Jon Beasley-Murray

University of British Columbia

jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca

Borges, Creature of Habits

If there is one theme that dominates both the work of Argentine writer Jorge Luis
Borges and that works critical reception, it is probably the relationship between the
particular and the general, the specific and the universal, the singular and the common.
To take but one example from Borgess own work: his early collection, A Universal
History of Iniquity, announces from its very title an ambition to say something about
iniquity (notoriety, deviance, violence) in general; but it does so by means of a series of
short, specific portraits of diverse and idiosyncratic figures, from The Cruel Redeemer,
Lazarus Morell to Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv or Mahomeds Double, all of
which are picked out, at times apparently almost by chance, from the breadth of
Borgess wide reading. It is far from clear what light this catalogue or dictionary of the
strange and perverse sheds on the category of the iniquitous as a whole. Indeed, one
possible conclusion to draw from the book is that its very approach undoes the project
announced in its title: that what, if anything, ironically unites its individual pieces is the
implicit demonstration that they do not and cannot make a whole, that there is no
universal history of iniquity to be told at all. There are only ever fragments, singular
instances, particular scenes or events that are inevitably traduced or betrayed by broad
abstractions or universalizing tendencies.
Elsewhere in Borgess fiction, it is not so much the general (or the desire for
generality) that betrays the specific, as the specific that undermines the general. In his
famous short story, The Aleph, for instance, the claim to have discovered a marvelous
union of all places and all times (from the populous sea to dawn and dusk, [. . .] the
multitudes of the Americas, [. . .] endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me
as though in a mirror, [. . .] all the mirrors on the planet [Collected Fictions 283]) is
undercut by its very specific and rather underwhelming location on a set of cellar stairs
in an unremarkable Buenos Aires house that is shortly due for demolition. This storys
narrator, asked to save the Aleph, this fantastic intimation of the universality, from its
imminent destruction by the vagaries of commercial development (the owners of the
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caf on the corner want to expand their premises), refuses to do so for the equally
particular (if not petty) reasons of personal dislike and latent jealousy towards the
houses owner. But ultimately, to say that the particular undermines the universal is
perhaps the same thing as to say that the universal (or the project of universalization)
only ever betrays and undoes the particular. Again, in some ways this is Borgess point
throughout his fiction: the relationship between the instance and what it is made more
broadly to represent (what it is an instance of) is always tense, antagonistic, hostile...
and yet somehow inevitable.
In the reception of Borgess work, this tension between specific and general plays
out in the divide between those who view him as primarily an Argentine writer, and
those who point rather to his claims to universality. One might imagine that the lines
between these positions also separate more political, materialist critics from the
traditionalists, but in fact things are rather more complicated: Borges has equally been
praised and damned for his particularities by politicized criticism, for instance. In part
this is because he does not fit easily into the postcolonial frame through which the
tension between general and specific has been increasingly viewed over the past thirty
years or so. He is not Argentine enough for those who want their writers to represent
some kind of (preferably indigenous) resistance to globalizing tendencies or the
presumed arrogance of so-called Eurocentrism, itself condemned as a particularism
disguised as universal. And yet of course the model of the resistant postcolonial writer
is itself a universalizing one that Borges discomfits precisely because he does not
exactly fit it very well. For such critics, he is insufficiently representative. On the other
hand, his perhaps peculiarly Argentine obsessions with the legacies of creole violence,
for instance, are part of what has prevented his full incorporation into the canon of
Western literature: thoroughly imbued in that canon himself, he also took the liberty of
taking pot shots at it from the margins. Indeed, it is as a writer of the margins that critic
Beatriz Sarlo observes that he somehow straddles the distinction between
cosmopolitanism and nationalism: he is the writer of the orillas, the banlieux or
disparaged suburbs on the outskirts of Buenos Aires expansive modernization, a
marginal in the centre, a cosmopolitan on the edge (Jorge Luis Borges 6). Yet Borges
himself, at least at times, seems to have wished to have been more universal, rather than
less. In response to a questionnaire in 1944, he said that his greatest literary ambition
was to write a book, a chapter, a page, a paragraph, that would be all things to all men
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. . . that would dispense with my aversions, my preferences, my habits (qtd. in
Williamson 279). For good or ill, however, Borges failed in this ambition; he remained a
creature of habit.
It is habit, however, that may help us resolve this apparent antimony between
the particular and the general, perhaps even in a (properly posthegemonic) way that
also loosens the bind of representation as an ambition that necessarily fails in its desire
to make the one always the instance of the other. For habit is both singular and general
without ever being anything other than what it is. Habits are both individual and
shared, distinctive without being essential: we are the sum of our habits, and yet no
specific habit defines us. All habits are acquired--none is innate--and yet they tend to
persist, and we persist with them. We transform them (and so ourselves) only with
difficulty, but as we do so we construct new forms of community, new modes of living
in common. Yet the trace of our past lives continues in the habits that we cannot quite
leave behind altogether.
Take for instance the tale of The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan, which, like
many others in Borgess Universal History, is a story of metamorphosis and performative
adaptation. Here, New York tenement boy Harrigan turns himself into the cowboy out
West who will be Billy the Kid by acting out melodramatic models provided by the
theater. In turn, he will become an iconic part of the myths of the Wild West propagated
by Hollywood. The key scene in this self-remaking, of Harrigans becoming Billy, is the
point at which a notorious Mexican gunfighter named Belisario Villagrn enters a
crowded saloon that is outlined with cinematic precision and visuality (their elbows
on the bar, tired hard-muscled men drink a belligerent alcohol and flash stacks of silver
coins marked with a serpent and an eagle [Collected Fictions 32]); everyone stops dead
except for Harrigan, who fells him with a single shot and for no apparent reason. In that
moment, Billy the Kid is born and the shifty Bill Harrigan buried (33). But even if it is
Bills disinterested (unreflective, habitual) killing that turns him into a legend (a
general type), there is always a gap between that legend and his behavior. He may learn
to sit a horse straight or the vagabond art of cattle driving and he may find himself
attracted to the guitars and brothels of Mexico (33, 34), but a few tics from his East
Coast days remain: Something of the New York hoodlum lived on in the cowboy (33).
The task of replacing one set of habits (or habitus) with another is never quite complete.
It is not as though Harrigan were the real thing and Billy the Kid a mere mask.
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Rather, it is that the new performance is informed by the old one. As always in Borges,
there is never anything entirely new under the sun, even the scorching sun of the arid
Western desert.
The focus on a pivotal moment in Bill Harrigan (and indeed, in many other of
the stories in the same collection) is unusual in its clarity. Borgess later stories tend to
describe a series of minor deviations, none of which is in itself crucial, but which
collectively have unexpected results. Perhaps the classic example of this is The Garden
of Forking Paths, but in fact we see it everywhere, as he elaborates the mutual
implication of, on the one hand, static scenes whose drama often derives from the
structural logic of genre fiction or the cinema and, on the other hand, plot development
guided by the logic of an accumulation of almost imperceptible (and seemingly
random) deviations from the norm. In various stories he then explores the diverse
possible relations between what we can call the logic of minimal deviation and the
structure of the scene. Sometimes one leads to the other, sometimes the two
complement each other, sometimes they are in tension, and so on. At times Borges
seems to be asking how much deviation (or how many minimal deviations) are
required to provoke a scene. At other times he wonders how many deviations any
particular scene can handle. And there are still other cases in which he proposes that it
is only by making a scene that the logic of gradual accumulation can be brought to a
halt. Take Death and the Compuass, for instance. Here the detective, Lnnrot,
carefully and slowly follows the periodic series of bloody deeds (147), each of which
is but a slight variation on its predecessor, until he arrives at the climactic scene that
gives (renewed) sense to the series itself. Or Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which begins
with a paradigmatic scene: a dinner with Borgess friend Bioy Casares, a glance at a
mirror that provokes a citation and then the fruitless search for its origin. This then
opens up a concatenation of curious circumstances, each one of which could easily be
overlooked: an additional encyclopedia article, a package from Brazil, a compass
packed in a crate of table service, a dead man who owns an unusually heavy metal
cone. Together, however, they constitute a new world. In all these cases (and others:
The Secret Miracle, for instance), what is at issue is the connection between habit or
the routine, with its many repetitions none of which is quite like the last, and drama or
the exceptional. How does the dramatic scene, with all its novelty, arise from routine
repetition? Why is it that we are suddenly confronted with a decision or choice that
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only in retrospect we can understand has been a long time brewing in all the vagaries of
chance? Or how, by contrast, does the scene itself become routinized or habitual?
We see the same logic also in The South, where it is not so much that there is
any single one crux in the process whereby (here) a mild-mannered urban librarian
finds himself, if only in his imagination, ultimately in the thick of a knife fight on the
pampa, the most classic of scenes from the mythology of the Western. There are, rather,
many points of slight divergence from the routine, all of which cumulatively lead the
plot to its narrative conclusion, and the storys protagonist, Juan Dahlmann, to his
untimely end. But each of these pivots on which the story and Dahlmanns fate rests is
presented as the lightest of touches: literally so, in the instance of the injury that leads
him to septicemia and the sanatorium. Fate can be merciless with the slightest
distractions, comments the storys narrator, as he explains that his protagonist makes a
slight change in his usual routine when he takes the stairs rather than the elevator; on
the way up, something in the dimness brushed his foreheada bat? a bird? [. . .] The
hand he passed over his forehead came back red with blood (174-175). Yet it is this
slightest of grazes that infects him with septicemia and leads him to the clinic from
which the rest of the story unfolds. The choices we make only half-aware (taking the
stairs rather than the elevator) combine with half-noticed events (a brush on the
forehead) to produce unexpected and sometimes fatal results. This particular event is
later mirrored when, in a store in the south of the storys title, Dahlmann suddenly felt
something lightly brush his face (278). But it would be wrong to say that it is his
reaction to this encounteraccepting a young thugs challenge to a fightthat seals his
fate. For one thing, whats required is the intervention of yet another unforeseeable
intervention, a gaucho throwing Dahlmann a weapon; for another, we might also say
that our protagonists conclusion has been inscribed in his ancestry, his grandfathers
own death fighting in the south, and the pull of that lineage. The logic of habit
suggests that one thing tends to lead to another, but this is only a tendency, not an iron
law of fate or history. Or perhaps it would be better to say that this is what fate and
history are for Borges, this is their iron law: no more and no less than an accumulation
of almost imperceptible (and seemingly random) deviations from the norm.
In this proliferation of endless differences that undermine any stable identity and
undo any project of representation (and so, by inference, hegemony), the wonder is that
anything survives at all. If we are only one step from chaos and violent disintegration,
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the issue is less how we prevent that step than how we emerged from that flux in the
first place. For Borges, the true mystery is not the endless division and uncertainty.
Time passes, things change, moment to moment everything is up in the air; neither
language nor reason can hold things still within their prisons of representation or
categorization. I is always another. It could not be otherwise. No, the real surprise is
that despite all this mutability and malleability, some things somehow do seem to
remain the same. It is, in short, not the singular or the so-called exceptional that requires
explanation, but the common, the fact that from a universe of chance emerge islands of
relative predictability and consistency. Here again, however, habit is our guide as its
tendency to persist constitutes a conatus (both individual and collective) that tends to
ensure longevity and survival. It may be mere illusion (though what could be less
illusory than habit?), but we do think--or better, as Borges puts it, feel--that we
incarnate some kind of singularity that is more or less the same today as it was
yesterday. This is a concern of Borgess from his very first publication, the collection of
poetry entitled Fervor de Buenos Aires, which (among other things) is devoted to the
unsettling displacements of the citys insistent expansion and modernization--the same
developments that doom the Aleph. In a brief poem entitled Final del ao (Years
End), he concludes by pointing to the:

wonder in the face of the miracle
that despite the infinite play of chance
that despite the fact that we are but
drops in Heraclituss river,
something still endures within us:
unmoved. (Obras completas I 50)

Much later, in Borges and I, this endurance is explicitly linked to Spinozas notion of
conatus: the idea that all things with to go on being what they are--stone wishes
eternally to be stone, and tiger, to be tiger. The twist then that Borges adds is that this
persistence and survival is thanks to a series of public performances that take on the
proper name from which he himself feels increasingly distant: I shall endure in Borges,
not in myself (if, indeed, I am anybody at all) (Collected Fictions 324). Little by little, he
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has become general, the property of all. His habits, in other words, have taken on a life
of their own: Borges finds that he is nothing more, if nothing less, than their creature.
Finally, then, what I hope to have begun to sketch is a Borges who is neither
particular nor general, specific nor universal, but a writer in the process of becoming
common through the development and pursuit of a series of habits that both change
and persist over the course of his career. Indeed, we see this process mirrored in the
formal aspects of his work, as a writer of short fictions that ceaselessly return to what
are often very similar preoccupations and scenes, none of which can be completely
reduced to any other, as they continuously incarnate slight deviations at the very
moment of their repetition. Or to put this another way: to see these stories in terms of
some kind of chain of equivalence is to ignore the diversity that they both thematize
and problematize. They work, moreover, not in terms of simple representation (or
allegory), given that one of themes to which they constantly return is precisely the ways
in which representation betrays and is betrayed by the specific instances that constitute
it. Rather, Borgess work serves to inculcate certain habits of reading that are attentive
both to the return of the familiar and to the emergence of drama, the construction of a
scene, in the slight deviations that provoke anxiety and humor alike. Borges, creature of
habits, passes on some of these habits to his readers as well as, by making us if only
intermittently alive to them, wresting from us some of the habits that are already ours.


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works cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras completas I: 1923-1936. Buenos Aires: Crculo de Lectores, 1992.
-----. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998.
Sarlo, Beatriz. Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. Ed. John King. London: Verso,
2006.
Williamson, Edwin. Borges: A Life. London: Penguin, 2004.