Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Read online

  GENEALOGIES (RELIGIOUS, IDEOLOGICAL, LITERARY)

  The young writer Cortázar was both disconcerted and excited by what he enigmatically called the diversa desmesura of Marechal’s novel (original Spanish version 23), its hypertrophic excess on various levels – perhaps its monstrous hybridity – which rationally he perceived as an inadequate matching of structural form to content but which intuitively the writer in him grasped as this novel’s aesthetic achievement, its “energetic push toward what is truly ours [in Argentine literature]” (24). As Ángel Rama put it, in Adán the forms of high culture meet those of popular culture in a parodic oscillation, with the net effect that the former are destabilized along with their philosophical underpinnings (216–17). By “high culture” one must understand the allusions not only to classical Greece and Rome, but also to the Bible – Northrop Frye’s “great code” – and to Catholic theology. Marechal himself insists that the “keys” to his novel are to be found in two parallel lines of thought stretching from Aristotle to Saint Thomas and from Plato to Augustine (Andrés 32); he interprets Adán Buenosayres as a Christian allegory, the soul’s odyssey through the world and its eventual homecoming in God (Marechal, “Las claves”). A Catholic-theological reading of the novel is certainly possible – Navascués’s narratological study and the introduction to Barcia’s scholarly edition are fine examples – but much of the novel’s material seems to overflow this ideological framework, to the point of rudely shaking or even damaging the frame itself. Argentine critic Horacio González once mused about the novel’s “comical,” “ironic,” or even “broken” Christianity.19 Even if one enlarges the Christian-epic reading to an ecumenical “metaphysical” interpretation, as Graciela Coulson does in order to account for the many allusions to non-Christian traditions, the essential problem only gets displaced, not resolved. Suffice it to say here that different readers, according to their cultural formation, will have different takes on Adán Buenosayres. As with all great works of literature, it is a novel that no single critical reading can exhaust.

  Adam Buenosayres and his close friend and confidant, Samuel Tesler, are both “traditionalists” who move in a discursive world informed by such radical traditionalist authors as René Guénon, whose voluminous output includes the apocalyptic Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps (1945) and who attempts to conflate the metaphysical systems of the world’s great religions in a single block that stands superior to the error of modern thought. The two “metaphysicals,”20 Adam and Samuel, make common cause against the positivist scientism of Lucio Negri. (The third “metaphysical” is the astrologer Schultz, who like Xul Solar could be described with the paradoxical term “avant-garde traditionalist.”) And yet, Adam will eventually rebuke Samuel for his Jewishness, invoking the hoary myths invented by medieval anti-Semitism. As in most traditional Catholic societies, a degree of anti-Semitism – a frightening term for us since the Second World War – was still quite normal in 1920s Argentine society. The Jews (mostly from Russia and Eastern Europe), along with the Italians, Galician Spanish, “Turks” (refugees of varying ethnicity from the crumbling Ottoman Empire), and so on, were cast as stereotypes in the popular imaginary; Marechal’s novel humorously sets those popular stereotypes on display. The Jews, the odd anti-Semitic incident notwithstanding, were in the mind of the Catholic criollo majority just one distinct minority among others. Nevertheless, the rise of Argentine Catholic nationalism, under the influence of a new outbreak of a very old virus emanating from Europe, was accompanied in some circles by a more virulent expression of anti-Semitism. Although the centuries-old prejudice was deeply racialized, the more thoughtful Catholic-nationalist intellectuals attempted to confine it to a religious question: the Jews’ failure to recognize Christ was a theological error from which they needed to be disabused. Manuel Gálvez, for example, professed his love for the Jews. This love, which he considered to behoove any good Catholic, did not, however, prevent his endorsing negative Jewish stereotypes (Schwartz 131–2). Gálvez – as well as Adam Buenosayres and perhaps even Marechal himself21 – could well be examples of what Máximo José Kahn in 1948 called “philo-Semitic anti-Jewishness,” referring to those who are philo-Semitic “by civilization” and anti-Jewish “by instinct” (Kahn 48).22 And yet, parsing this paradox further in his incisive but (deliberately?) enigmatic article, he opines that atheism is worse than philo-Semitic anti-Jewishness (57), even if the unbeliever seems to be on your side. Here he seems to refer to those liberals who waved the banner of anti-anti-Semitism as part of their anti-Peronist campaign, their negative philo-Semitism militantly expressing, within the perfectly polarized ideological field of the time, their hatred of Peronism and its supporters, which initially included the Catholic church.23 Adam and Samuel have their differences, but they are united against modern non-religious scientism. Both men locate themselves squarely in what Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell has called the tradition of the “anti-Enlightenment,” the many-faceted revolt against the Franco-Kantian Enlightenment that constitutes a second, parallel modernity (8).

  Reading the frank anti-Semitism on display in a few passages of Adán Buenosayres is a complicated business, not only because of the paradox of anti-Jewish philo-Semitism but also because of the novel’s polyphony. The shifting and parodic narrative voice makes it hazardous to ascertain precisely the pragmatic ethos of any given passage. What is certain, however, is that Adam Buenosayres dies and Samuel Tesler lives on to play a part in Marechal’s third novel, Megafón, o la guerra (1970), the only one of his fictional characters to do so.24

  From a strictly stylistic perspective, one finds another index of diversa desmesura in the juxtaposition of the earnest, spiritualist, neo-Dantian prose of Adam Buenosayres’s “Blue-Bound Notebook” with the novel’s Rabelaisian tremendismo, to use Marechal’s own term for his conscious emulation of Maître François. The humorous contrast of high and low, the spiritual and the coprological, stems as well from Miguel de Cervantes’s legacy, worth recalling here for the benefit of English-speaking readers.25 Besides the Cervantine device of the “found manuscript” mentioned above, Marechal, as Cervantes does in Don Quixote, interpolates into the text lengthy stories that serve as functional instances of mise-en-abyme; the stories told in Cacodelphia by The Man with Intellectual Eyes and by Don Ecuménico are salient examples. Another meta-literary technique bequeathed by Cervantes is to provide commentary, either directly or by allusion or by parody, on diverse texts of various genres, literary and otherwise. The Argentine component of Adán’s meta-literary discourse is what particularly struck Piglia: “A novelist constructs his own genealogy and narrates it; literary tradition is a family saga. In Adán, origins, relationships, endogamic successions are all fictionalized. Marechal treats the struggle among various Argentine poetics with the ironic tone of a (Homeric) payada [literary duel in the gauchesque tradition]” (xvi).

  In the notes accompanying this edition of the novel, the reader will find explicated many – not likely all! – such allusions to Argentine literature. For example, José Mármol’s foundational novel Amalia (1851) – a Manichean melodrama pitting noble unitarios against the evil federales of the Rosas regime – is prominently referenced at the outset of Adán Buenosayres. Equally significant, perhaps, is that another foundational text of Argentine literature – Esteban Echeverría’s short story “El matadero” (circa 1939) [The Slaughterhouse] – is seemingly effaced from Marechal’s literary genealogy. Echeverría memorably made the slaughterhouse a symbol of the bestial ferocity of the Rosas regime and its supporters (the Church and the lower classes). But Marechal, on the first page of Book One, evokes the slaughterhouse merely as a feature of the urban landscape and a symptom of “the world’s voracity.” If his image of the slaughterhouse carries any political valence at all, it refers not to the context of Argentine national politics, but rather to the geo-economic/political order: chilled beef – the term appears in English more than once in Adán – was being shipped from the refr
igerators of the slaughterhouse in Buenos Aires to “voracious” Europe.

  ADÁN BUENOSAYRES AND THE VISUAL ARTS

  When he speaks of the fictionalization of competing poetics in Adán, Piglia is likely referring to the fantastical adventures of Book Three (chapter 1), when a succession of national-literary characters and sociocultural stereotypes visit the seven drunken adventurers and provoke heated discussion among them. These episodes, and other flights of fancy in the novel – the street brawl as a Battle of Armageddon (Book One, chapter 2), Adam’s imaginary rampage as a mad giant in the streets of Villa Crespo (Book Two, chapter 2), and any number of scenes from Cacodelphia – could also be considered from the aesthetic perspective of the visual arts and their impact on Marechal’s novelistics. Marechal was always interested in the plastic arts, and it is no accident that the astrologer Schultz – based on polymath and avant-garde painter Xul Solar – is so important a character in the novel, both as Adam’s guide and mentor, and as the architect of Cacodelphia. Xul’s biographer, Álvaro Abós, does not hesitate to resort to Marechal’s novel to round out his account of the unclassifiable painter; just as Adam constantly converses with Schultz, avers Abós, so Marechal’s novel is an extended dialogue with Xul Solar (Xul 183). More interesting still than the two characters’ conversations about aesthetics is the performative dialogue between novelist and visual artist. Xul Solar’s sui generis watercolours have impressed Beatriz Sarlo for certain qualities that can likewise be discerned in Marechal’s novelistics. Sarlo speaks of the “semiotic obsessiveness” in Xul’s art, as well as the deliberate absence of perspective that recalls both primitive painting and cartoon strips ( Una modernidad periférica 14). Sign and image commingle, and the distinction between graphic and iconic representation is blurred and at times completely effaced, as in Xul’s Grafía (1935) [Graphemes] or Prigrafía (1938) [Pre-graphemes?].26 The perspectival flatness of Xul’s paintings gives them the appearance of creative texts rather than mimetic representations. Caricatural forms, products of a deliberate abstraction, collide in a two-dimensional space and easily recombine in outlandish hybrids such as Mestizos de avión y gente (1936) [Hybrids of Airplanes and Persons]. In Marechal/Schultz’s Cacodelphia, we find similar hybrids: homokites or kite-men, homoglobes or balloon-men, homoplumes or human feathers, bomb-men, and tabloid-men who, crushed by rotary presses, turn into newspapers and then back into humans. In the tabloid-men, body becomes text becomes body.

  The art of caricature, in both Xul and Marechal, is an aesthetic choice that offers the immense plasticity and freedom enjoyed by cartoon strips and film animation. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, Buenos Aires in the 1910s and ’20s was home to the great animationist Quirino Cristiani (1896–1984), who made the world’s first feature-length animated film, El apóstol (1917) [The Apostle], an amusing spoof of President Hipólito Yrigoyen. His Peludópolis (1931) was another premiere – the first “talky” in animated film. Its symbolic character Juan Pueblo [John of the People] may be the source of Marechal’s Juan Demos, a similarly symbolic figure who, seated on a pedestal inside the Cacodelphian parliament, offers pithy comments on the parliamentarians’ deliberations. Between those two landmark films, Cristiani prolifically created animated films for popular consumption (Bendazzi 49–52). Marechal’s novel, it would seem, not only enters into dialogue with the high avant-garde art of a Xul Solar, but also exploits the aesthetic possibilities, along with those of tango and popular theatre, of the popular visual arts.

  The picture theory explicit and implicit in Adán Buenosayres, grounded in Dante and Thomas Aquinas and yet keenly cognizant of the new visual media emerging in his time – in particular, cartoons and animated film – has yet to be comprehensively addressed in Marechalian criticism. For our present purposes, we need only observe that, if Xul Solar is the semiotically obsessed creator of pictures, Adam Buenosayres presents the converse case: the image-obsessed wordsmith whose obsession causes him guilt. Just as Dante’s image theory, as Hans Belting has put it, got “entangled in an unresolvable conflict” with the theological doctrine of the soul (An Anthropology of Images 133), so the piously logocentric Adam stumbles over contradictions in the aesthetic theory he expounds at Ciro Rossini’s restaurant (Book Four, chapter 1). Whereas the astrologer Schultz and his real-life model Xul Solar are fearless (or quite mad) in their semiotic-imagistic experimentation, Adam has profound doubts about the ontological status of the image and its verbal analogue, the poetic image. Though Adam’s theological language may strike late-modern readers as anachronistic, his angst over the nature of images, and their power, makes him our contemporary. We still await the picture theorist of the calibre of a W.J.T. Mitchell or a Hans Belting, who will translate Marechal’s theological metaphors into a twenty-first-century theoretical discourse.

  It is again no accident that filmmakers such as Fernando “Pino” Solanas and Eliseo Subiela are inspired by Marechal’s novel(s).27 The greatest cineaste to champion Adán Buenosayres has been the venerable Manuel Antín, whose project to take the novel to the big screen was repeatedly frustrated by Argentina’s turbulent history (Sández 36, 100). Spurred on by his friend Julio Cortázar (some of whose texts he filmed), Antín with the help of Juan Carlos Gené wrote a screenplay, which as recently as 2009 he still possessed.28 And yet, one cannot help wondering how Antín could have realized so quixotic a project as filming the diversa desmesura of Adán Buenosayres in the medium of live-action film. The medium of film animation could provide one solution to the technical difficulties involved. Twenty-first-century advances in computer animation offer another solution – the sort of filmic language developed, for example, by Esteban Sapir in La antena (2007) [The Aerial]. Steeped in the avant-garde film tradition of both Europe and Argentina, Sapir’s crossing of grapheme, word, and image, as well as his morphology of human-machine hybrids, seems a direct homage to Xul Solar and Marechal’s Schultz. The continuously falling snow-like substance in La antena – is it finely shredded paper? semiotic dust? – recalls the rain of grimy newsprint in the first circle of Schultz’s Cacodelphia; and Sapir’s hombres-globo (human balloons) are surely the formal descendants of the homoglobos designed by Schultz/Marechal or Xul Solar’s human airplanes. Perhaps Antín’s dream of filming Adán Buenosayres was an idea before its time.

  THIS ANNOTATED TRANSLATION

  This translation of Adán Buenosayres is based on the fourteenth (and final) edition of the original publisher, Editorial Sudamericana, and Pedro Luis Barcia’s annotated edition (Clásicos Castalia, 1994). Although I have consulted other editions, the minor textual variations (mostly orthographic) are too slight to be of significance for the English-language translator. Patrice Toulat’s French translation (Grasett/UNESCO, 1995) has been amply consulted as well, especially by Sheila Ethier, who read the first draft of my English translation against Toulat’s version and gave valuable feedback. Nicola Jacchia’s 2010 Italian translation arrived too late to provide a substantive point of comparison, but I have been grateful for our stimulating and helpful e-mail exchanges about translation problems.29

  In principle, this translation adheres as closely as possible to the elusive ideal of textual fidelity. Recourse to annotation allows for the possibility of rendering the novel’s rich colloquiality more directly. Though often rendered in approximate equivalents toward the beginning of the translated novel, many of the original lunfardo or Argentine-slang terms, are progressively incorporated in the translated text, with explanations provided in the notes and the glossary; the intent is that readers should gain more direct access to the palpable flavour of a unique urban culture, which in turn facilitates a more precise reading of it. It is worth noting that two of the many dictionaries I consulted – the Academia Argentina de Letras edition of the Diccionario del habla de los argentinos and José Gobello’s Nuevo diccionario lunfardo – both frequently cite Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres to illustrate particular Argentine usages; this is yet another indication of the novel’s cultural importance.<
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  The long sentences and elaborate language of Marechal’s neo-Baroque prose present a problem for English syntax. I have broken up run-on sentences when doing so seemed to profit readability, but never at the expense of any layer or nuance of meaning. Marechal’s prose is often self-parodic: he piles up clause after clause in pretentiously elaborate constructions with comic intent, the opulence of the expressive means humorously contrasting with the relative banality of the content. In such cases, I have adjusted the syntax as little as possible, in order to conserve the humour. In cases where language is ludically celebrated in nonsense prose or utterly gratuitous puns, I have at times needed to sacrifice textual fidelity; such instances are signalled in endnotes.

  Further, in order to retain as much original flavour as possible, I have, with two exceptions, not translated the characters’ names. The first is the most vexatious; the eponymous “Adán Buenosayres” – in Spanish a euphonious six-syllable verse of poetry – has been rendered as “Adam Buenosayres.” Unfortunately, the substitution disrupts the rhythm of the name/title, and the music of this lovely verso llano suffers. However, the name Adán is not readily recognizable to most anglophones, and would not therefore convey all the biblical and symbolic freight we hear in “Adam.” Poetry has thus had to take second place to meaning. The other exception is the name of the astrologer Schultz, changed from Marechal’s “Schultze,” the latter being a far less common form of the German surname. But the real-life model for the astrologer is the self-named Xul Solar, a monniker that condenses his birth name “Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari.” It seems likely that Marechal preferred “Schultze” because the German “Schulz,” lacking the final voiced “e”, is virtually unpronounceable within the phonological system of Spanish. In English, by contrast, it is more natural to say Schultz and to spell it with a “t” (as Marechal has done).