Vernacular, unacknowledged multilingualism, and esoteric code: failed revelations in J. L. Borges’s ‘Averroës’ Search’ and R. Kipling’s ‘The finest story in the world’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the idea that the vernacular (conceived as a context-dependent relation between socially unequal languages) can sometimes enable a form of communication that excludes the socially superior non-speaker, a kind of secret language or “dark tongue” (Heller-Roazen), of which parables, whose quotidian appearance serves both to reveal and conceal an esoteric message, provide a template. As a language shared by the disenfranchised yet inaccessible to the powerful, I explore the vernacular's potential as a vehicle for coded esoteric messages, and its intersection with issues of “unacknowledged multilingualism” (Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 2) in two stories of epistemological failure: Borges's “Averroës' Search” and Kipling's “Finest Story in the World”. Both stories stage a tension between a monolingual-imperial paradigm and an unrecognized multilingual constellation. Both ascribe the failure of revelation to the protagonists' inability to grasp the multiplicity of languages, cultures and beliefs that underpins their imperial environment (Said, Culture and Imperialism 20). I focus on the local/global entanglements pivotal to these stories, and the paradoxical ways in which the spiritual encoding of vernaculars intersects the cosmopolitan and monolingual paradigms that determine their characters' thinking.