One evening, the Muslim merchants of Sin-i-Kalal conducted me to a house of painted wood in which many persons lived. It is not possible to describe that house, which was more like a single room, with rows of cabinet-like contrivances, or balconies, one atop another. In these niches there were people eating and drinking; there were people sitting on the floor as well, and also on a raised terrace. The people on this terrace were playing the tambour and the lute—all, that is, save some fifteen or twenty who wore crimson masks and prayed and sang and conversed among themselves. These masked ones suffered imprisonment, but no one could see the jail; they rode upon horses, but the horse was not to be seen; they waged battle, but the swords were of bamboo; they died, and then they walked again."
"The acts of madmen," said Faraj, "are beyond that which a sane man can envision."
"They were not madmen," abu-al-Hasan had to explain. "They were, a merchant told me, presenting a story."
No one understood, no one seemed to want to understand. Borges Averroës's Search
In La Busca de Averroes -- commonly translated as Averroës's Search but there is something to be said, too, for Averroës's Hunt --, Borges imagines a (presumably) alcohol free, symposium with a lively discussion in twelfth century Córdoba. While the main focus of Borges's "tale" is on Averroës, the main focus of the discussion at this symposium is, initially, the travel tales of Abu-al-Hasan, a quick-witted traveler (whose "memory was a mirror of secret acts of cowardice").
These tales offer, inter alia, a comparison of two great civilizations: golden age Islam and China. Below I note the significance of this fact. In this paragraph I note that The comparison is shown, instead of told--a distinction that Abu-al-Hasan explicitly relies on when he tries to explain what tragedy is to his uncomprehending audience. It thus, exhibits, both the kind of thing that the purported narrator of Borges's tale says he wanted to show, that is, "the process of failure, the process of defeat" as well as an instance of this kind: "Averroës, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy....[that is] Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is." That is, this is an example of the ways in which pre-existing conceptual or cultural 'schemes' prevent us from discerning or grasping 'concepts' or 'content' that fall outside the scheme.
As an aside, the story also instantiates a way -- and it exhibits it without telling us so -- in which one can aim to overcome scheme-induced-failures-of-grasping content. For the story conveys to us what it's like to fail to grasp 'scheme-induced-failure-of-grasping content' through an imaginative. sympathetic identification with Averroës, which in turn involves a kind of, momentary, identification not exactly with Averroës the historical person, but rather the Averroës who is (now quoting the suddenly foregrounded narrator near the very end of the tale) "a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum." (Recall this post.) Here Borges hints, again (recall), at the fragility of identity.
To return to the main point of this post: given the heavy handed articulation by the narrator (the unnamed "I" quoted in the previous paragraph) of 'his' intention, it's easy to overlook that the Chinese performance we are told about by the traveler is about some kind of war or civil war/uprising. These contrast, in fact, with the secret acts of cowardice that crowd the traveler's memory. That is, while the performance may be entertaining, it is, in fact, also political in nature. So, what Borges shows us, is that by lacking comedy and tragedy, the urbane and wealthy, civilized Islamic culture he is describing lacks one of the means to explore the political. It does not lack all means, because it is explicitly noted -- room is made in the taut structure of the tale -- that "Averroës...had written his commentary on [Plato's] the Republic."* But by definition (in Ibn Rushd's philosophy), the commentary on Plato is not really accessible to non-philosophers.
The political hovers over the symposium which is introduced with praise of the rulers ("the incomparable virtues of the governor to those of his brother the emir"); we are not told if it is flattery -- a word that shows up two sentences down -- or not. Shortly thereafter we are shown the dangers of using the wrong words: the traveler finds himself backed into a corner in which, if he were to answer forthrightly, he "would be judged an infidel." Cleverly enough "He opted to breathe that Allah held the keys that unlock hidden things, and that there was no green or wilted thing on earth that was not recorded in His Book. Those words belong to one of the first suras of the Qur'an." The last quoted sentence shows the subtle hand of the narrator who is aware of his reader's ignorance--the learned participants at the symposium (at the house of a "Quranist!"), would not have needed that bit of editorializing. More amusingly and artfully, the quoted sentence (Surah 6:59) points us to the learned practice in which philosophy is associated with the study of both the hidden bits of nature and the esoteric teachings of the Quran.* That looks to be the end of the political issues discussed at the symposium. But when they turn to poetry, Averroës is quoted as follows:
Furthermore (and this is perhaps the essential point of my reflections), time, which ravages fortresses and great cities, only enriches poetry. At the time it was composed by him in Arabia, Zuhayr's poetry served to bring together two images—that of the old camel and that of destiny; repeated today, it serves to recall Zuhayr and to conflate our own tribulations with those of that dead Arab. The figure had two terms; today, it has four. Time widens the circle of the verses, and I myself know some verses that are, like music, all things to all men.
The meaning of a poetic text is not stable; in the absence of a firm authority, it multiplies over time and sometimes they support any interpretation. (Some other time, I'll discuss Ibn Rushd's treatment of this very theme in the Decisive Treatise.) It is hard not to see here an allusion to the problems of unstable identity/meaning that beset all religious traditions that rely on a revealed (poetic) text (such as the Quran). Saying the totality of all things is a property not just of the Quran, but also of other poetry: he "spoke of the first poets, those who in the Time of Ignorance, before Islam, had already said all things in the infinite language of the deserts."
All of this semantic instability and polysemy may be thought to undermine the role of revelation. But in the tale, Averroës turns this fact into an argument against poetic and religious innovation. This pleases even flatters his traditionalist audience: "The others listened with pleasure, for he was vindicating that which was old."
*In fact, the date of the Symposium coincides with the composition of the "eleventh chapter of his... Tahãfutal-Tahafut."
**One wonders if Borges's the author is more learned than his narrator, who claims to be drawing only on a "few snatches from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios."
***While the tale's Averroës' attack on a kind of natural theology in which nature is treated as a divine text that tells of the superiority of Islam [the narrator reminds the reader of Hume here] is interesting, perhaps more interesting is that shortly thereafter Averroës is exhibited as somebody who knows when to be silent not because he would spoil the party, but because "he could see that theology was one subject utterly beyond the grasp of his" interlocutor. That is, Borges's Averroës conforms to the philosophy of Averroës (as say exhibited in the Decisive Treatise) in which the learned must show self-command when talking with the less learned (recall).
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