Historias sobre historias: Una visión borgesiana de la circulación premoderna

Apstrakt

Along with other goods, texts, ideas and stories traveled along the Silk Road. One famous case of East-West circulation was the 1001 Nights. Another story, the Great Renunciation (the best-known version being the story of the Buddha) traveled across space and time, transforming, adapting and generating scores of versions. Scholars from the nineteenth century on have reflected on the global migration of stories, whether to point out the universal elements that account for the stories' transcultural adaptability, or to focus on the modular units that generate an exponential multiplicity of variants, in the wake of Goethean morphology. However, most often, premodern stories do not fold themselves neatly into the major contemporary theories of literary circulation, whether Franco Moretti’s model of imported form and local content, or Pascale Casanova’s Meridian model with its centripetal trajectory of texts through translations and literary prizes. David Damrosch’s definition of world literature as a “mode of reading and of circulation” does apply, but only in a broad and general sense. In this way, the East-West circulation of premodern tales offer a good point of entry into the current anxieties about the “presentism” of contemporary world literature theories. In this context, Borges's writings prove to be especially rewarding, offering us, not only a powerful re-reading of premodern literature, but also pathways for conceptualizing premodern circulation. The present essay looks at the ways in which these complicate, and also build on, an iconic master trope of literary circulation which is widely recognized as foundational to our discipline: the trope of the marketplace. Several of Borges’s stories and essays (“La busca de Averroes”, the essays on the circulation of the Buddha legend, and the texts about the 1001 Nights), offer both a metatextually productive illustration of current, often aporetical debates about global literary circulation, and creative strategies for a renewal of literary practice by returning to minor and/or archaic forms.