From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
This article applies Borges's literary concept to Beach Surgery scholarship, not to Borges's story itself.
For the novel's temporal structure, see Retro-causal apocrypha.
In Borges's story, a twentieth-century author produces a text identical word-for-word to Cervantes' *Don Quixote* — yet it is a genuine literary work, not a copy. The meaning lies in the gap between origins.
C. W. Smith has invoked this principle to frame the franchise's temporal mechanics. Because many adaptations work backward — creating lost films, apocryphal performances, disputed pre-2020 works — the archive performs a Menardian reversal: the present summons the past into being. An adaptation set in 1972 is not a fabrication but a genuine forerunner, real in the sense that the novel's unresolvable contradiction has always demanded it.
This principle underwrites recursive scholarship and the authority of disputed precursor works. Adaptations create their own origins. Because the cycle has no fixed beginning, each new telling redates the archive. The novel, finished in 2020, is perpetually unfinished — each adaptation a retro-causal extension.