Miguel de Cervantes, Author of the Apocryphal Quijote: Borges, ‘Pierre Menard’, and Literary Creation as Apocrypha

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ (1939) and Miguel de Cervantes’s two-part novel (1605 and 1615) in terms of Borges’s notion of the apocryphal. With reference to Borges’s writings on the apocryphal as a productive form of literary creation and interpretation, particularly the way in which he defines the apocryphal in terms of the ‘hidden’ meanings in a text, the article considers Cervantes’s own relation to the apocryphal in his imitation of various literary genres and in his response to Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quijote (1614) in the second part of the novel. By analysing the significance of the chapters from the first part of the Quijote that Menard reproduces, as well as Menard’s explicit refusal to reproduce the prologue to the second part of the Quijote, the article concludes that Menard’s engagement with Cervantean notions of truth, falsehood, and originality (as well as with Cervantes’s own treatment of Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quijote) ironically articulates the apocryphal nature of all ‘original’ literary texts.