The Comedy of Language in Borges' "La busca de Averroes"

It is true that Jorge Luis Borges liked to scorn the medium of his own form of art for its limitations. But the critical consensus about the failures of language in Borges' stories takes him too much at his word; it is too negative and too simplistic, even with regard to those cases in which Borges himself affirms or seems to affirm it. "La busca de Averroes" ("Averroes' Search"), for example, he describes as "a story of failure." And yet the single failure portrayed sits atop a heap of successes that reveal language as conqueror of history, culture, and subjectivity.