The Comedy of Language in Borges' "La busca de Averroes"
2006; Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/4143878
ISSN1939-9014
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Literature Analysis
Resumoa busca de (Averroes' Search), Borges tells us in an epilogue, is a story of failure: En la historia anterior quise narrar el proceso de una derrota.... Recorde a Averroes, que encerrado en el aimbito del Islam, nunca pudo saber el significado de las voces tragedia 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 (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 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 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-
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