On Arlt's broken threads and mixed metaphors

 

The streetlamps shone feebly, their shafts of woolly light only penetrating the dark of the pavements for a couple of yards, while the rest of the suburb remained invisible. Filled with an immense sorrow, Erdosain walked on as disconsolate as a leper.

He felt as though his soul had finally become detached for ever from any human emotion. His anguish was that of a man who carries a fearful cage inside him, where prowling, blood-stained tigers yawn among a heap of fish bones, their remorseless eyes poised for their next leap.

The mixed metaphors in that passage of Roberto Arlt's were oddly cinematic. The foreboding was almost its own parody. From the walk of a leper, to the fearful cage inside Erdosain, to blood-stained, yawning tigers on a heap of fish bones, you've got to hand it to the man. The noir and hysterics combined to produce a quirky animation of a forlorn man as he walked toward the dilapidated home of the Espilas, a family of misers. 

The first time he had seen them in their new surroundings had been a great shock. The Espila family had moved into a ramshackle three-story building near Chacarita, divided up by corrugated iron sheets. From the outside the tenement looked like a huge ocean liner, with kids swarming all over it as if it were a religious commune.

The "huge ocean liner" tenement where kids swarm all over as if it was "a religious commune" – the mixed descriptions teased out the absurdity of life in the underbelly of Buenos Aires. The hint of humor, however cruel, was suppressed but it bubbled to the surface like the hiss of chemicals mixed in a beaker.

The fog blocked off the road beyond sad patches of light around the oil streetlamps. Suddenly, Luciana grasped Erdosain's arm and whispered to him:

"I care for you so much, I really do."

Erdosain shot her an ironic glance. All his anguish had turned to cruelty. He said: "I know." She went on: "I love you so much that just to please you I've studied how a blast furnace and a Bessemer converter work. D'you want me to explain what the joists are for, or how the cooling process is carried out?"

Erdosain gritted his teeth. He stumbled along the street thinking only that man's existence is absurd, and an inexplicable anger rose in him again, directed against this sweet girl who was clutching his arm.

Erdosain rejected Luciana's feelings even if she did everything – even studied the alchemy of making a copper rose – for him. He could not simply imagine a fuck up trying to woo a fuck up like himself.

In the absurd, fucked up world of The Seven Madmen, characters were mostly unemployed or down on their luck. They wallowed in the poisonous pit lake of desperation and destitution. They fired off monologues as if saying their piece of mind was enough to atone for their sins. But their unedited speeches condemned them further to a life sentence. 

"Now I've reached the end. My life is a disaster … I have to create the foulest messes for myself … to commit sin. Don't look at me. Perhaps … listen: people have forgotten the meaning of the word sin … sin is not simply a mistake … I've come to realise that sin is an act by which a man breaks the slender thread still linking him to God. It means God is denied him for ever. Even if after committing the sin that man's life were purer than the purest saint's, he could never reach God again. And I'm going to break the slender thread that connected me to divine charity. I know it. As from tomorrow, I'll be a monster on the face of this earth … just picture it, a little creature … a foetus … a foetus that was somehow living outside its mother's womb … unable to grow … covered in hair … tiny … with no fingernails … walking among men without being one itself … its fragility horrifying all those around it … and yet there's no force on earth capable of restoring it to the lost womb. That's what's going to happen to me tomorrow. I'll cut myself off from God for ever. I'll be alone on this earth. My soul and me, just the two of us. With infinity in front of us. Alone for ever. Night and day … under a yellow sun. Can you picture it? Infinity growing all the time … a yellow sun up above, and the soul which cut itself off from divine charity wandering alone and blind under that yellow sun."

Erdosain's anguish before committing murder had made him philosophical and voluble. But his self-picturing of a fetus detached from its mother's womb was the summary statement of the negated status of Arlt's lost wanderers. People lost to the womb, cut off from charity and from the source of its life force. 

In Arlt, possession of life is malum prohibitum. Unlinked from God, his characters were walking dead sinners whose mere existence was itself a crime, or a sin. In the bleak, rank world of Arlt's novel, how does one create beauty from the savagery of existence? Remove the last traces of humor and the paradox is suffocating.

 

Notes on The Seven Madmen

Blighted landscapes, plaintive sights, the mise-en-scène in Roberto Arlt's novel cried out for release from the muck of doom. At the same time they aestheticized the lowlife. What redemptive power could be extracted from destitution but romantic destitution.

As the plaintive strains of a lowlife tango rose from the instruments, all the crooks accompanied it with their rage and misfortunes. The silence was like a many-handed monster that raised a dome of sound over heads drooping on to marble tables. Who knows what their thoughts were! And that huge, terrible dome pierced all their hearts, amplifying the mournful sounds of the guitar and bandoneon until there was something sublime in a whore's suffering, or in the oppressive boredom of prison when the inmate imagines his friends living life to the full on the outside.

The power of the prose derived from the piling of derelict images one after another, the recognition and acceptance of helplessness seeming to be the only recourse for a wasted life to make sense of the wasteland of terrorism and criminality bedeviling the Argentinian landscape.

Faces and foul-smelling gloom confirmed the lowlife atmosphere. Some were long and drawn-out, as if their owners were being strangled, their mouths gaping open, their lips swollen and floppy as sausages. Black men with porcelain eyes and gleaming white teeth between thick blubbery lips were touching up youngsters, grinding their jaws with pleasure; petty crooks and informers who looked like tigers, with sloping foreheads and unwavering gazes.

There's a lot to unpack in the string of metaphors here. To put it mildly, Arlt courted the obscene, even referencing characters from the controversial novels of Xavier de Montepin. The long philosophical speeches and exchanges were characteristically brilliant, offering a window not only into a character's thought processes but into the socioeconomic and political turmoils that created the the novelist's conception of reality. They were also a warning to the present of the dangers of veering into populism, autocracy, and fundamentalism. Through the character of the Astrologer, the novelist had the uncanny way of describing how peddlers of fake news and conspiracy theories can have a powerful grip on the masses.

It just goes to show that the people of this and every generation have an absolute need to believe in something. And if we can get a newspaper to back us, we can perform miracles. There are lots of them desperate for something sensational like this to sell. And we'll supply all these people hungry for marvels with a magnificent god, embellished with stories we can copy from the Bible ...

***

Or do you reckon that those numbskulls would move an inch if they weren't driven on by magnificent lies? I've given it so much thought! That's why the Astrologer's theory is such a stroke of genius: men only respond to lies. He gives lies the consistency of truth; people who would never have so much as budged to get anything, guys who have become totally cynical and desperate, come to life again in the truth of his lies. [...] With his falsehoods, the Astrologer seems extraordinary to us, but he's no such thing ... or rather, he is, he is ... because he's not after personal gain from his lies; yet he's not, because all he's doing is applying an age-old principle that every swindler and social dreamer has always used. If one day his life story gets written, those who read it with any sense of judgement will say: he was great because the methods he employed to achieve his ideals were those available to any charlatan. And what we see as extraordinary and disturbing is simply the fear of weak, uninspired minds who believe success only comes from complicated and mysterious processes rather than from anything simple. And yet you know as well as I do that the greatest gestures are the simplest, like Columbus and his egg.

The Astrologer's obit was a fitting nail to a life devoted to deceit and misinformation. And the invocation of biblical stories could remind one of the speechifying bloodthirsty Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. But really, the closest analog to the Astrologer's brand of anarchism and wayward utopia is probably the mass murderer Thanos of The Avengers fame.

Ending that argument with the anecdotal story of the egg of Columbus was a stroke of genius. But coming from an unreliable writer, that seemed to be a double-edged imagery. In any case, how truth-seekers could be so vulnerable as to latch on to lies they hear from false experts on social media was a spot-on analysis of the new world order.

For all its negative imagery and preponderance of sacrilegious poetry, what The Seven Madmen seemed to be mapping out (satirically or not; farcical or not) was the origin and spread of terrorism and anarchism through the establishment of a secret dangerous society composed of frustrated individuals.

"I don't see any point in repeating what we all know already and have agreed on in individual meetings ... that is, the plan to organise a secret society to be paid for out of both moral and immoral ventures. We are all in agreement on that, aren't we? What do you think (I have a liking for geometry) if we call the groups of our society 'cells'?"

"That's what they're called in Russia," said the Major. "And those in any one cell should not know the members of any other."

Behind the formation of such group, Arlt was hinting at the burning human discontent and demotivation that drove a band of seven madmen to come together and bring havoc to the world. The novel of ideas did not make any direct explanation how these like-minded individuals come to be.

But again, we go back to the blighted landscapes and we see how the hard work and industry of human work force contributed to the built assets of capitalism.

"And yet everything went on as before. The sun shone over the fields: we'd left the meat-packing plants behind, the tallow and soap factories, the glass and iron foundries, the stockyards with cattle sniffing at the posts, the avenues still to be properly surfaced, strewn with rubble and full of ruts. And then beyond Lantis we came on the awful spectacle of Remedios de Escalada, with its ghastly redbrick roundhouses and their blackened openings, where locomotives shunted to and fro under the arches, while in the distance, between the tracks, gangs of poor wretches were shovelling ballast or hauling railway sleepers."

Further on still, in among a straggling vegetation of plane trees choked by soot and petrol fumes, stood a diagonal line of red cottages where the railway company employees lived, with their tiny gardens, shutters grimy from the smoke, paths of cinders and ashes.

There was the beginnings of modern industrial complex, the pinnacle of achievement of humans on earth. That backdrop of furnaces, "cinders and ashes", told us a lot about modern life in Argentina in early 20th century. Perhaps a work arrangement that gave rise to cash economy, widening income gap, and modern inequalities. Perhaps a prelude to truth-seeking and terrorism.

***

All quotes are from the translation by Nick Caistor (Serpent's Tail, 2015). I'm on page 216 out of 304, excluding the translator and Roberto Bolaño's afterwords.

Read for the Spanish Lit Month 2020, curated by Stu at Winstonsdad's Blog and Richard at Caravana de recuerdos.

The Seven Madmen

The Seven Madmen (1929) by Roberto Arlt, translated by Nick Caistor, afterwords by Nick Caistor and Roberto Bolaño (Serpent's Tail, 2015)



I didn't think I shall ever finish The Seven Madmen, Roberto Arlt's infamous novel, in time for the end of the world. I tried to pace myself, reading a few pages at a time, but the virus of desolation spread rapidly to contaminate my buoyant spirit. I'm far from the finish line on this one. I'm hardly halfway through the novel. Definitely not your average picker-upper read.

Remo Erdosain, the protagonist, might as well be frolicking in purgatory. At the start of the novel we found him down and hard on his luck, having been accused of stealing money from his company and being given an ultimatum to settle the money he stole. As he walked the streets of Buenos Aires, trying to find a way out of his sticky situation, he encountered a gallery of characters, in various states of derangement. How bleak the outlook for Erdosain. The very air he breathed seemed saturated with depression and desperation. Erdosain was fucked. The novel was packed with an emotional wallop.

Let us say, for the sole purpose of comparison, that Erdosain is a citizen under the regime of Kim Jong-un. In this case, of course, Buenos Aires is Pyongyang, and Argentina is North Korea. That was an unoriginal approach. But you get the drift.

What's being paraded were hollow, cartoon characters, defined only by their anguish and revulsion. Characters wallowing in monotony and boredom. Even their flashes of paranoia and distrust were predictable. Wretchedness piled on top of wretchedness. What's worse than a damned soul?

He felt as though blood was pouring from every cranny of his soul – as if it was being torn by a drill. With his powers of reasoning numbed, stunned with anguish, he set out on a wild search for a brothel. It was then he experienced the horror of empty nothingness, that luminous horror like the dazzling brilliance of the sun as it bounces off the curved surface of a salt-flat.

The novel was full of these brilliant metaphors of light and darkness. The same light that blinded Meursault in Camus's L'Étranger or Tajomaru in Akutagawa's "In a Grove". In fact the novel was swimming in perverse metaphors.

Here's another example: "It seemed to Erdosain that each worry was an owl that flitted from one branch of his suffering to the next." That was the formulation of translator Nick Caistor who said he tried to avoid straightening the repetitions, lack of grammatical accuracy, and wayward logic of Arlt.

Los sietes locos was in fact translated twice in English, the first one in 1984 by Naomi Lindstrom, published by Godine. She translated the same sentence snappily as: "He felt each spasm of grief hopping like an owl from branch to branch in his misery." That sounded more wayward to me.

Another sentence comparison:

Lindstrom:
Like a horse with its guts torn out by a bull, mucking around in its own viscera, every step he took drained his lungs of their lifeblood.

Caistor:
Just as horses who have had their guts ripped out by a bull slither about in their own intestines, so every step that Erdosain took left him with a little less lifeblood in his lungs.

The violence in that sentence was palpable and exact and scientific. At the level of a sentence, Arlt conjured the devil in the details. One's life was at stake in each Arlt sentence. A bullet fired into the chest, close to the heart, gave a life or death sentence: "His life was saved only due to the fact that this organ contracted at the precise moment the bullet whizzed by." Whew!

What Erdosain was longing for was redemption for his soul, but we were almost sure he would not get it in this life.

"What am I doing with my life?" he would ask himself, trying with that question to shed light on the origins of this anxiety which led him to long for an existence where the next day would not be merely time measured out in a repetition of today, but something different and totally unexpected, like in the plots of North American films, where yesterdays tramp suddenly becomes today's secret society boss, and the gold-digging secretary turns out to be multimillionairess in disguise.

Let us say, it was a fictional fulfillment of desire. Erdosain was longing for fiction, for something unpredictable, "something different and totally unexpected". Wasn't that an existentialist objective?

Arlt's world was a beehive of lowlifes in the entrails of Buenos Aires. Whores and gangsters and tormented souls rubbed shoulders with pseudo-anarchists and terrorists. There's a fuzzy destabilization plot to rid the world of the bourgeois army. Society was a sewer connected to the latrines of emo individuals. Still, the perplexity and the questioning mode of Erdosain made for a novel of pathetic grandeur.

Lindstrom (81):
“I’m nothing in everyone’s eyes. But still, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or murder Barsut, suddenly I’m everything, the man who exists, the man for whom generations of criminologists have prepared punishments, jails, and theories… That’s really weird! And yet, only crime can affirm my existence, just as evil is all that affirms the presence of man on earth.. Really, this is all so weird. Still, despite everything, there is darkness and mankind’s soul is sad. Infinitely sad. But that can’t be how life is. If tomorrow I figured out why that can’t be how life is, I’d pinch myself and disinflate like a balloon spewing out all these lies I’m filled with.”

Caistor (88-89):
I'm nothing to anyone. And yet, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or kill Barsut, then I become everything, a man who exists, a man who generations of legal experts have prepared punishments, gaols, and theories for. ... That's so strange! And yet it is only thanks to crime that I can affirm my existence, just as it is only evil which affirms man's presence on earth. ... All this is very strange. And yet despite everything, darkness does exist, and man's soul is full of sorrow. Infinite sorrow. But that cannot be all there is to life. Something inside me tells me life cannot be like that. If I could only discover the precise reason why life cannot be that way, I could stick a pin in myself, and all this hot air of lies would be deflated like a balloon.

Roberto Bolaño (the poor Chilean) supplied a back cover blurb and afterword to the 2015 UK edition. The latter was the infamous essay, or speech, from Between Parentheses where Bolaño described three strains of doom-virus infecting the Argentinean literary canon. The essay was hardly a flattering portrait of Arlt's novelistic enterprise. Read properly (i.e., literally), Bolaño was saying Arlt could not be a basis for an Argentinean literary school or movement because of his pure fatalism. For him, Arlt's art was infected. He compared Arlt to Onetti. Both "[opted] for the parched and silent abyss." Arlt's writing represented a desertification of literature that guaranteed the destruction of literature. That may or may not be exactly a damning judgement, but it was an ambivalent assessment of Arlt's fiction. And yet he considered Arlt one of the "exceptional writers and literary giants" in Argentina. It was a love-hate judgement.

I think Bolaño was more irked by Ricardo Piglia's championing of Arlt's flavor of fiction than by Arlt himself, whom he called blameless. In fact, he was wary of (false) prophets or literary apostles or disciples. He could not bear César Aira trumpeting Osvaldo Lamborghini's legacy. The literature of doom as represented by the two Osvaldos (Soriano and Lamborghini) and Arlt (to some extent) is a self-destructive enterprise. The language of novels in this mold devours itself.

Bolaño delivered the speech "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom" in December 2002 in Barcelona at the Kósmopolis International Festival of Literature. He prefaced his reading as follows:

Argentine literature is so rich, so powerful, that in the end it seemed more fitting to focus [my piece] exclusively on it; on Argentine fiction basically. ... The piece is ... limited to the drift of Argentine literature since Borges's death, basically. Sadly, this gangster literature, or literature of doom is the most vital, the richest. Personally, it doesn't excite me much, mostly because I'm sick of the literature of doom, but there's no doubt it's the most vital, and that it has the most influence on the rest of Latin American literature. The literature of doom, as I've said, is a kin of sub-world or infra-world outside the law.

The self-contradictions in those opening statements were glaring. Who needs a self-help book if one is sick of the literature of doom?



P.S. Mad covers of English translations

1. The 1984 Lindstrom translation. Talk about literalism in depicting seven mad persons. Almost cool, if only for the rapacious swimmers in the background.

2. The first edition from UK publisher Serpent's Tail. The glum look.





3. The 2015 edition of Serpent's Tail. Nothing remarkable here.

4. The US edition from NYRB (2015). The cover is more apt for Melville's Moby-Dick.







Passages from Naomi Lindstrom's translation of The Seven Madmen quoted above are taken from Never Stop Reading. All Bolaño quotes are from Between Parentheses, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Caravana de recuerdos hosts The 2015 Argentinean (& Algerian) Literature(s) of Doom until the end of the month.