ROBERTO ARLT-WORK-VALIDITY – TELAM Agency
Author of novels such as “The Rabid Toy”, “The Crazy Seven”, “The Flamethrowers” and “El amor brujo”, plays such as “Three hundred million”, “Saverio el cruel” or “La isla desierta”, Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) was responsible for a prolific work that was based on the daily writing of journalistic texts to earn a living but that expanded beyond newsrooms and today its validity can be seen in the constant ree editions of his books.
Regarding this validity, the researcher Sylvia Saítta says that this is due to the fact that “as a classic of Argentine literature, his works continue to question readers who, even with reading perspectives very different from those in which these works were written or published, answer certain questions that continue in the present”.
In this sense, he cites “El juguete rabioso”, where at the center is “the problem of how young people, especially those who come from popular sectors, achieve, can or fail to enter the labor market. How they can access or not a labor market, a job that is or is in accordance with their expectations, their desires or their own choices”. “Read at the beginning of the 20th century or now, already in the 21st century, it continues to prompt us to reflect on this question. It also challenges us in the way in which young people access the world of imagination, reading and fiction. Although the supports have changed, in ‘El juguete rabioso’ it is obviously about books or literature that circulates in periodicals or magazines, and the question of access to the world of fiction and the impact that fiction produces on the imaginaries of those who consume that fiction has a truly remarkable present.”
It also highlights “that spectacular panorama” of ‘Los siete locos’, ‘Los lanzallamas’, where questions and reflections allow us to continue thinking about the present. “What happens when a group of socially marginalized, from the labor market, from access to symbolic goods, is organized under the tutelage of a figure like that of the astrologer, who is a charismatic, authoritarian leader, and who proposes as a way out of a present that is experienced as oppressive, not only violence, but the violent organization of a group, which in the novel is a secret society”, he analyzes.
The validity of this question is what Saítta underlines as “shocking”: “Many of the questions that we can ask ourselves today about the political situation, both in Argentina and in an important part of the planet, are concentrated in that figure, that of the astrologer. What happens when the poor are left out of the system? What happens with the appearance of these charismatic leaders, emptied of ideology, but who can give an answer to this group of marginalized?”
Soledad Quereilhac asserts that Arlt’s work has “an overwhelming validity due to its crossovers between realism and expressionism, his strategies of deformation of reality to make it speak its true meaning, his particular use of Spanish -always at the crossroads between lunfardo and cultured forms, in which industrialist, esoteric, geometric metaphors speak-, the permanent risk of derangement of his fictional universes, his powerful social sensibility and his ideological lucidity, among many other virtues, place his narrative and dramaturgy among the best works of Argentine and Latin American literature”.
On the same plane, he places his journalistic texts, his urban and travel chronicles and, towards his later years, articles on international politics. “Already conditioned by the imperatives of the newspaper for which he worked and attentive to the conventions bearable by the reading public of the time, Arlt provokes all the time and plays with the limits -reviews-. He does not cultivate any picturesqueness or political correctness; he takes subjects from the galley for his chronicles, in which there is never a lack of motley profiles of slackers, blackmailers and ruffians, the moral nonsense of the middle classes, the transformations of the city, among thousands of other topics”.
Meanwhile, Margarita Pierini points out that “the chronicle took a long time to be recognized as a great literary genre. Not all chroniclers had and have that approach to reach the reader” and admits she is fascinated by “the creativity that Arlt has with words, with twists, humor and with the initiative of adding literary and cinematographic allusions. In each etching one feels that they have much more to say but what the newspaper gave was a quarter of a page”.
The researcher has an etching to which she always returns: her coverage of the execution of Severino Di Giovani. “It seems perfect to me. It is a saying and not saying that it becomes impressionistic that is filtered with respect and admiration for who at that time was a scapegoat. It is a unique text in our literature,” she asserts.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
