Very Bad Wizards

Episode 192: Postmodern Wet Dreams (Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote")

July 7th, 2020  |  1 hr 36 mins

borges, my little pony, nazis, postmodernism, short story

David and Tamler dive into “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a very funny Borges story that also raises deep questions about authorship, reading, and interpretation. What would it mean for the same text to be written by two different authors more than three hundred years apart? Is this story the post-modernist manifesto that literary critics like Roland Barthes believed it to be? Or is the narrator in the story just a delusional sycophant, a victim of Menard’s practical joke – and by extension, a practical joke by Borges on the post-modernist movement to come? Plus, My Little Pony fans finally confront their Nazi problem.