La finzione della finzione. Il ruolo del Chisciotte nei labirinti della metaletteratura borgesiana

Abstract

The fiction of fiction. The role of Quixote in the labirinths of Borgesian metaliterature.
In 1939 Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short and fulminating story (about ten pages in all), entitled Pierre Menard, author of Quixote, later included in the Fiction collection (1944).
The text analyzes and reviews a fictional work of a writer, Pierre Menard, equally fictional. The "fantastic" work is actually the most famous novel in the world, namely Don Quixote. Borges presents Menard's text - completely identical, word for word, to Cervantes' masterpiece (albeit limited to chapters XXVIII and IX of the first tome of the work) - as the result not of copying or of simple transcription or of identification between Menard and Cervantes, but generated directly from Menard's mental life.
With one of the typical slips into the vertigo of Borgesian paradoxes, Pierre Menard will have to be the new author of Quixote to such an extent that the text will have to penetrate the fibers of his writing, preventing him from detaching himself, even by a comma, from the original text of Cervantes.
In the few pages of the story a literary construction takes shape that does not admit a solution of continuity between real and imaginary, fiction and truth, authors and characters, and which deserves to be investigated for its sociological and not just literary repercussions.