Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Read online

  Another clear source of inspiration is Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which traces Leopold Bloom’s itinerary through Dublin for a single day (16 June 1904).9 Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres takes place over three days, April 28–30, in an unspecified year in the 1920s. The novel opens at 10 a.m. on Thursday the twenty-eighth, as Adam wakes up. On Saturday the thirtieth at midnight, he and Schultz begin their descent into the infernal city of Cacodelphia. Meanwhile, we follow Adam and his friends around Buenos Aires; their adventures are recounted in Books One to Five by a Protean third-person narrator who, as in the case of Ulysses, assumes different voices in different contexts. These five “books” could stand alone as a traditionally structured novel. Books Six and Seven, on the other hand, are presented in the “Indispensable Prologue” by the quasi-fictive narrator as “found manuscripts” (an old Cervantine trick). Both these texts are narrated in the first person by Adam himself, and both take as literary models texts by Dante Alighieri. Book Six, “The Blue-Bound Notebook,” is Adam’s spiritual autobiography, an earnest account of his love and its transformation along the lines of Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita nuova. It is in Adam’s Notebook, far more than in the clownish misogyny of Samuel Tesler or Franky Amundsen, that the entire rhetoric predicated on gender divisions becomes interesting; a close study of Adam’s Neo-Platonist text from a gender studies perspective would surely produce worthwhile results. Finally, Book Seven – at once social satire and a great meta-literary romp – recounts the journey to Cacodelphia, jocosely parodying Dante’s Inferno.

  Borges complained that Joyce’s Ulysses, with its “arduous symmetries and labyrinths,” was “indecipherably chaotic” (“Fragmento sobre Joyce” 61). By contrast, the structure of Adán Buenosayres is quite orderly. Notwithstanding the young Cortázar’s astonishment at the novel’s apparent “incoherence,”10 the plot unfolds in a clear and simple temporal line: from Thursday morning to Friday night (Books One to Five), then Saturday night (Book Seven), and thence to the sunny, springtime morning when Adam’s funeral is quite literally celebrated, in a rite of distinctly paschal overtones, in the novel’s “Indispensable Prologue.” This temporal sequence echoes the narrative paradigm of the Passion of Christ as ritually codified in the Christian liturgical calendar, from Holy Thursday through the Crucifixion to the subsequent Resurrection.

  The novelist does, however, impose a couple of structural displacements on this linear paradigm. First of all, the ending (Adam’s funeral) is announced at the textual beginning. Second, there is a hiatus of six months between the descent into hell on a Saturday night in April and Adam’s funeral on a Sunday-like morning in October – spring, the paschal season, comes in October in Argentina. Third, Adam’s notebook, his spiritual autobiography, wedged between Books Five and Seven, textually pries open the linear plot but in a sense contains the rest of the novel. Depending on one’s perspective, “The Blue-Bound Notebook” is either a poetic diversion from the novel or both its centre and circumference.11 There is no narrative “chaos” here: the displacements are easily recognizable, and the reader has no need to resort to a complex scholarly roadmap of the kind Stuart Gilbert drew up for Joyce’s Ulysses. If one wishes to speak of “incoherence,” it will have to be on the level of interpretation: what do these clearly marked cleavages mean? Does Adam end up stranded at the bottom of hell, as the novel’s last page seems to suggest?12 Or does he spiritually climb out of the hole and achieve some sort of “resurrection”? But then, why has he died? Marechal’s narrator provocatively addresses his narratee as lector agreste “rustic reader,” clearly putting readers on notice: it will be up to the them to negotiate the novel’s narrative gaps, come to terms by their own lights with its built-in aporias. As in a Borges story, a structure of crystalline clarity is deliberately rent: readers are led to make their own intellective or imaginative leaps.

  Much has been made of Adán’s debt to Joyce, often by Marechal’s irate detractors. He read Portrait very attentively, as evidenced in his personal copy of Alonso Dámaso’s 1926 Spanish translation; later, when in Paris in 1929–30, he read Valery Larbaud’s French translation of Ulysses hot off the press and forthwith began work on the chef d’oeuvre that took eighteen years to come to fruition. According to the author, after writing the first few chapters in Paris in 1930, he dropped it for a long while before taking it up again in 1945, perhaps not uncoincidentally the year that Argentine José Salas Subirat’s first-ever Spanish-language translation of Ulysses was published in Buenos Aires. However, according to his lifelong friend, the poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez (glimpses of whom can be seen in Franky Amundsen in Adán), Marechal was already planning the novel in his imagination as early as 1926 (Bernárdez 2). This claim cannot be concretely documented, but it is plausible. The echoes of Joycean material in Adán derive largely from Portrait, plus the “Telemachus” section that opens Ulysses and focuses on Stephen Dedalus; in terms of content, Marechal’s interest was drawn to the narrative of the Stephen cycle, not to the adventures of Leopold Bloom. This is not, however, to deny Marechal’s evident uptake of Ulyssean narrative technique.13 Indeed, Adán Buenosayres is the first Joycean novel to be written in Spanish-language literature. When in the 1960s Cortázar’s Hopscotch was being hailed as the “Spanish American Ulysses,” it was José Lezama Lima – author of Paradiso (1966), another major novel deemed Ulyssean – who opportunely reminded his interlocutors that the clearest antecedent of Rayuela was Marechal’s Adán, never mind Joyce (Simo 57).14 The Joycean lineage that earned accolades for Cortázar brought mostly scorn upon Marechal, at least when Adán Buenosayres first came out in 1948. In a review that Piglia later termed an “infamous screed” (xvii), Eduardo González Lanuza described it as a pietistic imitation of Ulysses but “abundantly spattered with manure”;15 Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Enrique Anderson-Imbert, two major critics who would subsequently exert great influence in the North American academy, followed suit (Lafforgue xiii). The violence and incoherence of their ad hominem attacks are clear signs that something more than differences in sensibility and literary taste was at stake here.16

  The troubled history of Adán Buenosayres’s reception is a direct consequence of what might be called the mid-twentieth-century Argentine culture wars or, following historian Loris Zanatta, the “ideological civil war” cleaving Argentina during the thirties and forties (13). To some degree, this civil war is a reprise or recrudescence of political-ideological divisions dating back to Argentina’s birth as a nation in the nineteenth century, which was followed by a long civil war between federales and unitarios – between traditional, Catholic, Hispanophile Federalists, on one side, and liberal, anti-ecclesiastical, Europhile Unitarians, on the other. The latter eventually won out, and a modern liberal constitution was put in place in 1853. Culturally, modern nineteenth-century Argentina looked to France, England, and the United States; economically, it was friendly to the influx of British capital, while the immigration from impoverished Catholic countries, Italy and Spain, was uneasily tolerated by the liberal-patrician elite. After a triumphal celebration of the nation’s centenary in 1910, however, the liberal model began to show cracks and, with the 1929 economic crash, Argentina lurched into crisis. By the mid-thirties, after brewing since at least the early twenties, Catholic nationalism was becoming a powerful cultural and, eventually, political force. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the Second World War three years later, further polarized the nation’s writers and intellectuals. By the time Church-supported Juan Domingo Perón became president of the nation in 1946, the divorce was absolute. As a Catholic nationalist and a Peronist functionary, Leopoldo Marechal, along with a few other writers, was at loggerheads with the now-alienated liberal literary establishment, whose leading light was Jorge Luis Borges. Hunkered down, as it were, in the fortress of SADE (Sociedad Argentina de Escritores; Argentine Society of Writers), the liberals, guerrilla-style, maintained a coded war of words against what they hyperbolically called the “Nazi-Fascist
-Peronist dictatorship.” In return, Borges was unceremoniously removed in 1946 from his position at the Miguel Cané municipal library and named Inspector of Markets.17 Meanwhile, according to one cultural historian, Marechal had become enemy number one of SADE (Fiorucci 184n). Into this poisoned context was born the novel Adán Buenosayres.

  MARTINFIERRISMO AND CRIOLLISMO

  In the glory years of the literary review Martín Fierro (1924–27), Marechal and Borges had been friends who wrote admiring reviews of each other’s books of poetry. Politically, too, they saw eye to eye; in the run-up to the 1928 presidential elections, they struck the Intellectuals’ Committee for the Re-election of Hipólito Yrigoyen, with Borges as president and Marechal as vice-president (Abós 135–6). In her historical novel Las libres del sur (2004) [Free Women in the South], María Rosa Lojo – better known as a judicious literary and cultural critic – portrays the two young writers as fast friends who shared adventures. By the end of the decade, however, a rift was already perceptible. Marechal, Bernárdez, and Borges planned to revive the martinfierrista spirit in a new review titled Libra, but for reasons that remain murky Borges did not participate (Corral 26). In spite of the involvement of the prestigious Mexican, Alfonso Reyes, then resident in Buenos Aires, the review managed only a single issue, in 1929. The party was over. A military coup inaugurated the “Infamous Decade” of 1930s Argentina. Marechal and Bernárdez underwent personal crises – the spiritual crisis mentioned in the “Indispensable Prologue” of Adán – and joined the Cursos de Cultura Católica, an institute founded in 1922 that served as the stronghold of Catholic nationalism. The in-your-face vanguard journals of the twenties gave way to the more serene literary review Sur (founded in 1931); attempting to stay “above the fray,” Sur managed to provide a pluralistic venue for intellectuals from the Americas and Europe before finally succumbing toward the end of the decade and taking sides in the national ideological divorce (King 75). Victoria Ocampo, writer and wealthy patroness of the magazine, is caricatured quite unkindly in Cacodelphia, whereas ten years earlier, in 1938, Marechal had contributed to Sur a respectful article on “Victoria Ocampo and Feminine Literature.” The insult to Ocampo – in a passage surely written after 1945 – seems like a parting shot at his erstwhile colleagues at Sur, a grenade lobbed from Marechal’s side of the barbed-wire fence.

  However, the period evoked in the broad canvas of the novel is generally not the nasty thirties and forties, but rather the culturally effervescent twenties. Buenos Aires was directly plugged into the international network of the artistic and literary avant-garde. Just back from Europe in 1921, Borges and a few others, including Norah Lange, “published” the first issue of the review Prisma as a series of posters tacked to trees and pasted to walls throughout the city. This playful and provocative gesture set the tone for the decade to come. The short-lived Prisma was succeeded by Proa, in which Borges precociously wrote a review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1924. Patronized by wealthy Argentine author Ricardo Güiraldes, a friend of Joyce’s translator and promoter Valery Larbaud, Proa gained international prestige and notoriety. Though the young avant-gardists rhetorically challenged the previous generation of writers, such as Manuel Gálvez, Ricardo Rojas, and Leopoldo Lugones, they adopted as their presiding genius the elderly Macedonio Fernández, an eccentric philosopher and exquisite humourist. Proa endured for two short spurts (1922–23 and 1924–26). Meanwhile, Martín Fierro (1924–27) came into being. The finest flower of the contemporary avant-garde, it was the review that gave a generation its name – the martinfierristas. Their manifesto (attributed to Oliverio Girondo) began like this:

  Faced with the hippopotamic impermeability of the “honourable public”;

  Faced with the funereal solemnity of the historian and the professor, which mummifies everything it touches; [. . .]

  Faced with the ridiculous necessity to ground our intellectual nationalism, swollen with false values that deflate like piggy-banks at the first poke;

  [. . .]

  Martín Fierro feels it essential to define itself and call upon all those capable of perceiving that we are in the presence of a NEW sensibility and a NEW understanding, which, when we find ourselves, reveals unsuspected vistas and new means and forms of expression;

  [. . .]

  Martín Fierro knows that “all is new under the sun” if looked at with up-to-date eyes and expressed with a contemporary accent. (Revista Martín Fierro, XVI; my translation)

  The basics of martinfierrista ideology and rhetoric can be gleaned from this brief excerpt: the cult of the new and of youth (common to the international avant-garde of the period), a taste for provocative hyperbole, an aggressive attitude that doesn’t take itself in complete earnest, but also a sort of soft cultural nationalism that deserves some commentary. The review is named after a nationally iconic literary figure. José Hernández’s El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) [Martín Fierro the Gaucho] and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) [The Return of Martín Fierro] comprise a two-part poem recounting the tragedy of the gaucho, cowboy of the pampas, whose way of life was being eroded by modernization. In El payador (1916) [The Gaucho Minstrel], Leopoldo Lugones consecrated Hernández’s work as the Argentine national epic and the gaucho as a symbol of Argentine national identity. But Lugones’s ideological manoeuvre is complicated, if not outright contradictory, for in the same breath he celebrates both the gaucho’s contribution to Argentine identity and the historical disappearance of this ethnic type tainted by “inferior indigenous blood” (83). Though racially mixed, the gauchos always self-identified culturally as cristianos and criollos rather than indios. The archetypal literary gaucho, Santos Vega, had long been a paradigm of telluric nobility. (To this day, the phrase hacerle a alguien una gauchada in rural Argentina means “to do someone a right fine favour,” as a real gaucho would do.) Martín Fierro becomes a new archetype: the noble gaucho with attitude.

  When the manifesto of Martín Fierro impugns the “false values” of “our intellectual nationalism,” what is intended? Is the text alluding to Lugones’s seeming mystification? In what looks less like a serious prise de position than a provocative jab at Lugones, with whom he also polemicized on aesthetic issues, Marechal demanded that we “forget about the gaucho” (Martín Fierro 34, 5 October 1926). Or does the manifesto impugn the tendency of the academic elite to imitate European models too closely? Is it perhaps simply an anarchic rejection of empty rhetoric? “Tradition, Progress, Humanity, Family, Honour are now nonsense,” writes martinfierrista Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz toward the end of the decade in a famous essay titled El hombre que está solo y espera (101) [The Man Who Is Alone and Waits/Hopes]. Or does the manifesto express an inchoate nationalism that deplores economic colonization by British capital with the acquiescence of the Argentine landed oligarchy?18 All these elements – and more – jostled and clashed among the contestatory martinfierristas, who lacked any coherent ideological program as a group and argued with each other as much as they rebelled against their seniors. In Book Two, chapter 2 of Adán, the mock heroes get into a tempestuous argument about Argentine national identity – upon what values it should be grounded – in an episode that will repay the reader’s close attention.

  In that same violent discussion, the problem of criollismo gets an airing. With the phrase criollismo urbano de vanguardia, Beatriz Sarlo aptly synthesizes the motley ideological-aesthetic program of martinfierrismo (105). Nothing is surprising about the conjunction of the terms “urban” and “vanguard”; rather, it is criollismo that distinguishes the Buenos Aires avant-garde from its international context. Criollo was in colonial times the term for those of Spanish blood born on American soil, but came to mean simply “native to the Americas.” (The English and French cognates – Creole and créole – tend to be associated with the Afro-Caribbean.) In Argentina the term gradually acquired a more specific identitary thrust, somewhat comparable to the Québécois de souche of French-speaking Canada; the criollos were old-stock Spanish American Argent
ines, as opposed to indios on the one hand or immigrants on the other. But this ethnic distinction was destabilized by the massive influx of immigrants, both internal and foreign, into late-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. The cultural movement of criollismo contained elements of class struggle as well. According to Adolfo Prieto, criollismo became a discursive site where competing social groups attempted to defend or establish their legitimacy. For the ruling Argentine elite – and their ideological representatives such as Lugones – the appropriation of rural, gaucho discourse was a way of keeping at bay the unnerving presence of the poor lower-class immigrants thronging to the capital and spilling outward from there. For rural Argentines displaced from country to city, it was an expression of nostalgia and an alternative to rebellion against the impositions and demands of modern (sub)urban life. And for foreign immigrants, adopting criollista cultural expression was a sort of fast track to cultural citizenship in the new country (Prieto, El discurso criollista 18–19). In Adán Buenosayres, for example, we meet Tissone, a son of Italian immigrants, who, although he has never set foot outside the city of Buenos Aires, handily makes his living doing a schtick as a payador or gaucho minstrel.

  An urban criollista avant-garde, then, is a strange hybrid. In Europe, the avant-garde that looks to the technological city of the future normally turns its back on local autochthonous tradition. Not so the martinfierristas, even though their attitude toward an increasingly artificial and mediatized criollismo was ambiguous and conflicted. Marechal stages this conflict at the wake of Juan Robles, mud-stomper and “good old boy,” in Book Three, chapter 2, an episode that particularly delighted Cortázar (22b). As Prieto puts it, Marechal’s send-up of popular suburban criollismo brilliantly brings a long-lived cultural movement to a close (El discurso criollista 22). But parody always enacts a sort of homage as well, and the colourful gallery of cultural types and stereotypes populating this and many other episodes of Adán Buenosayres add up to a celebration of Argentine popular culture and its expressive forms. Why else would the epigraph to the novel’s first chapter be constituted of verses from a sentimental tango?