Novels and etchings by Roberto Arlt, the writer of burning beauty, are reissued

“Of course, texts with a strong ideological and political imprint have emerged in Argentine literature, texts that are deeply connected in a profound sense with its historical present; but Arlt’s extremism, his combination of melancholy and fury, his nose for detecting the knot of the abject in our class condition, I never found them like this in another author or author,” he replies.

Saítta, author of one of the most emblematic biographies of Arlt, considers him to be “a solitary avant-garde” and explains: “It’s almost an oxymoron, since the avant-garde is a group movement. Arlt does not entirely belong to the avant-garde groups of the 1920s, but his literature not only incorporates great narrative and textual procedures from the historical avant-gardes, but in the short tradition of the Argentine novel he is at the forefront of everything that had been written at that time.”

Above all, he refers to “Los Siete Locos”, “Los Lanzallamas”, which he defines as “a great cosmopolitan novel that incorporates not only what is happening in Argentina at that time as a reference, but also enters into dialogue with the great ideological, political, social and aesthetic debate throughout the West”.

In this way, Saítta highlights that Arlt takes charge in that fiction of the moment of enunciation in which he writes and that taking charge is what marks a line in Argentine literature that comes later.

In that after he cites “certain areas of a realism that simultaneously corrodes the conventions of realism and can be found both in some areas of the narrative in David Viñas, in Carlos Correas, and certain areas of experimentation that reappear in more unexpected places. César Aira’s reflection, for example, on expressionism in Arlt, also accounts for an Arlt line in César Aira’s narrative. The same could be said of a certain area of ​​Arlt in Julio Cortázar’s reading of Roberto Ar lt and in the moments in which Cortázar decides to link literature and politics, for example, in ‘El libro de Manuel'”.

In his text “A ‘manager of locos’ in Argentine literature” that opens the reissue of “Los siete locos” and “Los lanzallamas”, Quereilhac states that in his work the political is in the presentation of the economic as destiny. “Those are not my ideas, but Ricardo Piglia and Oscar Masotta, two brilliant and shrewd readers of Arlt’s work”, the researcher maintains, adding: “Arlt captures, through both his theatrical and narrative fictions, the tremendous hypocrisy of social morality, which only covers up the violence of class differences, as well as the material and miserable dimension of human relations.”

And he exemplifies: “In ‘El juguete rabioso’ it becomes clear, in the final act of betrayal, that the values ​​of goodness and ethics are mere artifices of a few, ideological coverings that serve to spare discrimination and exclusion. In ‘Los siete locos’ and ‘Los lanzallamas’ much more progress is made in this unmasking, but not with a denouncer tone, nor appealing to moralizing or sermons, not even to redemptive or liberating ideas, but with the very strength of the fictional universe and the dynamics of its characters. Everything is subjected to deformation and farce”.

Quereilhac recognizes a difference in relation to his journalistic texts, in which he says that “a somewhat more civilized voice emerges, inserted in the world of work -the journalist from the newspaper El Mundo- who without betraying his ideology clearly establishes another pact with his readers and chooses other forms of communication, which can appeal to the humor, irony and mischief of the urban walker”.

Margarita Pierini worked on this journalistic profile of Arlt in the book “Viajero de cercanías”, which compiled Arlt’s etchings and was published in 2022, and now she has returned to messing with the etchings but especially those dedicated to the Buenos Aires territory.

“There are many things that have been published. As I wrote many notes a week for 20 years, I discovered that there were still many unpublished. Working with the unpublished etchings for ‘Viajero de cercanías’ I found that there were many about places in the Province of Buenos Aires”, he tells about how he came to this set of texts originally published between 1927 and 1941 and mostly in the newspaper El Mundo.

This is how they can be found from a text about a square in Morón, through a chronicle about a day in Luján -where every day, and even more so those of rest, is lived “in a lucrative party”- or the description of a walk through the city of La Plata, which he describes as “the dumping ground for all Buenos Aires clutter”.

In these etchings, Pierini recognizes “on the one hand the hardness that the effect of estrangement or surprise has on certain places. The theme of poverty can be found in his etchings. He is indignant at misery but not with the poor, on whom there is a very human gaze. It may be a little ironic perhaps but there is respect”.

Arlt explains that he goes to the Buenos Aires territory from the city and from there he imagines “that life in these towns must be substantially different from what we do, inhabitants of four-by-four caves and little balconies for pygmies.”

“Because we, men of the city, are accustomed to a space of sixteen square meters. To the darkness of the apartments. And to all the frankly abominable that progress, the stinginess of the owners and the municipal digests have heaped on our heads,” he writes in an etching dated March 1929.

For Pierini, “in his Buenos Aires etchings is the neglect of hospitals, flooded neighborhoods” but he says he has not recorded etchings on Recoleta, for example. “My impression is that he is not interested as a subject. Many times when he is in what we call Conurbano, almost close to the countryside at that time, he sees everything as idyllic for me. Later he says no, that he would not resist more than two or three days”.

Saítta considers that in the Buenos Aires etchings published in the newspaper El Mundo, “politics is left out or enters in an indirect way, since it was a newspaper aimed at the middle class, a very careful newspaper when it comes to taking a political position” but he warns that international politics breaks into Arlt’s notes called “Al margin del cable”, published in the same newspaper, where he takes up the political events of what is happening before and during the Second World War.

The Argentine Literature teacher also recovers her explicit participation in the Communist Party newspaper, Bandera Roja, or some of the notes she writes for a pro-communist magazine called Actualidad, directed by Elías Castelnuovo, where the political analyst Arlt does break in. In turn, he cites the presence of politics in the theater texts, in which he is linked to the problems opened by the advance of totalitarianism and the start of World War II.

“In fiction, on the other hand, and especially in novels, in ‘El amor brujo’, from 1932, politics is more encrypted although Arlt himself, through a footnote, for example, locates and somehow dates the events of the novel in what it implied before and after the coup d’état of September 6, 1930”.

Saítta points out that what runs through all of Arlt’s work is “a certain conception of class struggle, the way of perceiving the role of the middle class in the class struggle in relation to a proletariat that is never mentioned in this way, although the figure of the worker, of the workers above all, appears quite a lot in journalistic notes and above all the reflection on the disenchantment of everything that a democratic system of government promises, but does not fulfill”.

For Quereilhac, Arlt’s work is so intense that, when he has to read aloud in class, the prologue to ‘Los Lanzallamas’, which he characterizes as “a kind of manifesto of his work and his task as a writer”, he can’t get to the end because he gets emotional.

“My voice does not come out and I must hide it, because it makes me a little ashamed. I am moved by its intensity, its fury, its truth, at one point its utopian impulse, which envisions a world that will come (or that could have come): ‘The future is ours, due to the arrogance of work. We will create our literature, not continually talking about literature, but writing in proud solitude books that contain the violence of a ‘cross’ to the jaw. Yes, one book after another, and ‘that the eunuchs snort.’ The future is triumphantly ours.’ At the height of the second sentence, I already begin to ask the students that one or another relieve me … “, he recounts.

Source: Ambito