Comment by lkm0

Menard's Quixote is also one of my favorites. I feel it illustrates almost in a mean way the futility and arrogance of analyzing a work through its author's life and intention. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this kind of literary analysis was still popular in Borges' time and place, but in France up to the early 20th century, an influential critic called Sainte-Beuve was claiming with great success that any work could be entirely (and scientifically) analyzed and elucidated by interviewing the author's friends, partners, by sniffing out their secret habits and what not -- and I assume Borges must've been aware of it, having been educated in early 20th century French-speaking Switzerland. If I had another life I'd probably do another PhD thesis on Borges vs Sainte-Beuve. Fun fact: Marcel Proust was so mad at Sainte-Beuve that it got him out of his writer's block; In Search of Lost Time is an anti-Sainte-Beuve essay that got out of hand.