CLOSE TO UNDERSTANDING

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34089, 28 February 1976, Page 10

CLOSE TO UNDERSTANDING

In Praise of Darkness. By Jorge Luis Borges. Allen Lane.. 142 pp. N.Z. price $7.85-

It. is as a writer of fables that Borges has his appeal: and it is the distinctiveness of his vision that his fables are ambiguous. They do not simply stop short of resolution; they insist on the impossibility of it. This may be accurate to the spirit of the age" but it appears to have been a constant and productive dissatisfaction with Borges. His fables often strike us, as he himself puts it in this new collection, “as a symool of something we are about to understand, but never quite do." The “darkness" in the tit e of this collection stands, Borges says, , “for both blindness and death. Borges age and his approaching blindness providing the impulse for the writing of most of these poems and short prose pieces, and give the book a deeplv felt personal quality so often excluded from Borges’s earlier work.

In poems like “Buenos Aires’’ and “Plain Things” he considers the objects, streets, and people amongst whom he has lived his lite, and is taunted at once by their familiar ordinariness, which will persist after his own death; and by the realisation that he has never been able to properly define his own relationship to these “things we do not understand vet love.” The stories concentrate on a similar unsatisfactory irresolution: the young anthropologist who has learned secret tribal wisdom will not communicate or live it, but becomes a librarian: the man who hid from the police for years in a cellar, “an animal at peace in its burrow, or a dim god.” The irresolution in even these pieces suggests Borges’s own in the face of both blindness and death." Borges’s age provides no answers, hut continues to suggest the strangeness of the questions we must continue to ask ourselves.