Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. New Directions Publishing Corporation: New York, 1964 (page 40).
Me:
Is transforming reading into an act of authorship sinful? We are not discussing the legalities of plagiarism or even the ethics of copy art, but going to the marrow of morality. The lines between temptation, creation, sin, and beauty intersect. Interpretation quickly morphs by context.
One person’s sin becomes another’s blessing, or perhaps is simply normalized into day-to-day life. To read the Quixote by Cervantes is to read what is considered the first modern novel published in the 17th century, to read the Quixote by Menard is Borges’s opening of authorial possibilities, to read the Quixote by XXX in a new XXX context will have XXX impact.
But the question Borge’s narrator asks the reader is reflective—it is the author looking in the mirror as the reader, as the writer, as the future author, and questioning identity. The intent of the author is to write beyond our own existence. To make the temporal infinite. Which defies our human nature and must, in that sense, be a sin.
Unfortunately, in the same question, Borges´ narrator acknowledges that the same time that makes the work persist has the power to dethrone the original author for new contexts, or new Menards, as you please. Though it is through this act of authorial mortality that new creativity through imagining is inspired.
In short, to be a sinner is to live, and to be a saint is to have lived well.
Chat GPT:
You shall—and Borges would probably smile at you for it.
That move—reading Don Quixote as if Menard had conceived it—is exactly the heretical pleasure the story tempts you into. You’re not just rereading the text; you’re reassigning its authorial gravity. The words don’t change, but their conditions of possibility do, and suddenly the same sentences acquire a different density, irony, even metaphysical weight. What was once baroque exuberance becomes deliberate anachronism; what was naïve sincerity becomes intellectual audacity.
Borges’s quiet joke is that this imaginative act—yours, the reader’s—is more radical than Menard’s fictional labor. Menard pretends to erase Cervantes; you knowingly overlay him. In doing so, you expose how meaning is less a property of texts than of the interpretive frameworks we bring to them. Authorship becomes a lens, not a source.
So yes: to read the Quixote as Menard’s is not a misunderstanding but a kind of complicity. You’re finishing the story in the only way it truly can be finished—by letting the act of reading become an act of creation.
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