The Work Was Mocking Me

Borges doesn't write about the problem of interpretation. He writes in it.

This is not a small distinction. A story about a man who cannot understand what a theater is would be a story about limitation — mildly interesting, philosophically instructive, done when you close the book. What Borges actually does in "Averroë's Search" is something stranger: he becomes Averroës while writing him, and then names, in the final paragraph, that this is what happened. "I felt that the work was mocking me." The commentary on the impossibility of commentary is itself an impossible commentary. The frame is the content.

Once you see this, you start seeing it everywhere in his fiction. The pattern is not incidental.

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is presented as a critical essay — a review, with footnotes, of an impossible work. But the essay is itself the only document of Menard's achievement that exists. The review of the work IS the work. Borges doesn't describe an impossible critic; he IS an impossible critic, and the description enacts the impossibility.

"Theme of the Traitor and Hero" opens: "Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counselor Leibniz (who invented pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I will perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow." An unwritten plan — but it is written, here, in this published story. The plan for the story IS the story. The frame announces incompletion; the publication performs completion.

"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a spy report — an account, written by a man condemned to death, explaining how he transmitted the name of a British artillery park to his German handlers. The report is a document that exists inside the fiction as a primary source. But the report IS the story. Yu Tsun's spy report, in which he must explain why he killed a sinologist named Stephen Albert, is itself a forking path — a narrative with a hidden meaning (the name of the city, Albertville) that can only be read correctly by the handler who knows the code. The spy report is a labyrinth, and the story about the labyrinthine garden is itself that labyrinthine spy report.

Each of these three stories describes a situation and then enacts it. The frame doesn't contain the content — the frame IS the content. Remove the meta-level and the story ceases to exist.

"Averroë's Search" is the most explicit case. The final paragraph is Borges stepping out of the fiction entirely to name the process:

I felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what a drama is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, wanting to imagine Averroes with no other sources than a few fragments from Renan, Lane and Asín Palacios. I felt, on the last page, that my narration was a symbol of the man I was as I wrote it and that, in order to compose that narration, I had to be that man and, in order to be that man, I had to compose that narration, and so on to infinity.

Borges commenting on Aristotle through Averroës is structurally identical to Averroës commenting on Aristotle through translators of translators. Both are working from a map of something they cannot directly access. Both produce a document. Both are satisfied with it. Neither has touched the original.

This is not irony about scholarship. It's not a joke at Averroës's expense. It's an argument about the condition of all interpretation — made by enacting it rather than describing it. The form is the proof. A description of the problem would leave the author outside the problem. Enacting it puts the author inside it, which is the only honest position for a story about the impossibility of being outside.

Why does Borges use this structure so insistently?

Part of the answer is that he distrusts arguments made from the outside. A story that describes the problem of interpretation while remaining immune to it would be a story that hasn't understood the problem. The interpreter always stands in the same position as Averroës: working from secondary sources, translating translations, constructing the lost original from evidence that mediates rather than transmits. To write a story that demonstrates this without embodying it would be to write a story that refutes itself — claiming knowledge of the condition it purports to describe.

Another part of the answer is that Borges takes seriously what most writers treat as a flaw: the impossibility of the author's position. He doesn't solve it. He builds it into the architecture. The coda of "Averroë's Search" isn't a confession of failure — it's the argument. The narrator couldn't reach Averroës from outside the orb of Islam, yes. But neither could he reach Averroës from inside it. The inaccessibility is total. Naming this doesn't overcome it; it completes the work.

The moment he stops believing in Averroës, Averroës disappears. The house, the fountain, the manuscripts, the books, the slave girls — all gone. This is not metaphor. It's a statement about what kind of thing Averroës is. He exists only in the act of being narrated. The moment the narrator steps outside, the narration ends, and Averroës — who has no existence independent of the story being written about him — ceases.

The frame is the content because the content has no existence outside the frame.

There is a footnote to this pattern worth keeping.

Hladik, in "The Secret Miracle," doesn't fit it. He achieves something none of the other figures do: he finishes. The invisible drama he writes in the stopped hour is complete — a labyrinth nobody will ever enter, but a labyrinth that is actually there. "He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him." The work exists for its own sake, in the mind of its maker, at the moment of completion. The volley arrives and the content is not lost — it was never external to the frame of Hladik's consciousness. It will die with him, and it is still complete.

This is Borges's counter-case to his own pattern. The frame IS the content — fine. But for Hladik, the content achieves completion inside the frame without needing to escape it. The invisible labyrinth is not less real for being invisible. It was finished. That's enough.

Whether this is consolation or argument, I'm not sure. It might be both.