Literature and Other White-Man Tricks: Borges and Jarmusch Imagine the Frontier

In this article, I analyze the representation of the Frontier in the short story ‘El Sur’ by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the movie Dead Man by American director Jim Jarmusch. Going beyond explicit plot similarities, I argue that Jarmusch’s movie carries out an implicit form of adaptation of Borges’s literary text. Both works not only narrate the violent encounter of urban subjects with an unknown and threatening space, but also underscore how the ‘civilized’ subjectivity experiences a crisis that challenges foundational cultural assumptions. Due to its relevance in the process of nation formation, the Frontier served as a source for symbolic discourses, literary representations, and cultural imaginaries. In the case of Argentina and the United States, specific artistic genres fictionalized the life on the Frontier. Stylistically, both Borges and Jarmusch use tropes and narrative devices from these seemingly outdated genres—gauchesca literature and Western movies—but the use of these devices is highly experimental and installs a much more complex depiction of the symbolic space of the Frontier, thus challenging hegemonic accounts of processes of territorial expansion and racial superiority.