Semiological approaches between Barthes and Borges: the artificial myth in "Pierre Menard, autor do Quixote"

Abstract

Both critical-essayistic and fictional writings by Jorge Luis Borges question notions such as copy, originality, source and influence: in essence, the mythology constituted around Authorship. First published in 1939, the short story “Pierre Menard, autor do Quixote” (2007) demystifies the myth of the author by architecting a character who proposes to rewrite Dom Quixote, the greatest novel in Spanish language. Contemporaries, Borges in Latin America and Barthes in Europe, the geographical, political and social distances did not restrain interpretative correspondences between the authors when it comes to the Text. In 1968, with the outbreak of “A morte do autor” (2012), Roland Barthes undermines the individualistic conception of the theoretical field by weaving the character of the writer as a modern creation; and declares that the death of the Author is the only subterfuge that makes the birth of the reader possible. Since the meaning of Authorship is constructed by a theft of language, it is possible to categorize it as a myth, naturalized and perpetuated throughout History. From this perspective, and based on the methodology of Mitologias (1972), this article explores whether the death of Cervantes, supposedly murdered by the Menardian Text, produces a counter mythical artistic phenomenon.