In Search of a National Identity
A country whose name comes from a poem could only have a resolutely literary destiny, and this is the case of Argentina. This term derived from the Latinism argentum (silver) would have appeared for the first time on a Venetian map in 1536, but it was thanks to the eponymous poem by Martin del Barco Centenera, a famous epic published in Lisbon in 1602, that it really took off. It resounded again in the words of the national anthem composed by Vicente López y Planes in 1813 and was finally adopted during the reign (1829-1852) of the terrible Manuel de Rosas. The Republica de las Provincias Unidas del Rio de la Plata thus became Federación Argentina, not without a certain paradox, since the governor's will was more interested in concentrating all the powers in Buenos Aires than in setting up a confederation. Between independence from Spain in 1816 and the signing of the constitution in 1853, the country experienced terrible internal and border conflicts and a dictatorship that forced many intellectuals into exile, including two important men, Esteban Echeverría and José Mármol. The first was born in Buenos Aires in 1805 and at the age of 21 received a scholarship from the government of Bernardino Rivadavia to study in Paris. A romantic wind was blowing in the Parisian capital at the time, and the young man brought back to his country this new inspiration, which was not confined to the style and themes he had tackled, but also encompassed a utopian exaltation that seemed to correspond so well to what was being played out on the other side of the Atlantic. From the thread of his reflections, Echeverría will derive a novel, Elvira o la Novia del Plata, from lyrical poems, the best known being La Cautiva, but also an essay, El dogma socialista. The exile to which he was forced under Rosas suggests a short cruel tale, TheSlaughterhouse (El Matadero). With this one, after having breathed romanticism into Argentina, he will plant the seed of naturalism. José Mármol (1817-1871), also worried about the regime in power, took refuge in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and in 1851 he began to publish his famous Amalia in the local newspaper La Tribuna, which would appear in its complete form three years later in Buenos Aires. Considered to be the first Argentine novel, fiction and reality are skillfully intertwined in it, which reinforces his pamphleteering against the dictatorship. Argentine national literature thus takes its roots in exile and is tinged with patriotism in the guise of an emblematic figure, the gaucho, a herdsman, generally of low status, but nevertheless reluctant to bow to authority. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, future president for the time being exiled in Chile, in 1845, endeavoured to retrace the biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1788-1835), a military warlord who was a supporter of federalism, and made him the champion of modernity, in opposition to the uneducated gaucho incapable of adapting to the necessary progress. This conflict between wildlife on the pampas and the evolving force of the cities, barbarity and civilization, will become a central point that still stirs both conversations and literature. But the gaucho is not always presented in such obtuse surroundings, in Estanislao del Campo's burlesque poem Fausto, a play becomes a pretext for making fun of each other, while in Hilario Ascásubi's play he becomes the hero of a duel against the devil and becomes part of the legend of Santos Vega, which will be taken up by Eduardo Gutiérrez, also author of Juan Moreira, and then by Rafael Obligado a few years later. However, it was above all under the name of Martín Fierro that the gaucho became mythical. In 1872 and 1879, José Hernandez recounted the adventures of a man who, having lost everything, became an outlaw fighting against all the social injustices of his country. His shadow continued to hang over Argentine literature until the beginning of the 20th century, when Ricardo Güiraldes' initiatory story Don Segundo sombra (1926) became a sumptuous swan song and, in turn, a classic of Argentine literature.
From realism to the avant-garde
In power, the Generation of 1880, to which Miguel Cané, renowned for his autobiographical novel Juvenilia, belonged, led the country until popular uprisings finally led to the adoption of the Sáenz Peña law in 1912, which guaranteed universal suffrage. In literature, the end of the 19th century was marked by realism and naturalism, and the influence of Rubén Darío brought a new lease of life. Born in Nicaragua in 1867, precocious in intelligence and renown, the man travelled the world, met his favourite poets in Paris and settled in Buenos Aires, where he published some of his greatest works, including Proses profanes, which foreshadowed his gift for rhyme and rhythm. The various modernist currents he propagated, from Parnassus to symbolism, found an echo in the work of his peers. Following him, Leopoldo Lugones was acclaimed for Las Montañas del oro (1897), but also for his collection Les Forces Stranges (1906), which is considered the first Argentine science fiction text. Nevertheless, his versatile and increasingly extreme political opinions seriously scratched his image, and he died in 1938 at the age of 63. Arturo Capdevila (1889-1967) completed the modernist picture with his first collection of poetry, Jardines solos, in 1911. He then tried his hand at theatre and then prose with the remarkable Córdoba del recuerdo with its autobiographical accents. His career was crowned three times by the National Prize of Letters and then by the Gran Premio de Honor awarded by the Sociedad argentina de escritores. However, the 1920s were already rife with the avant-garde, and two groups were formed that traditionally have been opposed to each other, no doubt because everything separates them. The first group was named after a proletarian neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Boedo, and brought together authors who put their talent at the service of a political commitment ranging from the denunciation of social inequalities to the rise of totalitarianism. We should be able to cite them all, from Elías Castelnuovo to Álvaro Ynke, from Nicolas Olivaro to Leonidas Barletta, but let's focus on one of the most representative, Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), who wielded a ferocious sense of humour as well as a "real language", that is to say a language as it was spoken in the street, from which an Italian word sprang here, a German slang there. French publishers are giving her writings a new lease of life, so in 2019 Asphalte published a second volume of its journalistic chronicles, Eaux-fortes de Buenos Aires, while Cambourakis published its two masterpieces, Les sept f ous in 2019 and Les Lance-flammes in 2020, one after the other. The importance of Roberto Arlt's work was long underestimated, but he left with a serious handicap: to be in direct competition with the spearhead of the rival group, an internationally renowned author, Jorge Luis Borges. The Florida group, named after a beautiful pedestrian street in the Argentinian capital, gathered around the magazine Martín Fierro, whose manifesto Oliverio Girondo signed in the fourth issue on 15 May 1924. The publication declares itself to be free of any influence although, in reality, its members travel and are therefore imbued with European currents, especially the ultraism that Spain has been exploring since 1919. For once, however, the exchanges are going to be reciprocal, because success is there.
From Borges to Elsa Osorio
The Martín Fierro magazine became a symbol of those crazy years, where a certain mocking humour was not out of place alongside the stylistically daring creations, intense memories of intellectual emulsion that can be glimpsed on reading the novel, with its false resemblance to Joyce'sUlysses, which Leopoldo Marechal would write a few decades later(Adán buenosayres, Éditions Grasset). The publication is above all a showcase for certain feathers that will quickly acquire real fame. This is the case of Macedinio Fernández, whose Tout n'est pas veille quand on a yeux ouverts, a philosophical treatise that examines the distinction between dream and reality, is to be found in Rivages, but above all of a young man who has just returned from a long journey abroad, Jose Luis Borges (1899-1986). If this name is familiar to us, it is because his work belongs to the world classics and offers an incomparable flavour close to Latin American magical realism. Borges has imagination, true erudition, and a sense of conciseness that can be tasted in his poetry and in his collections of fantasy and fantasy tales, Fictions, The Sandbook, The Aleph... Borges entered the international scene during the 1950s, he was honoured with multiple awards, going as far as being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature without obtaining it. He was a friend of Adolfo Bioy Casares, author of Morel's Invention, in which a man is stranded on a strange, not so deserted island, with whom he wrote detective stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq.
Before the coup d'etat that deposed Juan Perón in 1955, many intellectuals had fled the country, such as Julio Cortázar, who had settled in France four years earlier, and who published his greatest works in translation there, as he had continued to use his native Spanish. The unclassifiable Marelle (Gallimard, 1963), a novel whose 155 numbered chapters allow for two different reading orders, appears in its playful side to the Oulipo that he refused to join, but remains realistic, although the author has also rubbed shoulders with fantasy. Cortázar decided to stay permanently in Paris, even obtaining dual nationality a few years before his death in 1984. The poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) took advantage of the French capital with him in the 1960s, then returned to Buenos Aires to write her most beautiful verses (Extraction of the Stone of Madness, The Musical Inferno) before succumbing to her suicidal impulses. As for Manuel Puig, it was in Mexico that he found refuge in the 1970s and wrote his masterpiece, The Kiss of the Spider Woman
, a love and betrayal story between two prisoners. A novel that will be successfully brought to the screen by Hector Babenco. In Argentina, despite the political instability, literature continues to offer beautiful pages. Ernesto Sábato initiated a triptych in 1948 with his psychological novel The Tunnel, universally acclaimed as an essential work of the existentialist movement. He completed it in 1961 with Heroes and Tombs, then in 1974 with The Angel of Darkness, three books to be discovered at Points. He was also commissioned by the Commission of Inquiry into the Disappeared Persons during the "Dirty War", and he echoed the testimonies of the victims of the military in Nunca más in 1985. A subject that will also closely affect the human rights activist Elsa Osorio, born in Buenos Aires in 1952, who will evoke the dictatorship in her two great novels, Luz ou le temps sauvage in 2000, and Sept nuits d'insomnie 10 years later, two texts that will resonate internationally through multiple translations.
