SOURCE: “The Mark of the Knife: Scars as Signs in Borges,” in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 83, No. 1, January, 1988, pp. 67–75.

In the following essay, Balderston discusses the significance of scars in Borges's work.

… ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.

(Borges)¹

… if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh ‘writing’, then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word.

(Deleuze and Guattari)²

At the close of a long conversation with Borges about his favourite Victorian and Edwardian writers—Stevenson, Kipling, Chesterton, Wells, and others—the doorbell rang and the next visitor, a young Paraguayan writer, was shown in. Borges, hearing the nationality of the newcomer, asked me: ‘Do you remember the dictator of Paraguay...