Borges and Don Quixote
Souillot, Florent
Borges and Don Quixote - 2006.
30
Since his first playful attempts at rewriting when he was a child until his final projects, Borges remained haunted by Don Quixote. This becomes clear when we recall the importance of a short story such as Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote. Without elaborating further on the meaning of a short story already so often commented upon, this paper focuses on Borges’s perspective as a reader and a critic, fascinated as he was by the figure of Cervantes and very keen on the “partial magic” concealed in his work. Through this surprising approach, which was very different from that of Spanish readers, Borges focuses on the writer, his relationship with Don Quixote, and even more deeply on his way of upsetting the traditional balance between reality and fiction, hence the mirror narration, a baroque practice surprisingly still present in late short stories by Borges such as Guayaquil and El Evangelio según Marcos ( El Informe de Brodie).
Borges and Don Quixote - 2006.
30
Since his first playful attempts at rewriting when he was a child until his final projects, Borges remained haunted by Don Quixote. This becomes clear when we recall the importance of a short story such as Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote. Without elaborating further on the meaning of a short story already so often commented upon, this paper focuses on Borges’s perspective as a reader and a critic, fascinated as he was by the figure of Cervantes and very keen on the “partial magic” concealed in his work. Through this surprising approach, which was very different from that of Spanish readers, Borges focuses on the writer, his relationship with Don Quixote, and even more deeply on his way of upsetting the traditional balance between reality and fiction, hence the mirror narration, a baroque practice surprisingly still present in late short stories by Borges such as Guayaquil and El Evangelio según Marcos ( El Informe de Brodie).
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