The Dagger of Deliverance

By Edwin Warner

THE ALEPH & OTHER STORIES 1933-1969 by Jorge Luis Borges. 286 pages. Duffon. $7.95.

Jorge Luis Borges has spent a lifetime trying to run away--with stunning success. In part it is the fixed writer of public renown that he fears and flees. Each of his tales represents an escape to some unexplored realm of the imagination. In the most recent stories in The Aleph, he has made still another escape: from intellectual labyrinths to the raw, stark world of the pampas.

As a boy, Borges marveled at the deeds of the footloose gaucho. His style easily accommodates to this new setting: before, it was teasing and allusive; now it becomes as sharp as the knives brandished by the outlaws. These tales, moreover, have been smoothly turned into English by Borges and his collaborator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, an American translator who now lives with the Borges family in Buenos Aires.

The Dignity of Danger. The violence that saturates the tales has a peculiar purity, as if it existed apart from the will of man. In a story called The Meeting, two youths start quarreling over cards. They are drawn to a cabinet containing the knives of famous duelists of the past. They fight, one is killed, the other breaks down in tears over his senseless deed. Was it the weapons or the men that fought, asks Borges. It was "as though the knives were coming awake after a long sleep side by side in the cabinet. Even after their gauchos were dust, the knives--the knives, not their tools, the men--knew how to fight."

But if the knives divide men by killing them, they also forge a community of courage. A man's faith in his strength is "no mere form of vanity but an awareness that God can be found in any man." In The Challenge, one gaucho slashes another, then refrains from the fatal thrust. "I'm letting you live," he tells his antagonist, "so you'll come back looking for me again." Life cannot be lived without the dignity of danger.

Essential to Borges' vision is a conviction of oneness. To Borges, every human act, however slight, affects all other events. It is a world of perfect complicity. Little wonder that youthful readers in search of community find Borges a kindred spirit. Yet his work suggests that community is reached not by simply linking arms or sharing pot but through sacrifice.

Salvation through Memory. For Borges, that sacrifice is blindness, a condition that unites him with the rest of suffering mankind. In all of 20th century literature--a literature shadowed by darkness and blindness--there can hardly be a more powerful intimation of union through suffering than Borges' fiercely compressed parable The Maker. Included in the present volume, this 1958 work suggests Borges' own fate by invoking the life of the blind Homer. Before blindness sets in, writes Borges, the poet lives only by fleeting sensation: "Little by little, the beautiful world began to leave him; a persistent mist erased the lines of his hand, the night lost its multitude of stars. He went deep into his past, which seemed to him bottomless, and managed to draw out of that dizzying descent the lost memory that now shone like a coin under the rain." That memory is of a boyhood encounter, with drawn daggers, at the edge of the sea. "The exact taste of that moment was what he now sought. In this nighttime of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were also in wait for him --because he already divined a rumor of hexameters and glory, a rumor of men defending a shrine which the gods would not save and of black ships roaming the seas in search of a loved island."

If there is salvation in Borges, it is in memory that overcomes the isolation of blindness, that links Borges with Homer or a gaucho--or with the reader.

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