“The South”
“The South”
THE LITERARY WORK
A short story set in the city of Buenos Aires and in the Argentine countryside in 1939; published in Spanish (as “El Sur”) in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación on February 8, 1953, and in the two-volume Ficciones edition of 1956; first published in English in 1962 in the collection Ficciones.
SYNOPSIS
A man who prides himself on being Argentine appears to recover his cultural past at the expense of his life.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on August 24, 1899, to middle-class parents of Spanish and English descent, Jorge Luis Borges would become the undisputed giant of Latin American letters. Shy and bookish, a librarian by profession, Borges reflected throughout his career on the lives of his heroic Argentine relatives and on the myths and realities of the nation’s (often violent) character. When “The South” appeared in the two-volume 1956 edition of Ficciones (in the volume Artifices), Borges wrote in the preface that the story was perhaps his finest to date. It achieves a dreamlike, romanticized treatment of elements embedded in the Argentine sense of national heritage, namely of the violence and cruelty attached to the traditional rural lifestyle. In the mid-twentieth century Argentina was testing different versions of nationalism. One view holds that the story reflects tensions and fears felt by many Argentine citizens at the time.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
“La década infame.”
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Argentina was witnessing the end of the so-called “infamous decade” of the 1930s, in which conservative politicians consistently rigged elections to keep themselves in power. The decade was characterized by, among other things, burgeoning and competing philosophies of Argentine nationalism and the political expressions thereof. In 1930, in a bloodless coup, a coalition of conservative and nationalist politicians overthrew the Radical government of Hipólito Yrigoyen. The new leader of the nation, General José Félix Uriburu, courted European-style fascism, which relied on rule by a military-backed dictator and which elevated nation and race over the individual. Fascism had steadily been gaining political ground in Italy and Germany, and it took root in Argentina as well. The period of Uriburu’s rule (1930-32) oversaw a shift in political power from Argentina’s middle-class to its growing and sometimes ruthless political-military machine. Foreigners lived under the threat of deportation; anti-government activists were in danger of arrest, torture, and even execution.
In 1932 the conservatives overpowered the nationalists and General Agustín Justo became president. Justo favored the wealthy landowners and exporters from the pampas (Argentina’s fertile grasslands), and instituted a number of juntas, or regulatory boards, to support rural agricultural producers. In response to pressure from such outlying areas of its empire as Australia and South Africa, Great Britain—Argentina’s most significant trading partner—had threatened to cut off or greatly reduce its importation of Argentine beef. Justo responded quickly to this threat. In the Roca-Runciman agreement of 1933 (and again in the Eden-Malbrán treaty of 1936), the two nations arrived at a settlement whereby Argentina would continue to export beef to Britain at the same levels as always, and Britain would gain important concessions for British businesses (notably the railroads) operating in Argentina (Rock, pp. 224-25). Heated opposition rose up against the concessions granted to the beef industry in the Roca-Runciman treaty; some opponents protested that Britain was being offered outrageously advantageous terms, while others claimed that this settlement was merely a way of protecting the wealthy ranchers who backed Justo’s government (Rock, p. 227). As will be discussed below, these ranchers did not share their wealth with the workers who labored for them.
The resentment about the clout that Britain enjoyed in Argentina played into a new manifestation of nationalism that emerged mid-decade to join the more radical right-wing strain represented by Uriburu. Characteristics of this nationalism were its championship of the Church (clericalism) and of all things Argentine (nativism), as well as policies of anti-Semitism, an-tianarchism, and fierce anticommunism. In 1934 the U.S. oil company Standard Oil became embroiled in a price war with Argentina’s national oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF); Justo’s government had to bail out YPF, which had difficulty competing with Standard Oil, and protest erupted over this perceived instance of U.S. imperialism. (A noticeable anti-U.S. resentment had first emerged in Argentina in the late 1920s, also tied to the business practices of American oil interests.) Eventually, in 1937, Justo gave YPF a monopoly over all oil imported into the nation, and made it illegal for any oil to be exported (Lewis, p. 55). Meanwhile, politicians and historians were examining what they perceived as the destructive influence of Britain in Argentine history, drawing attention to such things as “the British invasions of 1806-1807, Britain’s role in the foundation of Uruguay in the late 1820s, its seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1833, the blockades under Rosas, the later collaboration between the ruling oligarchy and British business interests”; the upshot of such public discourse was that the pro-Britain Justo felt himself challenged by pro-nationalists, some of whom were vocal members of the Argentine army (Rock, p. 230).
In fact, Justo did support nationalist, militaristic organizations. He financially and politically backed two that had been created by his predecessor, Uriburu; the first, the Special Section, a branch of the federal police, hired tough men to “beat up and torture the government’s opponents”; the second, the Argentine Civic Legion, which modeled itself on and wore the same distinctive brown shirts as the German stormtroopers, announced that Argentina was destined to dominate South America (Lewis, p. 119). Under the guidance of General Juan Bautista Molina, who had strong Nazi leanings and who took over the organization in 1936, the Civic League grew to have as many as 10,000 members (Lewis, p. 119). In Borges’s short story “The South,” violence overtakes an average citizen at the hands of uncouth rural thugs. In fact, in the time at which the story is set, violence, or the threat thereof, was percolating throughout Argentine society and would remain pervasive in 1953, when Borges first published the tale. Such violence was not new to Argentina society. A hundred years earlier, the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (ruled 1835 to 1852) had “a band of spies and thugs” torture, murder, and imprison his enemies (Shumway, p. 120). Subsequent outbreaks of brutality in Argentina are seen as a return to this original violence.
The Argentine South
In “The South” Juan Dahlmann boards a 7:30 a.m. train in downtown Buenos Aires and travels south, through the city’s suburbs, around small farms, and into the nation’s preeminent ranching district, disembarking at sunset. Such a journey would have taken him into the heart of the pampas, which comprise most of the Argentine provinces of Buenos Aires and La Pampa. Vast, treeless, stoneless, relentlessly flat, and incredibly fertile, the pampas form “a near semi-circle roughly five hundred miles in radius from the River Plate estuary” (Rock, p. 2). Although the pampas also stretch north of the city of Buenos Aires and into Uruguay, the majority of Argentina’s grassy plains are to the city’s south. Because of the area’s economic importance, railroads and roads crisscross the countryside, which is home to the cow-boylike gauchos that figure in fact and legend.
On the eve of World War II, when the short story is set, the Argentine south was experiencing rapid change. At the national level, in a trend begun in the late 1930s, for the first time industrial production started to surpass agriculture; industry finally became the most valuable component of the Argentine economy in 1943 (Rock, p. 232). As the economy changed so did demographics; migrants poured out of the rural areas (an average of 70,000 per year between 1937 and 1943), mostly from the pampas, into the cities. “Before 1946, an estimated two-thirds of the migrants came from the pampas, perhaps as much as 40 percent of them from the province of Buenos Aires alone” (Rock, p. 235).
The pampas dwellers flooded into the cities for various reasons—chief among them was economic hardship. Many of the workers on the pampas were itinerant laborers, who would move from place to place as jobs opened up. Their wages amounted to much less—up to four times less—than those of city laborers (Rock, p. 236).
Also reflected in the short story is the prevalence of absentee landlords on the pampas. The protagonist Juan Dahlmann owns a ranch in the South that he has but rarely visited; in this regard, he resembles 62 percent of the actual landlords in the South at the time (Rock, p. 237). Some 20,000 of these landlords, most of whom rarely or never appeared, owned nearly three-quarters of the pampas. “The South” is vague as to just how much land Dahlmann owns, but the story refers to his “ranch.” Given the fact that there were large ranches on the pampas that sometimes covered hundreds of square miles, Dahlmann’s may have been sizable. Such ranches thrived on the hard laborer of the workers, who in many cases harbored resentment against the wealthy absentee landlords. Such festering resentment helps explain the tension between the rough-looking rural laborers and Dahlmann in the story.
The gaucho and Argentinidad
In much the same way that the cowboy has become an enduring symbol of the United States, particularly of the nation’s rugged individualism, so has the gaucho become an important symbol of Argentinidad—that which is perceived as being essentially Argentine. The gauchos, a largely mestizo population, traditionally roamed the pampas, living off free-range cattle, which they would avail themselves of as needed. Without license to do so, they rode wild horses and slaughtered the cattle to meet demands for their byproducts. Under Spanish colonial rule, the gauchos ran what was essentially a black market in tallow, hides, and beef. They lived in small ramshackle houses constructed of and furnished with whatever materials were at hand. The gaucho developed a reputation for cunning and violence; he typically carried a long (up to 27 inches) dagger, or facón. In “The South,” a slumped-over ancient gaucho throws this archetypal weapon to Juan Dahlmann. In real life, gauchos frequented pulperías—a combination general store, restaurant, and tavern, not unlike the establishment at which Juan Dahlmann will meet his destiny.
When the pampas were fenced in 1845 and individual ranches became clearly demarcated, the free-wheeling life of the gauchos drew to a close. Their itinerant lifestyle became criminal
BORGES AND THE GAUCHO TRADITION
In a 1951 lecture (first published in the magazine Sur in 1955) entitled ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition” Borges claims that so-called gauchesque poetry (which was never written by the gauchos themselves, who were usually illiterate) is an ut-terfy fabricated literary tradition defined more by propaganda and artificial language than by any genuine rendering of the gaucho lifestyle, and that the gaucho himself is the embodiment of Argentine provincialism, of its lack of sophistication and polish. For Borges, the genre, which he admits has produced admirable works, is too self-consciously preoccupied with ‘’being Argentine” “Nationalists pretend to venerate the capacities of the Argentine mind but want to limit the poetic exercise of that mind to a few impoverished local themes” writes Borges. “As if we Argentines could only speak of orillas[outbacks] and estancias[ranches] and not of the universe” (Borges, Labyrinths, p. 182). Borges points out that Argentine nationalists often hold up Ricardo Güiraldes’s renowned 1926 novel Don Segundo Sombra as a model of the gauchesque tradition, and yet this work draws heavily on the references to India in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which was, in turn, influenced by Mark Twain’s Mississippi River novel Huckleberry Finn. For Borges, influences across space and time lead to a literary tradition more than any obsession with local color or national culture. As demonstrated by ‘The South/’ Borges himself found Argentine issues and settings compelling subjects, but he refused to limit his stories to this locally tinged content Rather his strength lies in bringing to light the universality in what was Argentine and in relating Argentina to subjects and settings outside its own particular sphere.
ized and many were either forced to do the staid agricultural—as opposed to ranching—work that they despised, or were conscripted into the Argentine army to fight the native peoples, who resisted being pushed from their traditional homelands by the flood of incoming European ranchers. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the traditional gauchos disappeared; they were replaced by a straggling population of demoralized and exploited ranch-hands. The gaucho that Juan Dahlmann in 1939 calls “outside time” was by then a figure of the mythic past (Borges, “The South,” p. 178).
The gaucho’s transformation into a heroic icon is indebted largely to the publication of José Hernandez’s 1872 poem The Gaucho Martín Fierro (also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times). Hernández wrote sympathetically of the plight of the gaucho civilization, doomed as it was by the political machinations, economic greed, and overt racism of Argentina’s elite classes in the nineteenth century. “I have tried,” he wrote, “to present a type who personifies the character of our gauchos … the impetuousness of his pride, excessive to the point of crime; and all the drive and tumult found in children of nature who remain unpolished and unrefined by education” (Hernández in Shumway, p. 265). Hernandez’s poem instantly became central to rural Argentine culture—people could recite long passages of it, the gauchos adopted it as part of their own heritage, and the poem cemented the formation of a type of gaucho national literature. Preceding the poem were other gauchesque works by writers such as Bartolomé Hidalgo, Hilario Ascasubi, and Estanislao del Campo. Argentine culture as a whole was divided about the value of these works, but by the time of Borges’s short story, even the cultural elite had begun to hold up Hernandez’s poem as an example of the essentially heroic Argentine character. The wild ruffian haunting the borders of civilization became valorized as an important symbol of what it meant to be Argentine: fiercely independent, self-reliant, and possessed of a distinctively non-European culture. This certainly is what city-dweller and intellectual Juan Dahlmann of “The South,” who embraces rural traditions that are only partly his own, sees in the poem. All this must be viewed in the context of the nationalist sentiments that were on the rise in Argentina at the time. But even now, to say of a man in Argentina that he is muy gaucho is to heap praise upon that person.
The Short Story in Focus
Plot summary
Juan Dahlmann, civic librarian, considers himself to be “profoundly Argentine” (“The South,” p. 174). He descends from the Germanic Johannes Dahlmann, a minister, who arrived in Buenos Aires from Europe in 1871. However, he more greatly values his mother’s criollo (Spanish Argentine) lineage. (More broadly, criollo is a term for a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas). Her father, Francisco Flores, served as a soldier who died fighting the Indians on the border of Buenos Aires province, probably in 1874. From this heroic grandfather Dahlmann has developed a notion of his “Argentinization,” the prime elements of which include “an old sword, a locket containing the daguerreotype of a bearded, inexpressive man, the joy and courage of certain melodies, the habit of certain verses in Martín Fierro, the passing years, a certain lack of spiritedness, and solitude” (“The South,” p. 174). As part of this romantic idea about the Argentine past and his own place in the progression of history, Dahlmann has retained his maternal family’s ranch, although he has not been there in years.
In February 1939, while intently reading The Arabian Nights, Dahlmann runs into the corner of a casement window in his building; the wound becomes infected and a fever sets in. Eventually the librarian is taken to a sanatorium by his physician, and undergoes a myriad of painful and humiliating treatments to cure the septicemia (blood poisoning) that has nearly killed him. It is arranged for him to travel to his ranch in the South to complete his recuperation. He takes The Arabian Nights with him on the train as a talisman to remind him that the forces of evil have been thwarted by his recovery in the sanatorium, but he soon puts it down to enjoy the sights of the countryside through which he is passing, and to “allow himself simply to live” (“The South,” p. 176). As he whisks through the landscape (complete with horsemen, lakes, pastures, and glowing clouds) made dreamlike and ideal by his nostalgia, he finds that he recognizes even the vegetation, although he could not name the things he sees—“his direct knowledge of the country was considerably inferior to his nostalgic, literary knowledge” (“The South,” p. 177). In the growing solitude, which he senses is “perhaps hostile,” Dahlmann begins to feel as though he were traveling not only deeper into the southern countryside, but retreating into the past as well: “In fact,” explains one literary interpreter, “when he thinks he is going south, to the estancia, to recover his health, he is really going south to recover an image of his past” (Sarlo, p. 46).
As he nears his destination Dahlmann learns that the train will not stop at its usual station; he welcomes this potentially annoying information as an opportunity to have an adventure. He waits at a small local store/restaurant, outside of which there are horses tied up, for a ride to his country home. His fellows there are “rough-looking young men” and an ancient gaucho in authentic costume who “seemed to be outside time” (“The South,” p. 178).
Dahlmann was warmed by the Tightness of the man’s hairband, the baize poncho he wore, his gaucho trousers, and the boots made out of the skin of a horse’s leg, and he said to himself, recalling futile arguments with people from districts in the North, or from Entre Rios, that only in the South did gauchos like that exist anymore.
(“The South,” p. 178)
Over a simple dinner Dahlmann becomes gradually aware of the drunken antagonism of these characters toward him and eventually one of them, “the young thug with the Indian-looking face,” challenges him to a knife fight outside (“The South,” p. 179). As the shopkeeper protests that Dahlmann is unarmed, the old gaucho suddenly throws the sick man a dagger. When he
KNIFE FIGHTS
In “The South” Juan Dahlmann takes a cup of coffee “a few yards from Yrigoyen’s house”; the brief reference here is undoubtedly to one-time Argentine President Hipólito Yrigoyen, who died io 1933, imprisoned under house arrest in the city of Buenos Aires (“The South”, p. 176). This reference lends credence to one interpretation of the story, which posits that Juan Dahlmann, hero of “The South” does not in fact die in a knife fight on the pampas at sundown, but “imprisoned in a sanatorium and subjected to methodical attentions” he dreams a heroic death for himself as, in truth, he dies under the surgeon’s knife in the hospital (“The South” pp. 176-77). Supporting this interpretation is the fact that in the story the owner of the pulpería reminds Dahlmann of the sanatorium personnel. Borges himself suggests that an alternate reading is possible in his Foreword to the 1956 publication of Artifices, where he writes: ‘Of The South’ which may be my best story, I shall tell the reader only that it is possible to read it both as a forthright narration of novelistic events and in quite another way, as well’’ (Borges, “Foreword to Artifices” p. 129).
instinctively picks it up, Dahlmann realizes that this action has more or less committed him to fighting the other man. He also realizes that “the weapon would serve less to defend him than to justify the other man’s killing him” (“The South,” p. 179). As the story ends, Dahlmann goes outside with the man, prepared to die:
They went outside, and while there was no hope in Dahlmann, there was no fear, either. As he crossed the threshold, he felt on that first night in the sanatorium, when they’d stuck that needle into him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta. He sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen.
Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains.
(“The South,” p. 179)
This climactic scene, a knife fight with a stranger, is a romantic, gauchesque way to die, a fate far worthier of an Argentine than blood poisoning. It is as out of kilter with the rest of the story as a sprinkling of other details: the clothing on the old gaucho, which is typical of the nineteenth, not the twentieth, century and the facts that the shopkeeper calls the unidentified stranger, Señor Dahlmann, by name, and that this shopkeeper reminds Dahlman of the personnel at the sanatorium.
Borges as the Argentine writer
The 1950s were a heady and traumatic decade for the middle-aged Borges. He achieved international acclaim in 1951 upon the publication of two short story collections (the first in Buenos Aires under the title Death and the Compass; the second in Paris under the title Ficciones). In 1953 a third collection (called Labyrinths) was included in La Croix du Sud (The Southern Cross), a French series on Latin American literature. Meanwhile, back in Argentina, scholars began publishing articles on Borges’s writings.
At the same time Borges became the focus of a vigorous debate on the proper cultural and political role for Argentine writers. At issue was whether writers ought to address the circumstances of their place and time in history, as literary critics of the time suggested and as readers began to demand. Committed to literature for its own sake rather than for the sake of realism or social commentary, Borges could not have been more inimical to this demand. His fictions tended to feature characters in search of themselves rather than characters trying to come to grips with their social mileau. This did not prevent Borges from inserting traces of contemporary reality in stories such as “The South,” with its allusions to nationalism and violence. It also did not prevent him from taking political stands, as he did against Argentine dictatior Juan Domingo Perón, or participating in events of his times. His example offered much grist for the mill of debate—Borges was both detached from and involved in his environment.
In an article published in Sur (October 1951), H. A. Murena complained about the eclectic nature of Borges’s literary work, which, Murena charged, makes Argentine writers the heirs of all societies rather than their own particular society. Other critics of the time accused Borges of creating an alienated, aristocratic, superfluous kind of literature, and of representing the oligarchy. Condemning his anti-Peronism, these critics identified Borges with the enemy, describing him as an artist apart, out of touch with the national reality. In “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” Borges argued that William Shakespeare never doubted his right to create Hamlet, a play set in remote Denmark. Similarly, Argentine writers should not be afraid of being insufficiently Argentine, but should concentrate on successful writing rather than on local color, trusting that whatever does succeed will become part of Argentine literary tradition. This certainly is the case with Borges’s own literary works, which sometimes reflected his own social environment and sometimes did not. That he followed his own advice in embracing a wide array of settings is clear from his writings, as is his simultaneous attachment to and concern for the development of Argentine literature.
Sources and literary context
“The South” opens with an episode similar to one that occurred in Borges’s own life and that he claimed opened the door to his serious writing of fiction. In 1938 he cut his head on a freshly-painted window; life-threatening blood poisoning set in and Borges lost the ability to speak. When this faculty returned to him over the course of his recovery, he was worried that his mind had been weakened, so he persuaded his mother to read to him to test whether or not he could understand her. He could and, according to the story, decided to see whether he could fulfill a new literary project as further proof of his sanity and health. Thus he began to write short fiction, having already written poetry and essays. Borges’s biographers point out, however, that in fact he had begun his fiction writing career well before this incident (Alazraki, p. 851). His first short story, “Hombre de la esquina” (Streetcorner Man), appeared in 1933.
Other similar elements between Borges’s life and that of the protagonist are the ethnic heritage of their parents, their occupation as librarians, and the setting for the short story. Borges based the setting on another real-life experience in 1934 he visited relatives on the Uruguay/Brazil border, which, in his words, “seems to have impressed me far more than all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” (Borges in Rodriguez Monegal, p. 259). “The South” is redolent with the memories of this trip: “the stone fences, the longhorn cattle, the horses’ silver trappings, the bearded gauchos, the hitching posts”—all of which made the trip “more a journey into the past than a journey through space”—reappear in the short story that Borges would write some 20 years later. Significantly, on this 1934 excursion Borges also witnessed a casual murder in a rural bar. Actually the rough backland setting recurs in much of Borges’s short fiction. He touches also on the gauchos and their environment in other short stories, such as “Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Shape of the Sword,” and “The Dead Man.”
SYMBOL OF RESISTANCE
In 1946 Borges, already hailed as one of Argentina’s leading intellectuals and artists was, because of his open criticism of Perón, transferred from his post as assistant at the Miguel Cane municipal library to that of Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Buenos Aires public market. He refused the dubious honor and in a public statement denounced the “subservience … cruelty… [and] stupidity” of the Perón dictatorship (Rodríguez Monegal, p. 393). This turn of events did not go unnoticed by the city’s other intellectuals, and Borges became “the symbol of Argentina’s resistance to totalitarianism” (Rodriguez Monegal, p. 393). However, while the intelligentsia continued to voice concern over Peronist tyranny, it was able to offer but little in the way of viable resistance.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
The dictatorship of Juan Perón
Juan Domingo Perón was elected president of Argentina in 1946. Perón’s successful political strategy was to unite the interests of Argentine labor—both workers and managers—and the military and set them against the nation’s cultural elite, big business, and the intelligentsia. The U.S. Department of State denounced him for his fascist tendencies, as did others in his own nation, but none of this blocked the dictator’s magnificent rise to power, a rise that Borges would publicly lament until Perón’s death in 1974.
PROFOUNDLY ARGENTINE
In “The South” Juan Dahlmann believes himself to be “profoundly Argentine” thanks mostly to the fact that he is related on his mother’s side to a minor military hero (“The South”, p, 174). By such standards Borges himself would have been one of the most “Argentine” people in the nation’s history. The nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas was his great-great-great-uncle (Alazraki, pp. 845-46). His great-grandfather, Colonel Isidoro Suárez, fought Spanish forces at the head of a Peruvian cavalry unit in 1820 at Junin and was exiled to Uruguay at the time of the Rosas dictatorship. His mother’s father, Isidoro Acevedo, also fought against Rosas in the civil war. His other grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges, died in 1874 in the civil strife at La Verde. Another relative, on his mother’s side, was Francisco Narciso de Laprida, who presided at the 1816 Congress of Tucumán, at which Argentina became independent of Spain. The heroic past is present in much of Borges’s work, including one poem written in the early 1950s, “A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junin” which compares the struggle of his famous ancestor against Rosas with the struggle of ordinary Argentines against another “tyrant” (unnamed, but obviously Perón):
His great-grandson is writing these lines,
and a silent voice comes to him out of the past, out of the blood:
“What does my battle at Junin matter if it is only
a glorious memory, or a date learned by rote
for an examination, or a place in the atlas?
The battle is everlasting and can do without
the pomp of actual armies and of trumpets.
Junin is two civilians cursing a tyrant
on a street corner
or an unknown man somewhere, dying in prison.”
(Borges in Rodriguez Monegal, p. 427)
Upon his succession to power Perón did his best to silence his opposition. He purged the universities of his critics, terminated the tenure of nearly all Supreme Court judges, and restricted freedom of the press (Rock, pp. 280-81). In 1951 he expropriated the leading newspaper, La Prensa, which had long been critical of his regime, and turned it into a state mouthpiece. He instigated a new “contempt law” to prevent what he called “libel, slander, or defamation against public authorities” (Rock, p. 303). By 1953 (the year “The South” was published) many of Borges’s literary friends and relatives had been in jail (his own aged mother and his sister had been arrested briefly for singing the national anthem and passing out anti-Perón pamphlets); apart from his removal from his position at the Miguel Cane municipal library, however, the authorities did not interfere with Borges himself in any way.
Perón promised his country a “New Argentina” based on social justice, political self-determination, and economic independence. Coming from an immigrant, middle-class background himself, he identified himself with the nation’s workers and widely publicized his pro-labor stance. In the eyes of many he became a savior, a leader who “stood up for the common people, who put the anti-Argentinian oligarchy in its place, who defended national sovereignty against foreign capitalism, who made workers feel good about themselves, who safeguarded the country’s Catholic traditions, and protected the family” (Shumway, p. 298).
In fact, Argentine workers saw in Perón a leader who “stood for something every Argentine politician since 1930 manifestly failed to offer: the charismatic possibility of achieving a new order without bloodshed or corruption” (Woodall, p. 133). As Borges and other liberals saw it, however, Perón was leading Argentina down a dangerous path towards fascism; “a great number of Argentines are becoming Nazis without being aware of it,” Borges wrote (Woodall, p. 133). Such warnings, however, went for naught given the power and popularity of Perón and the champion of his cause, his wife Eva (or “Evita” as she was popularly known).
Although Borges had no way of knowing it, Perón’s power was already on the wane by the time “The South” appeared in print in 1953. Evita had died of cancer in 1952, and without her charisma the dictator lost substantial influence. Gradually the Argentine economy had spun out of his control, and an ill-conceived battle with the Catholic Church finally gave his opponents in the military the chance for which they had been waiting. In 1955 Perón went quietly into exile, where he would remain until his return in 1972 and a brief resurgence of power before his death in 1974.
Reviews
Borges himself wrote in the preface to the 1954 collection Artifices, which features “The South,” that the story “may be my best story” (Collected Fictions, p. 129). In an article for the London Review of Books, John Sturrock concurred, writing that “The South” is among Borges’s “finest stories” and praising it for its “heroic ingenuity” (Sturrock in Hall, p. 362). Writing for the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee called the story “haunting” and saw it, along with the many other works by Borges about confronting death, as “reveal [ing] the attractions of a life of action for their bookish and rather timid author” (Coetzee, p. 82). Critics the world over have praised Borges as one of the masters of modern literature, pointing out the dense allusions and overt references in his fiction to the works of other international writers. Nonetheless, using a phrase from “The South” itself, the critic Peter Witonski argued in the National Review that Borges is a “profoundly Argentine” writer:
His many references to the literature and culture of his native land may be missed by the reader unfamiliar with Argentina. Borges the bookman is drawn to the literature of the world, which he enjoys citing with mock-pedantry; but Borges the man is drawn to what he has called “the implacable pampas” of Argentina… . His many references to the knife-play and philosophy of the gaucho serve to emphasize this point.
(Witonski in Marowski and Matusz, p. 36)
—Emerson Spencer Olin and Lorraine Valestuk
For More Information
Alazraki, Jaime. “Jorge Luis Borges.” In Latin American Writers. Eds. Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The South.” In Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking, 1998.
_____. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: Modern Library, 1983.
Coetzee, J. M. “Borges’s Dark Mirror.” The New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998, 80-82.
Hall, Sharon K., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Yearbook 1986. Vol. 44. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987.
Lewis, Paul H. The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Marowski, Daniel G., and Roger Matuz, eds.Contemporary Literary Cñticism. Vol. 48. Detroit:Gale Research, 1988.
Rock, David. Argentina, 1516-1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1985.
Rodriguez Monegal, Emir. Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978.
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