Part One: Abstract is due May 7 at 10PM EST Part Two: 5 page (minimum) paper isn’t due until May 13 at 11:00PM EST. So this part does not have to be sent back to me by the due date set on this website

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hispania This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 201 Borges, Averroes, Aristotle: The Poetics of Poetics Daniel Balderston Tulane University Abstract: Borges's appropriations of literary theory are mischievous, undermining the grand, universalizing claims of theory. His strategies are clearly exemplified in "La busca de Averroes," which shows not only Averroes's difficulties in explicating Aristotle's Poetics but also Borges's own difficulties in depicting Averroes in his otherness in twelfth-century Islamic Spain. Ultimately the story is a parable of the impossibility of theory, a swerve from the general to the particular. Key Words: Borges (Jorge Luisyf $ Y H U U R H V % X V F D G H $ Y H U U R H V $ U L V W R W O H S R H W L F V O L W H U D U \ W K H R U \ 2 U L H Q W D O L V m La palabra corsarias corre el albur de despertar un recuerdo vagamente inc6modo: el de una descolorida zarzuela, con sus teorias de evidentes mucamas, que hacian de piratas coreogrificas en mares de notable cart6n. Borges, Obras completas (306yf 1 As Borges reminds us in the open- ing sentence of "La viuda Ching, kpirata" (in Historia universal de la infamia, 1935yf W K H R U \ L Q * U H H N P H D Q W I H V - tival" or "procession." Dario uses the word "teoria" in the same unusual sense in "El reino interior" (1896yf 3 R U H O O D G R G H U H F K o del camino adelante, / el paso leve, una adorable teoria / virginal. Siete blancas doncellas, semejantes / a siete blancas rosas de gracia y de armonia / que el alba constelara de perlas y diamantes" (67yf . Borges's use of the word is considerably more transgressive than Dario's in that he shoves the word from a "high" cultural con- text to a "low" one. By carnivalizing this solemn philosophical word, by turning the Greek word from religious procession to can-can, Borges, as is often his wont, deflates the notion of high seriousness or pure abstraction, here with a grotesque, even a pathetic image: the "evidentes mucamas" are domestic servants who as- pire to be vaudeville dancers but do not quite succeed. But if "La viuda Ching, pirata" ends up as a vindication of the life of a female pirate, moving from the ridicu- lous to the sublime, so Borges is-at least for our time-one of the world authors most frequented by "theory," high and low, pure and applied. In what follows I will be mostly concerned with the presence of the found- ing text of literary theory, Aristotle's Poet- ics, in the 1947 story "La busca de Averroes," hoping to suggest new ways to read the re- lation between "Borges" and "theory." From Genette and Foucault to de Man and Bloom, from Pierre Macherey to John Frow, Borges is invoked at any number of key moments in the theoretical discussions of the last thirty years. Borges has been subjected to all types of readings: structur- alist, Bakhtinian, Derridean, Marxist, Lacanian, feminist and queer, philosophical, scientific, new historicist and cultural stud- ies, postcolonial, religious, etc. etc. In fact, the MLA bibliography lists "applications of the theories of' the following to Borges: Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Spitzer, Girard, Bakhtin, Peirce, Eco, Robbe-Grillet, Genette, Amado Alonso, Jung, de Man, Eliade, Mario Valdes, Ricoeur, Berkeley, Carlyle, Propp, Greimas, Benjamin, Said, Cassirer, Steiner, and others, as well as the applications of such other kinds of theory as chaos theory, game theory, semiotics, quantum theory, translation theory and so forth. It seems from this astonishing cata- This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 202 HISPANIA 79 MAY 1996 logue that we are only lacking a Buddhist- Leninist reading of El libro de arena with applications of the theories of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Joseph Campbell, but no doubt someone, somewhere is writing a dissertation or an article along those lines. Borges's writings show his great famil- iarity with literary criticism: John Livingston Lowes's The Road to Xanadu, Dante criti- cism, Old Norse and Old English criticism, Valery, Eliot, Stuart Gilbert's book on Ulysses (praised as being worth reading in- stead of the Joyce novel itself [232]yf F U L W L - cism of gauchesque poetry, etc. He seems less interested in literary theory per se. There are two key references to Aristotle's Poetics-in "La busca de Averroes" and in "El pudor de la historia" (583, 754yf W K H O D W - ter to remark that Aeschylus increased the number of actors from one to two-and a few scattered references to Croce, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, and the James/ Stevenson debates on narrative theory. Borges makes no direct reference to the Russian formalists, Burke, the New Critics, even to Forster's Aspects of the Novel, or- perhaps because of blindness, perhaps from disinterest-to more recent schools of theory. But the theory/criticism distinction is undermined in Borges because "theoreti- cal" arguments may be embedded in fic- tional plots, in critical essays, even in the short prose pieces of El hacedor. For in- stance, the central theoretical insight in "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote"-that a text comes to be when read and rewritten- first appears in an essay, "La fruici6n literaria," in El idioma de los argentinos (1928yf D Q G S U H G D W H V W K H . R Q V W D Q ] V F K R R l of the "aesthetics of reception" and Stanley Fish's "reader response theory" by some forty years. In "La fruici6n literaria," Borges proposes a conundrum: that the meaning of a text varies greatly depending on its attri- bution. Working with a phrase "El incendio, con feroces mandibula[s], devora el campo," he inquires what this would mean if written by a fire survivor, by a Chinese poet, by an avant garde poet (of the kind he had been himself at the beginning of the same de- cadeyf R Q O \ W R U H Y H D O D W W K H H Q G W K D W W K e phrase is by Aeschylus, and as such is as- sociated with remote antiquity and its se- vere beauty (El idioma de los argentinos 90- 91yf 7 K L V V W X Q W R I L Q W H U S U H W D W L R Q L V J U H D W O y extended in "Pierre Menard," apropos of Menard's rewriting, under the influence of William James, of the phrase from Cervantes "La verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, dep6sito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir" (449yf . It is not easy to accomodate Borges's dis- parate ideas into a system or coherent theory, as Shumway and Sant have pointed out. Some have argued, for instance, that Otras inquisiciones advocates a literary his- tory without authors' names, but the essays on Wilde and Valkry undercut this idea by arguing that these authors can be valued for their sincerity (a word seldom associated with Wildeyf R U S H U V R Q D O L W \ Q R W Y L H Z H G D V a virtue by Valkryyf % R U J H V X V H V S D U D G R x throughout his critical writings as a way of resisting generalizations; this can be seen in "Pierre Menard" itself. Carla Cordua's insight into Borges's uses of metaphysics is germane here: Borges does not "do" phi- losophy-or theory-but does not just re- fer to it either. By "doing" theory differ- ently-by resisting the impulse to general- ize, by contradicting himself from one text to another, by thinking through paradox in much of his work-Borges proves exem- plary as a critic attentive to the particulars of the text he comments, and can be used productively at almost every turn of contem- porary theoretical work, although one would have to say that he is in but not ofthat textual universe. Cordua notes: Los frutos de la teoria [de la metafisica] son tratados por Borges, antes que nada, como productos de la fan- tasia y a los cultivadores hist6ricos de la filosofia los tiene por amables ilusos encandilados por la quimera de la verdad. Para Borges la teoria fue siempre una actividad de otros que trae al mundo ciertos objetos en extremo raros y sugerentes. Esta perspectiva, completamente inusual, si lo pensamos bien, puede ser ilamada, creo, una interpretaci6n est6tica de la filosofia. (630yf This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BORGES, AVERROES, ARISTOTLE: THE POETICS OF POETICS 203 If Borges chooses (in "La viuda Ching" and elsewhereyf W R U H W X U Q W R W K H * U H H N R X t of an interest in etymology, calling in his essay "El idioma infinito" for a return to the "primordial meaning" of a word (El tamahio de mi esperanza 41yf V R K L V V W R U \ / D E X V F a de Averroes" is shaped by another kind of desire for return: a return to the very origins of literary theory, Aristotle's Poetics.3 Borges's story opens with an epigraph from Renan's Averroes et l'averroisme and ends with an evocation of the same author, thus suggesting that Renan is Borges's primary or perhaps only source. Borges's Averroes, or ibn Rushd, as he is known in Arabic, is disturbed by a "philological" doubt related to his commentary on the Poetics at the moment he is penning the eleventh chapter of his TahafutAl-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherenceyf K L V D W W D F N R Q D O * K D ] D O L s Tahafut Al-Filasifa (Incoherence of the Phi- losophersyf L Q L W V W X U Q D Q D W W D F N R Q S K L O R V R - phy as an illegitimate branch of theology. (It should be noted that Averroes was exiled near the end of his life and some of his books burnt in a similar battle between the- ology and philosophy; Borges does not say so, but the stakes in this dispute were high.yf Averroes's "philological" doubt, that serves to interrupt his philosophy for an afternoon and an evening, has to do with two unknown words, "tragedy" and "comedy." Now, any reader of Aristotle's Poetics will concur that an inability to decipher these words will gravely impede an understanding of Aristotle's text, and Averroes shares that preoccupation: "Esas dos palabras arcanas pululaban en el texto de la Poetica; impo- sible eludirlas" (583yf . Much of the Borges story is a discussion with Abulc asim al-Ashari (the name is based on that of one of Averroes's biogra- phersyf D E R X W Z K H W K H U L W L V E H W W H U W R V K R Z R r to tell. Al-Ashari tells of his experience of having attended a theater in China- "Imaginemos que alguien muestra una historia en vez de referirla" (585yf D Q G E H - cause he does not tell of the experience in a way that is clearly understandable (even to Averroes, who is hungry for information about precisely this art, though he may not know ityf W K H F R Q V H Q V X V D P R Q J K L V O L V W H Q - ers is that it is unnecessary to use numer- ous people to tell a story when one would suffice. The issue arises in the Poetics, in the passage cited by Borges in "El pudor de la historia," when Aristotle recalls that Aeschylus increased the number of actors from one to two (Janko 6yf % R U J H V F R P - ments on this passage in that essay at some length, finally noting: ...nunca sabremos si [Esquilo] presinti6, siquiera de un modo imperfecto, lo significativo de aquel pasaje del uno al dos, de la unidad a la pluralidad y asi a lo infinito. Con el segundo actor entraron el didlogo y las indefinidas posibilidades de la reacci6n de unos carac- teres sobre otros. (754-55yf The same issue-showing vs. telling-, now wholly transposed into the art of nar- rative, preoccupied Henry James and his followers, notably Percy Lubbock; in the story, Farach, the scholar of the Koran, says of the Chinese theater that has been de- scribed by his guest Albucasim: "En tal caso ... no se requerian veinte personas. Un solo hablista puede referir cualquier cosa, por complejo que sea" (586yf - R K Q 6 W X U U R F k rightly calls attention to the unusual word "hablista" instead of "hablante" or "narra- dor" [284].yf But the central point of the story is, as the narrator states at the end, "el proceso de una derrota[,] ... el caso de un hombre que se propone un fin que no esta' vedado a los otros, pero si a 1" (587-88yf ) R U W K H Q D U U D - tor, and presumably for the reader, a read- ing of Aristotle's Poetics by someone with- out knowledge and experience of the the- ater is unthinkable, but such is the case of Averroes in twelfth-century Al-Andalus. Ironically, of course, the narrator calls atten- tion to boys in the street pretending to be muezzin and congregation (playing, that is, at the theateryf D Q G W K H F R Q Y H U V D W L R Q D t Farach's house, as we have seen, turns on Abulcisim's account of a visit to a theater in China.4 A reading of the Poetics by some- one who thinks that tragedy is panegyric or eulogy and comedy is satire seems ludi- crous, as Renan remarks in his Averroes et l'averroisme (in the same passage from This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 204 HISPANIA 79 MAY 1996 which Borges took the epigraph to the story, "S'imagininant que la trag6die n'est autre chose que l'art de louer"yf & H W W H S D U D - phrase accuse ... l'ignorance la plus com- plkte de la litt6rature grecque" (He imag- ines that tragedy is nothing if not the art of praising. This paraphrase reveals ... the most complete ignorance of Greek litera- ture. 48yf 5 Let me confess now to having read Averroes's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, translated into English in 1986 by Charles E. Butterworth.6 This work, as Butterworth notes, is almost unknown in the Arabic-speaking world, having only been published in the last 125 years and in scholarly editions that have apparently cir- culated little; the two Arabic manuscripts are preserved in libraries in Florence and Leiden. Renan knew the work through translations of translations of the original, remarking at one point that the works of Averroes that were available to him were Latin translations of Hebrew translations of a commentary made upon Arabic transla- tions of Syriac translations of Greek origi- nals (52yf $ Y H U U R H V V L Q D E L O L W \ W R U H D d Aristotle directly is more than compensated by his readers' inability (from Thomas Aquinas to Borgesyf W R U H D G K L P G L U H F W O \ , f it were not for Butterworth's notes, Averroes's quotations from and reflections on Arabic poetry and poetics would be nearly incomprehensible for the Western non-Arabist reader (as they were for one of his medieval translators, Hermann Alemannyf M X V W D V $ Y H U U R H V F R X O G Q R W P D N e much sense of Aristotle's references to Greek poetry. But this is not entirely the point. Averroes acknowledges at the outset that Aristotle comments on aspects of Greek poetry that do not have ready analo- gies in Arabic poetry, or in the poetry of "most or all nations," to use his frequent phrase; he sets as his task the adaptation of Aristotle's argument to Arabic poetry, a di- mension Stavans does not explore in this article on the story. Thus, he argues through his commentary that Aristotle did not set out the rules for all poetry and that he will not do so either; the Poetics and the Middle Commentary are particular rather than general in scope. As Averroes argues in his Tahafut Al- Tahafut [or Incoherence of the Incoherence]: The theory of the philosophers that universals exist only in the mind, not in the external world, only means that the universals exist actually only in the mind, and not in the external world, not that they do not exist at all in the external world, for the meaning is that they exist potentially, not actually in the external world; indeed, if they did not exist at all in the outside world they would be false. (65yf So here with the poetics. Borges's sum- mary of the eleventh chapter of Tahafut is exact in the story: "se mantiene, contra el asceta persa Ghazali, autor del Tahafut-ul- falasifa (Destrucci6n de fil6sofosyf T X H O a divinidad s61o conoce las leyes generales del universo, lo concerniente alas especies, no al individuo" (582yf $ Y H U U R H V K L P V H O f writes at the end of the chapter in question: And concerning both universals and individuals it is true of Him that He knows them and does not know them. This is the conclusion to which the principles of the ancient philosophers led; but those who make a distinction, and say that God knows universals but does not know particulars, have not fully grasped their theory, and this is not a consequence of their prin- ciples. For all human sciences are passivities and im- pressions from the existents, and the existents operate on them. But the knowledge of the Creator operates on existents, and the existents receive the activities of His knowledge. (269yf Knowing and not knowing: in this paradox resides one of Averroes's fundamental in- sights. In one of his essays on Dante, Borges writes: "La precisi6n que acabo de indicar no es un artificio ret6rico; es afirmaci6n de la probidad, de la plenitud, con que cada incidente del poema ha sido imaginado" (Nueve ensayos dantescos 88yf , Q W K H F D V H R f Borges's Averroes, what is at stake in argu- ing for "precisi6n" is not the minimal refer- ences to the local color of Moslem Spain- the fountain, the harem, and so forth-but the intellectual rigor with which Averroes's mental world has been recreated: the right chapter of the Tahafut is mentioned, the names of the Arabic translators of Aristotle are correctly cited, the Hellenistic commen- tator on Aristotle (Alexander of Aphrodisiasyf This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BORGES, AVERROES, ARISTOTLE: THE POETICS OF POETICS 205 is consulted at the right moment. John Sturrock gets it profoundly wrong when he calls Borges's erudition into question here, doubting the existence of Alexander of Aphrodisias (279yf D Q G V W D W L Q J R I W K H * K D ] D O i Tahafut and of Averroes's reply: "Whether these are real works of early Arabic thought, or whether Borges has made them up, I do not know. Their existence is, so to speak, immaterial" (280yf 2 Q W K H F R Q W U D U \ : Borges may not have known how to read Arabic or Hebrew but he made excellent use of the Latin and modern material (not, as the ineffable Mr. Sturrock would have it, "immaterial"yf D Y D L O D E O H W R K L P . As already noted, "Pierre Menard," like "La fruici6n literaria" before it, complicates the matter of literary interpretation by in- sisting that the meaning of a text depends not only on the conditions of its production (who wrote it, when, and under what cir- cumstancesyf E X W D O V R R I L W V U H F H S W L R Q , Q W K L s story the same idea is broached in the dis- cussion of whether a metaphor in a classic Arabic poem (destiny seen as a blind camelyf has become a mere cliche; Averroes argues to the contrary that an image penned in the Arabian desert acquires new layers of mean- ing centuries later in Al-Andalus: "Dos terminos tenia la figura y hoy tiene cuatro" (587yf 7 K H W Z R Q H Z W H U P V D G G H G W R W K e figure (which initially consisted of "camel" and "destiny"yf D U H = X K D L U W K H $ U D E L F S R H t who composed the image, and "nuestros pesares," the sufferings and sorrows of Zuhair's Spanish readers, so distant from the Arabian desert. By the same token, Aristotle's text is enriched on being read by Averroes, and Averroes's on being read by Borges, although the "difference" between one and another may be as invisible as that between Menard's and Cervantes's ver- sions of "la verdad, cuya madre es la historia" (449yf . "La busca de Averroes," then, is the story of the founding text of literary theory, as misunderstood-or better still, as reimag- ined-in a different cultural context. The story is cast as a tragedy in Aristotle's terms: the philosopher's quest is undone by his ignorance, and by his masking of his igno- rance with a sense of superiority. (One problem with the casting of this story as tragedy is its genre: the short story is a nar- ration, without the independent existence of characters, or their presence on the stage.yf For undertaking a translation of the Poetics without a sense of what theater is (much less the distinction between tragedy and comedyyf L V V X U H O \ D Q D F W R I K X E U L V 0 Averroes's failure ("quise narrar el proceso de una derrota" [587]yf L V P L U U R U H G L Q W K e narrator's failure, Averroes's disappearance before the mirror signalling the failure of the narrator's imagination. Van der Bergh states in his introduction to the Tahafut: "Averroes was the last great philosopher in Islam in the twelfth century, and is the most scholarly and scrupulous commentator of Aristotle. He is far better known in Europe than in the Orient [sic], where few of his works are still in existence and where he had no influence, he being the last great philosopher of his culture" (xiiyf . Yet he is knowable here only through his otherness. As Floyd Merrell has argued in his brief discussion of the story: The concepts of tragedy and comedy exist within the cultural milieu of the West, and hence the pair is for Borges adequately intelligible, but not for Averroes. Borges, on the other hand, endeavors to construct a narrative that lies within Averroes's Islamic form of life, a task equally as impossible as that of Averroes. The self-reflective injunction both men give them- selves is tantamount to the paradoxical Socratic knowledge paradox [sic], which pragmatically puts one in an untenable situation, for to know that one knows, one must already know, and if one already knows, then one cannot conscientiously set out to obey the injunction. Yet, in a manner of speaking, both tasks are possible, for Borges does complete his nar- rative, however inadequate he may claim it to be, and Averroes did somehow solve his problem, for his an- swer vaguely corresponds to Aristotle's Poetics. ... In this manner, the paradox has in a sense been resolved, yet it has not been truly resolved, since both Averroes and the narrator apparently merely muddled their way through to an answer; there is no way of their know- ing absolutely how they stumbled upon it or whether or not it was correct. (75-76yf Knowing and not knowing again: in Merrell's formulation, an insight into the particular, gained by "mere muddling through," by "vague correspondences," is This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 206 HISPANIA 79 MAY 1996 not sufficient knowledge of the whole, but it is knowledge of some sort. Corbin notes that Averroes (like Dante after him, in the letter to Can Grande discussed by Borges and so many othersyf D U J X H V I R U W K H F R H [ L V W H Q F H R f exoteric (zahiryf P H D Q L Q J V D Q G R Q H R U P R U e esoteric (batinyf P H D Q L Q J V \f; the next story in ElAleph is precisely "El Zahir." The subtle discussion of metaphor in Averroes's Middle Commentary (fuller than the corre- sponding discussion in Aristotleyf V X J J H V W s the importance for him of suggestion and connotation, a refusal of hermeneutic clo- sure, as does the succession of commentar- ies that he wrote to Aristotle, from the short initial ones to the later "middle" and "great" commentaries (see Fakhry 273 and Peters 95 on the various kinds of commentariesyf . He might have approved Borges's definition of esthetics (and beauty, and poeticsyf H V W a inminencia de una revelaci6n, que no se produce, es, quiza, el hecho estetico" (635yf . In placing a resistance to closure and to system at the end of "La muralla y los libros," the first essay of Otras inquisiciones, his primary book of essays, Borges mocks (in advanceyf W K H I R O O \ R I W K R V H Z K R Z R X O d try to box him in to one or another theoreti- cal approach, and by stressing the "immi- nence" of an (endlessly postponedyf U H Y H O D - tion, he leaves open the possibility of differ- ent, and endlessly renewable, readings. He makes the same point in the final essay of (later editions ofyf 2 W U D V L Q T X L V L F L R Q H V , "Sobre los clhasicos." Revelation itself is somewhat suspect, as faith requires clo- sure; the liminal is the space of poetics."n * NOTES 'Unless otherwise noted all quotations from Borges are from the 1974 edition of the so-called Obras completas. 2Cf. "Sobre los cldsicos": "Escasas disciplinas ha- brd de mayor interns que la etimologia; ello se debe a las imprevisibles transformaciones del sentido primi- tivo de las palabras, a lo largo del tiempo. Dadas tales transformaciones, que pueden lindar con lo parad6ji- co, de nada o de muy poco nos servirai para la aclara- ci6n de un concepto el origen de una palabra" (772yf . 3Nicolds Alvarez discusses the presence of Aristotle and Plato in Borges, though without discuss- ing "La busca de Averroes": he focuses his discussion (less productively, in my viewyf R Q / D H V F U L W X U D G H l dios," a story that is set in post-Conquest Guatemala, as I have argued in Out of Context (69-80yf . 4Cf. Aristotle: "what is possible is believable; we do not believe that what has never happened is possible, but things which have happened are obviously pos- sible-they would not have happened, if they were impossible" (Janko trans., 12yf . 5Surprisingly Julia Kushigian does not discuss the "Orientalist" tendencies in this story, which she men- tions in passing in her chapter on Borges in Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition (24yf . 6Oddly, Ilan Stavans calls the Middle Commentary "ahora extraviado" (17yf D O W K R X J K % X W W H U Z R U W K V W U D Q V - lation of it was published two years before his article. 7See Butterworth's introduction to his translation of the Middle Commentary (xiiyf D Q G 5 H Q D Q \f. 8Stavans argues that Borges could not have known the Tahafut because he could not read Arabic or He- brew (16yf I R U J H W W L Q J W K D W % R U J H V Z D V D Q H [ F H O O H Q t Latinist and could have read the book in Latin. It is worth remembering that Averroes, as Butterworth and others have remarked, is more widely published in Latin than in Arabic. 90n Zohair, see Butterworth's introduction, Averroes, Middle Commentary (61yf . 100f course critics who do have knowledge and experience of the theater have had myriad other prob- lems of interpretation of the Poetics, e.g. Else, Davis, Janko, and the essays in the Rorty collection. "I am grateful to Gwen Kirkpatrick for her care- ful reading and critique of a draft of this article. N WORKS CITED Alvarez, Nicolas E. "Arist6teles y Plat6n en 'La escri- tura del dios' (Borgesyf ( [ S O L F D F L Q G H 7 H [ W R V / L - terarios 9.2 (1981yf . Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. with notes and intro. Richard Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Averroes. Averroes' Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle's "Topics," "Rhetorics" and 'Poetics. "Trans. Charles E. Butterworth. Albany: State U of New York P, 1977. . Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics. Trans., intro. and notes Charles E. Butterworth. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. -. Tahafut Al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Inco- herenceyf 7 U D Q V L Q W U R D Q G Q R W H V 6 L P R Q 9 D Q ' H r Bergh. Cambridge: Trustees of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1954. Rpt. in one volume, 1987. Balderston, Daniel. Out ofContext: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Borges, Jorge Luis. El idioma de los argentinos. Bue- nos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina: Seix Barral, 1994. -.Nueve ensayos dantescos. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982. -. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emece, 1974. -. El tamai~o de mi esperanza. Buenos Aires: Proa, This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BORGES, AVERROES, ARISTOTLE: THE POETICS OF POETICS 207 1926. Corbin, Henry. History of Islamic Philosophy. Trans. Liadain Sherrard and Philip Sherrard. London: Kegan Paul and Islamic Publications, 1993. Cordua, Carla. "Borges y la metafisica." La Torre [nue- va epoca] 2.8 (1988yf . Dario, Ruben. "El reino interior." Antologia poetica. Ed. and intro. Guillermo de Torre. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1966. 67-69. Davis, Michael. Aristotle's Poetics: The Poetry of Phi- losophy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992. Else, Gerald F.Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument. Cam- bridge: Harvard UP, 1963. Fakhry, Majid. A History oflslamic Philosophy. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Kushigian, Julia. Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1991. Merrell, Floyd. Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 1991. Peters, F. E. Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam. New York: New York UP, 1968. Renan, Ernest. Averroes et l'averroisme. Paris: Calmann-ULvy, n. d. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, ed. Essays on Aristotle's Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Shumway, Nicolas, and Thomas Sant. 'The Hedonic Reader: Literary Theory in Jorge Luis Borges." Latin American Literary Review 9.17 (1980yf - 55. Stavans, Ilan. "Borges, Averroes y la imposibilidad del teatro." Latin American Theater Review 22.1 (1988yf . Sturrock, John. "Between Commentary and Comedy: The Satirical Side of Borges." English Satire and the Satiric Tradition. Ed. Claude Rawson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. 276-86. This content downloaded from 128.228.0.67 on Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:11:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms