Books: The Dagger of Deliverance

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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.