In an influential essay on Borges and his lessons for literary criticism, Gérard Genette, in his first volume of Figures, pays particular attention to the Argentine's celebrated parable of Pierre Menard, “Symbolist from Nîmes,” and his quixotic decision not to copy, but to rewrite – “word for word and line for line” – Cervantes' masterwork. The specific techniques brought to the art of reading by Menard's exploit, writes the narrator, are those of “deliberate anachronism” and “erroneous attribution.” Genette warms to Borges' suggestion, but ultimately veers toward a more “structuralist” intuition that, in the last analysis, authorial attribution itself – be it true or false – is our critical error or self-imposed impoverishment. The true Borgesian payoff, Genette suggests, comes with the awareness that literature itself may be read as a vast anonymous text, reversible in time, homogeneous in space: “l'utopie littéraire,” as he entitles his piece. As though the critic, in Paris, were inclined to read Menard's Nîmes the way Jarry reads Ubu's Poland – as nowhere.

No, it will be responded, not Jarry's Poland, but Valéry's Montpellier, barely an hour's drive from Nîmes. Menard, after all, is cousin to Monsieur Teste, and Genette has but reclaimed for French letters one of the extreme possibilities dreamed by France's premier poetician. Perhaps. Yet consider that with the displacement of Menard, the westering of Nîmes, the piquancy of Borges' text has been obliterated. If the “rhetorical eulogy of history” Borges quotes from Cervantes is not imagined as written by “a contemporary of William James,” Anachronism loses its hold on the text. If its author is no one in particular, Erroneous Attribution drops out of the equation.