For the return of Beyond Borges, Alejandra Pizarnik joins Alfonsina Storni and Silvina Ocampo as the third female to appear in the series and one of the most important and complex poets in Argentine writing.

In her 17 years of writing Pizarnik made a huge impact on Spanish language poetry, taking it down to its darkest depths and abandoning it there, leaving one of the most fascinating legacies in Argentine literature.

A Tormented Talent

Artist's portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Born in 1936, Pizarnik was a second generation immigrant of Jewish descent. She was raised in Avellaneda amidst a Jewish community and received education in both Spanish and Yiddish. In 1954 she began studying philosophy and letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) but later dropped out because she said it couldn’t give her what she sought.

Besides literature, she also studied painting under the surrealist painter Juan Batlle Planas but found herself either willingly or involuntarily tied to poetry.

“I would have preferred to sing the blues in some smoke-filled hangout than spend the nights of my life scrabbling through language like a madwoman” she once said. In a letter addressed to her good friend Rúben Vela, she described her poems as “brawling” inside herself and, though her relationship with her writing was a difficult one, she produced some of the most remarkable poetry of the 20th century.

A regular user of amphetamines and hallucinogenics (she reportedly once spent seven days holed up on hallucinogenics listening to Janis Joplin records) Pizarnik suffered throughout her life from periods of psychological instability and depression. These emotional states probably only served to make her writing more original and more interesting but undoubtedly caused her difficulties throughout her life.

Having never felt at home in Argentina, she travelled to Paris in 1960 where she lived for four years, endearing herself to the city’s creative circles and Argentine writers Arnaldo Calveyra and Julio Cortázar. Recognised as a great literary talent by many of those around her, she was also counted the influential Argentine poets Rúben Vela and Raúl Gustavo Aguirre, as well as Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Olga Orozco and Mexico’s Octavio Paz among her friends.

Besides receiving Buenos Aires’ First Municipal Poetry Prize, she was able to return to Paris a second time as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1968. Shortly afterwards Pizarnik was institutionalised following a suicide attempt in 1970, and eventually ended her life aged 36 by taking a sedative overdose.

Body of Work

Pizarnik published seven books of poetry and one book of prose during the years 1955 to 1972.

Her first book of poems, ‘La tierra más ajena’, was published when she was just 19 and still a student of philosophy and literature. She followed it with ‘La última inocencia‘ in 1956 and ‘Las aventuras perdidas’ in 1958, both written before her trip to Paris in 1960.

Portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Her 1962 collection ‘Árbol de Diana’, was written whilst she lived in Paris and is considered by many to be her best. Her most important work, however, would not arrive until 1968 when she was already grappling with her own mental illness.

‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ and the long prose poem of the same name, are regarded as a pinnacle of the author’s expressive abilities. Both the poem and its containing collection demonstrate a darkness not seen before in Argentine writing and rarely found afterwards.

As the title suggests, the book contains the most elaborate of Pizarnik’s meditations on the subject of madness – a theme carried across her entire body of work along with themes of entrapment and her almost hypnotic attraction to death.

Her books, in fact, come wrought with intertextual borrowing and overlapping symbolism; often mentioning forbidden gardens, cracks and voices in walls and night time (symbolic of both madness and death).

Obsessed with the idea of madness, fear of madness and the containment of madness, Pizarnik’s specialty was to drag the reader down into a chaotic, nightmarish world where they would be subjected to the same doubts, despairs, schizophrenic voices, claustrophobia, and fears as her.

Linguistically, her use of repetition, contradiction and words with ambiguous or changeable meanings lent her poems obvious overtones of paranoia. Her poems often transitioned radically between the first person, and a second third-person voice, which may have been forcibly created, or may, more likely, have emerged as second nature given her emotional and mental state.

If the character of Juan Pablo Castel in Ernesto Sabato’s existentialist novel ‘El Túnel’ had been an impressive product of the author’s imagination, then the ‘I’ in Pizarnik’s poetry was too close for comfort. One critic described the relationship between the two as a “death grip” – something which Pizarnik sought to distinguish herself from towards the end of her writing career.

Pizarnik’s Personal Legacy

From 1968 onwards Pizarnik set out to untether herself from “poetic language” and write with different “voices”. Around this time she turned to the writing of Cortázar in an effort to free herself from what she described as “creative prisons”.

Interestingly, though the “I” in her poems was something Pizarnik deliberated a great deal over, many poets have returned to use the first person singular without any of the same concerns.

The vocabulary and sometimes playful structuring of Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrate her mistrust for language. Her writing often freely condemned its failures and inadequacies whilst also revealing feelings of being powerlessness towards it. Torn between her dissatisfaction with language and her dependence on it as a poet, she would occasionally write poems omitting all punctuation marks bar parenthesis, and included lines of only one word causing intentional ambiguity.

A Spanish language edition of 'La Condesa Sangrienta' (April 2012)

An inability to write prose fiction was one of Pizarnik’s biggest grievances with herself as a writer, and she considered her only prose book, ‘La condesa sangrieta’, to be one of her greatest achievements.

The book, published in 1971, is in fact more of an elegant essay about a 16th century Hungarian countess who allegedly tortured and killed as many as 600 girls before finally ending her life walled up alone. Pizarnik ends the book with the resonating line “the absolute freedom of a human being is terrible” – a concept which she personally grappled with often.

Her last work, ‘El infierno musical’ was also written in 1971, one year before her death. It included the poem ‘El deseo de la palabra’, often considered to be her poetic suicide note.

Although it would perhaps be wrong to read the poem in this light, it does appear there was a literary suicide some time before Pizarnik’s real suicide took place. The poet and her poetry are at times so intertwined and bound up in each other that it almost seems her destiny was written out for her, by her.

Estranged, helpless and anguished, Pizarnik’s haunting words have garnered a 40-year following, earning her a reputation as perhaps Argentina’s most important female poet.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges and Victoria Ocampo are all names you’d likely come across before arriving at the writing of the next author in our Beyond Borges series.

Perhaps better known for being the wife of the former, or the younger and less-famous sibling of the latter, Silvina Ocampo was herself a prolific writer who gained independent recognition as the author of several prize-winning poetry collections and compilations of fantastic fiction.

Portrait of Silvina Ocampo

Know Your Ocampos

Born in Buenos Aires in 1903, Silvina was the youngest of six sisters to bear the already influential family name. Not initially literary-inclined, she originally travelled to Paris to work under the direction of artists such as the Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico and the French forerunner to pop art, Fernand Léger.

In the early 30s, her eldest sister Victoria became the founding editor of the long-running, culturally-significant journal ‘Sur’. It was through this review that, in 1933, Silvina was introduced to both Borges and a much younger Bioy Casares. Despite an age difference of nine years, she controversially became Bioy’s lover when he was just 19. Seven years later, they embarked on a marriage that, although not always faithful, saw them joined as occasional collaborators and lifelong companions.

As a poet, short-story author, translator and one-time playwright, Ocampo wrote incessantly and almost always independently throughout her life, publishing as many as seven poetry collections and around the same number of short story compilations.

In 1940 she collaborated with both Bioy and Borges on an anthology of fantastic literature and later an anthology of Argentine poetry. Although she had already published her first collection of short fiction, ‘Viaje olvidado’, in 1937, critics cite her involvement in this first anthology as having had a visible influence on her style.

Her later collections, including ‘Autobiografía de Irene’, ‘La furia y otro cuentos’, ‘Las invitadas’, ‘Los días de la noche’, and the children’s story ‘La naranja maravillosa’, perhaps exhibit a more prototypical Ocampo.

Writing the Feminine into the Fantastic

Inspired by authors such as Lewis Carroll, the majority of Ocampo’s literary output falls into the category of the fantastic, exploring surrealist ideas such as the manipulation of space and time, memory, mirrors and metamorphosis.

Whilst many of her themes crossed over with those explored by other authors or the fantastic, Ocampo’s treatment of what might have essentially been the same ideas, has been noted for its ingenuity and, perhaps most commonly, for its unusual cruelty.

The murders and other violent acts contained in her writing might not have met with descriptions of such ‘cruel innocence’ had the majority of her stories not presented them through the eyes of children.

Whether written for children or adults, her fiction often featured child protagonists in the recurrent setting of childhood homes and plots that appeared fairy-tale, at least in concept, if not in execution.

Many of Ocampo's stories were set in the childhood mansions of her protagonists. (This still, courtesy of 'Cornelia at her Mirror')

In ‘Biografia de Irene’ a marble statue of a winged horse speaks to a girl and promises to carry her into a fairytale land, and in ‘La torre sin fin’ a boy who makes fun of an artist who visits his house to display his paintings of a strange topless tower finds himself suddenly imprisoned there inside the painting, and although everything he paints comes to life it does not always take on the form he imagined.

Argentine author Julio Cortázar, whose own short stories run in a similar vein to Ocampo’s, commented upon the ‘strangeness of the everyday’ in her writing and her ability to infuse every day objects with a fantastic importance. Certainly, the disquieting nature of her short stories probably does stem from the fact that she wrote about such familiar every day circumstances the reader comes to doubt the occurrence of anything extraordinary.

Often written about alongside another Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, critics have suggested that an understanding of each writer’s attitude to childhood is fundamental to an appreciation of their work.

Claiming that female authors have historically leant towards the fantastic as a form of expression, some critics have also suggested Ocampo’s fantastic literature might have been a manifestation of feminine subversion, citing her treatment of metamorphosis by way of example.

Interestingly, her protagonists can be generally observed as responding differently to both the process of transformation and their new form, dependent on gender. Ocampo’s male characters are often reluctantly transformed to plants, whereas her female protagonists more often than not have an existing relationship with the object of their transformation appearing more welcoming of their transformation to either animal forms or objects that are essentially masculine.

Where her husband had prioritised plot over character, Ocampo favoured style above all else, tackling themes of love and infidelity or sin and forgiveness with an irony, dark humour and lightness that otherwise might not have existed.

Later Life and Recognition

A poster for the 2010 film 'Cornelia at her Mirror', inspired by OCampo's last book of fantastic fiction

Besides authoring some of the most original and ingenious short fiction Argentina had seen between 1937 and 1988, Ocampo was also highly-regarded as a poet, publishing her first collection of poems, ‘Enumeracio de la patria’, in 1942, and her last, ‘Amarillo celeste’, in 1972. In the middle she was awarded the 1954 Premio Municipal de Literatura for ‘Espacios métricos’ and the 1962 Premio Nacional de Poesia for ‘Lo amargo por dulce’, having won second prize for ‘Los nombres’ nine years earlier in 1953.

In later life she reportedly suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, which seems especially cruel for a writer who had explored the theme of memory in such depth in her work. In her first book ‘Viaje olvidado’ a girl looks to remember the moment of her birth, and in a later story a woman recounts her life story backwards, beginning with the present and eventually dying when she reaches the beginning.

Bioy withheld news of his wife’s own death in 1993 so that a private funeral could be held in accordance with her wishes. Having been associated for more than 50 years with prominent literary and artistic personalities, Ocampo is often described as having lived in the shadow of her sister on the one hand and her husband on the other.

Perhaps content to live as a ‘famous unknown’, some argue that Ocampo was not necessarily subjected to living under these shadows but rather chose to remain there, shying away from the public life that Buenos Aires demanded of its great authors.

Although her sister Victoria probably still stands to be the most talked-about of the Ocampo siblings, Silvina’s impressive literary production at least equals that of her husband Bioy in terms of quantity and possibly even far exceeds him in terms of quality, linguistic ability and influence.

As recognition of Ocampo’s contribution to fantastic literature continues to grow, her influence on other surrealist authors is also becoming more recognisable. Whilst she might always be comparatively unknown, critics acknowledge the value of her writing as a jumping-off point for the works of Borges, Cortázar and other more-recognised masters of the short-story form.

Awaiting the author Luisa Valenzuela in her Belgrano home, I sip my coffee as a number of eccentric artists come and go, eager to discuss a host of wild and wonderful ideas.

Luisa Valenzuela self-portrait.

The raven-haired Valenzuela emerges twenty minutes later, summoning me into her haven-like study. The cerulean room is flanked by rows of books, and an impressive collection of masks, procured over years of extensive travelling.

Valenzuela grew up under the aegis of her mother, herself a prominent Argentine writer named Luisa Mercedes Levinson. The Levinson household served as a literary salon, frequented by some of the great literary names of the twentieth century including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar.

Despite publishing her first story, ‘Ese canto’ at the tender age of 21, Valenzuela was not initially drawn to a literary career. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when she took a post at La Nación under the direction of the eminent literary critic Ambrosio Vecino, that she discovered her own writerly vocation.

I’ve come to discuss Valenzuela’s most recent publication, ‘Cuidado con el tigre’, the latest novel in a prodigious collection. Originally written in the 1960s, the novel was withdrawn from publication due to Valenzuela’s concern that it would be misinterpreted as advocating a radical political agenda.

Having come full circle in her literary trajectory, Luisa now feels that her work would be incomplete without the ‘missing link’ of ‘Cuidado’ which, she says, lay the groundwork for her subsequent, more convoluted, explorations of the the use and abuse of power.

Set in the tail end of a decade marked by the fall of Che Guevara, ‘Cuidado’ traces the farcical ins and outs of an Argentine revolutionary cell. More ‘ideological’ than political, the group’s radical antics only lightly veil more complex power structures, played out through the sexual entanglements of its overly zealous members.

Alfredo Navoni, the tiger alluded to in the title, is a man of action committed to the cause. A recurrent figure in Valenzuela’s work – he will resurface again in her later novels, ‘Como en la guerra’ and ‘Cola de lagartija’.

Navoni has friends in high revolutionary places, most notably, the mysterious ‘migrator’, so-named for his relentless travels to border countries. Here we encounter him in the midst of coordinating a rainforest mission, accompanied by the contrary sisters, Emanuela and Amelia, as well as a host of other tangential characters.

As captain of the organisation and a commanding figure, Emanuela strives to direct the mission on a level playing field with her male counterparts, whilst Amelia seeks refuge in domesticity, pandering to the tiger’s every whim. As for Navoni, detached and phlegmatic as any revolutionary caricature, he spends his time hopping between the sisters’ beds.

Amidst this host of idealists, the underground writer Artigueta is the only affiliate able to reflect on the contradictions inherent in striving to advance a political ideal, uncontaminated by emotional ties.

Written before her narrative experiments of the 1970s, ‘Cuidado’ relies on intersecting narrative strands and an impersonal prose style, commensurate with the seemingly objective mission of its protagonists.

Where Valenzuela’s later work is allusive in structure, addressing the violence and paranoia that was endemic under the last dictatorship, this early work tackles political activism head on, albeit with a heavily ironic slant.

In the face of Borges’ ‘art for art’s sake’ mandate, which prevailed in Argentine literature for the most part of the twentieth century, Valenzuela feared her political farce would have been considered anathema to literary prestige. Four decades later, its political resonances have attenuated somewhat, lending it a historic, retrospective dimension.

In her afterword to the novel, she describes how the tiger was obscured by another, less contextual but more striking feline creation, ‘El gato eficaz’. The novel, a series of literary and erotic vignettes of New York, was published in 1972.

The prelude of a ten-year stint in the US, Luisa says it was the “brutal” streets of New York that unleashed an unexpected upsurge of creativity in her, leading her down literary avenues she had not previously contemplated. At the same time, the city served as a place of refuge in the face of the mounting political turmoil and censorship back home.

In 2000, New Yorks’ Whitney Museum exhibited Valenzuela’s short story collection, ‘Aquí pasan cosas raras’, as part of its century overview of the evolution of American arts. Alongside the likes of Susan Sontag, Valenzuela was hailed as a defining writer of the 1970s, and was the only Latin American author to be granted such a prestigious entitlement.

If Valenzuela has firmly carved out a niche for herself in the US arts scene, her work has always assumed a more ambivalent position in relation to Argentine literary tradition. While her prose continues to address national issues, stylistically she has a stronger claim to a more generic Latin American heritage. She accounts her linguistic playfulness and dark humour to the years she spent among contemporary Latin American writers at the universities of Columbia, NYU and Iowa in 1970s.

Although she still publishes articles in the international press, Valenzuela ultimately leans towards fiction. “Sticking to facts, however pertinent,” she says, “doesn’t allow you to delve into metaphor, to understand the deeper implications. Fiction knows better than we do.”

Our meeting comes to a premature close – Valenzuela has to pack her bags since she’s jetting off to a mask festival in Sardinia tomorrow morning. Though she assures me she won’t be turning her hand to new fiction in the near future, masks, both concrete and metaphorical, are to be the subject of her next literary undertaking.

Having begun with the poet Esteban Echeverría and journeyed through such influential authors as José Hernández, Leopoldo Lugones and Roberto Arlt, The Argentina Independent’s Beyond Borges series arrives at its namesake.

Born in the city of Buenos Aires in 1899, poet, short story author, essayist, translator and critic Jorge Luis Borges went on to become not only the most recognisable name, but also the most recognisable face, in Argentine writing.

Widely acknowledged during his lifetime as a master of 20th century literature, a large proportion of local literary pride can be attributed to Borges’ extensive back catalogue. His impact on literature is remarkable, not only in terms of his contribution to Argentine writing but also his far-reaching and profound influence on literature worldwide.

Arguably Argentina’s finest export and commonly held up as a poster boy of its national literature; the relationship between the country and its most famous author seems, in true Borges fashion, to be both reciprocal and eternal.

Jorge Luis Borges, commonly used as a poster boy for national literature

Early Influences

Raised in a middle class family home, Borges grew up surrounded by the dizzying heights of his father’s multi-lingual library. Harbouring literary aspirations of his own, Jorge Guillermo Borges had never succeeded in becoming an author, but his young son seemed destined to become a prolific figure.

With English as his first language, Borges had made an active decision to embark on a literary career from a young age. His translation of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ was printed in an Argentine newspaper when he was only nine years old.

In 1914, his family moved from Argentina to Europe and settled in Switzerland until the end of the war. Home-schooled until age 11, this period of stability afforded Borges an opportunity to complete an institutional education. Following his graduation from the College of Geneva in 1918, the family lived in several European countries, spending time in the Spanish cities of Barcelona, Seville and Madrid.

It was in Spain that Borges fell in with ultraism- an avant-garde movement that had grown up in response to the modernism that dominated Spanish poetry. Having already published book reviews for newspapers in Geneva, he became a regular contributor to Spain’s literary press. In 1921, he returned to Buenos Aires, bringing with him the fresh ideas of ultraism.

The Face of Argentine Literature

Borges’ first poetry collection, ‘Fervour de Buenos Aires’, was published only two years after his return to the city, but it was his page presence in local reviews and journals that really launched his literary career in Argentina.

Already established as a central figure in a circle of vanguard authors, Borges became a regular contributor to the avant-garde magazine ‘Martin Fierro’ and a cofounder of several others, including ‘Proa’ and a broadsheet journal named ‘Prism’. Though he would later denounce both the avant-garde and ultraism, his involvement in these publications provided a valuable platform for his work and played an important part in increasing his public profile.

Graphic design inspired by Borges (Courtesy of Gregory Peterson)

Much of the writing collected under the 1936 title ‘Historia universal de la infamia’ had been previously published inside the literary supplement of Crítica, where Borges had assumed an editorial role in 1933.

In addition, several of the short stories contained the 1941 novel ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’, had also appeared inside Victoria Ocampo’s ‘Sur’ magazine as early as 1931. It was with this collection of stories that Borges arguably invented the concept of a hypertext novel, preceding both Julio Cortázar and Macedonio Fernández.

In his earlier writing he had experimented with using fictional techniques to tell what were essentially true stories and became the first author to create elaborate reviews of imaginary works. This playful approach extended to publishing, where collaborations under pseudonyms and frequent experimentations with literary forgery resulted in occasional false accreditations.

In basing much of his writing in his home city of Buenos Aires, Borges was adopted as a figurehead of criollismo, a Latin American movement that had its counterpart in North America’s regionalism.

But whilst he had built up a huge body of work based on Argentine culture and history, his themes were generally more universal. During the 1930s he began exploring existentialist ideas in line with increasing public interest, but it was following his father’s death and a near fatal accident of his own, that Borges’ imagination grew progressively fertile.

Argentina’s Finest Export

Among Borges’ best-known works are ‘Ficciones’ in 1944 and ‘The Aleph’ in 1949; two short story collections famed for their complex philosophical concepts. Interconnected by themes of infinity and time, dreams, mirrors, labyrinths, and religion, the stories play on a mix of fantasy and reality and are credited with marking the beginnings of magic realism.

Reacting against the realism of 19th century literature, magic realism gained popularity during the 1960s, when Latin American literature experienced a worldwide “boom”. Until this time, Borges remained little known outside Argentina and, although he preceded Cortázar and the other authors of the boom period, he undoubtedly benefitted from the exposure it provided.

Already a public figure in Argentina, Borges was appointed president of the Argentine Society of Writers, professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture and was, for some time, director of the National Library.

Argentina's most famous author continues to inspire international discussion (Photo courtesy of Casa de América)

Receipt of the International Prize in 1961, awarded jointly to Borges and Samuel Beckett, projected him into an international arena and spurred overseas interest in his work for the first time.

His elevated profile enabled him to embark on a prolific lecturing career whereby he lectured extensively on the art of translation. Having himself translated the work of Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling and William Faulkner, his stance was both new and controversial, declaring translations that contradicted or improved the original to be “equally valid”.

A succession of esteemed literary awards honoured Borges’ work both retrospectively and continuously. Having received the Jerusalem Prize in 1971, the Cervantes Prize in 1979, a Balzan Prize in 1980, and a French Legion of Honour awarded only three years before his death, some say he was systematically overlooked for the Nobel Prize in literature. “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” he said. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.”

Still, the impact of Jorge Luis Borges on Argentine literature and literature in general cannot be underestimated. Often described as the most important Spanish language writer since Cervantes, he has been credited as an author who renovated Argentine fiction, paving the way for a remarkable generation of Spanish language writers and turning ‘Borges’ into a household name.

If you were to write an ABC of Argentine literature, you’d expect to find three of the hardest-hitting household names. The Indy continues the Beyond Borges series with the author whose name would surely be the first on most people’s lips.

Nowadays best-known for his novels ‘El juguete rabioso’, ‘Los siete locos’ and ‘Los Lanzallamas’, Roberto Arlt was a novelist, short story author, journalist and playwright who, despite entering literature as something of an underdog, emerged as the first ‘modern’ novelist in Argentina and a source of inspiration to a generation of writers that followed.

An artists impression of Roberto Arlt (Courtesy of the artist Ricardo Ajler)

A Treasured Columnist

The son of immigrant parents, Arlt was born in Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century and raised in the Buenos Aires’ neighbourhood of Flores. He spoke openly about the difficulties of his upbringing and of the abusive and tyrannical nature of his father, a Prussian glassblower and postcard artist.

Having been expelled from school between the ages of eight and ten, he received minimal formal education from then on, choosing instead to spend his time on the streets of the city that inspired him, or reading the work of the Russian greats Gorky, Dolstoy and Dostoevsky.

His first short story, ‘Jehovah’, was reportedly published before he left home in 1916, but before pursuing writing as his profession. Arlt attended the a naval school of mechanics, and also served in the armed forces, undertaking various forms of employment as a mechanic, a painter, a dockworker, an apprentice to a tinsmith and a brick factory manager, before entering journalism.

Like many Argentine authors before him, he viewed journalism as a means of financially supporting his creative writing, but also as a step up to the arena he wished to enter.

Many years later, he published a column entitled ‘Yo no tengo la culpa’, whereby he spoke of the difficulties he encountered breaking into the country’s literary circles as an immigrant with an expressionless family name of no social standing.

But writing as a columnist proved to be an important aspect of Arlt’s career and an important form of expression for Arlt, who originally wrote part of his first novel, ‘El juguete rabioso’, as a column.

Published in a variety of newspapers including Critica, Don Goyo, and much later in El Mundo, Arlt’s columns, known as ‘Aguafuertes’, were the most popular of his literary offerings during his lifetime and brought him nation-wide recognition as a writer.

The ‘Aguafuertes’ written between 1928 and 1935 for the newspaper El Mundo, are favourably remembered for commenting on the peculiarities and the hypocrisy of life in Buenos Aires at the time. Retrospectively compiled and republished in a book that itself became a classic, they are often reprinted and remain treasured works of national literature.

Writing From Buenos Aires’ Underbelly

In the same year that his friend and contemporary Ricardo Güiraldes published his nostalgic novel ‘Don Segundo Sombra’, Arlt published his first novel ‘El juguete rabioso’ in 1926.

The novel, which narrates the adventures of a character called Silvio in his efforts to become someone, was originally drafted as ‘La vida puerca’ until Güiraldes prompted a rethink by suggesting that Argentine readers were perhaps not yet ready for such a crude title.

Roberto Arlt (Photo: Veronique Pestoni)

Featuring unlikely characters alienated by environments found to be rife with inequality and oppression, his fiction presented a so far unexplored perspective and found a huge audience among the youth.

Reflecting the hardships, as well as the energy and chaos of the time, the novel adopted a darkness of style that hadn’t been seen before, and expressed anguish and scenes of violence in a language that was described as at once “rough” yet the “most alive”.

His 1929 novel, ‘Los siete locos’, and its sequel ‘Los lanzallamas’, which followed in 1931, are collectively considered his masterpiece. Together with ‘El juguete rabioso’ they are occasionally considered a trilogy and whilst it’s true that they each played a part in revealing Buenos Aires’ hidden underbelly, it was ‘Los siete locos’ that earned Arlt the nickname ‘The Porteño Dostoyevsky’, after the Russian existentialist author.

The innovation of Arlt’s work lay not only in his style, but also in his decision to feature the poor, the criminal and the mad as his protagonists – predating the likes of William Burroughs and Irvine Welsh, who have since created equally shocking literature by adopting similar subjects.

Intended to be experimental and impressionistic, his novels introduced a fragmented and confused chronology, adding to the warped atmosphere and sense of chaos present in the storylines.

At once a heady mix of lower and middle-class Spanish, scientific vocabulary, vulgarities and foreign words blended with the dialects of porteños and thieves, Arlt was condemned by some for poor grammar and bad craftsmanship. At the same time, his coarse yet imaginative use of language was commended by others.

In saturating his work with a language that was as grossly urban as his themes, Arlt wrote with deliberate disregard for the rules knowingly observed by other authors. But whilst his unpolished colloquial writing came under fire from some, it was undoubtedly a refreshing move away from the middle-class literature exemplified by the Argentine writers of the same time.

Citing the changing of ideas as a reason to reject literary tradition, he made little effort to ‘linger over embroidery’, presenting a case for language being something that is constantly evolving, as though it were living.

It was this attitude that gained him the respect of a new generation of writers, who saw him as a proponent of anti-establishment anti-literary writing.

Julio Cortázar, author of the Argentine ‘anti-novel’ and the big name to have emerged from the Latin American literature boom of the 1960s regarded Arlt as a master, whilst award-winning writer Ricardo Piglia and ‘mass novelist’ César Aira have also cited him as particularly influential.

A recent stage production of Trescientos Millones (Photo: Estefanía Zinboer)

A Theatrical Legacy

With the exception of a fourth novel, ‘El amor brujo’, and two short story collections, Arlt moved his writing almost exclusively into a new medium from 1930 onwards.

Of his ten plays, only ‘El fabricante de fantasias’ was released in a commercial theatre, with the remaining nine premiering at independent venues such as Teatro del Pueblo.

‘Trescientos millones’ in 1932, ‘Saverio el cruel’ in 1936 and ‘La isla desierta’ in 1937, make up a trio of plays generally considered the most representative of his theatrical writing.

Commended for the construction of dreamlike sequences and the imagination of nightmarish characters in plays that were fuelled by a social conscience, Arlt is considered a forerunner to the trend of social theatre and the currents of absurdism and existentialism that followed.