Leopoldo Marechal - Adam Buenosayres

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.

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) 2shortly 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 after 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. 3Just 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.”