The Importance of Failure

I have elected to focus primary on Borges' short story. In short, I read "El etnografo" as a story of failure. A student that "goes native" while he is in the field, doesn't complete his work, and even ends on the note of failure, some would say, with his marriage ending in divorce. The theme of failure manages to float throughout the story in a way that I find to imperative to our thinking about how we develop the categories of "theory" and "Latin America" in the context of one another through literature. There is something about failure that operates as a way dismantling canonical ways of thinking, that forces things into a dialectic with one another, that I believe lends a political value to failure.

In our readings of Borges we have raised up how a disagreement (una discordia) or a paradoxical tension is always in place. But perhaps it is in this discordia that identity is found and made, yet never resolved. This even takes form in the text when Murdock's ancestry is described in connection to the border wars: "esa antigua discordia de sus estirpes era un vínculo ahora." How do we makes sense of unreconciled differences? It would appear that Murdock is working through his own internal enmity with what to do with the acquired secret doctrine he gained in the field and his role as a scholar and student. I read Murdock's internal conflict, his failure even, as a way of rethinking how we educate. Astonished by his decision not to publish, his advisor helps to demonstrate the point I'm trying to articulate and make sense of myself:

— ¿Lo ata su juramento? preguntó el otro.
— No es ésa mi razón — dijo Murdock —. En esas lejanías aprendí algo que no puedo decir.
— ¿Acaso el idioma inglés es insuficiente? — observaría el otro.
— Nada de eso, señor. Ahora que poseo el secreto, podría enunciarlo de cien modos distintos y aun contradictorios. No sé muy bien cómo decirle que el secreto es precioso y que ahora la ciencia, nuestra ciencia, me parece una mera frivolidad.

There is something powerful about Murdock's failure to produce written work. In many ways, it is a way of saying no to the status quo. He changes what we one does with acquired knowledge, it is a change in the educational model. Education should alert us of the contradictions in human experience—which I believe is at the heart of the dialectics produced through the tensions in identity politics.