Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Read online

  ADAM BUENOSAYRES

  Adam Buenosayres

  A novel by

  Leopoldo Marechal

  Translated by

  NORMAN CHEADLE

  with the help of Sheila Ethier

  Introduction and notes by Norman Cheadle

  © Leopoldo Marechal 1948, first edition

  © María de los Ángeles Marechal and María Magdalena Marechal 1971

  English edition

  © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014

  ISBN 978-0-7735-4309-6 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-8531-7 (ePDF)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-8532-4 (ePUB)

  Legal deposit first quarter 2014

  Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

  Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

  This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Laurentian University. This work has been published within the framework of the “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic (Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina).

  Cover: Detail from Pan Arbol (1954) by Xul Solar. All rights reserved by the Fundación Pan Klub – Museo Xul Solar.

  McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Marechal, Leopoldo, 1900-1970

  [Adán Buenosayres. English]

  Adam Buenosayres : a novel / by Leopoldo Marechal ; translated by

  Norman Cheadle with the help of Sheila Ethier ; introduction and notes by

  Norman Cheadle.

  ITranslation of Adán Buenosayres, originally published in 1948.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-7735-4309-6 (pbk.). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8531-7 (ePDF). –

  ISBN 978-0-7735-8532-4 (ePUB)

  I. Cheadle, Norman, 1953–, writer of added commentary, translator II. Ethier, Sheila (Translator), translator III. Title. IV. Title: Adán Buenosayres. English.

  HD3450.A3N63 2012 334.09716’0904 C2012-901237-8

  This book was typeset by True to Type in 11/14 Minion

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Illustrations

  Adam Buenosayres

  Indispensable Prologue

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  BOOK FOUR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  BOOK FIVE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  BOOK SIX (“The Blue-Bound Notebook”)

  BOOK SEVEN (Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia)

  Glossary

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  The following organizations are gratefully acknowledged for their support:

  • The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for a Standard Research Grant (2004–08)

  • The Laurentian University Research Fund

  • The Sur Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic

  • The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

  This project could never have been brought to fruition without the constant support, encouragement, and friendship of María de los Ángeles Marechal, who has helped in so many ways: by putting at my disposal the archives of the Fundación Leopoldo Marechal, facilitating access to the Marechal archives housed at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, and by introducing me to many individuals in Buenos Aires who in turn helped orient my research in diverse ways, all of whom I salute here. Special thanks go to filmmaker Gustavo Fontán, whose conversation and documentary films taught me much; to Alberto Piñeiro, director of the Museo Histórico de Buenos Aires Cornelio de Saavedra, whose highly knowledgeable guided tours through his city’s past and present have been unforgettable; to Guillermo Julio Montero, not only for his psychological insight into Leopoldo Marechal but also for his exquisite hospitality; and to Susana Lange, for sharing memories of her illustrious aunt. Thanks are due as well to Magadalena La Porta, especially for her diligent research at the archives of the Sociedad Argentina De Escritores (SADE). The art historian Adriana Lauria, Rosa Maria Castro of the Fundación Forner-Bigatti, and Enrique Llambas of the Centro Virtual de Arte Argentino have been wonderfully helpful in the procurement of old photos – my sincere thanks to all three. I wish to express my appreciation to María Magdalena Marechal, too, for the warmth of her conversation and the sensitivity with which she has brought her father’s work to the stage.

  Over the years, many people have influenced in some way or other the realization of this project. Fellow “Latin-Joyceans” César Salgado, Gayle Rogers, Brian Adams, and John Pedro Schwartz have all provided valuable insight and intellectual stimulation, as have fellow Marechal scholars Claudia Hammerschmidt and Ernesto Sierra. Conversations with my Argentine-Canadian colleagues Emilia Deffis, Rita de Grandis, and María del Carmen Sillato suggested new perspectives, added nuance, and were a source of enthusiasm and support; the same goes for fellow Hispanists, and translators, Hugh Hazelton, Stephen Henighan, and Andrea Labinger. Intellectual exchanges with Mario Boido, María Figueredo, Mark Heffernan, Amanda Holmes, Lucien Pelletier, and Michael Yeo have nourished and influenced my general perspective on this project.

  My immense gratitude to the editors at McGill-Queen’s University Press – to Kyla Madden for listening with courteous intelligence and opening the door; to Mark Abley for his good humour, sage advice, and Herculean efforts to make this project happen; and to Ryan Van Huijstee for his savoir-faire in the art of editing. I owe a special debt of gratitude to copy editor Jane McWhinney for many inspired stylistic suggestions that improved the text.

  To Nicola Jacchia, fellow translator of Adán Buenosayres, who helped me through thorny translation problems: Salute!

  The generously shared erudition of Javier de Navascués, as well as his friendship and moral support, has been quite simply invaluable.

  Introduction1

  CONTEXTS: NATION, HEMISPHERE, WORLD

  “The publication of this book is an extraordinary event in Argentine literature.” So wrote Julio Cortázar in his 1949 review of Adán Buenosayres (20)2 shortly after the novel was published in 1948. The young Cortázar struggled somewhat to conceptualize just why the novel was so extraordinary, but there can be little doubt that this literary event had an influence on Cortázar’s brilliant Rayuela (1963) [Hopscotch] whose unusual structure and celebration of language surely owe something to Marechal’s Adán. Later, other novelists of the 1960s Boom generation – Ernesto Sábato, Carlos Fuentes, José Lezama Lima, Augusto Roa Bastos – echoed Cortázar’s appreciation; and afte
r them, major post-Boom writers such as Ricardo Piglia and Fernando del Paso. Speaking as an Argentine, Piglia names Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leopoldo Marechal as his precursors, the writers who forged the direction of twentieth-century Argentine literature (“Ficción y política” 102). Del Paso, Mexican author of Noticias del Imperio (1986) [News from the Empire] – a sweeping tour de force that marries “Joycean” narrative with the historical novel – does not hesitate to qualify his “Buenosayres querido” [“beloved Buenosayres”] as “one of the greatest Spanish American novels” of the twentieth century (16). Today, one can say not only that the arrival of Adán Buenosayres was a signal event for both Argentine literature and Latin American narrative fiction but also, if we are to credit Franco Moretti, that Marechal’s novel is a significant feature in the topography of world literature.

  Paradoxically, however, as del Paso observes in the same breath, Adán Buenosayres is one of Spanish America’s least read novels. Even so vastly well-read an intellectual as Carlos Fuentes learned of Adán’s existence only in the 1960s, after fellow Mexican writer Elena Garro thought she detected its influence on Fuentes’s first novel, La región más transparente (1958) [Where the Air Is Clear]. The astonished Fuentes went to great lengths to track down a second-hand copy of Adán Buenosayres; thoroughly impressed by it, he then likened it to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), as well as to his own work (Carballo 561–2). The anecdote is significant for more than one reason. First, how was it possible that Fuentes, who actually lived for a time in Buenos Aires, had never heard of Marechal’s novel? Second, without any need to speak of influence, it became clear to Fuentes’s contemporaries that Adán Buenosayres was in tune with the new direction of the Spanish American novel of his generation. Third, Adán is a Joycean novel of the metropolis that Fuentes places in an international rather than a national, regional or hemispheric context.

  In the twenty-first century, literary theory and practice both confirm this third point. In Volume 2 of his monumental work The Novel, Franco Moretti includes a reading of Adán Buenosayres under the rubric “The New Metropolis” – a series of short interpretations of major novels that is critically framed by Philip Fisher’s “Torn Space: James Joyce’s Ulysses” (in Moretti 665–83). There, Ernesto Franco’s personal essay on Adán Buenosayres holds a place between other readerly takes on novels of the city, set respectively in Shanghai and Lagos.3 Just as those two novels give narrative form to the “torn space” of twentieth-century Asian and African metropolises, Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán grapples with the turbulent space of a great Latin American port city. Buenos Aires, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was deluged by torrential flows of foreign capital (mostly British) and immigration (especially from Italy, Galicia in northern Spain, and Eastern Europe, but also from Syria and Lebanon). By the 1920s “Buenos Aires in motion was laughing; Industry and Commerce were leading her by the hand,” warbles the narrator of Adán, cheekily parodying the boosterism of newsreels, propaganda organ of capitalism. Adam Buenosayres enters the street of his city – “a river of multiplicity” – and finds “peoples from all over the world [who] mixed languages in barbarous dissonance, fought with gestures and fists, and set up beneath the sun the elemental stage of their tragedies and farces, turning all into sound, nostalgias, joys, loves and hates.”

  Founded in 1580, Buenos Aires was laid out on a grid pattern, like many Spanish-colonial towns. For the first two centuries of its existence it was a quiet backwater, but by the end of the eighteenth century it had come into its own and in 1810 was the first Spanish American city to break definitively with Spain. In the 1880s it began to grow rapidly. By 1910, when it celebrated the centenary of Argentine independence, it was riding the crest of rapid urban growth and economic development powered by foreign capital investment, foreign immigrant labour, and internal migration. It was then that modern downtown Buenos Aires – its spacious parks, broad avenues, elegant cafés and confiterías, and Parisian-style architecture – took its definitive shape.4 With its newly constructed Obelisk replica arising from the midst of the world’s widest thoroughfare (Avenida 9 de Julio), as well as the tree-lined Avenida de Mayo modelled on the Champs Élysées, it was a city that fancied itself the “Paris of the Pampas.”5 Bounded by the broad estuary of the Río de la Plata on its northeast flank, it was rapidly expanding south and west over the pampa. Villa Crespo, relatively centrally located, has been a typical barrio (municipal district) among the forty-eight comprising the city. As we see in the novel, in the 1920s Villa Crespo was home to many immigrant communities. The First World War had temporarily interrupted the flow, but immigrants poured in throughout the twenties; between 1920 and 1930, the city’s population grew from 1,700,000 to 2,153,200 (Walter 83). In politics, the new Argentines found representation in the Radical Party, and their massive collective presence was expressed and reflected in new modes of cultural production – in amusement parks and mass entertainment centres such as Luna Park (depicted more than once in Cacodelphia), as well as in popular theatre, cinema, and literature.

  Immigrants arrived not only from abroad, however. If the inner-city barrio of Villa Crespo is the stage of cacophonous cosmopolitan encounter, the city’s suburban edge – the badlands of Saavedra – is where urban modernity and rural criollo tradition collide. It is where the hinterland’s displaced descendants, internal immigrants uprooted by the industrialization of agriculture and ranching, claw at the edges of metropolis in a new subculture of the arrabal. “I like the landscape in Saavedra, that broken terrain where the city comes to an end,” says Adam’s friend, the philosopher Samuel Tesler. Indeed, Adam and his avant-garde comrades are irresistibly attracted to that “frontier zone where burg and wilderness meet in an agonistic embrace, like two giants locked in single combat.” Zone of knife fights and tango, brutality and forlorn sentimentality, the suburban frontier traces an advancing line of creative violence, the very knife edge of modern actuality; and it is there that most of the novel’s mock adventures take place, including the long final descent into the avant-garde inferno designed by the astrologer Schultz.

  In Moretti’s selective encyclopaedia of the novel, then, Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres finds itself well positioned under the Joycean aegis of metropolitan “torn space”; not suprisingly, several critics have looked at the theme of the city and urban space in Adán (Ambrose, Limami, Wilson, Berg).6 But in light of the troubled history of the reception of Adán – a point to which we will return – a more general observation must be made. “Countless are the novels of the world,” notes Moretti apologetically (ix); and yet this particular novel cannot be left out of the account. Decades after Carlos Fuentes’s prescient observation, Moretti’s method of “distant reading” on a planetary scale finds Adán to be a significant fixture of world literature when viewed with the objectivity of the long view. This theoretical point is corroborated in practice by literary experience. In Santiago Gamboa’s novel El síndrome de Ulises (2005) [The Ulysses Syndrome], the Colombian protagonist-narrator meets at the Sorbonne a Morrocan-born student happily obsessed with Adán Buenosayres: Salim, a devout Muslim, is writing a doctoral thesis based on Marechal’s novel and its representation of the individual vis-à-vis the city (Gamboa 24).7 Remarkably, a novel written by an Argentine Catholic nationalist about 1920s Buenos Aires speaks to Salim across barriers not only temporal and geographical but also religious and ideological. Like the wily Ulysses, a great piece of literature can overcome tremendous obstacles and travel to the most unlikely places. And for Gamboa’s (autobiographical) narrator, who until that moment of recognition – through the eyes of a non-Westerner – had seen Adán Buenosayres as a book “condemned to live within its [national] borders” (32), there dawns a new geo-cultural consciousness.

  THE JOYCE CONNECTION AND CULTURE WARS

  At the heart of this novel is the story of Adam Buenosayres’s unrequited
love for a young woman called Solveig, whom the hapless poet reimagines as his latter-day Beatrice. This interior drama is boisterously paved over by a festive narrative about seven mock-heroes whose madcap antics, farcical adventures, and wild conversations about everything in heaven and on earth give the novel its living flesh. All seven evoke avant-garde writers and artists of 1920s Buenos Aires, a “golden age” of Argentine literature. Some are composite figures, while others are caricatures of clearly recognizable individuals: notably, Luis Pereda (Jorge Luis Borges), the astrologer Schultz (artist and polymath Xul Solar), the philosopher Samuel Tesler (poet Jacobo Fijman), and the pipsqueak Bernini (writer Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz), as well as the protoganist Adam, a quasi-autobiographical version of Marechal himself. Thus the novel is on the external level a roman à clef8 – with the curious anomaly of the character portrayed as Adam’s beloved, Solveig Amundsen. Since her family is clearly a novelistic version of the real-life Lange family, it has been speculated that behind the fictive Solveig stands the writer Norah Lange, dubbed at one time the “Muse of Martín Fierro” (the literary review to which we will return presently). Strikingly, however, the meek, passive, voiceless girl who is Solveig does not even vaguely resemble Lange – a creative, highly articulate, and outgoing intellectual. Solveig stands as a virtually empty figure, functioning as the Beloved whom the poet Adam Buenosayres idealizes and recreates in the mystico-courtly manner of the Petrarchan poets. When she accepts the suit of Lucio Negri, Adam’s rival for her affections, Solveig becomes a sort of antagonist to Adam, an obstacle whose stubbornly concrete existence he must overcome as a writer, especially since Negri epitomizes the bourgeois doxa against which Adam rebels. Thus, caution must be exercised when interpreting Adán as a roman à clef. On the other hand, it can be read as a Künstlerroman whose most obvious model is Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, though these two subgenres can hardly account for the novel in its totality.