“Legend” by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Andrew Hurley
Cain and Abel came upon each other after Abel’s death. They were walking through the desert, and they recognized each other from afar, since both men were very tall. The two brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. They sat silently, as weary people do when dusk begins to fall. In the sky, a star glimmered, though it had not yet been given a name. In the light of the fire, Cain saw that Abel’s forehead bore the mark of the stone, and he dropped the bread he was about to carry to his mouth and asked his brother to forgive him.
“Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?” Abel answered. “I don’t remember anymore; here we are, together, like before.”
“Now I know that you have truly forgiven me,” Cain said, “because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”
“Yes,” said Abel slowly. “So long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts.”
To understand the history of being, we must look within ourselves to discover the primordial habit of forgetting. This is the apparent claim of Borges’ “Legend”. Within this brief reflection, I take Borges’ central point of forgetfulness as a sound pillar of psychic motion. The absence of difficulty when we consider this habit of forgetting is evident: for so many of my moments are dictated by it. When I walk about on the street, perhaps I find a bird that interests me by virtue of its flying past me. But then with such a sharp quickness, a man crossing the street has tackled my mind, and I begin to wonder about him, who he might be. From his walk, it seems as if he is comfortable and confident in blindness. And from this confidence, my mind begins to wonder about the nature of this man, if he is a man at all, according to the framework of a red Adam. Or maybe he is Borges himself in uncorrupted flesh. And hopefully I arrive at a supermarket that I had forgotten.
It is in forgetting that the power of creation is revealed. And in this brilliant flash fiction, Borges provides us with the opportunity to treat our lives with forgetfulness, as if in our old age we are provided a new start. Before us are two well-known Biblical figures, whose conflict is a revered colloquial archetype: our father Cain and his brother Abel. The startling immediacy by which Borges presents this tale leads the reader toward an obvious allusion to Genesis, particularly, the moment in which God the Father tells Adam that it is his responsibility to name the novel creations He has given him.
Void and formless according to the following line, “In the sky, a star glimmered, though it had not yet been given a name,” we are given a fresh plain of existence. This universe has a clear problem of continuity, as briefly alluded to in the quote above. Here we might mark a world in which Abel was murdered and, by consequence, will not return to the earth, confusing itself with a world in which Abel was and was not murdered and is set on walking toward Cain in a perverted, resurrected manner. The stars and their firmament are nameless precisely because in this confused, novel world, both brothers are in a desert place, isolated from community (until, of course, they spot one another) and are thus involved in a world without myth, which Biblically presupposes the community (as even with God's three persons, who collaborate for the sake of creation). Both men walk with a history that fails to recognize itself as the one definitive History. They walk without the history of parents and elders, who by the structures of a community would have dictated the mythical characters whose substance is that of stars and planets.
History and its fiction being a great concern of his, along with the ways in which they might be altered, Borges not only manipulates this legend for the sake of novelty, but distorts the narrative as a means of demonstrating his own habit of forgetfulness. For Borges reaches into the Mesopotamian landscape with invasive fingers, corrupting the established tale for his thematic purposes, forgetting its original intent. In so doing, Borges underscores the shaky grip one has upon history, along with the corrupting element of their own time, demonstrating the ease by which supposedly established events can be renewed.
This ostensible grasp of history and the lack thereof is therefore not foreign to literature. It is the paradoxical nature of literature. For in the moment that I arrive at the time of the fiction with my own time, attempting to find the shared ground between the signifier and its faithful meaning according to the dictates of both my world and the fictional world, my literature and world crumble into one another. By virtue of my particular social standing and my context as it relates to a history relegated to my being and the perversion of such in my current moment, I contaminate the fictional world, and through my engagement with the fictional world, I also taint my own, a collision with a brilliant haze. It is the same with every interaction we have apart from literature, with each other and ourselves. Every time I am faced with another, or with myself, or with my body (which I am prone to forget until I am inflicted with pleasures or misery), I touch the void between myself and the other, the absence of a shared parental myth: for we in our perpetual forgetting have moved beyond the original text of our collective ancestors. We are all bound to deserts, within and without, with a gait that expects and distrusts our hope of finding someone we can see.
Both brothers walking toward each other are preoccupied with this ontological forgetfulness. Along with it, they are faced with the absurdity of sight: for despite what Borges writes, that “both men were very tall,” there is no reason for either brother to view the other (for both are certain of the non-existence that ought to characterize one of them). However, the absurdity is resolved and sublimated by the forgetting universe they occupy. A universe that has forgotten its name, its age, its children, and its Eternal divine Father. Indeed, it might be that this meeting between the two was not orchestrated by God (God is not even mentioned in this tale). It could simply be that the universe is confused and has resurrected Abel as a matter of maintaining what it believes to be its true continuity (that of Abel’s necessary presence to fulfill a murder that has already occurred and has yet to occur). This world as with our own, as with so many of Borges’ settings, cannot decide what it is or what its trajectory might be. It is unsure of and has forgotten what has occurred within it. And if we are to remove the implicit consciousness ascribed to it, as a consequence of referring to it with a subject-object syntax, the universe in its impersonal status is formlessness manifest, never holding to an immutable point of spatial and temporal reference: it is always in flux, always forgetting its prior place as a function of its nature.
However, this forgetfulness present in writing, fiction, and reality is not the primary principle of creation. Rather to engage in the act of creating, one’s being must be subjugated to the possibility of new flows. Forgetfulness enters in without announcing its presence. It is merely the gaseous catalyst through which the possibilities of new worlds and relations might be actualized only after psychic submission.
But along with such fruitful reactions, there is a moral problem that we face, because in the momentary escape from forgetting, if we are aware of the process being undertaken, we recognize what is being lost as a consequence of the new relation. What has been compromised is evident upon rigorous yet brief meditation, demonstrated in Cain’s response to seeing an enlightened Abel: “Cain saw that Abel’s forehead bore the mark of the stone, and he dropped the bread he was about to carry to his mouth and asked his brother to forgive him.” Denying himself sustenance, or that which should enable him to proceed forward with new flows and creations, he understands that if he is to further engage with Abel, and thus form a new relation with him, he must adorn himself with guiltiness, forsaking any chance of his being autonomous from the violence.
Setting Cain aside, when we enter into a potential consciousness of Abel, we find a man staring at his brother, feeling a pain in his forehead. Perhaps we feel that we can doubt the sincerity of his question, wondering if he is presenting vitriol through it: “‘Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?’ Abel answered. ‘I don’t remember anymore; here we are, together, like before.’” The irony, and our doubt, is derived from another possibility: that when Abel asks his brother this question, they are indeed sat in the same place where Cain felled him, “‘...here we are, together, like before.’” It may be that he speaks in a general way about where they are sat, or perhaps, despite his evidently faint memory, he truly does remember the location and the transgressor, but yet cannot confidently arrive at such a conclusion because of the confusion of the universe itself. Therefore, he is presented with not only the forgetfulness of the universe, but also with the forgetfulness within himself, which causes such doubt for all of us involved in the event.
The clarity of the event is partially grounded in Cain’s pleading for forgiveness, but it does not solidify the event (for Abel is alive, and thus destabilizes, to a certain extent, the world that Cain pleads from). Faced with his brother’s plead, Abel has before him two discernible options (both of which will destroy and create in some capacity and form): he can fabricate a world in which Cain has absolutely murdered him, or he can conjure up a world in which no one and everyone has died and no one and everyone is alive.
For it is clear that when Abel asks his brother about the murder, what he is really asking is, “Are we both guilty?—but I do not understand because we are here together in peace.” This latter world in which Abel sits peacefully with Cain presupposes the ambiguous and simultaneous possibility that both are guilty and innocent: for if Cain is solely guilty, Abel must forbid him from the community by virtue of the betrayal of their social relations.
But yet even in his questioning, the event of the murder is not negated. Because for Borges, this cohesive, merging element of the violent act is a strict consequence of their ontologies. If both are present, the legend between them is present: it is a part of the social bond that has and will always unite them. It is a current of existence that they have no choice but to be grafted on to, from which it might be partially abandoned for a new flow, or reinforced, enhancing the immortality of the conflict. Though in Abel’s commitment to forgetfulness it might appear that the transgression has wholly dissipated, its disappearance is only an illusion generated by the flux of culpability shared between the two brothers.
Therefore, Abel’s moral dilemma is not autonomous from the social event, but rather its presence is wholly conceived of in terms of the social, of which both brothers have an immutable obligation to belong to (for they cannot be defined otherwise). Yet, if Abel desires to maintain his innocence, for he is permitted to do so, and guarantee a social order by which moral ambiguities are coerced into definitive states, he must pursue a world in which Cain is inferior to him. Inferior with regard to Cain’s betrayal of their social bond. Not an inferiority of which the author of Hebrews maintains: “the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24). For there is no transcendent moral law; what exists between them demands a collaborative effort and is grounded in the materiality of their social standing. And even if Cain were not willing, as he is in Borges’ retelling, to take on the guilt, it is Abel’s denial of his brother, indeed, as his brother, that would usher in a new, morally-concrete world. A world, no doubt, from which Cain would conceive of a contrary moral law and existence so as to edify his righteousness (if he were stubborn and blind to Abel’s innocence).
But Abel denies himself a world in which he alone is justified. He chooses instead to allow forgetfulness to usher in a baptismal pool, from which Cain may emerge in forgiveness, a new beginning, and with the keen habit of forgetfulness himself: “‘I, too, will try to forget.’” For if Abel should have chosen the world wherein Cain is the sole perpetrator of violence, remembrance would remain in a manner that would prohibit new flows to be created. Cain would indefinitely be a murderer as a means of underscoring Abel’s righteousness. However, in this new world and legend, both brothers have and have not committed an atrocity, and the atrocity perists. As a consequence, both are now positioned for a collaboration wherein the atrocity can be addressed, even banished from their new world altogether, if they so desire.
Indeed, a new moral maxim emerges from their willingness to dwell in a shared oblivion: “‘So long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts.’” This statement functions in two ways. The first being that of reiterating their shared movement away from the atrocity. The second being that of establishing an ethical axiom for the movement. If either are to wrong each other in the future, as long as this habit of forgetfulness and confusion persists within and between them, they will supersede morality, move beyond good and evil, and affirm the multiplicity abounding in oblivion.
And here, for the sake of indulgence, might we briefly invoke a Deleuzian operation, conceiving ourselves in one way as inimical legend-machines. Forgetfulness is the point of collapse of world-machines, legend-machines, and relation-machines. These machines leak out all the slippery, unstructured potentiality: the full body without organs. We make reference to this indefinite potentiality, using our brief configurations of a self as a point of comparison shared with the body without organs.
Upon meeting one another, what we have for ourselves is a brief self that shares a space alongside all those connected machines, and these are precisely what we alter or destroy (as in, destroy their prior configuration) in our forgetfulness.
Then I must ask myself: what becoming do I desire, which flow do I want to join (an unstable I, yes, a fluctuating I): for this is the core of the moral dilemma. What body (a body in its flesh and governmental sense) shall I join myself to in a leap of forgetfulness? And will this body submit itself to our shared forgetfulness, or will it maintain itself and its remembrance: that is a greater concern.
One never wants to be played by memory. Or to be the play-thing of another’s remembering. Remembered especially in the teeth of the state, which postures itself according to its illusory histories wherein we are maintained as, those who are overcome for the Good. In the desert, I must turn from it, even if the threat of starvation overshadows. I decline its camp-fire: I cannot forget its violence.
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