Read down for an insight into the literature of Argentina.
Modern Argentina has an extremely high literary rate, around 95%, and good bookshops are to be found even in small country towns, with some really splendid librerías in Buenos Aires. Correspondingly, the country has produced some great writers, quite apart from the wonderful Borges, and it's well worth reading some of their work before you come, or seeking out a few novels to bring on your travels.
With an urban culture derived almost entirely from European immigrants, Argentina's literary development was heavily influenced by European writers in the 19th century, the works of Smith, Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau amongst others, being inspiration for the small literate elite of young intellectuals such as Mariano Moreno (1778-1811), one of the architects of the Independence movement. The great theme was how to adapt European forms to American realities, first in the form of political tracts and later in early nationalist poetry. Outside the cities, popular culture thrived on storytelling and the music of the gauchos, whose famous payadores are superbly evocative. They recount lively and dramatic stories of love, death and the land in poetic couplets to a musical background, with an ornate and inventive use of words (see Music below). Gaucho poets, like Medieval troubadours, would travel from settlement to settlement, to country fairs and cattle round-ups, singing of the events of the day and of the encroaching political constraints that would soon bring restrictions to their traditional way of life.
The theme of Argentine identity has been a constant through the country's development and remains a burning issue today. While many writers looked to Europe for inspiration, others were keen to distance themselves from the lands they had come from and create a new literature, reflecting Argentina's own concerns. The extremes within the country further challenge attempts at creating a single unified identity: the vast stretches of inhospitable and uninhabited land, the vast variety of landscapes and peoples, and the huge concentration of population in a capital which little resembles any other part of the country. These conflicts were clearly expressed in 1845 by politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888): Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. This was the most important tract of the generation, and became one of the key texts of Argentine cultural history. Strongly opposed to the Federalist Rosas, Sarmiento's allegory biography of gaucho Facundo laments the ungovernably large size of the country which allows caudillos like Quiroga and Rosas to dominate. For Sarmiento, the only solution was education and he looked to what he perceived to be the democracy of North America for inspiration.
With the attempt to consolidate the nation state in the aftermath of independence Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851) played a leading role in these debates through literary salons, in poetry and in short fiction. Other memorable protest literature against the Rosas regime included Echeverría's El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse, published posthumously in 1871) and José Mármol's melodramatic novel of star crossed lovers battling against the cut-throat hordes of Rosas Amalia (1855).
The consolidation of Argentina along the lines advocated by Sarmiento and the growth of the export economy in alliance with British capital and technology may have benefited the great landowners of the Littoral provinces. But those who did not fit into this dream of modernity - in particular the gaucho groups turned off the land and forced to work as rural labourers - found their protest articulated by a provincial landowner, José Hernández (1834-1886). He wrote the famous gaucho epic poems El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and its sequel, La vuelta de Martín Fierro (The Return of Martín Fierro, 1879). The first part of Martín Fierro is most definitely the most famous Argentine literary work and is a genuine shout of rage against the despotic caudillos and corrupt authorities, which disrupt local communities and traditional ways of life. Framed as a gauchesque song, chanted by the appealing hero and dispossessed outlaw, it became one of the most popular works of literature, and Martín Fierro came to symbolize the spirit of the Argentine nation.
As a small group of families led the great export boom, the 'gentleman' politicians of the 'Generation of 1880' wrote their memoirs, none better than Sarmiento's Recuerdos de Provincia (Memoirs of Provincial Life, 1850). As Buenos Aires grew into a dynamic modern city, the gentleman memorialist soon gave way to the professional writer. The key poet in this respect was the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío (1867-1916), who lived for an important period of his creative life in Buenos Aires and led a movement called modernismo which asserted the separateness of poetry as a craft, removed from the dictates of national panegyric or political necessity. It was Darío who would give inspiration to the poet Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938), famous also for his prose writings on nationalist, gauchesque themes. Lugones's evocation of the gaucho as a national symbol would be developed in the novel Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927), the story of a boy taught the skills for life by a gaucho mentor.
The Early 20th Century
The complex urban societies evolving in Argentina by the turn of the century created a rich
cultural life. In the 1920s a strong vanguard movement developed which questioned the dominant
literary orthodoxies of the day. Little magazines such as Martín Fierro (another appropriation
of the ubiquitous national symbol) proclaimed novelty in poetry and attacked the dull social
realist writings of their rivals the Boedo group. Argentina's most famous writer, Jorge Luis
Borges (1899-1986) began his literary life as an avant-garde poet, in the company of writers
such as Oliverio Girondo (1891-1967) and Norah Lange (1906-1972). Many of these poets were
interested in expressing the dynamism and changing shape of their urban landscape, Buenos
Aires, this Paris on the periphery. You can explore Borges' haunts in Buenos Aires with a
free tour organized by the tourist office: ask in their information centres for dates and
times. Roberto Arlt also caught the dreams and nightmares of the urban underclasses in novels
such as El juguete rabioso (The Rabid Toy, 1926) and Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen, 1929).
Much of the most interesting literature of the 1930 and 1940s was first published in the literary journal Sur, founded by the aristocratic writer, Victoria Ocampo. By far the most important group to publish in its pages were Borges and his close friends Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993), Victoria's sister, and Silvina's husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914) who, from the late 1930s, in a series of short fictions and essays, transformed the literary world. They had recurrent concerns: an indirect style, a rejection of realism and nationalist symbols, the use of the purified motifs and techniques of detective fiction and fantastic literature, the quest for knowledge to be found in elusive books, the acknowledgement of literary criticism as the purest form of detective fiction and the emphasis on the importance of the reader rather than the writer.
Peronism and literature
In the 10-year period of Perón's first two presidencies, 1946-1955, there was a deliberate
assault on the aristocratic, liberal values which had guided Argentina since 1880. Claiming
to be a new synthesis of democracy, nationalism, anti-imperialism and industrial development,
Peronism attacked the undemocratic, dependent Argentine elite (personified in such literary
figures as Victoria Ocampo or Adolfo Bioy Casares). This period was seen by most
intellectuals and writers as an era of cultural darkness and some writers such as Julio
Cortázar (1914-1984) - in the 1940s and 1950s a writer of elegant fantastic and realist
stories - chose voluntary exile rather than remain in Perón's Argentina. The much-loved
novelist, Ernesto Sábato (1911) who later confronted the Proceso, set his best novel Sobre
héroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs, 1961) partly in the final moments of the Peronist
regime, when the tensions of the populist alliance were beginning to become manifest.
(His novella El Tunel is also well worth reading). But Perón was not much interested in the
small circulation of literature and concentrated his attention on mass forms of communication
such as radio and cinema.
This period saw further mature work from the poets Enrique Molina (1910-), Olga Orozco (1922-) and Alberto Girri (1919-1991), whose austere, introspective verse was an antidote to the populist abuse of language in the public sphere. The literary field was to be further stimulated, after the downfall of Perón with the development of publishing houses and the 'boom' of Latin American literature of the 1960s.
The 1960s
In Argentina the 1960s was a decade of great literary and cultural effervescence. The novel to
capture this mood was Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), which served as a Baedeker of the
new, with its comments on literature, philosophy, new sexual freedoms and its open,
experimental structure. It was promoted in a weekly journal Primera Plana, which also acted as
a guide to expansive modernity. Thousands of copies of Rayuela were sold to an expanded
middle-class readership in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Other novelists and writers
benefited from these conditions, the most significant being the Colombian Gabriel García
Márquez who published what would later become one of the best-selling novels of the 20th
century, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) with an Argentine
publishing house.
Significant numbers of women writers helped to break the male monopoly of literary production including the novelists Beatriz Guido and Marta Lynch and the poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), with her intense exploration of the inner self.
Literature and dictatorship
The 'swinging' sixties were curtailed by a military coup in 1966. In the years which followed,
Argentine political life descended into anarchy, violence and repression, as a result
virtually all forms of cultural activity were silenced and well known writers, including
Haroldo Conti and Rodolfo Walsh, 'disappeared'. Many more had to seek exile including the
poet Juan Gelman, whose son and daughter-in-law counted among the disappeared.
Understandably this nightmare world provided the dominant themes of the literary output of these years. The return in old age of Perón, claimed by all shades of the political spectrum, was savagely lampooned in Osvaldo Soriano's (1943-1998) novel No habrá más penas ni olvido (A Funny, Dirty Little War, published 1982, but completed in 1975). The world of the sombre designs of the ultra right-wing López Rega, Isabel Perón's Minister of Social Welfare, is portrayed in Luisa Valenzuela's (1938-) terrifying, grotesque novel Cola de lagartija (The Lizard's Tail, 1983). Of the narrative accounts of those black years, none is more harrowing than Miguel Bonasso's (1940-) fictional documentary of the treatment of the Montoneros guerrilla group in prison and in exile: Recuerdo de la muerte (Memory of Death, 1984). Other writers in exile chose more indirect ways of dealing with the terror and dislocation of those years. Daniel Moyano (1928-1992), in exile for many years in Spain, wrote elegant allegories such as El vuelo del tigre (The Flight of the Tiger, 1981), which tells of the military style takeover of an Andean village by a group of percussionists who bring cacophany.
Within Argentina, critical discussion was kept alive in literary journals such as Punto de Vista (1978-) and certain novels alluded to the current political climate within densely structured narratives. Ricardo Piglia's (1941-) Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration, 1980) has disappearance and exile as central themes, alongside bravura discussions of the links between fiction and history and between Argentina and Europe.
The return to civilian rule
Following Alfonsín's election victory in 1983, the whole intellectual and cultural field
responded to the new freedoms. Certain narratives depicted in harsh realism the brutalities of
the 'Dirty War' waged by the military and it was the novelist, Ernesto Sábato, who headed the
Commission set up to investigate the disappearances. He wrote in the prologue to the
Commission's report Nunca más (Never Again, 1984): "We are convinced that the recent military
dictatorship brought about the greatest and most savage tragedy in the history of Argentina".
Current literature echoes the famous lines by Borges in the essay The Argentine Writer and Tradition: "I believe that we Argentines ... can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences." While many of the writers that first brought modernity to Argentine letters have died - Borges, Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, Girri, Cortázar, Puig - the later generations have assimilated their lessons. Juan Carlos Martini writes stylish thrillers, blending high and low culture. Juan José Saer (1937-), from his self imposed exile in Paris, recreates his fictional world, Colastiné, in the city of Santa Fé, in narratives that are complex, poetic discussions on memory and language.
The most successful novel of recent years is Tomás Eloy Martinez's (1934-) Santa Evita (1995) which tells/reinvents the macabre story of what happened to Evita's embalmed body between 1952 and the mid 1970s. The narrative skilfully discusses themes that are at the heart of all writing and critical activity. The critic, like the embalmer of Evita's body, "seeks to fix a life or a body in the pose that eternity should remember it by". But what this critic, like the narrator of Eloy Martínez's novel, realizes is that a corpus of literature cannot be fixed in that way, for literature escapes such neat pigeon holes. Instead, glossing Oscar Wilde, the narrator states that "that the only duty that we have to history is to rewrite it". The ending of the novel makes the point about the impossibility of endings: "Since then, I have rowed with words, carrying Santa Evita in my boat, from one shore of the blind world to the other. I don't know where in the story I am. In the middle, I believe. I've been here in the middle for a long time. Now I must write again". (Santa Evita, New York and London, 1996, page 369.) See Books, page , for recommended reading.
