“The South” is longer than many of the pieces in the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, and it’s more of a traditional story too. It begins with a librarian, Juan Dahlmann, falling ill due to a simple injury that turns septic, and it ends with him going to the south of Argentina to convalesce and finding himself in an unprovoked knife fight.

But as we’ve seen in this Borges Marathon, nothing in the work of Borges is very straightforward, and he gives us a hint in his introduction to the Artifices collection that we should be paying close attention:

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.

This is an interesting statement because Borges is normally very self-deprecatory in his introductions, so for him to say it may be his best story is notable. It also, of course, makes us look for that other way of reading the story.

The Straightforward Version

Before I explore that other way, let me say that reading it as a purely forthright narration of novelistic events is satisfying in itself. There are some beautiful pieces of description, such as:

The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by running water or a saying is polished by generations of humankind.

And then there’s this sentence, which elevates the everyday action of stroking a cat into quite a profound reflection on the nature of reality and our experience of time:

[He] thought, while he stroked the cat’s black fur, that this contact was illusory, that he and the cat were separated as though by a pane of glass, because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

Another Way

To me, the other way of reading the story is quite clear (although there are always other possibilities, which is why I changed the title of this section from “The Other Way” to “Another Way”). Feel free to leave your interpretations in the comments; here’s my take…

We are told that Dahlmann is taken to hospital where he falls into a fever and is on the brink of death. He suddenly recovers from the pain and torment and “incredibly” is able to go to his country house to convalesce. This house is “one of the touchstones of his memory”, but he’s never been able to live there because of his work in the city. So he has always dreamed of it but has had to content himself with the “abstract idea of possession”.

When he is released from the hospital, the narrative takes on a dreamlike quality. The South is idealised, “like some dream of the flat prairies”. Events get muddled—the train doesn’t leave him at the usual station, for a reason that doesn’t make sense. Later, Dahlmann goes to a bar where he thinks he recognizes the owner, only to realise that he merely resembles one of the employees at the sanatorium.

In the bar, some strangers provoke him for no reason, and although he is described as a bookish librarian with “a certain lack of spiritedness”, and even though he knows nothing about handling a knife, he accepts the challenge. To make things worse, he is given a weapon by a “motionless old gaucho in whom Dahlmann had seen a symbol of the South”.

So the other way of reading the story is surely that Dahlmann did in fact die in the hospital in the city of a banal injury turned septic, that he never made it to the house in the South that he’d delayed visiting for so long. The entire second half of the story is one long fever dream or hallucination.

There are a few more hints to support this reading. The Arabian Nights features heavily in the story, first as the book Dahlmann is so obsessed by that he cuts himself on the edge of a casement window and later as the book he is reading on his epic journey to the South. So perhaps this is a hint that Dahlmann, like Scheherazade, is spinning a story to stave off death?

Then there’s this beautiful paragraph near the end, as he’s facing the prospect of the fatal knife fight:

As he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium, when they’d stuck that needle in 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.

And if we look back to the very beginning of the story, we notice this sentence in the middle of a long description of Dahlmann’s ancestry:

In the contrary pulls from his two lineages, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps impelled by his Germanic blood) chose that of his romantic ancestor, or that of a romantic death.

As with the previous story, “The Cult of the Phoenix“, all these hints seem quite obvious when I list them like this. But in the story, they are spaced out and don’t feel at all obvious. It would be quite possible to read “The South” as a straightforward narrative—it’s a very well-balanced story that makes the reader do just the right amount of work.

Finally, we have this strange last sentence, which for the first time in the story switches from past to present tense:

“Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains.”

Why the sudden switch to present tense, and why the uncertain “may have”? Perhaps because in death, Dahlmann has stepped outside the confines of linear time and finally exists, like the cat he stroked earlier, in the “eternity of the instant”.