On the surface, Babak Lakghomi's South takes on the characteristic features of conventional allegory. Predominantly emphasizing narrative, it tells the story of a quasi-innocent protagonist (innocent in his understanding of the true dangers lurking in the world he inhabits) who undertakes a journey (in this case, to the "south") that, should he successfully complete it, will bring him good fortune (since the protagonist is a writer, the reward will be publication that will presumably bring more financial stability and help heal his troubled marriage). The novel's allegorical framework is reinforced by the cast of characters and the way they are portrayed: in the protagonist's first-person account, only his wife is given a proper name (Tara), while he is himself referred to simply as "B." All of the other characters are identified by their relationship to B. and their function in his story--"the Editor," "the Publisher," "the Assistant Cook,"-- or are described only vaguely--"the man with the deflated face." Finally, the novel's pared-back style de-emphasizes extended sensory description or other lyrical flourishes and focuses our attention resolutely on what happens, even when what is happening seems hallucinatory or surreal.
Ultimately we indeed might read South as broadly allegorical, a story about one man's confrontation with a reality more precarious than he had imagined, but it in fact winds up undermining the fundamental mechanism of allegorical narrative. A classic allegory is a narrative that proceeds on dual levels: the manifest, literal level on which the directly depicted events take place, and an impalpable, symbolic level of secondary, augmented meaning to which the first level alludes, but does not articulate. In this sort of allegory (as in, say, Pilgrim's Progress or some of the short stories of Hawthorne), that secondary level is charged with specific, relatively fixed meaning, although such meaning must be filtered through a reader's act of interpretation. But in South, the meaning is finally indeterminate, especially to the protagonist whose experience the narrative relates.
B. is a mostly unsuccessful writer whose most recent effort, an "essay about the extinction of painted storks," has failed to be published, although he has also written a book about his father that is being considered by the Publisher. As the novel begins, he has been given an assignment by the Editor to visit an oil rig in the South and report on labor unrest reputed to be occurring there. B. is not entirely sure why he has been given the assignment (and by the end of the novel, we're not sure, either), and when he arrives at the rig, he discovers that although the powers that be have been informed of his task and are prepared to allow him access, no one, including the workers supposedly threatening to strike, welcomes his presence. He receives no cooperation, except from his bunkmate, the \Assistant Cook, a veteran rig worker who provides him witb mostly general information about the Company, owners of the rig, and about the history of the rig's operation. He is also unable to communicate directly with anyone outside the rig, compelled to instead write brief notes to Tara and the Editor that are then relayed by the Secretary through Company email.
Gradually B.'s situation degrades from mere non-cooperation to more actively sinister actions taken against him, presumably at the behest of a white-haired man with whom B. meets several times and who seems to be the man in charge (at least on the rig). B. is held in increasing isolation, and seems also to be administered certain mind-numbing and mind-altering drugs. Most likely, B.'s increasing paranoia is an effect of these drugs, although it certainly seems to be the case that someone in the power structure is definitely after him--but by this time B. has also become an unavoidably unreliable narrator, so it becomes all but impossible for us to come to any definitive conclusion about what is actually happening. Eventually B. is able to escape the rig with the help of a woman he has managed to befriend, although it turns out she has also been an agent of the Company. Whether her assistance in enabling B to swim from the rig to a nearby island is a sincere gesture of kindness to B. or is still part of her collaboration with the Company is something neither B. nor we can decide, but B. does finally manage to get back home (to the City), where we next find him being tended by Tara.
B.'s experiences on the oil rig are prefaced by his initial account of driving to the south, in which he stops to witness a ceremony performed by locals, apparently an exorcism of wind spirits. Being haunted by the wind becomes a recurring motif in the novel, broaching the possibility that B.'s dilemma might involve such a haunting, a fate that might, as well, have afflicted his father, a poet and activist who disappeared when B. was a small boy. (Excerpts from the father's dream journal are provided at intervals during B's narration.) The man with the white hair strongly suggests that his interest in B. is as much an interest in his father's activity as in B.'s own, which further suggests that the line between the Company and the government is thin indeed. Exactly what B.'s father might have done to warrant the government's concern remains unspecified (it is suggested that among his reputed offences could have been that he was a homosexual), and it is additionally unclear whether its interest in B. himself extends beyond the information he might provide about the father.
Perhaps the offence committed by both B. and his father is simply that they are writers, naturally and therefore dangerously inquisitive. To the extent that the novel does point us toward some sort of unified allegorical meaning, this might be it: the writer's indulgence of curiosity and imagination is always a threat to the reigning powers.. Yet even this interpretation is not unambiguously supported by B.'s narrative. B., while still mostly a sympathetic character, does not always show a great sense of purpose or determination: his commitment to writing seems hesitant, and he hardly seems a stalwart defender of artistic freedom or a seeker of the truth. Even at the novel's conclusion, when he does seem prepared to persist in writing about what he has seen, his life (not to mention his memory) has been sufficiently impaired that the reader must wonder how successful he will be. But we may also end up feeling even more disturbed about a world in which even such a tentative truth-teller as B. is considered subversive.
What is communicated most forcefully in the story of B.'s journey to the south is how elusive meaning can be, how fragile our grasp of the truth. If it is becoming clearer that we in the putatively civilized world are not invulnerable to the dissolution of democratic norms and long-held assumptions, South provides a bracing glimpse at what living in a world in which arbitrary authority prevails is like.
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