Scheherazade, Achilles, and Borges: "El sur" as an Infinite Narrative

¡jue, la pucha, que trae licionesel tiempo con sus mudanzas!

—Martín Fierro

Los árabes dicen que nadie puede leerLas mil y una noches hasta el fin. No porrazones de tedio: se siente que el libro esinfinito

—Jorge Luis Borges, Siete noches

Ser Alonso Quijano y no atreverme a serdon Quijote.

—Jorge Luis Borges, "La fama"

Like some of his other stories, Jorge Luis Borges's "El sur" has a suggestive yet ambiguous conclusion.¹ The last paragraph (and last sentence) reads: "Dahlmann empuña con firmeza el cuchillo, que acaso no sabrá manejar, y sale a la llanura" (919). The narration–with conjectural phrases like "acaso no sabrá manejar"–makes this conclusion suggestive by leading the reader to assume that the protagonist, Juan Dahlmann, dies, without explicitly declaring him dead. Yet because it is left open-ended, it remains ambiguous, allowing the reader to speculate on the next step in the story. Its inconclusiveness is a result of both content and form. First, the narration stops short of spelling out a concrete ending–Dahlmann finds himself coerced into a dagger fight with an apparently more dexterous local tough and the story ends with the anticipation of this fight. Second, the narration switches from the past tense to the present tense, and then speculates by using the future tense, effectively giving the end of the story the uncanny sense of a beginning. The narrator's temporal aside also sets itself apart in a new, though brief, paragraph, which leaves it isolated from the preceding text. This shift in syntax and structure prolongs the narration in the present and suggests a narrative future, thereby keeping the story, as well as its protagonist, alive. Because many interpretations of "El sur" seemingly disregard this detail, the question of how Dahlmann dies eclipses the question of if he dies at all. And if one assumes that the protagonist expires, one downplays the open-endedness of the story. Taking the peculiar open-ended quality of the conclusion seriously is an important step in qualifying "El sur" as what we will call an infinite narrative.

In basic terms, and working off of Borges's idea that The Thousand and One Nights is a "libro infinito," an infinite narrative refers to a story that implicitly and explicitly perpetuates itself transtextually–to use Gerard Genette's terminology.² As an infinite narrative, "El sur" perpetuates itself intratextually, intertextually, and extratextually. A narrative's intratextual perpetuation operates via the components of its structure: i.e. foreshadowing, narrative arc, plot points, and sequence of events. An open-ended conclusion, for example, would be considered an intratextual perpetuation because of its integral part in the narrative framework. On the other hand, examples of intertextual perpetuation, of course, refer to the story's intertextuality, including, but not limited to, allusions and references to other texts. For the sake of argument, in our study of "El sur," imitative connections with other texts via Genette's notion of hypertextuality–e.g. parody, pastiche, and structural imitation (Palimpsests 7–10)–are included under the terminological umbrella of intertextual perpetuation. Finally, extratextual perpetuation connects with the biographic, geographic, and cultural context of the production and publication of the text, along with–again, to borrow from Genette–paratexts and metatexts, such as interviews, prefaces, post-publication commentary and analysis of the story.³ It goes without saying that many, if not most, texts contain intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual elements, but what qualifies a story as an infinite narrative depends on its intentional elements of narrative perpetuity. By qualifying "El sur" as an infinite narrative, one can fully appreciate its quality of questioning the very nature and scope of storytelling and its relationship with reality. The following article contends that essential clues of narrative perpetuity in the story, such as the role of The Thousand and One Nights, the structural imitation of Zeno's Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles, and Borges's extratextual influence, confirm "El sur" as an infinite narrative, thus placing it as an exemplar story in his oeuvre.

Of all the intratextual and...