantage point of a Freudian century and anticipating the mise en abyme of postmodernism, the phrase “mother of truth” makes history a creator rather than a chronicle. “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.”27

André Maurois, commenting on this last sentence, notes that although apparently absurd, it expresses “a real idea: the Quixote