CONVERSING WITH BORGES’S

“THE ETHNOGRAPHER”:
(UN)VEILING AN ALLEGORY OF
INTERCULTURAL HERMENEUTICS

SANDRA M. BOSCHETTO-SANDOVAL AND CIRO A. SANDOVAL

There are countless colloquia, broadcasts, and associations

that propose to improve cultural interaction: these may
not be harmful, but their usefulness may be questionable.
Twenty meetings between the French and Greek ministers
of culture will never equal the impact of a single novel
translated from one of these languages into the other.
—TzvetanTodorov, The Morals of History (1995)

We cannot—no self can—reach the quite other.

—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic
Education in the Era of Globalization (2012)

LITERATURE AND THE AMBIVALENT HERMENEUTICS OF

INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
Like the concepts of “culture,” “democracy,” “freedom,” and
“terrorism,” “intercultural or cross-cultural understanding” has
at one and the same time been stripped bare and blown up large,

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 43.3 Summer 2016

Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286
© Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2016
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 571

turning it into a slogan or cliché because it provides the energy and

satisfaction of a self-contained group (economic, political, religious,
academic) that bespeaks it only as “competence,” or “intercul-
turalism” divested of ethical import and responsibility or both.1 On
the other hand, as several intercultural theorists and scholars have
already cautioned (Holliday 2011; Arnett, et al, 2009; Blasco and
Gustafsson, 2004) the increasing de facto situations of intercultural
encounter and confrontation are far too sensitive and consequential
to be left solely to politicians, economists, and the mass media. If,
in its more positive import, intercultural understanding is also the
name of an ethical stance or attitude, how might the literary text
serve as a stage for intercultural ethical performance?
Tzvetan Todorov assigns what he terms “emotional weight” to
aesthetic experience, such as that of literature, narrative, myth, and
history. As Todorov clarifies, one of the distinguishing marks of
works of art and cultural imagery, broadly defined, is their ability
to inspire intense responses, inchoate emotions, and quasi-visceral
passions. Todorov intimates the significance of intercultural
epistemology by way of this emotional tectonics in the context of
reading foreign (strange) literature. Beyond exposing the attendant
risk of banality in intercultural interactions, Todorov maintains
that there is a transversal/transpositional rationality (1995, 79–83)
at play in works of art and literature, displayed as an intricate
de-centering, an ethical play between readers and their texts that
sidelines interpretation in order to shift toward “a space of possible
understanding” (15). This imaginary space of possible relation
with difference and otherness is constituted by the multilayered
juxtaposition of affect and expectation, of empathy and distance
that we experience while reading literature.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has more recently insisted on literary
and rhetorical reading practices in an effort to restore what she calls
“epistemological care, or indeed [social] planning for the ethical”
(2012, 197). She claims that such reading practices, particularly those
that focus on the singularity or peculiarity of literary language can,
“in an irrational, utopian, and impractical way . . . render an ethical
motor that undermines the ideological field.” She notes further:
If to be born human is to be born angled toward an other and
others, then to account for this the human being presupposes the
quite-other. Such presuppositions can battle bodies-without-organs
like “the nation.” This is the bottom line of being-human as being-in-
the-ethical relation. By definition, we cannot—no self can—reach
572 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

the quite-other. Thus the ethical situation can only be figured in

the ethical experience of the impossible. And literature, as a play
of figures, can give us imaginative access to the experience. (Spivak
2012, 352)
While literature can prefigure an ethical intercultural experience
with a “quite other”—other, as Spivak surmises through “imaginative
access,” its “ethical motor” also directs us to the utopian limits of
such an enterprise. Spivak’s reflection here echoes that of Martin
Heidegger whose exposition of hermeneutics as simultaneous
motion of concealment and revelation, “a kind of message of
the veiling that opens up” (1971, 56), renders a relation between
the reading of foreign (strange) literature and the exegesis of
intercultural encounters as a “playful” process of understanding and
not-understanding simultaneously. Nonetheless, there remains in
Heidegger’s hermeneutic model a tendency to deduce and reduce,
for understanding is—within the Western paradigm—equated
with self-understanding, and to understand others often means to
understand them after transforming them into one’s own categories
and structures. Such a hermeneutics of self-identity mainly aims
at appropriating the other. This is like saying that the literary
work constructs a relation to reality by establishing a relation to
itself. There appears to be an irresolvable relation between the
hermeneutical claim that to understand a text is to reconstruct the
question to which it is an answer, and the view of a literary text
as a constant dialectical unfolding, a dialogical event rather than a
constituted object.
Now, if intercultural hermeneutics constitutes a new way of being
in relation, this is due in part to its effort to describe more subtle
and encompassing patterns of comprehension, and more precisely
of historical and humanistic modes of understanding (Udeani 2007).
Intercultural hermeneutics offers two different and interesting
focuses of attention for the study of interpretation and understanding
of texts: (1) the understanding of a text as an event, and (2) the more
encompassing question of what understanding and interpretation as
such entail. Both of these propositions are developed in depth by
means of what can tellingly be envisioned as a philosophical turn to
the literary or aesthetic text.
The German hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer
has shown in his writings that the reading of literature (what he
terms “authentic artwork”) puts a question to orthodox social and
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 573

cultural values, and in doing so receives a fresh kind of response

from readers who adopt a “prolonged attentiveness” to its marked
difference or otherness.2 As the literary work is attended to by
different generations of readers from within their ever-shifting
horizon of expectations, conventional meanings are transformed as
to release new significances that were never anticipated. Gadamer’s
hermeneutic reflections are relevant not only to textual interpretation
in the narrow sense; they also radiate across the broader spectrum
of social, political, ethical, and intercultural understandings. His
philosophical insights, particularly in the decade following the
publication of Truth and Method (1960), expose literature’s relation
to the world of lived experience by postulating what has been
called a “hermeneutics of difference” (Dallmayr 1996). Gadamer’s
work resonates deeply with larger global, geo-cultural concerns,
including those of intercultural dislocations between indigenous
(autochthonous) and foreign cultures. As Gadamer writes in The
Legacy of Europe:
Where the goal is not mastery or control, we are liable to experience
the otherness of the other precisely against the backdrop of our own
prejudgments. The highest and most elevated aim that we can strive
for is to partake in the other, to share the other’s alterity. Thus, it
may not be too bold to draw as final political consequence of these
deliberations the lesson that the future survival of humankind
may depend on our readiness not only to utilize our resources of
power and (technical) efficiency but to pause in front of the other’s
otherness—the otherness of nature as well as that of the historically
grown cultures of peoples and states; in this way we may learn to
experience otherness and human others as the “other of ourselves”
in order to partake in one another. (Quoted in Dallmayr 1996, 53)

In this broader philosophical, socio-cultural contextualization,

Gadamer’s notion of understanding is hermeneutically more
encompassing than that of Heidegger. The turn or difference
is perhaps best summed up in Gadamer’s original notion of
“application.” “Application” is not so much akin to hermeneutics as
“appropriation,” as it is to that of “translation.” It is here, in Truth
and Method, that Gadamer first delineates the intercultural aspect of
the ethical, through the ethical dimension’s openness to the other.
The provisional “unfolding of understanding” attached to “appli-
cation” as tentative translation remains playfully attentive to the
folds of the literary text, in its “hope to communicate” rather than
574 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

in its desire to assign it significance. “The real event of understand-

ing,” Gadamer contends in Philosophical Hermeneutics, “goes continu-
ally beyond what can be brought to the understanding of the other
person’s words by methodological effort and critical self-control.
It is true of every conversation that through it something differ-
ent has come to be” (1977, xxii, emphasis added). “Understanding,”
Gadamer writes, “does not consist in a technical virtuosity of ‘under-
standing’ everything written. Rather, it is a genuine experience, that
is, an encounter with something that asserts itself as truth” (1989,
445, emphasis added). Gadamer’s understanding of understanding,
therefore, as something different that has come to be, draws us to
consider intercultural understanding not as a method, so much as an
“anthropology,” or way of life. “The type of anthropology we are in
search of,” intercultural philosopher Ram Adhar Mall contends, “is
not something ready made, just to be imitated; it is rather something
to be worked out and realized with the help of a ‘creative hermeneu-
tics’ (Eliade) that brings about a qualitative change in our being”
[sic] (2000, 58). To understand in this way means to understand the
“quite-other” without transforming her in her substance or without
understanding oneself once more. It is precisely one’s perennial feel-
ing of strangeness or estrangement before a text that is character-
istic of the hermeneutical situation par excellence. Understanding the
very other can never be absolute, complete, mirrored, or imitated;
rather it must be “worked out” in loving desire.3

BORGES AND THE ALLEGORY OF INTERCULTURAL HERMENEUTICS

We have chosen to illustrate the experience of intercultural

understanding that literature’s “ethical motor” can access with a
relatively minor work by Latin American writer Jorge Luis Borges
(1899–1986). Not unlike Gadamer’s reading of the poems of Paul
Celan (1997), Borges’s story-poems “reach us, and yet we miss them.”
Few literary texts have been tagged with more hermeneutical
ambivalence than those of Argentine author and poet Borges. Borges’s
stories, in other words, are ripe for hermeneutical performance: they
tease out a more “creative” understanding by taking the reader out
of the relation of knowing (story, other), toward a relation of ethical
(loving) trans-location.
For Borges, locating oneself in space and time—central inter-
cultural axioms—is a process, part of an itinerary rather than a
bounded site, real or imaginary. The border between self and other
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 575

is an unstable fringe or orilla (Sarlo 1993) where identities are for-

ever translated and destabilized. In many of his stories, on the edge
between poetic and philosophical inquiry, meditation and critical
reflection, Borges inserts an intercultural preoccupation with the
limits of identity and self-recognition spun across spatial, tem-
poral, and cultural margins or borders.4 The literary example that
bespeaks a deceptively brief, axiomatic, but at the same time encom-
passing intercultural hermeneutic conundrum is the enigmatic tale
titled “El etnógrafo” (“The Ethnographer”), a two-page story rel-
egated to a randomized collection of texts, and published in 1969
under the tropological title Elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Shadow).5
Narrative desire in this aphoristic text 6 is totalizing, a desire that
privileges understanding of the very other as a mysterious “case” to
be resolved, but not without investigative (hermeneutic) effort and
attendant risk.
Several readers of this story (e.g., Pennington 1998; Moraña
2003; Avelar 2004; Schwartz 2007) have trekked the slippery slope
of interpretation, with scant if any attention to its intercultural
hermeneutic circularity. To say that the story revolves around the
fieldwork undertaken by an anthropology graduate student, Fred
Murdock, who spends more than two years on an unspecified Indian
reservation in the Western United States attempting to gather data
for his dissertation is not commensurate with thick description.
After learning the language, Murdock experiences a personal rite of
passage (common metaphor in anthropological fieldwork), through
which he undergoes “certain exercises of both a moral and physical
nature” (“ciertos ejercicios de índole moral y de índole física”) (Borges
1974, 48).7 The anonymous tribal shaman in the story ends his
interaction with Murdock by revealing an arcane secret doctrine,
at which point Murdock abruptly returns to the city only to inform
his dissertation advisor that he knows what the secret (of the tribe)
is, but that he has no intention of “publishing it” (“publicarlo”) (48).
Instead, Murdock acknowledges that the most valuable aspect of
the secret doctrine is the paths (experiences) that directed him
to it, and that the universality of his newly acquired knowledge is
valid “for any place and for any circumstance” (“para cualquier lugar
y para cualquier circunstancia”) (50). The story concludes abruptly in a
kind of synchronic suspension that gives the sense of a reality not
in temporal diachronic flux. We are simply told that, “Fred married,
divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale” (“Fred se casó, se
divorció, y es ahora uno de los bibliotecarios de Yale”) (50).
576 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

The reader’s hermeneutical encounter with this unnerving

“strange” text—to use the intercultural metaphor—unfolds, we
propose, on three intersecting and interconnected levels. First, the
story’s positioning within the overall collection that includes it,
namely In Praise of Shadow; second, the peculiarity of its language,
including its mode of narration that sets in motion the presumed
desire to understand the “quite-other” “case” as already noted above;
and third, the ethnographic eye (allegory) that frames the tale.
These different levels of the story lay bare the perilous fringes or
deeper crevasses that any attempt at understanding it entails. More
to the point, “The Ethnographer” allegorizes the very hermeneutical
challenge that understanding the story—as experience of difference,
as event of encounter with a “quite-other”—entails.
In the first instance, the “story-poem” is part of a collection of
verse and prose that Borges calls his “fifth book of poems” (1974, 10).
Not unlike a poem, the two-page story foregrounds the construction
or making of a “poem,” not only in its very compression, abbreviation,
in its gaps, omissions, and silences, but also in its intensification and
condensation, formalistic mechanisms that Gadamer (by way of his
readings of the poetry of Celan) believes “increase the potency of
the elements of the [poetic] utterance . . . such that they say more
and radiate in more directions than they could in taut syntactical
wrapping” (1997, 135). In his preface to Elogio a la sombra (In Praise
of Shadow) in the 1974 bilingual edition, Borges, in his own English
translation, suggests that what lies in store for the reader “is not
information or reasoning but emotion” (Borges 1974, 10). Borges’s
story, in other words, is not intended to present a problem for
analysis, but a phenomenological situation to experience. He also
elucidates that, “although the difference between prose and verse
seems [to him] superficial, [his] intention is that this volume be read
as a volume of poems” (10). If in poetry “everything points to another
thing,” as the “most comprehensive formulation of the hermeneutical
idea” (Gadamer, 123–30), then Borges appears to coincide with
Gadamer’s perception when he muses that “In itself, a book is not
an aesthetic act, it is but a thing among things. The aesthetic act can
occur only when the book is written or read” (1974, 10), which is to
say, allegorically encountered or experienced. For Borges, therefore,
the act of reading or interpreting—like an intercultural encounter
or contact—carries not only “emotional weight,” but also ethical
import. As he specifies further in the preface, one of the new themes
inserted into the volume is that of “ethics” and the concern for the
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 577

ethical (10). Somewhat coincidentally Gadamer also subscribes to

this thinking of a poem as a form of relation, of ethical attentiveness
as to another human being. Understanding more for Borges (and
Gadamer) implies not so much a transposition of information or
knowledge as constant actualization of transpositionality, which
is to say a constant “growing one toward the other” (Gadamer
1997, 130–135).
It is the narrator of Borges’s story who self-reflexively foregrounds
the ethical relation of understanding as he seeks to understand what
is otherwise perceived as an exceptional “case,” and also when he
curiously announces at the outset that [they] referred the case to
him in Texas (El caso me lo refirieron en Texas) (Borges 1974, 46). This
initial voicing sets in motion the play or process of the ever-present
(un)veiling of understanding as desire to understand the very other,
while underscoring the difficulty in ultimately accomplishing
the endeavor. The story, thus, opens by signaling the existential
and integrative dimension of phenomenological questioning
and understanding of a different and distant other. The story (re)
presents, in its meta-fictional foregrounding and ambiguous textual
dissemination, the difficulty of the attempt to capture understanding
of an unknown, infinite (Levinasian) otherness, while paradoxically
and simultaneously underscoring the desire to bring forth this absent
otherness as presence. This experience is veiled as a dialogue (real or
imagined) between an I who narrates and an other (distantly situated)
unknown addressee, but a dialogue, nonetheless, structured by the
distance and foreignness that also distance the narrator’s voice
and the story’s readers, equally eager to comprehend the “case.”
This quintessential narrative event, in other words, seeks simply to
transform the distance of the onlooker into the involvement of the
implied participant.
It is no mere coincidence that Clifford Geertz writing in 1989
marks ethnography as closer to literary discourse than to science,
and James Clifford claims most succinctly that ethnography always
enacts an allegorical social performance, a performance or practice
in which “a narrative fiction continuously refers to another pattern
of ideas or events” (1986, 98–99). This representation that “interprets
itself” is reflected in its etymological source: (Gr. allos, “other,”
and agoreuein, “to speak”). Clifford states further that “allegory
prompts us to say of any cultural description not ‘this represents, or
symbolizes, that’ but rather, ‘this is a (morally) charged story about
that’ ” (100). This allegorical anthropology is explicitly suggested
578 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

in Borges’s story through his use of the ethnographic eye. The

ethnographic representation that “El etnógrafo” projects, in other
words, posits an “analogous hermeneutics” (Ram Adhar Mall) that
warns against reducing difference to the same (the hermeneutics of
total identity), or to radical difference, which makes understanding
(of the “quite-other”) impossible. Instead, the attentive observer
(reader) must adopt an “in between” stance: between understanding
and not understanding, between light and shadow. This positioning
carries attendant risks: the story’s poly-vocal construction reveals
that the transition to cultural and intercultural understanding (like
the ethnographic transition to scientific truth) is not smooth. If
ethnography deconstructs an intercultural encounter, an allegory of
contact and comprehension, a fable of communication, rapport, and
finally, a kind of fictional but potent kinship, how is this trajectory
enacted in Borges’s story and to what end?

“THE ETHNOGRAPHER” AS MOTOR FOR (UN)VEILING AN ALLEGORY

OF INTERCULTURAL HERMENEUTICS

As already noted, the apparent rapport in “The Ethnographer”

between the narrator and the in-disguise character, Fred Murdock—a
rapport not of knowing and being known but one mediated by
strangeness and indeterminacy of meaning—hails the reader (in
invitation) from the outset. Murdock’s ethnographic undertaking to
“observe” certain “esoteric rites” among a few indigenous “tribes” of
the Southwest (United States we presume), also echoes the nature of
ethnographic colonial misunderstanding, the undertaking of what
the narrator calls “a long adventure” (“una larga aventura”) among
“red men” (“hombres rojos”). The “fact” that Murdock’s (Borges’s)
ancestors were killed by some such “red men” “in a frontier raid” (“en
las guerras de la frontera”) (Borges 1974, 46) is playfully foreboding,
while simultaneously deconstructive of the same ethnographic
convention. This initial (re)presentation of the many-layered
problem of intercultural translation squares with Gadamer’s stress
on the question as to whether the phenomenon of understanding
is defined appropriately when we say that to understand is to avoid
misunderstanding (1977, 7–25).8
Murdock’s ambivalent voluntary displacement to the prairie—here
the metaphoric scientific laboratory of the ethnographic discipline—
also portrays the ethnographic adaptation to the “stranger role” of
the cultural and intercultural communicator/translator. While two
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 579

entire years of linguistic immersion produce results of which any

language teacher would be proud—namely the acquired capacity
to dream in a foreign language—this accomplishment alone does
not guarantee Murdock’s ethnographic access to the culture of the
unnamed indigenous tribe. His linguistic knowledge seems instead
to simply mark the distance between two worlds. This distance
is the raw material of ethnography that sees the intercultural gap
between ethnographer and her subject other as a problem to be
overcome, and language as a means in its possible resolution. The
disciplinary scientific method and its discourse, however, do not
guarantee cultural/intercultural understanding either. Borges’s
story captures ethnography’s impossible attempt to fuse objective
and subjective practices. Instead of abstractions and reductions
garnered from reading the esoteric texts of his early university
classes, Murdock’s intercultural reading in the field centers on the
tensional experience of the face-to-face encounter with the shaman,
and on the limitations of language and ethnographic modus operandi,
part of the textualist bias of Western civilization. It is the very doing
of ethnography as embodied, corporal practice and experience, in
other words, that the story foregrounds in the narrator’s detached
description, one that again unveils intercultural ethos as praxis or
productive work with “emotional weight”:
He would rise at dawn, he would go to bed at dusk . . . He accustomed
himself to off-flavours, he dressed in strange clothes, he forgot his
friends and the city, he came to think in a way his reason rejected.
(Se levantaba antes del alba, se acostaba al anochecer . . . Acostumbró su
paladar a sabores ásperos, se cubrió con ropas extrañas, olvidó los amigos y
la ciudad, llegó a pensar de una manera que su lógica rechazaba). (Borges
1974, 47–48)
Murdock here is not so much the social scientist as an interpreter
engaged in a praxis grounded in personal and participatory experi-
ence, situated in time, space, and history. The story thus allegorizes
not so much a communicative praxis, however, as the ontological
condition of being “always on the way.” Curiously lacking are the
normative and prescriptive intercultural signposts of adaptation,
integration, or even acceptance of/into the very other’s world. The
paratactic style at the level of language in the story again seems
to signal (and predict) the severing of these connective signposts,
whether at the level of the storyline or—hermeneutically speaking—
at the level of allegory. After Murdock has undergone the required
580 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

exercises, the medicine man asks Murdock to recall his dreams and
to relate them to him in the early morning. Murdock convention-
ally “discovers” that on nights when the moon is full, he dreams
of buffalo (bisontes), curiously and analogically (mis)translated to
English in the (1974) bilingual edition as “mustangs.” Rather than
a willful mistranslation of bisonte, “mustang” appears as a kind of
metonym or “change of name,” that in paratactic fashion offers up
another gap in understanding. This episode captures what appears
to be the central problem of understanding, which is not so much
whether we understand or not, but how we understand what we
think we understand. The buffalo dream and the metonymic rela-
tionship between buffalo and mustangs presents the reader/inter-
preter—who must at the same time remain fully aware of Borges’s
many literary translation hoaxes—with an ironic note on cultural
translation across the intercultural gaps of languages and cultures.9
The translation that seems to be at work here is different from the
abstract universality of an anthropocentric absolute rationality
that calls a sphere a sphere. In other words, much of our knowledge
about other cultures must be seen as contingent, the problematic
outcome of inter-subjective dialogue, translation and projection.
Also embedded in Murdock’s animal dreams is an anti-anthropo-
centric model for human values, an indigenous intercultural ethos
that pleads for the conviction of Murdock’s (our) embeddedness in
the all-encompassing household of cosmic nature. Finally, Murdock
confides his repeated “buffalo” dreams and is rewarded with the
unveiling of the shamanic “secret.”
As Eric Pennington (1998) and Idelber Avelar (2004) have
already commented, Eurocentric, colonial “structures of feeling”
and “vestiges of empire” are clearly present in Borges’s story-poem.
Nevertheless, while it is true that much of the story’s interpretation
depends on the hermeneutic circular nature of the text, and despite
the requisite postcolonial deconstruction, most readers of the story
remain frustrated with its intercultural conundrum, as allegorically
read in the inaccessibility of its strange “case.” The reader, it would
seem in this aphoristic instance, is called on, primarily, to position
herself at a more philosophical, rather than purely political, level
of reflection and intuition. Like Murdock, the reader must remain
attentive to every detail, attuned to the text of strangeness that
is Borges’s story in an event similar to that of humble listening
and “prolonged attentiveness” rather than a mere voyeuristic
undertaking of analogous hermeneutical (ideological) appropriation.
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 581

Murdock’s experience with the tribe is narrated “back stage,” so to

speak, foregrounding his and the reader’s ethical responsibility: an act
of metaphorical listening in loving attention. Attentiveness here is
not scrutiny, mere attention to external stimuli, but an attentiveness
of the ear, of the heart, and of memory. The imagined back-stage
encounter and the reported dialogue (absent presences) between
Murdock and the shaman foreground the parable of an unfathomable
alterity: the nomadic, de-territorialized always elsewhere of the
non-identical. It is for this reason also that full understanding in
this story-poem is forever deferred. The reader does not find in
this segment a “true” dialogical connection but rather the trace
of the phantom-other, perhaps only to underscore in this way his or
her unrepresentability. Murdock’s non-inscribed dialogue with the
shaman also reveals the possibility of the beginning of a dialogue,
of language as an invitation or “interpellative mode” (Levinas 1969)
where language addressed to the other expresses the desire of the
subject to be taught by rather than to assimilate or appropriate the
interpreted other.
The story’s free play of symbolic connotations, what Gadamer
calls “buoyancy in understanding” (1977, 105), delivers unanticipated
developments with surprising twists and turns that seem, also in
paratactic style, to have a life of their own, including Murdock’s
sudden departure and return to the city. “One morning, without
taking leave of anyone, Murdock left” (“Una mañana, sin haberse
despedido de nadie, Murdock se fue”) (Borges 1974, 48). This ambivalent
intercultural stance bespeaks Gadamer’s contention that “if, by
entering into foreign linguistic worlds, we overcome the prejudices
and limitations of our previous experience of the world, this does
not mean that we leave and negate our own world. As travelers we
return home with new experiences” (1989, 406).
Murdock’s return to more or less familiar ground is described
through the returning traveler’s “intuitive yet vivid” perception of
a felt difference, an understanding that something is other than
oneself, or what s/he used to be, or that a situation is other than
itself or what it used to be (Gadamer 1986, 157–70). This coming into
an awareness of both the world’s difference and its unity is almost
imperceptibly narrated into the story as “felt” circular movement of
return in the repeated event and image of nostalgia: the perception
of a time, a space (and a narrative) that unfold as something dèjá vu
yet also new that has come to be: “Back in the city, he felt homesick
for those first evenings out in the desert when, a long time before,
582 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

he had felt homesick for the city.” (En la ciudad, sintió la nostalgia de
aquellas tardes iniciales de la pradera en que había sentido, hace tiempo, la
nostalgia de la ciudad”) (Borges 1974, 48). The perceived circularity of
time is not something over and above the consciousness of Murdock’s
emotional and intentional involvement with his world-surroundings.
Felt time is not just subjective or arbitrary but what Mall calls “an
anthropologically overlapping constant given to us cross-culturally”
(2000, 65). Whereas temporal circularity mimics the circularity
of ideas that render intercultural understanding only part of an
ever-expanding hermeneutic circle, Murdock’s consciousness of
time as percolation rather than as linear flow (Serres 2004, 59)10 can
also be read as an awareness of his ever present sense of strangeness
to himself. As already underscored, it is not “understanding” that
Borges (and Murdock’s) discourse elicits, but disquieting emotional
weight, an experiencing and acceptance of felt strangeness.
The exchange between Murdock and his academic mentor is the
only face-to-face dialogue transcribed in the story, and yet it seems
to mirror in reverse the back-stage exchange between Murdock and
the shaman attended to earlier. Curiously, the professor is identified
twice by the narrator in the Spanish version of the story as el otro (the
other) (Borges 1974, 48). Here, however, el otro marks the professor
not only as interlocutor, but—in his attempt to educate (assimilate)
Murdock and the shaman to (into) his own world view—as a
representative of the Western bias of inscribed practice, according
to which the nature of a language remains within the bounds of
representation rather than in its capacity to welcome and address
the other. The professor’s dialogue with Murdock, in other words is,
for all intents and purposes, conducted in the language of ontology
or encoded knowledge rather than of ethics, of signs and emblems
rather than of persons.
Murdock, however, rejects the colonizing parasitical discourse
of the ethnographic discipline and of the professor who subscribes
to its allegory of salvage (theme of the vanishing primitive). In its
place, Murdock assumes an ethical position. His refusal to reveal,
or more precisely and significantly, to publish the secret, which may
or may not be that of the tribe, prompts the first question from his
mentor: “Does your oath bind you?” (¿Lo ata su juramento?) (Borges
1974, 48). Murdock responds by simply saying that “in that far off
place” he learned something that he cannot say (“aprendí algo que no
puedo decir”). His declaration “no puedo decir” registers the more eth-
ical turn. When asked by the professor if his reticence is due to the
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 583

“insufficiency” of the English language to express the secret (¿Acaso

el idioma ingés es insuficiente?), Murdock clarifies that his reason is not
couched in the problem of linguistic translation. For Murdock the
“secret” is something more than a sought-after scientific object of
investigation; it is a precious awakening, part of which is the fact
that Western science now appears useless when compared to “el
secreto.” (“No sé muy bien como decirle que el secreto es precioso y que ahora
la ciencia, nuestra ciencia, me parece una mera frivolidad”) (48). Murdock
learns that knowing what one does not understand about a situa-
tion is just as valuable as what one thinks one does understand.11
Murdock’s rejection of “methodologism” (of the sanctioned scien-
tific method), of cultural inscription and textualization, and his
resistance to objectifying cultural observation as such, also seem to
undercut the stasis of prescriptive competence rhetoric touted by cor-
porate business and social science models and paradigms taught in
intercultural communication departments.12 In contrast, the herme-
neutical phenomenological unveiling of intercultural understanding
as motion on the way is captured in Murdock’s words relating to the
revealed “secret”: “The secret, for that matter, is not worth as much
as the paths that brought me to it,” and “those paths, one must walk”
(“El secreto, por lo demás, no vale lo que valen los caminos que me condujeron
a él. Esos caminos hay que andarlos”) (48). Murdock’s precious discovery
reverts to this finding, which is both Socratic and phenomenologi-
cal, that the highest densities of meaning lie in the immediate expe-
rience, in the most obviously not mediated “at hand.” Rather than
empirical induction, Murdock (Borges) offers transcendental expe-
rience, one that engenders a precarious intercultural juxtaposition
or coexistence with the unknown other. The secret withheld, like the
field notes destroyed by Murdock, represents events of letting-be,
a condition of openness toward letting-go, a relation of audition, of
privileged listener, decipherer, scribe. It is also a relation of ethical
responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for. This latter
stance, however, is left to be imagined—or rejected—by the reader.
As Murdock’s shadowy “case” uncovers, exposure to strange
cultural strands bears strange fruit: an “aesthetic education” (Spivak
2012, 352) that leads to an unexpected, even disarticulating, cultural
paradigm shift. Murdock, at the end of the story-poem, is purportedly
no longer the character he was at the beginning of the story when
he did not yet know who he was: “Era suya esa edad en que el hombre no
sabe aún quién es . . . ) (Borges 1974, 46). Indeed, the secret he will not
unveil may well stand in for this new self-(un)veiling of himself as
584 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

a dialectical counterpoint to the “quite-other.” But if Murdock has

come to reassess prevailing patterns of thought in the light of newly
experienced insights, the reader can only speculate. Linguistic signs,
in the Derridean vein, point only toward themselves in an infinite
regress of self-reflexiveness in Borges’s text. Thus, the secret is also
the region of strangeness that, like an oracle, speaks itself, and that
remains as it is and must be, uninterpretable or untranslatable.
Borges’s narrator finally testifies in the story-poem that
Murdock’s intercultural experience brings about an alteration of life
and mind, in swift and unexpected sequences: “Fred married, was
divorced, and is now a librarian at Yale” (“Fred se casó, se divorció y es
ahora uno de los bibliotecarios de Yale”) (Borges 1974, 50). The narrator’s
frenzied aphoristic revelation once again shatters the reader’s sense
of the familiar, perhaps disclosing, as in a glimmer, something
intentionally concealed, and that can only remain unsaid, the
oxymoron of indeterminacy and (mis/beyond)understanding. If the
library is similar to Borges’s Library of Babel, it is easy to imagine
Murdock stacking books upon the shelves in a manner similar to
that of an ethnographer turned inquisitor. Nonetheless, as with
Borges’s imperfect librarians, Murdock, as the hapless ethnographer
researching through the library, may also find that “for every sensible
line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless
cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherencies” (Borges 1964, 53).
From textuality to experience, and from experience to textuality,
Borges’s story-poem ends not with ontological understanding, but
with an ungraspable circular hermeneutic excess of meaning that
remains shadowy.

ON THE WAY TO CONCLUSION

Why does Murdock abruptly leave the reservation? Why does
he refuse to say what he learned there? Why does he choose the
detached-from-experience job of librarian at an elite university, a
decision that indeed seems to contradict the lesson learned on the
journey? These questions are presumably not only those of the
implied narrator of the story-poem who presumes to undertake
an investigation of “the case.” They are also those of the countless
readers of the story who revel or despair in fathoming a more than
understandable, even resolvable interpretation. Spanish philosopher
José Ortega y Gasset understood that the strangeness of language
as silences also needed to be translated. Nevertheless, for Ortega
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 585

y Gasset (as for Gadamer and Borges), translation is only a path on

the way to understanding (“la traducción no es la obra, sino un camino hacia
la obra”), a creative and poietic activity (1937, 444–49). As Gadamer
reminds us, understanding does not occur when we try to intercept
what a text (or someone) wants to say to us by claiming we already
know it. Instead, what we can understand is what we will allow the
text (that which speaks to us) to say to us. And to understand what
a work of art says to us requires that we attentively engage with it
as we would with all others who address us, and to whom we must
respond.13 Thus, the process of attending to the task of understanding
that which the literary imagination calls forth also parallels in
allegorical fashion our attempt to understand others in given real
face-to-face encounters. Gadamer describes the “discovery” inherent
to this process of hermeneutical unfolding in a way that makes its
intercultural communicative and ethical relevance clear:
Whatever says something to us is like a person who says something.
It is alien in the sense that it transcends us. To this extent, there is
a double foreignness in the task of understanding, which in reality
is one and the same foreignness. . . . We cannot understand without
wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be
said. (Gadamer 1977, 101, emphasis in original)

Borges’s allegory of intercultural hermeneutic thinking enacts

(intercultural) understanding as a paradoxical, contradictory,
even conflictive ethical performance. In this sense, literary
understanding—like its imagined construct, intercultural
understanding—is not accomplished in complete comprehension of
the very-other but in response (attention) to her, a response permeated by
respect, reticence, and even silence. In its intimation of interpretive
surplus, Borges’s story-poem seems to caution the reader toward the
dangers of the Manichean bent of the modern temperament whereby
we find it easier to relate to the idea of things than to things and to
people themselves. In this conundrum the mind can shelter us from
the hard realities and difficulties of intercultural understandings and
connections as abstraction accompanies and spurs our inclination
to escape real bodies that suffer pain and loss. On the other hand,
Borges’s story can also be viewed as an invitation to a conversation or
to “friendship,” as Wayne Booth purports in The Company We Keep:
An Ethics of Fiction: a chance for the reader to “live together for a
while with a new friend, a way that will be . . . somehow too valuable
to be reduced to either the utile or the dulce” (1988, 175). Booth’s
586 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

metaphorical analogy echoes Spivak’s “ethical motor” when he notes

that “‘it is not the degree of otherness that distinguishes fiction
of the highest ethical kind but the depth of education it yields in
dealing with the ‘other’ ” (195). Viewed as a gift from a would-be-friend,
the literary text’s value, then, is not to be found necessarily in its
“strangeness” or “defamiliarization” in its surface content, but rather
in what the reader is likely to learn from the conversation about ways
of dealing with the unfamiliar or even threatening, and as a source
of insight into how to embrace otherness creatively, with intercultural
desire, which is to say with desire to understand the imagined-other
and disinclined to let rupture or estrangement have the last word.
In her call for a “transnational literacy” Spivak appears to project
a way out of the intercultural hermeneutic conundrum by calling
for new readings of peripheralized texts “with a disarticulating rather
than a comparative point of view.” If this new point of view can
constitute the way of being-in-the-ethical relation, then understanding
and interpreting these texts must also be realized in a way that is not
self-identifying but rather accomplished in a way that offers up an
“interruptive praxis from within our hope in justice under capitalism”
(2012, 152, emphasis in original).
As teachers of texts in the era of globalization and “aesthetic
education,” we have the task of exploring imaginary intercultural
worlds and guiding our students through their delights, possibilities,
resonances and pitfalls. Some texts will be more complex, more
profound, more daring in their exploration of the unknown, more
defamiliarizing than others. Whether they may induce understanding
or the failure to understand, the literary text is a terrain on which an
intercultural process as tensional event—of estrangement, evocation,
perplexity, and illumination—may take place.

NOTES
1
As noted by Una Chaudhuri, “in the area of performance, interculturalism
has been several things, the least desirable but probably most powerful of
which is an effect of global mass-communication. The wholesale export
of films, videos, and television programming, not to mention also the
worldwide dissemination of images of Western consumer culture through
print advertising, has in effect ‘interculturated’ the world to a degree and
in a way that is obviously and profoundly disturbing” (1991, 192).
2
Writing on the hermetic poetry of Paul Celan, for example, Gadamer
points to his own endeavor to understand in the following way: “In
presenting the outcome of prolonged attentiveness, this reader believes
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 587

to have detected ‘sense’ in these dark incunables—not always a univocal

sense, and surely not always a ‘complete’ (or completely transparent)
meaning. In many instances, he has only deciphered some passages and
offered vague hunches how the gaps of his understanding (not of the
text) could be mended. Whosoever believes to have already ‘understood’
Celan’s poems, this person is not my interlocutor and not the addressee
of these pages. Such a person does not know what understanding means
in this case” (quoted in Dallmayr 1996, 42).
3
Ann Carson explains this experience as aligned more closely to allegory
or parable: “As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire,
as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading
(or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges—toward
something else, something not yet grasped. The unplucked apple, the
beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable
objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so. The
unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends. As all paradoxes
are, in some way, paradoxes about paradox, so all eros is, to some degree,
desire for desire” (2000, 109).
4
“El Sur” (“The South”), “El informe de Brodie” (“Brodie’s Investigation”),
“Historia del guerrero y la cautiva” (“Story of the Warrior and the
Captive”), and “La cautiva” (“The Captive”) are just a few of Borges’s stories
that illustrate the author’s latent interest in cultural and intercultural
speculations across space and time. These stories suggest not only the
inherent risks in intercultural border crossings, but also their dynamic
potential for new, albeit ambivalent, insights. The intercultural desire to
understand oneself in relation to the very other persists like a palimpsest in
these stories, whether in the form of a banal cultural adaptation, or as felt
intuition in the first bewildering moment in which past and present merge
in playful recognition of difference as the same. For English translations of
these stories see Tom J. Lewis and Robert E. Jungman (1986).
5
This was translated and published in the 1974 bilingual edition as
In Praise of Darkness. In the same bilingual edition, “El etnógrafo”
is willfully, or in Borges’s ruse-inclined fashion, translated as “The
Anthropologist,” perhaps to echo the American anthropologist and Yale
University Professor George Peter Murdock (1897–1985), upon whom it
is believed Borges’s character Fred Murdock is based. George Murdock
is remembered for his empirical approach to ethnological studies—of
which Outline of World Cultures (1954) and the World Ethnographic Sample
(1957), his landmark cross-cultural studies on Old World populations, are
examples.
6
As noted by Saul Morson, the brevity of aphorism or short genre lies “on
an implicit continuum between literature and philosophy,” claiming a
distinct role for the reader, and hailing “a specific attitude to the moment
of uttering” (2012, 2–6).
588 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.3 Summer 2016

7
All English translations of text from Borges’s “El etnógrafo” (in the 1974
bilingual edition) are those of this essay’s authors.
8
This conundrum also seems to form part of Borges’s paratactic style
that—with absence of, divergence from, or interrupted connection as its
mark— infects the storyline.
9
The reader of Borges’s story-poem may not be aware that the author
is known for taking extensive liberties and manipulations with
translations. The translator of the 1974 bilingual edition alerts us
to this penchant for literary hoaxes on the part of Borges, when he
notes that the reader (of the 1974 bilingual edition) “should not expect
parallel texts, for our expressed aim [that of Borges and the translator
together] all along has been to produce versions which read as though
they were written in English. ‘The Anthropologist’ is a case in point.
The translation, seeking to improve a number of circumstantial details,
is in places a deliberative rewriting of the original. Borges intended us
later to alter the Spanish text—in effect, to translate the new English
parts back into Spanish—but we never got around to it. It is just as
well. Now the reader gets two texts, different but equally authoritative”
(1974, 139).
10
For French philosopher Michel Serres “time flows in a turbulent and
chaotic manner; it percolates” (1995, 59). According to Serres’s perception
of time, historical events are not separated in time and space. As time
percolates and folds upon itself, it brings events in history (and culture)
closer, not the opposite as might be understood in conventional linear
views of historical time.
11
Curiously serendipitous, the anthropologist Sara Rae Osterhoudt uses
four Borges stories as literary sources to understand issues of ethnography
and to offer anthropologists “allegories for thinking about ethnographic
practices” (2010, 8). While “The Ethnographer” is excluded from this
list, her summary describes the hermeneutic enterprise entailed not
only in ethnographic practice but in literary and intercultural practices
as well: “These mazes [ethnographic practices] arrange themselves into
circular patterns and necessitate thoughtful navigation replete with false
starts, sudden barriers, and a logic that seems to fold back upon itself. For
Borges, we often construct our own labyrinths, and then forget to leave
ourselves a trail of breadcrumbs so that we can escape again. Wandering
lost through aisles of the library or footpaths of the jungle, we may
at times feel overwhelmed by the information around us. Facing the
field notes we ourselves created, trying to reason through a theoretical
tautology, or realizing once we are back home that there was a crucial
question we forgot to ask: such common fieldwork experiences reflect
dimensions of Borges’ labyrinths” (8–9).
12
Gadamer also contrasts the scientific method to the method of phenom-
enology: a “method dealing with that which has no foundation, the way
 Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Ciro A. Sandoval | ESSAYS 589

of a ‘transcendental experience,’ not an empirical induction. For it must

create its ground for itself” (1977, 160). The intercultural scholar Ronald
Barnett contrasts intercultural understanding and “competence” by
noting that understanding “strikes against the conventionalism of com-
petence insofar as competency is a fulfillment of standards determined
in advance. . . . For understanding, read openness; for competence, clo-
sure” (1994, 110–11).
13
George Steiner perceptively speaks of the “interpretive response under
pressure of enactment” which he calls “answerability.” In other words,
in his view, the reader of a text is hailed and must answer to, or be
accountable to the “other” he encounters. This Steiner calls a “responding
responsibility” (1991, 8).

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SANDRA M. BOSCHETTO-SANDOVAL is Emerita Professor of

Spanish and Latin American Studies at Michigan Technological
University. She has published in the areas of Latin American
literature and cultural studies, including more recently on Chilean
author and educator Amanda Labarca Hubertson (Edwin Mellen
Press, 2004), as well as in the area of modern language program
development.

CIRO A. SANDOVAL is Emeritus Professor of Spanish and Comparative

Studies at Michigan Technological University. He has published on
the relation of science, philosophy and literature, including a critical
article in Philología Hispalénsis (2009) and a co-edited study (with
Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval) on the work of Peruvian writer, Josė
María Arguedas (Ohio University Press, 1998).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.