No habrá más penas ni olvido (Héctor Olivera, 1983)
Ernesto Sabato began his professional life as a scientist, first garnering a PhD in physics from Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de La Plata and then proceedings to the Sorbonne and the Curie Institute. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Sabato would abandon science in favour of writing and translating (which he’d do well into the 21st century). He produced only three novels, but all of them are considered canonical in Argentina and beyond. Just as Nikolai Gogol burned the second volume of his ingenious Dead Souls, Sabato would appear to have regularly done the same, evidently having come routinely to find his fictions unsatisfactory for one reason or another. He said that On Heroes and Tombs, second of the three aforementioned novels and generally considered his masterpiece, narrowly averted such a fate itself. Sabato’s principal legacy in his homeland may be related to the fundamental role he played in the national reckoning concerning missing and disappeared persons following Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976 to 1983, after which military dictatorship gave way to nominal democracy and a nationwide campaign of ‘truth and reconciliation.’ Thomas Mann admired Sabato. They share the same kind of staggering and frigid genius. The narrative fulcrum around which On Heroes and Tombs pivots and cycles in an intimate act of familial violence provisionally sketched-out in a short Forward. A young woman named Alejandra has shot her father to death with four bullets from a .32-caliber pistol and then burned herself alive along with her father’s corpse in the Mirador—a small tower or belvedere—that she has been using as a makeshift bedroom. The first two sections of the novel take place before the violent act, the third purports to be a transcription of Alejandra’s father’s paranoid and deranged “Repot on the Blind,” and the final section occurs subsequent to the death of the father (Fernando Vidal Olmos). “Report on the Blind” is a livid crescendo and psychic conflagration, a descent into Inferno, the mangled state of its author a mimesis of nation implosion, “a region of faults and fractures […] unstable, tragic, turbulent […] everything cracks apart and is ripped asunder.” The first two sections of the novel focus on the likewise turbulent courtship of a young man named Martín and Alejandra, the latter of whom remains eternally diffident and untouchable. This ‘love story’ has a nakedly terminal trajectory. At one point, Martín’s significantly older friend Bruno introduces him to the great Jorge Luis Borges; the two young men encounter the Buenos Aires-based literary giant in the streets whilst out strolling together. Borges does not appear to be blind insofar as he presents in the passage in question, but it is interesting to consider that since the passage is set in 1955 we more or less find ourselves set down in the period during which Borges ultimately went completely blind. Bruno says of Borges: “What I’m certain of is that his prose is the most remarkable of any being written in Spanish today. But his style is too precious for him to be a great writer. Can you imagine Tolstoy trying to dazzle his readers with an adverb when it’s a question of the life or death of one of his characters? But not everything in Borges’s works is Byzantine: far from it. There’s something Argentine in his best things: a certain nostalgia, a certain metaphysical sadness …” In his “Report on the Blind,” Fernando Vidal Olmos writes about his years pursuing an international organization of the blind which he believes has performed a central and diabolic role in human affairs, explicitly occult, for centuries. Fernando addresses the existences both of a “Sect of the Blind” and a “Library of the Blind,” the latter terminology making it difficult indeed not to think of Borges, for whom the archive was both library and living labyrinth. Bruno and Fernando were involved to varying degrees in anarchistic banditry earlier in their lives, and it is the cruel and amoral Fernando who has taken his war against society down a dark and paranoid avenue, able to perceive nonetheless that his “exploration” of the “universe” of the blind has been at the same time the “exploration” of his own “dark world.” The wretched of the earth are forever rooted in inhuman history and macabre destiny because the future too already happen and can offer us no aid or respite.
Sabato and Borges, though they may almost appear to present a clean dialectical opposition, are hardly the whole story when it comes to Argentinean literature, a vivid and robust field that invites ongoing inquiry unto death. Julio Cortázar, Manuel Mujica Lainez, and Roberto Arlt might any given one of them be an ideal place to set sail and get going. Arlt might be the fellow to get to first, because his lively, anarchic, and giddily transgressive tales probably have the widest general appeal. Argentinian literature resembles most national literatures in that it is normally a bourgeoisie or petite bourgeoisie pursuit. Roberto Arlt was a writer who lived what was by all accounts a somewhat desperate existence maintaining subsistence by the skin of his teeth (not unlike the Knut Hamsun who wrote Hunger a good many years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature). Both of his siblings died young in the slum conditions in which the family lived on the margins of Buenos Aires society, a rapidly expanding city in the early twentieth century that was increasingly wealthy but also beset by poverty, violence, crime, debauchery, and the fractures of miscegenation. Much of Artl's strikingly coarse and baroque literature, very clearly born as it is of lived experience, focuses on desperate people committing desperate acts in desperate situations. It is precisely his marginality that accounts for the nature of his belated reputation. (Roberto Bolaño, supplying the blurb to end all blurbs: "Let's say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ.”) Laugh-out-loud funny or not, I think it is safe to say that the virulent bitterness of Arlt’s masterpiece The Seven Madmen, first published in 1929, is productive of varieties of ecstatic rapture. I suspect more people are liable to be delighted by it than bummed out or horrified. There is something of the very best of crime fiction in the way the novel wallows in the lower depths as though they were a wading pool. The story of our antihero Erdosain is one of the embattled man—prone to both misjudgment and rotten luck—who rises up in confused impotence against the whole of the social order, the last straws having been termination from his job provoked by his embezzling and a humiliating cuckolding at the hands of his wife. Our man falls in with a malign figure knows as the Astrologer who is seeking to mobilize a militant secret society, overseen by a group of vile cretins, whose stated purpose will be to benevolently enslave the many, elevate a few miscreants to the upper echelon, and perhaps dabble in a little biological warfare, the whole undertaking to be financed by an industrial-scale prostitution ring. If Erdosain remains the centre of our attention he does so by and large as a man habitually operating in “the anguish zone.” As far as the torments of consciousness go, the poor bastard has seen and assimilated it all. On homicide: “I feel the need to kill someone. Even if only to take me out of myself.” On suicide: “killing oneself is just the same as going to have a tooth pulled.” Extremely characteristic is his bemoaning of “the unhappiness of the soul which eats at our bones like syphilis.” As in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, this is a book in which a man, half-mad in his dissolution and flailing about at multiple unavailing campaigns of terminal misadventure, spills his miserable guts to a prostitute. Arlt is known for a style that combines a certain street-level vulgarity with a unique, sui generis finesse at the level of craft. Dostoevsky was never this playful, although of course a cat too can be playful with a dead mouse.
