the south borges

MAJOR WORKS: 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. Rendered semi-delirious and confined in an anonymous room, he feels humiliation and self-hatred, as though he were in hell. The South By Jorge Luis Borges. 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). Three peones (farm hands) sitting at a table nearby throw a bread crumb at him, which he ignores, prompting them to recommence their bullying. 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). 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. Vol. "The South" (original Spanish title: "El Sur") is a short story by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, first published in La Nación in 1953 and later in the second edition (1956) of Ficciones, part two (Artifices). Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place, Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written. 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. (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.) Dahlmann boards the train and rides out of the city into the plains of the South. He refused the dubious honor and in a public statement denounced the “subservience … cruelty… [and] stupidity” of the Perón dictatorship (Rodríguez Monegal, p. 393). 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. If taken at face value, the main character Dahlmann is released from a sanatorium after a serious head injury. 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. As with "The Secret Miracle" the story raises questions about whether its events are real. 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). 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. Trans. Encyclopedia.com. NATIONALITY: South African Tampa, FL. This is a quick summary of The South by Jorge Luis Borges. 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. "The South" (original Spanish title: "El Sur") is a short story by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, first published in La Nación in 1953 and later in the second edition (1956) of Ficciones, part two (Artifices). DIED: 1916, Beaumont-Hamel, France 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). As the shopkeeper protests that Dahlmann is unarmed, the old gaucho suddenly throws the sick man a dagger. He takes the book home, and—eager to examine it—rushes up the stairs while reading it, slashing his head accidentally as it hits the sharp edge of a window frame left open. On the deserted station, Dahlmann steps off into nearly empty fields. In 1953 a third collection (called Labyrinths) was included in La Croix du Sud (The Southern Cross), a French series on Latin American literature. GENRE: Fiction, nonfiction Contemporary Literary Criticism: Yearbook 1986. Fascism had steadily been gaining political ground in Italy and Germany, and it took root in Argentina as well. Works Cited Borges, Jorge. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. 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. Preceding the poem were other gauchesque works by writers such as Bartolomé Hidalgo, Hilario Ascasubi, and Estanislao del Campo. Vol. 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. 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. Author, social commentator, lecturer 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). As he picks up the blade, Dahlmann realizes that this means he will have to fight, and that he is doomed; he has never wielded a knife in his life and is sure to die in the encounter. 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. Her father, Francisco Flores, served as a soldier who died fighting the Indians on the border of Buenos Aires province, probably in 1874. 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). CRITICISM 1987 Words8 Pages. 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). . Such festering resentment helps explain the tension between the rough-looking rural laborers and Dahlmann in the story. 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. Borges: Profile of a Writer Presents the Life and Writings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. All this must be viewed in the context of the nationalist sentiments that were on the rise in Argentina at the time. Retrieved January 13, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/south. Rock, David. Lewis, Paul H. The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism. But the story might be as mundane as Dahlmann’s northern life without its stunning conclusion: rather than living happily in the South like he’s always longed for, … Some 20,000 of these landlords, most of whom rarely or never appeared, owned nearly three-quarters of the pampas. 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. Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains. instinctively picks it up, Dahlmann realizes that this action has more or less committed him to fighting the other man. "The South." Their itinerant lifestyle became criminal. Coetzee, J. M. “Borges’s Dark Mirror.” The New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998, 80-82. Thus he began to write short fiction, having already written poetry and essays. 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. MAJOR WORKS: 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. He purged the universities of his critics, terminated the tenure of nearly all Supreme Court judges, and restricted freedom of the press (Rock, pp. 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. The nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas was his great-great-great-uncle (Alazraki, pp. A man who prides himself on being Argentine appears to recover his cultural past at the expense of his life. HISTORICAL CONTEXT His short stories are ranked among the best to emerge from Latin America. Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. At the same time Borges became the focus of a vigorous debate on the proper cultural and political role for Argentine writers. 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. New York: Viking, 1998. 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. Borges, in keeping with his other themes, tackles infinity as the absolute extension of nature and the self. 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. Xiangyun Liao Graduate Student of Statistics && University of South Florida - Volunteer. Foreigners lived under the threat of deportation; anti-government activists were in danger of arrest, torture, and even execution. Borges, Jorge Luis. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1985. 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. 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). In 1930, in a bloodless coup, a coalition of conservative and nationalist politicians overthrew the Radical government of Hipólito Yrigoyen. Laurence Gaume, Merry Zacharias, Vladimir Grosbois and Renee M. Borges, The fitness consequences of bearing domatia and having the right ant partner: experiments with protective and non-protective ants in a semi-myrmecophyte, Oecologia, 145, 1, (76), (2005). "“The South” 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. Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was a Uruguayan writer. The South (Borges story) Summary & Study Guide This Study Guide consists of approximately 18 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The South. Before coming to Pittsburgh, the Borges Center was based at the University of Iowa, where Daniel Balderston taught for nine years. It is also a state of consciousness. World Literature and Its Times: Profiles of Notable Literary Works and the Historic Events That Influenced Them. 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