ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which Argentina’s long-established dichotomies between the city and the countryside and between civilization and barbarism play out in Borges’s 1953 short story “El sur.” The protagonist, Juan Dahlmann, acts as a librarian flâneur in Buenos Aires, a convalescent flâneur in the threshold of the suburbs, and a gaucho in the vast Argentine pampa. Dahlmann’s journey from civilization to barbarism and from urban to rural environments suggests a preference for an uncivilized flânerie that merges the flâneur and the gaucho—two nineteenth-century figures who differ in appearance and topography but who nevertheless intersect as solitary wanderers and idlers, keen observers, experts on their respective milieus, and individuals in search of a more authentic and desirable identity.
