On the limits of modernity and the dream of a limitless marginality

* I apologize for the length. I didn’t keep track of my word count so it got long fast.

            There’s an oxymoronic desire in El Sur to make what is perceived as marginal to become infinite. As Dahlmann travels from the city to the countryside, everything becomes “vasto, pero al mismo tiempo íntimo y, de alguna manera, secreto” (Borges, El Sur). Is this journey a “renunciation of artifice,” of “cosmopolitan life” and “imported literature,” as Patrick Dove points out? Is it a movement against the universal or a journey to illustrate the universality of the marginal? As the train travels south, Dahlmann closes the book Las Mil y Una Noches and seems to live in the moment, experience nature, to expand with the growing landscape. The title of the book itself is a finite measurement of time (one thousand and one nights), yet its connotation is that of an eternity, Scherezade’s tale with no end (like El Sur). It seems like that many nights would take forever. It’s almost the way we perceive the temporality of our existence. It seems like a long time, but it does have an end. As an author who seems to have positioned himself against the closed order of nationalism and a proponent of Argentinean literature to embrace universality and incorporate the cosmopolitan, Borges is playing an interesting game here. He equates the city, modernity, the cosmopolitan, with blindness (Dahlmann can only be aware of his accident through the Other’s horror at the elevator), artifice, insufferable nightmares and the infernal “sanatorio” – all limited and/or limiting.

            Literature provides an escape, but it is a dangerous one, one that excises Dahlmann from reality and almost kills him (yet, like the ambiguity of the tragic ending, the emphasis here is on almost). Interestingly, the finite eternity implied by the title of the book, Las Mil y Una Noches, is a desired one, since the book is viewed as an enticing distraction, much like Scherezade’s tales expand her life within the book itself. But then, paradoxically, Borges describes Dahlmann’s feverish days after his accident as “ocho días pasaron, como ocho siglos” (Borges, El Sur). Here we have a short amount of time that is so undesired it expands to an eternity, albeit a finite one like the book title. Further on, at a café, Dahlmann differentiates himself as a finite creature in relation to the eternity of a magical cat because it exists in “la eternidad del instante” (Borges, El Sur). Dove explains, “this [temporal] gap, which not only separates the human from other beings but also separates the human from himself, is framed as a confrontation between temporality and infinitude” (Dove, 77). The question arises if this journey to the marginal, to tradition (to perhaps the setting of Marti’s bucolic revolution) is a universal one. One could interpret his one night in the south, a night that most likely will end his life, as that extra “una noche” in the title of the book. Again, that last night seems to have an intimacy, a secret, in opposition to the vastness of the other thousand. If that last night is viewed as the eternal instant, as the moment right before inevitable death, then we have a solution as to why the story refuses to give its reader the ending the protagonist seems to already know. Dahlmann thinks of his journey as a tragic one (he had already found affinity in the romantic heroism of his Argentinean grandfather), but must we think that as well? Borges refusal to agree with Dahlmann’s tragic affinity by ending the story in that instant of hopelessness to death is superseded by imbuing him, at the same instant, with a sense of fearlessness: “si en Dahlmann no había esperanza, tampoco había temor” (Borges El Sur). In my opinion, Borges could mean that only in our acceptance of that which is beyond ourselves (such as death) can we overcome our limits. He could be essentially incorporating the marginal into the universal, not choosing one over the other. He could be saying that as Dahlmann moves further south, further into his past, his tradition, his Gauchoness, his sense of romantic heroism, he also becomes vast, more infinite, universal, perhaps even paradoxically cosmopolitan… or is Borges satirizing that impossibility, saying that eternity can never be found by travelling south, backwards, to the past? Is he implying it is as unlikely as the deux ex machina “gaucho estático” handing over the knife because such a journey is in Dahlmann’s head?  Is it as artificial as the book Dahlmann carries, as illusory as the eternal moment of a magical cat or as impossible as the finite eternity of a thousand nights?