In Search of a National Identity
A country whose name comes from a poem could only have a decidedly literary destiny, and this is the case of Argentina. This term, derived from the Latin word argentum (money), 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 gained real importance. It resounded again in the lyrics 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 Río de la Plata thus became Federación Argentina, not without a certain paradox, since the governor's will was to concentrate all the powers in Buenos Aires rather than to set up a confederation. Between the independence from Spain in 1816 and the signing of the constitution in 1853, the country experienced terrible conflicts, both internal and at the borders, and a dictatorship that forced many intellectuals into exile, including two important men, Esteban Echeverría and José Mármol. The former 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 blew over the Parisian capital and the young man brought back to his country this new inspiration, which was not limited to the style or the themes, but also included a utopian exaltation that seemed to correspond so well to what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. From his reflections, Echeverría wrote a novel, Elvira o la Novia del Plata, lyrical poems, the best known being La Cautiva, and an essay, El dogma socialista. The exile to which he was forced under Rosas suggested a short, cruel story, The Slaughterhouse(El Matadero). With it, after having breathed romanticism into Argentina, he will plant the seed of naturalism. José Mármol (1817-1871), also worried by the regime in power, took refuge in Montevideo, capital of Uruguay, and began to publish his famous Amalia in 1851 in the local newspaper, La Tribuna, which was published in its complete form three years later in Buenos Aires. Considered as the first Argentine novel, fiction and reality are skillfully intertwined, which reinforces its pamphleteering will against the dictatorship. Argentine national literature is therefore rooted in exile and is tinged with patriotism in the form of an emblematic figure, the gaucho, a herdsman, generally of low status but not inclined to bow down to authority. In 1845, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the future president, now exiled in Chile, took it upon himself to retrace the biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1788-1835), a military warlord and supporter of federalism, and turned him into a champion of modernity, in opposition to the uneducated gaucho who was unable to adapt to the necessary progress. This conflict between the wild life of the pampas and the evolving force of the cities, between barbarism and civilization, will become a central point that will always agitate both conversations and literature. But the gaucho is not always presented in such an obtuse way: in Estanislao del Campo's burlesque poem Fausto, a play becomes a pretext for gently mocking one another, while in Hilario Ascásubi's work he becomes the hero of a duel against the devil and becomes part of the legend of Santos Vega, which will be taken up again by Eduardo Gutiérrez, who also wrote Juan Moreira, and then by Rafael Obligado some years later. However, it is especially under the name of Martin Fierro that the gaucho becomes mythical, José Hernandez tells in 1872 and 1879 the adventures of a man who, having lost everything, will become an outlaw fighting all the social injustices of his country. His shadow will continue to hover over Argentine literature until the beginning of the 20th century, with Ricardo Güiraldes' initiatory story Don Segundo sombra (1926) becoming 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 belonged, famous for his autobiographical novel Juvenilia, ran the country until the 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 then the influence of Rubén Darío gave a new lease of life. Born in Nicaragua in 1867, precocious in intelligence and fame, the man traveled the world, meeting his favorite poets in Paris and settling in Buenos Aires where he published some of his greatest works, including Proses profanes, which foreshadowed his gift for rhyme and rhythm. The different modernist currents he propagated, from Parnassus to symbolism, were echoed in the work of his peers. Following him, Leopoldo Lugones was acclaimed for Las Montañas del oro (1897), but also for his collection The Strange Forces (1906), which is considered the first Argentine science fiction text. Nevertheless, his versatile political opinions, more and more extreme, would seriously damage his image and he would die 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 theater and prose with the remarkable Córdoba del recuerdo, with autobiographical overtones. His career was crowned three times with the National Prize of Letters and the Gran Premio de Honor awarded by the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores. But the 1920s were already synonymous with the avant-garde, and two groups were formed that were traditionally opposed to each other, no doubt because everything separated them. The first one takes its name from a proletarian district of Buenos Aires, Boedo, and gathers authors who put their talent at the service of a political commitment that goes from the denunciation of social inequalities to the rise of totalitarianism. It would be necessary to mention 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 used a ferocious humor as much as a "real language", that is to say, a language such as it was spoken in the street, from which sprang here an Italian word, there a German slang. French publishers are making his writings available again, and in 2019 Asphalte published a second volume of his journalistic chronicles, Eaux-fortes de Buenos Aires, while Cambourakis published his two masterpieces, Les Sept fous in 2019 and Les Lance-flammes in 2020. The importance of Roberto Arlt's work has been underestimated for a long time, but he started with a serious handicap: being in direct competition with the spearhead of the rival group, an internationally celebrated author, Jorge Luis Borges. The Florida group, named after a beautiful pedestrian street in the Argentine capital, gathered around the magazine Martín Fierro, whose manifesto was signed by Oliverio Girondo in the fourth issue on May 15, 1924. The publication declared that it was free of any influence, although in reality its members travelled and were therefore influenced by European currents, especially ultraism, which Spain had been exploring since 1919. However, for once, the exchanges will be reciprocal, because the success is there.
From Borges to Elsa Osorio
The Martín Fierro magazine became a symbol of those roaring twenties, where a certain mocking humor did not stand out alongside stylistically daring creations, intense memories of intellectual emulsion, which can be glimpsed in the novel with a 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 some writers who will quickly acquire real fame. This is the case of Macedinio Fernández, whose All is not Eve When One's Eyes are Open, a philosophical treatise that questions the distinction between dream and reality, is to be discovered at 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 flavor close to the Latin American magic realism. Borges has an imagination, a true erudition, and a sense of conciseness that can be tasted in his poetry and in his collections of fantastic and fantasy tales, Fictions, The Book of Sand, The Aleph... Borges will reach the international scene during the 1950s, he will be honored with multiple awards, going as far as being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature without actually obtaining it. He was a friend of Adolfo Bioy Casares, author of The Invention of Morel, 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'état that deposed Juan Perón in 1955, many intellectuals had fled the country, such as Julio Cortázar, who had moved to France four years earlier and published his greatest texts in translation there, because he had continued to use his native Spanish. The unclassifiable Marelle (Gallimard, 1963), a novel with 155 numbered chapters that allow for two different reading orders, has a playful side that makes it similar to the Oulipo, which he refused to join, but remains realistic, even though the author also dabbled in fantasy. Cortázar decided to stay permanently in Paris, even obtaining dual citizenship a few years before his death in 1984. The poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) enjoyed the French capital with him in the 1960s, and 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 story of love and betrayal 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. Moreover, commissioned by the Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearance of Persons During the "Dirty War", he will echo the testimonies of the victims of the military in Nunca más in 1985. A subject that will also touch closely the human rights activist Elsa Osorio, born in Buenos Aires in 1952, who will evoke the dictatorship in her two great novels, Luz or Wild Time in 2000, and Seven Nights of Insomnia 10 years later, two texts that will resonate internationally through multiple translations.
