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. Her father, Francisco Flores, served as a soldier who died fighting the Indians on the border of Buenos Aires province, probably in 1874. He purged the universities of his critics, terminated the tenure of nearly all Supreme Court judges, and restricted freedom of the press (Rock, pp. Significantly, on this 1934 excursion Borges also witnessed a casual murder in a rural bar. 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). In Borges’s short story “The South,” violence overtakes an average citizen at the hands of uncouth rural thugs. New York: Viking, 1998. However, he more greatly values his mother’s criollo (Spanish Argentine) lineage. In 1932 the conservatives overpowered the nationalists and General Agustín Justo became president. The gauchos, a largely mestizo population, traditionally roamed the pampas, living off free-range cattle, which they would avail themselves of as needed. After days of painful treatment in the hospital, he is suddenly told that he is completely recovered, having survived sepsis. 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. Reginald in Russia (1910) The second best result is Kathleen L Borges age 60s in Somerset, MA. Juan Dahlmann is an obscure secretary in an Argentine library. Detroit:Gale Research, 1988. Borges was born in Buenos Aires, the city with which he became inextricably linked. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/south, "“The South” The South, for Borges, is both a locale where his ancestors battled for dominance and the Southside of Buenos Aires where he spent his child- hood. Select this result to view Mary M Byers's phone number, address, and more. Encyclopedia.com. Get help now. Riding a taxi at dawn to the train station, Dahlmann regards the awakening city sights with great joy, enjoying them as if for the first time. “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). Coming from an immigrant, middle-class background himself, he identified himself with the nation’s workers and widely publicized his pro-labor stance. The alarmed shopkeeper reminds Dahlmann that he does not even have a weapon. London: Hodder &Stoughton, 1996. 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): Upon his succession to power Perón did his best to silence his opposition. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. A Magical Realism Story:"The South" Symbols of "The South" By Jorge Luis Borges The Theme Of "The South" 1. In fact, Justo did support nationalist, militaristic organizations. This channel discusses and reviews books, novels, and short stories through drawing...poorly. Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones explained with part summaries in just a few minutes! SOURCES . ." It is possible Dahlmann never left the hospital and is only imagining this romantic gaucho-style duel in the South. 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. 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). Literature, poetry, the criminal underworld and the nature of the Infinite were all fair game for his writing. 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). Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Print. Also reflected in the short story is the prevalence of absentee landlords on the pampas. One thousand years after the melting a forebulge migrating towards the ice loads causes water to flow from the South Pacific into the North Pacific suggesting that raised beaches should occur in the South Pacific. —Emerson Spencer Olin and Lorraine Valestuk. 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. 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.”. Ellen B Borges . Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. In February 1939, he obtains a copy of Weil's Arabian Nights. He sits down, orders food, and begins to read Arabian Nights. He refused the dubious honor and in a public statement denounced the “subservience … cruelty… [and] stupidity” of the Perón dictatorship (Rodríguez Monegal, p. 393). His mother’s father, Isidoro Acevedo, also fought against Rosas in the civil war. 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. 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. As with "The Secret Miracle" the story raises questions about whether its events are real. Upon resting there, he finds that his wounds magically heal - but he is not surprised to see this. 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. "“The South” Borges uses the same theme in his story "The South". 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. Their itinerant lifestyle became criminal. The man who landed in Buenos Aires in 1871 bore the name of Johannes Dahlmann and he was a minister in the Evangelical Church. Having to wait for his departure, he decides to have a bite at a famous cafe near the station where a cat lends itself to the patrons' caresses. Much of his literature is committed to contriving circumstances … SOUTH, THE Eds. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. In the mid-twentieth century Argentina was testing different versions of nationalism. 48. Borges, in keeping with his other themes, tackles infinity as the absolute extension of nature and the self. Hall, Sharon K., ed. The gravitational attraction of an ice mass upon a nearby ocean tends to hold sea level high in the vicinity of the ice. MAJOR WORKS: 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. Although of German descent, he is proud of his criollo maternal ancestors: his military grandfather had died fighting the aboriginals in the wild Pampas "pierced by the Indians of Catriel", a romantic end that he enjoys thinking about. DIED: 1916, Beaumont-Hamel, France “The South” by Jorge Luis Borges At first impression, “The South” misses many of the signature Borgesian qualities of stories like “ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ” and “ The Library of Babel.” There are no magical numbers, no flights of philosophical fancy, no fake footnotes, and no intrusive first-person narrator. A man who prides himself on being Argentine appears to recover his cultural past at the expense of his life. 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. 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). The narrative switches from past to present tense in the story's final sentence, as Dahlmann and the toughs exit the bar and walk into the endless plain for their confrontation. When the pampas were fenced in 1845 and individual ranches became clearly demarcated, the free-wheeling life of the gauchos drew to a close. 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. He heads out to the countryside in the hope of convalescence, but is unwillingly embroiled in a … 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. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. “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. Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was a Uruguayan writer. 280-81). “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). Xiangyun Liao. Borges: Profile of a Writer Presents the Life and Writings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges. Mary is related to Lisa M Borges and Paul K Byers. Following the tradition of its founders (Ivan Almeida and Cristina Parodi), the Borges Center maintained an intense academic and cultural work. In the prologue to Part 2, Borges says "The South" can be "read as a direct narrative of novelistic events, and also in another way." 2. Their wages amounted to much less—up to four times less—than those of city laborers (Rock, p. 236). "“The South” NATIONALITY: South African Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. GENRE: Fiction CHARACTERS However, he feels that his death in a knife fight is honorable, that it is the one he would have chosen when he was sick in the hospital, and he decides to have a go. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography. 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). In 1990, Carlos Saura wrote and directed a 55-minute television movie based on El Sur entitled Los Cuentos De Borges: El Sur (English: The Borges Tales: The South). MAJOR WORKS: 176-77). Shumway, Nicolas. Author, social commentator, lecturer “To travel with this book, which was so much a part of the history of his ill-fortune, was a … He descends from the Germanic Johannes Dahlmann, a minister, who arrived in Buenos Aires from Europe in 1871. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. THEMES “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. The shopkeeper (calling him by name) tells Dahlmann to pay them no heed, saying they are drunk. 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. 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). “The South” by Jorge Luis Borges portrays the life of Juan Dahlmann, a librarian from Buenos Aires, wherein a sequence of unfortunate events brings him, eventually and triumphantly, to the South. 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. They have also lived in Phoenix, AZ and Maricopa, AZ. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. 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. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (/ ˈ b ɔːr h ɛ s /; Spanish: (); 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language and universal literature. For Borges, influences across space and time lead to a literary tradition more than any obsession with local color or national culture. This certainly is the case with Borges’s own literary works, which sometimes reflected his own social environment and sometimes did not. Select this result to view Kathleen L Borges's phone number, address, and more. An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain, Adrogue, con ilustraciones de Norah Borges, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_South_(short_story)&oldid=997634770, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, The events of the story are semi-autobiographical: Borges also worked in a library. Giancarlo Bruni. 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. In “The South,” a slumped-over ancient gaucho throws this archetypal weapon to Juan Dahlmann. 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). 18 (Free) Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time Coetzee, J. M. “Borges’s Dark Mirror.” The New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998, 80-82. The New South . HISTORICAL CONTEXT Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967-8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary) Two Drawings by Jorge Luis Borges Illustrate the Author’s Obsessions. Vol. ." Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. As will be discussed below, these ranchers did not share their wealth with the workers who labored for them. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. 845-46). 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