Quand j'ai écrit “Le Sud,” je venais de lire Henry James et de découvrir qu'on peut raconter deux ou trois histoires en même temps. Ma nouvelle est donc ambiguë. On peut la lire au premier degré. Mais aussi considérer qu'il s'agit d'un rêve, celui d'un homme qui meurt à l'hôpital et aurait préféré mourir sur le pavé, l'arme à la main. Ou celui de Borges qui préférerait mourir comme son grandpère le général, à cheval, plutôt que dans son lit—ou encore que l'homme est tué par son rêve, cette idée du Sud, de la Pampa, qui l'avait conduit là.

—Borges, L'Express, May 1977

Is there a structuring principle underlying Borges' short fiction? How are his stories made, and to what degree is it possible to derive from them a narrative code? How do his narratives signify? In other words, how are the literary signs organized and what meanings or functions do they propose, beyond their explicit content? Borges' work has repeatedly and perhaps excessively been examined at the level of its content, as a denotative language no different from that of the press. If, as Hjelmslev says, literature is a semiotic system whose means of expression is another semiotic system—language—it must be concluded that in a literary text there is, first, a linguistic function, a vehicle common to language and to literature that explains that “all the words with which a Garcilaso sonnet is written, appear verbatim in any dictionary of the Spanish language,” as Cortazar has remarked. But it must also be recognized that in the literary discourse the linguistic sign becomes a signifier with functions or signifieds absent in the system of signs of language. The literary sign absorbs the linguistic sign in order to convert it into a new signifier whose signified transcends the orbit of language. The “fiction of literary language seeks not to clear up the meaning of a word but to reconstruct the rules and norms of elaboration of that meaning.”¹ The literary text “unfolds in some way in order to add to its own explicit or literal signification, or denotation, a supplementary power of connotation that enriches it with one or several secondary meanings.”² Literature is “a domain of a translinguistic or metalinguistic nature that comprises techniques of signification situated not next to language, but above or inside it.”³ Gerard Genette explains this effect of oversignification in literature with an example from classical rhetoric:

In the synecdoche sail-ship there is a signifier, sail, and there is an object (or concept) signified, the ship: that's the denotation. But since the word sail has substituted the noun ship, the relationship (signification) that unifies the signifier with the signified constitutes a figure. This figure, in turn, designates clearly, within the rhetorical code, a poetic state of the discourse. The figure functions, then, as the signifier of a new signified—poetry—over a second semantic plane, that of the rhetorical connotation. The inherent quality of connotation is, in fact, its capacity to establish itself above (or underneath) the first signification, but in an unconnected fashion, using the first meaning as a means of designating a second concept.⁴

This second concept, inserted in the first, would then be the object of literary studies or at least of one type of study, since a text becomes literature when it produces poetic functions which organize themselves in a coherent system of signs, when it transforms natural language into a second language, when it abandons the denotation of the linguistic code and gives way to connotation to create with it its own expressive code. This transformation constitutes an operation by means of which the writer interrogates the world. The function of the critic would then be to examine this operation, since if for a writer literature is “a first language or language-object, criticism is a discourse about a discourse, a second language or metalanguage.”⁵

Being a reader as well as a critic of his own work, Borges was the first to suggest that his story “The South” “could be read as a direct narration of fictional facts and also as something else” (F, 105). Asked about this second way, he answered:

Everything that happens after Dahlmann leaves the hospital could be interpreted as his own hallucination when he is about to die of septicemia, as a fantastic vision of how he would have chosen to die. Hence the slight correspondences between the two halves of the story; the volume of One Thousand and One Nights, that appears in both parts; the horse-carriage that first takes him to the hospital and then to the railroad station; the resemblance between the tavern's owner and a hospital worker; the touch Dahlmann feels on his forehead when wounded and the touch of the bread-crumb thrown by the “compadrito” to provoke him.⁶

This interpretation suggested by Borges himself escapes the denotative or literal level. At that level, Borges wrote a linear story in which Dahlmann recovers in the hospital and travels to his ranch to convalesce. It is in the make-up of the story that a second meaning is implied. The text has been organized in such a way that the first signifier is forced to fold over onto itself and generate a second signifier capable of new poetic functions. This organization consists of an introduction and two parts. In the first part, the protagonist is introduced and the conflict is presented: in the clash between his two lines of descent, we are told, Juan Dahlmann chose the line of his romantic ancestor, the one with a romantic death. It should be noticed that the Argentina of the 1930s is not the romantic country of Francisco Flores, and that Juan Dahlmann, librarian, reader of Martín Fierro and of the One Thousand and One Nights, leads a life closer to that of his Germanic ancestor than to that of his criollo grandfather. His circumstances are Argentine, but his name is the same as that of the evangelical minister, and so is his faith in culture. This element of the conflict appears in the introduction. Juan Dahlmann is a symbol of his country's fate: the conflict between his two lineages is an expression of Sarmiento's formula “civilization and barbarism.” Dahlmann chooses the first of these alternatives, but the country will force him to face the second. The first link of the story is thus a compendium of the story as a whole.

The autobiographical character of this story is obvious. Juan Dahlmann is a mask of Borges, of a Borges who chooses, like his ancestor Laprida, books, but who knows that the deep reality of his other lineage is pierced by violence—a violence he abhors and whose futility he has repeatedly underlined, but which he recognizes as “an apocryphal past, at the same time stoic and orgiastic, in which any Argentine has defied and fought to finally fall silently in an obscure knife-fight.”⁷ There is a second factor of a psychological nature. Grandchild and great-grandchild of colonels, offspring of heroes of the wars of independence, Borges has expressed in several poems his admiration for those military ancestors who shaped Argentine history. Secluded in a humble library, Borges has given in, more than once, to a nostalgic fascination for that past he views as epic. In his “Autobiographical Essay” he has said: “On both sides of my family I have military forebears; this may count for my yearning after that epic destiny which my gods denied me, no doubt wisely.”⁸ Borges returns to that epic universe of his ancestors seeking neither a futile violence that he condemns nor an empty bravery that he insistently calls “useless,” but a virtue that our time, predominantly individualistic, has forgotten. It is no accident that Bernard Shaw was one of his favorite writers. In him, Borges finds an alternative of liberation to the anxiety of modern man, and through Shaw he defines the meaning of that virtue he admires in his ancestors:

Bernard Shaw is an author to whom I keep returning. … He has epic significance, and is the only writer of our time who has imagined and presented heroes to his readers. On the whole, modern writers tend to reveal men's weaknesses, and seem to delight in their unhappiness; in Shaw's case, however, we have characters like Major Barbara or Caesar, who are heroic and whom one can admire. Contemporary literature since Dostoievski—and even earlier, since Byron—seems to delight in man's guilt and weaknesses. In Shaw's work the greatest human virtues are extolled. For example, that a man can forget his own fate, that a man may not value his own happiness, that he may say like our Almafuerte: “I am not interested in my own life,” because he is interested in something beyond personal circumstances.⁹

In his heroic forefathers, Borges seeks to rescue that virtue: an epic sense of life, values that transcend the narrow limits of our individual selves and propose a stoic dimension that liberates life from its existential bounds. To the values of the novel—centered in the destiny of the self—Borges opposes the axiology of the epic: acts of courage that prove that people are capable of transcending their own egos in defense of humanistic ideals and elevated tasks. Violence is thus understood as a cathartic agent. The destruction of a life is not a gratuitous act, nor a macho's boastful display of guts. A hero—reasons Borges—defends a cause (a virtue, a destiny, a duty) whose value far exceeds that of his own life. In the duel between Juan Dahlmann and the boisterous compadrito who forces him to fight, Dahlmann succumbs as victim of a violence he has not chosen and of which he does not feel part, but in the final analysis the decision to fight is Dahlmann's. When Dahlmann bends over to pick up the knife thrown to him by “the old ecstatic gaucho in whom he saw a cipher of the South,” he understands that he will be able to defend his injured dignity with the only language his provoker knows: the knife. The compadrito fights motivated by laws of honor which Borges has unequivocally condemned as a form of barbarism. Dahlmann's motivation is quite different. Dahlmann defends a moral value—his injured dignity—with his life. From this act one must conclude that for Dahlmann—for that Dahlmann who is dreaming his death in an innocuous hospital bed where he indeed is dying of “physical miseries”—dignity is dearer than the life that holds it. Viewed from this set of values, it is understandable that Dahlmann chose to pick up the knife that “would justify his killing.” Between his death and the loss of his honor, Dahlmann chooses death.

But this choice is framed within a dream. When he is about to die of septicemia, prostrate in a hospital bed, Dahlmann confesses to himself that “if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.”¹⁰ The adverb (then) is important on two accounts. First, because it points to the circumstances under which that violent death was chosen. Second, because it refers to a literary dream that restores an Argentine myth: “a lowly knife fight dreamed by Hernández in the 1860's.”¹¹ Dahlmann's dream represents, in a way, the dream of all Argentines. It is just an avatar of that fight in which “a gaucho lifts a black off his feet with his knife, throws him down like a sack of bones, sees him agonize and die, crouches down to clean his blade, unties his horse, and mounts slowly so he will not be thought to be running away.”¹² Hernández's dream—Borges adds—“returns infinitely.” The whole of Argentine history is ciphered in that dream that time has turned into a “part of the memory of all.” Before dying, Dahlmann returns to that dream he knows he is part of. He chooses the dream of his criollo lineage, but only when nearing death. Dahlmann's life, devoted to books, has been an effort to correct the violence of that lineage. But as an Argentine vulnerable to the “imperatives of courage and honor,” Dahlmann is forced to return to that “dream” of one man which is part of the memory of all, he is compelled to go back to that myth that defines the essence of his violent condition.

Borges' story presents with deliberate ambiguity the futility of that dream, and at the same time its paradoxical inevitability. There is not a single and logical meaning, and yet Borges has articulated his story with impeccable logic. The laws of that logic go beyond syllogism. Its coherence stems from the text itself and from a very Borgesian world-view, but this world-view is contained as a whole in the narrative. The text, in its etymological sense of texture, tissue, structure, contains the answers to its seeming incongruities: How does one explain the fact that Dahlmann, who has devoted his life to books, would agree to a “useless” fight that amounts to his own destruction? Borges' answer is formulated through the organization of the narrative. By dividing the story into two halves—the accident and the trip to the South—and by suggesting that the second half, connected to the first by subtle symmetries, is a dream that the protagonist dreams before dying in the hospital, Borges faces the question of the credibility of the knife fight by turning it into a dream. By doing this, he gives the fight a precise meaning: this fight—Borges seems to imply—exists only as a dream, and that dream is no different from the one dreamed by Hernández in Martín Fierro. Because it is “part of the memory of all,” we return to this dream infinitely as to a collective unconscious which intrinsically defines Argentines, as to a mirror that, more than reflecting a façade, gives back the image of the other, a violent face waiting to tear the surface with a knife. For the image of the other to appear, Borges takes his character to the South—the last stronghold of courage, the last sanctuary of that religion of gauchos and compadres—and to dispel all doubt about his condition of dream, or, what amounts to the same thing, of expression of an intimate collective unconscious, Borges structures the story like a mirror in which the second half is a symmetrical reflection of the first. This structure suggests that the second half is a dream and that in this dream, Dahlmann would fulfill the duties of courage. He will carry them out as any Argentine for whom Hernández's fight is the cipher of his own destiny would, and for whom the purpose of the tango is “to give Argentines the conviction of having been brave, of having complied with the requisites of courage and honor.”¹³

In the poem “Junín,” Borges, the poetic speaker, searches for the other in the battle of his forebears. Like Juan Dahlmann, he also seeks to rescue that mythical being which defines him in his most essential condition:

I am myself but I am also the other
The man who died, the man whose blood and name
Are mine: a stranger here, yet with a fame
He won keeping Indian spears at bay,
I come back to this Junín I have never seen,
To your Junín, grandfather Borges.(14)

The poem shows a greater degree of explicitness than the story. In this imaginary return to the “epic Junín,” Borges recreates in more abstract terms the trip of Juan Dahlmann to the South. It could be argued that the historical battle is not a knife fight in a humble country tavern, and that while the first is an indisputable epic event, the knife fight is merely an expression of showy courage. But for Borges, there is a common denominator between the battle and the duel: in both acts there prevails a cult of courage that turns the duel into an epic act, and the battle into an expression of personal bravado. Speaking about the civil war that followed Argentina's war of independence, Borges has said of the caudillos: “Fighting a war was not for them the coherent execution of a plan but a game of manliness.”¹⁵ And referring, in Evaristo Carriego, to the knife fight between Wenceslao and the Santafesino, he alludes to this duel as “the epic of Wenceslao,” adding that the episode has “a clearly epic and even knightly character,”¹⁶ which is not to say that the wars of independence and the duels of the knife fighters have for him the same value. If there is any doubt regarding Borges' aversion towards this type of vain violence, it will suffice to refer to his more recent short story “Rosendo Juarez” to dispel it. At the same time, this kind of aversion does not exclude his admiration for the violent side of a knife fight. Otherwise, his preference and pleasure for knife-fight stories could not be understood. Nor could it be understood that in order to explain the etymology of the word virtue he wrote: “Virtus, which in Latin means courage derives from vir, which means man.”¹⁷ Or that, in order to demonstrate that the tango and the milonga seek to express “the conviction that fighting can be a feast,”¹⁸ he resorted in his book, Evaristo Carriego, to the major epic poems of European literature (the Iliad, the Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland and Orlando). If we add that courage, which could also be an epic trait found in a knife fight, is the virtue most worshipped by Argentines as an act or as a dream, Borges' evocation of Junín and Dahlmann's dream assume an unequivocal meaning.

As a linear story, “The South” leaves the impression of an arbitrary act and a gratuitous gesture. But if Borges had said in the text that Dahlmann's trip to the South was a dream of the patient who was dying in a hospital, the fight would have lost much of its effectiveness, and the text itself would not have had the tension and the precision that it has. “Since everything could happen in dreams—we would have reasoned—the fight impresses us as any other arbitrary act.” Borges' solution lies in preserving the linear narrative at the level of the denotation and in correcting it at the level of connotation through the structure of his text. This double solution is a technical achievement, but it also represents the counterpart—at the level of the signifier—of the duality of meanings that, like a double-edged weapon, the trip to the South suggests. Through the linear reading of the story, Borges condemns the fight as an act of vanity—vanity in the compadrito's provocation, vanity in Dahlmann's acceptance, vanity in a blind act that subscribes to and celebrates barbarism. From this point of view, Dahlmann does not choose his death: he fatalistically succumbs to the law of the knife. Through the reading suggested by the structure of the story, on the other hand, the fight reorganizes itself as a dream. Before dying in his hospital bed, Dahlmann dreams a death in consonance with that of his forebears. This dream is an encounter with the other, with the blood of his grandfather killed by the Indians of Catriel; it is an encounter with the epic sense of a fight in which one chooses to die to prove a virtue more important than life. Dahlmann's dream is also an encounter with his past, it is a last journey to that history that exhausts itself in “a lowly knife fight,” a last effort to enter into that “dream of one man that is part of the memory of all,” the fight narrated in Martín Fierro.

It could be argued that the two meanings are contradictory; that violence cannot be reproved and, at the same time, celebrated; that a knife fight cannot be an epic act and, at the same time, empty bravado. But, like most of Borges' work, “The South” plays with contradictory meanings that resolve themselves in ambiguous paradoxes. Like the tango and the milonga that are reminiscent of “a stoic and orgiastic past,” the fight that Dahlmann dreams is an excess and a deprivation, a destruction and a form of fulfillment, a negation and an act of affirmation. Borges' answers are not causal: they assimilate, like an oxymoron, two terms that seemingly contradict and reject each other. In a way, “The South” is a story that holds two stories, and each of them suggests a contradictory version of the meaning of Dahlmann's fight. But in order to suggest a second meaning, it was necessary to interpolate in the story a second signifier incorporated into the first one. The narrative presents difficulties that the poem ignores. In “Junín,” the first line says straightforwardly: “I am myself but I am also the other, the man who died.” To convey a similar idea in the story, Borges constructs a mirror structure: the second half of the story reflects the image of the other that Juan Dahlmann seeks to be, and in order to preserve the verisimilitude of the story—a librarian suddenly turned into a knife fighter—that other surfaces, as if in a dream, from the agonies of a dying librarian.

Borges has warned that “the verbs to live and to dream, according to the Idealist doctrine, are strictly synonyms.”¹⁹ He has also said that “literature is a controlled dream.”²⁰ Through literature, through literature's dream, Borges “returns to Junín where he had never been”; he is “a vague person and also the man who stopped the spears in the desert.” Dahlmann also will rescue his other through a dream and, like Pedro Damian in “The Other Death,” he will die two deaths. Most of Borges' stories offer this double level, a false bottom of sorts; the second of these levels, like a mirror, returns the image of the first, but inverted. Like Borges, who recognized himself as a divided personality in the short prose piece “Borges and I,” Juan Dahlmann is that frail librarian fascinated by the marvels of books, and that violent other whose final fulfillment happens in a knife-fight dream.

In many ways, “The South” is the inverted version of a poem from San Martin Copybook (1929), entitled “Isidoro Acevedo.” Borges' maternal grandfather, Acevedo, was not a military man, but “he fought in the battles at Cepeda and Pavón.” In the poem, Borges sets out “to rescue his last day,” or, more accurately, “an essential dream” of the last day of his life: “For in the same way that other men write verse / my grandfather elaborated a dream.” In this young Borges, the formula “literature = dreams” already appears as an equation of interchangeable terms. Here, as in Dahlmann's last dream in the poem, Borges will fulfill the epic destiny of his grandfather in an apocryphal dream. This fictitious dream of a heroic death, when Acevedo is actually dying of a pulmonary disease in his bedroom, will be, however, his true death, “the death that he [like Dahlmann] would have chosen or dreamed, if he had been able to choose or to dream his death.” The story and the poem are motivated by the same effort: to force destiny to correct itself, to make it comply with the requisites of courage, to be part of that memory in which, consciously or unconsciously, all Argentines recognize themselves. This is the dream that Borges makes his grandfather dream.

While a lung ailment ate away at him
And hallucinatory fevers distorted the face of the day,
He assembled the burning documents of his memory
For the forging of his dream.
His dream was of two armies
Entering the shadow of battle;
He enumerated the commands, the colors, the units.
“Now the officers are reviewing their battle plans,”
He said in a voice you could hear,
And in order to see them he tried sitting up.
He made a final levy,
Rallying the thousands of faces that a man knows without
Really knowing at the end of his years:
Bearded faces now growing dim in daguerreotypes;
Faces that lived and died next to his own at the battles
Of Puente Alsina and Cepeda.
In the visionary defense of his country that his faith
Hungered for (and not that his fever imposed),
He plundered his days
And rounded up an army of Buenos Aires ghosts
So as to get himself killed in the fighting.
That was how, in a bedroom that looked onto the garden,
He died out of devotion for his city.(21)

In this dream that Borges weaves, like a mask of his grandfather, death gives expression to an intimate will, to a strong necessity to exalt that epic side that Borges admires in Shaw's characters. Man's epic sense of life finds in death its ultimate challenge. Acevedo, killed by a pulmonary disease, and Dahlmann, killed by septicemia, refute that heroic side of life in which they believed. Such an innocuous death negates that stoic past of their heroic ancestors, an epic past to which Borges relentlessly returns and with which he identifies. It also negates the substance that makes up the gaucho or the compadre or any Argentine for whom courage is still the highest virtue. In order to correct those fortuitous deaths unworthy of his heroic sense of life, and in order to comply with the requisites of courage, Borges resorts to dreams or to their homologue, literature. Freud thought of dreams as the blurred fulfillment of desires and needs intimately repressed (or postponed), and Jung's contribution to the theory of dreams was his idea of a collective unconscious and its reverberations in archetypal dreams, in myths that express not the individual but the species. Borges' intent is to rescue that collective dream that is part of the memory of all. He compels Juan Dahlmann, Isidoro Acevedo, Pedro Damián and even Martín Fierro himself, in his story “The End,” to dream it.

In “The South,” as in “The Other Death,” “The End,” and in the poem “Isidoro Acevedo,” there are two deaths, and those two deaths embody two different signifieds expressed also through two different signifiers. The first signifier finds its expression linearly; the second is coined through the structure, through those two symmetrical halves of the story that induce us to read the second part as a dream. The story leaves a perplexing aftertaste because the two signifieds proposed by those two signifiers are contradictory. On the one hand, courage is presented as a useless virtue that forces Dahlmann to a death no less useless; on the other, courage is presented as Dahlmann's last attempt to return to a stoic past. His death makes possible the fulfillment of a dream in which Dahlmann meets the epic past of his grandfather who died a romantic death.

These two opposite sides of courage are intertwined in the story as an oxymoron through which Borges expresses his two-fold and contradictory view of courage. For Borges as an individual and a book lover, courage is useless, a token of barbarism, a primitive state fitting a nation of shepherds and riders who do not understand urban civilization. For Borges as a member of a national group that sees in bravery the most precious of virtues, and as a descendant of heroes who wove a good stretch of the history of his country, courage is a yearning, an intimate epic necessity, a romantic death-wish that expresses itself in an apocryphal dream, a dream that is part of the memory of all. As a conscious reflection, as an act of lucidity, Borges rejects and condemns courage; voicing the dictates of a collective unconscious that glorifies bravery, Borges sees courage as a myth he knows himself to be part of, as a myth that fulfills the dark depths of his blood. Borges' literary accomplishment in “The South” lies in having given expression to that ambivalent vision, in having turned the first signifier (the linear narrative) into another signifier (the second narrative suggested through the structure), and finally in having chosen the plane of the linear or causal narration to express his lucid version of courage, while at the same time permitting his mythical or unconscious version of courage to be expressed, as it were, underneath the text, through the structure of the story or, what amounts to the same thing, through an implied dream.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 306.

2. Gerard Genette, Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 213.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 215.

5. Roland Barthes, op.cit., p. 304.

6. J. Irby, N. Murat and C. Peralta, Encuentro con Borges (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1968), p. 34. Borges' interpretation of his own story has prompted a rather long and fertile controversy. Allen W. Phillips was the first to deal with this aspect of “The South” in his article “‘El Sur’ de Borges” (Revista Hispánica Moderna, vol. XXIX, no. 2, April 1963, pp. 140–147). I discussed his interpretation and suggested a different reading of the story in La prosa narrativa de J. L. Borges (Madrid: Gredos, 2nd ed. 1984), chapter IX (pp. 122–137). Subsequent articles by Z. Gertel (“‘El Sur’ de Borges: búsqueda de identidad en el laberinto,” Nueva Narrativa Hispanoamericana, I, 2, Sept. 1971, pp. 35–55), Robert M. Scari (“Aspectos realista-tradicionales del arte narrativo de Borges,” Hispania, LVII, 4, Dec. 1974, pp. 899–907), and particularly John B. Hall (“Borges' ‘El Sur’: A Garden of Forking Paths?” Iberoromania, Göttingen, no. 3, neue folge, 1975, pp. 71–77) have contributed new views and enriched the discussion of this story.

7. Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1955), p. 149.

8. J. L. Borges, “An Autobiographical Essay,” in The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969 (New York, Dutton, 1970), p. 208.

9. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 97–98.

10. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (New York: Grove, 1962), p. 174.

11. J. L. Borges, “Martín Fierro,” in Dreamtigers (University of Texas, 1964), p. 40.

12. Ibid.

13. J. L. Borges, Evaristo Carriego, p. 149.

14. J. L. Borges, Selected Poems 1923–1967 (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1972), p. 211.

15. J. L. Borges, Evaristo Carriego, p. 124.

16. Ibid., p. 154.

17. Ibid., p. 146.

18. Ibid., p. 147.

19. J. L. Borges, El Aleph, p. 113.

20. J. L. Borges, Other Inquisitions, p. 72.

21. J. L. Borges, Selected Poems 1923–1967, pp. 53–56.