The Composer Has No Clothes

In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a fictional French writer recreates, word for word, chapters from Cervantes’s famous novel. The new version is not intended as a mere copy but as a subterranean reworking: “To be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous—and consequently less interesting—than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard,” writes Borges’s narrator, a fictional literary critic. The story shows the mind-tangling complexities behind the seemingly simple idea of authorship. Tristan Foison, a real-life French fabulist who built a career on plagiarism, might be considered Menard’s counterpart in the august realm of classical music.