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The Comedy of Language in Borges' “La Busca De Averroes”

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The Comedy of Language in Borges' “La Busca De Averroes” The Comedy of Language in Borges’ “La busca de Averroes” E. Joseph Sharkey University of Washington “ a busca de Averroes” (“Averroes’ Search”), Borges tells us in an epilogue, L is a story of failure: “En la historia anterior quise narrar el proceso de una derrota…. Recordé a Averroes, que encerrado en el ámbito del Islam, nunca pudo saber el significado de las vocestragedia y comedia” (310) [“In the foregoing story, I tried to narrate the process of a defeat…. I remembered Averroes who, closed within the orb of Islam, could never know the meaning of the terms tragedy and comedy” (155)]. Borges delights in the irony that Averroes, the 12th-century Spanish Muslim philosopher so famous for his commentaries on Aristotle, could fail to comprehend these rather unmysterious terms so fundamental to the Poetics. Most of Borges’ critics, better poets than historians, take this particular plot as just another instance of the universal one they see in all stories, the tragedy of language. But the critical consensus about the limitations of language in Borges’ stories is too negative, and too simplistic, even with regard to those cases in which Borges himself affirms or seems to affirm it. Like an alarmist chorus, the critics cry that the gods of language go down whenever their oracles fail to travel like Hermes, winging perfectly across time, place, and mind: Averroes fails to translate tragedy and comedy, and we refuse ever again to go reverent to the altars of the word gods.1 Of course, the word “gods” can seem rather clumsy, or perhaps it is just that we don’t know how to worship them. Consider that today our access to Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy is far greater than Averroes’, yet we have no consensus about a definition of the term. We also have many rival definitions of comedy, but perhaps that is more excusable given that Aristotle’s discourse on the topic is as lost to us Westerners as it was to Averroes. I find two definitions of comedy relevant to “La busca de Averroes.” The first is the simple, traditional one that we may associate with Dante: a story that ends happily. The second is more complex, though still too narrow to fit many comic plays: a parody of a tragedy, in which events that would bring great pain in a tragic story turn out not to be very painful, and yet, or rather therefore, the characters fail to learn the wisdom that is the consolation of tragic suffering; this wisdom is nevertheless available to attentive members of the audi- SPRING 2006 ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 53 E. Joseph Sharkey ence. As for Borges’ imaginary Averroes, we could follow the prompt of the epilogue and understand him to suffer a modest tragedy in his hermeneutical failure, but I would argue that his story is fundamentally comic, in both of the senses defined above: his single failure sits atop a heap of successes, and yet in the exceptional episode dramatized by Borges, his chance for enlightenment passes him by. More thoroughly comic, in the second sense, is the story of Borges himself and many of his critics: they fail to see the lesson about language that has been paraded before them. They cast language as a failure, when in fact “La busca de Averroes” repeat- edly celebrates it as conqueror of history, culture, and subjectivity. I will attempt a reversal here and for help will occasionally turn suppliant before a modern-day oracle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who, because of his understanding of the relation between the particular and the universal, has more in common with Aristotle than might be supposed. Jon Stewart offers a representative reading of “La busca”: “The short story presents us with a thesis about the intimate connection between culture and language and the ultimate futility of translation and crosscultural knowledge and comprehen- sion” (321). According to Ana María Barrenechea’s closely related interpretation, the story reveals to us that “Borges siente como escritor que las experiencias son inefables porque es inútil querer traducir con palabras comunes a todos lo único de cada individuo y de cada circunstancia” (78) [“As a writer, Borges feels that experiences are unutterable because of the uselessness of translating the essence of each individual and circumstance with words that are common to all” (80)]. Gene Bell-Villada’s reading, which is helpful for the historical context about Averroes it offers, combines the main points of the other two: “the problem at the thematic center of ‘Averroës’s Search,’” he writes, is the degree to which any serious attempt to understand materials foreign to one’s experience—whether the materials be an institution, an art form, or even an individual—will inevitably run up against the socially formed perceptions of the observer (an idea well known to anthropologists). Indeed, the narrative suggests, through Averroës as well as Borges, that such an enterprise is ultimately hopeless. Inevitably an observer relies on the artifacts and terms received from his or her own time and culture, and any “understanding” yielded by thought and research is only an approximate and partial view of the subject matter. (173) Thus the critics identify two obstacles for language: the gap between different cul- tures, especially cultures divided by time, and the gap between different individuals, even individuals within the same culture. In each case, language fails to cross the gap. Is that failure, then, the lesson of “La busca de Averroes”? 5 4 ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW SPRING 2006 Borges’ “La busca de Averroes” It may be the lesson of Averroes’ mistranslation of tragedy and comedy, but we shall see that it is clearly not the lesson of the story as a whole. First we should describe the obstacles as Borges presents them. As an example of the second kind, consider the incident from the story Barrenechea cites as evidence of Borges’ opinion that common words are useless for translating unique experiences. She quotes a character named Abulcasim who hesitates when asked to tell a story from his exotic travels: La memoria de Abulcásim era un espejo de íntimas cobardías. ¿Qué podía referir? Además, le exigían maravillas y la maravilla es acaso incomunicable: la luna de Bengala no es igual a la luna del Yemen, pero se deja describir con las mismas voces. (306) [Abulcasim’s memory was a mirror of intimate cowardices. What could he tell? Besides, they demanded marvels of him and marvels are perhaps incommunicable; the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it may be described in the same words. (151)] The complaint Abulcasim makes and Barrenechea accepts is unreasonable. What would be the remedy? A language equipped with two words: one for Bengalese moons and another for Yemenite moons and so on? Borges does not intend us to take his character’s complaint too seriously here: one ought not to expect “marvels” to be fully communicable, certainly, but surely we can communicate our percep- tion of the moon from disparate places if we use words prudently or poetically, as Borges himself consistently does. As a younger man, however, Borges does seem to have shared Abulcasim’s frus- tration. He takes it to its logical extension in “Palabrerías para versos” [“Palaver for Poems”], an essay written in 1926 and thus twenty-three years before “La busca.” Here the twenty-something Borges suggests that because a given human experience is unique, only a unique word could properly name it: El mundo aparencial es complicadísimo y el idioma sólo ha efectuado una parte muy chica de las combinaciones infatigables que podrían llevarse a cabo con él. ¿Por qué no crear una palabra, una sola, para la percepción conjunta de los cencerros insistiendo en la tarde y de la puesta de sol en la lejanía? ¿Por qué no inventar otra para el ruinoso y amenazador ademán que muestran en la madrugada las calles? ¿Y otra para la buena voluntad, conmovedora de puro ineficaz, del primer farol en el atardecer aún claro? … Sé lo que hay de utópico en mis ideas y la lejanía entre una posibilidad intelectual y una real, pero confío en el tamaño del porvenir y en que no será menos amplio que mi esperanza. (49) [The world of appearances is extremely complex and language has only brought into being a very small share of the inexhaustible combinations that might be realized in it. Why not create a word, a single word, for the joint perception of SPRING 2006 ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 55 E. Joseph Sharkey cowbells declaring the evening and the setting sun in the distance? Why not in- vent another for the dilapidated, threatening look of the streets at daybreak? And another for the good will, touching in its utter inefficacy, of the first streetlight in the undimmed daylight? … I am aware of the utopian quality of my ideas, as I am of the distance between an intellectual possibility and a real one, but I have confidence in the size of the future, and that it will be no less expansive than my hope.] The critics who cite this passage do so without much scrutiny. James E. Irby calls the passage Borges’ “admittedly utopian aspiration toward a language of new and more comprehensive signs” (98). Barrenechea introduces it as Borges’ dream of “la creación futura de términos adecuados a las representaciones poéticas” (79) [“the future creation of terms adequate for poetical representation” (80-81)]. Both critics seem to accept Borges’ supposition that the language he imagines would improve upon the languages we already have. But a moment’s reflection discovers the confusion of Borges’ hope, on both aes- thetic and logical grounds.
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