Beatriz Sarlo confronts the now-familiar problem of how to speak of cultural processes that develop within a modern city. She undertakes tasks similar to those of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna and Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, which define modernity as the lived experience of economic modernization and modernism as the artistic response to modernity.
The Buenos Aires of the twenties is a particularly appropriate scenario. Its population doubled between 1911 and 1936, and immigrants gave it a distinctive cultural cast, captured in the lyrics of the tango, with their deployment of lunfardo and urban angst. The era was one of café society, avant-garde manifestoes, literary banquets, dance halls, and the cinema, with its images of the modern woman. With one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America, Buenos Aires was above all a city of ardent readers—of detective fiction, sentimental novels, translations of Gorky and Mme. Blavatsky.
Sarlo focuses on the varied and sometimes contradictory ways in which writers experienced the city and refashioned identities in the midst of vertiginous change. For those with memories of the rural Argentina, nostalgia for the lost Eden permeated their experience of the new. Here the symptomatic text is Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra, with its curious attempt to marry stylistic sophistication and an ethics of manliness inspired by the idealized gaucho. But nostalgia could be deployed in other ways. For the young Borges, Argentinidad would be situated in a borderland, the “orilla,” on the city edges—a frontier that, while productive of nostalgia, also suggested a universal marginality. In contrast to those who evoked nostalgia, there are others who plunged enthusiastically into the modern city. Here Sarlo’s examples are Girondo and Arlt, the first with his irreverent celebiations of the cityscape and the latter the explorer of the lower depths. The city that Arlt described in El juguete rabioso and Los siete locos is perhaps the most disconcerting—a city of the occult, of sudden violence, of conspiracy, of “madmen” whose fantasies feed on popular science and technology, astrology and radical politics.
Sarlo not only brings to life the now-forgotten polemics to which the writing of Borges, Girondo, and Macedonio Fernández was a response but shows how distinct the Argentine avant-gardes were from the European. For Fernández, for instance, the aggressive conquest of the “new” meant liberating literature from its socio-ideological references—in contrast to many avant-garde Europeans, whose project was to break down the barriers that separated art from life. But the twenties and early thirties also saw the emergence of “the new Argentinian,” often the child of immigrants whose entry into Argentine culture came about primarily through journalism. This kind of writer is exemplified by González Tuñón, for whom modernity meant an enlargement of experience and whose work as sports-writer and crime reporter put him in touch with territories hitherto uncharted in literature: the docklands, the thieves, and the opium dens of his poetry.
Yet old problems haunt this modern city. For women in particular, the entry into modern life was hedged with obstacles, and they often gained relative freedom only by strategic masquerade. Norah Lange wrote within a protected, familiar circle. Alfonsina Storni, though overtly feminist, wrote popular and acceptable poetry by drawing on the “readable language of late romanticism and modernism. Victoria Ocampo, according to Sarlo, was the writer who came closest to defying the limits placed on her by social class and gender.
Sarlo concludes, nevertheless, that the writers of the twenties who register modernity’s disruptive force in so many ways failed to answer satisfactorily two questions that seemed to underlie their angst—“Who are we?” and “What is Argentina?”
