Borges has a style of world-creation that challenges fundamental notions about what is real, or what has meaning. Take the arena of university scholarship, in which academics take great pains to provide proof of their sources, to "verify" their claims, to back up their "authority" in order to say the things they're saying. This is the hallowed ground, the rules of which are taught in college to future generations of scholars. In "Pierre Menard," the premise is that a scholar is defending and proving the value of his friend, Pierre Menard. To do so, he uses the tricks of academic rhetoric--quotation, citation, logic, claims, argument. But the very idea of Menard's work is indefensible: Menard was engaged in (re)writing a book that had been composed three hundred years earlier. Furthermore, his expressed goal was to
lose all evidence of his struggle to achieve this work.
Ha, ha, ha, ha! In the world Borges was satirizing, or at the very least, confronting, people take pride and great comfort in ownership and material gain. It is the proof of self-worth. It seems that Borges wrote the estimable opposite of the Superman, a man who embraces monumentally futile work. Consider the author's description of Menard's project: "He resolved to outstrip that vanity which awaits all the woes of mankind; he undertook a task that was complex in the extreme and futile from the outset."
In the end, Borges's narrator links Menard and Jesus Christ. Or, at least he links Don Quixote and Christ. Or perhaps just the authors of the texts: Cervantes and generations of biblical scribes. For all would-be writers: Do you care how people read what you write? What are you writing? What is writing you?
And now, I'll not comment at length on "Funes, the Memorious," as I hope to read comments that consider this story in terms of world-building. Memory: another type of world building. Another type of unreality. Another narrative form, one that walks the tightropes of "truth" and "meaning."