Pierre Menard the Sur-realist

Jorge Luis Borges openly rejected surrealism as “snobbish chitchat,” and most scholars have taken such statements of his at face value. Research into the surrealist magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Victoria Ocampo’s papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library, show just the opposite. This article uses archival and published sources to trace the literary network that brought Pierre Menard from the surrealists to the pages of Sur, in order to reveal Borges’ intimate connection to the surrealists from whom he always sought to distance himself. This connection crystallizes in the ambiguous figure of the Comte de Lautréamont, apostle of plagiarism as artistic method, who himself was the subject of a graphological analysis by the real Dr. Pierre Menard, published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in the very month that Borges published his seminal story in Sur.