Borges in the library of Alonso Quijano

Abstract

Beyond his essays on Don Quixote or that address some aspects of it, his critical opinions on the novel expressed in numerous reports and dialogue books, his partial and fragmentary literary recreations of the great character, and the theory of fiction and reading implicit in the magnificent narrative exercise of "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote", Borges has left a precious interpretive key to the great work of Cervantes in three poems dedicated to Alonso Quijano: the sonnets "Readers" and "Alonso Quijano dreams", and "I'm not even dust". Based on the analysis of the first of the aforementioned poetic texts, and with eventual support in the other two, this article aims to define and analyze the peculiar Borgean conception of Don Quixote as a great interspersed or second degree story, of a dreamlike nature, which narrates never occurred and only imagined adventures of Alonso Quijano, and link this hermeneutics –which implies a virtual rewriting of the work, in tune with the example of Menard– with the analogous structural resolutions of some of Borges' most emblematic short stories, such as "The South" and "Circular Ruins".