“Dangerous Southern Islands”: Modern Aesthetics as Anaesthetics in Carpentier’s The Lost Steps and Borges’s “The South”

Friedrich Nietzsche metaphorical equation of the senses with a "dangerous southern island" might legitimately strike us as uniquely modern, at least insofar as the modern, including modernization, modernity, and modernism alike, depends constitutively on colonization and imperialism. Nietzsche's compressed account of a northern intellect tempted by, struggling to resist and then ultimately fleeing from a southern body reappears in Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps and Jorge Luis Borges's "The South"; both published first in 1953. More concretely, the process begins with an encounter and an apparent transformation: the intellectual encounters the material, historical, southern Other and appears to become Other himself. In The Lost Steps, the composer's first stop on Nietzsche trip south is a Latin American capital and his first impression is negative. The very "pastness" of the place—where various manifestations of nature foil the best-laid plans of modernization—disorients him.