Monday 9 June 2008

Borges, Humour- Wrong

In ‘A Note On (towards) Bernard Shaw’, Jorge Luis Borges writes,

Humour, I suspect, is an oral genre, a sudden flavour of conversation, not something written.

With the insertion of but a single word, I will provide a refutation that is the incarnate proof of itself; that being the incarnate contrary of the preceding declamation.

Humour, I suspect, is an oral genre, a sudden flavour of conversation, not something written. Not!

I have turned the significance of the phrase completely on its linguistic head, and with a blow of such simple, yet brutal, mastery that the discerning reader is helpless but to laugh. My apologies should this explosive expulsion of psychic energy from the private inner domain to the public one of shared sound prove alarming to any immediate witnesses of the action, or embarrassing to the actor.

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