Introduction
In May of 1939, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was published in its original Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur. This fictional piece is written as if it were a literary criticism of Pierre Menard’s work as the author of the novel Don Quixote. From the very title of the piece, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Borges has set the reader against what they believe to be true. As the story continues, Borges lists the works of Pierre Menard creating a chilling dissonance for the reader by mixing real and imagined works to create Menard’s résumé. This résumé is meant then to build up confidence in the fictional reader that Menard is a trustworthy academic, but for the actual reader, Menard is a fictional character and yet his work is almost plausible because it mentions real academics and their work woven together with the fictional work. This differs from historical fiction which takes place in a real time and real history and yet is not actually historical, but it is instead an alternative history, suggesting a different world that is close to our own. This speculative fiction story is believed by some to be the first Postmodernist work or perhaps a proto-postmodernist piece.

How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been though before me by another.[1]

Alifano: So that in concurring with Plato's definition, you would accept the idea that poetry is, above all, an aesthetic act?
Borges: Yes. I still believe that poetry is the aesthetic act; that poetry is not the poem, for the poem may be nothing more than a series of symbols...Poetry is a magical, mysterious, unexplainable - although not incomprehensible - event.[5]

The Sum (La Suma) Jorge Luis Borges, 198, Translation by A. S. Kline

The silent friendliness of the moon
(misquoting Virgil) accompanies you
since that one night or evening lost
in time now, on which your restless
eyes first deciphered her forever
in a garden or patio turned to dust.
Forever? I know someone, someday
will be able to tell you truthfully:
You’ll never see the bright moon again,
You’ve now achieved the unalterable
sum of moments granted you by fate.
Useless to open every window
in the world. Too late. You’ll not find her.
We live discovering and forgetting
that sweet familiarity of the night.
Take a long look. It might be the last.

[70] An updated version of the “conflict” between Menard and Cervantes is embodied in an quote from a Bush aide. It appeared in a New York Times Magazine article, Oct. 17, 2004, and was later attributed to Karl Rove. It pits those that are influenced by facts against those that (take your pick) create them or make them up. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[7]

You can't give him the benefit of the doubt on this, and he's telling you what was in his heart? You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.[8]