Borges and a Differently Colored History

Abstract

Borges wrote repeatedly—obsessively—about the stubborn contradiction between conventional linear time and the (Greek) time of eternity.¹ The present chapter relates this “habit” to the broader question of Borges’s understanding of tradition and modernity. Or, rather, traditions and modernities. For in Borges, both tradition and modernity may be taken in two main ways. Tradition is the popular cultural forms, figures, and social relations of the nineteenth-century Southern Cone, but also the order of revealed knowledge about the world that held sway before the advent of secular modernity. Modernity is the (problematic) name given to a historical phase of socioeconomic development, but also an aesthetico-philosophical condition characterized by a questioning of received knowledge and authority, and by the production of novelty. The interest of the relationship between tradition and modernity, and between eternal and linear time, lies in their messy entanglement, not in their separateness. Modernity may be dominated by el tiempo que pasa, but it is not reducible to it; tradition may have been dominated by la identidad que perdura, but is not oblivious to the river of successive time.² In Borges, the time of eternity is one “habit” among many used to criticize modernity and affirm tradition, even if, as Pierre Menard came to understand, the direct recitation of fragments of tradition necessarily alters it.