Escape to Reality

By Edwin G. Warner

DOCTOR BRODIE'S REPORT

by JORGE LUIS BORGES

128 pages. Dutton. $5.95.

Borges' best previous stories were strange, dreamlike fables that cast an oblique, ironic light on the doings of this world. In this latest group, the world is all too much with the author. These are mostly plain, unadorned tales--some harsh, some tender--of love, hate and the inevitability of death. In his preface, Borges admits giving up the "surprises inherent in a baroque style. Now, having passed 70, I believe I have found my own voice." Or is it, he asks himself, only the "fruit of weariness"?

The characters of these stories are the sort of people Borges grew up with in Argentina, the heroes and villains of the legends he was taught as a child. They are assorted freebooters and roustabouts who subsist precariously on the edge of civilization. Resigned as they are to a grim fate, the world holds no surprises for them. Murder is as casual as breathing. In The End of the Duel, two gauchos who hate each other are conscripted into the same army and taken prisoner by a malicious prankster who orders them to run a race after their throats have been slit. The winner never knows he has won.

At his advanced age, Borges is a master at describing people who have come to the end of their world and their dreams. One engaging story, The Elder Lady, concerns an old woman who has not ventured out of her house in Buenos Aires since 1921. "The last pleasures left her," writes Borges, "would be those of memory and, later on, of forgetfulness. She recounted historical happenings, but always using the same words in the same order, as if they were the Lord's Prayer, so that I grew to suspect there were no longer any real images behind them. Even eating one thing or another was all the same to her. She was, in short, happy."

The pick of the collection is the title story, which is a partial return to the dream kingdoms of the earlier works. With powerful brevity, Borges limns a decadent nation where language--and all that it implies of hope and beauty --is the execrated enemy. Disdaining vowels, Borges' updated Yahoos grunt only in consonants. When they want to open what passes for a conversation, they fling mud. Their king is protected from mortal corruption by being blinded and castrated.

The most esteemed figure among them is the poet. "Six or seven words, generally enigmatic, may come to a man's mind. He cannot contain himself and shouts them out. If the poem does not stir [people], nothing comes to pass; but if the poet's words strike them, they all draw away without a sound, under the command of a holy dread. Now he is a man no longer but a god, and anyone has license to kill him."

Is this, then, the role of the poet in a civilization sliding downhill--the metaphorical fate reserved for a Borges? Is prosaic reality the only escape today? Elsewhere in his writings, Borges suggests that there is such a thing as a surfeit of language. In a parable about Shakespeare, he writes that the dramatist, fired with the need to fill his own emptiness of spirit, created a rich panoply of kings, villains and lovers. In time, he wearied of all the pomp and splendor and abruptly returned to a plainer reality. Aged and blind, Borges may have sought a similar respite. The voice he now calls his own is actually one of many he has improvised over the years and not his most inspiring. Yet it speaks with a haunting humanity.

. Edwin G. Warner

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