Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, is a short story by Borges. The text imagines a 20th-century French writer, Pierre Menard, who publishes an edition of the Quixote, that is exactly the same as Miguel de Cervantes’ original, word-for-word, but has his name, Menard, on it.
I can’t say for sure what Borges meant by this story. I can tell U that it has taken root in my mind. I’ve made a series of jokes over the years about Menard. pierre menard’s metta phrase. pierre menard’s toot. pierre menard’s sexts.
me and the three other people who’ve read Pierre Menard find these jokes hilarious. Well, I find them hilarious, and the others get the joke. 😂
To me, the story Menard poses the question: if U take the same text, and a different person says it, at a different point in time, is it meaningfully different? I would say, no, Menard didn’t write the Quixote, Cervantes did. Cervantes is worthy of all that glory. Probably, most people would agree with me.
fun fact: the First Lieutenant Governor of Illinois was named Pierre Menard!
But what if U change another variable?
What if U change one word? Ten words? What if U change the gender of the character? What if U change it so it’s set in space?
To my mind, with each change of a variable—even a small variable—the degree to which a creation is plagiarized goes down, and the degree to which it is generative, creative, art goes up.
Posting on Twitter for years has afforded me an interesting lens on considering these questions.
If a different person or account posts the exact same text as another, it can have a radically different effect or result, leading to wildly different replies or interactions. Consider the same question posted by different accounts, or by the same account at different times, moments in history.
And often, someone can take someone else’s post, change it ever so slightly (or a lot), and make it meaningfully different in terms of what it says, what it means, what the impact on the reader or the world is.
I could point to a thousand different example, but here’s a very specific, concrete example that came up recently. Forgive me while we wade into some extremely online drama that will perhaps not matter very much to those who are not on Twitter, and may not matter very much to those who are, either.
For quite some time, my friend Loopy has posted a series of tweets that start with “oh to be a girl.” He’ll take a recent post from a woman on the timeline, a post that highlights the experience of being a woman in a notable, memorable way, and rephrase it to begin with the phrase “oh to be a girl who.”
After a recent example of this, Goblinodds posted back, saying “bro what why would you tweet this” with a link to the original. Loopy replied that this was an ongoing art project. Both Goblinodds and Brooke put forth arguments that this behavior was creepy and undesired. Mary Zoso replied that she’d always found the tweets very sweet. As a result, Loopy paused on creating these tweets.
With all due respect to Goblinodds, Brooke, and anyone else who took the perfectly reasonable opinion of objecting to the posts, I would like to disagree on the record with that perspective! No one asked my opinion—and I am not a woman, nor did Loopy do this with my tweets—but I think this was a loss for the community, that Loopy paused posting these tweets! We actively discouraged someone from creating, from putting something out into the world.
For starters, I think Loopy is entitled to his account and his art, and that prefixing “oh to be a girl who” is already sufficiently original. I’ve personally appreciated the curation this provides, both in a given week or month—it often alerts me to tweets I wouldn’t have come across otherwise, but are interesting to me—and over time, seeing the tweets as a curated whole by searching his account for the relevant phrase.
If I were Loopy, if this were my project, I would personally do it by quote-tweeting the original as attribution, but that’s an artistic choice and I wouldn’t want to force that on anyone.
A woman who didn’t want their tweets remixed in this way could proactively request that Loopy not do so with their tweets (something I feel confident he would be happy to honor), or even block him to honor their own boundaries without attempting to control his expression.
For myself, for my own projects, I value attribution. If my work is based on another’s art, I would like to credit them where possible.
And to return to the original text: I think Menard poses a question of, what is a meaningful difference? And points out that it might be smaller than you think.
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