In "Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote" is Menard an analogy for a critical lens?

Question

In *Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote* by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator of the work talks about how when he read *Don Quixote* after having been told that Pierre Menard had rewritten it with the same words, he could feel a new life coming from the page and new meaning in every word. Was this solely a satire of the ridiculousness of over-reliance on authorial intent or was it also an analogy for critical lenses?

Answer 1

Good question! Or, as a third possibility, is it an examination of how the same idea is different depending on who has it and when they have it?

One very charged but more vivid way of thinking about it is the conversations we're having now about who is allowed to tell racially specific stories. Would you see "BlackKklansman" and "Green Book" differently if Peter Farrelly and Spike Lee suddenly admitted that they had each really made the other movie and had spent a year deceiving audiences?

That's not exactly the same thought experiment Borges, who was actually a woman, by the way, is running, but it's similar. What thought process led Cervantes to put those words in that order? And what thought process would you have to go through now to end up with the same words in the same order?

Not to say either of the two possibilities you raised is wrong, but just to outline another one. Borges was certainly both a game-player and a critic, so satire and analogy for criticism are both definitely valid. How do you understand the story in each of those contexts? Also, Borges wasn't a woman, but did anything change in how you read his work when I said that?