0

The Ironic Apocalypse:

Language and Rhetorical Politics in the

of Leopoldo Marechal c

Norman Cheadle Department of Hispanic Studies McGill University, Montreal May, 1996

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. c Copyright@> by Norman Cheadle 1996 National Ubrary Bibliotheque nationale of Canada duCanada Acquisitions and Direction des acquisitions et Bibliographic Services Branch des services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa, Ontario Ottawa (Ontario) K1AON4 K1AON4 Your file Votre refl!lrence

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0 CONTENTS

Abstract (in English, French, and Spanish versions) ...... 3

Introduction ...... 7

1. The structure of Addn Buenosayres: the of diremption ...... 35

2. The Book of Revelation as subtext: Adan' s personal apocalypse ...... 58

3. Metahistory and the cycle of language ...... 76

4. Light versus Darkness: versus science ...... 107

5. Adan's poetics in practice and theory ...... 123

6. Schultze: the avant-garde charlatan as teacher ...... 150

7. The Last Judgment as carnival: "Viaje a la oscura ciudad de c Cacodelphia" ...... 165 8. Rhetorical politics in Cacodelphia ...... 180

9. Mise en abyme: the story of Don Ecumenico ...... 208

10. The apocalyptic : El Banquete de Severo Arctingelo ...... 216

11. Samuel Tesler's last word inMegaf6n o la guerra ...... 257

Conclusion ...... 269

Works by Marechal ...... 287

Criticism on Marechal ...... 287

General Bibliography ...... 293

0 c 3 ABSTRACT

This is an investigation into Leopoldo Marechal's cycle of apocalyptic novels,

comprised by his masterpiece Adan Buenosayres (1948) and its dialectical sequel El

Banquete de Severo Arcangelo (1965). The latter novel, recounting a mock-apocalypse,

demands attention mainly for the light it sheds on the former. In addition, a thematically

relevant section of the posthumous Megaf6n o la guerra (1970) is treated herein as a coda

to the apocalyptic cycle.

It is argued that Marechal' s novels are informed by an attitude of ironic skepticism.

Breaking with the line of criticism that reads Marechal as a Christian apologist, this study

fmds that the of Adtin Buenosayres does not achieve redemption through the c Divine Word; on the contrary, he loses his illusions about the efficacy of the Logos. Thus his story represents an ironic inversion of the apocalyptic romance of redemption. By

parodying the book of Revelation, in which the Word intervenes to save the faithful,

Marechal embarks on a ludic exploration into the nature of language. Through the

monologues and the dialogues of his characters, Marechal demonstrates various

fundamental strategies with which human beings construct their world-views from

language. The discourses resulting from these different rhetorical strategies come into

and polarize into a dichotomy: poetry and metaphysics challenge the hegemony

of scientific description. Marechal treats this contest with hilarity, up a mock­

Manichean struggle between good and evil. Employing a strategy of double ,

Marechal privileges neither one side nor the other. His irony plays not only on the

0 differences between verbal codes, but also on the gap between language and reality. 0 4

RESUME

Cette these est une etude du cycle de romans apocalyptiques de Leopoldo

Marechal, cycle qui se compose d'Adan Buenosayres (1948) et sa suite dialectique, El

Banquete de Severo Arcangelo (1965). Ce dernier, qui reconte une apocalypse burlesque,

se signale surtout grace a la lumiere qu'il fait sur le premier. En plus, est consideree ici,

a titre de coda du cycle apocalyptique, la partie de 1' oeuvre posthume, Megafon, o la

guerra (1970) qui s'y rapporte par son .

Nous proposons que les romans de Marechal sont informes par l'ironie sceptique.

Rompant avec la critique qui tient Marechal pour un apologiste chretien, cette etude - conclut que le protagoniste d'Adan Buenosayres n'atteint pas le salut grace a la Parole Divine; au contraire, ses illusions sur l'efficacite du Logos se dissipent. Ainsi, son

histoire represente une inversion ironique du recit apocalyptique de la redemption. En

parodiant l'Apocalypse, ou la Parole fait figure de Chevalier celeste venant a la·rescousse

des fideles, Marechal entreprend une recherche ludique sur le langage. Par le monologue

et les dialogues entre ses personnages, Marechal montre diverses strategies fondamentales

grace auxquelles les etres humains construisent leurs visions du monde apartir du langage.

Les discours qui resultent de ces differentes strategies rhetoriques entrent en conflit et se

polarisent: la poesie et la metaphysique rivalisent avec la description scientifique.

Marechal traite ce conflit de facon comique en creant une lutte pseudo-manicheenne entre c le bien et le maL En se servant d'une strategie d'ironie a double tranchant, Marechal ne c 5 privilegie aucun des deux poles opposes. Son ironie exploite non seulement les differences

entre les codes verbaux mais aussi I' ecart entre le langage et la realite.

RESUMEN

Esta investigaci6n versa sobre el ciclo de novelas apocalipticas de Leopoldo

Marechal, ciclo en que su obra maestra Adan Buenosayres (1948) va seguida de una

continuaci6n dialectica, El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo (1965). Esta ultima novela, que

narra un burlesco, exige nuestra atenci6n principalmente por la luz que arroja

en la primera. De la p6stuma Megafon o la guerra (1970), por otra parte, s6lo un trozo, c por su pertinencia tematica, es tratado aquf en calidad de coda al ciclo apocaliptico. Se arguye que las novelas de Marechal acusan una actitud de escepticismo ir6nico.

Rompiendo con la linea critica que lee a Marechal como a un apologista cristiano, este

estudio encuentra que el protagonista de Adtin Buenosayres no alcanza la redenci6n gracias

al Verbo Divino, sino que, al contrario, pierde su creencia ilusa en la eficacia del Logos.

Asi la trayectoria de Adan representa una inversion ir6ca de la apocaliptica historia rosa

de redenci6n. Parodiando el Apocalipsis de San Juan, en que el Verbo interviene como

un Caballero celeste para rescatar a los fieles, Marechal emprende una indagaci6n ludica

de la naturaleza del lenguaje. Por medio del mon6logo y de los dhilogos entre sus

personajes, Marechal demuestra varias estrategias fundamentales que los seres humanos

empleamos para forjar con lenguaje nuestras representaciones del mundo. Los discursos c que surgen de estas distintas estrategias ret6ricas entran en conflicto y se polarizan en una c 6 dicotomia: la poesia y la metafisica se sublevan contra la hegemonia de la descripci6n

cientifica. Marechal trata esta contienda con hilaridad, armando una lucha de

maniqueismo burlesco entre el bien y le mal. Empleando una estrategia de ironia doble,

Marechal no privilegia a ninguno de Ios dos contrincantes. Su ironia no s6lo juega con

Ios desajustes entre diferentes c6digos verbales, sino tambien con la escisi6n entre el

lenguaje y la realidad. c

0 c 7 L' ironie a penetre toutes les langues mod ernes ... elle a penetre les mots et les formes ... L'ironie s'est glissee partout, est attestee sous tous ses aspects -­ depuis l'ironie infune, imperceptible, jusqu'a la raillerie declaree. L'homme modeme ne proclame plus, ni declame, il parle, et il parle restrictivement. Les genres declamatoires se preservent principalement dans des moments constituifs du roman, des moments parodiques ou semi-parodiques. [ ... ] Les sujets parlants des genres declamatoires nobles --pn~tres, prophetes, predicateurs, juges, chefs, patriarches, etc.-- ont disparu de la vie. Tous, ils ont ete remplaces par l'ecrivain, le simple ecrivain, devenu l'heritier de leur style.

--Mikhail Bakhtin1

La bestia humana, la rnas civilizada de las fieras, es c la bestia del Apocalipsis. --Augusto Roa Bastos, Vigilia del Almirantt?

Introduction

The following dissertation is an attempt to interpret the novels of Leopoldo

Marechal by approaching them through the intertext of the Revelation to John, the final

book of the Christian scriptural canon, as well as the legacy of this text in the imagination

and discourse of the West. It will be shown that Marechal parodies the Book of

Revelation, as well as the apocalyptic genre to which it belongs, in order to turn

apocalypse into an ironic with which to problematize the nature of language. c Marechal wrote three novels: Addn Buenosayres (1948), El Banquete de Severo 8 0 ' Arcangelo (1965), and Megaf6n, o la guerra (1970).3 The first is both the longest and the

most important of Marechal' s oeuvre, and as such it receives the most attention in this

study. The second novel is not so important in itself as for the light it sheds on Adtin

Buenosayres and thus on the significance of Marechal' s work in general. The third novel

breaks with the apocalyptic cycle formed by the first two novels and therefore requires

only incidental treatment in this investigation.

The term "apocalypse" in this thesis may be understood on three related levels.

First of all, it refers to the Judeo-Christian version of the of cosmic destruction,

followed by renewal or redemption. Upon this myth of remote Indo-European origin,

Zoroastrianism impressed the good-evil duality characteristic of the apocalyptic genre of c religious narrative. Apocalypticism made deep incursions into Jewish thought, as for example in the Book of Daniel. Heir to this tradition, the Christian Gospel outlines a

single apocalyptic narrative of which John's Revelation or Apocalypse is the final textual

flourish.

However, the New Testament appropriates the Old Testament into its own narrative

design, turning the trajectory from Genesis to Revelation into a single story about man's

Fall and final Redemption. Secondly, then, the apocalypse means the happy ending of this

romance whose protagonist is humankind. 4 The apocalyptic romance has been given two

basic interpretations in the history of Christianity. The original version is chiliastic: the

primitive Christians, convinced of the imminent collapse of the order represented by the

Roman Empire, wished actively to clear the way for the Kingdom of God on earth. As c the Church militant became an established institution, however, it found this sort of 9

revolutionary zeal inconvenient. Origen and then Augustine read Revelation anagogically

as the journey of the soul to the City of God, postponing the end of the world to some

indefinite future (Cohn 13; Tuveson 17). The two views reflect contrary positions vis-a-

vis the established order: an oppressed people's apocalypse is polemical, historical,

revolutionary; the priestly apocalypse is spiritual, a-historical, and a-political.

Thirdly, the term denotes the salient moments of the visionary drama written by

John of Patmos, including the battle of Armageddon, in which the struggle between good

and evil is decided once and for all, and the ensuing Last Judgment. The heroic

protagonist of these episodes and others is Christ conceived as the Word of God. John's

insistent protagonization of the divine Logos becomes particularly fertile ground for

Marechal's praxis of parody; the seer's logolatry serves as a to the novelist's irony.

Irony and parody, as these terms are used in the present work, have a

complementary relationship. The classical concept of irony as a rhetorical figure is simple

antiphrasis, in which one thing is said while the opposite is meant. Marechal' s irony,

however, is better served by D.C. Muecke's definition: "the art of irony is the art of

saying something without really saying it" (5), the strategies of this art being multifarious.

When a writer's work is permeated by irony, as is Marechal's, it evidences a skeptical

attitude before all human behaviour and discourse. The German Romantics raised irony

to a quasi-philosophical stance, and championed it as an artistic means of transcending the

contradictions confronting human intelligence. 5 Their legacy in late modernity is still with

us, especially in the theory of postmodernity, which is itself an ironic notion. 6 About

0 irony in general, J.A. Cuddon observes that most of its forms "involve the perception or 10

awareness of a discrepancy or incongruity between words and their meaning, or between

actions and their results, or between appearance and reality. In all cases there may be an

element of the absurd and the paradoxical. "7 Marechal' s irony highlights above all the

discrepancy between language and reality, the divorce not between signifier and signified

but rather between the signified and the ungraspable otherness of reality. For Marechal,

a proposition such as "In the beginning was the Word" can only be uttered, or rather

repeated, ironically. His irony presupposes an agnosticism, in the epistemological sense

of this term, which he refrains from expressing directly.

Parody as a literary technique serves the ironist well. Linda Hutcheon's definition

is elegant and precise: "Parody, therefore, is a form of imitation, but imitation c characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text ... Parody is, in another formulation, repetition with a critical distance" {6). Not only specific texts

but entire discourses and genres can be parodied. Hutcheon's proviso that parodic irony

does not necessarily mock the parodied text should be borne in mind. Marechal's writing

parodies the language and stylistic conventions of many genres of discourse --prophetic,

, philosophical, scientific, etc.-- without necessarily intending to heap ridicule upon

any of them. In other words, his irony and parody are not necessarily satirical. The

satirist's intention is usually corrective {Hutcheon 56). From his position as the holder of

the truth, whether it be , religious, philosophical or esthetic, the satirist ironically

or sarcastically scorns his target that it may be admonished. To use Hutcheon's

terminology, the "ethos" or pragmatic intention of irony and parody is not always clearly c marked, whereas in it usually is. Irony and parody are characterized by an 0 11 ambiguity which the reader may choose to resolve according to his or her prejudices or

simply to enjoy in Roland Barthes's salacious manner. There is also, of course, the option

of reading a parodic text as satirical, again depending on the mindset of the reader. My

reading of Marechal emphasizes the elements of irony and parody, fmding corrective satire

only occasionally. For that matter, Marechal Is own concept of satire seems to admit the

possibility of moral generosity. The last sentence of the prologue to Adan Buenosayres

affirms that "la satira puede ser una forma de caridad, si se dirige a Ios humanos con la

sonrisa que tal vez los angeles esbozan ante la locura de Ios hombres" (AB. 10). These

figurative "angels" suggest an intelligence endowed with a divine sense of irony and

humour, recalling the god-like posture of Romantic irony. At the same time, Marechal c evokes this hackneyed figure in a spirit of ludic parody. Parody and satire are often interactive modes. Due to this interdependence, it is

not surprising that there has been in a longstanding confusion between

the two terms. 8 Undertaking a fairly exhaustive analysis of this problem, Elzbieta

Sklodowska concludes pragmatically: "Habra que resignarse, pues, a la idea de que la

parodia tiende a registros muy variados y cada intento de esclarecer su especificidad tendni

que partir de un texto concreto" (5). This sensible advice will be heeded in my approach

to Marechal' s parody of Revelation.

Another serviceable, if less elegant, definition of parody is that of Margaret A.

Rose: "parody may be defmed in general terms as the comic refunctioning of preformed

linguistic or artistic material" (Parody: Ancient 52), where "refunctioning" means to give

a new set of functions to the parodied materiaL Marechal Is novels appropriate the text of c 12 Revelation and make it function in new ways. As a pre-text to those novels, the

Apocalypse lends form and meaning to bothAddn Buenosayres and Banquete, even though

that form and meaning are ironically inverted. As a subtext in the former novel, John's

Revelation runs beneath the narrative and at crucial moments of the it is foregrounded

so as to illuminate, usually ironically, the significance of what is happening. Secondly,

also in Adan Buenosayres, Marechal parodies the fundamental light/dark or good/evil

dualism informing apocalypticism by pitting mutually hostile forms of discourse against

one another. This kind of parody, employing the strategy of Muecke' s "double irony" in

which two equally invalid points of view cancel each other out (24), sends up the

unyielding polemicism that is characteristic of all apocalyptic and its legacy in Western c political discourse both on the "right" and the "left." What makes Revelation a particularly fruitful target for Marechal' s parody, however, is its pronounced metaliterary

quality. John of Patmos has constructed his text, in Northrop Frye' s words, as "a mosaic

of allusions to the Old Testament" (Great 135). Furthermore, the chief protagonist of his

cosmic drama is the Word. Since, as Rose observes, parody is itself metaliterary by

nature, 9 its on a text like Revelation produces a very rich intertextuality, which

besides affording literary pleasure, constitutes a complex exploration of the nature of

language and .

Adan Buenosayres is a poet with naive religious-philosophical pretensions who, in

the name of poetry and metaphysics, rebels against modernismo (AB 147), by which he c means not the literary movement that went by that name, but rather the late 19th- and early c 13 20th-century world-view based on scientific positivism and the doctrine of progress. In

love with a girl called Solveig Amundsen, Adan the metaphysical poet attributes to his

love a transcendental significance; in writing about her, he fatuously imitates Dante's

Neoplatonic treatment of Beatrice. Solveig spurns Adan and accepts the suit of Lucio

Negri, a defender of the ''modernism" that Adan despises. This is less tragic than it is

mock-tragic, and the suggested by the names of the --Adam as the

symbol of Man is beleaguered by Lucio Negri or the black light of the Dark Age, who

obscures the light of the Sun of true wisdom (the name Solveig contains the Spanish word

for sun)-- is in fact allegory parodied. The story of Adan's disappointment in love and his

ensuing crisis becomes a hilarious send-up of everything that Adan purports to believe in. c Adan, habitual reader of Revelation, experiences his crisis as an apocalypse -- a and a personal Last Judgment. But it becomes a carnivalized Last Judgment

when Adan is taken on a journey to the hell of Cacodelphia by his friend and mentor, the

feckless astrologer Schultze, who calls himself the Neogogue or new spiritual leader. The

Neogogue ends by revealing to Adan nothing more than the Paleogogue, a hideous,

shapeless mollusc representing both the source and terminus of all constructs of human

language.

In my reading of the novel, Adan's mock-apocalyptic experience represents the

collapse of Platonist idealism, which in turn depends on a particular of language

based on the of metonymy. 10 Through metonymy. the logos is elevated to a

metaphysical category that stands a priori to concrete reality. Historically, the Greek c logos became the divine Word of John the Apostle, a notion that flows into the 0 14 Neoplatonic realism of Augustine, for whom the res intelligibiles are "the constitutive

principles of things" (Cam:, Nominalists and Realists 1). Adan mistakenly seeks

redemption through the Christian-Platonist Word, i.e. through metonymic language, and

finds instead the opposite or diremption, an unbridgeable chasm between his desire and

reality. Thus Adan' s story ironically inverts the Christian narrative of redemption. The

divine Word is not a saviour, as in Revelation 19:11, where it is dramatically pictured as

a knight descending from heaven on a white horse. But if the word is not redemptive, our

understanding of reality nonetheless depends on the way we use language to represent

reality to ourselves. Our representation of reality is what we call the world, and the

twentieth-century world in which Adan fmds himself is the construct of a different mode c of language, i.e. the descriptive language favoured by science. Marechal's ironic strategy pits one rhetoric against another, poetry and metaphysics on one side against science on

the other. Rhetorical strategies are humorously exposed, inverted, parodied. The writing

of the novel is thus a performance in the ironic mode, with the result that its significance

is also riddled with ambiguity, beginning and ending with Adan's apparent death. In my

view, the death of Adan represents the collapse of his pretentious poeticizing and his

superannuated, Platonist metaphysics. In a word, his symbolic death stands for his loss

of linguistic innocence, the destruction of his world by irony. In a way, then, Marechal' s

irony is "apocalyptic" in the dual meaning of this word: in the etymological sense, it

"unveils" and thus, in the word's more popular usage, it destroys (imaginary) worlds .

. The same apocalyptic irony becomes much more explicit in El Banquete de Severo c Arcangelo (1965). A wealthy industrialist in the grip of a pseudo-mystical mania, Severo c 15 Arc:ingelo prepares at his private villa an apocalyptic "Banquet" for a group of elegidos,

who, after undergoing the ordeal of this event, are to accede to a mythical space called the

"Cuesta del Agua." Severo's concept of "Banquet" seems to allude to the "marriage

supper of the Lamb" envisioned in Revelation 19:9 (Smith 87), but also to Trimalchio's

Supper in Petronius's Satyricon (B 114). The Banquet is thus both sublime and

grotesque, 11 and this ambivalence produces a text of baroque irony in which the language

of the sublime, irreversibly contaminated by the grotesque, is emptied of meaning.

In the prologue to Banquete, Marechal makes it clear that this second novel is a

thematic and dialectical sequel to the flrst. In effect, Banquete synthesizes and clarifies

the discursive structure common to both novels. Thus, to some extent, it is appropriate c to read the flrst novel in light of the second. Explicitly dramatized in Banquete is the theory of "metahistory," a term flrst proposed by Schultze in Adan Buenosayres (213).

According to this theory, history moves through a descending series of ages, analogous

to Hesiod's golden, silver, bronze, and iron ages. The succession of the ages is

punctuated by cataclysms, and the dark age of iron ends in an apocalypse, whereupon the

entire cycle is repeated. Severo Arc:ingelo' s enterprise consists of an elaborate drama-

tization of this metahistorical cycle. But, as I shall try to show, in both Banquete and

Addn Buenosayres, Marechal intends metahistory to stand for an analogous cycle of

language: a golden age of poetry, a silver age of priestly metaphysics, a bronze age of

scientific description, and an iron age of irony. The mode of language that rules the

writing of both novels is that of irony. Thus one cannot take too seriously Severo

Arcangelo' s ostensible aim to bring about the consummation of the world as it exists in 0 16 the present iron age in order that a new golden age may be inaugurated. He is not only

a retired metallurgist, but also an amateur actor with a predilection for farce. As the

director of the enterprise of the Banquet, he serves as a burlesque puppet manipulated by

Marechal himself, who wishes to problematize the rhetorical foundations of world-views

by working within the ironic mode. What Severo Arcangelo achieves with his Banquet

is left untold; what Marechal accomplishes is a novel that ironically folds in upon itself,

leaving the reader with nothing. The possibilities of irony are exploited to the point of

exhaustion. Irony fmally becomes sterile, and the "dark age" of ironic language thus

reaches its consummation.

Marechal's third and final novel, Megafon o la guerra (1970), breaks with this c apocalyptic cycle, but contains a significant coda to it. Samuel Tesler, a from Adan Buenosayres, reappears in Megafon to expound his "Teoria y Practica de la

Catastrofe." A kind of inspired buffoon, Samuel gives apocalypse, metahistory, and other

related themes a final burlesque treatment, not without making significant allusions to the

problem of language. But on the whole, by the time he writes Megafon, Marechal has put

aside his metalinguistic preoccupation, and his chief concern lies rather in the politics and

history of .

Marechal gives his reader plenty of signals to indicate his ironic and parodic modus

operandi. The "Pr6logo indispensable" to Adtin Buenosayres is as rife with tricks as it is

with keys to understanding the noveL The narrator of the main body of the novel c addresses the reader in provocative language, challenging him or her to decipher his game. In Banquete, the first-person narrator is shown from the beginning to be patently c 17 unreliable. Indeed, neither he nor any of the other characters is dignified with any amount

of verisimilitude. Instead, Marechal seems deliberately to flaunt and mock their artificial,

literary status. These considerations will inform the present reading of Marechal's novels

in the hope of advancing the state of criticism on Marechal.

One major stumbling-block encountered by every student of Marechal must be

confronted at the outset. The problem arises when one tries to read the novels of

Marechal as an extension of the discourse of Leopoldo Marechal the man and Argentine

citizen. Marechal was a self-professed Christian, having passed from Catholicism to an

obscure evangelical sect in the last years of his life. 12 He was also a committed Peronist. c These positions, pertaining respectively to private and public life, should not necessarily be attributed to the implied author of the novels. On the contrary, one must distinguish

between Marechal the man and Marechal the writer. To read Marechal the novelist as a

Christian-Peronist prophet declaiming the truth of Argentina and prescribing her future,

requires that one wilfully ignore the texts of the novels themselves. For these in fact

parody the Christian scriptures (especially Revelation), satirize Christian preachers, 13 and

make a mockery of messianic programs for the Argentine nation of the Peronist type. 14

Moreover, in dealing with the man himself, or at least with the persona Marechal

presented in interviews, one must be on one's guard. What is one to make, for example,

of the Leopoldo Marechal who says that he is a "cristiano viejo y antiguo peronista"

(Andres 57)? For anyone familiar with the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, as c Marechal most certainly was, the phrase "cristiano viejo" evokes the spectre of the 18

religious intolerance towards "cristianos nuevos" (converted Jews and Moors, and their

descendants) and the almost paranoid obsession with "limpieza de sangre" that prevailed

in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish society. By calling himself a "cristiano viejo,"

Marechal is certainly being provocative. In using such a loaded term, does he wish to

present himself as a racial and religious bigot? Or is this a kind of sly joke with which he

implicates and mocks the innocent "reader" (receiver of the verbal message of the

interview), and challenges the informed reader with subtle raillery? Not wishing to read

a great deal into this bit of mischievous word-, one must nevertheless acknowledge it

as such. In another interview, Marechal soberly abjures religious sectarianism with the

comment: "Soy mas metafisico que religioso porque la supone siempre una

11 c ortodoxia rigida que sue le chocar con la universalidad de la verdad ( qtd. in Coulson, 11 Leopoldo 11 30n). In any event, this study does not concern itself with the question of who

Marechal was as a private person or as an Argentine citizen, nor does it propose any

theory of personality by which his attitudes and behaviour might be explained. It is

perfectly plausible that Marechal as an ethical and political being was indeed a Christian

in the simplest sense of this word, i.e. a person who in loving one's fellows, as

preached by the Gospel. However, his ethical position as a person and citizen does not

prevent Marechal the novelist from occupying an essentially skeptical position vis-a-vis

language and the various and worlds that we construct from language, even

though those narratives be consecrated in sacred texts.

If Marechal the man is not to be confused with Marechal the writer, a second c distinction must yet be made between the young poet and the mature novelist. Marechal c 19 began his literary career as a poet, publishing several anthologies of verse between 1922

and 1945. His passage from poetry to the novel is significant. The "Pr6logo

indispensable" to Adan Buenosayres alludes to a certain profound crisis that has to do with

the writing of that novel. 15 If one wishes to relate Marechal to his title character, as

certain biographical details suggest, 16 then the poet Adan Buenosayres, whose death is

announced in the prologue, must be seen as a fictional version of the young poet Leopoldo

Marechal, who "dies" and is survived by Marechal, the ironic novelist. The narrator of

the main body of Adan Buenosayres treats his protagonist satirically, raising him to mock-

heroic stature with his parody of epic forms, and insincerely praising the quality of Adan's

pretentious "Cuademo de Tapas Azules." The narrator's insincerity reaches its

when, at the end of Book Five, he relates with mock-pathos an episode facetiously

suggesting that Adan is being saved by Christ. As it turns out, Adan is not saved at all,

but rather ends up stranded at the bottom of hell. Adan, the naive poet with metaphysical

aspirations, dies at the behest of his author and creator, the ironic novelist Marechal.

It has been observed that only a poet could have written Adan Buenos ay res .17 It

would be more accurate to say that it could have been written only by a novelist whose art

developed out of an original vocation to poetry. In one sense, Adan Buenosayres is to

Leopoldo Marechal as Don Quixote is to Cervantes. Only a former devotee of the libros

de caballerfas could have parodied that genre so knowledgeably, satirizing the poor

country gentleman who, after attempting a chivalric novel himself, becomes a victim of

its generic . Instead of mastering the genre, Don Quixote lets himself be mastered

0 by it. Cervantes, on the other hand, asserts his control by placing the topoi and c 20 conventions of the fantastic genre in an ironic perspective. Similarly, Adan Buenosayres

is a failed poet and metaphysician who, instead of seducing others, is himself seduced and

dominated by poetry and metaphysics. The poet Marechal, on becoming a novelist, takes

that rhetoric in hand by parodying it, assuming a satirical stance toward his unhappy

protagonist and putting Adan's poetic discourse into an ironic context. Indeed, Marechal

parodies his own poetry, as will be discussed in Chapter 3 of this thesis. If Marechal

himself was ever the dupe of the lies of the poets (as Nietzsche's Zarathustra calls the

transcendental notions propounded by poetry and metaphysics), he puts that innocence

behind him by writing ironic novels.

Finally, one must separate Marechal the novelist from Marechal the essayist and c critic. In his book of essays, Cuaderno de navegaci6n, he indulges in a series of whimsical metaphysical conceits. Any attempt to put together a sober train of thought is

quickly derailed by his apparently uncontrollable urge towards playful . His

"Cosmogonia elbitense," for example, clumsily tries to reduce the fmdings of astrophysics

to theological notions (Cuaderno 12-42). His essays illustrate the truth of Nietzsche's

observation that when the artist tries to think scientifically, he only succeeds in showing

the whole world "that his mental cabinet is narrow and disordered" (Gilman, Nietzschean

Parody 16). Marechal's "Claves de Addn Buenosayres," on the other hand, appears

solemnly to ratify Adan's absurd Neoplatonic fantasies (Cuaderno 127); as a critic,

Marechal completely misses the ironic genius of his own work. As Julio Cortazar c commented in his review of Addn, "una vez mas cabe comprobar c6mo las obras evaden la intenci6n de sus autores y sedan sus propias leyes finales" (24). The slant Marechal c 21 chose to take on his novel, after the fact, should not be our main concern. In the words

of Northrop Frye, a writer may comment on his own work, but what he says carries no

peculiar authority; it is the critic 1 s task to determine the fmal meaning of a literary work

(Anatomy 5). Leopoldo Marechal is an accomplished parodist, but his capacity for critical

thought is limited. Actan Buenosayres has assumed an important place in the history of the

Spanish American novel for reasons that are quite beyond Marechal 1 s critical acumen.

This study, then, deals only with Marechal Is novels and not with his poetry. His

essays, as well as the sainetes he wrote for the theatre, will be taken into account only

when they relate thematically to the novels in question.

c. There has not been a great deal of extended criticism on Marechal' s novelistic

work, despite the fact that this contemporary of has been recognized as

anticipating the nueva novela of the Spanish American "boom." 18 At first, this dearth of

critical attention was due to Marechal Is marginal position vis-a-vis the Argentine intellec­

tual community, whose enmity he earned by supporting and working for Juan Domingo

Per6n in the forties and fifties. But even since his relative rehabilitation in the sixties,

there have been only five book-length studies devoted to his novels, two of which are

doctoral dissertations. 19 The most important monographs are Graciela Coulsonls

Marechal, la pasi6n metafisica (1974) and the team effort of Valentin Cricco et al entitled

Marechal, el otro: la escritura testada de "Adan Buenosayres" (1985). Coulson's work c has the virtue of mapping out a good deal of the "metaphysical" literature that goes to make up Marechal' s verbal universe, emphasizing that much of that literature is not at all c 22 confmed to the Scholastic tradition, a fact that many of his Christian critics prefer to

overlook. In particular, Coulson correctly stresses the importance for Marechal of Rene

Guenon, 20 a "traditionalist" thinker who con:flates the metaphysical traditions derived from

several major . However, if Coulson has rescued Marechal 's work from parochial

readings of the Christian variety, she has yet failed to recognize the fundamental irony of

Marechal' s novelistics.

By contrast, Valentin Cricco and his collaborators are on the right track when they

turn their attention to the "other" Marechal, as the title of their work indicates. They point

out that most criticism of Marechal has tended either to ratify the metaphysical content of

his novels (either within a Christian or a more inclusive context)21 or, conversely, from c liberal or Marxist points of view, to condemn the same content as reactionary (9). In either case, such critics fail to recognize Marechal's ironic distance from both his

characters and his material. Neither the naive Adan Buenosayres nor the authoritarian

Severo Arcangelo is Leopoldo Marechal. The metaphysical ideas expressed by his

characters cannot be attributed in a literal way to the novelist. Given this ironic

displacement, what then is Marechal' s intention? What does his writing in fact mean?

Cricco and his fellow writers choose to locate its significance in the realm of semiotic

theory, proposing the hypothesis that "la escritura de Adan Buenosayres [refleja] un

proceso transformador del lenguaje similar al que se produjo en la historia del signo

teorizado" (11). Specifically, they have in mind the philosophical breach that opens in the

late Middle Ages between realism and nominalism. In other words, Marechal's novel is c about the fundamental ways language is used, which is what Cricco and his team mean c 23 with their reference to semiotic history. The tension between realism and nominalism

which is reflected in Marechal's writing "introduce un descentramiento ir6nico y par6dico

que pasa por el relativismo del signo hasta alcanzar el caracter c6mico y burl6n que

Marechal toma de su maestro Rabelais" (12). From Cricco' s rich and suggestive essay,

which deals only with Adtin Buenosayres, I have adopted two fundamental ideas: that

Marechal's "apocalyptic" novels are about language, and that he writes in the ironic mode.

My approach differs most significantly from that of Cricco and his eo-writers in

that I consider Marechal's frrst two novels to form a single cycle, following the indication

that Marechal gives in his brief prologue to El Banquete de Severo Arcdngelo. He writes

that, whereas in Adtin Buenosayres he left his hero in the last circle of a hell with no exit, c his second novel proposes a way out

present study will not attempt to relate the novel to its Argentine socio-historical context,

nor to contemporary political ideologies (such as Peronism), nor even to its place in

Argentine literature. 22 Rather, my interpretation of Addn Buenosayres will be a textual

analysis rooted in the metaphysical intertexts and ideologies forming the woof on which

Marechal weaves his own designs. The more concise narrative design of Banquete,

composed of metaphysical motifs, provides the template by which to measure Addn

Buenosayres. The template is already present in Addn Buenosayres, but is, as it were,

overgrown with the luxuriance of Marechal's baroque writing; in the sequel novel, c Banquete, it stands out. c 24 It is immediately evident from even the most casual reading of El Banquete de

Severo Arcangelo that its primary intertext is the New Testament Revelation to John. The

Apocalypse is alluded to throughout the novel. In Chapter 30, Hermano Pedro explains

the Banquet's "theorem" by reinterpreting the Book of Revelation. Moreover, the novel's

plot is modeled on what Frank Kermode calls the apocalyptic paradigm (Sense 6): the

entire story builds toward and stands in the shadow of the Banquet itself, an event

coinciding with the ending of the text. At the same time, Lisandro Farfas's

openly parodies certain stylistic elements favoured by John of Patmos.

Several critics have commented on the apocalyptic content of Banquete. Samuela

Dare Davidson Smith devotes a chapter to Marechal' s novels in her doctoral dissertation c on Apocalyptic in the Argentine Novel. She considers his novels to deliver a

very straightforward Christian message. Banquete contains "a philosophical allegory of

an immense feast in the manner of the 'Last Supper' or the 'Marriage Supper of the Lamb'

(see Rev. 19:9), [with which] Marechal points to the inevitable approach of the Last

Judgment" (87-88). The faithful elegidos, to whom Hermano Pedro has revealed the

enigma of the Cross, will find refuge therein at the hour of the apocalyptic Banquet.

Smith concludes her chapter on Marechal: "The centrality of the Final Judgment is

common to both Adan Buenosayres and El Banquete de Seve_ro Arcangelo. [ ... ] In

both novels, the only way to redemption is that of the Christian gospel, 'el secreto del

enigma,' or the Cross and the individual's conversion" (96-97). Smith's reading of c Marechal completely ignores his parody and irony. Nevertheless, it is interesting that she fmds the apocalyptic element of the Last Judgment to be central to both novels. Though c 25 she does not say so, she has no doubt been led to underscore the apocalyptic symbolism

of Addn Buenosayres because of its preponderance in Banquete.

Graciela Maturo, in the article she devotes to the novel, observes that Banquete is

modeled on the "genero apocalfptico" (33). However, her argument that it is "una novela

de intenci6n marcadamente realista y agudo compromise hist6rico" (34) is quite

unconvincing, since she does not show how the novel is historically engaged, but asks us

to accept this premise as a theoretical necessity. Most surprising of all is her categorical

affirmation that "Marechal concibe la escritura como una practica mesianica; su lector,

alma redimible, es el destinatario de un programa de salvaci6n que el enuncia para sus

compatriotas" (38). To attribute messianic aspirations to this ironic novelist seems c misguided, to· say the least. Maturo assumes that the "program of salvation" that Marechal preaches to his compatriots consists of his personal "cristianismo militante" coupled with

the Peronist ideology of "justicialismo" (39), but refrains from indicating how the text of

the novel might actually convey such messianic propaganda. One is more inclined to take

Marechal at his word when in an interview he protests: "yo les aseguro que al escribir la

novela [Banquete], no tenia ninguna intenci6n de referirme al peronismo ni al anti­

peronismo" (qtd. in Coulson, Marechal98).

If Banquete is not a vehicle for political ideology or for a messianic program for

Argentina, what does the novel mean? Father Edmundo Garcia concludes his study of the

novel's with a rhetorical plea expressing bafflement: "Maestro, explicanos esta

parabola" (Andres 119). If Banquete is a , its explanation is not to be found in c Christian theology. Even when one widens the scope of inquiry to account for Marechal' s c 26 allusions to many metaphysical traditions, as does Graciela Coulson, no coherent solution

seems to present itself. Coulson limits herself to indicating sources and literary models.

These are so numerous and incongruous that she ends by renouncing explanation: "El

Banquete es un desafio al lector y una version sui generis del juego de la vida" (Marechal

104). Coulson's thoroughness and caution are to be respected. Banquete, like Adan

Buenosayres, deliberately challenges the reader and is certainly a unique noveL

From my point of view, rather than representing the absurd play of life, Banquete

refers to the play of language and its rhetorical underpinnings. Although the constructions

of language may be absurd in the end, in Marechal' s vision the various modes of language

do not move in a random flux. Rather, the novel proposes a clear pattern that is analogous c to Hesiod's cycle of ages. What appears to be a metahistorical novel with an obscure apocalyptic message can be read as a metalinguistic novel that takes the form of an ironic

parable, a parable whose significance lies in a direction other than the ostensible one. But

it is the more acutely ironic because it is referring to the very stuff of which it is made,

language. In the end, this self-referential novel reaches the point that its signifying power

is turned completely back upon itself. When verbal signs no longer point to anything

beyond themselves, meaning ceases, narrative movement is arrested, time comes to end.

By tlfus annulling its own significance, the novel effectively performs a textual apocalypse.

The novel does not seem to realize the "redemption" that the prologue promises.

Severo Arcangelo, Marechal tells us, proposes a "way out" of Cacodelphia where Adan c Buenosayres has been stranded. This implies that Adan's descent into hell will be redeemed by an ascent to the "Cuesta del Agua," analogue of the paradisal New Jerusalem 0 27 of Revelation. In other words, the diremption of Addn Buenosayres must be followed by

a redemption in Banquete: that which was taken apart and divided in the former novel

must, in the latter, be redeemed --literally, "brought back"-- and put back together. The

gap between desire and its object, between language and reality, will be healed in some

original, transcendental centre of unity. This unity is achieved, ironically, in the cessation

of significance, in the carefully orchestrated recall of all signifieds to a centre of

nothingness.

If Banquete seems to frustrate any meaningful reading, the same cannot be said

about Addn Buenosayres. Marechal's first novel is laden with meaning, engaging many

levels of the concrete world as Marechal witnessed it in the Argentina of his youth.

Underlying this wealth, however, are other concerns of a "metaphysical" --or more

accurately, "meta-linguistic"-- nature. These concerns, as has been argued above, are

brought out more clearly in the light of the very concise and abstract Banquete. Julio

Cortazar was the first one with the prescience to understand that Addn Buenos ay res, more

than a satirical roman a clef, represented "un acontecimiento extraordinario" (23) because

of its treatment of language. 23 Referring to the linguistiC material of the book, he speaks

of "capas geol6gicas a veces artificiosas" and, in the next breath, marvels at the

"cataclismo [que] signa el entero decurso de Addn Buenosayres" (23). These "geological

layers" of language can be seen to correspond to modes or phases of language --poetic,

priestly, and descriptive-- postulated by Northrop Frye; in Banquete, they are allegorized c in a metahistorical design. The "cataclysm" which Cortazar notes running through the text, unearthing those layers of language, is the effect of a fourth, ironic, mode of 28

language. Marechalian irony finds its definitive narrative metaphor in the apocalypse.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation will outline the formal structure of Addn Buenosayres

as a narrative of "diremption. " Marechal has constructed his novel so as to suggest a

cyclic unity resonant with the biblical cycle of the Fall and Redemption, but at the same

time he has built into it counter-structures which in effect blast that unity apart. These

structures will be discussed, with special attention given to the novel's "Pr6logo

indispensable" and the tricks played by an . Consideration will also be

given to the problem of authorship in the various segments of the novel.

Chapter 2 follows the story of Adan's disappointment in love and his existential c crisis as the tale is told in Books One to Five of the novel. The Book of Revelation acts as a subtext in an ambiguous way, for on one hand it forms part of Adan's own conscious

interpretation of what is happening to him and, on the other hand, the narrator exploits the

apocalyptic subtext to impose a misleading design on those same events. This state of

affairs leads to two divergent interpretations as to the significance and outcome of Adan' s

crisis.

The third chapter is devoted to a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the

novels. Marechal appears to have intuited a metalinguistic theory about the nature of

language, to which he gives narrative form by relating it to an analogous metahistorical

theory. In Banquete, the theory of metahistory is explicitly dramatized during the

preparations for Severo Arcangelo' s Banquet. In Addn Buenos ay res, metahistory is treated

in an overtly burlesque fashion, but in Book One of this novel, the parallel metalinguistic ~ 29 theory is demonstrated through Adan's narrated monologue. Marechal's theory of

language will be drawn out with the help of Northrop Frye's ideas (which have evolved

from those of Giambattista Vico), supplemented by Hayden White's theory of the ironic

mode of language. Marechal's own writings, both in his novels and essays, the

primary source of his notions about metahistory: the French writer Rene Guenon. It will

be argued, however, that far from naively transmitting Guenon' s vision of a cycle

beginning with a Golden Age and ending in an apocalypse, Marechal parodies this

doomful notion in order to show how we use language to make and unmake the world.

In fact, his parody has the effect of deflating the pompous of Guenon' s reactionary

metaphysics. In order to highlight this last point, my argument brings in the ideas on c language of Friedrich Nietzsche as a polar opposite to Guenon. Nietzsche is mentioned in interesting contexts in both novels. Though Marechal is not a Nietzschean, he does

appear to share the skepticism of the German philosopher. Nietzsche provides the critical

tools with which to make sense of Marechal' s irony.

Chapter 4 examines how Marechal parodies the good/evil dichotomy characteristic

of apocalyptic ism, with special attention devoted to Book Three of Adan Buenosayres.

The novel's characters can be divided into two groups. The "profane" characters, who

move within the world generated by descriptive language, stand in opposition to the

"initiatic" group composed of Schultze the astrologer, Adan Buenosayres the poet, and

Samuel Tesler the philosopher. These latter are adepts of the esoteric mysteries of priestly c language. Through the polemical dialogues between the two groups, Marechal deploys an opposition between poetry and metaphysics, on one side, over against scientific c 30 materialism on the other, in a mock-apocalyptic struggle. His ironic strategy appears to

favour the "good," i.e. poetry and metaphysics, over "bad" materialism, but in the end

neither faction is left with much credibility. An ironic attitude is brought to bear upon all

modes oflanguage.

In Chapter 5, Adan 1s metaphysical poetry and his poetics are analyzed first in

terms of Northrop Frye 1S theory of language modes and then against the tension between

realism and nominalism. These two schools represent fundamental attitudes toward the

status of language, and Adan is torn between them. Augustine Is semiotics represents an

extreme position of realism, while twentieth-century avant-garde poetics is an extremity

of nominalist development. Adan 1 s desire fluctuates between the safe conformity of the c one and the risky freedom of the other. Also discussed is the priestly topos that compares the world to a book, for it is emblematic of both realism and metonymic language. Adan

is a dupe of this topos.

Chapter 6 highlights the role of Schultze as Adan 1 S friend and mentor. It will be

argued that Schultze Is role in the novel is to teach Adan about the status of language.

Schultze, "the astrologer," is an avant-garde theorist whose outrageous poses and

rhetorical gestures are designed to liberate Adan from his enslavement to metonymic

language.

Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to the "Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia."

Cacodelphia is in fact an invention of Schultze's irreverent imagination, where all of the

novel's characters, and especially Adan, must face their Last Judgment, i.e. Schultze 1S

0 carnivalized judgment. However, even though Schultze is the Demiurge of this inferno, c 31 he is not exempt from being judged by his unruly "creatures." The astrologer can only

survive by imposing his will through his mastery of language and rhetoric. In effect, the

entire journey through Cacodelphia becomes at another level an exploration of the politics

of rhetoric.

The aim of Chapter 9 is to point up the parodic nature of the story of Don

Ecumenico, which is the last interpolated tale in Book Seven. This story will be treated

as a case of mise en abyme reflecting the story of Adan's folly. The chapter closes by

considering the significance of the Paleogogue.

Chapter 10 follows the argument of El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo (1965) and

essays a critical assessment of this enigmatic novel based on the hypothesis that Marechal c continues to work within the ironic mode. Marechal refuses to make good on the promise held out in the novel's prologue that we shall be led out of the depths of the hell of

Cacodelphia. He leads his readers on a wild goose chase, though it is not entirely clear

for what purpose.

Finally, Chapter 11 considers Samuel Tesler's "Teoria de la Catastrofe" as he

expounds it in Marechal's final novel, Megaf6n, o la guerra, published posthumously in

1970.

NOTES

1. Mikhai1 Bakhtine, Esthetique de la creation verbale, trans. Alfreda Aucouturier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979) 351. c 2. Augusto Roa Bastos, Vigilia del Almirante (Madrid: Santillana, 1992) 123. c 32 3. Quotations from the three novels will be indicated as follows: AB. for Adlin Buenosayres; B. for El Banquete de Severo Arctingelo; M for Megajon, o la guerra. All quotations will be from the Sudamericana editions listed under "Works by Marechal."

4. See Northrop Frye's discussion of "The Mythos of Summer: Romance" (Anatomy 186- 192). In the "Genesis-apocalypse myth ... Adam is cast out of Eden, loses the river of life and the tree of life, and wanders in the labyrinth of human history, until he is restored to his original state by the Messiah" (191).

5. See Muecke's chapter on "Romantic Irony" (159-215). "What the theory of Romantic Irony achieved ... was a (highly generalized) programme for modern literature, a modus vivendifor the writer and for writing in the modem 'open' world ... It recognized, to begin with, man's ironic predicament as a finite being, terrifyingly alone in an infinite and infinitely complex and contradictory world of which he could achieve only a finite understanding, and in his art only a finite presentation" (214-15).

6. The irony, as many postmodernist theorists point out, has to do with the prefix "post," which suggests that postmodernity succeeds, goes beyond or transcends modernity, a claim that postmodernity refuses to make. In Ernst Behler's formulation: "Postmodernity therefore reveals itself as an ironic notion communicating indirectly, by way of circumlocution, configuration, and bafflement, the necessity and impossibility of discussing the status of modernity in a straightforward and meaningful manner. Postmodemity, in its twisted posture, seems to be the awareness of this paradox, and consequently of the status of modernity, in a somersaulting fashion" (4-5). Given the inherent aporia in the concept of postmodernity, one might just as easily turn the proposition around and say that postmodernity is simply another "twisted posture" --a posture of exacerbated irony- that modernity has adopted in an attempt to come to terms with itself.

7. J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary ofLiterary Terms and (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1991) 460.

8. Linda Hutcheon distinguishes parody from satire with the terms "intramural" and "extramural" (25); Sklodowska follows her lead, calling parody "intratextual" and satire "extratextual" (12). This means that parody targets literary material, while satire aims at values held in society at large, or by members thereof. However, as both critics admit, this neat theoretical division blurs when it comes to approaching concrete texts. The reason for this is summed up in Jacques Derrida's famous aphorism: "Il n'y a pas de hors texte" (qtd. in Behler 131). Values are encoded in discourse, whether oral or written, and one can quickly come to grief in attempting to disentangle them from their codification in language. c 9. This is, in fact, Rose's premise. Her book Parody!Meta- (1979) is devoted to "an analysis of the role of parody as a meta-fictional mirror to fiction," for "to study such c 33 parody is to study the analysis of fiction made from within fiction itself" (13).

10. Metonymy here is understood in Friedrich Nietzsche's definition of the term (see chapter 3 below), and has nothing to do with Roman Jakobson's famous metaphor­ metonymy dichotomy (Jakobson 37-48).

11. As Banquete's first-person narrator observes: "Pero las cosas venian asi, como si el Banquete de Severo Arcangelo debiera caminar sobre dos pies contradictorios, el de lo sublime y el de lo grotesco" (R 94).

12. See Marcos Antonio Ramos's article "Leopoldo Marechal como novelista cristiano."

13. For example, "el Gran Oracionista" CAB. 615-22); and the Hermanos Joruis and Pedro (B 245-55; 268-78).

14. For example, Bruno de San Yasea, the ghost of Adan's idle fantasy who comes back to haunt him in the hell of Cacodelphia (.AB 626-27).

15. Marechal explains that after writing the first pages of the novel in 1930, " [u ]na honda crisis espiritual me sustrajo despues, no solo a los afanes de la literatura, sino a todo linaje c de accion" (AB 10). He finished the novel in the 1940s. 16. See section entitled "Lo autobiografico" (58-60) in Graciela de Sola.

17. "En ultima instancia, tal vez, solo un poeta pudo haber escrito este libro. Pero un poeta que ha bajado al infiemo de la realidad que transunta --al de Ios vivos, no al de Ios muertos--, real y fantastico, sombrio y apasionado, burlesco y apocaliptico" (Zum Felde 327).

18. "Es indudable que [tanto] en el Sabato de Sobre heroes y tumhas como en el Cortazar de Los premios y Rayuela se encuentra la huella de Marechal" (Rodriguez Monegal248). Javier de Navascues discusses the narrative elements that Julio Cortazar's Rayuela has in common with Adan Buenosayres in his article "Sobre novela argentina ... "

19. William J. Hardy, Life and Work of Leopoldo Marechal (Missouri, 1973); and Javier de Navascues, Las novelas de Leopoldo Marechal: Antilisis narratolOgico (Navarra, 1991). Navascues's doctoral thesis is the basis of his Adan Buenosayres: Una novela total (Estudio narratol6gico).

20. On inspecting Marechal's personal library, Coulson found that "numerosos voll1menes de Rene Guenon" were among the books given pride of place (Marechal 8) and observes that the Frenchman was "enormemente admirado por Marechal" (97).

21. Pedro Luis Barcia's "Introduccion biografica y critica" to his annotated edition of c Adtin Buenosayres (1994) inscribes itself in this traditionalist line of Marechalian criticism. c 34 Javier de Navascues's narratological study also fails to question the Christian reading.

22. Adan Buenosayres elicited a good deal of negative reaction from his contemporaries because it can be read as a roman a clef satirizing the avant-garde generation of writers and artists associated with the literary review Martfn Fierro. See Adolfo Prieto on martinfierrismo in "Los dos mundos de Adan Buenosayres." There can be no doubt, however, that Marechal's ambition went beyond a desire to create local caricatures. In an interview cited by Navascues, Marechal recalls: "Leyendo a los autores argentinos y a los autores universales llegue a decirme: '[ ... ] Yo soy argentino, pero tambien soy un hombre, y si un hombre de Inglaterra, Francia, Italia, ha podido escribir grandes obras, por que yo no puedo hacerlo. Y asi, empez6 en mi el deseo de hacer una gran obra'" (Sobre 81-2). Marechal was aiming for a more universal context than that of Argentine letters and aspired to be inscribed in the Western literary tradition.

23. "No se, por razones de edad, si Adan Buenosayres testimonia con validez sobre la etapa martinfierrista, y ya se habra notado que mi intento [to review the novel] era mas filol6gico que hist6rico" (Cortazar 30).

c c 35 Chapter 1

The structure of Addn Buenosayres: the narrative of diremption

The Book of Revelation, the last in the Christian biblical canon, brings to a

culmination the Christian narrative of redemption. As a story, this is a romance that

begins in Genesis. The serpent or Satan tricks Adam and Eve into a fall from grace. The

Edenic unity of God, man, and nature is spoiled. At the end of time, the Divine Word

banishes Satan and invites Adam to enter the New Jerusalem, a new version of the

paradise he was forced to leave. The original cosmic unity is thus restored, the creature

reunited with his/her Creator, Christ the Logos. Adam, of course, in the downward slide c of historical time has become many, and at the fmal reckoning there are more than a few casualties. Not everyone goes to paradise; the faithless --i.e. all non-Christians-- are

destroyed in the lake of fire along with man's , Satan. Nevertheless, the

fundamental drama that draws to a close in the Apocalypse is the triumph of good over

evil, light over darkness, and the redemption of mankind, whose paradigmatic figure is

the Edenic Adam.

This romance is parodied in Adan Buenosayres. The novel's eponymous

protagonist is also, if only by virtue of his name, a paradigmatic figure. Adan' s story,

however, is not one of redemption, but rather of diremption, as Hayden White

characterizes the satiric mode of story emplotment (9). If redemption means the fulfilment

of mankind's ultimate desire, then diremption, in the case of Adan Buenosayres, means c the irredeemable cleavage between his idealist desire and the way things turn out in reality. 0 36 The mystical longings that Adan expresses in his "Cuaderno de Tapas Azules" are

definitively frustrated by the novel's end. Concretely, this frustration is caused by the

inevitable dissonance between the constructs of language and the irreducible, chaotic

otherness of reality. Into the abyss that yawns open between language and reality falls not

only the Christian narrative of redemption, but the Platonist metanarrative in which it is

grounded. In this chapter, I shall try to show only that the novel is constructed in the

spirit of ironic diremption. First, I shall identify a central "iconic metaphor" --Mieke

Bal's (126) term for a kind of organizational mise en abyme-- which in this case replicates

diremption. Secondly, I shall discuss the "Pr6logo indispensable" as an internally

diremptive structure.

Before examining the formal structure of Addn Buenosayres, an outline of the story

is in order. It can be resumed chronologically as follows: The young poet and

schoolteacher, Adan Buenosayres, meets and falls in love with the fourteen-year-old

Solveig Amundsen. She, however, chooses another suitor, a young doctor named Lucio

Negri. On Thursday afternoon (April 28, 192-) at the Amundsen tertulia, Adan sees

Solveig and Lucio together and accepts the evidence of his defeat. He spends Thursday

night drinking, talking, and carousing with his friends. On Friday he goes to his work as

a schoolteacher. Friday midnight finds him wandering alone through the city streets,

overcome by the crisis provoked by his disappointment in love. On Saturday at midnight,

he embarks on the journey to the hell of Cacodelphia with his friend Schultze. A few c months later, in October, he dies under circumstances that are left unknown and is interred by his former comrades. The nucleus of the plot, in a word, is Adan's rejection as a lover c 37 and his concomitant spiritual crisis. He experiences this crisis as the Apocalypse.

The novel consists of a prologue and seven Books. These can be grouped in four

distinct narrative units: 1) the "Pr6logo indispensable"; 2) the main body of the novel,

comprised by Books One to Five; 3) the "Cuaderno de Tapas Azules" (Book Six); and 4)

the "Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia" (Book Seven). Arranged according to how

each advances the plot, they form the following chronological order. Adan's "Cuaderno"

(Book Six) tells how he first meets Solveig some weeks or months before the events of the

main body of the novel, but it also gives an obscure version of the events following the

fateful tertulia. Books One to Five recount the events from Thursday morning, when

Adan wakes up in his room, to late Friday night, when Adan falls asleep after his ordeal c in the streets. The "Viaje" (Book Seven) takes up the story at Saturday midnight, as Adan and Schultze head for Saavedra and Cacodelphia; Book Seven and the novel end when

Adan and Schultze reach the lowest circle of hell. Finally, the prologue --which in terms

of the plot is really an epilogue-- informs us of Adan's death.

Leaving aside the problematic prologue, it can be seen immediately that the

"Cuaderno de Tapas Azules" is the chief interruption to the chronological order of the tale.

This is so because it refers to a different kind of time. Books One to Five, as well as

Seven, are contained within ordinary time, precisely the last three days in April of a

certain year in the nineteen twenties. This time is chronos, the passing of time measured

by watches and calendars. The "Cuaderno," in contrast, has no clearly defined time­

frame, for it is written in terms of poetic, mythical time. It is also kairos or spiritually 0 meaningful time (Kermode, Sense 47). Adan explains that in writing his notebook, "no c 38 me propuse trazar la historia de un hombre, sino la de su alma" (AB 435). In this spiritual

autobiography, he describes his childhood not in terms of calendar time but rather as the

absolute preterit of Genesis: he was "Adan en mi jardin o Robinson en mi is la" CAR 434).

When he meets Solveig, it is a metaphorical springtime: "Fue prima vera en

el dia y la hora en que se me apareci6 Aquella cuyo nombre real no sera escrito en estas

paginas" (AB. 445). The notebook's very last words express Adan's attitude toward his

future; he hopes for "un dia en que la sed del hombre da con el agua justa y el exacto

manantial" (AB 467). This refers directly to Revelation (22: 16), where Christ promises

that the thirst of the faithful will be slaked:

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." And let everyone who hears say, "Come." And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone come who wishes to take the water of life as a gift.

Adan' s spiritual autobiography, then, is rendered in the time of divine revelation. Frank

Kermode observes that "the divine plot is the pattern of kairoi in relation to the End" (47).

Adan' s account traces a similar pattern, a microcosmic replication of the divine plot that

begins with Genesis (his childhood) and looks forward to the season of fulfilment promised c by the Apocalypse. c 39 The chronological vagueness of Adan's notebook is such that it would stand apart

as a fragment completely unrelated to the events of the novel, were it not for a fictional

editor who relates the metaphorical events of the notebook specifically to the tertulia

where Adan understands that Solveig has rejected him. This editorial intervention is

crucial; it relates the time of the "Cuaderno" to the time-frame of the rest of the novel:

(Nota: lo que sigue es el final del Cuaderno de Tapas Azules, escrito, sin duda, por Adan Buenosayres despues de su tertulia defmitiva en Saavedra. Tengo ahora el texto manuscrito bajo mis ojos, y antes de transcribirlo contemplo sus lineas atormentadas, llenas de tachaduras y enmiendas, tan diferentes de aquellos renglones que forman la primera parte del Cuaderno y cuya pulcritud anuncia un lentisimo trabajo de artista. Empieza con una fabula o ap6logo extravagante. Dice c asi:) [AB 463].

This parenthesis effectively breaks the "Cuaderno" into two sections, corresponding to

before and after Adan's "tertulia defmitiva." Adan, for his part, makes no direct mention

of this catastrophic event. He writes instead of the death of "Aquella": rather than

attending a tertulia at her house, he visits her house only to fmd her dead body lying in

state. This is his way of interpreting his loss of her, an interpretation quite at odds with

a very alive Solveig whom we see at the tertulia. Following this, some time passes:

"Siguieronse dfas insonoros que desfilaban como aut6matas frente ami ser, trayendo por

la mafiana y llevandose por la rioche su vieja y manoseada quincalleda" (All 465). The

number of days is wholly imprecise. They could be two or three, or ten or twenty; the c measure of their duration is not numerical but emotional. Adan' s depression is alleviated c 40 by what he claims to be a dream, though its portentous symbolism is more likely the

invention of his "lentisimo trabajo de artista." He gives a final temporal indicator in his

concluding paragraph: "Desde entonces mi vida tiene un rumbo certero" (AB 467). Some

time seems to have passed since his "dream," which in turn occurred some indeterminate

number of days after the tertulia.

Returning to the other six Books of the novel, and to the narrative framed within

realist time, one notes that between the tertulia on Thursday afternoon and the end of Book

Seven, less than three days have passed. This would seem to be less than the time that has

transpired between the "death of Aquella" and the ending of Adan's notebook; the

"Cuaderno's" ending, therefore, is possibly posterior to the ending of the "Viaje a c Cacodelphia," which is the ending of the novel. We cannot be sure of this, of course, for Adan's treatment of time is not realistic. Nevertheless, considered in terms of the

chronology of the story, the "Cuaderno's" temporal scope is greater than the time-frame

of the rest of the novel, since the notebook also includes the story's prehistory. This

means that from one point of view, the "Cuaderno," though the shortest of the novel's

seven Books, nevertheless has the first and last word; it ought to provide the pattern of

kairoi that gives meaning to the noveL Conversely, the realist narrative of the other six

Books textually dominates the positions of beginning and ending.

Now, this state of affairs is concretely encoded in a curious formal structure.

Being inserted between Books Five and Seven, the "Cuaderno" interrupts the flow of

calendar time and thus challenges the hegemony of prosaic realism. In so doing, Adan' s

notebook proposes a more inclusive, transcendental interpretation of the same events; the c 41 poetic time of the "Cuademo" aspires both to include and to impose its own order on the

realistic time of the main narrative. At another level, however, the same formal structure

is replicated, but in such a way as to invert its meaning. Just as the "Cuademo" interrupts

the main novel, the latter irrupts into the "Cuademo" through the gap opened by the

editor-narrator's parenthesis. In a few brief words, the fictional editor interprets the entire

"Cuademo" in terms of the events of Adan's "real" life, i.e. his life in ordinary time as

represented in the novel's fiction. The editor underlines the change in the physical state

of Adan's manuscript: the part written after the "tertulia definitiva" is tear-stained,

laboriously worked and re-worked. He passes editorial comment on the remainder of

Adan's text: it contains "an extravagant ." In sum, the world of crude realism rushes c into the breach opened by the editor's parenthesis and demolishes the wistful, poetical pattern of kairoi outlined by the "Cuaderno."

Strikingly, these reciprocal intrusions of one text into the other occur at equally

proportionate junctures, with almost mathematical precision. The "Cuademo" has

fourteen chapters, that is, exactly twice as many as the novel's seven Books. The

notebook is interrupted at the end of chapter XII, analogously proportionate to the break

in the novel at Book Six. This reciprocal interruption, then, constitutes a case of

calculated structural irony, a mise en abyme whereby the micro-structure reflects an

inverse mirror image of the matrix structure. The inherent contradiction forces the reader

to make an interpretative choice: Which version of the story is correct, the one implied c in the matrix novel or Adan's mystical one? Let us consider briefly how each of these versions ends. In the "Cuaderno," 0 42 Adan's existential and spiritual crisis is resolved when in his "dream" a Christic figure

intervenes to put Adan back on the mystical path. This personage seems to be the

incarnation of the Divine Word; he presents himself to Adan: "Soy el que ha movido,

mueve y movera tus pasos" (AB 467). 1 He instructs Adan to forget about Solveig and to

seek "el (mico y verdadero semblante de Aquella," meaning the mystical Madonna

/ntelligenza. (The Neoplatonism of the "Cuaderno" will be discussed in chapter 5). In

the notebook's last sentence, Adan expresses his faith in the mystical Madonna "cuya

forma cabal y unico nombre conocere alg(m dia, si, como espero, hay un dfa en que la sed

del hombre da con el agua justa y el exacto manantial" (AB 467). Thus ends Book Six.

Book Seven's ending, that of the "Viaje a Cacodelphia" and the textual ending of the c novel, leaves Adan in the last circle of hell facing the ugly Paleogogue, which lies like the Beast of the Apocalypse in the abyss. This is certainly not the "agua justa" that Adan is

looking for. It is thus ironic that Book Seven follows textually as a sequel to Book Six,

and the more so in that Adan is both author of the "Cuaderno" and first-person narrator

of the "Viaje." These two endings, then, do not mesh or in any way corroborate each

other, but stand instead in a relation of diremption.

There is also a third ending that should be mentioned before passing on to the

novel's prologue. While Adan is author of his "Cuademo" and first-person narrator of the

"Viaje," Books One to Five are narrated in the third person and thus stand as a discrete

narrative unit. This narrator closes Book Five by suggesting that Christ is watching over c Adan as he sleeps. We are led to believe that Adan's redemption is imminent. Considering Books One to Five as a unit by itself, its ending achieves a very tidy closure, c 43 symmetrically related to the opening of Book One -- a co:risideration that led Julio Cortazar

(the pre-Rayuela Cortazar) to opine that the novel ought to have ended there. 2 This

ending, however, is definitely anterior to the other two and thus is superseded by them.

It is, in fact, a trap laid for the unsuspecting reader by an unreliable narrator, as I shall try

to show presently.

The question of endings is related to the question of the end, the telos towards

which a given narrative fiction is meaningfully oriented. In the ideally transparent literary

fiction, there is a concord between the ending and the meaning of the fiction as a whole.

In his meditation on The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode takes as his point of

departure the paradigm of the Apocalypse, in which the entire biblical narrative exists in c the shadow of the End and derives its significance from it (6). With the book of Revelation, the End and ending, telos and textual closure (of the Christian Bible), are

made to coincide. It is this feature that makes the Apocalypse paradigmatic for literary

fictions. Kermode shows that even the most resolutely anti-paradigmatic texts, the

nouveau roman for example, implicitly refer to the model of beginning, middle, and end

(20). Likewise, Samuel Beckett's of the absurd or perfect meaninglessness,

borrows the shadow of its form from the fully meaningful Christian narrative (115-16).

With this in mind, I should like to pass now to the novel's prologue, which

clamours for attention with its title, "Pr6logo indispensable." Its very first sentence

announces Adan's end, i.e. his death, as a fait accompli: c En cierta maiiana de octubre de 192., casi a mediodia, seis hombres nos c 44 internabamos en el Cementario del Oeste, llevando a pulso un ataud de modesta factura (cuatro tablitas fragiles) cuya levedad era tanta, que nos parecia llevar en su interior, no la vencida came de un hombre muerto, sino la materia sutil de un poema concluido (AB 9).

Here, then, is the definitive End, the end of the world for Adan Buenosayres. The End

is announced at the beginning, creating expectancy in the reader, who will want to know

how and why he died. 3 Ironically, we never really find out. Thus this End, far from

casting the shadow of unitary meaning over the rest of the novel, only confirms the

diremptive tendency of Adfzn Buenosayres. Adan' s death is riddled with ambiguity. This

becomes apparent as soon as one tries to approach it through each of the divergent endings c of Books Six and Seven. Let us assume for a moment that the "Cuademo" is indeed the key to the novel and

try to relate its ending to Adan's end. According to the "Cuademo," Adan devotes

himself to the mystical Madonna with the ultimate aim of being reborn in Christ (AB 467).

Perhaps, then, he has found his reward in death, and in this way we might explain the

festive aura of the funeral:

La primavera reia sobre las tumbas, cantaba en el buche de Ios pajaros, ardia en los retofios vegetates, proclamaba entre cruces y epitafios su jubilosa incredulidad acerca de la muerte. Y no habia higrimas en nuestros ojos ni pesadumbre alguna en nuestros corazones; porque nos parecia llevar, no la pesada came de un hombre muerto, sino la materia leve de un poema concluido (AB 9). c On this reading, Adan's story resonates with the Passion of Christ. The poet has 0 45 undergone his Calvary in April, the month of Easter, and now he has been resurrected in

Paradise. This is how Graciela Coulson sees it. But she is given pause by the

"ambigiiedad temporal" of the prologue and wonders why the funeral is six months

posterior to the events of the novel: "Si Adan llega a Cristo en abril, l,por que 'muere'

recien seis meses despues?" (Marecha/86). Coulson resolves the problem by treating both

dates as "entidades simb6licas." Easter and springtime both connote rebirth. Easter is in

April, whereas springtime in Argentina is in October. She does not pause, however, to

consider the irony in the fact that April and October are antipodal to each other, and that

in the southern hemisphere, springtime renewal is as temporally distant as possible from

the month of April. On the other hand, the cultural institution of Easter, derived from the c Jewish Passover, has everything to do with the renewal of life in the springtime. When this cultural tradition is translated from one hemisphere to the other, the basis of its

symbolic value is ironically undermined. In Argentina, Easter is in autumn, when life

wanes and passes into winter; Easter is associated seasonally with decay and death, not

rebirth. If the Passion story is being retold here, its form has suffered violent diremption:

six months separate Adan' s Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Black Saturday in April

from his Easter-Sunday resurrection in October. Formally, Adan's story would be a

parody of the Passion.

Another detail in the prologue's opening paragraph, however, alerts us to a far

more significant irony. This irony arises from a mini-parody within the text itself. In the

first sentence (quoted above), we read that Adan's coffin is so light that it seems to carry c "not the womout flesh of a dead man, but the subtle matter of a concluded poem." c 46 Exactly the same passage is repeated almost verbatim only a few lines further down on the

same page: "not the heavy flesh of a dead man, but the light material of a concluded

poem." Must the writer of this prologue be so heavy-handed? I suggest that this is not

pretentious clumsiness, but that the repetition of such ponderously figurative language

signals irony: the second utterance parodies the first, deflating its lyric pomposity and

altering the sentence's significance. In Linda Hutcheon' s succinct definition, "parody is

repetition with a critical difference" (6). In this case, the critical difference is marked by

a subtle but significant change in the adjectives. In the first instance, "vencida carne" is

opposed to "materia sutil"; in the second, "pesada carne" to "materia leve." Unlike the

opposition "wornout-subtle," the antinomy "heavy-light" is precise and refers more c pointedly to the physical weight of the coffin. We are invited to read the second, parodic utterance not figuratively but literally. That is to say, there is in fact no dead body in the

coffm. If "la materia sutil de un poema concluido" may be read as a metaphor for Adan's

soul, "la materia leve de un poema concluido" means exactly what it says: a poem on

paper, which would be a light material object. This is perhaps the "Cuaderno" itself--

concluded, fmished, dead. 4

This evidently flies in the face of the mystical reading of Adan's death. When a

Christian dies, it means that his or her eternal soul is liberated from its mortal coil, which

for its part is buried according to traditional rites. Flesh dies, souls go to heaven. What

I am suggesting here, in contrast, is that there is no dead body and that the funeral

signifies the death of something else. On the other hand, it is clear that the joyful

atmosphere of springtime implies some kind of renewal. This paradox of death and c 47 rebirth, however, is not resolved satisfactorily by a mystical reading of the novel. There

is a missing body not yet accounted for.

Now let us consider the novel's textual ending, the ending of Book Seven, in

relation to Adan's apparent death. The prologue's opening words -"En cierta mafiana de

octubre de 192., casi a mediodia"-- place the funeral squarely within the chronological

time that prevails in the bulk of the novel. The six-month interval is promptly announced

and underlined. The ironic symbolism of this antipodal diremption has been noted above.

But this temporal gap is paralleled in the formal structure: the greatest textual distance

possible separates the "End," or at least the end of Adan's story, from the novel's ending

on page 741. But what has happened to Adan in the meantime? There is nothing c anywhere in the novel --aside from the dubious metaphorical evidence of the "Cuademo "-­ to indicate that Adan has ever left Cacodelphia. Given the apparent absence of his body

at the "funeral," one could conclude that Adan is still alive and well in Cacodelphia. This

infernal city, behind all of the "Viaje 's" self-conscious hyperbole and farcical

phantasmagoria, is before everything a representation of Buenos Aires, Adan's city by

antonomasia. If Adan is alive, then, why the funeral? Who or what has died? In the

following chapters, I shall argue that not a man but an idea of Man has died, along with

the metanarrative that supports that paradigmatic verbal construct of Adam. This is the

significance of the text's fragmented structure: a fiction whose protagonist is man suffers

an irremediable separation from living, flesh-and-blood human beings. The consequence

of this is not the death of man, but the collapse of a narrative fiction and even of a

metanarrative. Adan Buenosayres suffers a split in his very name: the paradigmatic Adam c 48 who was destined for the celestial city of the New Jerusalem has died; the flesh-and-blood

individual continues to live in the terrestrial city that gives him his surname.

Adtin Buenosayres in effect begins and ends with the "Pr6logo indispensable." On

one hand, the prologue is an architext that introduces the novel, telling us how it is put

together. On the other hand, it concludes the story told by the novel. Thus it stands

outside the text of the novel and at the same time forms an integral part of the novel. Its

status is dual, being both architext and text, prologue and epilogue. Our attention is called

to this duality by the adjective "indispensable" in the title. This qualifier, I believe, is a

sign pointing to the indispensability of reading the prologue a second time --after having

read the novel. The first reading discloses a prologue; on the second reading, the same

text assumes a new significance and becomes an ironic epilogue. This relation of prologue

to epilogue parodies that of Genesis to Revelation in the Christian bible. By referring so

directly to Genesis, the Apocalypse closes a textual circle and thereby reaffirms the truth

of the first text. In Adtin Buenosayres, by contrast, the reader will find that the epilogue

literally repeats the text of the prologue but does so parodically.

We have seen just now an example of how the prologue's text parodies itself.

What is implied by this pattern of utterance and counter- or para-utterance? Does one

voice parody another voice? In the prologue, a profusion of voices and identities surface

and disappear, making it very difficult to determine who is talking and with what attitude.

The epilogue of Revelation evidences a similar confusion of voices, as observed both by

biblical scholars (Buttrick, Interpreter's Bible XII 544) and Jacques Derrida: "One no c 49 longer knows very well who in the Apocalypse lends his voice and to someone else,

one no longer knows very well who addresses what to whom" (qtd. in Behler 36). On

reading Revelation, nevertheless, one assumes a unity of communicative intent. The

prologue of Addn Buenosyares, by contrast, manifests ironic dissimulation. This in turn

has important implications for how one reads Books One to Five of the novel.

In the prologue, a narrator introduces himself as the editor of two manuscripts

bequeathed to him by Adan Buenosayres, namely, the "Cuademo de Tapas Azules" and

the "Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia." In order that the reading public may

achieve "una intelecci6n cabal" (AB 10) of these texts, the narrator has appointed himself

the task of writing about their author and protagonist. As well as editor, then, he presents c himself as the chronicler of Books One to Five. In the first half of the prologue, this

narrator speaks as a member of the fictional world of Addn Buenosayres and gives strong

hints as to his identity. Writing in the first person plural, he includes himself among the

pall-bearers at Adan's funeral. He emphasizes that he has been an eye-witness to the

events that he will relate in his five Books, recalling "las figuras de sus [Adan's]

compafieros de gesta, y sobre todo las acciones memorables de que fui testigo en aquellos

dias" (AB 10). The "gesta" to which he refers will be the night of drinking and mock­

heroic adventures narrated in Books Three and Four. Thus the narrator will parody the

epic genre, but his fundamentally ironic stance vis-a-vis his material will only become

apparent to the reader later, when he or she reads the main body of the novel. Thus the c prologue can be fully understood only on re-reading it after the rest of the novel. On the first reading it is utterance; on the second reading, counter-utterance or parody. c 50 The narrator, then, claims to be a witness to the events of Books Three and Four.

In Book Three, Adan and his comrades undertake a journey through the lowlands of

Saavedra ("el bajo de Saavedra"). The mock heroes are seven in all. They are Adan,

Samuel Tesler, and Schultze, as well as the four members of the patota or "gang." The

narrator of Books One to Five punctiliously enumerates the individuals integrating the

patota according to their lights: "Por orden riguroso de iluminaci6n eran las que siguen:

Luis Pereda ... ; Arturo Del Solar ... ; Franky Amundsen ... ; y el petizo Bernini, soci6logo

al que veniamos llamando 'el hombre de la talla diminuta' " (AB 190). The narrator here

refers to the characters both in the third person --eran, "they were"-- and in the first

person --venfamos llamando, "we used to call." Thus he at once distances himself from c and associates himself with the group of seven characters.

The first paragraph of the prologue describes Adan Buenosayres' s funeral, where

these same characters assist as pall-bearers. With Adan dead, they are now six: "seis

hombres nos internabamos en el Cementerio del Oeste ... El astr6logo Schultze y yo

empuiiabamos las dos manijas de la cabecera, Franky Amundsen y Del Solar habian

tornado las de los pies: al frente avanzaba Luis Pereda ... ; detr;is iba Samuel Tesler" (AB

9). Who is "yo"? It is natural that on finishing the novel the reader should return to the

prologue, which is also the epilogue, looking for clues about Adan's death. The reader

will naturally connect the group of pall-bearers with the group of seven mock heroes

whose antics entertained him for so many pages. On noticing that, in the enumeration of c the pall-bearers, the only individual missing from the original seven is Bernini, it is strongly indicated that "yo" is the petizo ("pipsqueak") Bernini. A trap has been built into c 51 the text to lead one to identify the narrator with Bernini. Since the narrator himself

specifies in Book Three that, of the seven heroes of the expedition, Bernini' s intelligence

is the dimmest, the narrator effectively satirizes himself and sabotages his own credibility.

Bemini' s identity is one of several assumed by the narrator. In the second

paragraph of the prologue, he dons another persona and adopts a new tone. He now

explains how he wrote "esta obra," beginning in Paris in 1930 and completing it much

later, as though he were Leopoldo Marechal himself talking about the genesis of Adan

Buenosayres. 5 Indeed, the prologue is signed with the initials "L.M.," suggesting the

name Leopoldo Marechal. This creates a problem, for the narrator's status appears to be

at once intratextual and extratextual, being both a character within the fiction and the

c author without. This new voice goes on to speak of a deep spiritual crisis and his project

of humiliating in himself "el orgullo de ciertas ambiciones que confieso haber sustentado."

The crisis, he tells us, had to do with giving up a false vocation to mysticism or "el dificil

camino de los perfectos" (Al110). But now it is as though he were Adan himself, the

post-funeral Adan, writing about his old mystical self, the one who wrote the "Cuademo

de Tapas Azules." Adan too must renounce his idle dreams of saintliness, and will pay

for his vain spiritual ambitions in the hell of Cacodelphia. This must certainly influence

the way we understand Adan' s end and what the novel means.

In his final observation, the narrator suggests that one more identity is his:

Y una observaci6n final: podria suceder que alguno de mis lectores identificara c a ciertos personajes de la obra, o se reconociera el mismo en alguno de ell os. En tal caso, no afmnare yo hip6critamente que se trata de un parecido casual, sino que c 52 afrontare las consecuencias: bien se yo que, sea cual fuere la posici6n que ocupan en el Infierno de Schultze o los gestos que cumplen en mis cinco libros, todos los

personajes de este relato levantan una "estatura heroica" (~ 11).

The narrator refers to "la obra" and its various components. Why does he mention

Schultze's hell in the same breath with "mis cinco libros"? His use of the preposition "or"

seems to be inclusive rather than disjunctive; that is, he appears to be accepting

responsibility, not only for his five books, but for the satirical nature of Schultze's inferno

as well. Thus he tacitly implicates himself in the making of Cacodelphia, which means

that Schultze would be another aspect of his identity. In effect, he seems to claim

authorship for the entire novel, with the glaring exception of the "Cuaderno de Tapas

Azules." The latter text is the only one left unclaimed by the narrator. Adan' s

"Cuaderno" is the only text that cannot be reclaimed from oblivion. It would seem that

the "Cuaderno," and everything it stands for, is what is being "buried" at the mock-funeral

of Adan Buenosayres.

All of the foregoing becomes intelligible only on re-reading the prologue after

having read the novel. On the first reading, the reader will be able to understand much

less: a certain Adan Buenosayres has died (a fact still devoid of significance); Leopoldo

Marechal is announcing himself as the author of what promises to be a roman a clef.

Besides this, the reader may sense something amiss in the dual status of the narrator as

fictional character and novelist, but will leave it as a puzzle to be clarified by the story that c lies ahead. On the second, virtually obligatory reading, the reader's new competence will allow him or her to read the "Pr6logo indispensable" anew. What he or she reads the first c 53 time is a prologue; the second time, an epilogue. The relation of prologue to epilogue is

much like the initial pattern we saw above, that of utterance and para-utterance. The first

and second readings disclose text and counter-text respectively. The counter-text is mined

with and discontinuities, but being the epilogue, it is the final word.

Let us now resume this counter-text as I have outlined it above. The narrator dons

a series of masks: Bernini, Schultze, a reborn Adan Buenosayres, and Leopoldo

Marechal. He is a practical joker and a parodist, both satirical and self-mocking. This

narrator has created such a Gordian knot of confusion that the only way to cut through it

is by renouncing the fictional pact that must exist between narrator and narratee and

admitting that the whole text, including the novel itself, is nothing but a game invented by c Leopoldo Marechal. If the architext of the "Pr6logo indispensable" lays the foundations of the of the novel, its para-text, in effect, destroys those foundations.

Like Adan's "Cuaderno" in Solveig's hands, the verbal cosmos is rolled up like a book-­

sicut liber involutus, as it is written in the Apocalypse. (As we shall see, this is the phrase

that haunts Adan Buenosayres, the words that reveal to him the end of his Platonist

world.) This novelistic manoeuvre anticipates the flourish with which Gabriel Garcfa

Marquez brings to a close Cien aflos de soledad (1967). Aureliano, the last of his line,

reads the narrative history of the Buendia dynasty as it is written in Melquiades' s

parchments, and as he does so, the world of the novel is consumed by an "huracan

biblico" (447). Aureliano's reading is in fact a second reading, the first having been c accomplished by the reader of the novel. Garcia Marquez sets up a perfect concord between the end of the world and the ending of the novel: the end of a bibliocosm. What c 54 Garcia Marquez's text does explicitly, that of Marechal has already performed implicitly.

Nevertheless, between the prologue and epilogue of Addn Buenosayres, there

hovers a transient verbal cosmos that is both entertaining and instructive. On entering that

universe, of course, one must beware of the narrator. As we shall see, he opens Book

One by mocking and challenging his reader. And yet, in spite of the narrator's

unreliability, one may posit the existence of an implied author who stands behind and

works through the narrator. This implied author (whom I shall call Leopoldo Marechal

for the sake of convenience) would be he who has put all the fragments of the novel

together to form a unity -- the five books, the "Cuademo," and the "Viaje a Cacodelphia,"

as well as the quasi-fictional prologue with its quasi-fictional narrator. The pragmatic

question that faces us is, can we infer the intentions of this implied author? Can one make

sense of his irony? In a way, the reader is obliged to invent this implied author lurking

behind the practical joker who serves as his narrator. Such is the challenge presented by

the novel. The reading of Adan Buenosayres outlined in the following pages is one

possible response to that challenge.

Before this chapter concludes, a map of my reading ought to be outlined in terms

of the vexed problem of authorship. Let us accept the narrator's claim that he has written

the first five books. He has also said that both the "Cuaderno" and the "Viaje" were

penned by Adan, but these two texts are very different both in nature and in their

relationship to the novel as a whole. The "Cuademo" is Adan's spiritual autobiography c as well as an of his poetical metaphysics; within the fictional world of the novel, he is this text's undisputed author, in the full sense of this term, for the "Cuaderno" c 55 is his creation from its conception to its written expression. The question of the authorship

of the .. Viaje .. is trickier. Who is its "author": Schultze, who is recognized by all

characters as the "demiurge" of Cacodelphia (AB 541) and guides Adan through it; the

"narrator" who insinuates his responsibility for Schultze's hell; or Adan, who the narrator

says has written the 11 Viaje" and who in any case is its first-person narrator? The problem

is a thorny one and admits of many possible solutions. To simplify matters, however, I

suggest that the "narrator," qua fictional persona, be left out of the question of the

"Viaje." It would seem that the novelist has "slipped" (deliberately?) and allowed his

authorial voice to emerge from behind his narratorial mask. The implied author of Adan

Buenosayres lets it be known that Schultze's hell is ultimately his invention. Within the c fictional world of the novel, however, Schultze the demiurge is the "author" of

Cacodelphia. Adan is simply the chronicler of what happens there. His putative

"authorship" of the manuscript of the "Viaje" is of a nature different from that of his

"Cuaderno." This text clearly stands apart from the rest of the noveL The "Viaje," by

contrast, participates in the main of the novel, concluding the story that begins on

Thursday morning and ends on Saturday night The episodes recounted in the "Viaje" are

things that happen to Adan. It is true that the "Viaje" is transparently "literary" and

without verisimilitude. But so are the many supernatural apparitions witnessed by the

seven mock-heroes in Book Three. In both cases, the reader is asked to suspend disbelief;

the narrative illusion is sustained by the dialogue among the characters, all of whom c witness the same phantasmagoria and discuss its significance. In Book Three, no one questions the "material" appearance of the prehistoric Gliptodon (AB 206) or that of the 56

literary personage Santos Vega (AB 217); instead, they argue over the meaning of these

happenings. Likewise, in Book Seven, none of the characters doubts the fact of their

presence in Schultze's artificial world; however, they do question Schultze's justice and

challenge his authority. That they should do so with so much energy may be interpreted

as the work of the implied author who stands behind the creation of Cacodelphia.

Marechal parodies his own poetry through his character Adan Buenosayres.

Schultze, for his part, gives expression to many of Marechal's ideas. In the adventure

with King Midas in Cacodelphia (AI! 567-575), for example, there is evident

intertextuality between Schultze 1 s discourse and Marechal 1 s essay "Autopsia de Creso,"

as shown below in chapter 8 of this thesis. In effect, Marechal carnivalizes his own

ideology. By lending Adan his poetry and Schultze his thought, the implied author of

Adan Buenosayres includes Marechal himself among the targets of his irony.

NOTES

1. The construction "ha movido, mueve y moveni tus pasos" echoes that of Revelation 1:8, where Christ identifies himself as the Alpha and Omega "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty."

2. Cortazar reviewed Adan in 1949: "Los libros VI y VII podrfan desglosarse de Adan Buenosayres con sensible beneficia para la arquitectura de la obra; tal como estan, resulta dificil juzgarlos si no es en funci6n de addenda y documentaci6n; carecen del calor y del calor de la novela propiamente dicha, y se ofrecen un poco como las notas que el escnipulo del bi6grafo incorpora para librarse por fm y del todo de su fichero" (24). That Cortazar later mode led the "architecture" of his famous novel on the game of hopscotch c 1 (Rayuela, 1963) shows how drastically his esthetic ideas changed and that Marechal S c 57 novel undoubtedly excercised a influence. See Javier de Navascues, "Sobre novela Argentina: Rayuela y Adan Buenos ay res" 79-80.

3. Because we learn of Adan's death at the outset, Javier de Navascues considers the ending of the novel to be "un fmal falsamente abierto" (Fin y final 4 7).

4. Valentin Cricco et al discuss this and other scriptural repetitions in the prologue from a different point of view, finding in them paradoxes that highlight the artificiality of writing, which in turn "descubre la copula secreta entre el pensamiento y la realidad" (28- 29).

5. In Palabras con Leopoldo Marechal, the novelist speaks of "las planificaciones de Adan Buenosayres que yo realizaba paralelamente" (Andres 32), i.e. concurrently with touristic activities in Paris. Referring to his Italian sojourn during the same European tour, he concludes: "todo ese proceso esta muy vinculado ami vida y por consiguiente ami obra, y vuelvo a remitirme alas 'Claves de Adan Buenosayres'" (35-6). After the death of his wife and Per6n's ascent to power in the mid-forties, Marechal resumed work on his novel: "Retome mi cien veces postergada Adan Buenosayres, lo rehice todo y le di fin. i., Y sabes por que? Porque mi personaje habfa evolucionado conmigo y realizado todas mis experiencias" (45). The long postponement mentioned here, in large measure because of his wife's illness, corresponds to "las contrariedades y desgracias" that, according to c L.M., "demoraron su ejecuci6n [de esta obra]" (AB 10). The autobiographical basis of "mi personaje," who has realized all Marechal's experiences, is evident.

c c 58 Chapter 2

The book of Revelation as subtext: Adan' s personal apocalypse

In this chapter, it will be shown how Adan' s story is informed by the guiding

subtext of the Book of Revelation. This subtext is foregrounded at decisive moments in

the story, and this happens through two distinct voices. Adan's own voice is transmitted

by a third-person narrator as an interior monologue, and this voice tells the better part of

his story. Certain passages from Revelation obsess Adan and thus enter the text through

his interior monologue. The other voice is that of the narrator, who occasionally makes

independent comments and interpretations. At certain crucial moments, the narrator

c imposes his own design on the events. He does so disingenuously or, perhaps, ironically.

Thus there is a cleavage between what "really" happens to Adan and the false construct

the narrator mockingly puts on his story. This ironic gap becomes most evident when one

reads Adan's story, as told in Books One to Five, through the subtext of the book of

Revelation.

The myth of the end of the world has become very important to Adan as a result

of his midnight readings in the book of Revelation. His obsession with the Apocalypse

revolves around one phrase in particular:

Las tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis venian resonando en sus oidos desde la c noche anterior: Sicut liber involutus [Apocalypsis 6:14]. Adan recordaba que, abandonando la lectura en aquella imagen, habia contenido su respiraci6n y c 59 escuchado el ominoso y duro silencio de la noche; y alla, en el coraz6n del silencio, le habia parecido sorprender un jcric! de grandes resortes que se aflojaban, un crujido de formas que se anonadarian al instante, una sublevaci6n de ::itomos que se rechazaban ya. (All 22)

The image of the sky being rolled up like a book is associated in Adan's imagination with

total destruction, both of forms and of matter right down to the atomic level. The phrase

"sicut liber involutus" becomes an important Leitmotiv in Adan's interior monologue. For

example, a passing funeral procession incites Adan to meditate on death in terms of the

Last Judgment at the end of time: "[el difunto desconocido] oira la trompeta del angel,

y sentira caer sobre sus hombros la ultima hoja del tiempo. Quia tempus non erit amplius" c (AB 85). This citation from Apocalypsis (10:6) concerning the exhaustion of time inevitably leads back to the same obsessive Apocalyptic sentence:

[Adan] mir6 el cielo que resplandecia en las alturas, pero ante los ojos de su alma la vio marchitarse y caer a jirones como la vieja decoraci6n de un drama. --"Y el cielo sera retirado como un libro que se arrolla." Tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis a medianoche (All 85).

On one hand, the sky is compared to the backdrop of a drama falling to shreds, and on the

other hand, to a book being rolled up. Thus the literary topos of the theatrum mundi is

linked to the metaphor of the world as book, all under the sign of the Apocalypse. St.

John's "tremendous words," or as Northrop Frye's title would have it, "words with

power," both terrify and fascinate Adan, for they enable him to participate imaginatively

in the same visionary powers as the seer of Patmos, words that through the magic of c 60 metaphor turn the destruction of the world into a matter of rolling up a scroll or

dismantling a stage-set.

This episode takes place in Book Two as Adan makes his way through the streets

of his native Villa Crespo to the tertulia at the house of the Amundsen family. He is

anticipating a decisive meeting with Solveig Amundsen, for he plans to play his trump

in his bid for her love by revealing to her his "Cuaderno de Tapas Azules. '' In the

"Cuaderno," Adan has edified a second Solveig. He has constructed an ideal, celestial

woman on the basis of a flesh-and-blood, earthly woman, as he has confessed earlier in

conversation with his friend Samuel Tesler: c Suavemente obligado a una confidencia, el Visitante (Adan] demostr6 la escasa realidad de sus amores, acerca de los cuales dijo, tras referirse a un Cuaderno de Tapas Azules, que solo tenian la fragil esencia de una construcci6n ideal, aunque se basaran en una mujer de came y hueso. [ ... ] [Adan] admiti6 estar edificando una mujer de cielo sobre la base de una mujer terrestre. (AB 68)

Now Adan is apprehensive as he makes his way Solveig's house, because everything

depends on how the two Solveigs will measure up against each other. On the one hand,

"alleerlo [el Cuademo de Tapas Azules], 6Se reconoceria Solveig Amundsen en la pintura

ideal que habia trazado el con rnateriales tan sutiles?" On the other hand, "lreconoceria

el a la Solveig ideal de su cuademo en la Solveig de came y sangre que lo habia llamado

y a la que se aproxirnaba en aquel instante?" In any event, "[l]a confrontaci6n de ambas c criaturas era temible" (AB. 79). What matters to Adan is that the two Solveigs should harmoniously coincide. In order for this to happen, the flesh-and-blood girl, on reading c 61 his "Cuademo, " ought to recognize his genius and then submit to the ideal form that he

has created for her. At least, so Adan hopes:

lo que le interesaba en realidad ... [era] el conocimiento que mediante aquellas paginas harfa Solveig de un Adan Buenosayres prodigiosamente desconocido hasta entonces. "Acaso, al descubrirsele de pronto aquel extrafio linaje de amor, ella se le acercaria con Ios pies amorosos de la materia que busca su forma ... " (AB 79)

His fantasy is that, once his love has been revealed to her, she will be as formless materia

looking to him in search of her form. This form, one may deduce, will be the ideal one

created by Adan.

As it turns out, however, Solveig does not even read the notebook. No harmonious

conjunction of the earthly and the ideal woman occurs. This is a catastrophe for Adan,

not only for the blow to his amour propre, but also because his idealist world-view is

given the lie by events in the "real" world (of the fiction).

Adan' s personal catastrophe is heralded by the last adventure that befalls him

before arriving at the Amundsens' house in Saavedra. He "witnesses" --though it is

largely an event in his imagination-- a mock battle of Armageddon. It begins as a spat

between two housewives, but soon implicates the entire neighbourhood, which is a

microcosm of the whole world since it involves all of the races and nationalities that make

up Argentina, elaborately enumerated in the text (AB 116). They are polarized into two c opposing armies, as in the war of the end of the world, and amid "una furiosa trompeteria c 62 de angeles, la batalla se hace general y tremenda" (AB 119). At the height of this

universal, apocalyptic brawl, a phrase from the Book of Revelation is inserted into the

text:

Sin saber c6mo ni en virtud de que arte, el Carrero se halla en poder del vasco Arizmendi, el cual, lleno de santa furia, lo aprieta entre sus brazos de ciclope. La multitud deja oir un murmullo de asombro: se hace luego un silencio de media hora. Los dos heroes combaten, y bajo su pies redobla la tierra. (AB. 118; my emphasis)

The phrase stands out because it does not make sense in the immediate narrative context;

in the midst of a street brawl, it is impossible that suddenly there be a half-hour of silence. c The quote from Revelation does make metanarrative sense, however, when interpreted in

terms of Adan' s personal apocalyptic drama.

The interpolated phrase is drawn from that passage of Revelation in which the

seventh seal is opened: "When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was a silence in

heaven for about half an hour" (Rev 8:1). This is one of many enigmatic passages in the

Apocalypse. Why the silence and why for half an hour? Various interpretations of the

silence have been proposed, but they are inconclusive since there is no explanation for the

duration of half an hour. As one commentator concludes, "possibly the most that can be

definitely stated is that it is a dramatic pause preceding the new set of calamities that are

to ensue" (Buttrick, Interpreter's Bible XII 425). 1 Nacar and Colunga coincide with the c idea of the dramatic pause, calling the half-hour of silence an "entreacto," but add that now "la escena pasa del cielo a la tierra y marca la ejecuci6n de los juicios contra el c 63 mundo" (Sagrada 1281, n.8.1). InAdan Buenosayres, the half-hour of silence occurs at

the end of the first chapter of Book Two, in a mock battle of Armageddon taking place in

Adan's imagination. This phantasmagorical episode interrupts the narrative line that

follows Adan through the streets on his way to the Amundsens' house. The thread is

picked up again in chapter two after Adan has arrived at the tertulia. This is where the

judgment against him and his poetic world will be executed. Thus the "half-hour of

silence" marks a transition from one scene to another, from the "cielo" or realm of Adan's

imagination to the "tierra," the concrete social world of the tertulia. The untimely

irruption of the Apocalyptic subtext into the flow of the narrative, then, announces its

crucial fore grounding in the next chapter, the account of the tertulia. After projecting his c imaginative forebodings of Apocalypse onto the cosmos, Adan will experience catastrophe personally.

When the interrupted narrative line is resumed in chapter two, Adan has already

given his "Cuaderno de Tapas Azules" to his beloved, thus bringing about the dreaded

confrontation between the two Solveigs, the celeste and the terrestre. In love with

someone else, Solveig is quite indifferent to Adan's gift. She sits on the blue divan and

plays distractedly with the notebook in her hands: "Silenciosa y prieta de misterio,

Solveig enrollaba y desenrollaba un Cuaderno de Tapas Azules" (AB 130). The same

variation on the Apocalyptic phrase --sicut liber involutus-- is repeated some pages later:

"Ahora las manos de Solveig enrollaban y desenrollaban el Cuaderno de Tapas Azules"

(AB 141). An ironic strategy here takes advantage of the polysemia of the Spanish word c 64 celeste, which means both "of the sky" and "blue." By virtue of this double meaning, the

"Cuaderno de Tapas Azules" becomes doubly symbolic. On one hand, it stands for the

image of Solveig celeste whose image it carries within. Therefore, Solveig terrestre --the

real Solveig or "la de Dios," as Adan himself allows-- destroys Solveig celeste, who is

Adan' s ideal creation. The irony of this is the more mordant since Solveig terrestre is

sitting on a "divan celeste," as is repeatedly mentioned. The earthly woman has usurped

the heavenly position. On the other hand, Adan's blue notebook signifies the (blue) sky

which, according to the obsessive Apocalyptic phrase, gets rolled up like a book. The

figurative language of Revelation becomes literal and then ironic. Hence Solveig, by

rolling up the "Cuaderno," plays the role of an apocalyptic angel who rolls up the sky and c destroys the world of the "Cuaderno de Tapas Azules."

In this confrontation between the two Solveigs, the stakes are very high. It is not

only the very unequal contest of poetry against reality. Adan's more identifiable rival is

not reality but Lucio Negri. Symbolically, their rivalry is a battle of conflicting truths,

that of poetry (Adan) versus science (Lucio). Solveig is the arbiter in this contest, and she

has spoken. By rejecting Adan and choosing Lucio Negri, she has rejected poetry and

endorsed the scientific world-view. Adan appears to accept the verdict. Later, in Book

Three, during the journey through the lowlands of Saavedra with his companions, the

unhappy poet contemplates making a gesture that would speak more eloquently than words

of the demise of his idealist values. It happens when one of the adventurers, Franky c Amundsen, falls into a sewage ditch and comes out covered in foul-smelling muck. When he asks for something with which to clean himself, Adan considers offering him "cierto c 65 inefable Cuademo de Tapas Azules que habia rescatado esa noche del poder de una

ingrata; pero lo contuvo su infinita modestia, al recordarle que aquellas paginas no eran

suyas, sino de la posteridad" (AB 230). Adan has admitted, at least internally, the defeat

of the system of values contained in his "Cuademo" and has come to a dismal estimation

of their true worth: the equivalent of toilet paper. That they might hold some interest for

posterity can only be understood as mordant self-irony.

Nevertheless, the narrator alludes to another aspect of the Apocalyptic intertext

during his presentation of the tertulia and suggests a different interpretation of the meaning

of Solveig' s rejection of Adan. In the following passage, the narrator speaks c independently about Solveig and makes an indirect but unequivocal reference to John's

Revelation:

Y Solveig adivinaba ya la posesi6n de una fuerza naciente, y vagos ensueiios de dominio se abrian paso en su imaginaci6n. La noche aquella en que la dejaron sola, ;..no se habia puesto ella el vestido largo de su hermana Ethel, ese gran vestido negro con adomos de plata? i,NO habia caminado ella frente al espejo, grave como una dama, y respondiendo con una leve inclinaci6n de su rostro a las reverencias profundas que le dedicaba una invisible corte de admiradores? [ ... ] Lo que le complacia en Lucio era, justamente, la lisonja reverencial de sus miradas y el cobarde temblor de sus voces cuando a ella se dirigia; y cada vez que Lucio bailaba con ella, se estremecia todo y entornaba Ios parpados, como su perro Ner6n, aquella tarde, cuando tendida ella en la piel de carnero que mister Chisholm trajo de la Patagonia, le habia palmeado el vientre liso y calido, a la hora de la c siesta. (AB 133) c 66 Clearly, the narrator in this passage is no longer transmitting Adan' s thoughts, for the

protagonist could not possibly be privy to these intimate details of Solveig's life. Why

does the narrator supply all these details about the girl's dog and the circumstances of her

siesta? What is he trying to insinuate? Solveig has a dog named Nero. This detail, so

unnecessary to the advancement of the immediate story-line, can hardly be innocent.

Nero, the Roman emperor notorious for his persecution of the early Christians, has always

been associated with the Beast in the Apocalypse whose number is 666. In the Sibylline

Oracles, Nero redivivus is identified as the Antichrist and portrayed as a purple dragon and

a great beast (Buttrick, Interpreter's Bible XII 461, 466-7). The Beast, representing the

imperial power of Rome, has a close relationship with that other well-known apocalyptic

c figure, the Scarlet Woman or Whore of Babylon, who personifies Rome, "the great city

that rules over the kings of the earth" (Rev 17: 18). The power of the Scarlet Woman is,

at least metaphorically, female sexual power: "the kings of the earth have committed

fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of

her luxury" (Rev 18:3). In the above passage from Addn Buenosayres, Lucio Negri is

compared to Solveig's dog Nero, and Solveig, by association, to the Scarlet Woman.

Under the shadow of these Apocalyptic figures, Solveig's "ensuefios de dominio" and

Lucio's "cobarde temblor" take on a mock-sinister aspect. Solveig dominates Lucio

through her nascent sexuality. Her "evil" is further enhanced by her association with

mister Chisholm, who in the novel represents the evil of English imperialism and who has c made Solveig the gift of the lambskin on which she sensually reclines. Due to the biblical symbolism of the Lamb, Solveig 's otherwise innocent gesture of petting her dog acquires c 67 an aura of the abominable luxury of the "woman drunk with the blood of the saints and the

blood of the witnesses to Jesus" (Rev 17:6). Rather than the political aspect of the

Johannine text, in which Whore and Beast are symbols of Rome and its power, the

narrator emphasizes the sensuality of Solveig as the Scarlet Woman. 2 If Solveig terrestre

is evil because of her carnality, then Adan Is apparent bad luck in having been spurned by

her ought to be considered as a blessing in disguise, for he will have been delivered

providentially from the baleful fascination exerted by the Great Whore. While the

discourse of scientific materialism, represented in Lucio Negri, is in thrall to the evil

influence of the passions of the body, Adan Is cult to the ideal form of woman has taken

refuge in the desert that it may remain pure, ultimately to be vindicated on Judgment Day. c On this reading, then, Adan's disappointment in love will not be the Last Judgment, but a test of his faith, which ought to be rewarded if he perseveres. The narrator, independent

of Adan's consciousness, is setting up an alternative resolution to the apocalyptic crisis by

taking the intertext out of his character's interior monologue and putting his own slant on

it.

If someone were to object that this exegesis is making a great deal out of a lap-dog

named Nero, I could only agree. However, the intertext of the Book of Revelation is

insistently there, and Marechal's characteristic hyperbole --what he himself calls his

3 Rabelaisian "tremendismo " -- invites one to read hyperbolically. Indeed, one of

Marechal's favourite parodic strategies is exaggeration. A squabble between housewives c turns into a battle of epic proportions. When a few drunken bohemians wander for a couple of hours through a suburban wasteland, it becomes a heroic gesta replete with c 68 supernatural adventures. Marechal has his narrator parody the epic mode by exaggerating

its stylistic effects and by employing it for inappropriate situations. Likewise, he plays

with the Book of Revelation. It is difficult to exaggerate the language of Revelation,

already superlatively hyperbolic. But he does employ that text ironically to enhance

otherwise banal situations. In the present case, our conventional sense of proportion tells

us that it is outrageous that a fourteen-year-old girl who happens to prefer one young man

over another, should be cast in the grandiose mythic mold of the Whore of Babylon. But

this insinuation arises from the text itself, or more accurately, from the intertext. The

immediate question at hand is: what are the consequences of this insinuation with regard

to Adan' s story? c The central crisis of the novel's plot is that Solveig spurns Adan and his "Cuaderno." This crisis can now be resolved by one of two different denouements, which

depend on two divergent readings of the Apocalyptic intertext. In one reading, Adan has

erected a false celestial image that has been struck down through the agency of Solveig

terrestre. In the other reading, the one obliquely suggested by the detail of the dog Nero,

Adan would have innocently mistaken an unsuitable woman as a possible model for a

divine one. The error would lie not in his intention, nor in his artistic-metaphysical

procedure; rather, the evil would be in the unworthiness of his earthly model. Since the

controlling interpretative code is Apocalyptic, the unworthy Solveig terrestre is made out

to be a Scarlet Woman, for in the apocalyptic mind-set, one is either on the right side or

the wrong side, either one of the 144,000 elect or marked with the sign of the Beast, either

redeemed in the New Jerusalem or cast into the lake of fire. Solveig, upon her entry into c 69 womanhood, must be either Beatrice or the Whore of Babylon; there is no middle ground.

Samuel Tesler "el fil6sofo" seems to interpret Adan's plight according to this

second version. After the adventure of the brothel, as the two friends walk homeward

through the streets arm in arm, the philosopher's thoughts turn to Adan's "inefable historia

de amor": "[Samuel] evoc6la figura de cierta mocosa [Solveig] que ya sabia darse humos

entre las espigadas mujeres de Saavedra; y se dijo, en su alma, que solo un ingenuo como

el amigo Buenosayres podia encontrar en aquella endeble criatura la materia prima de una

Laura ode una Beatriz" (AJ.l352-3). For Samuel, the brat who puts on airs is clearly

unworthy, and Adan is a fool to idealize her. Though he does not go so far as to call her

a Scarlet Woman, he does denounce her successful suitor, Lucio Negri, in an outburst of c righteous anger: "--jEs una bestia negra! --insisti6 Samuel--. jHabia que verlo,

arrastrandole su ala de pavo a la mocosa!" (AB. 353). Thus Samuel Tesler, when in a state

of extreme inebriation, helps to corroborate the narrator's interpretation of events. The

narrator has not thereby gained a terribly valuable ally, for as Adan reflects shortly

afterwards, the philosopher very often moves in the plane of farce (AB. 360).

After a digression during Books Three and Four, the parallel denouements of

Adan's crisis are narrated in Book Five, the last to be narrated in the third person and the

end of the main body of the novel. As I have shown above, the first version of the

unhappy love affair is the one Adan experiences (though he will gloss this over in his

"Cuademo"). It is Adan who is obsessed by the Apocalyptic image sicut liber involutus; c it is he who sees his ideal world destroyed as Solveig rolls up his "Cuademo." He has been judged and found wanting, both as a lover and more importantly as a metaphysical 70

poet. In Book Five, we are again privy to his thoughts as he wanders the streets at

midnight Friday. As a result of his failure with Solveig, Adan has entered a crisis of self-

doubt. He repents of the vanity of his literary vocation. He abandons himself to despair.

Eventually, he finds himself in front of the statue of Christ known as "el Cristo de la

Mano Rota." The desperate young man prays to the broken statue and receives no answer.

Having clutched this last straw in vain, his despair is now complete. He returns home and

meets a linyera (a homeless tramp) on his doorstep. The linyera disappears, but Adan falls

asleep and dreams about him as a stumbling Christ figure: "[ellinyera] anda, se tambalea,

cae de rodillas y vuelve a incorporarse" (AB. 425) on the road to Golgotha. The

physiognomy of each of the soldiers who accompany him reflect images of the seven c deadly sins. Adan discovers to his horror that all these sins are in his own features. Thus ends Adan's subjective experience in what he calls "esta noche fmal" (AB. 412).

Nevertheless, toward the end of Book Five, a second denouement emerges to

complete the other apocalyptic version of why Adan has lost Solveig, in which the narrator

has insinuated that the girl is bad and that the ingenuous poet has been delivered from evil.

At the juncture where Actan gives up, the narrator takes matters into his own hands and

imposes his version of events. As Adan suffers, the narrator detaches his voice from

Adan's consciousness and creates a gaudy cosmic backdrop featuring a battle between the

heavenly hosts of Light against those of Darkness for Adan' s soul, the outcome of which

is predictable. Adan, meanwhile, remains quite unaware that his soul is being saved and

that divine justice is leaning this time in his favour.

The point at which the narrator's voice cleanly detaches itself from Adan' s interior 71

monologue is very clear. Adan finishes a soliloquy full of self-recrimination with the

words "jS6lo un literato!" and then the narrator's voice, clearly distinct from that of the

protagonist, takes over:

Espadas angelicas y tridentes demoniacos chocan sin ruido en la calle Gurruchaga: se disputan el alma de Adan Buenosayres, un literato; porque, seg6n la economfa suprema, vale mas el alma de un hombre que todo el universo visible. Pero Adan nolo sabe, yes bueno que nolo sepa todavia (AB. 419).

Whereas before the narrator stayed discreetly in the background, usually limiting himself

to relaying the protagonist's perceptions, he suddenly and ostentatiously imposes his own

voice in the role of a theologian who sees the divine scheme of things and interprets the

action for us. When Adan prays, his soliloquy is punctuated by the narrator's voice

recounting step by step the apocalyptic battle of the heavenly hosts: "Y, entretanto,

espadas angelicas y tridentes demoniacos han suspendido su contienda; porque lleg6 la

hora en que Adan Buenosayres debe combatir solo" (AB 423). And again: "Adlin ignora

que mi1 ojos invisibles estlin llorando por el en las alturas, y que Ios de la espada, en tomo

suyo, han comenzado a mirarse y a sonreirse, como si desde la eternidad poseyeran un

secreto inviolable" (AB 423). And yet again: "Las campanas del cielo han comenzado

a redoblar, y redoblan a fiesta. Voces triunfales estallan en los nueve coros de arriba;

porque vale mas el alma de un hombre que toda la creaci6n visible, y porque un alma esta

peleando bienjunto a la reja de San Bernardo. Pero Adan Buenosayres no las oye, yes c bueno que no las oiga todavfa" (AB. 4234). None of this cosmic choreography, a verbal 72

pastiche of the Gloria scene in medieval Christian art, forms part of Adan's consciousness,

as the narrator himself smugly points out. The protagonist has become a pawn in this

narrator's Christian morality play, in which Adan's soul is struggling on the battlefield of

a spiritual Armageddon, according to the Augustinian reading of Revelation. 4

This same narrator has the final word in Book Five, which marks the end of his

narrative contribution to the novel:

Una gran quietud reina en el cuarto. El silencio seria total ahora sin el susurro de la y el rechinar del camaranch6n bajo Adan Buenosayres que se agita en suefios. Presencias torvas retroceden: huyen vencidas y como a regafiadientes hacia Ios cuatro angulos del recinto. De pie junta a la cabecera, Alguien ha bajado sus armas; y apoyado en ellas vigila eternamente. (AB 426)

After Actan's encounter with the linyera and his Christic dream, we are invited to identify

this "Alguien" as Christ, who lays down his arms, and watches over Adan eternally. That

He should be bearing arms seems to suggest Christ in his persona of the apocalyptic

Knight Faithful and True (Rev 19:11), intervening in Adan's personal Armageddon.

There is something cartoonish in the image of the dashing knight of the cosmic battle

between Light and Darkness, resting on his armour at the head of a bed; one thinks of don

Quixote' s "vel a de las armas. " This clumsy, transparent use of the theatrical cliche of the

makes the scene ring so hollow that one begins to suspect that the

narrator, with his mask of maudlin and almost farcical piety, is pulling our leg. c One's suspicions increase on recalling the jarring tone with which the narrator introduces his text, i.e. the main body of the novel comprised of Books One to Five. He 73

addresses the reader in an unsettling way in the second sentence of Book One:

Lector agreste, si te adornara la virtud del pajaro y si desde tus alturas hubieses tendido una mirada gorrionesca sobre la ciudad, bien se yo que tu pecho se habria dilatado segl1n la mecanica del orgullo, ante la vision que a tus ojos de porteiio leal se hubiera ofrecido en aquel instante. (AB 15)

The content of his ensuing description of industrial Buenos Aires is quite inappropriate to

the tone of bucolic lyricism, which therefore is burlesque and sarcastic: "Trenes

orquestales entraban en la ciudad, o salian rumbo alas florestas del norte, a los viiiedos

del oeste, alas ge6rgicas del centro y alas pastorales del sur ... Pero refrena tu lirismo,

encabritado lector" CA.B 15-16). Hence, the vocative "lector agreste" can by no means be

innocent. The adjective "agreste," meaning "relative al campo," is in both Spanish and

French a literary word adapted from the Latin agrestis. In both languages, this original

meaning, with its bucolic overtones appropriate to the pastoral genre, is obsolete. In

Spanish, the word retains its figurative meaning "tosco, rudo, grosero" when applied to

human beings. 5 The narrator plays on this double meaning, at once referring parodically

to the word's literary past, and jocosely insulting his reader as a country bumpkin, an

uncouth rube. This unflattering epithet, agreste, tinges with sardonic overtones such

locutions as "una mirada gorrionesca" and "la mecanica del orgullo" inasmuch as these

characterize the hypothetical reader. In sum, the narrator treats his reader as a lout who

reacts according to predictable mechanisms, lacking the necessary sophistication to know c when he or she is being led by the nose. It is to such a reader that the narrator's mock- c 74 beatific ending is addressed.

The narrator is the same practical joker that we have seen in the "Pr6logo

indispensable." But he has given us some warning in the way he has structured his

account. Just as the ending of the novel refers us back to the prologue, the ending of Book

Five closes a cycle begun in Book One. After addressing himself to his "lector agreste,"

the narrator begins by introducing his sleeping protagonist as Actan awakes in the morning.

With perfect symmetry, he closes his text after Adan has fallen asleep late at night. The

narrator has had the first word (in the morning) and the last word (at night). But his first

word --as it were, his "prologue" or preliminary word-- is to mock the reader as gullible.

Since by virtue of the cyclical structure his first word must be related to his last, the

narrator has deliberately structured his account to call attention to the unreliability of his

ending.

To sum up, Saint John's Book of Revelation is the subtext informing the story of

Adan Buenosayres. The protagonist experiences his crisis as a kind of apocalypse. But

due to the meddling of the narrator, the subtext works in two divergent ways. What Adan

experiences as a catastrophe does not coincide with the narrator's way of interpreting it.

The narrator --either ironically or in bad faith-- superimposes the Christian narrative of

redemption on Adan's experience, though the narrated events in themselves do not imply

redemption at all. This cleavage between the fictional "facts" and an inadequate

interpretation of them is consistent with the generally diremptive tendency of the novel.

Looking behind the narrator's false design, the following chapters will attempt to explore 75

an alternative meaning to Adan's apocalyptic crisis.

NOTES

1. In the book of Revelation, the opening of the set of seven seals is followed by a series of seven trumpets. In Adan Buenos ay res, the mention of the half-hour of silence on page 118 is followed by the image of the "furiosa trompeteria de angeles" on page 119' which possibly might be construed as an allusion to the episodic set of the seven trumpeting angels in Revelation. On the other hand, the image of the sky being rolled up like a book occurs on the breaking of the sixth seal. Nevertheless, it is not my contention that the narrative plan Addn Buenosayres is based on the episodic structure of the book of Revelation, but rather that Marechal draws images from the biblical text as it suits the narrative requirements of his own text.

2. The Whore of Babylon serves as a symbol of the evil of sex on another occasion. In the brothel scene in Book Four, Adan's friend and comrade in amorous suffering, Samuel Tesler, denounces the institution of prostitution in the same terms: "iEs la ramera del c Apocalipsis, lamas desnuda entre las vestidas! En mi tribu la llamaban Lilith" (M 333). 3. Marechal writes in his essay entitled "Claves de Adan Buenosayres" that his readings of Rabalais left in him "una inclinaci6n a la 'gigantomaquia' que se advierte no poco en Addn Buenosayres," as well as "el gusto de un humor sin agresiones que oculta un sentido profundo bajo su mascara 'tremendista"' (Cuademo 131). The word "mascara" is of key importance. But who wears the mask? Even when he appears to explain himself, Marechal hides his meaning behind a rhetorical figure, this time prosopopeia ("the taste for humour ... wears a mask"). As for the "sentido profundo" to which he refers, it seems preferable to think of the meaning of Marechal' s humour in terms of another spatial metaphor: rather than covering up a deeper meaning, it ironically displaces meaning.

4. Following the example of Origen, who replaced millenial, collective eschatology with an eschatology of the individual soul, Augustine interpreted the Book of Revelation "as a spiritual allegory" (Cohn, Pursuit 13, 14).

5. Joan Corominas qualifies agreste as a "voz culta"; Le Robert designates the French equivalent as 11 Vieux ou litteraire." The standard meanings of "relativo al campo" and the figurative "tosco, rudo, grosero" are listed in all of the standard Spanish dictionaries consulted, including Maria Eloisa Alvarez del Real's El vocabulario actual de la America Latina y Espafla (Panama: America, 1976). No other special usage is cited in the c dictionaries specializing in popular Argentine language. 76 Chapter 3

Metahistory and the cycle of language

This chapter will look at the cyclical paradigm of "metahistory" as Marechal

receives it from Rem~ Guenon, only to parody it as a way of showing an analogous cycle

of language modes or phases, each of which is characterized by a particular trope or

figure. Having described these modes of language with the help of Giambattista Vico,

Northrop Frye, and Hayden White, I will then trace how Marechal, in Book One of Adan

Buenosayres, demonstrates this metalinguistic cycle in the interior monologue of his

protagonist. Finally, irony will be discussed as the trope ruling the language and meaning

of this novel.

The structure of Adan Buenosayres is circular, albeit in an ironic way. If the Book

of Revelation is the principal intertext of the novel, this circularity presents us with an

interpretive problem. One of the distinguishing features of the Judeo-Christian tradition

is its development of the concept of linear time, which is fundamental for the later

development of the modem idea of history. In the Christian narrative, time begins with

the creation of the world in Genesis and ends with its destruction in the Apocalypse. Time

is not cyclical; it has a definite beginning and end. A schematic representation of world

history according to Christian apocalypticism can be pictured as a line descending from

the moment of the Creation down into the depths of darkness and evil to the rock bottom c of the present day, characterized as the absolute rule of the Beast. At the end-point of time, there is a cosmic revolution which inaugurates the New Jerusalem and Christ's c 77 eternal rule. In terms of the quality of life, the end of time means a return to the

perfection of the moment of Creation, but this in no way implies a repetition of the

process. 1

In both Adtin Buenosayres and El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo, by contrast,

apocalypse signifies the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. The conventional

apocalyptic view of history, as outlined above, is subordinated to a theory of

"metahistory," a term proposed in the former novel by the character Schultze (AB 213).

The neologism has been invented by Schultze "el astr6logo," but the theory it denotes is

shared by the novel's two other "metaphysical" characters, Adan Buenosayres and Samuel

Tesler "el ftl6sofo." Their theory of metahistory proposes a cyclical model of history, and

it represents a conflation of various sources, including the Eastern religions. The most

evident of these is Hesiod's doctrine of the four ages of mankind. During his "tertulia

definitiva" (AB. 463), Adan Buenosayres mentally recites "la elegia del buen Hesiodo, que

ya en su siglo lamentaba esta Edad de Hierro: «Los hombres estanin rotos de trabajo y

miseria durante el dia, y senin corrompidos a lo largo de la noche. El uno saqueani la

ciudad del otro: no se hallani piedad alguna, ni justicia, ni buenas acciones, sino que

habra de respetarse a1 hombre violento e inicuo))" (.AB. 150). In El Banquete de Severo

Arcangelo, Professor Bermudez quotes a similar version of the same passage from The

Works and the Days CB. 118-9), in which the Greek philosopher bemoans having to live in

the miserable, iniquitous Iron Age. c The most direct exposition of the theory of metahistory is the one presented by Bermudez at the "Segundo Concilio del Banquete" CB. 195-210). A Great Cycle is made 78

up of the four small cycles: the Golden Age of man in his perfection, the Silver Age, the

Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. The transition from one cycle to the next is marked by a

cataclysm, though some memory of the preceding ages is retained. At the end of the Iron

Age, when humanity has sunk to the extreme limit of degeneration, a more definitive

cataclysm intervenes, "un hecho catastr6fico" wiping out all trace and memory of the

former ages.

In Addn Buenosayres "the philosopher" Samuel Tesler expounds the same doctrine

at the Amundsen tertulia:

--Se gun los hindues --lo aleccion6 Tesler--, la Edad de Oro tuvo una duraci6n de casi dos millones de aiios. Luego vinieron la de Plata, la de Cobre y la de Hierro. Y si pensamos que entre una edad y otra sucedieron terribles cataclismos que modificaron totalmente la fisonomia del planeta, jdigame si es posible que nos quedase alguna mina para que se divirtieran los arque6logos! (AB 149)

He adds that the last catastrophe was the Universal Flood, marking the passage from the

Bronze to the Iron Age some 2300 years ago. He concludes that the present world will

be destroyed by fire "al finalizar este siglo" (.,AB 151).

All traditions remember the Flood, notes Samuel Tester, citing the Hindu tradition

in particular. In Banquete, one of the participants at the Segundo Concilio asks Bermudez

which traditional chronology he is following, the Hebraic, the Hindu or the Chinese. It

is evident that the model of metahistory attempts to conflate several traditions, the Hindu c carrying the most weight. Where did this model come from? It is my opinion that 79

Leopoldo Marechal did not invent it, but rather borrowed it from the French writer, Rem!

Guenon (see above, Introduction n.20). During the "Viaje a Cacodelphia," Schultze

delivers a historical discourse in which his interlocutor maliciously points out the influence

of "recientes lecturas de cierto metafisico glilico" (AB 571). This Gallic metaphysician

is surely Rene Guenon, whom Marechal praises as a "fil6sofo de la historia" in his essay

"Autopsia de Creso" (Cuademo 53). Furthermore, Marechal cites Guenon as one of the

influences determining his understanding of Dante, which in turn influenced the writing

of Adan Buenosayres (Andres 35).

One of Guenon's best known books is La Crise du monde modeme, first published

in 1927, then again in 1946, just two years before the publication of Adan Buenosayres.

Here is how Guenon conflates the Hindu doctrine of the Great Cycle or Manvantara with

Hesiod's doctrine:

La doctrine hindoue enseigne que la duree d'un cycle humain, auquel elle donne le nom de Manvantara, se divise en quatre ages, qui marquent autant de phases d'un obscurcissement graduel de la spiritualite primordiale; ce sont ces memes periodes que les traditions de l'antiquite occidentale, de leur cote, designaient comme les ages d'or, d'argent, de bronze et de fer. Nous sommes presentement dans le quatrieme age, le Kali-Yuga ou «age sombre». (Crise 15)

Guenon prefers the Hindu version, adducing examples and ideas from the Graeco-Roman

and Judeo-Christian traditions merely as corroborations of Oriental doctrine.

In spite of his fondness for exotic traditions, however, Guenon's cast of mind c coincides very well with that of apocalypticism. He abhors the modern West for having 80

strayed from the equilibrium embodied in "Tradition," by which he means a theocratic

society such as medieval Europe or classical India. In recent years, explains the

Frenchman, "les evenements sont alles en se precipitant avec une vitesse toujours

croissante," and we are approaching "une crise," which etymologically implies "un

jugement" and symbolically "le «jugement dernier»". Following this judgment, "s'ouvrira

une nouvelle periode de l'histoire de l'humanite terrestre. [ ... ] Cette fm n'est sans doute

pas la «fin du monde», au sens total ou certains veulent l'entendre, mais elle est tout au

moins la fin d 'un monde." The world that will come to an end is "la civilisation

occidentale sous sa forme actuelle." Thus the end of the world means "la fm d'une epoque

ou d'un cycle historique, qui peut d'ailleurs etre en correspondance avec un cycle c cosmique, suivant ce qu'enseignent a cet egard toutes les doctrines traditionnelles" (Crise 7-13). For Guenon, cosmic and historical cycles correspond; the design of history

participates in a cosmic design. This is what Schultze, too, means by "metahistory."

Elsewhere, Guenon observes that our accelerating descent toward the end of the world is

not a random occurrence; rather, it is "perfectly logical but of a logic truly «diabolical»,

of the «plan» according to which the progressive deviation of the modem world is brought

about." This passage comes from The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times (201),

first published in French in 1945, three years before the publication of Adlin Buenosayres.

Guenon's words and apocalyptic posture are echoed by Samuel Tesler when he speaks of

the "diabolical plan" of modem science (AB 127). c The incidence of Rene Guenon' s ideas in the work of Marechal cannot be overestimated. Marechal's essays continually echo Guenon's thought, vocabulary, and 81

even his penchant for highlighting the most significant nouns of each sentence with

quotation marks. In Marechal's novels, two related aspects of Guenon's thought play an

important role. The first of these is the Frenchman's apocalypticism, which springs from

his totally negative and metaphysically reactionary attitude towards late modernity. 2 The

second important feature is Guenon's occultist religion of esoteric initiatism. The

Johannine Apocalypse has always fascinated those secret-mongering occultists whom

Umberto Eco has satirized as "diabolicals" in his novel Foucault's Pendulum. Though it

would be unjust to place Rene Guenon among their ranks, he does share with them the

occultist conviction that the Apocalypse is written in the language of "esoteric symbolism,"

which can be deciphered by the initiate who has inside knowledge of the esoteric traditions

of the major religions of both East and West, as well as of astrology, alchemy, and

Hermeticism. Guenon handles the vocabulary of all these arcane disciplines as so many

symbols that can be conflated within one supreme priestly world-view.

Rene Guenon implicitly presents himself as an "initiate" or high priest of an

unbroken esoteric Tradition that lies behind all exoteric religions. He inherits the doctrine

of the prisca theologica given its definitive form by such Renaissance thinkers as Marsilio

Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. The Renaissance philosopher-magus,

as Prances Yates3 generically calls these thinkers, believed in a unitary theological

tradition that went back to a pre-Judaic source religion. This was based on the gross

historical misconception, abetted in the Middle Ages by such Church authorities as

Lactantius and Augustine, concerning the antiquity and historical reality of Hermes c 4 Trismegistus, the Thrice Great One-- as priest, magus, and law-giver. Hermes occupied 82

the first link in a supposed chain of prisci theologi, who by Ficino's reckoning were

Hermes, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, and Plato. Though Guenon does

not openly say so, he lets it be understood that after Plato comes Rene Guenon to continue

this illustrious line. As an initiate of the "ancient theology" dating back to the beginning

of time, he is authorized to prophesy the apocalypse of the modern Western world.

None of this is to say that Leopoldo Marechal the novelist adopts Guenon's

ideology uncritically and gives it expression inAdtin Buenosayres. He borrows Guenon's

apocalyptic doctrine of metahistory and, deploying it through his characters, parodies it.

"Parody" here should be understood in Margaret A. Rose's sense of the term, as "the c comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material," where "refunctioning" means to give a new set of functions to the parodied material (Parody: Ancient 52). In

effect, the metahistorical cycle becomes a kind of ironic metaphor for a cycle of language

modes which underpin all discourse. These modes strictly speaking are not necessarily

bound to any particular historical period. But they could be said to correspond roughly

to the ancient, medieval, modern and late-modern periods. Thus Guenon's metahistory

is parodied as a way of problematizing a metadiscursive cycle.

We can get some idea of the relation between metahistory and metadiscourse

implicit in Marechal' s novels by looking briefly at one of his essays. In the context of

"Las cuatro estaciones del arte," Marechal the essayist expresses Guenon's idea of history

as a fall from "normality" in an accelerating plunge toward the nadir of the Dark Age or c Kali Yuga: '~ I~ 83 Me apresuro a decide [to his interlocutor Rafael Squirm] que nuestra epoca, merced a su terrible y ya largo desequilibrio con respecto a toda "normalidad", constituye algo asf como una suerte de anomalia en la Ronda de las Estaciones que acabo de pintarle y que puede suceder, ya en la esfera individual de un hombre, ya en la esfera colectiva de un pueblo y hasta de un mundo. El formidable desequilibrio de nuestra epoca tendria una explicaci6n mas exacta en el "proceso descendente" del ciclo humano, sometido a una inquietante "aceleraci6n". Ahora bien, Rafael conoce la doctrina oriental de Ios Yugas ... Quiero decir que podrfa yo ahora lanzarme con Rafael a esta pendiente rapida del Kali Yuga. --Pero esa es otra historia --le digo. --t.Cuando y d6nde la veremos? --me pregunta el desde su mecedora. --En El Banquete de Severo Arctingelo. (Cuaderno 119-20) c In this essay, Marechal seeks to establish a correspondence between the cycles of art and the Hesiodic-Guenonian doctrine of cycles, symbolized by the four seasons of the year.

Curiously, he identifies not four but three "seasons" of art: Classicism, "Academicism,"

and Romanticism. Apparently, his idea is little more than an elaboration of the

commonplace that pits Classicism against Romanticism. He proposes Academicism, i.e.

the degeneration of the classical spirit into empty formalism, as a means of explaining the

need for the rebellion of Romanticism. But there is no fourth term. Romanticism seems

to end the cycle:

El Romanticismo tiene la de la reacciones cicl6nicas, y tambien su escasa duraci6n. Porque, habiendose metido en otra desmesura, el arte no tarda en buscar nuevamente su "formula equilibradora" y la encuentra muy luego en otra estaci6n c del Clasicismo. (117) 84

Why only three seasons of art instead of four? For Marechal, we are presently in a

"Romantic" period, but an unusually long one. The "terrible y ya largo desequilibrio,"

he says, can only be understood in terms of a larger "proceso descendente," i.e. the

descending movement of the Manvantara as interpreted by Rene Guenon. Thus we are

experiencing now "una anomalia en la Ronda de las. Estaciones." This special, apocalyptic

season of art Marechal has chosen to leave nameless. His reluctance to name this period

of outre, overextended "Romanticism" is perhaps due to either modesty (which is doubtful)

or a sort of suggestive coyness. For there can be little doubt that Marechal' s own

novelistic poetics belongs to this final season, which might be called the season of irony

and parody.

It is evident that in this essay Marechal aspires to allude to something larger than

styles in the production of art. Indeed, he concludes his discussion of art by relating the

season of Romanticism to several parallel phenomena in other genres of discourse:

la Reforma, en religion; el Romanticismo, en las artes y las letras; el Individualismo liberal, en politica; las atomizantes filosofias germanas y otras, en el orden del pensamiento; y los otros "ismos" inventados con tanta profusion por la ciencia y el arte. (119)

In a word, his discussion of Romanticism aims at the entire discourse of modernity, which

in turn sustains the modem world-view. His notion of Classicism, on the other hand,

refers primarily to a Platonist mode of discourse, best exemplified in the Middle Ages and c championed in the twentieth century by Rene Guenon. By discussing the seasons of art, c 85 therefore, Marechal means to engage another, more inclusive cycle of discourses or

metadiscourse.

It is convenient to approach this metadiscursive cycle in terms of language.

Marechal himself alleges that "el arte de la palabra es el mas completo" (Andres 103). All

discourse, of course, is conducted through language, and a given discourse is preceded by

a fundamental posture vis-a-vis language. Hayden White calls such a posture a

"prefigurative (tropological) strategy" and expresses the view that "the dominant

tropological mode and its attendant linguistic protocol comprise the irreducibly

'metahistorical' basis of every historical work" (xi). The same may be said about

discourse and its metadiscursive element. Underpinning every discourse there is a c dominant trope whose mechanism determines the metadiscursive basis of that discourse. 5 Twentieth-century structuralists are not the first to hold such a view. The

eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico studied history through philology. Vico

posits a metahistorical cycle that is accompanied by various phases of language. His "new

science" discovers "the design of an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories

of all nations" (Vico 6). This design is a sequence of three ages: 1) the age of the gods,

2) the age of the heroes, and 3) the age of men (20). To each of the three ages

corresponds a specific kind of language: hieroglyphic or sacred language, symbolic

language, and epistolary or vulgar language (20). The peoples of the first age "were poets

who spoke in poetic characters," which were "certain imaginative genera (images for the

most part of animate substances, of gods or heroes, formed by their imagination)" (21-22).

Vico speculates that "poetic wisdom ... must have begun with a metaphysics not rational c 86 and abstract, like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men

must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous

imagination" (116). In the second age, the heraldic language of law and religion was

spoken by nobles who were also priests (20). In the third age, human language is vulgar

(vernacular) and uses "words agreed upon by the people, a language of which they are

absolute lords" (20). At the end of a cycle of ages there follows a ricorso or re-traversing

of a new cycle; hence Vico's ricorso is roughly analogous to the apocalypse at the end of

Guenon's metahistorical cycle.

Vico's system has been adapted by Northrop Frye for the purpose of studying the

Bible in relation to Western literature. In Frye's scheme, there are three phases or modes c of language, to each of which he attributes a controlling trope. The phase of poetic or hieroglyphic language is predicated on the metaphor (Great 7). Homer's language, for

example, is of this phase. The personal God of Genesis and the figures of the Apocalypse,

considered as mythical personages, are also metaphorical. The second phase Frye calls

hieratic and its master trope is metonymy (8-9). Plato inaugurates the period in which

metonymic language becomes ascendent, reaching its peak of dominance in the discourse

of the Middle Ages. In the Christian tradition, the personal God tends to evolve into a

transcendental principle, the Logos. Frye's third phase is that of demotic language, to

which he assigns not a trope but a controlling figure: the simile (13). Third-phase

language is the linguistic basis for the development of the modem scientific world­ c description; hence it is also called descriptive language. 6 In order to draw out what is problematized implicitly in Marechal's novels, I shall c 87 follow Frye's terminology. In particular, I refer to the hieratic mode as metonymic

language, for from my point of view, Frye' s most significant contribution to Vico' s system

is that he pinpointed metonymy as the specific prefigurative mechanism of hieratic

language. But Vico's and Frye's phases of language, like Marechal's seasons of art, fall

short by one if they are to match the four metahistorical ages. This missing phase of

language, i.e. its dominant tropological strategy, is that of irony. Irony is the final

category in Hayden White's system and characterizes the final stage of historiographical

strategy. 7 Similarly, one may say that irony characterizes the final stage of the

metadiscursive cycle.

As a tropological strategy, irony has a special status. White makes the important c distinction between the "naive" tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche) and the "self­ conscious" trope of irony. He continues:

It can be seen immediately that Irony is in one sense meta-tropological, for it is deployed in the self-conscious awareness of the possible misuse of figurative language. Irony presupposes the occupation of a "realistic" perspective on reality, from which a nonfigurative representation of the world of experience might be provided. Irony thus represents a stage of consciousness in which the problematical nature of language itself has become recognized. It points to the potential foolishness of all linguistic of reality as much as to the absurdity of the beliefs it parodies. [ ... ] In Irony, figurative language folds back upon itself and brings its own potentialities for distorting perception under question. [ ... ] The trope of Irony, then, provides a linguistic paradigm of a mode of thought which is radically self-critical with respect not only to a given c of the world of experience but also to the very effort to capture 0 88 adequately the truth of things in language. (37)

As a linguistic paradigm, irony arises to prominence when the fictional structures of the

world grow old and shaky. Irony levels them: the figurative language sustaining those

fictions "folds back upon itself" and erases its own truth-saying power. Vico, for his part,

says that "Irony could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned

of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth" (par.408). The "mask

of truth" is not the truth. Irony cannot positively proclaim any truth, for it has renounced

any possible ground of truth for language.

It is such a levelling process that is undertaken in Adtin Buenosayres. The novel's

primary "metatrope" is irony. But precisely because of its metatropological status, irony

itself is not problematized in the novel. The "naive" tropes can be ironized, but it is

difficult to ironize irony. Thus in Adtin Buenosayres, irony is strictly performative. The

ironic mode is ubiquitous, but it can never stand above itself and critically reflect its own

mechanism.

With this in mind, I should like to examine the opening pages of Book One of Adtin

Buenos ay res, where a similar cycle of language modes or phases stands out. The

metalinguistic cycle is dramatized through Adan's narrated monologue and framed by

thematic reference to Genesis and Apocalypse.

Adan wakes up in the morning and experiences his awakening as the creation of c the world: "Como en su primer dia el mundo brotaba del amor y del odio ... : «jSoy la c 89 granada!», «iSoy la pipa!», «isoy la rosa!», parecieron gritarle con el orgullo declamatorio

de sus diferenciaciones" (AB 18). In Adan's consciousness, this process is likened to a

parody of genesis: "Un sabor amargo en la lengua del cuerpo yen la del alma, eso era

lo que sentia el [Adan] al considerar la parodia de genesis que se desarrollaba en su

habitaci6n" (AB 18). Why a parody of genesis? In the book of Genesis, Adam is granted

the power to name the things of the world: "So out of the ground the Lord God formed

every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and he brought them to the man to see

what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its

name" (Gen 2: 19). The biblical Adam collaborates with God in a very interesting way;

God creates the world, but Adam is in charge of assigning words to it. If God is the c author of creation, then Adam is the author of the verbal world. In this parallel creation, Adam's authority is just as total and arbitrary as God's: whatever he calls a thing or

creature, that is its name. Adam is the arbiter of significance. Similarly, in his

"Cuademo" Adan Buenosayres recalls his frrst poetic expressions as a child: "me valia

de palabras incoherentes o voces en libertad, no por lo que significaban, naturalmente,

sino por el valor intencional que yo les asignaba seg6n el caso" (AB 435). Now, however,

the adult Adan finds that he has been despoiled of this power enjoyed by the biblical

Adam, the child in Eden. When Adan awakes and hears the world stuttering its frrst

names to him --"el mundo ... ya le balbucia sus primeros nombres" (AB 18)-- it means that

the procedure of determining significance has been reversed. Instead of Adan naming the

world, the things of the world dictate their names to him. This reversal, for Adan, is c responsible for the parodic nature of the morning genesis of his world. c 90 As the objects of the world seem to name themselves, Adan considers them "sin

benevolencia" and experiences a bitter taste in "the tongue of his soul" ("la [lengua] de su

alma"). This metaphor is highly significant, for lengua also means language. Adan is a

poet, an ambitious one; the objective world imposes its "language" on his consciousness

to the detriment of the "language" of his soul. In Saussurian terms, the description of the

world embodied in the langue imposes its parameters on Adan the individual's parole.

Adan fmds this state of affairs unacceptable. He would prefer to be the single arbiter of

signification and significance, as was the first man in Genesis.

Since Adan is dissastified with the parodic genesis of the world, his next impulse

is to destroy the world: c Entonces, con el animo de un dios en vena de cataclismos, Adan cerr6 los ojos y el universo volvi6 a la nada. "iQue sejorobe!", refunfuii6, imaginando afuera la disoluci6n de la rosa, el aniquilamiento de la granada y el estallido at6mico de la pipa. Quizas, y al solo cerrarse de sus ojos, tambien la ciudad se habria disipado afuera, y se habrian desvanecido las montafias, evaporado los oceanos y desprendido los astros como los higos de una higuera sacudida por su fruticultor ... (AB 18)

The image of stars falling like figs from a fig tree comes from Revelation 6: 13. Adan

himself attributes these imaginings to his "lecturas del Apocalipsis, a medianoche."

In effect, Adan has traversed telescopically in his imagination an entire mythic

cycle from the beginning to the end of the world. His perception is mediated through the c language of what Frye calls the poetic-magical or metaphoric mode. According to Frye, 0 91 the most representative metaphor in this mode of language is the nature god of mythology:

"The central expression of metaphor is the I god, I the being who, as sun-god, war-god,

sea-god, or whatever, identifies a form of personality with an aspect of nature" (Great 7).

Gods are not abstract principles but rather metaphorical personifications. Likewise Adan

has compared himself to a such a god, the Old-Testament Yahweh thought of as a

personage who can unleash floods and destroy his creation at will. Vico, for his part,

associates this propensity to personify the impersonal with childhood:

The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons. c This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets. (par.186, 187) ·

Adan himself recognizes the childishness of his imagination and admonishes himself: "no

era el caso de entregarse a un pavor infantil de genesis y catastrofes" (AB. 19). That is to

say, he recognizes the inadequacy of giving himself over uncritically to the mythical

stories of Genesis and Apocalypse. The poetic mode of language by itself does not give

him sufficient control over his imaginative world. He requires a fundamental trope that

will allow him to dominate the naive of poetic myth. He will find the ideal

trope in a particular species of totalized metonymy.

Accordingly, Adan's consciousness now leaves the primitive-poetic level and c moves on to the level of abstract thinking: c 92 Lo cierto era, por ejemplo, que al cerrar sus ojos (y Adan lo hizo nuevamente) la rosa no se anonadaba en modo alguno: por el contrario, la flor seguia viviendo en su mente que ahora la pensaba, y vivia una existencia durable ... ; porque la flor pensada no era tal o cual rosa, sino todas las rosas que habian sido, eran y podian ser en este mundo: la flor cefiida a su numero abstracto ... ; de modo tal que si el, Adan Buenosayres, fuera eterno, tambien la flor lo seria en su mente, aunque todas la rosas exteriores acabasen de pronto y no volvieran a florecer. "iRosa bienaventurada! ", se dijo Adan. iVi vir en otro eternamente, como la rosa, y por la eternidad del Otro! (AB 19)

Adan is now thinking in terms of Platonic ideas, according to the doctrine known as

transcendent or Platonic realism, that is, "the doctrine that universals exist separated from c particulars" (Armstrong 11, 176). The term "universals" in Armstrong's definition does not come from Plato but rather Aristotle, for the latter was the first to criticize Plato's

doctrine of the ideas. For the twentieth-century philosopher, the Aristotelian universal is

still an admissible concept, while the Platonic idea has been long since discredited. In the

history of modern thought, perhaps the most notorious and aggressive opponent of

Platonism has been Friedrich Nietzsche. With almost inquisitorial zeal, he excoriates any

tendency to idealism in nineteenth-century thinking and profoundly marks twentieth-

century consciousness.

As a general linguistic strategy, Platonic realism could be said to exemplify what

Frye calls the dialectical or metonymic mode of language. This use of language depends

on the fundamental trope of metonymy. Of the many definitions of metonymy, c Nietzsche' s is the most useful for the way it links the trope directly to Platonic thought. c 93 In his discussion of ancient rhetoric, Nietzsche defmes metonymy thus:

Metonymy, the placement of one noun for another ... the substitution of the cause for which we say a thing in place of the thing to which we refer. It is very powerful in speech: the abstract substantiva are qualities inside us and around us, which are tom away from their substrata and set forth as independent essences ... These concepts, which owe their origin only to our experiences, are proposed a priori to be intrinsic essences of the things: we attribute to the appearances as their cause that which still is only an effect. The abstracta evoke the illusion that they themselves are these essences which cause the qualities, whereas they receive metaphorical reality only from us, because of those characteristics. The transition from the eide [originally, shape or form of that which is seen] to ideai [ideal forms] by Plato is very instructive; here, metonymy, the substitution of cause and c effect, is complete. (Gilman, Friedrich 59)

Metonymy is the fundamental tropological stategy of a certain metaphysical tendency, of

which Plato is perhaps the most notable exponent. Metonymy, as Nietzsche says, is very

powerful, for it subordinates the real, concrete world to a construct of human language.

The mechanism of this procedure can be understood in terms of Saussure's model. The

word or sign is made up of two sides, the signifier (mark) and signified (concept). For

the practitioner of metonymic language, the signified --the mental image-- is the true rose.

The process of signification stops within the construct of the word itself, for the referent

is not the material rose but the abstract concept of it. Thus language no longer depends

on the real, concrete world of physical objects. It refers to a transcendental realm of ideal

forms. Platonic idealism postulates the independent existence of this transcendental realm, c 94 as though it existed a priori to language and not as a result of it.

From the point of view of descriptive language, the world of Platonic ideas is a

misleading fiction. This third mode of language adopts a different, more tentative

prefigurative strategy. In naming the rose, the signified (the concept of the rose) is

something like the iconic image of a universal, which is a tentative generalization drawn

from the visual experience of concrete roses. Northrop Frye identifies the controlling

figure of descriptive language as the simile: "a true verbal structure is one that is like

what it describes" (Great 16). Applying this to the Saussurian model of the sign, the

signified of the rose is like the real, concrete rose. However, unlike metonymy, the third

mode of language does not subordinate the concrete rose to the signified but rather finds c the reverse order natural: the signified adjusts itself to the concrete referent. Now, the attitude of descriptive language informs the langue of twentieth-century

society. Therefore, inasmuch as Adan participates concretely as a citizen of the social

order, he must submit willy-nilly to the world-description of this third mode of language.

This is what happens as soon as opens his eyes definitively:

El dfa es como un pajaro amaestrado, reflexion6 Adan, viene cada doce horas al mundo, por el mismo rinc6n del globo, y nos encaja en su eterna cancioncita; o mas bien un maestro pedante, con su bonete de sol y su abecedario de cosas largamente sabidas: esto es la rosa, esto es la granada. (AB 20; emphasis in novel)

Adan is struck by the dreadful monotony of daily existence. The parodic Genesis that took

place earlier in the first-person --"I am the rose, the pomegranate" -- is echoed now in the c 95 third person. The subjective affirmation "I am" gives way to the constative "this is." A

circle of signification between language and world, sign and referent, has been closed.

The result of this for Adan is "una realidad sin vuelo que se daba todos los dias, inevitable

y mon6tona como el grito de un reloj" (AB 20). The pedantic schoolmaster symbolizes

the stable social system which is held in place linguistically by the langue. Again the

social construct has closed in on Adan's consciousness, this time more forcefully. The

name of the rose no longer gives access to a transcendental reality, but merely refers to

a concrete rose in the real world.

By following the Leitmotiv of the rose in Adan's internal monologue, we have

traced the evolution of three distinct phases in language, according to Northrop Frye's c scheme. In the first phase, the magical-poetic, Adan's internal verbal activity leads him into the naive, poetic realm of myth. In the second, or metonymic phase, he finds the

transcendental world of ideal forms. Finally, the descriptive phase of language, which

dominates and informs the world of the twentieth-century, grounds Adan in the here and

now of his contemporary social reality.

Adan is forced to accept the third, descriptive, phase of language against his will:

Adan Buenosayres abri6 definitivamente los ojos, y al ver que Ios objetos le mostraban su cifra irrevocable, salud6 al fin, descorazonado: "jBuenos dias, Tierra!" No deseaba romper a1.1n la inmovilidad de su cuerpo yacente: hubiera sido una concesi6n a1 nuevo dia que lo reclamaba y al que se resistia el con todo el peso de una voluntad muerta. (AB 19) c Adan is now fully present in the daytime of the concrete world, whose objects "show" him c 96 their cifra or code. The important point here, from Adan's point of view, is that this code

is "irrevocable." The desideratum of descriptive language is that one sign should

correspond unequivocally to only one referent, with a view to fostering a virtual

transparency between reality and language. The statement "This is the rose" does nothing

more than point out a single concrete object and establish a closed circuit of meaning

between sign and object; hence the irrevocability of the signs. The circuit of meaning is

locked and can only be repeated with the mechanical precision of a clock.

We saw above that for Adan the day is like a pedantic schoolmaster dictating a

tiresome lesson ("esto es la rosa, esto es la granada") which reinforces and maintains the

world of descriptive language. This simile carries a telling irony, for Adan himself is a

teacher at a boys' school. A portion of Adan's identity, then, participates in the

descriptive language-world that he rejects. Adan the metaphysical poet stands in

opposition to Adan the schoolteacher. Adan affirms his poetic, metaphysical side by

taking a double decision:

Adan resolvi6 en su alma: "jNo ire a la escuela!" Esto es la rosa, medit6luego. jNo! jLa rosa era Solveig Amundsen, pese a lo que afirmara el dial CAB. 20)

The decision not to go to work at school that day concerns his actions as an individual

citizen in society. The decision that a rose is not just a rose, but rather that the rose is

Solveig Amundsen is a decision in favour of the world of either metaphorical or

metonymic language. One decision is practical, the other linguistic, but for Adan they are

really two aspects of a single affirmation. c 97 Having defied the language of the day, Actan wonders about his antipathy for

daytime reality. His musings take the form of an internal dialogue:

--lSeria el, acaso, un espiritu nocturno, emparentado con aves maleficas, insectos de culo fosforescente y brujas que montaban en escobas mansitas?-- No, porque su alma era diurna e hija del sol padre de la inteligibilidad. --Siendo asi, lPOr que vivia de la noche?-- Frecuentaba la noche porque en su siglo el dia era incitador y antorcha de una guerra sin laureles, violador del silencio y hitigo contra la santa quietud ... CAB 27)

He does not reject the daytime out of a morbid penchant for the nocturnal. Rather, he

:flees the diurnal reality specific to his century or his time, that is, the final, dark stretch c of the Iron Age. The night, on the other hand, is "silenci6fila," a quality of capital importance because "el silencio es principio y fin de toda musica." The night,

"destructora de carceles," stimulates "el amanecer de las voces dificiles y los hondos

llamados que sofoca el dia bajo sus trombones" (AB 28). In other words, the night

favours the expression of the language of the soul, "la lengua de su alma," which the

descriptive language of the day, the daytime of the twentieth-century, suffocates or

imprisons.

Once Adan has decided to miss school, the line of battle is drawn: poetry stands

against the descriptive language-world of the present Dark Age. At one level, this war is

allegorized in a mock-epic of rivalry over a girl. Actan is in love with Solveig Amundsen;

his rival is a young doctor called Lucio Negri. In spite of his surname, Lucio is on the c side of the day. Or conversely, the daytime of the twentieth-century is no day at all, but c 98 rather a time of black light, the benighted Iron Age. Lucio's mentality epitomizes

descriptive language, of which the full-blown rhetorical construction is the scientific

world-view. Adan ruefully recalls his last meeting with the young doctor; by reciting

Adan's poetry, Lucio humiliated the poet in front of Solveig. To console himself, Adan

foresees the vindication of his truth in the Apocalypse:

"jBah!, pens6 Adan malhumorado, Lucio Negri no ha de impedir que alguna vez el dia pierda su gastado alfabeto ni que el mundo se tambalee como don Aquiles, el maestro ciruela de Maipu, cuando buscaba sus perdidos anteojos en las carteras de los alumnos; ni que, jay!, la luna sea hecha como de sangre, ni que sea retirado el cielo como un libro que se arrolla." Las tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis venian resonando en sus oidos desde la noche anterior: Sicut liber involutus. (AB c 22)

The day, as we saw above, is like "un maestro pedante"; now the world staggers like a

"maestro ciruela." Virtually the same simile applied to both day and world, points toward

a third term: a particular mode of knowing reality through language. The diurnal language

of our time, with its closed circuits of signification, will wear out its alphabet, with the

result that the world will stagger like a doddering old pedant. It is the world of descriptive

language that will falter and die, and to characterize this process further, Adan resorts to

the poetic language of Revelation --"the moon became like blood" (Rev 6:12)-- and evokes

the myth of the end of the world. The other apocalyptic image, that· of the sky being

rolled up like a scroll, belongs more to the metonymic mode of language than to the c poetical-mythical. This image introduces the metaphor of the world as a book, a topos c 99 especially important to the metonymic or hieratic phase of language and central to Adan's

understanding of reality. Adan is a poet, but he also considers himself to be a

metaphysician, as he makes clear later in the novel: "Schiller no era un metafisico. Yo

voy mas lejos que Schiller" (AB 309). Metaphysics for Adan means the metaphysics of

metonymic language, which can be characterized generally as Platonist or Platonizing.

In sum, Adan opposes descriptive language and champions the poetic and metonymic

modes of language.

So far, the tropological strategies of language have been within the compass of

Adan's competence. He uses the various modes of language, though he does not do so

with complete self-consciousness. He passes from poetic to metonymic language c instinctively and reacts to the descriptive mode by instinct as well. The fourth tropological mode, irony, is beyond his competence. The practitioner of irony must have a

sophisticated and critical awareness of the prefigurative mechanisms of language. This

comes only after having gained a profound mastery of the various linguistic strategies of

discourse. Adan does not yet possess such mastery, and so he is not a master of irony but

rather a victim of it.

Like the Iron Age of the metahistorical cycle, irony comes last in the cycle of

language. From another point of view, the action of irony is similar to that of the

Viconian ricorso. This is so because irony, in its simplest form of antiphrasis, entails a

reversal of the direction of signification: one thing is said, the opposite is meant.

Metatropological in nature, it can re-traverse the cycle of dominant tropes. In doing so,

irony reverses the direction of their signifying value. No longer truth-affirming, the tropes c 100 turn on themselves and consume themselves. The result of this is a kind of chain reaction.

The discourses supported by the dominant tropes lose their positive grounding, and in turn

the fictions erected by discourse are destabilized.

The effect of irony, then, is to undennine the structures of a given language-world.

Irony plays on their rhetorical underpinnings and thus brings these to light. Such exposure

corrodes the structures of discursive thought, subverts conventional epistemology. At the

level of semiosis, irony plays on the cleavage between signifier and signified, and reveals

the arbitrary nature of language. In Adan Buenosayres irony is ubiquitous. It pervades

the writing and informs the novel's structure. But it is also embedded in this structure's

atomic level, at is were, within certain Leitmotivs that serve as keys to the novel's c meaning.

The first of these Leitmotivs shows up for the first time in the same crucial few

pages that I have been analyzing. It is an ironic metaphor contained in a couplet from

Adan's own poetry: "El amor mas alegre/ que un entierro de nifios" (AB 20). 8 Adan

recalls these verses again mid-way through the novel, at the glorieta Ciro, when he is

about to expound his poetics CAB. 302). Finally, near the end of the novel, a character in

Schultze's hell confronts Adan with the absurdity of this same metaphor (AB 667). This

"love happier than a children's funeral" sums up Adan's unhappy relationship with his

beloved.

The first time Adan recalls the unfortunate verses is when he thinks back to one of

the Amundsen's tertulias, at which Lucio Negri recited the couplet and exposed Adan to

public ridicule. All those who were present, including Solveig, found the verses shocking c 101 and laughed at their absurdity. Now, ruminating over his humiliation, Adan recalls the

genesis of the metaphor. When he was a small boy, Adan once took part in a wake

mourning the death of a child. But everyone was singing and dancing and laughing.

When Adan asked why, the adults told him that they were celebrating because the child

was not really dead, but living a blessed existence in God. Adan's train of thought

concludes: "Por eso debia ser alegre el entierro de un nifio: era irse a vivir en otro

eternamente, por la virtud eterna del Otro" (AB 21). The linguistic code here is that of

metonymic language. Adan has used the same language in his Platonist meditation on the

"rosa bienaventurada." The child is similarly blessed, for he has gone to live eternally in

God. For Adan, then, the key to the analogy lies in the Christian-Platonist conception of

the soul as an ideal form in the mind of God. Adan has not intended any irony in his

comparison between a happy love and a child's funeral: he is comparing one instance of

happiness with another.

The problem is that Adan's linguistic code is not the one that prevails in society.

Adan's metaphor violates the social conventions embodied in ordinary language. In this

code, the two terms of the metaphor are contradictory, one being happiness (love) and the

other sadness (children's funeral). Thus the metaphor is absurd, as denounced by the

denizen of Schultze's hell. But it is also ironic, grotesquely so. The two terms are signs

that point in opposite directions, happiness and sadness. The metaphor is thus a self­

cancelling proposition.

But what is this love happier than a child's funeral? When the verses are c contextualized in Ad3n's interior monologue, their irony takes on a larger significance. c 102 Lucio Negri has deliberately made his rival look foolish in front of Solveig by ridiculing

the poet's unfortunate verses. Solveig's laughter is what most pains Adan: "Pero Solveig

Amundsen no debi6 reirse con las otras muchachas, ni lo habria hecho, tal vez, si hubiera

sabido que con su risa iniciaba el desmoronamiento de una construcci6n poetica y la mina

de una Solveig ideal" (AB 21). Adan has created the ideal Solveig, like the ideal "rosa

bienaventurada," for he has proclaimed: "jLa rosa era Solveig!" The analogy between

the blessed rose and the ideal Solveig is made quite explicit when Adan concludes his

meditation on the child's funeral:

Por eso debia ser alegre el entierro de un ni:iio: era irse a vivir en otro eternamente, por la virtud eterna del Otro. Y Solveig Amundsen lo ignoraba, sin c duda; pero aquella tarde no debi6 reirse de Adan, porque tambien ella, sin saberlo, vivia en el una existencia emancipada de las cuatro estaciones. "Le llevare mi Cuaderno de Tapas Azules", resolvi6 Adan en su animo (AB 21-22).

Just as the blessed rose lives eternally in the mind of God, the ideal Solveig lives in the

mind of Adan, and her ideal image has been enshrined in the book-world of the poet's

"Cuaderno de Tapas Azules." Solveig should not have laughed at his metaphor, laments

Adan. But she has laughed, and her laughter destroys the Platonist code ruling that

metaphor, releasing the devastating irony that lurks within another, more accessible code.

Adan's unrequited love for Solveig is this "amor mas alegre que un entierro de niiios."

And just as Solveig will prove indifferent to Adan's love and to the edification of his

"Cuaderno de Tapas Azules," so reality will spurn Adan's metaphysics. Furthermore, the c Leitmotiv of the happy funeral also resonates with the structure of the entire novel. Adan' s c 103 own funeral in the "Pr6logo indispensable" is also the "entierro de un nifio" which is

celebrated jubilantly. The ingenuous "child" who wrote the "Cuademo de Tapas Azules"

has passed away. As I suggested in Chapter 1, however, it is not really Adan who has not

really died, but rather the language-world he created and inhabited. The poet will be

"reborn" in the sense that he will learn to use language in a new way by the end of the

novel.

There are two other Leitmotivs in Adtin Buenosayres that work in a complementary

fashion. One of these is "El Cristo de la Mano Rota," a statue of Christ at the Church of

San Bernardo. The statue's hand has broken off. The other is Adan's recurring

premonition that he is being reeled in like a fish caught on a hook by the Pescador, c meaning Christ the fisher of men. The fish/fisherman theme surfaces in Adan's interior monologue in the context of thoughts about the Last Judgment, occasioned by a passing

funeral cortege:

Tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis a medianoche. Un terror sagrado que redobla sus tambores desde la lejania, in crescendo, in crescendo, hasta romperme los timpanos del alma. El pez en el anzuelo, yo: un pez que ha mordido el anzuelo invisible y se retuerce a medianoche. (AB 85-86)

Later, Adan suffers a brief nervous crisis during the symposium at the glorieta Ciro and

says aloud:

jEs absurdo! Uno esta navegando en ciertas aguas oscuras, y de repente c se da cuenta que ha mordido un anzuelo invisible ... iY uno se resiste, forcejea, c 104 trata de agarrarse al fondo! Es im1til: jel Pescador invisible tironea desde arriba! (AB 318)

The same image, rendered in the same vocabulary, also occurs in Adan's "Cuaderno de

Tapas Azules" (AB 443).9 In a state of spiritual crisis near the end of Book Five, Adan

prays before the dilapidated statue, thinking to give himself up to Christ. It is only then

that the (tragi-)comic irony in the Leitmotivs becomes apparent: throughout the novel,

Adan has been anxiously waiting to be fished out of the waters of chaos by a personal god

who turns out to be as inefficacious as a fisherman with a broken hand. Naturally, the

wornout statue of Christ cannot match Adan's misguided expectations. The Last Judgment

is deferred until the following evening, when Adan undertakes his initiatic journey to the c hell of Cacodelphia. Clearly, the ironic interaction of these two Leitmotivs is devastating

to the implied narrative of redemption that has been discussed above in Chapter 2. 10

Christ is represented as a fisherman with a broken hand because the myth of a personal

god who can intervene directly to solve our problems for us no longer works for Adan.

He is left to fend for himself. Thus the fictions of poetic language are undermined. But

for Adan the metaphysician, Christ means the Logos, the Divine Word. This notion is

proper to Platonist, metonymic discourse. The grandiose fiction of this discourse is left

ironically deflated as well. Christ, both as myth and transcendental principle, metaphor

and metonym, is cut down by the anti-Christ of irony. Adan is obliged to confront the gap

between language and reality. c c 105 Resuming my discussion of Book One, the metadiscursive cycle of language,

analogous to the metahistorical cycle, is framed in the biblical narrative beginning with

Genesis and ending with the Apocalypse. Through Adan's interior monologue, we can

witness how Adan actually traverses this cycle as he emerges from sleep in the morning

and composes his perception of the world. The world produced by the descriptive mode

of language in the twentieth-century is anathema to Adan. In order to oppose and subvert

it, he resorts to the poetic and metonymic modes of language. But his strategy of going

against the grain of the dominant mode of language results in an ironic conflict of

linguistic codes. This leads to the collapse of language itself, which Adan will experience

personally when the "Cristo de la Mano Rota" fails him on Friday at midnight, at the end c of Book Five. The irony, built into the atomic level of the novel's text, results in an "estallido at6mico," the atomic explosion not of the pipe or the rose, as in Adan's

daydreaming, but of the rose which Adan insists is Solveig. Not the rose but the name of

the rose undergoes apocalyptic disintegration.

NOTES

1. I refer to the schema shown in The Interpreter's Bible (Buttrick XII 365). The definitive end is preceded by a blip representing the Millenium of Christ's rule on earth. This temporary return to perfection, however, does not alter the basic pattern. In any case, millenarianism does not enter into the scheme of Marechal's novels.

2. By reason of his apocalypticism, Guenon had some appeal for the great modernists of the first half of the twentieth century; even Andre Breton read and appreciated him (Batache 9-1 0).

3. The ideas resumed in this paragraph concerning the Renaissance and the prisca theologica are culled from the first two chapters of Prances Yates' s Giordano Bruno and c 106 the Hennetic Tradition (1-43).

4. Lactantius quotes the putative works of Hermes Trismegistus extensively in his Institutes "in his campaign of using pagan wisdom in support of the truth of Christianity" (Yates 7). Augustine, in his De civitas Dei (VITI, xxiii-xxvi), condemned "Hermes the Egyptian, called Trismegistus" for what the latter "wrote" concerning idols, which leads Yates to conclude that Augustine confirms rather than denies the historical existence of Hermes (9).

5. Indeed, White's structuralist methodology is inspired not only by philosophers of history but also by "two literary theorists whose works represent virtual philosophical systems," namely, Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke (Metahistory 3n.).

6. In Words with Power, Frye re-conceptualizes the scheme and speaks of four, rather than three, modes of language: the descriptive, the conceptual or dialectical, the ideological, and the imaginative modes (3-28). The additional category is the ideological. Frye replaces "phase" with the word "mode" to de-emphasize the idea that there is a diachronic progression (or regression) of the various phases of language and to indicate instead that at any given historical moment all modes or phases of language are operative, even though one of them tends to dominate. I prefer Frye's original scheme because it more nearly fits c the contours of Marechal' s thinking. 7. Hayden White postulates a somewhat different cycle of linguistic modes. He distinguishes four types of prefiguration by the names of four tropes of poetic language: Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony (x).

8. In his annotated edition of the novel, Barcia points out that these verses come from Marechal's "Poema del indio" in Dfas como flechas, published in 1926 (158n). This is is not the only time that Marechal treats his own poetry parodically, in Linda Hutcheon' s sense of the term: "Parody is ... repetition with a critical difference" (6).

9. The origin of the conceit is Marechal' s sonnet "Del admirable Pescador," first published in Sonetos a Sophia (1940). The sonnet's last tercet is: "jQuien le dijera, para su consuelo,/ Que abajo estaba el pez en el anzuelo/ Y el admirable Pescador arriba!" (Antologia [1950] 57). Marechal the novelist parodies the of his own poetry, ironically inverting its significance.

10. Angel Nufi.ez, ignoring Marechal's irony, combines the two motifs and extrapolates from them a message of Christian redemption: "el Pescador Cristo de la Mano Rota asegura el pescado-Adan en su anzuelo, y este asi lo descubre, reconoce y adora" (20). Nothing in the text of the novel, however, tells us that Adan discovers, recognizes and adores Christ. On the contrary, during his "dark night of the soul," he fmds only silence. c The following evening he discovers Cacodelphia and the Paleogogue. c 107 Chapter 4

Light against Darkness: poetry versus science

This chapter will focus on the parodic reworking in Adan Buenosayres of the

apocalyptic dichotomy of good and evil or light and darkness. In this case, the parody

does not directly target the Book of Revelation, but rather apocalypticism in general, of

which John's text is the most well-known example. The apocalyptic division of good and

evil is absolute, and in the end, good must prevail over evil as surely as light dispels

darkness. 1 Some of the dialogue that takes place at the Arnundsen tenulia in Book Two

will be analyzed, as well as the mock-epic adventures of Book Three.

C' ' Of the four Hesiodic ages --denoted in descending order by gold, silver, bronze,

and iron-- only the Golden and the Iron Ages are ever talked about in Addn Buenosayres. 2

These two ages form a polarity of light and darkness, the basic tension driving the cosmic

drama of all apocalyptic. According to the cyclical view of time, the goodness of the

preterit Golden Age will be restored after the apocalypse at the end of this present evil

Iron Age. These "ages" have less to do with history than with modes of language. In

Adan's mind, poetry and metaphysics form a seamless unit that stands opposed to

"science" (as he perceives its status in his own time), and the present Iron Age must give

way to a future Golden Age. At that time, when the alphabet of descriptive language has

worn out, the language of poetical metaphysics will again hold sway, shedding the light c that will banish materialist obscurantism. Poetical-metaphysical language will no doubt be spoken in the future "Philadelphia, la ciudad de los hermanos" -- the city that finds c 108 favour in John's Revelation and whose advent Ad.an considers to be announced (All358).

Adan Buenosayres is not the only partisan of poetical metaphysics in the novel.

He has two allies: Samuel Tester "el fil6sofo" and Schultze "el astr6logo." These three

--poet, philosopher, and astrologer- form a block of "initiates" in Guenon's sense, which

stands apart from the rest of the novel's characters. The latter include Lucio Negri and

his conversational ally Senor Johansen, as well as the members of the patota or "gang":

Luis Pereda, Del Solar, Franky Amundsen, and the petizo ("pipsqueak") Bernini. All of

these "profane" characters --with the exception of Luis Pereda, who occupies an

intermediate position between the initiated and the profane-- move within the world-view

generated by descriptive language. The initiatic group, on the other hand, is at home in c the metonymic mode of language and are conversant with the priestly and/or mystical lore that this language has produced. Adan cultivates Neoplatonic mysticism in imitation of

the medieval Fideli de amore, a cult which, according to Rene Guenon, claimed Dante

among its adepts. 3 Samuel Tesler, as a member of "la raza sacerdotal" who claims direct

descent from Old-Testament patriarchs, is a zealous defender of metaphysical "ortodoxia"

(AB 162). Schultze is an adept of "las verdades ocultas" (AB 170) in the Hermetic

tradition; on one occasion he proposes a ceremonial libation "al iniciatico Hermes" (AB

303). Furthermore, Schultze possesses the "tranquilo imperio de un saber que ha

descifrado el enigma de Ios Tres Mundos" (AB 185). The three worlds refer to the

tripartite cosmos of Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism. Schultze's most important c visionary invention, the Neocriollo, will be a superhuman being whose language "sera entre metaffsico y poetico" (AB 139). c 109 The three initiatic characters form a discernible hierarchy. Schultze is the true

magister ludi. He is the Demiurge of the hell of Cacodelphia and guides his apprentice

Adan through that fantastic city by way of an initiation or learning experience. Thus

Schultze plays a highly important role in the novel (a fact that has been largely ignored in

criticism on Marechal). Samuel Tester, though something of a wild card, is at the lower

end of the initiatic hierarchy. While Schultze and Adan, parodying Virgil and Dante,

freely tour Cacodelphia, Samuel is one of the condemned of that hell. Adan, in spite of

his close friendship with Samuel Tesler, holds a condescending attitude towards the

eccentric, bombastic philosopher, as can be seen in their conversations in Book One and

at the end of Book Four. In Book One, Adan humours his friend with the title of c "Effendi. 11 During their late-night dialogue in Book Four, when a very drunk Samuel becomes maudlin and verbose, Adan doubts whether "aquella confesi6n era obra de la

sinceridad, de la borrachera ode la farsa en cuyo piano el fil6sofo se movfa tan a menudo"

(AB. 360). The narrator refers to Samuel as "aquel temible payaso" (AB 127) when the

latter squares off against the defenders of science at the Amundsen tenulia. It is

significant, then, that within the economy of the novel it falls to Samuel Tester to castigate

the "heresy" of the scientific world-view produced by descriptive language. Samuel

Tester's clownishness undermines the view that he himself represents. Marechal's novel

undertakes a critique of what Samuel calls "el plan diab6lico" of twentieth-century science

(AB 127) and what Adan refers to as "modernismo" (.AB 147), but the black-and-white

apocalypticism of that critique is deliberately hyperbolic and self-parodic. The result is c that poetic metaphysics is pitted ironically against modern science and neither world-view c 110 is left standing intact.

Samuel Tesler engages Lucio Negri and then Senor Johansen in verbal battle at the

tertulia. Significantly, the argument begins over the subject of Genesis and ends with

Samuel's prediction of the Apocalypse. In the face of Lucio Negri's incredulity, Samuel

Tesler sustains that according to his grandfather Maimonides, "el Genesis es un tratado

de fisica. Naturalmente, mi abuelo Maim6nides, que tambien era matasanos, conocia el

idioma de los simbolos" (AB 124). The language of symbols is the hieratic, metonymic

language par excellence and is so powerful that it can conflate with physics. This

is the kind of knowledge that Samuel and the other initiatic characters consider to be c "metaphysics." (Hegel, on the other hand, has "un craneo inhabitable para la metafisica," expostulates Samuel when his adversary refers to the views of the German philosopher.)

The argument between philosopher and doctor pits two diametrically opposed philosophies

of history against each other: the theory of evolution with its corollary of Progress is

opposed to the divine origin of man. Lucio Negri believes in "la direcci6n ascendente del

Progreso" (AB. 146). For Samuel, technical progress has been won "a costa de la

regresi6n espiritual mas formidable que vieran los siglos" (AB 147), and his ally Adan

supports him by affirming that man's history follows the line of "una progresi6n

descendente." How does he know this? Lucio wants to know. Adan intervenes to adduce

the doctrine of prisca theologia: "--Una tradici6n comun a todas las razas ... nos describe

al primer hombre recien nacido de las manos de un Dios: obra divina, obra perfecta que ~- se le ech6 a perder bastante con el andar del tiempo" (AB 147). Adan thus anticipates c 111 Samuel's exposition of the Hindu-Hesiodic doctrine of the four ages, ending in the

philosopher's prediction that the world will be destroyed by fire at the end of this century.

The tone of the argument between Samuel and Lucio is sarcastic and bellicose.

When the young doctor alludes to "el misterio de la secreci6n interna," the philosopher

farcically kneels before him: "--iSecreci6n internal --le suplic6 de rodillas--. Ora pro

nobis!" (AB 126). Lucio Negri gets his own back by sending up the sacred notion of the

Golden Age:

--FigU.rese usted --le explic6 al sefi.or Johansen-- que en la Edad de Oro los hombres eran sabios de nacimiento. No necesitaban trabajar y comian gratuitamente los frutos de la tierra. Las fuentes no daban agua como ahora, sino c vino tinto y blanco, a piacere. Corrian arroyos de leche pasteurizada y rios de miel, etc., etc. (AB 148)4

If blow for blow the two contestants are more or less equal, Samuel's cause has been

favoured by the way the narrator frames their dialogue. Narrated in two stretches (AB

124-128 and 146-151), the entire discussion is bracketed thematically by Genesis at the

beginning and Apocalypse at the end; the philosopher has the last word on both of these

subjects.

Once Lucio Negri has retired from "el sector metafisico del salon," his ally, the

uncultivated Sefi.or Johansen, is left to fend for himself. Meanwhile, the patota has blown

into the tertulia like a hurricane of gaiety. Franky Amundsen organizes a debate between

the two contestants as though they were two boxers in a ring: Samuel is cast in the role

of the Lion of Judah and Sefi.or Johansen, the Bear of Lappland (AB 159). With these c 112 monikers, the boxing match acquires a mock-apocalyptic dimension. As Charpentier and

Gheerbrant (575-6) observe, the Lion of Judah is a running throughout the Holy

Scriptures; Jacob's messianic prophecy in Genesis 49:9 is fulfilled --according to the

Christian narrative-- in Christ. In John's Apocalypse "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the

Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals" (Rev

5:5). Samuel does well to predict universal cataclysms if he wishes to live up to his

boxing moniker. The bear, by contrast, is a traditional symbol of the tenebrae

(Charpentier 717). The lines of the symbolic combat have been drawn clearly, but in a

completely farcical context. If Samuel and Lucio engaged in what might pass for a serious

discussion, the philosopher and Senor Johansen have fallen to the level of pure c Billingsgate, a contest of personal insults. With his vastly superior culture and wit, Samuel Tesler naturally wins the battle at this level, but this is no moral victory of the

doctrines he professes.

The Samuel Tesler/Lucio Negri debate should not be interpreted merely as

versus . There is a moment in which the discussion rises above this level. Lucio

exclaims that God is "un comodfn verdaderamente c6modo" and this joker "esti en la base

de toda explicaci6n absurda." Samuel's response is that Lucio prefers "su mono

darwiniano. Es otro comodin, aunque bastante mas feo" (All 147). The philosopher

seems to try to shift the discussion onto the terrain of rhetoric and esthetics. If both God

and Darwin's monkey are convenient jokers or wild cards, if both the myth of man's

divine origin and the theory of evolution are master fictions, and if these fictions both

depend on fundamental rhetorical choices, then the only legitimate criterion for assessing c 113 the "truth" of these fictions is esthetic. God is sublime; the monkey is ugly. Lucio is

blind to the subtlety of this argument and returns to the charge with a new rationalistic line

of attack. The young doctor has no inkling of the fact that his world-view is only that:

a view and not reality itself. Samuel Tesler is aware that any world-view is a fiction

constructed on the basis of choices, which in turn determine that view's epistemology and

its truth. This does not make Samuel's metaphysics "truer" than Lucio's science, but the

philosopher's awareness of the relativity of truth does afford him a rhetorical versatility

that gives him the edge over his opponent.

The rhetorical nature of truth is an idea that comes out more clearly in Book Three, 0 in which the salient opposition is that of "poetic rigour" versus "scientific rigour." This tension is dramatized against the backdrop of an apocalyptic setting. The lowlands of

Saavedra are geographically and literally at the end of the world -- that frontier region

between city and desert, "un terreno desgarrado y ca6tico" which at night "no es mas que

una vasta desolaci6n" (AB 183). This region represents the geographical and

topographical analogue of the temporal end of the world. 5 The seven "heroes" --the three

initiate-priests of metonymic language and members of the profane patota who adhere to

the demotic world-view of descriptive language-- undertake a midnight journey through

the lowlands of Saavedra. The journey consists of a series of carnivalesque encounters

with supernatural apparitions, all of which occasion much discussion among the heroes.

Samuel Tesler sets the tone for the evening's adventures by announcing that above c where the heroes stand, he hears the apocalyptic "batalla de Ios angeles" (AB. 195). He c 114 describes this battle as taking place on two levels. The first is earthly: "Dos millones de

almas que sostienen, la mayoria sin saberlo, su terrible pelea sobrenaturaL .. oscilando

entre los dos polos metaffsicos del universo." But the celestial battle is the more

important: "Ahora bien, no solo intervienen Ios hombres en ese combate metafisico: la

verdadera batalla se decide arriba, en el cielo de la ciudad. Es la batalla de Ios angeles y

Ios demonios que se disputan el alma de Ios portefios" (AB 196). The good/evil duality,

central to apocalypticism, could not be given clearer expression. In terms of language

modes, one can see how the poetic metaphor of angels and demons has been subjugated

to the hierarchy of two principles. These principles exist absolutely and "above";

therefore they are more real than human beings themselves, for the true battle, as Samuel c says, is decided above. This is a transparent instance of the trope of Platonic metonymy.

The categories of good and evil are abstracted and placed a priori to the reality from

which they which they were derived. Thus cause and effect are reversed and the resultant

ideological structure is totalized into a world-view, in this case that of apocalypticism.

The Platonist-apocalyptic discourse sustaining this view is in continual conflict with

scientific discourse throughout the journey in Saavedra. At a given moment, the

spiritually plebeian Bernini --who earlier in Book Three is classified by the narrator as the

most benighted member of the patota (AB. 190)-- objects to a thesis put forward by the

initiate Schultze because it lacks "rigor cientffico." Adan counters by saying that it has

plenty of "rigor poetico" (AB. 212). The thesis in question forms part of the theory of

what Schultze himself calls "metahistoria" (AB 213), and not surprisingly this thesis

derives from a book by Plato. Developing the myth of as expounded in the c 115 Critias, the astrologer maintains that the Atlanteans (the original men of the Golden Age)

were red-skinned and that their descendants were to be found in the old Inca and Aztec

civilizations, which are vestiges of the "civilizaci6n asombrosa" of Atlantis in remote

antiquity CAB. 211-2). The myth of Atlantis can be subsumed nicely under the

metahistorical doctrine of the cycle of ages separated by cataclysms. 6 This doctrinal

conformity appears to be what Adan means when he claims "poetic rigour" for Schultze's

ideas. Poetic rigour, in Adan's usage, also means "metaphysical" rigour, in Rene

Guenon's sense of this term. Poetry, of the "metaphysical" sort, is illuminated by the

good; science is obscurantist and bad.

In the war between poetry and science, the former appears to be favoured in the c episodic structuring of the mock-heroes' journey through the Saavedra lowlands. This can be seen in two adventures in particular, one involving the apparition of the Gliptodonte

and the other, that of Santos Vega. The first episode begins when the heroes come onto

a stretch of open plain. Samuel Tesler claims to sniff "una gran frescura de diluvio,"

adding that his olfactory capacity in this regard comes to him directly from his ancestor

Noah CAB. 202). The philosopher seems to allude to the theory that the Argentine pampa

was once covered by the sea, but with his reference to the biblical Flood he incorporates

the preterit maritime episode into the larger metahistorical scheme in which the successive

ages are punctuated by universal cataclysms. As he has said at the tenulia, the Flood

marks the passage from the Bronze to the Iron Age. Shortly afterwards, Bernini presents c the same maritime period of the pampa' s past in terms of the discourse of natural science: "--El terreno pampeano ... es de formaci6n maritima. La pampa entera es el vasto lecho c 116 de un mar que se debatia contra los Andes y que se retir6 luego" (All 205). Samuel's

discourse, informed by "poetic rigour," stands opposed to Bernini' s scientific discourse.

The antagonism in this instance is resolved by the supernatural apparition of a glyptodon,

an extinct species of mammal from the Pleistocene age. Only Bernini, adept of natural

science, is able to identify the creature, for the extinct mammal exists for us as a name and

as a signified thanks only to scientific discourse. But to Bernini' s dismay, the Glyptodon

reprimands him and denies the idea that an ocean once covered the pampa (AB 207),

before going on to give the "true" version of the origin of the pampa, as well as a

prophecy as to its future. Bemini has thus had his position undercut by a creature

produced by the very discourse he sponsors. Samuel Tesler, by contrast, considers c himself vindicated: "Mas que satisfecho qued6 el fil6sofo villacrespense con la misteriosa profecia del Gliptodonte" (AB 209). Why is Samuel so satisfied? Has the Glyptodon not

also rebuffed the philosopher's invocation of the Flood?

The Glyptodon's lesson on the geological processes that formed the pampa turns

out to be an extended metaphor, for the creature "acab6 por insinuar que la formaci6n

etnografica de la llanura corresponderia en mucho a su formaci6n geol6gica" (All 208-9).

The extinct mammal declares that the pampa was "una gran llanura de destrucci6n" (AB.

207; emphasis in novel); a great wind swept over it and deposited the loess that now

blankets it. The human contingents who will populate the pampa will likewise be the

sediment of a great destruction, deposited by " y nunca dormido viento de la

Historia" (AB 209). The old world of Europe is being destroyed and its fragments form

the nation of Argentina. Thus the Glyptodon's discourse is not scientific but poetic. By c 117 making a metaphor of the discourse of natural science, the creature subordinates "scientific

rigour" to "poetic rigour."

The concept of the great plain of destruction, however, refers to more than just the

demographic formation of Argentina. The seven heroes have discussed the theme of

Europe vis-a-vis America earlier at the tertulia. Adan, supported by Samuel Tesler,

expressed the view that the European immigrants to Argentina had lost their traditional

values. Adan has visited the old world --he refers to rural northern Spain-- and has seen

the people in the villages "con un sentido heroico de la existencia que los hacia o alegres

o resignados en su disciplina, en la fe de su Dios y en la estabilidad de sus costumbres"

(AB 164). The rural Spaniards had a stable system of values that dates back to the Middle

Ages. On arriving in Argentina, they lose those values:

--Y cuando esos hombres llegaron --prosigui6 Adan--, l,que sistema de orden les ofreci6 el pais a cambio del que perdian? Un sistema basado en cierto materialismo alegre que se burlaba de sus costumbres y se reia de sus creencias. (An 165)

From the Golden Age of medieval Christianity, they have fallen into the Iron Age of

American materialism. The old "tabla de valores" (AB. 166) --to use one of Adan's

phrases-- is destroyed by the diabolical "wind of history." The table of values symbolizes

not only a social construct but its supporting world-view. This, then, is what is

accomplished in the pampa of destruction.

Samuel Tesler is thus nmore than satisfied" with the Glyptodon's prophecy for two 118

reasons. First, the Glyptodon has championed poetic rigour over scientific rigour.

Secondly, the prehistoric creature has obliquely corroborated the doctrine of metahistory

that sees modernity as a lamentable destruction of true spiritual values. Samuel's

evocation of the Flood has nothing to do with oceans or water but rather refers to the

collapse of human systems of order, the apocalyptic cataclysms that punctuate the course

of history according to a metahistorical pattern.

The second episode favouring poetical metaphysics over science with its doctrine

of Progress is the supernatural visitation of Santos Vega. This gives rise to a lively

discussion about how to interpret Rafael Obligado's celebrated poem Santos Vega (1885),

in which the legendary gaucho and payador is defeated in a payada, a kind of lyric and c musical duel, by the devil disguised as Juan sin Ropa. 7 Santos Vega appears before the mock-heroes in Saavedra, but then metamorphoses into his fatal opponent. Bernini,

always the fall guy, gives the story a philistine Sarmientian reading in which barbarie

(Santos Vega) is defeated by progress (Juan sin Ropa). "Progress" for Bernini would

carry the same positive value as Sarmiento' s civilizaci6n. But the phantasmal Juan sin

Ropa corrects Bernini's reading: Progress, says Juan the devil, is the name he assumes

when he travels incognito. Under the sign of Progress, he defeated Santos Vega in the

service of a satanic cause, which Samuel Tesler has called earlier "el plan diab6lico":

Su [the gaucho's] falta de ambici6n, su desnudez terrestre, su guitarrita y su caballito amenazaban con establecer en estos pagos una nueva edad de inocencia, justamente cuando el Jefe ya estaba en visperas de un triunfo universal y las c naciones caian de hinojos para besarle el upite. (Juan sin Ropa se di6 aqui una c 119 palmada en el trasero.) [AB 219]

This is another variation of the metahistorical doctrine of descending cycles. The "nueva

edad de inocencia" means the new Golden Age, which must be inaugurated only after the

evil Iron Age has reached its final consequences. The end comes only after "the Boss" or

Satan has triumphed and holds universal dominion.

The intervention of Schultze in this discussion is particularly interesting, for the

astrologer's interpretation of the significantly alters the dialectical relationship

between good and evil that has been dominating the episodic development in Book Three.

For Schultze the initiate, "aquella fabula tenia un sentido esoterico; y Juan sin Ropa, c vencedor en el combate lirico, s6lo era una prefiguraci6n del Neocriollo que habitaria la pampa en un futuro lejano" (AB 221). The Neocriollo will be the denizen of the new,

Golden Age. Thus the demonic Juan sin Ropa will undergo a metamorphosis to become

the New Man. But it must be recalled as well that in the principal diegesis of the novel,

Juan sin Ropa appeared as a result of the metamorphosis of the good and innocent Santos

Vega. Thus a series of transformations unfolds: the innocent gaucho turns into the devil

who in turn prefigures the New Man. In Schultze's metaphysics, good and evil are not

absolutely separate principles as they are in apocalypticism, but are rather relative terms

that exist in function of a creative dialectic.

It could hardly be said, however, that Schultze is a high-minded Hegelian watching

the World Spirit dialectically fulfll its design. The best way to describe the astrologer c would be as a wonderfully creative, avant-garde charlatan. Lest he appear to be above the c 120 fray with his superior knowledge, he is made the butt of more than one joke. One of these

occurs when the heroes come upon a linyera or hobo sitting by his campfire. If in Book

Five Adan the Christian poet finds Christ in the linyera, in Book Three Schultze the

Hermeticist takes this other linyera for an authentic magus. Attempting to communicate

with the taciturn hobo, Schultze tries various modem languages, without success, and then

ingenuously resorts to "un Iatin desastroso y mas tarde un griego peor." The linyera

finally raises his head and responds laconically: "--La puta que Ios pari6" (AB. 232).

Schultze takes a great deal of ribbing over this episode:

El astr6logo soportaba en silencio aquel diluvio de cuchufletas, y su coraz6n magnanimo compadecia la ignorancia de aquellos hombres que, desconociendo el c horror de ciertas potestades ocultas, fluctuaban entre Ios polos del Bien y del Mal, desamparados como niiios ante cualquiera irrupci6n de lo demoniaco. Pero, como las burlas aumentaran, el sentimiento caritativo de Schultze degener6 en cierta voluntad irascible de tomar alguna venganza sobre aquellos reidores. (AB. 233)

Schultze knows many languages both old and new. As we shall see, he is also adept in

the various modes of language, a qualification that grants him a special role to play in the

novel. But for all his knowledge, Schultze is as human and fallible as all the others.

It is also through Schultze that hieratic lore is carnivalized. If so far we have seen

that the "poetic rigour" of hieratized myth has been prevailing over "scientific rigour," the

former also suffers ridicule in Book Three. The same Glyptodon who refuted Bemini's

scientific discourse mocks the Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic doctrine of the three c worlds. Schultze asks the extinct mammal whether it is a mortal, immortal or c 121 intermediary being (AB 206), in accordance with his three-world system. The Glyptodon

ridicules this mania. Asked to leave a message for future generations, the beast responds

by raising its tail and dropping "tres grandes esferas de bosta f6sil" (AB 209). Similarly,

when Schultze's Neocriollo (another apparition) is requested to perform a miracle, the

bizarre creature turned around, "apunt6 con sus nalgas a los heroes y solt6 un pedo

luminoso que ascendi6 en la noche hasta el cielo de los fijos y se ubic6 en la constelaci6n

del Centauro, entre las estrellas alfa y beta" (AB 223). Neopythagoreanism, magic, and

astrology --all that hieratic lore possessing poetic rigour-- are given the scatalogical

treatment of carnival.

To sum up, poetry and metaphysics are pitted against science, and poetic and c metonymic language against descriptive language, in a mock-apocalyptic struggle of light

against darkness. The apocalyptic model is parodied, however, for the upshot of the battle

is that neither discourse prevails. Light does not overcome darkness, in spite of Schultze's

vision for a new age, nor vice versa. What does prevail is an ironic outlook on the

validity of all language systems. Even the priestly knowledge of Schultze, who to a degree

rises above the rigid good-evil dichotomy, is not accorded any privileged status in the

novel. I shall argue in chapter six, however, that Schultze does know what he is doing

when he plays with metonymic language.

NOTES

1. Apocalypticism "may be defmed as the dualistic, cosmic, and eschatological belief in c two opposing cosmic powers, God and Satan (or his equivalent); and in two distinct ages-­ the present, temporal and irretrievably evil age under Satan, who now oppresses the c 122 righteous but whose power God will soon to overthrow; and the future, perfect and eternal age under God's own rule" (Buttrick, Interpreter's Dictionary I 157b). The basic pattern consists of two interlocking dualities: evil in the present against good in the future.

2. This dichotomy was common even in Roman literature, where the Age of Saturn (the Golden Age) is contrasted to the inferior Age of Jupiter (contemporary times). Thus Ovid' s version of the Hesiodic myth in the Metamorphoses concentrates on the Golden Age and the Iron Age, mentioning only briefly the intermediate ages (Lovejoy 52, 53-79).

3. See Guenon's L'esoterisme de Dante (1957). Before writing Adan, Marechal read the "esoteric" book by Luigi V alii entitled Illinguaggio segreto di Dante e dei Fedeli d'Amore and compared it with Guenon's Aper9us sur l'esoterisme chretien (Andres 35).

4. Lucio's discourse parodies the famous lines written by the early Church Father Lactantius in his Divinae Institutiones, in which the Millennium is linked with the pagan Golden Age: "The rocky mountains shall drip with honey; streams of wine shall run down, and rivers flow with milk ... In short, these things shall come to pass which the poets spoke of as being done in the reign of Saturnus" (qtd. in Tuveson 12).

5. The lowlands of Saavedra recall Ezequiel Martinez Estrada's characterization of the pampa: "es la tierra en que el hombre esta solo como un ser abstracto que hubiera de c recomenzar la historia de la especie --o de concluirla ... hacia el preterite y el futuro se abren simas sin fondo; el pensamiento improvisa arias en torno de los temas conocidos, libre, suelto" (Radiografia 12).

6. Rene Guenon endorses the doctrine that Atlantis was the original civilization (Crise 34; Reign 164).

7. Rosalba Campra argues that "Santos Vega aparece en este poema despojado de toda caracterizaci6n hist6rica. Es un payador legendario cuya unica defmici6n es justamente. esa: la de ser un poeta. La esencia del gaucho ha quedado reducido al canto; yen el canto se produce su derrota" (America 38). c 123 ChapterS

Adan 's poetics in practice and theory

Adan is a poet who has written the "Cuademo de Tapas Azules." He is also a

poetic theorist, and his poetics provides a metaliterary perspective on his own work. But

Actan's poetics itself is put into ironic perspective by the novel as a whole. In this chapter,

I should like to work through these three levels --Adan' s poetry, his poetics, and that

poetics ironized-- beginning with the "Cuademo, n then passing on to Actan' s discourse on

poetics, and finally to the foundering of that poetics on its own contradictions. The failure c of Adan's poetics may be read as the collapse of the Platonist language-world.

Adan's "Cuademo de Tapas Azulesn is written wholly in metonymic language and

in a very earnest tone, without a trace of the irony that pervades the rest of the novel. The

poet declares that, in writing this spiritual autobiography, he will use the abstract nidioma

de la geometria" and he affirms that "mi trabajo ha de parecerse al desarrollo de un

teorema o a la consideraci6n de un enigma (AB 436). This mention of a theorem and an

enigma in the same breath points to Adan's addiction to the mystique of

Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, 1 two closely related schools of religious-

philosophical thought that fall squarely within the tradition of the metonymic mode of

language. Pythagoras, according to Pythagoreans, considered that the cosmos was

ordained by number, and therefore so was the soul of man (Butler 7). Adan is constantly

talking about numbers in a way that is incomprehensible in modem usage: "la flor cefiida c 124 a su nfunero abstracto" (AB 19}, "Ios nfuneros del amor" (446}, "el nfunero de la paloma"

(437; 438}, etc. Everything in the world has its number which, metaphysically speaking,

is a priori to the thing itself; hence Adan's repeated references to the notion of "el

admirable m1mero creador" (447; 459}. The precise mathematical relationships governing

the heavenly orbs in cosmic harmony are the source of Pythagoras's "music of the

spheres." In Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic doctrine, the soul of man mirrors the

structure of the cosmos. Thus when Adan describes the inner harmony that he feels after

having fallen in love with "Aquella," he uses the imagery of planetary motion:

Dos movimientos observaba yo en ella [his soul] : uno de traslaci6n en torno de la mujer suavisima, por el cual mi alma la cercaba en lentos giros, la media y c estudiaba con amoroso cuidado; y otro de rotaci6n sobre su eje, gracias al cual mi alma iba estudilindose a si misma en el modo y efectos de su contemplaci6n. (AB 450}

This emphasis on amorous contemplation is proper to Neoplatonism. In the hierarchy of

the three worlds or spheres of being --corporal, intelligible, and spiritual-- each level is

derived from its superior. Therefore each derived being finds its reality by turning back

toward its superior in a movement of contemplative desire (Encyclopedia Britannica XVI

217). This is how Adan presents his love for "Aquella": a movement of contemplative

desire toward a higher sphere of being. When she pronounces his name, he gains a sense

of his reality: c Y aqui, a riesgo de parecer ocioso, necesito expresar el efecto que tan breves c 125 palabras obraron en mi: por primera vez ofa yo en su boca las letras de mi nombre; y en aquel "Adan Buenosayres" que pronunciaba ella me sentf nombrado como jamas lo habia sido, tal como si, por vez primera, lograra yo en aquel nombre la total revelaci6n de misery el calor exacto de mi destino. (AB. 462)

11 Aquella" belongs to a higher sphere, to the intelligible or spiritual world; she is the

11 11 transcendental conduit of the Logos, which grants Adan hi~ being. Aquella, according

to Adan, is not merely the girl Solveig. Or conversely, Solveig is not merely a flesh-and­

blood mortal. In fact, for Adan the demonstrative pronoun 11 Aquella" points to two

superimposed signifieds. One of these is a feminine figure belonging to a higher world,

who represents allegorically a transcendental principle. The other is Adan's image of c Solveig, which he understands as an instantiation of that higher principle in the lower, concrete world.

Adan has structured his spiritual autobiography to make it clear that in the

beginning is the feminine principle of the higher world and that Solveig's existence derives

11 11 11 from it. In chapter VIII of the Cuademo, Adan meets Solveig ( "Aquella ) for the first

time. Immediately beforehand, in chapter VII, he describes a mystical experience. In a

dream, Adan has a vision of a celestial woman whose body forms the axis around which

revolves a transparent planetary sphere, "que producia un sonido grave como de arco al

rozar una cuerda 11 (AB 444-5), i.e. the music of the spheres. According to Marechal

himself, this woman, Madonna Intelligenza, symbolizes "el Intelecto trascendente por el

cual el hombre se une o puede unirse a Dios, y que lo simboliza en su perfecci6n pasiva c o femenina" (Cuademo 126). Adan experiences ecstatic joy in contemplating her, and this 0 126 experience stands as the prototype of what he later feels for Solveig. The image of the

celestial woman, then, exists prior to Solveig, and Adan's carefully and exquisitely

composed narrative makes the nature of their relationship clear. After recounting the

mystical dream of the celestial woman, Adan closes chapter VII of his "Cuademo" with

this sentence: "Con este suei'io doy fin a la historia de mi alma en lo que tiene de

abstracto, para referir ahora el advenimiento de Aquella por quien escribo estas lfneas"

(AB 445). Clearly, then, "Aquella" comes into Adan's life not as Solveig Amundsen but

as an instantiation of the abstract celestial woman.

Having forged this artificial connection between a Neoplatonic idea and a flesh-and­

blood woman, Adan spends the rest of the "Cuademo" relating the vicissitudes he

c experiences in keeping his edification intact. Finally he must take matters into his own

hands: "Entonces concebi la empresa increible" (AB 462). He intends to reconstruct

Solveig artistically and thus immortalize her beauty:

viendo yo lo mucho que se arriesgaba su hermosura al resplandecer en un barro mortal, fui extrayendo de aquella mujer todas las lineas perdurables, todos los vol6.menes y colores, toda la gracia de su forma; y con Ios mismos elementos (bien que salvados ya de la materia) volvi a reconstruirla en mi alma segU.n peso, n6.mero y medida; y la forje de modo tal que se viera, en adelante, libre de toda contingencia y emancipada de todo llanto. (AB 463)

As we already know from the main body of the novel, this undertaking turns out to be

fruitless. In fact, it is a last desperate measure undertaken by Adan to save his sense of

c the ontological order of life. The enterprise, says Adan, was "un movimiento del terror 0 127 venerable, o tal vez la fecundidad de mi pena, o quizas el grito de la nunca enmudecida

esperanza" (All463). Thus it is not surprising that Adan's desperately hopeful project

soon founders.

Adan announces his "extraiia obra de alquimia y de transmutaci6n" at the end of

chapter XII. At this point (as discussed above in chapter 1 of this thesis), the narrator­

editor intervenes to establish a narrative correlation between Adan's notebook and what

we already know from the main body of the novel. The narrator tells us that the last two

chapters constitute 11 el final del Cuaderno de Tapas Azules, escrito, sin duda, por Adan

Buenosayres despues de su tertulia defmitiva en Saavedrall (AB 463). According to what

we read in Book Two of the novel, the disaster that befalls Adan at the tertulia takes the c form of a confrontation between the two Solveigs, terrestre and celeste. The result is that

the celestial Solveig is demolished. Adan, in his "Cuaderno, 11 puts a contrary

interpretation on this definitive event. Once the alchemical work of redemption (as the

poet conceives of it) has been initiated,

se produjo en Aquella un inevitable desdoblamiento, seguido de cierta oposici6n entre la mujer de tierra, que se destruia, y la mujer celeste que iba edificando mi alma en su taller secreta. Y como la construcci6n de la una se hacia con Ios despojos de la otra, no tarde yo en advertir que, mientras la criatura espiritual adelantaba en crecimiento y virtud, la criatura terrena disminuia paralelamente, hasta llegar a su limite con la nada. Fue asi como "la muerte de Aquella 11 se impuso ami entendimiento con el rigor de una necesidad. (All464) c The "mujer celeste" is edified at the expense of the "mujer de la tierra," so that logically c 128 "la muerte de Aquella" must mean the death of Solveig terrestre. Once the "necessity"

of this event "imposes itself" on the poet's mind, it is as though the death had already

taken place, for in the next paragraph, Adan attends the funeral of "Aquella" at the house

in Saavedra.

But perhaps Adan is not so sure that "la muerte de Aquella" means the death of "la

criatura terrena." After distinguishing so insistently between the "earthly creature" and

the ideal form of the "mujer celeste," why does Adan speak of the death of "Aquella" and

not say clearly that the "earthly creature" has died? Why this retreat into ambiguity? One

can observe this ambiguity in the vocabulary Adan uses to recount the dream in which he

fmally gives up the corpse of his creation. In the final chapter (XIV) of Book Six, Adan c dreams that he is in a small boat bearing "el cuerpo devastado de Aquella." But as he rows over the lugubrious lake, he says, "contemplaba yo aquellaforma de mujer." He

arrives at a dock, goes up some steps, and hands over to someone "el cuerpo muerto" (AB

466; my emphasis in each case). Adan's alternating use of the words "body" and "form"

reflect the uncertain status of "Aquella." When Adan refers here to "el cuerpo muerto,"

he cannot be talking about the flesh-and-blood body of Solveig (which he claims to have

seen already in a coffm in Saavedra), but rather the imaginary body of his created Solveig.

This means that what was once an ideal form --"lineas perdurables ... toda la gracia de su

forma," all these elements "salvados ya de la materia"-- has now become for Adan a dead

body. This is a neat piece of metaphysical sleight-of-hand that enables him to salvage his c Neoplatonic world-view. Only bodies can die, while ideal forms are eternal. He will simply have to seek the ideal elsewhere. c 129 Having rid himself of the dead body of his ideal woman, Adan is visited

serendipitously by a numinous figure who shows him how to redeem this metaphysical

scandal. This "vieja y andrajosa figura de hombre, 11 like the linyera in Book Five, seems

to be another Christic figure, for he advises Adan by paraphrasing Jesus: "Deja que la

muerte recoja la suya" (Matt 8:22; Luke 9:60). He then directs the young man toward the

transcendental: "Abandona ya las imagenes numerosas, y busca el unico y verdadero

semblante de Aquella" (AB 467). It is evident that when this numinous figure refers to

11 Aquella, ~~ he does not mean the idealized Solveig but the celestial woman whom Adan

witnessed in his visionary dream before meeting Solveig. In any event, this is how Adan

interprets the advice: c aquel hombre ... me ordenaba proseguir el trabajo de la mujer celeste, sobre cuya excelencia me parecia escucharle tan encendidos elogios, que, arrebatado alii por una rara exaltacion, desperte subitamente, con el gusto de aquella musica en el oido del alma. CAR 467)

This "music" recalls the music of spheres he heard when he had the vision of the cosmic

woman. And yet, when Adan affirms that he now follows this edifying advice, there

remains a certain ambiguity as to who "Aquella" is:

Desde entonces mi vida tiene un rumbo certero y una certera esperanza en la vision de Aquella que, redimida por obra de mi entendimiento amoroso, alienta en miser y se nutre de mi substancia, rosa evadida de la muerte. (AB 467) c While "la vision de Aquella" points back to Adan's original visionary dream, other c 130 elements of this description indicate instead Adan's construction of the ideal Solveig, for

it has been "redeemed" by dint of "his amorous understanding." Furthermore, the allusion

to the Leitmotiv of the rose recalls Adan's defiant affirmation in Book One that "iSolveig

es la rosa!" Keeping the distinctions blurry allows Adan to achieve a synthesis between

the transcendental entity of Madonna Intelligenza with his own idealized version of Solveig

Amundsen.

To sum up, the cycle as outlined in the of the "Cuademo" is

thus complete. From the vision of the transcendental celestial woman, Adan descends to

the corporeal world where he encounters the imperfect reflection of that ideal form in

Solveig. When Adan attempts to correct the imperfect adjustment between the real Solveig

c and the ideal, she splits into her constituent terrestrial and celestial parts. The former is

destroyed while the latter is reintegrated to the ideal form from which it derives. This is

how Adan understands it. Nevertheless, a closer examination reveals that once the ideal

Solveig has been given the lie by events in the real world, Adan surreptitiously demotes

her to the status of the corporeal, in order that the Platonist order of reality may prevail:

ideal forms are eternal, only bodies perish. But in concocting this Neoplatonic redemption

of the split Solveig, Adan is fighting a losing, rear-guard battle. His "certera esperanza

en la visi6n de Aquella que ... se nutre de mi sustancia" sounds distinctly unhealthy and

not very convincing. "Aquella" sounds less like a vehicle of redemption than a chimera

to which Adan stubbornly clings to his own detriment. It is costing him a disproportionate c effort to maintain the Neoplatonic fiction intact against the incursions of reality. 0 131 In the "Cuademo," Adan expresses his life experience with metaphysical poetry.

In Book Four of the novel, he theorizes about the process of poetic expression. During

a bohemian gathering at a restaurant called the glorieta Ciro, Adan expounds his poetics.

Adan models his system on the three-world hierarchy of Neoplatonism. These

spheres are related by a cosmogonic narrative. In the beginning, at the top of the pyramid,

are God and "el Verbo Divino que ha creado el universe" (AB 307). From the Godhead

derives the intermediary, intelligible world of "substantial forms. " Below this level is the

material world onto which the forms are stamped from above. Ultimately, everything

derives from the Divine Word.

For Adan as a Christian poet, the Divine Word means first and foremost the Logos c of the gospel of St. John. Within his scheme of the three phases of language, Northrop

Frye understands the Johannine Logos as representing a move from metaphorical to

metonymic language:

The Biblical terms usually rendered "word," including the logos of the Gospel of John, are solidly rooted in the metaphorical phase of language, where the word was an element of creative power. According to Genesis 1:4, "God said, Let there be light; and there was light." That is, the word was the creative agent that brought the thing into being. This is usually thought of as characteristically Hebrew in approach, although in Heraclitus the term logos is also essentially metaphorical, and still expresses a unity of human consciousness and physical phenomena. In the metonymic phase logos takes on rather the meaning of an analogical use of words to convey the sense of rational order. This order is c thought of as antecedent to both consciousness and nature. Philo and the author of John combine the two traditions, and John's "In the beginning was the logos" c 132 is a New Testament commentary on the opening of Genesis, identifying the original creative word with Christ. (Great Code 18)

To clarify this further, it may be noted that Philo, often called the "Platonizing Jew,"

ought to be considered as a thoroughly metonymic thinker. Only by reference to a

transcendent rational order could he have conflated Greek philosophy with Jewish

theology. On the other hand, the putative author of the fourth gospel, under the influence

of Philo, is the one who stands ambiguously between the metaphorical Word of Genesis

and the metonymic logos. (There is also the very plausible possibility that, since the term

logos appears only in the prologue and nowhere else in the fourth gospel, the prologue is

a later interpolation into John's book.) The metaphorical word is creative; the metonymic c logos is coextensive with the eternal, immutable order of reality. The word of poetic­

phase language is actively engaged in the phenomenal world, a process of flux in time that

Heraclitus likens to "a child at play, moving pieces in a game" (Kahn 71).2 The hieratic

attitude, by contrast, is that the Logos was already one with the immanent, rational order

of the universe, and the "creation" was simply the bodying forth of that pre-existent order.

Adan's attitude to the word, like that of John the Evangelist, lies ambiguously in between

these two positions.

Adan's idea is that the act of poetic creation is analogous to the way the Logos

created the world in the beginning. Since the poet is "un imitador del Verbo Divino," it

follows that uel modo creador del poeta es analogo al modo creador del Verbo [Divino]"; c hence, "el poeta, estudiandose a si mismo en el memento de la creaci6n, puede alcanzar c 133 la mas exacta de las cosmogonias" (AR 307). Thus in the process of creation the poet

undergoes two falls ("cafdas") as he retraces the cosmogony of the three worlds. The first

fall occurs after the moment of inspiration. It is the emergence of the word from

primeval, pre-linguistic chaos into the world of substantial forms. At this point, the poetic

expression assumes an intelligible form within the poet's mind. The second fall entails

reducing the intelligible form to a concrete, sensible form in the material ("materia") of

language, at which point the poem is given concrete existence (AB 312). The poetic work

of art thus produced is an "homologado" (AB 319) or verification of the Logos.3 This

poetic "cosmogony" is framed by the cyclical metaphor of breathing, for Adan presents

it as 11 el secreto de la inspiraci6n y expiraci6n poetica" (Ali 307). c Such are the bare bones of Adan' s poetics in what I am calling its metonymic

aspect. If the poet names, say, a bird, he imitates not "el pajaro de came y hueso, como

se cree ahora, sino la 'esencia' del pajaro, su numero creador, la cifra universal, abstracta

y solo inteligible que, actuando sobre la materia, construye un pajaro individual, concreto

y sensible" (AB 305). Translating this notion into Saussurian terms, what Adan calls the

"essence" may be said to correspond to the signified. Adan correctly observes that the

poet "imitates" or evokes only the signified of the word "bird," and not a flesh-and-blood

bird. But Adan pushes this one step further by making the signified a priori to the real

bird. Adan goes on to refer to the "essence" of the bird as its "«idea» plat6nica" or "forma

sustancial. 11 The Platonic idea generates the flesh-and blood bird, and thus Adan's c doctrine illustrates the reversal of cause and effect that occurs in the trope of Platonic metonymy. c 134 But if the substantial forms are divine inventions, which the poet is limited to

imitating, then a problem arises with some of Adan's other ideas about the nature of

poetry. Particularly problematic is his concept of the creative metaphor. Before

expounding on his poetics, Adan gives this definition of poetry: "Jugar con las formas,

arrancarlas de su limite natural y darles milagrosamente otro destino, eso es la poesfa."

To illustrate his thesis, he gives the following example: "--Si ustedes comparan un pajaro

con una citara ... , la cftara, rompiendo sus lfmites naturales, entra en cierto modo a

compartir la esencia del pajaro, y el pajaro la esencia de la citara" (AB 302). On one

hand, Adan holds that the poet is not an absolute creator because he "esta obligado a

trabajar con formas dadas" CAB. 302), i.e. with the substantial forms ordained by the c Divine Artificer or Platonic Demiurge. On the other hand, the poet seems to have a great

deal of creative power; if he can rearrange the blueprint of reality at the level of ideal

forms, he must be going considerably beyond the mere gesture of imitating these forms.

Adan himself seems to say as much: "la inteligencia no es un mero cambalache de formas

aprehendidas, sino un laboratorio que las trabaja, las relaciona en si, las Iibra en cierto

modo de la limitaci6n en que viven" (AB 301). Essentially, Adan here seems to be

expressing an avant-garde poetics similar to ultrafsmo or creacionismo. The cultivation

of unusual metaphors is typical of the former. The young Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his

"Manifiesto ultrafsta" that "los poemas ultraicos constan, pues, de una serie de metaforas,

cada una de las cuales tiene sugestividad propia y compendia una vision inedita de alglin c fragmento de la vida" (Torre 541). Adan's idea of liberating things from their given forms recalls the decree of a founding figure of the avant-garde, Max Jacob:4 "una obra de arte c 135 vale por ella misma y no por las confrontaciones que pueden hacerse con la realidad"; the

same idea is echoed by one of the inventors of creacionismo, Pierre Reverdy, who

clamours for "una obra de arte que tenga vida independiente" (Torre 248). In avant-garde

poetics, the work of art is to be a heterocosm separate from reality as it is given. Relating

the notion of the laboratory of the intelligence to that of the poet who "a la manera del

Verbo, crea «nombrando»" (AB. 307), the image that emerges is one of a poet imbued with

demiurgic powers. Adan thus appears to restore to language the magical properties that

it possesses in its primitive, poetic phase, before the metonymic phase of language

becomes dominant and raises its hieratic edification crowned by God, abstraction of all

abstractions. Adan's poet is just the kind that Plato would exclude from his ideal republic. c Adan attempts to gloss over this contradiction between his urge for poetic freedom and his need to adhere to priestly, metonymic doctrine. As we saw, he compares human

intelligence to a laboratory that re-works the substantial forms, thus usurping the creative

role of the Divine Word or "Artifice Divino." Then in his next breath, Adan makes an

incredible leap of logic:

Por eso la inteligencia, despues de admitir que la relaci6n establecida entre las dos cosas [such as the bird and the zither] es absurda en el sentido literal, no tarda en hallarle alguna raz6n o correspondencia en el sentido aleg6rico, simb61ico, moral, anag6gico ... (AB. 301)

The suspension points in the text are no doubt meant to draw our attention Adan's logical c non sequitur. He deliberately enumerates the four levels of interpretation recognized by 0 136 medieval criticism and which Dante --for Adan a model of the faithful imitator of the

Divine Word (AB 315)-- summarized in his Convivio. 5 In the medieval view, poetry

cannot create anything; it can only produce allegorical, symbolic, moral or anagogical

confirmations of revealed truth --revealed, of course, by official Church doctrine. Human

intelligence is not a creative laboratory at all. As Curtius writes:

For the Middle Ages, all discovery of truth was first reception of traditional authorities, then later --in the thirteenth century-- rational reconciliation of authoritative texts. A comprehension of the world was not regarded as a creative function but as an assimilation and retracing of given facts; the symbolic expression of this being reading. The goal and accomplishment of the thinker is to connect all these facts together in the form of the "summa. " Dante's cosmic c poem is such a summa too. (326)

Does Adan want to be like Dante, a corroborator of received truths and assembler of the

given forms consecrated by the Divine Word? Or does he really want to deform and

recombine those given forms creatively?

Adan's metaphysical position on poetics, then, is unstable. On the one hand, he

claims for poetry a demiurgic creative power. On the other hand, he wishes to pass for

an orthodox adherent of medieval theology. He gives himself away as potentially

heterodox, however. Let us return to his example of the bird and the zither. The

intelligence-as-laboratory creates a new, imaginary signified from the signifieds of bird

and zither. The official, metonymic blueprint of reality must be able to account for this c new signified. But why should this be so? What prevents the new signified from stepping 0 137 outside the pattern of pre-existing truths enforced by official doctrine and even challenging

those truths? What Adan has to say about poetry would not be very convincing to an

orthodox guardian of the faith.

Another way of approaching the contradictions within Adan' s metaphysical poetics

is through the traditional antagonism between (Platonic) realism and (Aristotelian)

nominalism.6 In Adan's case, the manifest Neoplatonism in his "Cuademo de Tapas

Azules" would place him under the sign of realism, while his poetics betrays distinct

leanings toward nominalism. Notwithstanding this latter tendency, Adan, when

expounding his poetics at the glorieta Ciro, tries to maintain a position that implies c adherence to the Platonist school of realism.

It is significant, then, that his interlocutor on this occasion is philosophically a

nominalist. Luis Pereda, as everyone knows, is a fictional representation of Jorge Luis

Borges. 7 In Adan' s view, Pereda is "un agn6stico de bolsillo" (AB 306), though

significantly Adan will later defend his friend in Cacodelphia. Pereda, for his part, does

not swallow easily Adan's realist universals such as the "cifra universal" or "forma

sustancial" of the bird: "jCompadradas fllos6ficas no!" objects Pereda. "Imitar un pajaro,

o la forma de un pajaro, £,no es lo mismo en definitiva?" (AB 306). For the realist,

especially of the religious type, the distinction between ideal form and concrete instance

is crucial. If the form is the original, then human intelligence is granted epistemological c access to reality, whose contours conform to the structures of the human (and/or divine) intellect. For Pereda, however, the form of the bird exists in function of the individual, c 138 concrete bird. Any universal idea of "birdness" could only be the result of a mental

operation a posteriori, and the word representing it, an arbitrary symboL Hence Pereda

is, as Adan says, an agnostic.

The difference between the lines of realism and nominalism, or Platonism and

Aristotelianism, is summed up incisively by Barges himself in a paragraph that he has

reproduced in three different texts: 8

Observa Coleridge que todos los hombres nacen aristotelicos o plat6nicos. Los ultimos intuyen que las ideas son realidades; los prirneros, que son generalizaciones; para estos, ellenguaje noes otra cosa que un sisterna de sirnbolos arbitrarios; para aquellos, es el mapa del universe. El plat6nico sabe que el universe es de algun modo un cosmos, un orden; ese orden, para el aristotelico, c puede ser un error o una ficci6n de nuestro conocirniento parcial. A traves de las latitudes y de las epocas, los dos antagonistas inmortales cambian de dialecto y de nombre: uno es Parrnenides, Plat6n, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; el otro, Heraclito, Arist6teles, Locke, Hume, William James. En las arduas escuelas de la Edad Media todos invocan a Arist6teles, maestro de la humana raz6n (Convivio, IV, 2), pero los norninalistas son Arist6teles; los realistas, Plat6n. George Henry Lewes ha opinado que el unico debate medieval que tiene algiin valor filos6fico es el de nominalismo y realismo; el juicio es temerario, pero destaca la importancia de esa controversia tenaz que una sentencia de Porfirio, vertida y comentada por Boecio, provoc6 a principios del siglo IX, que Anselmo y Roscelino mantuvieron a fmes del siglo XI y que Guillerrno de Occam reanirn6 en el siglo XIV (Rest 54- 55). c If Platonic realism epitomizes what I have been calling metonymic language, it does not necessarily follow that nominalism must be identified with the modem scientific world- 139

view, though the philosophy of modern science could never have developed without

nominalism. Borges, for example, finds himself squarely on the nominalist side of this

great philosophical divide, but his attitude to scientific knowledge is skeptical. As Jaime

Rest observes, "su [Borges's] inten!s en las doctrinas de William James permite suponer

que al conocimiento cientifico, seg6n la 6ptica del pragmatismo, s61o lo concibe como una

creencia operativa, no como una comprobaci6n forzosamente verdadera" (59). Nietzsche,

whose definition of metonymy clearly aims at the deconstruction of Platonist realism, is

another good example of an adherent to Aristotelianism (according to Borges's definition)

who maintains a skeptical distance from the rigid structure of modern science (Gilman,

Nietzschean 17). Nor does nominalism necessarily lead to a position of denying c metaphysics, as does logical positivism; once again one may refer to the example of Borges, who "comparte con Schopenhauer la convicci6n de que el ejercicio de la

metafisica es un impulso incontenible que el hombre percibe en su necesidad de sustentarse

en medio del vacio y del misterio" (Rest 59). The metaphysical impulse stems from man's

need to explain the world to himself. The difference between the nominalist and the realist

is fundamentally one of attitude toward the explanations we invent. The realist identifies

the explanation with the shape of reality itself; the nominalist sees the explanation as a

tentative fiction.

The skepticism implicit in nominalism leads to the corrosion of systems of thought

and world-views predicated on metonymic language. In the dominant view of

contemporary scholarship on medieval nominalism, the nominalist Scholastics such as

William of Okham and Duns Scotus are responsible for the dismantling of the medieval 0 140 world-view (Langer 7). Hans Blumenberg sums up this view:

The modern age began, not indeed as the epoch of the death of God, but as the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus -- and a hidden God is pragmatically as good as dead. The nominalist theology induces a human relation to the world whose implicit content could have been formulated in the postulate that man had to behave as though God were dead. This induces a restless taking stock of the world, which can be designated as the motive power of the age of science. (qtd. in Langer 8; original emphasis)

Once God pragmatically disappears, the metonymic language-world unravels, for God is

the lynch-pin that holds it in place. To see how this happens, one has only to consider for c a moment the semiotics of that thorough-going Platonist thinker and Church Father, Augustine. Joseph A. Dane summarizes Augustine's semiotics succinctly:

Augustine divided the world ... into signa and res, signs and their referents. In the real world, the world created by God, everything we perceive is a part of a universal sign system with God as its referent; the only res tantum in the world is God-- a concept of being with no signifying function. (148)

God creates the world and he is also the terminus of all meaning. But if God the immobile

principle becomes unstuck from his creation, if he is pragmatically absent, then the system

of meaning becomes fluid and unstable. The universal sign system is no longer a fixed

map of the universe, and the poet (or any other creator of fictions) can assume a creative

role. In the most extreme cases, as in the avant-garde esthetics and poetics of the early c twentieth century, the poet consciously aspires to create a heterocosm to replace the real 0 141 world. The Cubist Max. Jacob, for example, held that "una obra de arte vale por ella

misma y no por las confrontaciones que pueden hacerse con la realidad" (Torre 248).

Thus the avant-garde poet deliberately exploits the schism between reality and language

that has been opened initially by nominalism. He starts from the premise that there is no

fixed order in the universe, and therefore the only cosmos, the only order, is the one

created through his language. As we saw in Chapter 3, this power to decree significance

is a privilege enjoyed by the Edenic Adam and one that Adan Buenosayres longs to

recover. He is prevented from satisfying this desire not so much by the descriptive

language of the modern world-view as by his addiction to Platonic realism and Augustinian

semiotics, or in other words, by his thralldom to the hieratic mode of language predicated

0 on metonymy.

From the foregoing discussion of Adan's poetics, it can be surmised that Adan is

confused about the nature of language itself. For Augustine, the real world is the ideal

one in which the only res tantum is God and the rest of the world is signum. But even

Augustine makes concessions to the fallen world in which we live. As Joseph Dane

explains,

human society could hardly communicate on the basis of such a simple and coherent world view, for there would be no way of speaking at all, no way of

saying anything other than the ineffable, "God." The simple dichotomy whereby the world is signum and God is res is thus transformed into a phenomenological one, whereby the dichotomy applies to the perceived world. Not only is every res c a signum, but every signum is also a res ("quod enim nulla res est, omnino nihil est" I.ii.2, "what is no thing, is nothing at all"). Everything in the world, thus, c 142 can be interpreted either as a sign or as a thing, and it is man's responsibility to know the difference- a difference which collapses as soon as the world is placed in relation to God, but one which is necessary in order for society to function. (148-9)

The problem for all users of language is to know the difference between signum and res.

Augustine sets up, in effect, a dual system of semiosis that complicates matters. In one

system, the res tantum is like a powerful electric magnet that sucks all other res towards

it, turning them into signs that are arranged like iron filings in a magnetic field. In the

other system, it is as though the current to the magnet were temporarily turned off: the

world's signa then assume the status of relative res. When is a given res just what it is c in itself and not a signum pointing to something else? When is a girl just a girl and not the sign of Madonna Intelligenza? It is the responsibility of the human user of language

to know the difference, but Augustine has made his or her task very difficult by setting up

two conflicting sets of criteria for making such a discrimination. Adan is still confused

by the duality of Augustinian semiotics.

If Augustine reduces the phenomenal world to a sign system pointing to God, then

it is natural to conceive of the world as the writing of the Logos. In the Middle Ages, this

concept achieved great prominence. As Emst Robert Curtius says of Dante's time, the

apprehension of the truth of the world was symbolically a process of reading (326). Frank

Kermode speaks of the medieval world-model as a bibliocosm (Sense 52). The topos of c the world-as-book is of particular importance in Marechal' s novels because it looms large c 143 in the text of Revelation. It is one of the elements of the Book of Revelation parodied in

Marechal's novels, as we saw above in Chapter 2 where I discussed the ironic use made

of the Apocalyptic phrase sicut liber involutus. The parody of the world-as-book topos

makes the novel's irony especially biting.

Though the conceit of the book of the world became very prominent in the

European Middle Ages, it did not originate there. The hieratic reverence for the written

word is much older. Chevalier and Gheerbrant say that in the ancient Middle East,

writing was considered to be of sacred origin. "Elle [l'ecriture] est le signe visuel de

l'Activite divine, de la manifestation du Verbe" (390). This central idea is elaborated by

various cultures --Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindu-- in the context of several religions c and mystical philosophies. Saint John's Revelation is steeped in this tradition, and his text makes ample use

of what Curtius calls "the metaphorics of writing." John has Christ the Logos declaim:

"'I am the Alpha and Omega,' says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to

come, the Almighty" (Rev 1 :8); the trajectory from the beginning to the end of the

manifest world is the unfolding of the alphabet. In addition, the faithful will be guaranteed

salvation by being "written upon" by Christ: "I will write on you the name of my God,

and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God

out of heaven, and my own new name" (Rev 3:12). Book metaphors are an especially

important type of writing metaphor. Christ opens the seven seals of the book of doom, c a scroll written on both sides (Rev 5: 1). The Last Judgment is executed according to books: "And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were c 144 opened ... And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books"

(Rev 20: 12). In the same verse, "another book was opened, the book of life." The image

of the book of life occurs first in Exodus and later in Psalms. 9 In this and many other

cases, John of Patmos was drawing on a long biblical tradition of book and writing

metaphors. 10 Curtius (310) notes that the passage in which "caelum recessit sicut liber

involutus" (Rev 6:14) borrows directly from Isaiah's vision (34:4) in which

"complicabuntur sicut liber caeli" (the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll). Thus

Marechal was not the first to recycle this bit of text, though he does so in a spirit markedly

different from that of the seer of Patmos.

The importance of the world-as-book topos for Adan is indicated right away in c Book One, when Adan muses on the parodic Genesis he perceives on his awakening in the morning: "el mundo era una rosa, una granada, una pipa, un libro" (AB. 18). Only the

first three objects of this list are physically present in Adan' s room: "Adan consider6 sin

benevolencia las tres granadas, una rosa trasnochada en su copa de vidrio y la media

docena de pipas que descansaban en su mesa de trabajo." Notably absent, by contrast,

is any physical book. Thus the proposition "el mundo era ... un libro" stands at a different

level; it is a rhetorical figure that Adan has picked up from hieratic tradition and believes

in rather too literally.

If the world is a book, then the world's creatures are its letters. The specific

source of this idea, curiously, appears to be neither Jewish nor Christian, but Islamic.

According to the Shahada: 0 c 145 La creation est effectivement envisagee comme un livre dont les creatures sont les lettres. "11 n'est rien dans le monde, ecrit Abu Ya'qub Sejestani, qui ne puisse etre considere comme une ecriture". (Chevalier 390)

Adan Buenosayres, according to his own confession (AB 387), has read a good deal of

exotic hieratic literature -- enough, at least, to have absorbed this idea about the scriptural

nature of the creatures of the world. During his night of crisis in Book Five, Adan's

remorse revolves around this very theme:

i Senor, yo hubiera querido ser como Ios hombres de Maipu, que sabian reir o llorar a su debido tiempo, combatirse o reconciliarse, bien plantados en la vistosa realidad de este mundo! Y no andar como quien duda y recela entre imagenes c vanas, leyendo en de las cosas mucho mas de lo que literalmente dicen, y alcanzando en la posesi6n de las cosas mucho menos de lo que prometfan. Porque yo he devorado la creaci6n y su terrible multiplicidad de formas: jab, colores que llaman, gestos alocados, lineas que hacen morir de amor!; para encontrarme luego con la sed engafiada y el remordimiento de haber sido injusto con las criaturas al exigirles una bienaventuranza que no saben dar. Y luego este desengaiio, jtambien injusto!, que me pone ahora frente a las criaturas como ante un lenguaje muerto. jNo haber mirado, ab, no haber mirado! 0 haber mirado siempre con puros ojos de lector, como Ios que tenia en mi nifiez, alla en el huerto de Maipu, cuando en la belleza de las formas inteligibles alcanzaba una vision de lo estable, de lo que no sufre otofio, de lo que no padece mudanza. Y ahi estan la injusticia y el remordimiento: haber mirado con ojos de amante lo que debi mirar con ojos de lector. (AB 409) c Adan's remorse, like his poetics, is typically confused. He regrets that he has not lived 0 146 purely as a reader of the book of the world and that he has let himself be seduced by the

world's creatures. And yet at the same time, he regrets having been too much a reader,

"leyendo en el signo de las cosas mucho mas de lo que literalmente dicen. " The signs that

Adan reads point to the higher, intelligible realm of immutable Platonic forms. As a result

of trying to "read" the world's creatures in this way, he has been left with nothing, his

thirst unquenched. The most painful case in point is his relationship with Solveig. By

posing the duality of Solveig terrestre and celeste, by (mis)reading h~r as signum

indicating res divina, he has lost both the real girl and the Neoplatonic chimera. In the

most telling phrase of this passage, Adan expresses his disappointment at fmding himself

before the creatures of the world as though before a dead language. What Adan does not c understand is that the creatures are "dead" signs because their presumed transcendental referents have disappeared. The metonymic language with which Adan reads the world

has died of inanition, for lack of res to which to refer. For a purely disinterested

"reader," this might not be a problem. But there are no disinterested, disembodied

readers, for all readers are also living creatures, inextricably compromised with "the gaudy

reality of this world." Living creatures need living language, language that has some

relation, however approximate, with reality as they experience it.

In Adan's morning genesis, he saw that the world was a book. What happens to

the book of the world when its language dies? Adan has witnessed Solveig' s gesture of

rolling up his "Cuademo" and he has correlated this gesture with the vision of the heavens

being rolled up in the Apocalypse. Here Adan does read the signs correctly: he knows 0 that his language-world of poetic metaphysics is coming to an end. It no longer has any c 147 relation to reality. If this language-world represents a cosmos, then it is a heterocosm,

irremediably separate from reality. As such, it has only an ephemeral existence. The

realm of Platonic forms is not an eternally abiding, immutable order. It is as tentative and

fragile as any other world constructed from language.

To conclude this chapter, I should like to return to the theme of the deus

absconditus of the Nominalists in order to see how this concept is implicit in Adan

Buenosayres. Nominalist theology in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance insisted on

the freedom of God from necessity (Langer 28). Adan's nominalist tendencies are evident

in the way he defines God in his theological-poetic discourse: "Dios es el principio c inm6vil: ni desciende ni asciende. Es el Omniperfecto: esta libre de necesidades ... Y siendo asi, (,que necesidad podria tener El de manifestarse luego por las criaturas

exteriores?" (AB 313). Adan asks this question rhetorically, but he has not yet thought

out the consequences of the matter. Other poets before him, however, did think about

this, specifically in connection with the literary conceit that makes the fictional author an

analogue of the Creator. As Ulrich Langer shows in his book on Divine and Poetic

Freedom in the Renaissance, the analogy took on ·increasing importance for poets as the

Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance. Working with this analogy, writers such as

Ariosto and Rabelais exploited the new possibilities opened up by the nominalist concept

of God. When the Creator becomes a hidden one, pragmatically absent, the game

becomes more interesting. As Langer observes, "the nominalist God, absolutely speaking, c is unreliable from the creature's point of view. He cannot be held to any laws he has set c 148 down, or rather, he can decide at any point to transgress them" (8; Langer's emphasis).

The poet who takes this deus absconditus as his model gains a new kind of freedom. It

is significant that Leopoldo Marechal acknowledges Rabelais as one of his formative

influences. This influence can be seen in the way the "Pr6logo indispensable" has been

structured. The author-narrator fully avails himself of his license to transgress the laws

of his own fictional universe with his games of changing identity. He remains hidden

behind a series of masks. The author-narrator of the prologue is not only a nominalist,

but a nominalist who has become extremely skeptical about the validity of all language

systems and their respective discourses. In a word, he is an ironist. If Marechal is a

consummate ironist, Adan is a victim of irony because of his earnestness and naivete. c NOTES

1. Though there is no clear line of demarcation between them, Neopythagoreans and Middle Platonists (forerunners of the Neoplatonists) differ only slightly in their preferred terminology. The former "think of the eternal realities and cosmic principles as numbers rather than as [the Platonic] forms or ideas (though ideas are often identified with numbers)" (Encyclopedia Britannica XVI 220).

2. Kahn's translation of Fragment #XCN: "Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child." The word "lifetime" here is a translation of aion. Heidegger translates aion in this fragment as Weltzeit, "world-time" (Sallis, John and Kenneth Maly, eds. Heraclitean Fragments. University, AL: U of Alabama P, 1980. p.ll).

3. Adan never explains what he means by the highly suggestive term homologado because the conversation is interrupted at that point. Leopoldo Marechal uses the same word in his mystico-esthetic essay entitled Descenso y ascenso del alma por la belleza: "no hay ninguna distinci6njormal entre lo que me dice la belleza de un pajaro, de una flor, de una columna griega ode un movimiento sinf6nico, pues todos esos homologados de lo bello no son para mf sino trampolines que me hacen saltar instantaneamente a la intelecci6n y c contemplaci6n de una belleza mas alta, sin forma alguna, indecible, deleitable, que se me 149

aparece de subito en el secreto vertice del alma" (15; Marechal's emphasis). The first meaning of the verb homologar according to the Vox Spanish dictionary is: "hacer pruebas respecto a la calidad de un producto para comprobar si ajusta a determinadas normas." In can be inferred then that Marechal and Adan use the word homologado to designate an external copy that the divine Logos makes of itself, with or without a human agent, as a way of confirming and verifying itself. Adan uses the word to describe the relation of the completed work of art to the poet who has produced it.

4. Max Jacob wrote a book of poems entitled Le Laboratoire central (1921). The metaphor in the title is similar to Adan' s concept of the intelligence as a laboratory.

5. Northrop Frye et al, The Harper Handbook to Literature (New York: Harper, 1985) 201.

6. It may be recalled here that Marechal "estudiaba las lineas filos6ficas Plat6n-San Agustin y Arist6teles-Santo Tomas de Aquino, todo lo cual influy6 en las planificaciones de Adan Buenosayres" (Andres 32).

7. Luis Pereda is a "visible sosias de Borges," comments Adolfo Prieto (52).

8. According to Jaime Rest, the passage figures in Borges's prologue to William James, c and in two articles of Otras inquisiciones, (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1971), namely, "El ruisefior de Keats" (167-168) and "De las alegorias alas novelas" (213-214).

9. In Exodus, Moses pleads to God on behalf of his people: "'But now, if you will only forgive their sin -- but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written. ' But the Lord said to Moses, 'Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book'" (Ex 32:32- 33). In the book of Psalms: "Let them [the guilty] be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous" (Ps 69:28).

10. Curtius says that the first instance of a writing metaphor in the Old Testament occurs in Exodus 31:18, where the tables of the law are "written with the finger of God" (310).

0 c 150 He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.

--James Joyce, Ulysses (572)

Chapter 6

Schultze as Adan' s teacher

Schultze plays an enormously important role in the novel. He is Adan's friend and c mentor, and his function is to help the naive young poet understand more clearly the relation between language and reality. Both characters move in the avant-garde milieu of

which the organ of expression was the revue Martin Fierro. 1 Adan, however, has not

truly absorbed the spirit of the avant-garde, which seeks to create heterocosms divorced

from reality, making grand gestures in a metaphysical void. Adan is still stubbornly

realist in the philosophical sense. Although he does reject the wishful doctrine of progress

based on the positivism proper to descriptive language, he ingenuously resorts to the

obsolete language-world of Platonism and clings to the illusion that metonymic language

is a valid map of reality. Schultze, by contrast, is a consummate nominalist. Master of

all modes of language --poetic, hieratic, and descriptive-- he plays freely with them. In

particular, however, he makes parodic use of metonymic language. c In a verbal portrait of his friend and teacher, Adan Buenosayres sums up in his c 151 "Viaje a Cacodelphia" the various facets that Schultze's character outwardly presents:

habia quienes lo imaginaban en el grado ultimo de la iniciaci6n vedica, y quienes lo suponian flotando en las excelsas regiones del macaneo teos6fico, amen de algunos que, demasiado suspicaces, lo reverenciaban como al humorista mas luctuoso que hubiese respirado las brisas del Plata. (AB 474)

The "lector agreste" will perhaps take Schultze at face value as a Vedic initiate or a

theosophist, but those who are "too suspicious" will realize that Schultze is above all a

mournful humourist. He is sad because he is aware of the epistemological inefficacy of

language that condemns all constructions of language to ephemeral transience. But the

astrologer has overcome his loss of the illusion of philosophical realism. Like the clown c or the saltimbanque, he turns sadness into humour and plays, like Heraclitus's child, the

game of inventing with language. At bottom, Schultze has no illusions about the fictional

status of his inventions. This is not always evident, for the astrologer plays his humour

straight; he is a true eiron, a dissimulator who hides not behind questions like Socrates but

rather behind feigned rhetorical innocence.

The sly astrologer plays with poetic and metonymic language in order to create his

own outlandish fictions. At one moment he brags about how he has invented angels

starting from a theory based on "la doctrina oriental que profesaba." But then he adds that

"habia superado su propia teoria, y que actualmente trabajaba en otra mas verdadera y

menos pompier" (.AH 197). The term "pompier" is a code word that the avant-garde c martinfierristas of the 1920s used to designate the old Lugonian modernistas (Andres 19). 152

Thus Schultze tacitly admits that his angels are figments of poetry and his theory is a

rhetorical posture. As an avant-gardist, he glories in gratuitous creation, turning

philosophical doctrines into objects of play. On another occasion, by contrast, he claims

with a straight face: "yo no he inventado al Neocriollo: sera el producto natural de las

fuerzas astrol6gicas que rigen el pais" (AB. 136), as though he, Schultze, were nothing

more than a passive conduit of prophecy. Likewise, with respect to Cacodelphia, he

claims in all seriousness that "Cacodelphia y Calidelphia ... no son ciudades mitol6gicas.

Existen realmente (AB 473); a few pages later, he proudly outlines the various stages he

went through to invent Cacodelphia (AB. 480-82), revealing tacitly that this city does not

"really exist," as he claims earlier, but is merely his fantastic concoction. Schultze speaks c with a forked tongue, or with his tongue in his cheek, depending on how one is disposed towards him. He is a past master at manipulating words to create fictions, and he takes

it upon himself to teach his wisdom to the younger Adan, who for his part does not

manipulate language so much as language manipulates him.

The teacher/disciple relationship between Schultze and Adan sets up what might

be called the narrative of initiation. Graciela Coulson discusses Adan as a hero who

undergoes a "viaje inicilitico" (Marechal16ff). Referring to Joseph Campbell's The Hero

with a Thousand Faces (1949), Coulson isolates two of Campbell's hero-types as relevant

to Adan Buenosayres: "son el viajero rnistico o espiritual --Ulises-- y el civilizador --o

maestro-- Prometeo, Orfeo, Hermes, Zaratustra" (77). Coulson concentrates her analysis

on Adan, the hero as mystical traveller. In my reading of the novel, Adan's mystical

journey has an ironic outcome, as discussed in Chapter 1 above. Schultze as a "hero" 0 153 would fall into the second category mentioned by Coulson, that of civilizer and teacher,

but he fulfils these roles in the ironic mode.

Schultze has specific links with both Hermes and Zarathustra. (Schultze' s ironic

connection with Zarathustra will be discussed below.) As an adept of Hermetic occultism

(AB 170; 303), the astrologer is heir to the tradition established by the supposed writings

of the mythical Egyptian sage. The Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius, in reality a

compilation of various unknown Greek authors in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., was

considered by the Renaissance to be the work of Hermes himself, a real person who lived

in times of remote antiquity. Ficino' s Latin translation (1463) of these apocryphal writings

was the main source of inspiration for the Renaissance magus (Yates 2, 13). The

Hermetica contain an unsystematic religious philosophy cobbled together from the popular

Greek philosophy of the late Roman Empire and heterogeneous Gnostic doctrines,

presented under the guise of the exotic, i.e. antique Egyptian. Suffused by an intense

piety, the Hermetic treatises often take the form of a dialogue between master and disciple,

which culminates in an illumination, i.e. an experience of mystical gnosis. The Hermetic

intertext is another target of parody in Addn Buenosayres, which I shall only mention here.

It is evident that the Hermetic narrative of gnosis is ironically inverted in Marechal' s

novel. Under Schultze's guidance, Adan's eventual illumination is not one of mystical

gnosis but rather a shattering of the neophyte's illusions about the possibility of such

gnosis. c Schultze' s main lesson to Adan takes place in Book Seven when the astrologer leads the poet on an "initiatic" journey through the apocalyptic Cacodelphia (Book Seven). 0 154 But even before that, the astrologer begins teaching Adan at the dinner conversation in

Book Four, when he intervenes in Adan's theological-poetic discourse. As we saw above,

Luis Pereda challenges Adan's Platonism. Adan, however, overrides Peteda's objections,

treating him as though he had not enough metaphysical sophistication to understand Adan's

Christian-Platonist poetics. Schultze, on the other hand, questions Adan' s discourse from

a position of knowing all too well what ails the young poet. The clever astrologer does

not directly challenge Adan's Platonism but rather undercuts it obliquely.

Schultze' s first important intervention comes when Adan has finished explaining

the first moment of poetic creation, that of poetic inspiration. According to Adan, in the

moment of inspiration the poet experiences a return to the "Caos primitive": c En esa plenitud armoniosa que adquiere el poeta durante su inspiraci6n, yo diria que resuenan a la vez todas las musicas posibles: resuenan todas ya, y ninguna todavia, en cierta unidad extrafia que hace de todas una y de una todas las canciones posibles, yen cierto "presente" de la musica por el cual una canci6n no excluye a la otra en el orden del tiempo, porque todas hacen una sola canci6n inefable. CAB. 309)

The atemporal, primordial chaos is the source of all form, and Adan makes clear later that

only the spiritually gifted poet has access to this realm. Schultze decides at this point to

give his friends a lesson in etymology. The word "chaos," he says, means "el vacio del

bostezo" (AB 310; emphasis in novel), the void of the yawn. He insists that everyone try

the experiment of yawning. Adan is effusive about the results: "jNotable! jEl bostezo

es una inspiraci6n profunda! [ ... ] jFormidable, Schultze! Y ahora recuerdo que la 0 155 inspiraci6n poetica viene acompafiada en mi de una inspiraci6n fisica muy honda. [ ...] Y

de un entrecerrarse de parpados, como cuando uno se duerme" (Aft 310). Schultze

concludes: "Asf es. El caos es la concentraci6n y el sueiio de todas las cosas que todavfa

no quieren manifestarse" (Aft 311).

Schultze's etymology is accurate; the Greek word "chaos" means "gulf, chasm,

abyss" and is indeed related to a verb meaning "to yawn, gape. "2 Miguel de Unamuno

adduces a similar etymology for "chaos" in quite a different context, that of the political

climate of Spain in 1932. Unamuno meditates on the prevailing "sentimiento catastr6fico,"

the feeling in Spain of impending catastrophe: '

;.,Que es ese gran advenimiento, ese apocalipsis? Pues es la serpiente del mar, la c fiera corrupta, la aurora boreal, el diluvio universal, el juicio fmal, la lntemerata, la de San Quintin, el disloque, el caos ... Yes curiosa esa otra palabra: caos, que etimol6gicamente quiere decir, como la latina hiatus, bostezo. Pues bostezo es la sima que se abre en la tierra en un temblor de ella, en una catastrofe o revoluci6n terrea.3

In Unamuno's word play, the connection is made between "chaos" --via "yawn" and

"catastrophe"-- and "apocalypse" as a metaphor for political revolution. Schultze's method

is similar but his purpose is different. On one level, he appears only to corroborate

Adan's concept of chaos by concluding that chaos is the dream of the non-manifest. As

a fellow avant-gardist, Schultze can share Adan's enthusiasm for creating from scratch,

starting from the pre-ontological. Performatively, however, Schultze is showing the origin

0 of this grandiose metaphysical concept denoted by the word "chaos." It has its 0 156 metaphorical root, like so much of our language, in the human body, in this case the

corporal act of yawning. But by conducting the others in the experiment of yawning in

situ, Schultze goes further to show that Adan's esoteric "poetic inspiration" is a

metaphorical derivative of the physical act of yawning. Adan, victim of Schultze's tacit

irony, enthusiastically correlates the various symptoms of his poetic inspiration with those

of yawning. If Adan believes in the truth of his "Caos primitivo," along with the rest of

his theological-poetic discourse, then Schultze is trying gently to insinuate to the ingenuous

poet that truth is merely a construct of language. Schultze understands what Nietzsche

says in his famous essay "On the Nature of Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense": c What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors ... (Gilman, Friedrich 250).

Adan's primitive chaos is a perfect example of a metaphor heightened through Platonic

metonymy, as analyzed by Nietzsche (Gilman, Friedrich 59). First, the bodily act of

yawning is made into a metaphor for a larger kind of opening and drawing-in that occurs

in earthquakes. Later, the image is made to refer to a metaphysical concept, and through

metonymy (the reversal of cause and effect) that concept becomes the primary reality or

the res, of which the yawn is only the signum. The practical result of Schultze's

experiment is that the bodily yawn recovers its status as res, while Adan' s notion of poetic

inspiration and chaos are revealed as derivative illusions. c 157 The really malicious irony in Schultze's etymological demonstration stems from

the connotations of yawning in ordinary, demotic language. If in the language of poetry

the word "yawn" connotes chaos and poetic inspiration, in common language yawning is

considered a sign of boredom. While Adan waxes effusive about inspiration and yawning

in terms of one code, his discourse is mirrored parodically through another code, such that

all his talk about poetics --and his poetry, too-- provokes nothing more than a yawn of

boredom.

As the symposium proceeds, Schultze draws attention to the contradictions in

Adan's discourse. When the younger man concludes his exposition of the two "falls" of

poetic creation, Schultze sets Adan a leading question: "jHum! (.Nos habla de una caida

0 en el sentido de «pecado»?" (AB 312). Adan answers no. "Pero usted," pursues

Schultze," nos habl6 recien de alguna correspondencia entre la creaci6n del artifice y la

creaci6n divina. jCuidado! (.Habra que suponer en Dios una necesidad y un descenso

parecidos?" Adan, anxious and unsure of himself, explains that God is the "principio

inm6vil" who neither descends nor ascends, being free of necessity (AB 313). Pressed

further by Schultze, Adan explains that God is

una perfecci6n infmita, etema y simple. De toda etemidad se conoce a si mismo y se manifiesta en su Verbo interior, que por ser una entraiiable expresi6n de la divinidad participa de la esencia divina y hace uno con Dios. Y siendo asi, (.que necesidad podria tener El de manifestarse luego por las criaturas? (AB 313). c Under pressure from Schultze, Adan presents God as being a kind of solipsistic entity c 158 existing for all eternity in the mirror reflection of his "interior Word." In effect, this is

the nominalist deus absconditus who has no binding relation to his creatures. Adan then

goes on to say that God has manifested himself and thus created the world through "un

acto libre de su voluntad: cre6 porque quiso, cuando quiso y como quiso. Acto de amor

le llaman los te61ogos." The divine act of creation is utterly free and arbitrary. Because

it is not bound by necessity, it is an act of "love." In response to another of Schultze's

leading questions, Adan then asserts that the poet's analogous act of creation is also an act

of love, but not free (AB 314). Schultze highlights the contradiction in Adan's words with

a single question: "i,Un acto de amor forzoso?" Then he drops out of the conversation

for a while. c All through the conversation, Schultze has been manoeuvring Adan into postulating a nominalist definition of God. Once Adan admits that the nominalist God and his Word

have an arbitrary relation to reality, the poet's Platonic realism is brought under an

intolerable strain. Adan fmds ways to explain away the contradictions at the level of

theology (as theologists have always done), but his position as a practising poet becomes

problematic. According to Adan, the poet imitates the Divine Word. But if the deus

absconditus and his Word are arbitrary, how can the poet reasonably expect to imitate that

Word? Is the poet's word not equally arbitrary? But then the poet would not be an

imitator at all, but indeed a sovereign creator. The astrologer presses Adan concerning

the analogy between divine and poetic creation, deliberately probing its weak points, in

order to make Adan realize that divine creation is a metaphor derived from poetic creation,

and not vice versa. For his part, Schultze refers to himself as the Demiurge, always with c 159 a capital D, of Cacodelphia. Earlier in the novel, at the tertulia, an engineer criticizes the

astrologer for wanting to re-invent everything:

--Usted anda innovandolo todo --le advirti6--. Primero el idioma de los argentinos, despues la etnografia nacional, ahora la musica. jOjo! Ya lo veo con una llave inglesa en la mano, queriendo aflojar Ios bulones del Sistema Solar. --El Gran Demiurgo --le respondi6 Schultze-- nos da el ejemplo al modificar incesantemente su obra (AB 134-5).

Schultze is pulling the engineer's leg, of course. He is not following the example of the

Great Demiurge at all: he has appropriated this theological fiction and cast himself in the

role ofDemiurge. His supreme arrogance is charmingly absurd, not to be taken seriously. c Adan, by contrast, retains a residual superstitious belief in the Lord, whose Word is law, the very structure of reality. He has sublimated this superstition into (Platonist) realism,

and believes that by imitating the divine word, he will be tracing the true contours of

reality with language. Adan thinks his poetic imitations of the Divine Word --his

"Cuaderno," for example-- ought to be taken seriously, and thus he is paradoxically more

arrogant than the ironic astrologer.

Schultze comes back into the conversation when Adan is explaining how a poet like

Dante will be awarded 11 algll.n premio divino 11 for his "«fidelidad» como imitador del

Verbo." Schultze queries doubtfully: "£,Esta seguro de que sea tan grande su fidelidad?"

(AB. 315). Schultze' s questioning of the great poet's fidelity to the Word seems to throw c Adan into a state of agitation, perhaps because it implicitly calls into question Adan's "fidelity" as well. It seems to be the fmal turn of the screw, for Schultze' s question 0 160 provokes a passionate reaction from Adan: "El verdadero poeta lo sacrifica todo a su

vocaci6n. (Dramatico.) jOigan bien, hasta su alma!" (AB. 316). Schultze has fmally

pushed Adan out of his superstitious timidity. Rather than obediently imitate the divine

word, he is now ready to sacrifice his soul. Schultze then asks the impassioned poet point­

blank if he would continue to write if there were no one left on earth to read him. Adan,

"en el colmo de la exaltaci6n," replies: "V ea, Schultze. Imaginese un rosal a punto de

abrir una rosa en el instante preciso en que la trompeta del angel anuncia el fm del mundo.

t,Se detendria el rosal?" The astonished Schultze is obliged to admit that he thinks not.

"jAsi es el poeta!" concludes Adan "sublime" (AB 316).

Why does it occur to Schultze at this point to ask Adan whether he would write in c a void? Perhaps he is referring to the analogy of the utterly free God of nominalist theology. The God who exists solipsistically in function of his own Word, absolutely

independent of the creatures of the manifest world, would be like a poet who writes for

no one. Perhaps the point Schultze intended to make was that creative writing is not about

imitating the divine word, even when the "divine word" is a worn-out metaphor for

reality, but rather about making a communicative gesture to other living beings. Adan' s

thoughts, however, are moving in a different direction. Reacting to Schultze's suggestive

image of an earth with no people left on it, Adan's excited imagination leaps to his own

obsession with the Apocalypse, the personal apocalypse that he is living. When he talks

about the rose-bush and the rose, he is perhaps referring to himself and the object of his c unrequited love. The Leitmotiv of the rose refers to the idealized Solveig --"jSolveig es la rosa! "-- and Adan is the rose-bush who creates her. His world is coming to an end --he 0 161 is losing Solveig- but in spite of all, he will "open a rose," i.e. create his poetic image of

Solveig, an image that for him participates in a higher reality.

This melodramatic outburst leaves Adan unnerved. Shortly afterwards he suffers

a nervous crisis and collapses sobbing onto the table. The vision of the Pescador

(discussed above in chapter 2) returns to haunt him. He becomes mawkishly religious,

much to the dismay of his table companions. Schultze strikes the attitude of a doctor

towards a sick patient: "Lo sospechaba," he says ruefully. "Desde hace tiempo" (AB

318). What worries Adan now is the idea of Redemption: "El poeta es un imitador del

Verbo en «el orden de la Creacion», pero no en «el orden de la Redenci6n»" (AB 317).

The divine word not only creates, but also redeems that which has fallen away from the c primordial cosmic unity, the unity of word and reality. By evoking images of the the end

of the world, Adan's desire reaches for the redemption promised by the apocalyptic

narrative, where The Word of God descends from heaven to put everything to rights again

(Rev 19:11-21). Specifically, Adan longs for the reparation of the scandalous abyss that

is yawning open between the poetic Solveig celeste and Solveig terrestre, and by

extension, between his language-world and the actuality of his life. The irreparable

cleavage between language and reality is something Schultze has absorbed and accepted

already. His response is an attitude of ironic humour towards his creative urge to play.

Adan has not yet understood this "gay science. " He must be taken to the very last circle

of the hell of Cacodelphia in order to learn it. c Schultze's next lesson to Adan is more directly didactic. It takes place that same evening at a brothel where the party of friends has repaired after leaving the glorieta Ciro. 0 162 In the brothel's vestibule, several customers await their turn to receive the amorous

services of a single prostitute named Jova. Among them is a taciturn young man dressed

with the greatest care and formality, such that "todo en su indumentaria parecfa obedecer

a un orden lirurgico" (AB 326-7). Schultze calls Adan's attention to the young man,

qualifying his ceremonial apparel as a "traje nupcial":

--Esrudielo bien --respondi6 Schultze, mirando furtivamente al Joven Tacitumo--. Desde hace media hora ese muchacho es un arquitecto. --lUn arquitecto? --Eso es --insisti6 Schultze con amargura--. ;,Y sabe lo que construye ahora ese arquitecto? Un fantasma. --;,Una construcci6n ideal? c --Oigame bien --asinti6 Schultze--: yo no he visto a la mujer que oficia detras de la puerta, ni el tampoco, sin duda. Pero creame que, cuando ese mozo este adentro, se desposani con un fantasma. Adan Buenosayres guard6 silencio, y la imagen de Solveig Amundsen cruz6 por su mente: "Si, el barro fragilfsimo de una sutil arquitectura, o la materia prima de un suefio." [ ... ] --Es posible --contest6 al fm, sin mirar al astr6logo. --Metafisica pura --le corrigi6 Schultze con severidad. (AB 327)

Schultze' s lesson concerns the nature of Platonism as an imaginative activity. He clearly

states that the ideal constructions of hieratic language are illusions. By a happy

"coincidence" (engineered of course by the author), Schultze uses precisely the

architectural vocabulary with which Actan thinks of his own metaphysical-poetic work

based on Solveig. Thus Adan has no difficulty in relating Schultze's lesson to his own 163

case. Just as the "Joven Taciturno" creates a phantasm out of a prostitute whom he has

not even seen, Adan has engaged in an exercise of "pure metaphysics" when he created

the ideal Solveig. The point here is not that Solveig should be reduced to the status of a

whore. Neither the "Joven Taciturno" nor Adan know very much about the real nature

of the objects of their respective fantasies. The former (according to Schultze) imagines

that he is going to Jova as to a mystical bride. Adan has imagined that Solveig is a

reflection of Madonna Intelligenza. But whereas the taciturn young man merely imagines,

Adan has written of his fantasy with Neoplatonic language and privileged it at the expense

of concrete reality. The point of this passage, then, is not to reflect Solveig in a satirical

light, but to deflate the constructions of Platonism that attempt to dissimulate their fictive c nature by claiming to reflect a higher knowledge of reality.

In conclusion, futs chapter has outlined the preliminary lessons given by Schultze

to his friend and protege Adan. The ironic astrologer's first intent is to disabuse Adan of

his illusions about the nature of language, especially of metonymic language as exemplified

in Platonism. Schultze the avant-gardist also shows that using language is a creative, ludic

exercise. In Book Seven, Schultze takes Adan on a tour through a heterocosm of his own

design, a creation he calls Cacodelphia.

NOTES

1. The apparent model in real life for the character Schultze is the avant-garde painter-poet , whose real name was Alejandro Schultz Solari (Foster, Handbook 23) and who was also an astrologer. Graciela de Sola, in her article "La novela de Leopoldo Marechal: Adan Buenosayres," calls attention to the "papel preponderante [de] Xul Solar, pintor, astr6logo y poeta que tuvo curiosa influencia en un momento dado sobre el grupo 0 164 martinfierrista" (65). Despite this extraliterary connection, Schultze and the Neocriollo are essentially Marechal's inventions, as is proved by Marechal's signed pencil sketch entitled "El Neocriollo de Schultze," reproduced in Alfredo Andres's Palabras con Marechal (80-81).

2. See "Chaos" in Emest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966).

3. Miguel de Unamuno, "El sentimiento catastr6fico" in Ensuefi.o de una patria: Periodismo republicano 1931-1936 (Ed. y pr61. Victor Ouimette con la colaboraci6n de Maria Elena Nochera de Ouimette. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1984) 118. It might be noted that Unamuno forces things a little bit. Joan Corominas, in his Diccionario critico de la lengua espafi.ola (Berne: Franca, 1954), shows that the Greek noun caos passed through Latin into Spanish. But his entry on the verb bostezar, derived from the Latin oscitare, clearly shows that there is no etymological connection between bostezo and caos. Nor is there any link between the Latin hiatus and either bostezo or caos, as Miguel de Unamuno claims. c 0 165 Chapter 7

The Last Judgment as carnival: "Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia"

Cacodelphia is Schultze' s invention. He makes this very clear when he proudly

explains at length that he expended no small effort in perfecting its form (AB 480-482).

Cacodelphia, however, is supposed to form only one half of Schultze' s larger cosmovision.

The other half would be Calidelphia. As Schultze explains to Adan, "las dos ciudades

[Cacodelphia y Calidelphia] se unen para formar una sola. 0 mejor dicho, son dos

aspectos de una misma ciudad. Y esa Urbe, solo visible para los ojos del intelecto, es una

contrafigura de la Buenos Aires visible" (AB 473). The concrete Buenos Aires stands

0 opposed to the intelligible Buenos Aires, i.e., to Schultze' s artistic invention. This ideal

or eidetic Buenos Aires has two faces, one bad (caco-) and the other beautiful or good

(cali-). The former Greek term is the etymological source of the vulgar Spanish words

caca and cagar, as well as the English "cack." Thus there is a scatalogical joke running

throughout the Cacodelphian text: Cacodelphia might as well be called "Excrement

City. "1 Schultze takes Adan on a journey through his carnivalesque cosmovision, and the

itinerary was supposed to include a descent to Cacodelphia --"la ciudad atormentada"-­

followed by an ascent to Calidelphia --"la ciudad gloriosa" (AB 472). However, the

journey as well as the novel end at the bottom of Cacodelphia, and there is not so much

as a single mention of Calidelphia once the two travellers are launched on their adventure.

Schultze invents his dualities --Paleogogue/Neogogue, Cacodelphia/Calidelphia,

criollo!Neocriollo-- by parodying the apocalyptic topoi of St. Paul. Paul spoke of the old 0 166 Adam and the new Adam (I Cor 15:45), the old man and the new man (Eph 4:24), ideas

that drew their poignancy from the of expectancy that "we will all be changed, in

a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet" (I Cor 15:52).2 Paul participates

in the Christian apocalypticism which believes in the imminence of a superior, spiritual

age. Ironically, Schultze performatively suppresses Calidelphia from the agenda.

Calidelphia, along with the fantastic Neocriollo, exist in an invented future that has

nothing to do with the present. Cacodelphia alone reflects the real twentieth-century

Buenos Aires and, by extension, the rest of the real world. The Neogogue's fmal

revelation to Adan will be nothing new and bright but rather the ugly old Paleogogue.

Marechal the novelist places the "Viaje a Cacodelphia" as a text in its matrix text,

0 the novel Addn Buenosayres, in a way that parallels the relationship of the Book of

Revelation to the Christian canon of the Holy Scriptures. Northrop Frye commented with

respect to John's Apocalypse that "one feels it was deliberately composed as a coda or

finale to the whole canon [of the Christian Bible]" (Great 199); with his mosaic of

allusions to the Old Testament, the seer of Patmos rendered a vision, as he conceived it,

of the true meaning of the Scriptures (135). The same may be said of the "Viaje a la

oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia" in relation to the novel that it brings to a close. Book

Seven of Addn Buenosayres organizes all of the novel's material --its characters, themes,

and ideas-- into a single vision, which takes the form of the hierarchical structure of

Schultze's hell. Book Seven is the culminating moment of the novel, like Paul's last 0 trumpet or John's seventh trumpet announcing the fulfilment of the mystery of God (Rev 11:7) --not the Pauline resurrection, however, but the Johannine Last Judgment. In 0 167 Schultze' s hell, the entire world of the novel, reflecting also the extra-textual world of

literature, philosophy, and politics, is brought to judgment through satire. The "Viaje"

is the Last Judgment of the Apocalypse in carnival mode.

Schultze realizes this project at the behest of his author Leopoldo Marechal, who

wrote in his brief article "Novela y metodo" that in planning a novel, "[yo] concreto las

figuras de los personajes, las protag6nicas y las no protag6nicas, y trazo enteramente sus

destinos en una sintesis de " (Andres 102). The novel's central protagonist is

the eponymous Adan Buenosayres, and the synthesis of his final judgment comprises three

inter-related aspects. First, Adan faces his fmaljudgment as a failed lover. Secondly, he

is judged as a poet who has missed the mark. At a third level, Adan is led by Schultze c through a kind of initiation for the purpose of learning how to judge more accurately.

Leopoldo Marechal places a great deal of emphasis on the importance of judging and

judgment. One chapter of his essay Descenso y ascenso del alma por la belleza is entitled

"El juez." Immediately prior to this chapter, he quotes St. Augustine:

"A fuerza de amar las cosas amadas -dijo Agustin--, el hombre se hace esclavo de las cosas, y esa esclavitud le impide juzgarlas." Y con esta cita doy fin a mi descenso. Porque no bien el hombre requiera la vara de Ios jueces, empezara el ascenso por la belleza. (35; Marechal's emphasis)

To descend into hell is to face judgment, but at the same time to acquire judgment. The

power of judgment liberates one from the love of things. Adan Buenosayres --as an

individual, as a poet, and as a paradigmatic figure-- is not so much a slave to the things 0 168 of this world, i.e. the real world, as he is to the imagined res or figments of metonymic

language. Through his initiation, he will learn to discern the illusions of language and

liberate himself from them. As in traditional initiations, Adan's liberation will entail a

symbolic death, which is the meaning of the funeral recounted in the "Pr6logo

indispensable."

At the same time, Adan Buenosayres is a paradigmatic figure representing man in

modernity. In his dream at the end of Book Five, the physiognomies of the soldiers

symbolize six of the seven deadly sins --Lust, Avarice, Sloth, Anger, Gluttony, Envy--

corresponding to the first six circles of Schultze's hell. He then feels the same features

in his own face (AB 426). Thus Adan reflects, or symbolically assumes, the sins of

humanity, and all of the judgment scenes in hell are meant to reveal to him some aspect

of his own error. Ironically, while Schultze is the author and architect of Cacodelphia,

Adan is the narrator of the text of the "Viaje."

At the level of the novel's plot, there has been left pending the resolution of the

antagonism between Adan Buenosayres and Lucio Negri. The young doctor representing

the black light of modem science has won the favours of Solveig, whose name contains

the word sol, "sun" (Cricco 112). According to Adan's Neoplatonic vision, the girl

represents Madonna Intelligenza, by whose grace human beings know their true

ontological nature. Thus by taking her away, Lucio Negri would be symbolically

responsible for darkening the sun of intellection and he must be punished in hell. But

Schultze's vision of hell is not ruled by the pious Neoplatonism so dear to Adan. Schultze 0 169 has allotted Lucio Negri his place in hell according to other criteria. His "sin" is his naive

realism.

At the Amundsen tertulia, Lucio Negri denies the existence of the soul: "iEl

alma!," he snorts derisively. "jPor favor! La he buscado con el bisturi, en la sala de

disecciones"

fallen prey to a manic compulsion to dissect cadavers in search of the human soul. His

punishment is made complete when his medical colleagues turn against him. A fat,

demagogic surgeon denounces him for retrograde tendencies, i.e. his search for a soul.

The surgeon harangues the associates of the School of Medicine, whipping them into an

angry mob that flings itself upon the unhappy Lucio. c The demagogue frames his discourse with the paradigm of the battle between Body

and Soul, parodically treated as a boxing match. In the bad old days, says the surgeon,

under theocracy, the Soul as pugilist always won in the ring against the Body. Then the

surgeons became the managers and trainers of the Body, who grew in strength until he

managed to knock out the Soul in the latest rounds of the match. Thus the doctors

succeeded in inventing and propagating "una mistica del cuerpo" with the result that "la

humanidad entera vive hoy pendiente de nuestros bisturies" (AB 708). The surgeon then

raises the dreadful possibility that the Soul might return to the ring, a specter that produces

shock among his : "Rein6 en la sala un silencio como de media hora" (AB. 708).

As discussed above in Chapter 2, this sentence alludes to the same verse of the 0 Apocalypse that appeared in Book One of the novel, in the context of the street brawl: "When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was a silence in heaven for about half an 0 170 hour" (Rev 8: 1). In the parodic juxtaposition of the literary model of the body-soul battle,

the twentieth-century boxing match, and the intertext of Revelation, it is the Apocalypse

that serves as the master narrative and imparts a transcendent meaning to the whole

episode. The battle between Body and Soul is that of Darkness against Light. The

mystique of the body fomented by medical science is the equivalent of the worship of the

Beast, for as Samuel Tesler observed, "la ciencia moderna parece obedecer a un plan

diab6lico" (AB 127). We are presently living the Last Days, the seventh seal is about to

be opened, and presently the Word will come to intervene in an Armageddon-like boxing

match in which the Beast only seems to have the upper hand. The apparent hegemony of

the Evil One surely heralds his definitive destruction.

0 Beneath all this carnivalesque parody, however, it can be discerned that Lucio

Negri's real "sin" is not that he has denied the existence of the soul, but that he has fallen

prey to the crudest form of realism. Unable to understand that the soul is merely a

tropological construct of metonymic language, he has succumbed to superstition and

attributed to the soul a concrete, physical reality. The other doctors are likewise guilty

of the same kind of superstition; their fear of the soul's return gives them away. They

exorcise their fear by making Lucio Negri a scapegoat.

Lucio Negri has been punished, then, but not according to the apocalyptic justice

that Adan has imagined when he was longing for revenge against his rival (see Chapter 3

above). Were it so, the punishment of Lucio Negri would be symmetrically answered by

the vindication and triumph of Adan's position. Such is not the case at all. Adan is also

judged and found wanting. In the same circle of Pride where Lucio Negri gets his c 171 comeuppance, Samuel Tesler accuses Adan of having perpetrated "el asesinato metafisico

de cierta Solveig terrestre; pero no hay seiiales que todo eso haya trascendido los pobres

lfmites de la literatura" (AB 691). On one hand, Adan, ungracious loser in the game of

love, is guilty of wanting to kill the Solveig who spurned him and his fantastic imaginings

about her. On the other hand, his "metaphysical assassination" is nothing more than

literature. If Adan the poet is a "tejedor de humo," the stuff of his metaphysical spinning

and weaving is no more than the smoke of fantasy.

Adan' s judgment, however, does not take place in the hell of Pride but in the circle

of Sloth where he encounters "los potenciales," the importunate ghosts of his own

fantasizing. This confrontation completes a process that began in Book Five when Adan c was in the thick of his spiritual crisis in the streets of Villa Crespo and he confessed aloud

to himself:

--jlmaginaci6n! ... jEn cuantas posiciones inventadas me coloque yo mismo, tejedor de humo, desde mi nifiez! [ ... ] Confieso haber ejercido la dictadura de mi patria, la cual, bajo mi ferula, conoci6 una nueva Edad de Oro mediante la aplicaci6n de las doctrinas politicas de Arist6teles. Confieso haberme dado al mas puro ascetismo en la provincia de Corrientes, donde cure leprosos, hice milagros y alcance la bienaventuranza. Confieso haber vivido existencias poetico-filos6fico­ heroico-licenciosas en la India de Rama, en el Egipto de Menes, en la Grecia de Plat6n, en la Rorna de Virgilio, en la Edad Media del monje Abelardo, en ... jBasta! (AB 418-19) c In the sector of the potenciales, these and other vainglorious flights of fantasy are semi­ materialized as celluloid puppets, all of whose names are anagrams of Adan Buenosayres c 172 (Cricco 145). They return to mortify Adan with their ridiculousness. The fantasy of

being the dictator of Argentina who would return the country to a new Golden Age is

dramatized in the celluloid "potential" called Bruno de San Yasea. In his "vestidura entre

civil, military sacerdotal," Bruno would have harmonized the social classes "como si

fuesen las cuerdas de un laud, para que juntas y sin discordia levantaran el acorde unitario

de la vida," as "sesenta millones de almas emprendian el sabroso camino de la metafisica

y alcanzaban todos Ios grados de la contemplaci6n" (AB. 626-27). The potential ascetic

of Corrientes is Fra Darius Anenae (O.S.B.), who torments Adan by raving for a full two

pages about his glorious career as a religious (AB 627-29). In order to avoid "este

bochomo," declares Adan, "hubiera querido hundirme bajo la tierra como un gusano" (M c 627).

This image of the earthworm relates the episode of the potenciales to the characters

in the immediately preceding sector of the hell of Sloth. There Schultze exposes what he

calls the quietist heresy of Oracionismo. The oracionistas, in a word, hide behind a mask

of piety in order to do nothing and live as parasites in society. It is significant that the

oracionistas are presented to Adan just prior to his own comeuppance, for they represent

the religious spirit in its most sclerotic condition. The fate of the oracionistas is a direct

warning to Adan: they are condemned to ride a merry-go-round whose mounts are painted

wooden figures drawn from John's Book of Apocalypse.

As Schultze explains it to Adan, there are two types of Oracionismo: aquilismo

and gusanismo. They are like the obverse faces of parasitic vanity. Gusanismo is

informed by a false, secretly prideful humility. When asked for an opinion, the c 173 "oracionista vermiforme" responds with the refrain: "(.,Que puedo saber yo, triste gusano

de la tierra! "; when asked for the slightest effort: "(.,Quien soy yo, triste gusano que se

arrastra, para intervenir en una obra tan admirable?" Gusanismo appears to be false

modesty, a form of vanity. As such, it mirrors Adan's vain fantasizing. Whereas the

prayer-monger hides behind false humility, the poet dreams of doing everything on a

larger-than-life scale and fails to live at all. Both are guilty of undue self-complacency.

When the mortified Adan wishes to sink into the earth like a worm, he swings from one

pole to the other of the same sin.

Now, both species of oracionista, secure in their self-satisfaction, look forward to c the reward promised to the elect by the book of Revelation. Schultze explains to Adan: el oracionista vermiforme caia mil y una veces en tan arriesgada complacencia, sobre todo en Ios anocheceres de esta gran Babilonia que es Buenos Aires, cuando, recorriendo la calle Florida entre tantos impios y fornicadores, apenas lograba contener la risa, al verlos. caminar hacia el infierno, mientras el, pobre gusano de la tierra, sentia ya en sus carnes el roce de la blanca vestidura que han de llevar los justos en el dia de la c6lera. (AB 619)

The gusanista uses the apocalyptic narrative to justify his hypocritical, holier-than-thou

attitude.

The oracionista of the aquiline variety, on the other hand, presumes upon his pre­

ordained citizenship in the New Jerusalem and adopts a supercilious attitude towards the c rest of humanity. Schultze describes him thus: c 174 Disposiciones alarmantes caracterizaban al oracionista de tipo aquilino: dueii.o de las alturas, peat6n de la Via Iluminativa y desde ya ciudadano de la Jerusalen Celeste, mostraba la hosquedad, el orgullo solitario y la facil irritaci6n del aguila que abandona sus cumbres. AI descender a este planeta, solia manifestar asombros angelicales, como si de pronto se viera en un mundo ajeno; y ocasiones bubo en que sus discipulos, llorando de piedad, tuvieron que recordarle cual era el uso de un tranvia o c6mo se empuii.aba un tenedor. Eso si, ya en la tierra, el oracionista de tipo aquilino clavaba en la humanidad una pupila irritada, buscando trozos de hfgado prometeano en que ejercitar la c6lera celeste de su pico. Y a este linaje de oracionismo --concluy6 Schultze-- pertenece o ha pertenecido el hombre que tenemos delante. (AI! 618)

The aquiline oracionista whom Schultze and Adan have before them is called the "Gran c Oracionista," and in Schultze's heterocosm, he is labelled the chief heresiarch of

oracionismo.

If the "Gran Oracionista" claims to be orthodox, Schultze' s carnivalesque discourse

inverts the notion of orthodoxy, branding oracionismo as heresy. The ironic astrologer

has his own idea about what constitutes "la buena doctrina" (AB 621). The avatar of the

correct doctrine, says Schultze, was a certain "extraii.o ap6stol" who claimed for himself

the title of Vice-Pope (AR 617). Like a knight in armour, the Vice-Pope declares war

against the heresy of oracionismo. It becomes evident, however, that the Vice-Pope is in

reality a bohemian avant-gardist, very much like one of Adan's circle of friends or the

members of Manfn Fierro. 3 The humourless "Gran Oracionista" has nothing but contempt c for the Vice-Pope: "jun te6logo cuyo genio solo podia navegar en oceanos de cerveza! jSi hablaran los compartimientos del bar Jousten!" (AI! 621-22). Referring to the Vice- 0 175 Pope's appointed "cardinals," the oracionista expostulates: "iRuntla de trasnochadores

que bebian como templarios! jFrivolidad andante que no vaci16 en pisar los rosados

talones de la puta pagana!" (.AB 618). Schultze lets stand this image of the Vice-Pope and

his cardinals, and responds by parodying an old saw: "--Los unicos ebrios entre tantos

sobrios --le recorda juiciosamente" (AB. 618). Where the "Gran Oracionista" sees vice,

Schultze sees virtue.

Schultze recounts to Adan in mock-epic language the jousting match in which the

Vice-Pope defeated the "Gran Oracionista." The latter, after hearing Schultze's yarn, calls

it a "relato carnavalesco." Again, Schultze does not object to this label, but adds

significantly: "--Mi relato es historia, aunque vestida con traje de marinero" (AB 621). c Like the carnivalesque tales of Rabelais, the one told by the astrologer contains "un sentido

esoterico" (the phrase Schultze uses with respect to the story of Santos Vega).4

One way of interpreting the Vice-Pope's war against the "Gran Oracionista" is that

they fight over a fundamental difference in their attitudes toward language. The

oracionista represents a sclerotic metonymic or hieratic posture. The Vice-Pope

represents an ironic position. His bellicose spirit is proper to the avant-garde, which is

itself a metaphor drawn from the language of war. Schultze' s account of the war must be

read ironically. In order to combat the "heresy" of oracionismo, the Vice-Pope arms

himself with "el escudo de la philosophia perennis, el hacha de Don Silogismo y la pica

de Doiia Escohistica" (AB. 617). The Vice-Pope uses these Thomist "arms," proper to 0 metonymic language, in a ludic spirit, just as Schultze does with other hieratic vocabularies. From another point of view, the Vice-Pope's attack on oracionismo echoes 0 176 the critique that nominalism brought against realism. At one point, the "Gran Oracionista"

utters "dos o tres flatus vocis quejumbrosos" (AB. 618). The Latinism, meaning literally

"breath of the voice," is a term invented by the nominalists to denote universals, which

they considered to be empty words without any corresponding objective reality. 5 Thus the

"Gran Oracionista" is a realist, and the Vice-Pope a nominalist. Schultze describes the

hand-to-hand battle between the two mock-knights: "los dos caudillos ... cambiaron alli

golpes tan violentos, que las desquiciadas armaduras volaban en piezas, sembrando por el

terreno los rubies, las esmeraldas, Ios zafrros y los lapislazwis de que estaban guamecidas

con un primor que algunos dieron en calificar de barroco" (AB 621). One of the theses

sustained by Valentin Cricco and his co-authors is that the critique of realism realized by

nominalism eventually resulted in the esthetics of the baroque, and that this development

is parelleled in the writing of Addn Buenosayres (11). The same authors affrrm that "Addn

Buenosayres es el texto barroco por excelencia de nuestra [Argentine] literatura" (85). 6

But Schultze's sentence can also be read as a reference to the baroque quality of avant­

garde art. Guillermo de Torre, in his discussion of literary cubism, recalls that the word

"baroque" was used originally to describe irregular pearls (241). The "primor barroco"

alluded to by Schultze also characterizes avant-garde literature. The ironic, ludic,

combative spirit of the avant-garde, attacking all forms of realism, produces a baroque

beauty. The words embedded in the constructions of metonymy --like the gems encrusting

the "shield of the philosophia perennis"-- are violently dislodged and scattered about to 0 form irregular, surprising combinations. When playful irony comes along to destroy the certainties nurtured by the realist attitude towards language, the result is the destruction 0 177 of the obsolete and the creation of a new kind of beauty.

As the Demiurge of Cacodelphia, Schultze adjusts the punishment of the

oracionistas to their abuse of theme of the Last Judgment in the Book of Apocalypse. The

"Gran Oracionista" tries to browbeat Schultze with the specter of the Day of Judgment:

"«No juzgueis, por temor de ser juzgados.» jYa vendni el Dia del Juicio, en que senin

pesadas todas las intenciones!" (AB 620). This only prompts the astrologer to comment

that the Last Judgment is a favourite Leitmotiv among the oracionistas. Thus they are

condemned to ride the apocalyptic merry-go-round. As the carousel revolves, recounts

Adan,

dejaba oir una musica gangosa, como de organito, que se hacia o exageradamente c rapida o demasiado lenta, de acuerdo con el ritmo de la rotaci6n, y en la cual reconoci luego con bastante sorpresa el Dies irae gregoriano. Un concurso de hombres graves, cuya solemnidad no me pareci6 a tono con aquel pasatiempo infantil, ... aparecian jineteando feos animates de madera pintada, entre Ios cuales identifique al Dragon Apocaliptico, a la Bestia de Siete Cabezas, a la Bestia de Ios Dos Cuemos, a la Gran Prostituta y a Ios reyes de Gog y Magog. (AB 615-16)

As they ride the merry-go-round, these grave men reach out in vain to grasp "una sortija

resplendeciente que ... les ofrecia y les negaba cierto demonio calesitero disfrazado de

angel" (AB 616). The demon disguised as an angel denies the oracionistas the reward

which, according to what Schultze says subsequently, would correspond to the place in the

New Jerusalem promised to the elect by the Book of Revelation. c The demonic merry-go-round operator maliciously plays with the pretentious c 178 priests, which is very much in keeping with the carnivalesque tenor of the scene. Indeed,

the image of the apocalyptic merry-go-round may be seen as the definitive emblem of

Schultze's hell. The entire "Viaje" transpires under the sign of carnival. The inversion

of angel and demon exemplifies the world-turned-upside-down, the overturning of the

official, priestly hierarchy. Schultze's parodic Last Judgment is informed by an ambient

spirit that is half-fun, half-nightmare.

The gay rotation of the merry-go-round could also be interpreted as a carnivalized

image of the cycle of the ages, which moves meaningfully from a golden age to a final

cataclysm and thence to a new golden age. With the merry-go-round image of the

Apocalypse, however, Schultze --and by extension Marechal-- sends up the whole notion

0 of meaningful movement toward the telos. Instead, the circle of the merry-go-round is an

image of meaninglessness, an endless round of futile emptiness. Like the merry-go-round,

the world goes round and round. Schultze's design recalls a verse from Schiller (a poet

7 to whom Adan refers in his discourse on poetics ): "the history of the world is the Last

Judgment. "8 The Last Judgment, recontexualized in the "Viaje a Cacodelphia," is a

continuous, revolutionary carnival, with no beginning and no end.

NOTES

1. For example, on being thrown out of the Circle of Gluttony, Adan narrates, "el astr6logo y yo miramos hacia la puerta que asi nos rechazaba: era circular, e iba cerrandose ahora en movimiento centripeto, como un esfinter gigantesco" CAB. 541). The two travellers have been literally excreted. 0 2. In his article "Imagenes del Hombre Nuevo en la obra de Leopoldo Marechal," Javier de Navascues seems to agree that, for Marechal, the notion of the "New Man" originates 0 179 with St. Paul by referring to it as "la expresi6n paulina" (88).

3. The episode of the Vice-Pope has its anecdotal origin in an avant-gardist caper realized by Leopoldo Marechatts friend and colleague, Cesar Pico (Andres 39).

4. Cricco (23) cites this sentence from Rabelais's Gargantua y Pantagruel: "pues suele haber un sentido oculto que apreciar en todo esto que se dice como por casualidad y en cordial alegria."

5. The expression is attributed to Roscelin de Compiegne ( 1050-circa 1125): "general ideas, universals, are merely names, nomina, and even noises, flatus vocis" (Cam~ 41).

6. Cricco's interpretation of this passage is that the "Gran Oracionista" is a double for Adan and the Vice-Pope represents Leopoldo Marechal (144).

7. In response to Luis Pereda's allusion to the German poet, Adan rejoins: "Schiller no era un metafisico. Yo voy mas lejos que Schiller" (AB 309).

8. Quoted by Max Harold Fisch (xliii) in the "Introduction" to The New Science of c Giambattista Vie a.

0 ' c 180 Chapter 8

Rhetorical politics in Cacodelphia

Besides being a coda or summation, the Book of Revelation contains a rudimentary

politics of the most polemical sort. "Politics" should be understood here in its broad

meaning, both as a set of relations obtaining between various groupings within the polis,

as well as the struggle among these. The basic idea of apocalyptic politics is simple: the

ruling powers --whether they be an empire, a nation, a caste, or a class-- represent the

forces of evil. These powers must be resisted, for according to a pre-existing cosmic plan,

they will be destroyed imminently to make way for the kingdom of heaven on earth. In

the pattern of Iudeo-Christian apocalyptic, the suffering of Israel at the hands of its

oppressors fmally must be avenged in what Northrop Frye calls a culbute generate (Great

115, 135), that is, a general reversal of fortunes whereby the great are brought low, and

the oppressed are vindicated. In John's Apocalypse, Rome will be destroyed and "Israel"

(now a symbol for the Jewish Christians) will be vindicated. As the twenty-four elders of

John's vision declaim: "The nations raged, but your wrath has come, and the time for

judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear

your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth" (Rev

11:18). This apocalyptic paradigm is at the root of much revolutionary rhetoric down to

the twentieth-century. 1 0 Leopoldo Marechal has declared in his essay "Claves de Adan Buenosayres" that the "Infiemo de la Violencia" contains a politics (Cuaderno 130). Since strictly speaking 0 181 there is no "Infierno de la Violencia" in the "Viaje," one may assume that he means to

refer to the "Infierno de la Ira," which includes various sectors devoted to the Dynamiters,

the Assassins, and "Ios violentos del arte." However, the exposition of a politics begins

before that in the "Infierno de la A varicia" or Plutobarrio. The politics apparently

espoused there by Schultze could be construed equally well as either reactionary or

revolutionary apocalyptic ism. In this chapter, it will be argued that the politics outlined

in Cacodelphia is neither one nor the other, but rather a politics of rhetoric and discourse.

The question of what constitutes a "correct" political orientation is begged in Book Seven.

Schultze, even though he is the Demiurge of Cacodelphia, is not the architect of

Cacodelphian politics but rather one more participant within it. By trying to outline a c theory of politics, Schultze succeeds only in spawning an anarchic disorder that continually

threatens to overcome his authority. Schultze nevertheless successfully defends his status

as the character who is most adept at the art of rhetorical politics.

In the hell of Avarice, Schultze and Adan are detained and interrogated by King

Midas. He obliges Schultze to undergo an examination. On the surface, it seems to be

a test of his political correctness, for the astrologer must respond to a highly tendentious

question: "--lCree usted --le habia preguntado el senor Midas-- que las iniquidades y

despojos cometidos por la llamada clase burguesa, o tercer estado, aconsejarian su

amputaci6n del cuerpo social?" (All 567). But a closer examination of the dialogue 0 reveals that it is primarily a test of rhetoric, in the old sense of oratorical persuasiveness. Schultze responds to King Midas question by saying that, if the bourgeoisie now 0 182 occupies the "primer estado," it is because "a traves de la Historia, se ha cometido una

doble usurpaci6n" (AB 569). First, the "metaphysical" caste of Brahmans was overthrown

by the warriors, who in turn were dislodged by the merchants. The ideal disposition of

the body politic, according to Schultze, resembles the theocracy of classical India:

--Sabido es --expuso el astr6logo-- que Brahma (jloado sea mil veces!) distribuy6 a los hombres en cuatro clases, estados o jerarquias: la primera es la del metafisico Bracman, que por conocer las verdades eternas ejerce la funci6n sutilisima de conducir a todos Ios hombres ya en la via terrestre ya en la celeste; la segunda es la del aguerrido Chatriya, cuya vocaci6n es la del gobiemo terrestre y la defensa militar; la tercera es la del adipose Vaisya, el burgues, que tiene la funci6n de crear y distribuir los bienes materiales; y la cuarta es la del transpirado 0 Sudra, que naci6 de los pies de Brahma (jloado sea mil veces!). Cuando todas las clases guardan fidelidad a su vocaci6n y se mantienen en su jerarquia, el orden humano reina, y la justicia tiene la forma de un toro bien asentado en sus cuatro patas. (AB 569)2

When Schultze refers to justice as "un toro bien asentado sobre sus cuatro patas," Midas

interrupts and upbraids him for this "balazo metaf6rico." Schultze continues his argument

in Latin, only to elicit another reprimand: "--jSefior, sefior! --volvi6 a reprenderlo Midas-

-. jExponga con llaneza! t..O ha olvidado que se dirige al gran publico?" (.All569). In

response, Schultze uses very vulgar and colloquial language, peppered with proverbs, and

thus earns himself further criticism of his rhetorical style: "--Exacto en el fondo --aprob6

el sefior Midas--, aunque vulgar en la forma" (.All570). When Schultze "venomously" c reminds him that he is addressing the public at large, Midas grudgingly accepts his 0 183 examinee's demotic style.

The king's next criticism comes from a new angle. "--No esta mal --dijo aqui el

senor Midas. Y agreg6 ponzonosamente: --Aunque su exposici6n acuse lecturas recientes

de cierto metafisico gala ... " (AB 571; original suspension points). The Gallic

metaphysician is probably Rene Guenon, and this home truth provokes a violent reaction

in Schultze:

Al oir aquellas palabras, el astr6logo enrojeci6 visiblemente, y no de vergiienza, segU.n afmnaba luego, sino de justa indignaci6n. --Vea, senor --le dijo tartamudeando--, si utilice un esquema de otro, iY nada mas que un esquema!, lo he revestido en cambio de una camadura bastante 0 originaL Por otra parte, ahora viene lode mi propia cosecha. (AB 571)

The vanity of the artist in Schultze has been touched to the quick; Harold Bloom's "anxiety

of influence" rears its head. The metaphor with which the astrologer defends his

originality is significant: the ideas underpinning his discourse are merely a skeletal frame,

bare bones which he has fleshed out in an original manner. What counts, Schultze

implies, is not abstract ideas but rather the living flesh that constitutes the mode of their

expression. Ideology is a secondary concern; the astrologer wishes to defend above all his

skill as a rhetor. Midas, after all, has been testing Schultze's rhetorical powers of

persuasion. The classical definition of rhetoric, attributed to the Syracusan Corax, is

"rhetorike peithous demiourgos [rhetoric is the maker of persuasion] " (Gilman, Friedrich 0 167, 214). Thus when Schultze in the end passes the test and wins the warm congratulations of his severe examiner, he has defended his title of Demiurge in another c 184 way, the only way that counts. That he is the maker of this hell grants him no immunity

in his passage through it. Only his skill as a rhetor ensures his safe-conduct and vindicates

his authority.

In this episode, Schultze justifies his position as the Demiurge of his hell by

displaying his mastery of all modes of language, from the balazos metaforicos of poetic

language, to the Latin idiom of hieratic language, to demotic language. In this way,

Schultze possesses the "tranquilo imperio de un saber que ha descifrado el enigma de Ios

Tres Mundos (AB 185). This is how he can claim to be the Neogogo. Schultze the

Demiurge is also the Neogogue or new spiritual leader. He is not stuck in any single

phase or mode of language. He recognizes no authority, as he makes clear to Adan: c "Pero, si bien lo mira, estamos en un Infierno privado y hasta clandestine, sin patente ni

oficializaci6n alguna" (AB 497). He does not represent any consecrated priesthood,

whether it be scientific or religious-metaphysical. He has set up his hell not so much to

judge the world as to assess critically the ways in which language is used and abused. In

a word, his purpose is to reveal language and its marvellous power for creating illusion.

Schultze' s demonstration of rhetorical mastery takes place at the spoken level. The

astrologer is not a writer; his disciple Adan fulfils the role of chronicler. Schultze's hell

brings under critical judgment the written forms of language more than anything else. In

various circles of hell, different genres of verbal production are satirized, from journalism

in the suburb of hell to philosophy in the seventh circle, the hell of Pride. The hierarchy 0 of literary "evil" in this inferno reflects an inverse image of that of the genres of writing. In the suburb of hell, journalism is portrayed in grotesque imagery: c 185 De pronto se descolg6 sobre la llanura un diluvio de papeles mugrientos, hojas de peri6dicos, revistas ilustradas, carteles llamativos; y la multitud, arrojandose sobre aquel rofioso tna.na, lo recogi6 a pufiados, lo mastic6 y devor6 con avidez. En seguida, ellos bajandose los pantalones y ellas levantandose las faldas, se pusieron en cuclillas y defecaron solemnemente, mientras, con voces de cotorras, declamaban ampulosas editoriales, gacetillas de cinemat6grafo, debates politicos, noticiarios de rutbol y cr6nicas policiales. <.AB. 483)

Journalism is judged harshly in Schultze's hell. A large sector of the hell of Ire is

dedicated to the producers and writers of tabloids, "Ios hombres-diarios" (.AB. 649-58).

The vulgarity of journalism clearly characterizes for Schultze the last stages of the Iron

Age which twentieth-century man is condemned to live. A cynical newspaper boss in

Schultze' s hell for journalists contends that one must pander to interests of "el Lector

Standard," which in order of importance are the interests of the Standard Reader's

stomach, his pocketbook, his heart, and lastly his intelligence (AB 653). If tabloid

journalism is thoroughly disparaged in the astrologer's hell, then the "higher" genres of

literary production are also targeted. Poetry is accorded a large sector in the hell of Ire.

And, as we shall see in the story of Don Ecumenico in the supreme hell of Pride, the

writings of philosophy and traditionalist metaphysics are are also carnivalized.

The sector of "los violentos del arte," located in the circle of Ire, is inhabited by

poets or 11 pseudogogues. 11 According to Schultze the Neogogo, in this false Parnassus,

"los pseudogogos abren metaf6ricamente sus colas de pavorreal, dirigidos por las falsas

musas o Antimusas, como yo las llamo 11 (M 664). It will be instructive to examine the 0 discourse of the "pseudogogues 11 or false leaders with a view to seeing wherein lies their c 186 "error." Adan converses with four pseudogogues, and the ftrst in line is Luis Pereda.

The second is "el tunicado violeta," guilty of excessive modernista preciousness. The

third and fourth are "el tunicado petizo," decked out with cardboard angel wings, and "el

tunicado rojo," a partisan of the Boedo school of Argentine literature which places art at

the service of social and political progress.

The Boedo partisan dismisses Adan as a fifi of the competing Florida literary school (.AB. 670) and accuses the angelic petizo of being "un frai16n al servicio de la burguesia" (AB 669). The petizo's poetics are a product of hieratic thinking:

Entre las actividades humanas existe un orden jenirquico de valores que seria peligroso destruir. En raz6n de su trascendencia y universalidad, lo metafisico es superior a lo artfstico, y lo artfstico es superior a lo politico. El arte puede servir c a lo metafisico sin rebajarse, ya que, al hacerlo, sube a una esfera superior; en cambio, sirviendo a cualquier actividad que le sea inferior, el arte deja de ser libre para caer en la servidumbre de lo inferior (AB 669-70).

This view is diametrically opposed to that of the Boedo poet, who proudly afftrms: "Yo

pongo mi arte al servicio de la justicia social" (AB 669). But since both poets ftnd

themselves in hell, one assumes that the points of view of both are mistaken. Adan

intervenes in this polemic to take the side of the angel-winged petizo, telling Schultze that

"el tunicado petizo di6 en la tecla del asunto" (AB 670). Not surprisingly, Adan fully

endorses this hieratic poetics.

With the modernista poet, Adan discusses the rhetoric of metaphor. Adan sustains c that in comparing one thing with another, one must not "rebajar lo superior a lo inferior, c 187 sino conseguir, por via de cotejo, que lo inferior ascienda en cierto modo a lo superior.

Comparar el cielo con un water-closet es ofender al cielo y ridiculizar al water-closet."

His interlocutor's retort is trenchant: "--lY que debemos hacer? ... lComparar el water­

closet con el cielo, para que el water-closet ascienda?" (AB 667). Indeed, what difference

does it make whether the sky (heaven) descends to the level of the water closet or vice

versa? In either case, the principle of hierarchical order is annulled. If one analyses this

hypothetical metaphor that links sky and privy, it is necessary to find the unifying

referential system in the human body, the source of so much metaphorical language. The

water closet is associated with defecation and urination, i.e. the final stage of the

alimentary process; the sky, with the mental operations of the head. When these two c levels are mixed through the procedure of metaphor, one arrives at imaginary possibilities such as eating and then bodily eliminating the products of the mind -- the ronoso manil of

written material, for example. What is accomplished by comparing faeces with the written

word, or vice versa? Are faeces perhaps elevated or is writing degraded? The question

is pragmatically meaningless; the hierarchy that privileges things of the mind or spirit over

those of the body is razed.

This same line of reasoning may be applied to the angelic petizo's "jerarqufas del

arte" (AB. 669), for he and Adan use the same vocabulary, distinguishing between "lo

inferior" and "lo superior." Art is supposed to stand between the lower level of politics

and the higher level of metaphysics. It must not "lower itself" into politics, but rather

11 0 Serve" the higher truth of metaphysics. The corollary to this would be that politics must "serve" the truth of art, Le. receive its structural norms from those of art and poetry. This c 188 is evidently absurd, but no more absurd than the Platonist notion that the metaphysical is

a priori to all else. In reality, every metaphysics presupposes a politics, and every politics

is grounded in a metaphysics. At the mediating level of art, furthermore, every poetics

presupposes both a metaphysics and a politics. The "Viaje a Cacodelphia" itself is, among

other things, an exploration of rhetorical politics on the shifting metaphysical terrain of

modernity. No one of these three levels takes absolute precedence over any other. This

explains why the conflicting views of the three tunic-bearing pseudogogues are all in error.

The "tunicado rojo" places politics before all else; the "tunicado violeta" indulges in art

for art's sake; and the angelic petizo, with his "misticismo rampl6n" and "divagaciones

teol6gicas" and "simbolismos que ni Dios entiende" (AB 669), privileges a (degenerate) c form of metaphysics. All of these partial points of view, these ideological partis pris, are levelled at the moment of the definitive judgment.

Perhaps the most interesting encounter in the sector of the pseudogogues is the one

Adan has with Luis Pereda, the fictional stand-in for the young Jorge Luis Borges.

According to Pereda's jailer, the false muse Euterpe, his crime does not lie in his

enthusiasm for suburban malevos (gaucho outlaws), but rather

lo malo esta en que don Luis ha querido llevar a la literatura sus fervores mistico­ suburbanos, hasta el punto de inventar una falsa Mitologia en la que los malevos portefios adquieren, no solo proporciones heroicas, sino hasta vagos contornos metafisicos. (AB 665) c Apparently, Schultze has placed Luis Pereda in hell because the latter has dreamed up a c 189 "false Mythology" that makes heroes out of malevos (suburban tough guys) to the point

that they even acquire "metaphysical" significance. Why should Schultze, an inventor of

mythologies himself, object to such a procedure when it is undertaken by another? It does

not seem fair to Adan, who defends Pereda on the basis of his contribution to the

"literatura nacional" (AB 666). A probable reason for Schultze's indictment of Luis

Pereda, I propose, should be looked for in the common human failings that drive the

ubiquitous drama of interpersonal politics. This level is humorously brought out in the

text when Pereda expresses resentment at Schultze's shabby treatment of him: "--iLas

veces que le habre pagado el tranvia! --grufi6 Pereda, mirando rencorosamente al

astr6logo" (AB 665). Schultze may be the Neogogue and the Demiurge, but that does not c mean he is a saint, as many episodes of the "Viaje" reveal. Schultze has created his own mythology of angels and the Neocriollo. The old mythologies, frozen in the distant past,

may be allowed to subsist as reference points, but a competing, contemporary mythology

poses a threat. Thus the Demiurge finds it opportune to suppress Luis Pereda' s literary

mythology through ridicule. 3

This interpersonal politics translates into an intratextual politics, based on the

Creator-creature dialectic, and both kinds of politics are dramatized in parallel throughout

the "Viaje." The entire tour of Schultze and his ward through Cacodelphia is one

confrontation after another, a circumstance that moves Adan to complain:

Ya me venia resultando abusivo el hecho de que, contra todo uso y costumbre, se tergiversara el c6modo papel de mir6n que sin duda me correspondia en aquel c descenso infernal, para someterme a dhilogos, controversias y disputas que no c 190 deseaba y que me convertian en otro actor del sainete schultziano.

The "intelligible city" of Cacodelphia is no static eidetic image in the realm of the eternal,

but an embroiled political arena. As a novice and aspirant to rhetorical mastery, Adan

must learn to defend himself on his own, following the example of his guru, the

Neogogue.

Though not a writer, Schultze is an author in the sense that he is architect and

demiurge of the world of Cacodelphia. In a way, all of the inhabitants are his creatures,

even the ones he has appropriated from the "real" world of the rest of the novel. The

astrologer has boldly arrogated to himself the absolute freedom of the nominalist God. c The basis of his authority is perfectly arbitrary, his eccentric "initiatic" credentials notwithstanding. Not surprisingly, then, his "creatures" take quite a different view of his

qualifications and the justice of his authorial power. Throughout the "Viaje," Schultze is

criticized, verbally insulted, and even physically attacked. In a word, his authority is

continually challenged. Luis Pereda casts aspersions on Schultze's esthetic taste; referring

to the Falsa Euterpe, the false muse of music under whose tutelage Schultze has placed

Pereda, the latter remarks caustically that she is "una jugarreta de Schultze, un chiste

aleman del peor gusto" (AB. 665). One of the denizens of the sector of the assassins

aggressively proclaims that the inventor of this Hell "de be ser o un vanguardista o un

chamb6n" (AB. 674), as though to imply that between an avant-gardist and a goofball there

is not much to choose. Similarly, a gourmet in the hell of Gluttony challenges Schultze's c taste and judgment: "Y presumo que el inventor de esta risible arquitectura infernal debe c 191 de ser un chamb6n,. un media cuchara, incapaz de ver Ios matices que diferencian un caso

de otro"

terms Adan and his guide: "jUn Dante de carton y un Virgilio de opereta!"

One of the vulgar Cuiiadas, who were present at the funeral of Juan Robles in Book

Three, also makes an accusation: "--jAndan metiendose en vidas ajenas --cacare6 Matilde­

-. iO a eso le llama literatura?" (AB 640). One of the surly boatmen in the hell of Envy

declares Schultze to be "un Escipi6n de segunda mano" (AB 633), probably in reference

to the Scipio Aemilianus and his literary, philhellenic circle, dramatized by Cicero in De

Republica. 4 All of these characters place themselves above the fiction which pretends to

place them; they pass judgment on both creation and creator. Thus they attempt radically c to subvert the Creator-creature hierarchy. Several of Schultze' s creatures hold compromising memories of his past. In the

hell of Gluttony, for example, the astrologer is greatly embarrassed on meeting Don

Celso, the father of the bride whom Schultze abandoned on their wedding day. While the

astrologer furtively tries to avoid his former father-in-law, Don Celso takes pleasure in

their reunion. The Demiurge relates to Adan the episode of the wedding supper, at which

Don Celso made such a disgusting spectacle of himself with his gluttony that Schultze,

horrified, ran away from the house forever. The astrologer's speech of self-justification

is less than convincing; the father-in-law's gluttony does not excuse Schultze's having

betrayed the daughter. Don Celso, for his part, accepts with equanimity the damning c description of his past behaviour, and even passes favourable critical judgment on Schultze' s oratory: 0 192 --No esta mal --opin6 [don Celso]--. Alguna influencia de Homero en el estilo: una influencia que, sin duda, se hara mas visible cuando el narrador intente darme Ios contomos de un Polifemo a la modema. Pero siga, joven Schultze: admito que su vis c6mica es irresistible. CAB. 533)

The old reprobate clearly has the upper hand on two accounts. He places himself above

Schultze' s discourse by assessing it critically, in literary terms, thus overstepping

Schultze's demiurgic (rhetorical) authority. At the same time, by accepting his own guilt

and punishment, he holds the moral high ground vis-a-vis his judge, who tries to justify

his own shabby behaviour by accusing another. Thus the judge is judged by the

condemned. c Another creature, an aspiring pop musician who had known Schultze when he used to frequent the cabaret scene of Buenos Aires, embarrasses the Demiurge by recalling his

past posturing as an alchemist:

--Place Pigalle --susurr6 un guitarrero, encarandose con el astr6logo--. Vos eras un muchacho que se las daba de intelectual... Si, hablabas en dificil con aquellos tres alemanes barbudos. Quimicos, o quimistas, algo asi me pareci6 que se llamaban. [ ... ] --'Dissolvons, putrefions [sic], sublimons!' --parodi6 el guitarrero en un fiances detestable. El astr6logo se puso de todos los colores: --l Y cual era tu ambici6n ridicula? --pregunt6 urgentemente al guitarrero, como si desease hacerle cambiar de tema. (,AR 610-11)

0 While Schultze has condemned the pop entertainer for his artistic and personal vulgarity, c 193 the latter satirically mimics the initiatic pretentiousness of the astrologer in his youth. It

is interesting that Schultze should be so mortified by this particular aspect of his past. One

can surmise that the young Schultze who posed as an alchemist no doubt took himself and

his esoteric lore quite seriously, similar to the way in which Adan takes his own

Neoplatonic mysticism in earnest. Schultze the Neogogue, on the other hand, has freed

himself from the prison of hieratic language and the attitude that sustains it. He has turned

his slavery to hieratic language into mastery of it and its underlying trope of metonymy.

Yet his mastery does not make him invulnerable in relation to his fellow human beings.

His special status as Neogogue and his authority as Demiurge are not grounded in truth

but are rather unstable, ephemeral, and even illusory. The only truth that Schultze can

0 reveal definitively is that there is no incontestable truth accessible through language.

One more instance in which Schultze' s creatures confront him with his past merits

some discussion. In the "Laboratorio de Ios dinamiteros," where Schultze has placed the

anarchists, the astrologer is recognized by his former anarchist companions and denounced

as a traitor. As in the case of his ex-father-in-law, Schultze tries to avoid being

recognized, but to no avail. He is accosted by one of the hombres-bombas:

Schultze se detuvo, lo mir6 friamente y se volvi6 hacia mi: --No conozco a este hombre --me dijo--. Debe de padecer una ilusi6n 6ptica. --jGenuflexo!-- le gritaba el hombre bomba--. jDesert6 la bandera de Anarkos para lamer los pies elegantemente calzados de la burguesia! i V eanlo aboral jlnventa un infierno, a imitaci6n del Gran Burgues que pretenden hacernos 0 adorar los curas! 0 194 [... ] El astr6logo, sudando a mares, ahuyent6 a Ios hombres bombas que ya se le echaban encima. (AB 645)

Schultze' s creatures manage to bully him into owning up to his Anarchist past, which included a plot to blow up a gas storage facility, as well as sleeping with his fellow anarchists' women (AB 645). The astrologer, seeking Adan's indulgence, explains his behaviour:

--j Yo era joven! ... Lecturas perversas me habian inducido al culto de la destrucci6n simbolizada en Kali, la tenebrosa, quien, al bailar sobre Ios escombros del mundo, sacude bellamente sus tetas de novilla. [ ... ] Crei hallar en estos hombres a Ios adeptos de Kali. .. t.No los oia yo a toda hora conjugar el verbo destruir?

Schultze as a young man was obsessed with destruction on a grand scale and for this

reason he was attracted to Anarchism. The details of this past relate this astrologer to

Roberto Arlt's character dubbed "el Astr6logo." In Los siete locos (1929) and its sequel

Los lanzallamas (1931), "el Astr6logo" thirsts for the violent destruction of capitalist

society and takes away Ergueta's wife Hip6lita. This may be accidental or an instance of

pointed intertextuality. In any case, Schultze-Marechal highlights in the hombres-bombas

the same kind of Nietzcheanism that animates Roberto Arlt' s seven madmen. As I

mentioned above, Schultze characterizes the bomb-men as being loaded with bad literature,

specifying "el Zarathustra o el Apocalipsis johanita"

burguesia" CAB 646). In both cases, Zarathustra refers to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke

Zarathustra. 5 If Nietzsche's famous work and the Apocalypse form the explosive charge

of the hombres-bombas, then the same texts surely figure among the "perverse readings n

that turned the head of the young Schultze. By his account, books are to blame for wrong­

headed attitudes.

The data apportioned us by Schultze's creatures combine to paint a triple image of

the astrologer's youth: the inconstant lover, the alchemist, and the Anarchist. In sum, he

appears as a flighty, over-imaginative young man. Even his flirtation with Anarchism is

more literary than seriously political. Thus in his youth he had a good deal in common c with his young protege Adan, the unstable "tejedor de humo." Schultze, through a maturing process that is left untold, has become wiser. But he has not necessarily become

better. What kind of wisdom does Schultze possess?

Returning to the episode of the hombres-bombas, one notes that Schultze the

Demiurge has no control over these unruly creatures. His fear induces him to lie to them

outright in order to escape their notice. They overcome his prevarications and oblige him

to confess to his past. Schultze attempts to regain the upper hand by striking an attitude

of paternalism towards them, alleging that they are good at heart, only misled by

literature. But from behind his condescension emerges the most injurious mockery:

El astr6logo me sonri6, como rogandome para ellos una brizna de caridad. --jLos excelentes hermanos! --dijo--. Son unos panes de Dios ... Cierto es 0 que malgastaban sus horas esbozando en el papel inofensivos descarrilamientos y c 196 voladuras, o mezclando substancias quimicas del todo inocentes. Pero daba gusto verlos en Ios pic-nics dominicales, cuando mordisqueaban sus piernas de gallina como pacificos burgueses. (AB 647) 6

Schultze is nothing like the kind Heavenly Father of Christian teaching. Instead he takes

malicious delight in tormenting his creatures by rubbing their noses in their own

insignificance. Infuriated and beyond care for their own safety, the homhres-bombas chase

Schultze and Adan as unwelcome intruders from the "laboratorio de Ios dinamiteros." The

Demiurge is a fugitive in his own helL

Another politically revealing encounter takes place in the hell of Envy. There,

Schultze has trouble with two insolent boatmen who must take him and Adlin across a c lagoon. The sixth circle of Schultze' s inferno consists of a parodic facsimile of the cosmos:

Toda el area infernal parecia sugerir un contraste de cielo y suelo, de ordenaci6n y caos: arriba, en la negrura de la noche muy bien imitada, esferas celestes giraban sobre sus polos y alrededor de soles verdes, azules y rosas; pero lo hacian aceleradamente, con un ritmo artificial de Planetario, y cada una, en su rotaci6n, producia un musical diferente que al unirse al de las otras esferas integraba cierto acorde furioso como de avispas irritadas. (AB. 631)

The buzzing of the planets appears to be a cacophonous parody of the music of the

spheres, judging by the question asked by one of the boatmen: "~Qui ere hacerme creer,"

he asks Schultze, "que oye la musica de las esferas?" "Hasta la ultima nota," replies the

0 astrologer (AB. 633). Schultze the nominalist is pulling his creature's leg by lying with the 0 197 truth. Of course the clever Demiurge hears the music of spheres because he is the author

and designer of this Planetarium; he does not hear, as his ingenuous interlocutor seems to

believe, Pythagoras's music of the spheres, that is, the harmonic resonance of the

philosophical realist's cosmos, whether this be a divine dispensation or otherwise

independent of human intentionality. For Schultze, a cosmos is a human projection of

order; the divine, far from being other, is thoroughly human.

The problem at hand for Schultze is to bend to his will these creatures of his

artificial creation. He brings them round with his demiurgic power of persuasion, not

without first losing his temper. Faced with their disobedience,

el astr6logo se puso a insultarlos violentamente, haciendo uso de calificativos 0 esotericos entre Ios cuales dej6 caer al fin el muy alado y musical de "putifilios". Aquella palabra debfa de tener algtin sentido magico, ya que, al oirla, los tripulantes, venciendo su natural resistencia, enfilaron hacia nosotros la proa. [ ... ] --i Hijos de tal por cual! --tron6 Schultze--. t.Saben con quien estan hablando? (,La soberbia igualitaria los ha enceguido hasta impedirles reconocer al Neogogo? (AB 632-633)

The refractory boatmen are brought to heel first by the abusive, mock-erudite neologism

meaning "hijos de puta" (a pointed parody of hieratic language), then by the astrologer's

claim that he hears the music of the spheres, and finally by a self-parodic display of

initiatic verbiage that Schultze offers as "una credencial, un signo" of his status as

Neogogue. 7 The ignorant boatmen, far from recognizing the playful charlatanry in the 0 astrologer's discourse, treat him "con una solicitud casi adulatoria" (AB 634). Schultze 198

has thus successfully taken advantage of their gullibility. Unlike the intractable hombres-

bombas, who were ready to blow themselves up for the sake of exterminating the odious

Demiurge, the custodians of the hell of Envy let themselves be cajoled by Schultze's ruses,

their envious natures turning cowardly as soon as they suspect that the astrologer may

indeed be their superior.

In both cases, however, from behind the apparent examples of the capital sins and

their punishment, there emerges a demonstration of the politics of discourse and language.

What is most remarkable are not the failings of the creatures inhabiting Schultze' s hell,

but rather the dubious moral quality of the Demiurge's wisdom. The astrologer appears

as a sort of erudite and successful picaro. He may fulminate against the "soberbia c igualitaria" of his creatures, but he is morally on the same plane with them. His only saving grace is that he mocks himself as well.

In this he resembles Nietzsche's self-parodic alter ego, Zarathustra, who treats his

followers in similarly high-handed fashion even as he mocks his own teachings. Sander

Gilman, in his book on Nietzschean Parody, has shown in his analysis of Zarathustra' s

sermon "On Poets" that the prophet ends by mocking his own doctrines (53-56). A

disciple reminds Zarathustra that he has said that the poets lie too much. Zarathustra

agrees; "we do lie too much," he says emphasizing the first-person pronoun. "We also

know too little and are bad learners; so we simply have to lie." The passage concludes:

Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed. 0 And especially above the heavens: for all gods are poets' , poets' c 199 prevarications. Verily, it always lifts us higher - specifically, to the realm of the clouds: upon these we place our motley bastards and call them gods and overmen. Ah, how weary I am of all the imperfection which must at all costs become event! Ah, how weary I am of poets! (Nietzsche 239-40)

Zarathustra places his own doctrine of the overman among the lies of the poets in a

discourse that according to Gilman parodies not only Shakespeare and Goethe, but also

certain lines of Nietzsche' s own poetry. Although Schultze is never quite so frank about

his own doctrine of the Neocriollo or his position as the Neogogue, his self-parodic verbal

gestures show that he does not take himself or his excentric doctrines very seriously.

These are simply a convenient means of imposing his artistic will. When Adan learns to c adopt such an attitude before the language-produced illusions of poetry, philosophy, and religion, he too will have been cured of "el mal metafisico" that afflicts him.

An episode that brings to an end the duo's tour of the hell of Gluttony gives rise

to an important discussion of the creator/creature dynamic. Near the exit of this circle of

hell, Adan and Schultze meet a fat woman who is the very personification of gluttony.

With grotesque coquetry, she holds out her hand to be kissed by Schultze. He refuses,

alleging: "Yo soy el Demiurgo de este infiemo, y dice la sabiduria: 'No adoraras la obra

de tus manos'." The insulted woman barks an order to her Cyclops henchman:

"iAgarreme al Demiurgo, y echamelo afuera!" (AB 541). The doughty Cyclops obliges

with alacrity. Ruminating over their indecorous exit, the Demiurge and his disciple

engage in an important dialogue: 0 c 200 -Amigo Schultze --le dije--, l,C6mo es posible que sus mismas criaturas no hayan reconocido en usted al creador? --Eso es posible, y hasta corriente --me respondi6 el--. Y si no, que Ios digan los dioses inmortales: t,que negaci6n teol6gica no han recibido Ellos de los hombres?, (,que rebeli6n no les aguantaron?, (.que impiedad no les sufrieron? Si bien lo mira, todo eso es halagador para un Demiurgo que se respeta. --l,Halagador? --proteste yo, sintiendo aun en mis riiiones la caricia del Ciclope. --Supongamos que usted le da el ser a una criatura, y que se lo da con tanta plenitud que la criatura, lejos de reconocer en usted a su causa primera, se imagina ser por si misma, libre de toda relaci6n entre causa y efecto. Supongamos que Don Quijote, por ejemplo, negara la existencia de Cervantes: esa exuberancia de ser, que Cervantes di6 a su heroe y por la cual se ve negado, J:,no seria el mas c agradable incienso que, como creador, pudiera recibir de su criatura? --jHum! --observe--. Teorizadores menos peligrosos que usted acabaron en el , cuando el mundo era mas prudente. (,All542-43)

Only the most naive reader could join Adan in believing that Schultze is discussing a

question of theology in this passage. His example of Cervantes and Don Quixote is

strictly literary and is taken almost certainly from another literary source, Miguel de

Unamuno's highly influential novel Niebla (1914). 8 It was one of the latter's pet conceits

that the immortal Knight is historically more "real" than Cervantes himself. At the climax

of the story in Niebla, the fictional Augusto Perez meets Unamuno. In the course of their

interview, Augusto rebels against his author and then attempts a revolution that would

invert the ontological relation binding creature to creator. 9 In Unamuno's "nivola" the c theological construct is present as a metaphorical substrate; the plane of reference is 201

literature, which may be extended to include history as a form of literature. In Schultze's

discourse, too, the theological dynamic of Creator and creature is metaphorical, but in his

case the literary relation of author and character, Cervantes and Don Quixote, is as well

metaphorical. I do not think that Schultze, who is not a writer, is referring his discourse

primarily to the plane of literary production. A large number of the astrologer's

"creatures" are not his own inventions at all, but rather characters appropriated from the

matrix novel; that is to say, they share with him the same ontological status within the

novelistic fiction. Schultze does not invent literature but rather creates a human order,

using for his material the world as he fmds it. It is at once a political, moral, and esthetic

order: a cosmovision or Weltanschauung. The positive image of the Schultzian cosmos, c left unrecorded, would be Calidelphia. His inferno is its negative mirror image, as it were. And yet Schultze the self-appointed N eogogue is strictly speaking neither a political

theorist, nor a moralist, nor an esthetician. His cosmovision is supported by no rigid

theoretical framework, no single conventional body of discourse, but must shift for itself

in the metaphysical groundlessness of language, the stuff of all discourse. The vulnerable

Demiurge, master of rhetoric, can count only on his ability to move with agility and

freedom in language as the fish swims in the sea. The entire "Viaje a Cacodelphia" may

be read as a metaphorical dramatization of the unsustainable nature of the master fictions

by which humans rule their collective lives. Every cosmos exists ephemerally on the fine

line between its willed realization and its apocalyptic dissolution into chaos. If the

underlying principle of a given cosmos is personified dramatically as God the Creator,

0 then Schultze's experience of being bodily ejected by the Cyclops dramatizes how easily 202

God himself can be thrown off the metaphysical stage, victim of the revolution of his

volatile creatures.

For this reason, Adan, who is still trapped in the notion of immutable truth as in

the medieval religious world-view, raises the specter of the Inquisition, warning Schultze

that theoreticians less dangerous than he were burned at the stake "when the world was

more prudent." From the point of view of theocratic orthodoxy, Adan is quite right. In

order to rationalize the failure of his authority, Schultze impudently compares his own

predicament to that of the gods. By thus invoking the theological paradigm of Creator and

creature, he effectively deconstructs it before our eyes. By using the example of

Cervantes and Don Quixote, he shows how the creator/creature paradigm can be a c figurative device proper to literature and that therefore theology may be seen as tantamount to a genre of literature. This evidently subverts the political and metaphysical

authority of orthodoxy.

Adan cannot yet accommodate the metaphysical-political scandal implicit in

Schultze's dramatically conveyed teaching. The astrologer, for his part, having suffered

a humiliation at the hands of his creatures, astutely directs his discourse to Adan's own

condition as a would-be creator. Let's suppose, Schultze proposes, that you endow a

creature with being, and you do so with such plenitude that the creature, far from

recognizing you as its first cause, imagines that its being is independent of you. Schultze' s

use of the pronoun "you" may be impersonal, the equivalent of the third-person "one," but

it can just as well be understood literally as the second-person pronoun referring

0 specifically to Adan. The young poet, of course, is the creator of his Solveig celeste, a c 203 creature to whom, in his own view, he had fully endowed with being: "le habia dado el

un cuerpo, un alma, una existencia y un idioma" (AB. 141), he ruminates during the

Amundsen tertulia. As the following passage of his interior monologue shows, he hoped

to impose his artistic will on Solveig Amundsen by showing her his "Cuaderno de Tapas

Azules":

Porque, al leerlo [el Cuaderno de Tapas Azules], l,Se reconoceria Solveig Amundsen en la pintura ideal que habia trazado el con materiales tan sutiles? ... "Acaso, al descubrirsele de pronto aquel extraiio linaje de amor, ella se le acercaria con Ios pies amorosos de la materia que busca su forma ... " (AB 79)

He wished that the flesh-and-blood Solveig might seek the ideal form he had prepared for

c her, that he might be the creator of Solveig. As we have seen, Adan's creation was

doomed. The "real'' Solveig, called by Adan Solveig terrestre, destroyed Adan's ideal

representation of her by simply ignoring it. Even if she had read the "Cuademo," Solveig

could never have recognized herself in its shabby-pretentious Neoplatonic symbolism.

Likewise, however, Schultze's "creatures" reject the image which their "demiurge" paints

of them. The sly astrologer has merely deviated attention from his own problems to

Adan's failure as a creator.

But is there, then, any difference in status between Schultze's and Adan's

creations? Apparently, both men proceed in fundamentally the same way. Adan sets

himself up as a creator within the sphere of literature and attempts to extend his sphere of c influence to the hors-tex-te. Schultze appoints himself Neogogue, prototype of political c 204 philosophers, estheticians, metaphysicians, and all other creators of human order,

including dramaturges and other literati. He creates a fictional cosmos and tries to impose

it upon others. His cosmos is unsustainable, for his creatures obstinately reject his order.

The ephemeral nature of Schultze's hell is betrayed constantly, as, for example, when Luis

Pereda promises to buy Adan a drink as soon as he gets of there. 10 In the case of both

poet and Neogogue, the irreducible otherness of reality proves ultimately impervious to

a definitive imposition of human order. But the two men react differently to this state of

affairs. For Adan, the maladjustment between his creation and reality was catastrophic.

The intrepid astrologer, on the other hand, knows how to roll with the punches. In the

face of the refractory nature of othemess, he simply invents new ways of rationalizing his c position as the Demiurge. If his creatures fail to recognize or obey him, Schultze finds a way to interpret the untoward circumstance as one more proof of what a brilliant success

he is as a Demiurge. He would agree with Lenin's famous retort to those who objected

that his plans were at odds with reality: Then so much the worse for reality! The

astrologer has built his cosmos beyond the pale of all recognized authority and thus claims

for himself untrammelled freedom; as he remarks in the hell of Envy: "Todas las audacias

del intelecto son aqui [en Argentina] posibles y deseables, aunque este sucio chiquero se

intente demostrar lo contrario" CAB 633). If Schultze lets nothing stop him, Adan, to the

contrary, has had his audacity almost extinguished by reality.

The difference between the poet and the Neogogue, in their capacity as creators,

lies in the way each of them understands language and its relation to reality. Adan labours

0 under a terrible disadvantage vis-a-vis his mentor. He is in thrall to the grandiose c 205 constructions --the "edifications"-- generated from the systematized metonymy of hieratic

language. When he says or writes "Madonna lntelligenza," for example, he believes that

he touches the highest, the "realest," feminine reality, of which Solveig is only a

reflection. By artistically representing the girl according to the canons of Neoplatonism,

he thought he was yoking a great metaphysical power to his purpose. But the power

turned out to be empty and he was left defenceless before the implacable otherness of

reality. Had he undertaken his enterprise armed with a different assessment of the nature

of his tools --words-- he may not have been any more successful as a lover, but almost

certainly he would have done better as a poet and creator. Schultze, on the other hand,

makes metonymy and all other tropes serve his will and purpose. He appropriates the c hieratized mythology of metonymic language and uses it creatively to construct and impose his own world-view. If reality proves intractable, he simply varies his strategy. He has

no false illusions about what he is doing, and so the continual setbacks he experiences do

not break him down. His control is never perfect, but neither is he ever caught

defenceless. Adan strives to imitate the Divine Word. Schultze knows that the divinity

of the Logos is nothing more than an instance of the trope of metonymy raised to

totalitarian dimensions. For Schultze the initiate knows further that rhetorical politics can

serve the purposes of worldly politics, those of aspiring or already dominant priesthoods,

whether they be religious, ideological, scientific or academic. Adan' s artistic aim is to

wipe away the film of grime that obscures the timeless edifice of revealed truth, the cosmic

order which has been interpreted and given its verbal structure throughout the ages by the

0 prisci theologi. Schultze shows him that such an edifice of truth is an invention of human c 206 language which must be continually re-invented. For every cosmos is a transient, unstable

construction that arises through an apocalypse and exists on the verge of being returned

apocalyptically to the chaos of potential forms out of which it was put together.

NOTES

1. Karl Mannheim, for example, traces the origins of nineteenth-century Anarchism to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, a Chiliastic sect that in turn participates in the medieval apocalypticism inspired by the writings of Joachim of Fiore in the twelfth century (Ideology and 190-197).

2. Leopoldo Marechal's essay entitled "Autopsia de Creso" outlines the same scheme, and its subsequent degradation, in terms of Greek mythological figures: "Tiresias, el sacerdote, pontifice del hombre (o sea el que 'le hace puente' hacia lo sobrenatural); Ayax, el soldado, que asegura, como ya dije, la defensa, el orden la justicia temporales en la organizaci6n; Creso, el rico, llamado a producir y distribuir la riqueza material o corp6rea c que necesita el organismo; y Gutieriez, el siervo, ayudante de Creso en sus operaciones econ6micas" (Cuaderno 51-52; Marechal's emphasis). He goes on to attribute the gist of these ideas to Rene Guenon (53).

3. Similarly, Marechal himself has stooped to criticizing Borges as "inauthentic" and as a "falso mago" (Fermindez Moreno 46). Marechal' s hostility can be explained to some degree by their diametrically opposed political positions: Marechal was a Peronist, Borges a traditional liberal. But the vocabulary used to berate Borges as a writer is absurd, coming from the author of Addn Buenosayres; Marechal's appeal to "authenticity" is quite hollow. One is obliged to acknowledge an unmistakable mean-spiritedness in Marechal' s remarks.

4. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973) 963-64.

5. The apocalyptic revolutionaries in Marechal' s play La batalla de Jose Luna also consider Zarathustra to be a kindred spirit. The ring-leader, Fabricio, exhorts his fellows: "que bailen como Zarathustra" (32). Another of them, Gambaro, confuses Nietzsche with Marx: "iEl camarada Zarathustra decia lo mismo: la eternidad es el opio de Ios infelices! " (88). c 207 6. There is likely an allusion here to a scene in Manuel Galvez's novel El mal metajisico (1916). The protagonist Carlos Riga goes one Sunday with his friend, the anarchist poet Gualberto Garibaldi, to a park called Isla Maciel. "Los anarquistas celebraban alii sus pic­ nics." The park is also frequented by "pequefios burgueses," and Riga is depressed by "aquella mediocre e ingenua alegria dominical, un poco burguesa y un poco de bajo pueblo" (El mal metaftsico [vida romantica], Col. Austral 433, 3a Ed., Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1962 164-166).

7. "--Se me reconoceria como vastago del Sol y de la Luna --dijo [Schultze]--, si un exceso de modestia no me vedara llevar en la frente Ios dos cuemos del iniciado. El Principe de la Floraci6n Oriental no me desmentiria, si yo dijese que he comido el bongo violeta, que he domado al tigre-mujer y al drag6n-hombre, que monte a la cigiiefia de copete rojo y baile la danza de la cigiiefia amarilla, que conozco el vergel de Leang, el estanque de las turquesas, las diez islas y Ios tres promontorios. Pero mi verdadera credencial es otra: Ios veintiocho signos del buey Apis, dibujados en este cuerpo que se ha de tragar la tierra" (AB 634).

8. Unamuno's presence is evoked deliberately on another occasion, when the important character Don Ecumenico alludes to the title of the Basque's most famous work. Describing himself, don Ecumenico says: "Ignoro si esas manifestaciones pueriles c acusaban en mi un 'sentimiento tragico de la vida' curiosamente prematuro" (AB 719). 9. "--No sea, mi querido don Miguel --afiadi6 [Augusto Perez]--, que sea usted y no yo el ente de ficci6n, el que no existe en realidad, ni vivo ni muerto ... No sea que usted no pase de ser un pretexto para que mi historia llegue al mundo ... [ ... ] --Bueno, pues no se incomode tanto si yo a mi vez dudo de la existencia de usted y no de la mia propia. Vamos a cuentas: l,nO ha sido usted el que no una, sino varias veces, ha dicho que don Quijote y Sancho son no ya tan reales, sino mas reales que Cervantes?" Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla (Col. Austral 99. 20a ed. : Espasa-Calpe, 1983) 150-51.

10. Adan earns his drink by defending his friend. "--jGracias, pueblo! --me grit6 Pereda, visiblemente conmovido--. Cuando salga de aqui te pagare una ginebra en el almacen rosado de la esquina" CAB. 666). Pereda parodies Barges's verse "Un almacen rosado como reves de naipe," in "Fundaci6n mitica de Buenos Aires" (Obras completas 101). c c 208 Chapter 9

Mise en abyme: the story of Don Ecumenico

The episode in which Don Ecumenico the insect-man tells his story is the final

event in the tour of Cacodelphia, prior to the brief vision of the Paleogogo, and thus

effectively sums up not only the "Viaje" but also the novel as a whole. Don Ecumenico' s

tale pointedly reflects Adan's own situation and thus serves as an instance of mise en

abyme. Don Ecumenico and Adan Buenosayres mirror each other in their names, which

both have a paradigmatic quality. "Don Ecumenico" may be translated approximately as

"Mr. Everyman." Adan Buenosayres -which may be rendered as "Buenos Aires Man"-­ c is also a kind of Everyman, a citizen of the great city, the polis. We can better understand the end and ending of the novel by studying the relation between the two characters and

their stories.

Don Ecumenico tells the story of his metamorphosis from a man into a man-sized

insect. In his youth, he had been a poet and voracious autodidact. After an unhappy love

affair, he settles into a happy marriage and a routine life. The death of his wife plunges

him into a spiritual crisis. In response, he tries the penitential path of asceticism, but soon

gives it up to seek enlightenment through books. He enters "la siniestra Casa de Ios

Libros" and meets the "Bibliotecario que Miraba desde Brumosas Lejanias" (M 728).

Under the guidance of the mysterious Librarian, Don Ecumenico progresses through three

stages of initiation into the library's treasures. Beginning in the general reading room, he

moves on to the second room where he devours ("empece a devorarlo todo" [729]) the c 209 fictional worlds of literature -- novels, poetry, and theatre. Only after repeated requests

does the Librarian grant Don Ecumenico access to the library's inner sanctum, unlocldng

for the unsuspecting novice a scarcely visible, small padded door. "En el recinto nfunero

tres," Don Ecumenico fmds

gruesos volumenes de paginas amarillas y duros lomos: aquellos libros contenian todas las iluminaciones del alma, todas las locuras de la intelecci6n, todos Ios razonamientos prudentes y las audacias blasfematorias a que habia llegado el hombre mortal en su buceo de lo Absoluto. (AB 732)

In a word, this is a collection of the artifacts of metonymic language. Here the ill-fated

seeker of the Absolute gradually abandons his life in the outside world until he remains c permanently shut up inside the inner sanctum. In the process, he stops eating normal food

and, possessed of an insatiable appetite, devours the surrounding books, no longer

figuratively but literally. It is this food that fuels his metamorphosis into an ugly

lepidopterous insect, suggesting a parody of Chuang Tsu' s proverbial butterfly.

Don Ecumenico' s story is evidently a warning against the dangers of excessive

book-learning. But the cautionary tale is directed against a particular kind of learning

through books, undertaken in a certain spirit. It is the longing to possess the absolute

through metonymic language, to seek Truth, to come face to face with the source of

absolute knowledge, God. Don Ecumenico's is the search for the definitive revelation.

However, we should be chary of interpreting this story as a parable admonishing us 0 against Babel-like pride. The lesson is perhaps not about morality but language. Don c 210 Ecumenico looks for the absolute in books; he describes the exercise of reading as:

"colocar un libro en el atril y debatirme luego con la Divinidad, en una lucha de annas

desiguales pero embriagadora en su misma desproporci6n" (AB 733). His finds these

mental wrestling matchs inebriating. In the course of reading, he says, "mi entendimiento

se deslumbra, tambalea, cae de pronto en abismos insondables" (AB 734).

If one allows that the Book of Revelation may be present as a hypotext in this

episode, it becomes ironic that Don Ecumenico should eat books. At a given moment in

the Apocalypse, an angel instructs the seer John to eat a book (Rev 10:8-10). This passage

recycles a similar one from the book of Ezekiel, in which God bids the prophet eat a book

(Ezek 3:1-3). The seer in Revelation finds the book sweet in his mouth, but bitter in his c stomach (Rev 10: 10). Similarly, Don Ecumenico enjoyed the taste of so much priestly erudition, but found the after-effects rather bitter. At the same time, Don Ecumenico's

gorging on books refers intratextually back to the episode in the suburbs of Schultze's hell,

where the citizens eat the written material of journalism (AB 483). What is the

significance of this insistent parody of the biblical metaphor? The original passage in

Ezekiel is explained by the exegetists thus: "By eating it he [Ezekiel] became possessed

of its prophecies, so that his book is actually a reproduction of the heavenly one"

(Buttrick, Interpreter's Bible XII 438). The author of the book of Ezekiel wants us to

understand that his text reflects an original "heavenly" book, symbolized in the scroll that

God gives to the prophet. This exegesis clearly brings out the trope of metonymy: the

heavenly text, the divine blueprint of reality, exists a priori as the cause of the earthly

one. 1 Eating the heavenly text must be a metaphor for the conversion of the divine text c 211 into the earthly one, in other words, for the act of written prophecy. But if one

deconstructs the underlying metonymy, the heavenly text is revealed as a metaphorical

figment, a metaphysical construct produced by human volition. To literalize the eating

metaphor, as Schultze does in the "Viaje a Cacodelphia," is to sweep away with irony that

metaphysical construct.

After having done serious damage to the stacks of the inner sanctum, Don

Ecumenico curls up into a chrysalis. As soon as he awakens, transformed into a moth, the

sinister Librarian opens the skylight to let him fly free, and his tale comes to a sudden end:

"Y sali volando al aire libre, para descender a este Infiemo" (AB 740). He seems to

implore his listeners to supply an epilogue: c Don Ecumenico habia terminado su historia. Nos mir6 a todos en la cara, fija y ansiosamente, como si aguardase una objeci6n, acaso una pregunta o siquiera una mirada consoladora. Pero Schultze y Tesler se mantenian en su aire lejano, y no encontre yo palabra que decirle. (AB 740)

Schultze and Samuel are not directly implicated in Don Ecumenico's misfortune, so they

adopt a distant air. Adan, however, has a great deal in common with Don Ecumenico.

Just as the latter has buried himself in priestly literature, Adan has spent long, solitary

periods reading "libros de ciencias olvidadas, hermeticos y tentadores como jardines

prohibidos" (AB 387). The story of the insect-man is meant for Adan, but since he is left

speechless, it is left to the reader to interpret it.

There are striking similarities in the life situations of the two characters. Like c 212 Adan, Don Ecumenico as a young man was disappointed in a platonic love affair with a

girl named Dol ores, who threw him over for an "obeso importador de vinos" (All 725).

While the poetic Don Ecumenico was abandoned for a vulgar business man of pronounced

corporeality, Adan has been rejected in favour of Lucio Negri, avatar of the demotic

world-view and its mystique of the body. Don Ecumenico and Dolores conducted their

relationship through the exchange of poetry. Don Ecumenico found out later, when it was

all over, that Dolores had lifted her verses straight from Gustavo Adolfo Becquer. Her

act of plagiarism points up the essentially fraudulent nature of the platonic love affair;

since the two communicated only through poetry, Dolores, by falsely passing off another's

verses as her own, was in effect not present at all in the communicative act. Likewise,

Adan fails to communicate with Solveig through poetry, for she never read his

"Cuaderno." Indeed, it is likely that from Solveig's point of view there was never any

question of a love affair with Adan. Despite his disillusion, Don Ecumenico continues to

theorize about love in language that echoes the "Cuaderno de Tapas Azules": "hay en el

hombre una capacidad de amor esencialmente metafisica: es un ala de amor que yerra, se

lastima y ensucia en este mundo, porque fue creada solo para la navegaci6n del cielo" (AB

723). Don Ecumenico's metaphor "un ala de amor" echoes Adan's phrase "un ala de

paloma", which he uses in his "Cuaderno" to describe his discovery of mystical love (All

437-38). Both men are talking about a failure in love in similar terms. Adan's "ala de

paloma" descended into the material world, seduced by an earthly creature (Solveig or

"Aquella") who was in his view a mere reflection of the "Mujer celeste," while Don

0 Ecumenico envisions the "wing of love" being dirtied in this lower world. The most c 213 striking point of similarity between the two characters is their reaction to existential crisis.

Don Ecumenico is deeply shaken by the death of his wife and, not having learned his

lesson properly, he responds to the crisis by undertaking a search for the absolute through

reading, hoping to fmd the "heavenly book." Adan, for his part, is in the midst of a life

crisis. Given the disposition of his character, it is very likely that, left to his own devices,

he would follow in the footsteps of Don Ecumenico and repeat the 'disastrous "navegaci6n

del cielo" that has brought the insect-man to grief. Don Ecumenico has arrived in hell

because he lacked the wit to discern that the sky (or heaven) in which he navigates is a

derived, not a higher, reality. His experience serves as a warning to his younger

homologue, and his story, placed en abyme, mirrors Adan's possible future. c With the episode of Don Ecumenico, Schultze's demiurgic game comes to an end.

There remains only one fmal gesture to make, the supremely ironic revelation of the

Paleogogo. He leads Adan to the edge of the Great Pit ("la Gran Hoya") where Schultze's

hell ends. "Me asome a la hoya," Adan recounts, "yen el fondo vi estremecerse una gran

masa como de gelatina, que daba la sensaci6n de un molusco gigante, aunque no lo era"

(AB 741). The Neogogue has led Adan on a long journey in order to bring him face to

face with the metahuman, or infrahuman, Paleogogue. The formless gelatinous mass may

be considered to be the fundamental human reality that underlies and outlives all discourse.

Words come and go, but the Paleogogue endures:

0 --Mas feo que un susto a medianoche. Con mas agallas que un dorado. c 214 Serio como bragueta de fraile. Mas entrador que perro de rico. De punta, como cuchillo de viejo. Mas fruncido que tabaquera de inmigrante. Mierdoso, como alpargata de vasco tambero. Con mas vueltas que caballo de noria. Mas fiero que costalada de chancho. Mas duro que garr6n de vizcacha. Mafiero como petizo de lavandera. Solemne como pedo de ingles. (AB 741)

With these final words, closing both the "Viaje" and the novel, Adan gives expression to

his final disillusion. His quest for redemption through the Word has reached its ironic

conclusion, in the lucid consciousness that there is no real redemption. The Paleogogue

lies beyond the magic circle that human intelligence draws around its imaginary centre,

a centre that may be said to be located at any given point on the amorphous body of the c Paleogogue. With language we build the order of the world, but in the last instance, the verbal architectures sculpted by human intelligence are grounded in the blind, writhing

othemess of the Paleogogue, their existence a brief accidental bubble. In the beginning

and in the end, there is the Paleogogue.

At the same time, however, Adan's description of the Paleogogue shows a

significant change in his language. He is no longer the earnest author of the "Cuademo

de Tapas Azules" who expresses himself with pretentious Neoplatonic language. Instead,

he inventively plays with coarse, demotic language. Adan has given up metonymic­

language abuse, renounced that form of inebriation which was the ruin of Don Ecumenico.

Adan has avoided the fate of the insect-man, but his salutary awakening comes at a price.

The old Adan has died and will be symbolically interred, as the "Pr6logo indispensable"

has already told us. The new Adam, informed by the revelation of the Paleogogue, speaks c 215 another kind of language. Renouncing the dream of the Celestial City, of Calidelphia, he

now speaks Cacodelphian, the language in which Leopoldo Marechal has written his

novel.

NOTES

1. It could be argued that the exegetists of the Interpreter's Bible are the ones who apply the metonymy to an otherwise "innocent" text. However, the writing metaphor of the scroll already betrays the priestly origin of the text. The exegetists only make explicit the metonymic structure that is implicit in the text. c

0 c 216 Chapter 10

The apocalyptic novel: El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo

Leopoldo Marechal' s second novel, published 17 years after Addn Buenosayres,

opens with a one-page "Dedicatoria pr6logo a Elbiamor," in which Marechal states that

in writing Banquete,

di con una manera de reparar una injusticia que me atormentaba: en Addn Buenosayres deje a mi heroe como inmovilizado en el ultimo circulo de un Infiemo ... El Banquete de Severo Arcdngelo propone una «Salida,; y a mi entender no fue otro el intento del Metalurgico de A vellaneda. (B 9) c Marechal has decided to ignore Adan's "funeral 11 and any kind of symbolic rebirth it may

imply. For Marechal, Adan was left as though immobilized in the last circle of hell facing

the repulsive Paleogogue. This invertebrate slug symbolizes the human condition as it

was, as it is, and apparently, since there is no Calidelphia, as it ever shall be. The

grandiose narratives and metanarratives constructed out of human language are the

ephemeral hallucinations of the writhing, directionless Paleogogue. As the master of

rhetoric, the astrologer has disabused the individual Adan Buenosayres of his illusions

about language, but clearly he has not come to redeem Adam, i.e. humanity in general.

Schultze, then, does not have the solution. Nor does he make such a claim: his strategy

is continually to invent and re-invent ad hoc solutions. "El Gran Demiurgo," claims the 0 impudent astrologer, 11 nos da el ejemplo al modificar incesantemente su obra" (AB 135). c 217 Schultze, with his self-conscious charlatanry and his parodic version of the New Man,

does not alter the fundamental existential situation of man in the twentieth century, who

peers ironically at the old truths as at naive rhetorical constructions and receives new

truths with withering skepticism. Now Marechal appears to have repented of this ironic

view-point: the new novel, he claims, proposes a way out of the carnivalesque hell of

Cacodelphia. This implies a redemptive deliverance to Calidelphia, to the New Jerusalem

or, as it is called in Banquete, the "Cuesta del Agua." Severo Arcangelo's "buenos

prop6sitos" are to achieve this deliverance through an artificially staged apocalypse. In

this chapter, it will be shown that the success of this project is extremely dubious. After

discussing Severo Arcangelo's enterprise on its own terms, I shall try to show how the text c of the novel conspires to defeat this redemptive purpose. The text parodies itself and satirizes the doctrines proposed within it.

Severo Arcangelo, the wealthy metallurgist of Avellaneda, has experienced a

revelation; a numinous being called Pablo Inaudi appears and bids him undertake "una

empresa trascendental" (B. 34) known as the Banquet. To this end, Severo has brought to

his opulent suburban estate a disparate group of individuals, all of whom have arrived in

one way or another at the limit of meaninglessness in their lives. Like Adan, they have

come to the end of a long fall and find themselves, as it were, facing the Paleogogue.

Having reached the nadir, they are the proper candidates to undertake the initiatic ascent:

these madmen and failed suicides are the chosen few who will attend the mysterious

Banquet. Three of the elect, known as the "capos del chalet" (the experts or "eggheads" c 218 who share a separate chalet on the estate) have particular importance in the preparations

for the Banquet. These are the astrophysicist Frobenius, a former professor of Classical

philosophy Bermudez, and the ex-journalist and first-person narrator Lisandro Farfas.

Two hired clowns apocalyptically named Gog and Magog form the Opposition to the

Banquet. Their negative propaganda competes with the official mythology propagated by

the Organization of the Banquet. The villa's numerous servants polarize into two

antagonistic groups: "el de Ios Fieles y el de Ios Negadores" CB. 230). The villa with its

inhabitants, effectively isolated from the world, becomes a microcosm structured according

to the cosmic narrative of the Apocalypse.

The metallurgist of A vellaneda has mode led his artificial world on the initiatic­ c priestly metaphysics parodically mimicked by Schultze in Adan Buenosayres. Severo's enterprise is underwritten by the Guenonian discourse that reinterprets Hesiod' s cycle of

four ages. Man is nearing the lower limit of the descent, which must result in a

catastrophe. In his Fourth Monologue, Severo Arcangelo characterizes this descent by

means of two complementary metaphors derived from the totalizing symbol of the cross.

In the horizontal axis, according to Severo, we are being displaced from the source, the

Eden of the Golden Age, by the river of time; in the vertical axis, we are falling, not at

a steady rate, but at the rate of acceleration specified by Newton's law of gravitation CB.

259). This looks like a re-statement of Guenon's doctrine of modem man's accelerating

plunge toward the apocalypse (Crise 15). Severo wishes to oppose this historical gravity, c swim up-river against time, and retrace the steps of the fall: c 219 jVolver sobre Ios pasos del hombre y recobrar todo lo perdido en su fuga o descenso! jRecobrar los horizontes dejados atnis, los extasis abolidos, Ios templos ocultos en la maraiia invasora y Ios alegres jardines clausurados! (R 260)

The metallurgist of Avellaneda is engineering a ricorso in one of the senses Vico gives to

the term, a retraversing of the same stages in the opposite direction. 1 The goal of this

temporal regression is to recover the Edenic state, represented in the novel by the "Cuesta

del Agua." But Severo calls himself "un Retr6grado en el «tiempo» y un Vanguardista en

el «no-tiempo»" (B. 260). His direction is double, both back toward the origin and

"forward" --in the sense that he is in the vanguard-- to the telos at the limit where time

gives way to eternity. The "Cuesta del Agua" represents not only the Eden of Genesis but c also the New Jerusalem in Revelation. The two biblical types, representing beginning and end, are thus conflated in one transcendental symbol. The ricorso, then, is not literally

temporal but metatemporal or transcendental.

Severo's ricorso has been designed to take place in three stages marked by three

events at which all of the elect are present. These are the First and Second Councils, and

the Banquet itself. These events are located in the text such that they divide Lisandro

Farias's narrative into three roughly equal parts. The Banquet comes at the very end of

the third part of his oral account. What transpires at the Banquet is not actually told at all

--"Y el Banquete «fue»," concludes Lisandro laconically (R 289)-- but by that time we have

all the information necessary to imagine for ourselves how the Banquet was. Moreover,

by the end of Lisandro's tale, the Banquet and its purpose have been explained piece by

piece, "como los factores de un teorema o las premisas de un silogismo," as Lisandro puts 0 220 it m251}. The First and Second Councils serve to frame both the progress of the story

and the metaphysical explanation of Severo Arcangelo 's apocalypse. The two Councils

illustrate respectively the world-views predicated on descriptive and metonymic language.

It is the latter that defines the direction of the enterprise. The final aim, presumably, is

to return to the poetic language proper to humanity's childhood, the mythical horizons of

the "alegres jardines" of Arcadia. Thus the elect of the Banquet will return to the Edenic

origin of the metalinguistic cycle, where "todo recomienza," as Lisandro cries in his

melodramatic dying words. In the end, this does not occur, for the discourse of the

Banquet gets bogged down in authoritarian, hieratic language, which in turn is thoroughly

discredited by the ironic aspect of the novel's text. c At the First Council, the astrophysicist Frobenius delivers a lecture on twentieth­ century cosmology. His main point is that man is a ridiculously tiny, ephemeral and

insignificant event in the immensity of the universe. Frobenius's opening words are

bitterly ironic:

-Senores aspirantes al Banquete: no hay duda de que nosotros, los bipedos humanos, constituimos una especie cuya dignidad (exaltada, como es notorio, por sus mismos detentores) le ha valido el indiscutible liderazgo del planeta Tierra. Ignoro a que grado de vanidad pomposa o de ingenua ilusi6n pudo llevarnos esa gratuita jefatura. m105)

He describes the tremendous magnitude of galaxies careening through the void at dizzying

velocities: "--jAhi estan! --exclam6 Frobenius--. jAstros y galaxias! En su aparente c quietud Ios te6logos y los poetas vieron una imagen de la estabilidad consoladora, frente c 221 alas tragicas mutaciones que conmovian al bipedo humano. jQue ilusos!" (B. 109). At

the conclusion of Frobenius' s discourse, Severo Arcangelo and his valet Impaglione

intervene to draw the pertinent moral. The valet recites from a script written by his

master: "--jHemos inventado ultramundos y dioses para combatir esta frialdad c6smica

y este vacio en que nos agitamos!" Severo himself adds: "--iAnte su increible finitud, el

bipedo humano (que asf lo llam6 con justo desprecio el sabio de la tribuna) concibi6 un

Infinito donde reparar su lamentable naturaleza!"CB 112).

The First Council demonstrates the scientific world-view. But more importantly,

Severo Arcangelo has striven to associate this world-view with a specific attitude, one of

pessimism. The references to theologians and poets, other-worlds and gods, echo the c language of Nietzsche' s Zarathustra, for whom the poets are liars, and the gods their prevarications. The metallurgist ignores the cheerfulness of Zarathustra' s irony, his

insistence on joy and the affirmation of life. Thus the organizer of the Banquet himself

takes a highly tendentious attitude toward the rhetorical horizons open to the world of

science. For him, the collapse of the old metonymic edifications can only result in despair

and helplessness, "una metafisica de la nada" CB 115), as Lisandro Farias concludes after

attending the First Council. By implication, Severo Arcangelo excludes Schultze's

strategy of parodic inventiveness as a possible solution or way out of Cacodelphia.

At the Second Council, Professor Bermudez speaks. He begins by characterizing

the Second Council as a dialectical progression from the First. While the First Council

located man in Space, he says, his purpose is to situate man in Time CB 195). Bermudez c then expounds the doctrine of the cycle of ages: c 222 --La presente humanidad ... ha vivido ya cuatro edades que aqui estan simbolizadas por estos hombres metalicos: el Hombre de Oro, el Hombre de Plata, el Hombre de Cobre y el Hombre de Hierro, es decir el actual, cuya degeneraci6n asombrosa conoceremos en seguida, ya que vive y habla, mientras que Ios otros yacen en sus tumbas prehist6ricas desde hace millones de aiios. (B 195)

The relation between these symbolic "hombres metalicos" is analogous to that which

obtains among .the hierarchy of worlds in Neoplatonism. That is, each one exists in

function of the one above or before. The perfect man of the Golden Age "era un primer

espejo de la Verdad o su imagen directa" CB. 201). The Truth is defmed as "la verdad

absoluta de su [man's] Principio." The "hombres metalicos" form a chain of mirrors, each c one reflecting with diminishing luminosity the image of the previous mirror. The Iron

Age man is the "cuarta especulaci6n que solo refleja la imagen de la imagen de la imagen

de la imagen" CB. 201).

Evidently, there is a radical discontinuity between Frobenius's and Bermudez's

discourses, in spite of the latter's attempt to unify them under the rubric of space-time.

Frobenius presents a twentieth-century scientific description of man's existence in space,

while Bermudez speculates on man's temporal condition. The support of his speculation

is the primordial Truth. In the former discourse, man is dwarfed by the immensity of

space; in Bermudez's anthropocentric discourse, human existence is coextensive with time

itself. Had Frobenius outlined the Ptolemaic universe, then Bermudez would have been

justified in connecting the two discourses on the same plane. But in fact, the leap from c 223 the First Council to the Second Council represents a regression in the history of thought,

which Bermudez has turned into a dialectical progression through his rhetorical

manoeuvre. This is in accord with Severo Arcangelo's project of regressing

metatemporally as a means of advancing teleologically.

Bermudez goes on to introduce two new symbolic anthropoi, the "Hombre de

Sangre" and the "Hombre Final." These two stand in a polarity. The "Hombre de

Sangre" is a new dispensation of the Golden Age man. Later in the novel, he is identified

with the Christ. Thus the advent of the "Hombre de Sangre" fulfils the eschatological

expectation of New Testament apocalyptic. Bermudez, backed up by the "voz autoritaria"

of Severo Arcangelo, claims that the "Hombre de Sangre" has already arrived CB 207).

By authoritarian decree, then, Christ's Second Coming or Parousia is taking place at

Severo's Banquet. The "Hombre Final," by contrast, represents "la oscuridad profunda"

of Iron Age man in the twentieth century CB 206). In Bermudez' s dramatized lecture, a

hired actor named Johnny L6pez plays the role of the Last Man. Prompted by members

of the audience (the prospective commensals at the Banquet), Johnny L6pez explains in

vulgar porteiio language the theory of evolution and expresses his belief in progress

towards a "Paraiso Cientifico" (B 202-205). His position is the same as that of Lucio

Negri in Adan Buenosayres, while Bermudez holds the same view as Adan and Samuel

Tesler. Thus the philosophical battle that has animated the tertulia in the first novel is

echoed at Severo Arcangelo' s Second Council. In the former, however, there was

something of a contest, a rhetorical sparring match between Samuel and Lucio, while in 0 Banquete there is no contest at all. Johnny L6pez is displayed merely as an object of c 224 ridicule. The priestly agenda of the Banquet satirizes Darwinism and the naive scientism

that created the materialist myth of progress. But it does not stop there. Following the

example of Rene Guenon, the Banquet's priesthood throws out the entire philosophical

discourse of modernity. Severo Arcangelo has set in motion a dialectical juggernaut that

marches towards the transcendental past.

It is of more than passing interest that Leopoldo Marechal must surely owe the

topic of the despicable Last Man to Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1892). This

theme was prominent in English Romantic literature, notably in Mary Shelley's novel The

Last Man (1826). Due to its popularity, the last-man theme quickly degenerated into a

Romantic cliche (Paley 34). The last man on earth was a solitary Romantic hero in the c tragic mold. Nietzsche took this Romantic topos and gave it a satiric twist, making over the last man into the most contemptible of men, the end-product of European decadence.

In 11 Zarathustra' s Prologue, 11 the prophet attempts to teach the doctrine of the last man by

way of a counterpoint to his teaching of the Ubermensch. When the townspeople do not

understand the idea of the overman, he decides to appeal to their sense of pride: "Let me

speak to them of what is most contemptible: but that is the last man" (Kaufman 129;

Nietzsche's emphasis). Zarathustra's last man is content with a mean happiness, such as

that which might be provided by the "Paraiso Cientifico." Decadent and spiritually

exhausted, he is no longer capable of greatness; in Zarathustra's metaphor, the last man

will no longer be able to give birth to a star. The reason, says the prophet, is that "one

must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a star" (129). Nietzsche's

0 literary persona values chaos as highly as do Schultze and Adan Buenosayres. The c 225 sublime can arise only from the conflictive potentiality of chaos. The last man, in the

fictions of both German philosopher and Argentine novelist, has been reduced to a

condition of dull, contented imbecility in a false utopia. In Nietzsche: "'We have

invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink" (129). In Marechal: "el ultimo

[Adan] se universaliza en la idiotez" (B 203). The German's and the Argentine's last-man

concepts do not wholly coincide, but the basic profile of the figure is markedly similar.

In both cases, furthermore, the despicable last man is presented in tandem with a sublime

counterpoint: the overman or superman and the "Hombre de Sangre." At the Banquet's

Second Council, Bermudez presents the "Hombre Final" first and then the "Hombre de

Sangre." The professor's audience immediately suspects the Nietzschean connection and c they react to the notion of the "Hombre de Sangre": "-jOjo!" cries one voice. "jNos esti insinuando al Superhombre de Nietzsche! [ ... ] --jNo lo consentire!" shouts another. "iEl

Superhombre nietzscheano es un hijo esquizofrenico de la «Selecci6n natural»! n (B: 206).

Bermudez quickly reassures them that the "Hombre de Sangre" is not "un producto de

factura germanica" (B 206). He should not be so sure. The "Hombre de Sangre" may not

be Nietzschean, but the "Hombre Final" almost certainly is. If Bermudez and the rest of

the Banquet's priestly element hold Nietzsche in contempt, their metahistorical fiction

nonetheless owes its dichotomy of the "Hombre de Sangre" and the "Hombre Final" to

Zarathustra' s superman and last man.

The third and definitive event in Severo Arcangelo's agenda is of course the

Banquet itself. Essentially, it is meant to be an ordeal in which the Cacodelphian world

0 is finally consumed. The Banquet is to be a cathartic event that will propel the elect into 0 226 the mythical space of the "Cuesta del Agua." The orchestra will play the cacophonous

"Sinfonia de Robot." After the commensals have eaten foul-tasting dishes, the "Mesa del

Banquete, 11 a steel structure at which they sit, will be set in centrifugal motion in such a

way as to induce unbearable vertigo and nausea. Not only will the table revolve around

its own centre, but also the guests' individual seats will spin on their axes. Each partipant

will be wearing his "Traje de Banquete," designed jointly by pyschologists and tailors to

reveal the wearer's personality in its most ridiculous light. Thus the participants will

undergo a last judgment. They will be invited to see themselves reflected in a human

robot named Colof6n, the "creature" of the apocalyptic preacher Jonas. The name of the

human robot alludes again to the world-as-book topos. A colophon is an inscription at the 0 end of a book or manuscript. Thus the robot Colof6n is another metaphor for the Last Man. When humanity degenerates to the point of robotic imbecility, the end of the great

metahistorical cycle will have been reached and the apocalypse will ensue. As the saving

remnant of mankind, the elect will go to the "Cuesta del Agua," i.e. back to the blessed

origin and the beginning of a new cycle.

Perhaps the most devastating aspect of the Banquet is the havoc to be wreaked by

the presence there of Thelma Foussat, an artificially produced Whore of Babylon

embodying the principle of non-being. An exquisitely beautiful woman, Thelrna has been

submitted by the Organization to an "alchemical" transformation called 11 Operaci6n

Cybeles," which has left her utterly brain-washed, perhaps even brain-dead, though more

beautiful than ever in appearance. She is described as an 11 «indeterminaci6n» total" and

0 "una <

prospective guests at the Banquet is tested in Chapter 26. In this trial run, she provokes

an uncontainable outpouring of male libido and aggression, setting all the men to fighting

among themselves in a blind rage. The priestly Bermudez defines her with the same

language that the narrator of Addn Buenosayres used when referring to the prostitute called

Jova in the brothel episode. Bermudez names Thelma: "--Afrodita ... o Cybeles, o

Astarte, o Penia, o Diana, o Prakiti: la de mil nombres y ninguno"

Jova is called "el monstruo antiguo, la bestia de mil formas y de ninguna ... la nada en

traje de Iris ... la deidad antigua, la de mil nombres barbaros" (AB 325). It will be

recalled that on this locus of indetermination, this absence of form and name, the "Joven c Tacitumo" constructs his ideal, in the same way that Adan constructs the metaphysical fiction of his Solveig celeste. Samuel Tesler, for his part, identifies the prostitute Jova as

"la ramera del Apocalipsis" (AB 333). For Marechal's "metaphysical" characters,

therefore, the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon seems to symbolize non-being, which means

lack of form and name. Indeed, John of Patmos himself calls the Great Whore "Mystery"

(Rev 17 :5). The intervention of the Whore of Non-Being at the Banquet, as Bermudez

confirms, is meant to provoke "una conflagraci6n" (.B. 236), a kind of trial by fire.

Non-being is evil, according to Bermudez and by extension his boss, Severo

Arcangelo. This value-judgment differs sharply from the way Adan and Schultze

characterize non-being in Adtin Buenos ay res. In the first novel, non-being is associated

with the primordial chaos, a pre-ontological plenitude that is accorded a highly positive

0 value. It is true that Don Ecumenico came to grief when he discovered the concept of 228

non-being, but that was because he did not know how to handle language. Severo

Arcangelo and his Organization, in contrast to Adan and Schultze, take a rigidly

authoritarian attitude in metaphysics. As their experiment with Thelma Foussat clearly

shows, they regard non-being, indetermination, formlessness and --above all--

namelessness as evil; and this, one may surmise, is because what is nameless remains

beyond the reach of cosmic central control, i.e. that of the Organization in Severo

Arcangelo's microcosm. The absence of word and name is the realm of the tenebrae.

Conversely, plenitude of being, the good, must stand in the light of the Word and the

Name.

The key to explaining the so-called theorem of Severo Arcangelo's Banquet (but c not necessarily the novel by that name) lies in the tension between this evil non-being -- absence of word and name-- and its opposite, the Word and the Name. In the Christian

apocalyptic narrative, word and name meet in the concept of the Christ. In John's

Revelation, there is a curious preoccupation with a mysterious new name for Christ, which

will be revealed at the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth. Christ says to the

Philadelphians that, if they remain faithful to the end, "I will write on you the name of my

God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my

God out of heaven, and my own new name" (Rev 3:12). At the battle of Armageddon,

when Christ appears as a knight on a white horse, the seer testifies: "His eyes are like a

flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed that no one

knows but himself" (Rev 19: 12). The name must remain a mystery until the appropriate

0 kairos, the turning point when one world ends and another begins. And yet immediately 229

afterwards, in verse 13, the seer writes that "his name is called the word of God," and in

verse 16: "On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, 'King of kings and Lord

of lords."' The seer is not really divulging Christ's new name; he is simply establishing

the equivalency between Christ, the Divine Word, and the supreme reality. The new name

will be a new manifestation of the eternal Word. To a new world will correspond a new

name.

The narrative motif of Christ's new name has been taken up in Banquete. As we

have seen, Professor Bermudez, under the direction of Severo Arcangelo, has announced

the "Hombre de Sangre." It turns out that this is Christ's new name. This information

is conveyed to Lisandro Farias in Chapter 30, wherein he receives his final indoctrination c from a high-ranking member of the Banquet's Organization. This personage, known simply as Pedro, has been named appropriately after Petrus, rock and first Pope of the

Church. (Lisandro also dubs him "el Salmodiante de la Ventana. ") Pedro socratically

leads Lisandro to make the key identification: "--jEl Cristo! --volvi a gritar--. iEl

Hombre de Sangre!" (Jl274). Pedro, who insists on being called "hermano" rather than

"padre" (Jl269),2 tells Lisandro that he was the one who found the new name: "--Lo

busque y lo halle" (Jl272). Pedro also explains why it was necessary to fmd Christ's new

name:

--El Cristo --asinti6 el Salmodiante de la Ventana--: un Nombre que se nos revel6 como superior a todo nombre proferido antes del suyo. ;.,Y que nos queda ya de un nombre que se fue gastando y muriendo en bocas mecanicas? Tambien 0 el Cristo es una "palabra perdida". (Jl271) 230

Pedro alludes here to the old hieratic topos of the "lost Word." Guenonian-style, priestly

wisdom holds that the Word of the "Revelation primordiale" is reflected in the language

of the "Revelations secondaires," such as the Hebrew, Christian, Mohammedan, and Vedic

sacred texts; the mystical search for the "Parole perdue" is the quest for the Word of the

primordial Revelation (Chevalier 560). In finding the "lost word," Pedro has also found

the "new name." The Word is eternally there; the problem, according to this hieratic

viewpoint, is that the word of secondary revelation gradually ceases to reflect the

primordial presence of the Word. Thus the words of human language are emptied of

meaning. Earlier in the novel, Severo Arcangelo has articulated the same problem in his

Third Monologue: c Todas las palabras han perdido ya su valor originario, su tremenda eficacia de afirmar o negar; todos los gestos han perdido su energia ritual o su fuerza magica. Lo perdieron en nosotros; en nuestras bocas que hoy parecen duras cajas de ruidos yen nuestros pies de bailarines automaticos. No obstante, las palabras de vida estan en nosotros, t,lo estan o no, mi alma? Si, lo estan, pero como en instrumentos grabadores que las repiten mecanicamente sin entenderlas ya, sin morder su vieja pulpa inteligible. (B. 149)

Through man's descent from the Golden to the Iron Age, his words have lost the original

value of the creative Word. Hence the inefficacy of religion and metaphysics based on

metonymic language: the words have become husks emptied of the "old, intelligible pulp"

of the Logos. 3 What will be necessary is a parousia. This term was originally used by 0 Plato to denote the relation obtaining between the ideal form or Idea and the particulars - 231 which depend upon it. A particular concrete thing is beautiful, for example, because the

Idea of beauty is present in it. Parousia means literally "presence," i.e. the presence of

the Idea in the particular (Ross 29). In Hellenism, parousia meant the epiphany of a god

or goddess, and secondly, the visit of an emperor or a king to a province (Hastings 728).

When John the Evangelist (or some posterior interloper) identified the Logos with Christ,

all three of these meanings converged and were heightened by the eschatological

expectancy of the primitive Christians. Thus was created the apocalyptic concept of the

Parousia as Christ's second coming, the resurrection of all Christians, the definitive

redemption.

This evolution of the Platonic parousia to the Christian Parousia represents a c change of secondary metaphor, beneath which the fundamental tropological strategy of linguistic representation remains constant. In Plato, the parousia denotes the immanent,

static presence of the Idea in the particular thing. The relation of Idea to particular is

visualized spatially: the Idea is located behind the mere appearance of the particular. The

Idea, of course, is the a priori reality of the thing; the spatial metaphor is secondary. In

Christianity, the a priori Word is divorced from the world which it has created not by

space but literally by time. The Word was fully present in the beginning, and that

presence must return in the end, at the time of the Parousia. Meanwhile, there is a

scandalous diremption between the primordial Word and the word of the fallen world.

Both the spatial metaphor of Platonic metaphysics and the temporal metaphor of

apocalyptic, however, depend on the fundamental tropological strategy defined by

0 Nietzsche as metonymy, the reversal of cause and effect (see above, Chapter 3). In both 232

cases, there is anthropocentric illusion: inventions of human reason and imagination are

posited as the molds of reality.

With his project of the Banquet, Severo Arcangelo has apparently engineered a

parousia, as this term is understood in both its Platonic and apocalyptic senses. In

Chapter 30, Pedro imparts to Lisandro the Banquet's theoretical doctrine, which he calls

a theorem. As we have just seen, the "lost word" of Christ has been found in the

"Hombre de Sangre." At the Banquet itself, one assumes, Christ's new name will be

internalized in the consciousness of the commensals through an experience of apocalyptic

gnosis. Having received the secondary revelation of the new Name at the Second Council,

the elect will witness, in the experience of the Banquet, the primordial Revelation of the c Word. Pedro, then, fleshes out for Lisandro the theoretical underpinning of the Banquet, at the level of secondary revelation. His "theorem" is in fact an inventive exegesis of the

Genesis-Apocalypse narrative, conflated with the Hesiodic cycle of ages. In the garden

of Eden, there were four rivers that flow from the river of life (Gen 2: 10), the same one

that irrigates the Kingdom of God in Revelation 22:1. According to Pedro, those four

rivers are symbolic:

--Los cuatro rios del Paraiso ya trazan la expansi6n crucial hacia cuatro direcciones del Espacio y cuatro eras del Tiempo. Y justamente allf, en el punto central donde nacen Ios cuatro rios, hay un Adan inm6vil, pero como ya tentado a la expansi6n o la fuga.

0 The four eras are the same as Hesiod's or those of the Manvantara. In the Edenic Golden 233

Age, the first Adam stood at the intersection of the form of a cross. The fall or fugue

from the primordial unity took place as a centrifugal movement in the four directions

throughout the four ages. This centrifugal n;1ovement was symbolically arrested by

Christ's crucifixion. Through his Passion, the Nazarene opposed a centripetal movement

leading back to the original centre. Thus, says Pedro, the "teorema humano" is laid out

in the figure of the cross. (Pedro impresses the importance of the cross on Lisandro by

means of a mystical teaching aid. The neophyte receives his instruction while standing

with his arms outstretched on a cross painted black against a white wall.) In the trajectory

from the beginning to the end, Eden to New Jerusalem, something will have been

accomplished, which Pedro expresses in the language of geometry: "Si bien se mira, es

una fuga que va desde un Jardin en circulo a una Ciudad Cuadrada ... Tambien el circulo

es figura de movimiento; y el cuadrado es figura de la «estabilidadn. La soluci6n del

teorema humano estaria, pues, en la cuadratura del circulo" (!! 275). The progression

from Eden to the New Jerusalem is conceptualized as the squaring of the circle. Thus

Pedro theorizes the Parousia: The Christ principle, the Logos, has intervened to arrest

the scandalous fugue, the leakage of meaning, the tendency towards diremption between

Word and wor(l)d; this definitive arrest has been accomplished by replacing the round

Eden with the Square City. 4

To conclude his teaching, Pedro delivers a little homily, derived from the

Neoplatonic doctrine of the three worlds, about the Platonic Demiurge and his creature,

Man: "La criatura Hombre tiene una «realidad inteligible>l solo cuando acruan en el tres

0 conciencias en armonia: la conciencia que el Hacedor tiene de su criatura Hombre, la 234

conciencia que la criatura Hombre tiene de su Hacedor, y la conciencia que la criatura

Hombre tiene de si misma" Ql276). Naturally, the creature exists only in function of his

Maker's consciousness. In order to attain any degree of ontological reality at all, the

creature must cultivate his awareness of his Maker; only thus will he gain awareness of

himself. To the degree that the creature loses his awareness of the Maker, he becomes

less and less real. The end result is man as Robot: "Robot es el final obligatorio del

Hombre descendente: ya desconectado de su Principio, Robot noes masque un fantasma

lleno de vistosidades externas" Ql277). At the nadir of the metahistorical cycle, when the

human creature has become totally robotic, a catastrophe will ensue. And this is so for

a fundamental reason: "--El Hombre tiene una funci6n central y centralizadora en este

mundo, y los desequilibrios del Hombre inciden en el medio c6smico. Si el desequilibrio

alcanza el grado tope, la catastrofe se desencadena"

It should be clear by now that Hermano Pedro is no brother at all but rather Severo

Arcangelo' s pope and chief indoctrinator. The argument for the divinity of the Word and

the Name, which happens to have been revealed to him, Pedro, before anyone else, is not

only a rhetorical but a political manoeuvre that aims to justify an authoritarian

metaphysics. The Square City, like Plato's ideal Republic, is the dream of all repressive

regimes, theocratic or otherwise. There everything will be fixed once and for all; there

will be no more anarchic slippage of meaning, no more irony, no more parody. The Word

of God will rule unchallenged by Gog and Magog, the agents of the tenebrae; all signa

will be polarized always and unequivocally toward the res tantum, as in the ideal world

0 according to Augustine. Unless we can restore this ideal situation, the cosmos will plunge 235

into catastrophe.

Thus far in this reading of El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo, I have been treating

the novel's priestly ideology, as expressed through the salient characters, at face value.

Like the "lector agreste" of Adan Buenosayres, I have so far ignored Banquete's shadow

side, its irony and parody. Unlike the rich irony of Adan Buenosayres, Banquete's irony

is much less funny, much less poignant. We have seen that Pedro's discourse appears to

explain the "theorem" of the Banquet by stringing together a rosary of exhausted priestly

topoi. By the end of Chapter 30, his words are sounding especially hollow. This is no

doubt what leads Teresa Orrechia Havas to comment with respect to Banquete: "En este

0 universo de maquinaci6n ... todo ha sido trucado, todo es falso, comenzando por los

sfrnbolos" (510); she concludes that any critical reading that attempts to identify a meaning

in this novel is condemned in advance to be nothing more than "una practica sutil de la

superstici6n (512). She may very well be right. It is not easy to justify the existence of

this novel. Nonetheless, it may prove fruitful to leave the point of view of the "lector

agreste," even that of a cynical reader of this type, and approach Banquete from the other

side, i.e. from the point of view of the Banquet's officially constituted Opposition.

The clowns Gog and Magog exist under the sign of parody. On one occasion, the

clowns unite all the resources of their art to achieve a perfect impersonation of Severo

Arcangelo and his manservant Implaglione. Lisandro Farsias is moved to reflect on this

feat: 0 236

11 11 Lo que ab ora me desconcertaba era su arte par6dico , manifestado en las imitaciones de Severo y de Impaglione que habian construido ellos en mis propias narices: nunca me gust6la parodia, ya que mi natural honradez abomin6 siempre toda mistificaci6n o caricatura de la verdad. En el caso de Gog y Magog, el hecho se me antojaba :rruis temible, pues yo no habfa dejado de observar que lo par6dico se daba en ellos, no como un accidente circunstancial, sino como una marca 11 definitoria" de sus naturalezas.

Lisandro' s sanctimonious comment on the nature of parody cannot be taken too seriously.

As we shall see, he himself is a duplicitous character, not at all given to the integrity

implied by his phrase 11 mi natural honradez." As for "mistificaci6n," he literally gets

drunk on it on more than one occasion. Lisandro 's dipsomania, a recurring joke c throughout the novel, may be understood as a metaphor for his susceptibility to high­ sounding language. 5 In spite of Lisandro' s unreliability, however, he has made a valid

identification of the clowns with the parodic mode, a fact that serves as a key for

interpreting the novel.

The clowns' aim is to sabotage Severo Arcangelo' s Banquet. In the end, they fail

to do so. And yet their technique of opposing the Banquet's official discourse achieves

more than their literal failure might indicate. Here is how Lisandro describes their

technique: "Una vez mas, utilizando lo absurdo y lo verosfmil en una mezcla de habiles

proporciones, Gog y Magog intentaban destruir ante mis ojos una mitologfa que sin duda

les era odiosa" (B 85). The actions and discourse of the clowns are not in themselves of

great interest. The clowns, as Bermudez points out (B 75), are symbols. What they

0 symbolize is the opposition that operates within the novel's text as a cross-current to the 237

Platonist-apocalyptic narrative sponsored by the official Organization of the Banquet. This

opposition works through parody, irony, satire, mixing the absurd with the textually

plausible in a way that contaminates and deviates the novel's ostensible doctrine.

The clowns, ex-vaudevillians themselves, are the first to alert Lisandro Farias to

the fact that everything in Severo Arcangelo' s Banquet, beginning with the Metallurgist

of Avellaneda himself, is empty farce: "El Viejo Truchiman," says Gog in reference to

Severo Arcangelo, "ya le ha representado sin duda su farsa de malandrfn arrepentido" Oi

80). As well, the clowns reveal Severo Arcangelo's past as a bad amateur actor (R 146).

Theatrical metaphor abounds throughout the text of Banquete. At a given moment, this

metaphor invades the fabric of the narrative to set up a mise en abyme. About halfway c through the novel, in Chapter 17, Severo Arcangelo commissions Lisandro to write the libretto for a "show" (Severo uses the English word), of which the theme will be "la Vida

Ordinaria" (ll 156). This piece of theatre is to be performed at the Banquet itself.

Granted complete liberty as to the form of the commissioned piece, Lisandro decides on

the genre of the sainete. His choice is not insignificant, for his show serves as a burlesque

mirror, an ironic mise en abyme, of the dramatic fiction of Severo Arcangelo' s Banquet.

What is this genre that Lisandro has selected? Angel Nuiiez defmes the sainete as

it developed in Argentina: "Arte popular por excelencia, el sainete fue espejo burlesco sin

desdefiar ciertos toques dramaticos (melodramaticos tambien), donde qued6 reflejado el

aluvi6n inmigratorio en sus variantes mas tipicas" (Historia/3 1013a). The sainete's

defming elements are the burlesque, melodrama, and stereotypical characters. This is not

0 high dramatic art. The sainete was a very popular form in the Argentina of the 1920s and 238

30s. Its very popularitY brought about its decadence, for it became formulaic: "Ios

autores," writes Nufi.ez, "se limitaban a reeditar viejas f6rmulas, justificadas y hasta

originales en su momento pero ahora obsoletas" (1013b). Raul Hector Castagnino concurs

with this assessment: "escritores, urgidos por la necesidad de renovar semanalmente

dobles carteleras, descuidan la calidad de sus engendros con la mirada puesta en la

taquilla ... un recurso explotado una vez con exito en determinado escenario, es imitado

hasta el cansancio, y sin escrupulos, en todos" (121). A key figure in this process was the

sainetero Alberto Vacarezza. A kind of modem-day Lope de Vega, Vacarezza was a very

talented playwright whose enormous box-office success invited the kind of unscrupulous

imitation outlined by Castagnino. The same critic accuses Vacarezza of exhausting the c genre of the sainete: "Vaccareza [sic] ... usufruct6 el genero hasta agotarlo y fue quien lo mineraliz6 en f6rmulas, las cuales presentadas, en sf, como 'nuevo arte de componer

sainetes', en sus consecuencias incubaran el fin de la especie" (124). This genre that

combines the burlesque with the melodramatic, now degenerated into empty formulas, is

the one elected by Lisandro Farias for the Banquet's show.

Lisandro' s piece seems to belong to a subgenre that Abel Posadas et al have called

the "sainete de divertimiento y moraleja" (148b). Characterized by "su esquema lineal y

sin alteraciones," plays of this type aim to entertain and preach at the same time. Lisandro

has decided that his stage design will represent an enormous mouse cage peopled by the

hilarious fools of Ordinary Life. He reasons that Dante Alighieri had likewise placed his

whole generation in hell, but with a didactic purpose in mind. Lisandro concludes: "En c virtud de la «Santa Pedagogia» resolvi conservar mi ratonera y sus desdichados cautivos" 239

(B174). Lisandro aims to make his show at once funny and edifying. The moral lesson

has already been stipulated by Severo Arcangelo: "la Vida Ordinaria, en su aparente

seguridad, solo es una formidable ilusi6n colectiva" (B 161). In other words, to consider

ordinary life as being real is a mistake. Lisandro will drive home this moral by giving his

show an apocalyptic ending: "se me ocurri6 poner en las alturas del escenario un angel

con su trompeta, el cual anunciaria en su hora el fmal de la Vida Ordinaria, la destrucci6n

de la ratonera y el panico de Ios ratones"

will be destroyed, and this, it goes without saying, will allow the advent of the "reality"

of Platonist metaphysics. Severo •s purpose is to destroy one illusion of reality, the

concretized fiction of social reality, and replace it with another illusion. By authoritarian

decree, naive realism must give way to philosophical realism.

Clearly, the apocalyptic ending of Lisandro' s sainete mirrors the dramatic

apocalypse that is to take place at the Banquet. Lisandro appears to have understood

Severo Arcangelo 's plan to destroy the illusion of Ordinary Life and reveal the truth of

metaphysical reality. After the Banquet, the elect are to accede to a symbolical space

called the "Cuesta del Agua." Corresponding to no fixed geographical locus, the "Cuesta

del Agua" is a kind of enchanted cyberspace invented by Severo and his Organization for

the addicts of poetic metaphysics and metonymic language: "Esa gran ilusi6n tenia su

nombre," comments Lisandro in a moment of nominalist lucidity, "y acaso no era mas que

un nombre: la Cuesta del Agua"

that of the Severo Arcangelo •s Banquet, it does not necessarily follow that this specular c relation can be extended to the novel of that name. As we shall see, the moral lesson 240

dictated by the metallurgist to his dramatist Lisandro Farias does not come through as the

novel's message. Or rather, if that message comes through, it arrives in contaminated

form, riddled with irony, emptied of significance.

Apart from the Organization's official doctrine, Lisandro has also thought to

incorporate a project of his own in his sainete:

Pero tendria yo, en cambio, el gusto de meter en la ratonera, y contra su voluntad, a todos mis enemigos de ayer, a Ios que me torturaron con su juiciosa imbecilidad o me hirieron con su estU.pida suficiencia: los haria cumplir gestos de un ridiculo inexorable, y los encararfa en dililogos y mon6logos de sesudos ratones, cuyo poder hilarante fuera capaz de hacer que la Mesa del Banquete desmoronara de risa. (R 174) c Considering this passage as a mise en abyme, it becomes clear that the mirror is now being

held at a different angle, reflecting not Severo Arcangelo's project but the content of the

novel. The pretentious characters being ridiculed in the novel's many dialogues and

monologues (Severo has pronounced four Monologues) include the metallurgist of

A vellaneda himself, Bermudez, Frobenius, Hermano Pedro, as well as another Brother

whom we shall consider presently, "el Hermano Jomis." The inexorable ridiculousness

of these characters' speech is indeed enough to make the Banquet Table fall apart, along

with the discourse for which that table serves as synecdoche. In particular, it is the

Platonist apocalypticism of the initiates that is reflected in a ridiculous light.

The chief indoctrinator, Hermano Pedro, is a good example. Lisandro Farias,

0 first-person narrator, has set up the episode of his interview by drawing attention in 241

advance to the capital theme ofPedro's discourse, the Apocalypse. Describing the small

room where he awaits his interview, Lisandro notes: "Lo que desentonaba en el cubfculo

era un gran atril, al parecer de oro, sobre el cual, y abierta en el Apocalipsis, descansaba

una Biblia de notable antigiiedad" CB. 268). The Book of Revelation is not merely

advertised, it is virtually thrust into our faces. The overly large, gold (or fake gold)

lectern bearing the ancient Bible clashes with the decor: Lisandro calls our attention to

the key intertext with baroque hyperbole, going over the top into burlesque. Thus Pedro's

subsequent discourse is doomed in advance to be undermined by irony. Referring to his

discovery of the "lost Name" of Christ, Pedro avers: "Y o era capataz en un frigorifico

de La Ensenada, y el Nombre se me revel6 entre medias reses de vacunos" CB. 272). The c ex-foreman of refrigeration mouths an ironic witticism of which he is surely unaware. He has found the Name "entre medias reses," a play on the Latin phrase .

According to Revelation, Christ is the Alpha and the Omega. But Pedro has found

Christ's Name neither at the beginning nor the end but rather "in the middest," among

dead cows. Then, speaking of his flock in Ciudadela and their eschatological hopes, the

priest drops another unwitting irony:

[Son] Ios que hallaron el Nombre perdido y a el se agarran como a un barril flotante ... <,Que los anima? La promesa de una Ciudad Cuadrada, el pan y el vino de la exaltaci6n en los blancos manteles del Reino. Sus ultimas palabras rodaron en el vacio: me dormf profundamente, yen sueiios me pareci6 que descendia yo a grandes y tranquilizadoras honduras. m272)

0 The mystical Name is compared to a floating barrel, i.e. to a hollow, empty vessel. The 242

theme of emptiness is underlined when Lisandro resumes his narration: Pedro 's words

rolled (like barrels) "en el vacio," for his stream of empty verbiage has put Lisandro to

sleep.

Apocalypticism receives its most burlesque treatment in the episode of "el Hermano

Jonas" and his creature Colof6n, the "Hombre Robot" (Chapter 28). This fire-breathing

preacher employs apocalyptic discourse to fulminate against twentieth-century

technological society. The Antichrist or false Messiah who will perform false miracles has

been recast as "el Gran Mono." Jonas refers to him repeatedly as "el muy hijo de la Gran

Ramera" (B. 248, 249), a play on the very vulgar expression "el muy hijo de puta." The

rule of "el Gran Mono" will last three and half years, just like the reign of the Beast in c Revelation 11:3. "iLO dice la Palabra! 11 exclaims Jomis. "Luego el Gran Mono sera precipitado al Avemo, entre una rechifla de angeles" CB 253). The hysterical preacher

takes apocalyptic language over the top, rendering his own rhetoric absurd. Indeed, he

unconsciously parodies the whole Platonist-apocalyptic discourse of the Banquet's Official

Organization. For him, Bermudez's concept of "Hombre Final, 11 dramatized at the Second

Council by a hired actor called Johnny L6pez, does not go far enough in portraying the

absolute iniquity of the final stages of the Iron Age: "--l,Johnny L6pez? --exclam6 Jonas

con desprecio--. iNO es un finalista! Es el hombre actual y algo asi como el tatarabuelo

de Colof6n" CB. 248). According to Jonas, Johnny L6pez still retains a residual

consciousness of his "Principio Creador, 11 whereas that consciousness will have been

erased entirely in Colof6n. The Human Robot will be the puppet of "el Gran Mono," or

0 metaphysically speaking: "El de Colof6n sera, pues, un «vacio de la Divinidad»" (B. 250). 243

In other words, the Human Robot's condition will be that of non-being, the same absence

of Word and Name that is symbolized by the alchemically produced Cybeles or the Great

Whore.

If Hermano Jonas parodies the discourse of the Banquet, he also helps construct

the theorem of the Banquet, making explicit the term Parousia, which hitherto is only

implicit. He refers to the present as "estos afios vecinos a la Parusfa" (B 247). Thus,

from the narrative point of view, he prepares the way for Pedro' s definitive theoretical

exposition two chapters later. The preacher's intervention in the official discourse of the

Banquet, therefore, is paradoxically both constructive, integral to its structure, and

parodic, contaminating, deviant. He is like a baroque gargoyle on the cathedral-like c edifice of the Banquet's discourse, but a gargoyle that forms part of a supporting pillar. Ironically, Jonas continually resorts to the notion of parody, employing the term

three times in his discourse (B 249, 251, 252). The Great Monkey or Antichrist, he

claims, "hara una parodia grotesca del Evangelio" (B 249). In reality, it is Jonas who

grotesquely parodies the language of the apocalyptic Gospel, as well as the ideological

premises of the Banquet.

The final irony of the preacher's discourse is that he himself has literally created

Colof6n. Through a process left unknown, Jonas has managed to materialize this

hallucination of his demented vision. He is extremely protective of his creature and does

not suffer anyone to touch the robot CB 255), whom he treats with "una solicitud casi

paternal" CB 247). Jonas is quite enamoured of his apocalyptic vision, which is not a

0 revelation but his own imaginative creation. He is demented because he cannot distinguish 244

between reality and the chimerical creations of "la Palabra." His exacerbated realism has

taken him over the edge into insanity.

In this episode of Hermano Jonas and Colof6n, it also becomes apparent why

Lisandro has chosen the formulaic genre of the sainete for the show that will reflect the

Banquet back to itself. Again, the clowns are the agents provocateurs who force out into

the open the connection between the empty stereotypes of the sainete and Severo

Arcangelo' s Banquet. When Jonas first arrives at the clowns' hut, he recognizes them

right away as agents of evil: "iAzufre! ... Yo se olfatear al Enemigo hasta en un sainete

de Vacarezza" (B 246). His observation is very ironic. The Brother himself, along with

the clowns, behaves and speaks as a burlesque type in a "sainete de divertimiento y c moraleja. " The clowns recognize him as one of their own, an actor specializing in absurd and empty postures. At the end of the episode, Gog pays homage to the preacher, and the

narrator calls particular attention to this gesture: "Entonces vi lo increible: vi a un Gog

que, acercandose de nuevo al Hermano, caia de hinojos a sus pies y le calzaba el zapato

volante. Sin dar muestras de haber ponderado aquel gesto devoto, el presunto cura se

dirigi6 nuevamente ami" (B. 253). · Jonas misses the significance of the gesture. The

clowns in fact understand who and what Jonas is better than he does. Beyond the theatre

metaphor, the emptiness of the sainete played out by Jomis and all the other characters of

the novel reflects the emptiness of the official discourse propagated by the official

Organization of the Banquet. The language of that discourse is obsolete, "mineralized"

in empty formulas. Hence the necessity to parody that language and to satirize the hieratic

0 attitude that underwrites it. 245

In Lisandro' s narration, there is a specific parody of the declamatory style of the

book of Revelation. The seer of Patmos opens his text by swearing to the veracity of what

has been revealed to him:

Apocalipsis de Jesucristo ... , dado a conocer por su angel a su siervo Juan, el cual da testimonio de la palabra de Dios y el testimonio de Jesucristo sobre todo lo que el ha visto. (Apoc.1,1-2)6

After the Introduction, John uses the following formula to present the main body of his

account:

Yo, Juan, vuestro hermano y compafiero en la tribulaci6n, en el reino y en la c paciencia en Jesus, hallandome en la isla llamada Patmos, ... oi tras de mi una voz fuerte, como de trompeta, que decia: Lo que vieres, escribelo en un libro y envialo a las siete iglesias. (Apoc 1 :9-11)

Lest we doubt John's reliability, the seer lets the voice of Jesus Christ vouch for his

visionary pedigree: "Yo, Jesus, envie a un angel para testificaros estas cosas sobre las

iglesias" (Apoc 22: 16).

In Banquete, Lisandro Farias has been sent not by a mere angel but by the

Archangel Severo in order to give testimony of the apocalyptic Banquet. He begins his

narration:

Yo, Lisandro Farias, nacido en la llanura, muerto en Buenos Aires y resucitado en la Cuesta del Agua, me propongo iniciar la narraci6n del Banquete cuyo epilogo 0 se ha recatado en esta dura provincia como un secreto en forma de almendra ... 246

pues el signo de Severo Arcangelo es inflexible. (B. 13)7

Lisandro returns to this declamatory fonnula throughout his narration. He introduces the

episode of the Second Council with it: "Yo, Lisandro Farias, juro que todo lo que pinto

ahora y pintare hasta el fin es verdadero y sucedi6 en la casa de Severo Arcangelo 11 m

194). And he closes his account: "Y el Banquete «fue». Y yo, Lisandro Farfas, nacido

en la llanura, muerto en Buenos Aires y resucitado en la Cuesta del Agua, doy testimonio

de Ios hechos" m289).

However, the same fonnula is given burlesque treatment on another occasion:

11 Yo, Lisandro Farias, nacido en la llanura, muerto en Buenos Aires y resucitado en la c Cuesta del Agua, soy, como dije ya, un antiguo y conmovedor aborto de la literatura 11 m 261). In the immediate context, Lisandro means that he is a failed writer. 8 Severo

Arcangelo has reminded him of his "antigua y fracasada vocaci6n poeticall (R 156).

Lisandro himself alludes on another occasion to his "risibles ensayos poetico-filos6ficos"

m115). This failed scribbler, then, is the one who bears witness to the revelation of the

Word, the Parousia. Unlike John of Patmos, who has a direct line to the angel sent by

Christ, Lisandro is an unreliable narrator. Nor is it merely a question of defective literary

skill. In character, he is literally duplicitous. Pablo Inaudi, the angel or numinous being

who presides over the Banquet, visits Lisandro and confronts him with his behaviour:

"Me refiero a su actitud ambigua en la empresa: usted viene trabajando a dos puntas, la

del Banquete y la de la Oposici6n al Banquete" m169). Lisandro plays off the clowns 0 against the official Junta. His attitude hardly behooves a witness of Revelation. Pablo 247

Inaudi demands and receives Lisandro's commitment to the transcendental enterprise, but

the duplicitous narrator continues to frequent the clowns. Eventually, Lisandro goes with

the rest of the elegidos to the "Cuesta del Agua" only to desert this dubious paradise. The

text of the novel itself is similarly divided against itself, alternately signifying and

ironically destroying significance. Pablo Inaudi makes a comment that could apply equally

well to the novel: "Todo ser es un gesto que se dibuja y se desdibuja"

the text of Banquete parodies the rhetorical gestures of hieratic language as they arise; the

writing ironically exhibits the emptiness of its baroque flatus vocis.

There is one character, however, who stands outside the Manichean division

between the Banquet's Organization and its Opposition. Nominally, Andres Papagiorgiou

is a prospective commensal at the Banquet, but the clowns point out that "el griego

chiflado no esta en la Junta del Banquete"

and the Second Councils, without in any way making common cause with the clownish

Opposition. At the Second Council, he objects to the disdainful treatment accorded to

Johnny L6pez, representative of the Last Man; Papagiorgiou declares his "solidaridad

entusiasta con el ente humano, y con el Hombre de Hierro en particular" (B 209).

Papargiorgiou also flouts the general priestly condemnation of Nietzsche by expressing his

opinion that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is "una obra de imaginaci6n en prosa" CB. 206). This

is a character who does not participate in the stereotypical sainete of the Banquet. He does

not move within the magnetic field ruled by the dual polarity of faithful and faithless, nor

does he swing back and forth between the two camps as does Lisandro. Rather, the Greek 0 is an eccentric, an outsider, a loner. Just as Don Quixote sallied forth into the world three 248

times, Papagiorgiou, "el Navegante Solitario," has thrice attempted to circumnavigate the

globe in small craft. On his last voyage, he recounts, he experienced an hallucination:

Entonces me puse a estudiar la luna llena, su cara de astro muerto, su aridez terrible, su desnudo esqueleto mineral. Y de pronto imagine a nuestro planeta igualmente difunto, sin verdores ni sonidos, como la luna, sin ontologfas animadas ni entes capaces de inteligir y de expresar. Y en mi alucinaci6n vi a la Tierra como un libro de texto borrado, sin palabras ni lectores. <,Entienden? (1!134)

No one in his audience understands this cryptic apocalyptic vision. It seems to be posed

as a riddle for the reader. Papagiorgiou invokes the world-as-book topos consciously,

deliberately, not naively the way Adan Buenosayres does. The Greek is not in thrall to c his own rhetoric; he makes it clear that he is talking about an hallucination, not a revelation. Like the immortal Knight at the end of all his travels, Papagiorgiou has

experienced the final, definitive disillusion. There are probably many solutions to the

Navigator's riddle. The one proposed by this study is that Papagiorgiou's vision refers

to the apocalyptic erasure of the bibliocosm in which he literally fmds himself: "ellibro

de texto borrado" is the text of El Banquete de Severo Arctingelo.

Thanks to Papagiorgiou' s intervention, we can perceive more clearly the self­

cancelling irony inherent in Severo Arcangelo's Third Monologue (quoted above). This

soliloquy has been secretly recorded on a tape which the clowns later manage to pilfer and

play for Lisandro. In his taped discourse, Severo expresses his desire to recover the

"original value" and "tremendous efficacy" that words have when they are infused by

0 some primordial Word. In these dark times, he laments, we are like mere recording 249

instruments that mechanically repeat empty words

and vicariously for the reader, the source of Severo' s message is also a tape-recorder. His

rhetorical strategy --the simile of the tape-recorder-- is thus highlighted at the expense of

the discursive content. Marechal' s text ensnares Severo' s words in a loop of meaning in

which the means of expression refers first of all to itself. The result is that Severo' s

discourse, by coming to us as a mechanical repetition, is rendered as meaningless as the

situation he laments.

It is thus that the novel's ending can be understood: a discourse couched in

metonymic language is cancelled by an ironic discourse, such that the book rolls up on

itself (to borrow the metaphor that Adan Buenosayres borrows from John's Revelation) c and refuses to project any significance beyond itself. This can be seen more clearly if one examines the novel's structure of superimposed ends and endings. There are two principal

levels of fiction: the diegesis in which Lisandro Farias meets the fictional Leopoldo

Marechal in the hospital, and the dramatic fiction engineered by Severo Arcangelo and his

Organization (which is reflected ironically by a third fiction placed en abyme, i.e.

Lisandro's sainete). In the first diegesis, the ending of the novel very nearly coincides

with Lisandro's end, his death. His death in turn closely follows the ending of his oral

narration of the dramatic fiction realized by Severo. And this ending of Lisandro's oral

account coincides in its textual placement with the End towards which Severo's project is

teleologically oriented: "Y el Banquete «fue»"

are very nearly superimposed one upon the other, the illusion is fostered that they stand

0 within a single harmony, as though in virtually transparent layers. This illusion is 250

shattered on a closer reading of the text.

Let us begin with the second diegesis and examine the eventual goal of the

Banquet: the "Cuesta del Agua." Lisandro first learns about the "Cuesta" in its guise as

a poetic myth with which the Organization of the Banquet encourages a healthy attitude

of hope among the servants of the villa. (Or as the clowns would have it, this myth is the

"opium" the Management uses to coopt the masses.) Later, after his indoctrination is

complete, and having re-read the Book of Apocalypse, Lisandro learns that the "Cuesta

del Agua" is the precinct of a sort of virtual reality for initiates of metonymic language,

or as Lisandro thinks of it, the reality of symbolism:

Mi relectura del Apocalipsis tambien hizo destacar para mi Ios nombres de 0 Gog y de Magog vinculados a los ultimos tiempos y en la linea non sancta. ;,Era un simple alarde literario el hecho de que la Direcci6n del Banquete diera esos nombres a Ios dos payasos que habitaban la choza? [ ... ] ;,No se intentarfa en el Banquete un formidable juego de simbolos? Me respondi que no, y las cosas del Banquete se iban dando en una realidad cruda y llena de intolerables absurdos. jCuan errado andaba yo al formular esas distinciones! Mas adelante, en la Cuesta del Agua, me hicieron entender la energia viviente de Ios simbolos. Porque hay simbolos que muerden como perros furiosos o patean como redomones, y simbolos que se abren como frutas y destilan leche y miel. Y hay simbolos que aguardan, como bombas de tiempo junto a las cuales pasa uno sin desconfiar, y que revientan de subito, pero a su hora exacta. Y hay simbolos que se nos ofrecen como trampolines flexibles, para el salto del alma voladora. Y simbolos que nos atraen con cebos de trampa, y que se cierran de pronto si uno Ios toca, y mutilan entonces o encarcelan al incauto viandante. Y hay simbolos que nos rechazan con sus 0 barreras de espinas, y que nos rinden al fin su higo maduro si uno se resuelve a 251

lastimarse la mano. (B 257-58)

The "Cuesta del Agua" is the realm of symbols, the cyberspace in which their "energia

viviente" determines reality. Symbols are not inert signs, but active nuclei of energy. The

sense of the term "symbol" as Lisandro uses it here is explicated by Jean Chevalier in his

erudite "Introduction" to the Dictionnaire des symboles. Chevalier distinguishes between

the mere sign and the living symbol. The sign is "une convention arbitraire qui laisse

etrangers l'un a l'autre le signifiant et le signifie (objet ou sujet), tandis que le symbole

presuppose homogeneite du signifiant et du signifie au sens d'un dynamisme organisateur"

(x; Chevalier's emphasis). Due to the dynamic nature of the symbol, Chevalier coins the c term "eidolo-moteur," by which he means that the symbol is an idea (eidos) with the capacity for generation (xi). This concept looks very much like the creative Word --and

its related Platonic notion of the Demiurge or Divine Arquitect-- as that concept is

espoused by Adan Buenosayres in his theological poetics. Thus the "Cuesta del Agua" is

something like Actan's Neoplatonic language-world resuscitated. Finding the "Cuesta del

Agua" means the revindication of philosophical realism and of metonymic language. Or

perhaps more accurately, in view of the gush of metaphors in Lisandro 's discourse on

symbols, it represents the triumph of the "poetic metaphysics" Adan believed in too

earnestly, and of the language, "entre metafisico y poetico" (AB. 139), which Schultze's

chimerical Neocriollo was to have spoken in the New Age. At the same time, the "Cuesta

del Agua" is the goal of Severo Arcangelo' s transcendental project to retrace the steps of 0 metahistory back through the cycle of language to a metatemporal source, which must also 252

be the eternally immanent telos of all language, the res tantum of all signa.

The diegesis of the metallurgist's dramatic fiction, however, is enveloped by

another, in which Lisandro Farias meets the fictional author, tells him his story, and

finally dies. This diegesis has the first and last word in the text of the novel. At the

beginning of the novel, when the fictional Leopoldo Marechal meets Lisandro Farias, the

latter shows that he is quite familiar with the literary work of the Argentine poet and

novelist. How does he know it so well? Marechal wants to know. "--En la Cuesta del

Agua se lee y se ficha todo el papelerio --rezong6 el [Lisandro] como en la evocaci6n de

una molestia retrospectiva" CB. 16). As it is reflected in this comment, the paradise of

virtual reality does not sound so heavenly, nor the "energia viviente" of its symbolism c quite so vivifying. Rather than the spiritual "concentraci6n defmitiva" that Pablo Inaudi claims it to be CB. 170), the "Cuesta del Agua" sounds more like a scholarly concentration

camp whose occupants are condemned to the endless drudgery of mulling through and

filing the productions of written language. Thus the supreme goal of Severo Arcangelo' s

Banquet has been under an ironic shadow right from the beginning of the text going by

that name. On arriving at the end of the novel, one is left with an ambiguous image of the

"Cuesta del Agua." Is it the promised celestial city, blessed with the full presence, the

parousia, of the creative Word? Or is it the Square City, a repository of dead words, inert

signs lacking significance? This ambivalence reflects two diametrically opposed views of

the metaphysical status of language, which according to Jorge Luis Borges are summed

up in the difference between realism and nominalism (Rest 54-55).

0 The first diegesis, then, neutralizes with ambiguity the import of Severo 253

Arcangelo's dramatic fiction. To arrive at the "Cuesta del Agua" can mean either to gain

access to the fount of all meaning, where Alpha and Omega meet and are one; or it can

mean reaching the point where language is revealed to be a set of arbitrary ciphers. Both

of these divergent possibilities are reflected in the ending of the novel's enveloping

diegesis, in which Lisandro tells his story. After alternately affirming and denying,

committing himself to and then deserting the faith taught him by the Banquet's priesthood,

Lisandro Farias is summoned by Pablo Inaudi and "saved" at the moment of his death. 9

The narrator-protagonist cries: "iY todo recomienza! No por nada uno fue crucificado

alguna vez, aunque solo haya sido en una cruz pintada con alquitran. lQue ya es hora?

jSi, Pablo, ya voy!"

frustrated inAdan Buenosayres, but which the author-narrator of Banquete's prologue has

pledged to make good in this second noveL After everything that has gone before,

however, this happy ending is utterly unconvincing. Lisandro, drunk on words again, is

going nowhere but to his death. Nothing is about to begin again. If Lisandro has admitted

to being "un antiguo y conmovedor aborto de la literatura"

the significance of his words has also been aborted. His effusive final utterance fmds no

referent in any reality, either concrete or imaginary. Thus the redemption suggested by

the ending is meaningless. Not even the lamely ironic allusion to Lisandro's fake c crucifixion can strike a spark of significance from his fmal speech. Nor do the musings of the narrator of the "Epilogo del autor" give us any real clues. He wonders about the 254

possible significance of the Banquet: "i_,Se originaba en la premonici6n de otro desastre

cfclico en la historia del Hombre, cuya inminencia exigia la construcci6n de un Area o

refugio?" m291). The answer to this question would be yes, but for the circumstance that

the text's irony has already dismantled the Guenonian doctrine of metahistory and the

discourse ofPlatonist apocalypticism. The narrator seems to acknowledge this. He admits

that he has made a fruitless search for the "Cuesta del Agua." His final sentence: "Pero

mis investigaciones, hasta hoy' no han arrojado ninguna luz" m292). Thus the text closes

in perfect darkness. By comparison, the Paleogogue lying in the pit of hell is a beacon of

significant light.

In conclusion, the novel seems to mean virtually nothing. Its discourse undercuts c itself with parody and continually displays its emptiness. The signifying power of this baroque text stops at the words on the page. Leopoldo Marechal was surprised by the

success of his second novel: "Tome, abandone y retome no pocas veces El Banquete de

Severo Arcangelo: era el arte por el arte, inadie me lo publicaria!" (Andres 55). What

he means by "art for art's sake" is interesting. In his essay "Autopsia de Creso,"

Marechal talks about the artist who finds himself "sin «funci6n social» determinada" and

must dedicate himself to "el arte por el arte." Alone in his ivory tower, the artificer is

reduced to creating "con su propia substancia y merced a una suerte de «respiraci6n

artificial», creador solitario en su torre sola, que solo ejercitaba su arte para si mismo y

para una elite de «torreros» en minoria y tan asfixiados como el" ( Cuaderno 82). Marechal

wrote this essay, as well as Banquete, during his ten-year proscription from Argentine

0 intellectual life after the fall of Juan Domingo Per6n in 1955. Like his cameo character 255

Andres Papagiorgiou, Marechal was a solitary navigator of the imagination during those

years, receiving visits from only a handful of loyal friends. El Banquete de Severo

Arcdngelo is a product of that time, the eccentric result of a lonely exercise in artificial

respiration. 10

NOTES

1. In Vico's usage, the ricorso can mean literally a retraversing of the same stages of history in the same order, or it can mean traversing the same stages in the opposite direction. To illustrate this second sense, Bergin and Fisch compare course and recourse to the ebb and flow of the tides (Vico xlii).

2. Pedro no doubt intends to emulate the magnanimity of the angel of the Apocalypse. As John recounts, the angel "said to me, 'These are the true words of God.' Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, 'You must not do that! I am a fellow servant c with you and your comrades who hold the testimony of Jesus"' (Rev 19: 10). 3. The concept of the intelligible or "noetic" comes from Plato's theory of the Ideas, in which the philosopher distinguishes the topos oratos from the topos noetos, the place of the visible and the place of the intelligible. The latter is behind, above, and a priori to the former (Chassard 16).

4. Pedro does allow that the Square City is three-dimensional: "Habhibamos de la Ciudad Cuadrada, o mejor dicho «cubica». l, Y a que se pareceria esa construcci6n del Apocalipsis? A un gran silo" (R 276). The New Jerusalem is really a silo in which to store the human harvest: "Todo el misterio del Hombre se resuelve asi en un trabajo de agricultura divina." This agricultural metaphor, probably an allusion to the "harvest of the earth" in Revelation 14:15, is left dangling, without being integrated into Pedro's theorem.

5. When receiving Pedro's teaching, Lisandro confesses: "Siempre fui un «hincha» de lo hermoso posible y de lo posible hermoso: yo estaba como borracho en la pared, y el teorema del Salmodiante me parecia traslucido como un juego de nifi.os. [ ... ] --l, Y que importa? --le grite en mi borrachera--. {,Que importa la finalidad si el drama es picante y lirico, adetruis de necesario?" Such effusiveness is repugnant to Pedro the Jesuitical teacher: "--No pierdas la cabeza --me amonest6 el" Ql.275). 0 256

6. The Spanish Apocalipsis is quoted here to allow a more transparent view of the intertexuality between it and Lisandro 1 s narration.

7. There is a narrative aporia involved here. This passage is the only one that Lisandro actually writes. The author-narrator of the Prologue has inherited it. In the main body of the novel, Lisandro is telling, not writing, his story. And yet he continues to use language as though he were writing.

8. There is also a literary joke here. Lisandro Farias is a recombination of two Marechalian characters: Liberato Farias, the horse-breaker from Adan Buenosayres and Lisandro Galvan, protagonist of the play Antfgona Velez (Maturo 35). It is the clowns who draw attention to Lisandro Is status as a literary character. When Lisandro tells them his name, Gog remarks "con insolencia": "--Noes una recomendaci6n"

9. Pablo lnaudi has foretold that at the instant of his death, a voice will whisper in Lisandro's right ear: "Esta salvado"

10. In this respect, though she reads the novel differently, Graciela Coulson draws a similar conclusion. Observing that Banquete lacks any relevance to the concrete reality c of Argentina, she speculates: "Pero ignorar la circunstancia hist6rica, lno es tal vez la mejor manera de repudiarla, de asentar una condena implicita y una desilusi6n profunda? Noes improbable, al fin, que la satira, la farsa, la incongruencia, el absurdo resulten del olvido en que se tuvo a Marechal durante tantos afios. Por eso El banquete [sic] es, en cierta medida, la obra de un «marginado social»" (Marecha1107). Implied in Coulson's conclusion is that Marechal was in a royal pout when he wrote Banquete. My reading of the novel finds sterile rhetorical and metaphysical buffoonery. The two conclusions, Coulson's and mine, are not at odds.

0 257

Chapter 11

Samuel Tesler's last word on the Apocalypse in Megafon o la guerra

Having written El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo, Leopoldo Marechal seems to

have got his obsession with apocalypse out of his system. His third novel, Megafon o la

guerra (1970), can be read with fruition only in the context of Argentina's recent history.

Although there are apocalyptic motifs in the text, the Book of Revelation is no longer an

omnipresent intertext. Megafon is concerned with historical transformation, but Marechal

opts to express this change with a metaphor likening the Argentine Republic to a snake

about to shed its old skin. 1 It is true, on the other hand, that the novel is informed by c political messianism, but the Messiah is only a secondary feature of apocalyptic literature

(Buttrick, Interpreter's Bible Xll 350b). The eponymous protagonist, Megaf6n, is a

messianic figure whose vision for Argentina has much more to do with Peronism than with

apocalypticism. Megajon as a novel therefore remains outside the purview of this study,

with the exception of one episode. This is the reappearance of "el ftl6sofo" Samuel Tesler

with his teaching of the Teoria y Practica de la Catastrofe.

It is strangely ironic that Samuel Tesler has now become a Christian. The

significance of this is clear in terms of the old Sibylline prophecy that prior to the end of

the world, "the Jews will be converted to the Lord [Jesus Christ], and 'his sepulchre will

be glorified by all.' In those days Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell with 0 confidence" (qtd. in McGinn 49). Thus the Millennium will be inaugurated. It is significant that the biblical quotation in this Sibylline text comes from the Old Testament 258

(Isaiah 11:10) rather than the New. Among the Christians, whose religion derives from

Judaism, there has always been an anxious longing for the Jews' acceptance of

Christianity. The conversion of the Jews played an important role in the thought of the

great Joachim de Fiore in the twelfth century; Joachim devoted to the problem an entire

book, Adversus ludeos (McGinn 134, 138, 317 n.58). With the expansion of the Roman

Church's imperial hegemony during the Middle Ages, this longing turned aggressive. As

sober a thinker as Roger Bacon (often considered a father of modem science), drawing on

accredited sources, casually places the Jews under the sign of Gog and Magog and the

Antichrist in his Opus Majus (1266) (McGinn 157). The Franciscan Spirituals, for their

part, nurtured the dream of a single totalitarian unity. 2 They held that after the death of c the Antichrist, the whole world (including the Jews) was to convert to the faith of Christ:

"There will be one flock and one shepherd" (McGinn 220-1). The Sibylline tradition

seems to be the soil out of which sprang the legend of the Wandering Jew, widely divulged

in the seventeenth century. According to the story, Ahauserus the Jew was condemned

personally by Jesus Christ to wander the earth until Judgment Day. Evidently, Ahauserus

is a symbol of the Jewish diaspora, and the legend satisfies the Christian need to justify

that historical circumstance, as well as the Christians' role in aggravating it. In

Marechal' s first novel, Adan Buenosayres alludes to this legend in his late-night

conversation with the Jewish philosopher, who vehemently denies that Jesus was the

Messiah. According to Adan, the Jews are suffering "la maldici6n del Crucificado," and 0 the Christian poet knows exactly how long Christ's curse will endure: "--Hasta que Ios judios reconozcan en masa que crucificaron a su Mesias --le contest6 Adan--. Entonces ... " 259

(.AB 361). And then, what? Read naively, Samuel's conversion symbolically means that

he, and by extension the Jewish people, have been "saved" and that the Millennium is

nigh. Concretely, the Jewish philosopher's redemption takes the form of having been

cured of his mental health problems. The fictional Leopoldo Marechal (who figures as a

character in Megafon) explains to Megaf6n what has become of the philosopher: "--Vive

aun ... Usted recordani que lo deje yo en el Infierno de la Soberbia. No bien equilibr6

alia su balanza, el noble fil6sofo volvi6 a la periferia." Samuel has "balanced his scale"

by accepting the Christian Gospel, thus correcting the spiritual error that cursed his life.

The philosopher's problems are not over, however. On his return from hell, Samuel "se

dio a la tarea de predicar los dos Testamentos en la via publica. Y lo encerraron por c locura mistica" (M 24). We are given to understand that this incarceration in a mental

asylum is unjust, for Megaf6n and his band liberate the philosopher so that he may

participate in their "war" to liberate the country. Samuel is not mad any more, it is

implied, because he has adopted a correct theological position and now recognizes the two

Testaments of the Christian canon.

It bears mentioning that there is a disturbing element in all of this. More than one

critic has accused Leopoldo Marechal of anti-Semitism, and their arguments are not

unconvincing. 3 Nevertheless, the same irony that has been a focus of this study undercuts

what at first appears to be crude prejudice and parochial sectarianism. Samuel Tesler,

whether he be Jew or converted Christian, is always the same irrepressible, madcap 0 metaphysician. Having received the "Good News," the philosopher fortunately does not change a whit. He has retained his Rabelaisian exuberance and his comically supercilious 260

attitude toward the world. Asked his opinion of the planet Earth and its inhabitants, he

responds: "Este mundo es una bola, y nosotros unos boludos, geometricamente hablando 11

computadoras! 11

his nominal religious correctness or incorrectness. The Christian cure for mental

imbalance is utterly inefficacious. Samuel's incorrigible eccentricity is proof against the

totalitarian project of universal Christian hegemony. Samuel's example refutes the noxious

that have grown up around the connection of the conversion of Jewry with the

Millennium. The importance of the theme of sectarian and racial prejudice

notwithstanding, Samuel's adherence to this or that religious denomination, from the point c of view of this study, is irrelevant. What interests us here is the philosopher's Teoria y Prdctica de la Catdstrofe and what this theory says about the Apocalypse and language.

It is unclear in the text whether Samuel's Teoria is a piece of written work, as

implied by its italicized title, or a doctrine that he retains mentally. It would seem that it

is the latter, for he declaims it orally like the Old Testament prophets to others.

Convinced that "antes del Juicio Final, era de rigor el advenimiento de un profeta que

aleccionase a los mulatos fmalistas" (M 136), the burlesque philosopher takes this

prophetic responsibility upon himself: "Haciendo un amilisis de sus contemponineos y

mirandose largamente en el espejo, el fil6sofo advirti6 que nadie, como el, alzaba una

estatura de profeta"

intellectual stature in the eyes of his prospective proselytes, Samuel elects to preach his

doctrine to the uncultured crew of a tugboat moored in the Rio de la Plata.

The content of Samuel's discourse resumes the priestly notions doctrines we have

seen in the first two novels. The theory of the great and small cycles of metahistory

punctuated by catastrophes is summed up in burlesque style; Samuel distinguishes between

"un cataclismo de media barba" and "un cataclismo de toda la barba" (M 139). He also

trots out the priestly doctrine of the creature vis-a-vis his authoritarian Creator. The

creature is obliged to be conscious of his Creator, to whom Samuel refers variously as "el

Padre," "el Ser Absoluto", "el Gran Arquitecto, "el Verbo" and "el Hijo." When the

creature defaults on this moral and metaphysical responsibility, catastrophe ensues. c Samuel repeats the prediction he made in Addn Buenosayres that the world will be destroyed by fire, suggesting quite directly a global nuclear war: "La desintegraci6n

at6mica libera temperaturas increibles: hermanos, a mi entender, este mundo sera

destruido por el fuego" (M 144). When will that be? he is asked. By way of a response,

Samuel cryptically cites the apocalyptic book of Daniel 7:25: "-«Un tiempo, dos tiempos

y la mitad de un tiempo.»"4 The philosopher has retreated from his earlier prophecy that

places the world's destruction by fire in an historical time-frame, i.e. at the end of this

century (AB. 151). From the time of chronos, the sly philosopher has withdrawn into the

time of kairos; without renouncing his gift of prophecy, Samuel has prudently veiled his

discourse with obscure references to priestly literature. Thus the meaning of his prophecy, c if there be any, is hidden in a thicket of words whose significance can never be pinned down. Samuel can play the role of prophet without having to say anything definite at all. 262

Clearly, the philosopher enjoys hamming it up for his uninstructed audience. He manages

to strike the imagination of these simple mariners: "En el duro silencio de sus auditores

el fil6sofo adivin6 con delicia un despunte de aquel terror necesario a una buena catarsis"

(M 142). It is evident that Samuel's prediction of the destruction of the world is pure

theatre.

Within this burlesque farce, nevertheless, one can discern a more or less serious

reference to the cycle of language modes discussed above in Chapter 3. One is alerted to

this level of meaning by what can be interpreted as a sign of intellectual good faith from

Samuel: he is not coy about saying straight out that the whole theological-metaphysical

construct of his discourse is an anthropocentric metaphor, though this point is lost on his c unsophisticated listeners. Samuel directly equates "el Padre" of the Christian Trinity with "la parte mas excelsa del hombre, vale decir ... su region intelectual ... su divino intelecto"

(M 141). This admission goes beyond the Neoplatonic doctrine that establishes

correspondences between the "above" and the "below," between the Divine Intellect and

the human intellect. Rather, Samuel makes it clear that the mind of man is the Madonna

/ntelligenza, as well as the "Father" of the world. Thus when Samuel goes on to talk

about the world as being a creature of the Father, he is referring to the language-world that

humans mentally inhabit and impose to some degree on their concrete environment. This

is made clear in the passage where Samuel recounts not his theory but his practice (the

second element of his doctrine's title) of apocalyptic catastrophe:

0 --Estoy en mi cama --prosigui6 Samuel--, y siento de pronto que los 263

metales, los ladrillos y las maderas estan ablandandose ami alrededor, encima y abajo. jSe agrieta el techo, se resquebrajan las paredes y oscila el piso: toda la casa esta por derrumbarse! Abandono corriendo mi habitaci6n, salgo a las calles y veo que Ios mono blocs ya se tambalean como borrachos antes de caer. Miro al cielo y busco las metaforas del Apocalipsis: jno, las estrellas no se desprenden arriba como los higos de una higuera! jSeria demasiado hermoso! Lo que veo en lo alto son explosiones de materia c6smica y una pulverizaci6n de atomos radioactivos. iHermanos, la poesfa tambien ha muerto! (M 140)

The last sentence, which at first glance looks like a non sequitur, is the key to Samuel's

discourse. In his cathartic practice of catastrophe, Samuel suffers the same intense

existential anxiety as Adan Buenosayres. As we saw above in Chapter 2, the poet's angst c was due to his failing relationship with Solveig, which in turn may be seen as a metaphor for the crumbling of his poetic-metaphysical language-world. Similarly, Samuel Tester,

who also lives by language, suffers the anxiety that his verbal fictions are transient,

unstable, subject to collapse at any moment. When this anxiety overcomes him, Samuel's

imagination, like Adan's, resorts to the images of the Apocalypse as a means of

representing his experience to himself, which in turn is a way of taking some control of

that experience and converting it into a catharsis. To his dismay, however, the poetry of

Revelation no longer works for him. Instead, his imagination is invaded by images that

have been produced by another language-world, that of descriptive language and twentieth­

century science. Hence his anguished cry: poetry too has died! In other words, one can

no longer mediate one's experience of reality through poetic language. In the novelistic c world of Leopoldo Marechal, Adan Buenosayres was the last man to be able to think and 264

feel naively through poetry.

This element of naivete is important, for it could be argued that Samuel's vision

of atomic explosions is just as poetic as the phantasmagoria conjured up by the seer of

Patmos. Indeed, the detonation of the nuclear bomb has become a well-worn topos of

mid-twentieth-century poetry. The crucial difference between Adan's and Samuel's

literary imaginations lies not in the nature of the imagery but in the attitude of the

conscious subject toward his "poetic" experience. When Adan was in the grip of intense

anxiety, his consciousness was imaginatively identified with the images of the Apocalypse.

By contrast, Samuel is burdened with a sense of critical distance from his vision, even in

the midst of his cathartic experience. He consciously looks for "las metaforas del c Apocalipsis": he is aware of the rhetorical status of those verbally produced images. Unlike Adan, he recognizes that language is mediating his sense of reality, as though he

were outside his own mind watching language at work. With this recognition, those poetic

images are lost to Samuel. Hence his nostalgia for them: once terror-inspiring, he

remembers them now as being beautiful. The image of atomic explosions, by contrast,

is ugly to Samuel. It is an image produced by the language that rules the contemporary

world and our collective psyche.

But if poetry and poetic language are dead, what of hieratic language? Samuel

Tesler continues to use (and abuse) metonymic language, but like Schultze, he does so

from a position of irony. The metatrope of irony allows him to re-appropriate the

tropological strategies informing the other modes of the metalinguistic cycle and to re­ 0 deploy those strategies subversively. His use of metonymy is in reality a form of 265

dissimulation. Samuel thus challenges the current hegemony of descriptive language, but

he does so not in order to supplant it with metonymic language, nor to overthrow science

in the name of "poetry. " Samuel's position is like that of the guerrilla fighter who fmds

himself confined to a mountainous enclave of shrunken epistemological possibilities. From

there, he conducts metaphysical, metalinguistic raids on the ruling empire of descriptive

language and science, camouflaged in burlesque dissimulation and armed with irony. The

goal is not to achieve ultimate victory but to remind the world of the precarious nature of

its fictions, lest they become rigid and repressive. For this reason, Samuel deliberately

keeps the significance of his utterance somewhat indeterminate, fraught with ambiguity

(and often humour); the signifiers point in shifting or contradictory directions, and in the c end they sputter out like sparks in a void.

This is exactly what happens to Samuel's Teoria y Practica de la Catdstrofe. After

the philosopher has announced the imminent end of the world by fire, Ber6n the cook

answers by announcing dinner, with the result that the plug is pulled out of Samuel's

verbal balloon:

--Sefi.ores --dijo--, con licencia del profesor y si todavia nos queda tiempo, ia la carga! Los asados estan listos. jGran Dios, era la hora de la verdad! iY que nos venian a nosotros con el fin del mundo y su coheteria de reventaduras at6micas? Cuchillo en mano, el fil6sofo y sus oyentes en plena catarsis avanzaron hasta la parrilla y la despojaron de sus frutas carnosas. [ ... ] Las dentaduras entraron en actividad: cortaban Ios incisivos, desgarraban Ios caninos y trituraban los molares. iPobres idiotas, el 0 mundo recien empieza! Hubo un alegr6n un3.nime cuando el piloto llen6 los vasos 266

con el tintillo de la costa y su picante sabor a uva chinche. (M 144)

Thus ends Samuel Tester's attempt to preach his Teorfa y Practica de la Catdstrofe. With

abundant Rabelaisian detail, the narrative voice of the fictional Leopoldo Marechal

underlines the contrast between carnal reality and the "elevated" themes of Samuel's mock­

sermon, favouring the former. All talk of the creation and destruction of the world is

empty blather when judged against the "frutas carnosas" of the brazier. And so the

Argentine novelist ironically disposes of the theme that has given him so much literary

mileage: "la hora de la verdad" is not the dies irae and the world's destruction by fire,

nor a Parousia and a new dispensation of the primordial Word. The last judgment of c apocalypticism is consummated at a cordial and mundane barbecue. Alternatively, to experience the simple pleasures of food and wine in the company of one's fellows is to live

in the Millennium.

Samuel Tesler's relationship with the members of the boat's crew can be read as

indicative of the shift in Leopoldo Marechal' s literary direction. The crazy philosopher

needs the company of these straightforward men:

Con la boca grasienta y los ojos que le chispeaban, Samuel Tesler admir6 a esos

hombres en solidez y tan ajenos a los fen6menos nucleares. "Padre --or6 en su alma,-- i.,C6mo dejarias caer en ellos la mano de tu rigor y no la de tu misericordia?" Y lagrime6 de ternura sobre medio chorizo ensartado en su tenedor. (M 144-5)

0 Only the "lector agreste" could take the philosopher's "prayer" and its priestly 267

condescension at face value. It is not the sailors who need the comfort of divine mercy.

The comically pathetic image of the greasy-mouthed philosopher blubbering over the

sausage impaled on his fork shows us that in reality Samuel is weeping with pity for

himself, as well as with relief that there are simple, solid people whose concerns are not

abstract but as concrete as meat and wine. Ironically, it is not the sailors but the

philosopher who has received a lesson in this episode. The mariners relieve Samuel of his

metaphysical preoccupation and direct his attention to the earthly and concrete. Likewise,

Marechal' s Megaf6n attempts to address the concrete reality of Argentina. From the

metalinguistic and metapolitical hermeticism of Banquete, the novelist passes to the plane

of the concretely political. c Nevertheless, Samuel Tesler is given the last word even in this third novel, which ends with his mock-beatific death-bed scene. In attendance are his friends, as well as the

fictional Marechal equipped with a tape-recorder. Asked to prophesy about the

approaching twenty-first century, the philosopher obliges with a last Rabelaisian gesture.

Taking the microphone, "lo ubic6 entre sus nalgas y le solt6 un pedo monumental que nos

dej6 aterrados: era un pedo barroco, exultante en escalas cromaticas, fugas y

contrapuntos." All present agree that "jamas habian oido en este mundo un flato de tanta

envergadura" (M 365). Samuel's last "word" is an outburst of flatulence, a last

carnivalesque gesture. The philosopher appears to be fully cured of his apocalyptic cares.

As though to underscore this point, the narrator concludes the scene by quoting one of the

philosopher's aphorisms: "«En la existencia universal no hay puntos finales --decfa c Samuel Tesler--: solo hay puntos suspensivos»" (M 366). There is no first or last Word, 268

only a succession of fictions that rise and fall as language grapples with reality.

NOTES

1. See M 15-18. The motif recurs throughout the text.

2. Jeremy Cohen, in his study on medieval anti-Judaism, finds that the thirteenth-century orders of mendicant Friars such as the Spirituals played a key role in fomenting virulent anti-Jewish feeling. Referring to Waiter Ullman, Cohen suggests that the mendicants "manifest the outlook of a society which one prominent historian of the Church has characterized as totalitarian" (16).

3. Noe Jitrik (42) attributes Adan Buenosayres's anti-Semitism to Marechal himself and his Catholic parochialism. Leonardo Senkman (13-14) delicately discusses the anti-Jewish sentiment as an incompletely extirpated Catholic prejudice in otherwise well-meaning liberal Catholics (Marechal and his milieu). Gabriel Saad analyses, and thoroughly vilifies, what he considers to be blatant anti-Semitism in various episodes of Adan c Buenosayres involving Jewish characters (245-48).

4. This bit of apocalyptic numerology is usually interpreted as meaning three and a half years, since this period of time, rendered into the corresponding number of months or days, is mentioned in several other passages in Daniel (Buttrick Vl466). John of Patmos continues the tradition. Three and half years is the period of time the two witnesses will prophecy (Rev 11 :2-3), as well as the duration that the celestial woman (symbolizing the Church) will pass hiding in the desert before the dragon is vanquished (Rev 12:6). Beyond the simple concept of chronological duration, the phrase "a time, two times, and half a time" must certainly bear as well some occult numerological significance, and the riddle was the subject of a great deal of post-biblical Rabbinical speculation (Buttrick, Interpreter's Bible XII 444).

0 269

Conclusion

Leopoldo Marechal's most important novel, Adcin Buenosayres (1948), is

significant beyond the sphere of matters Argentine. It is of universal literary interest for

the baroque brilliance of its parodic creativity. Its most far-reaching consequences derive

from the novel's parody of the totalizing narrative of apocalypse, so fundamental to

Western thought and literature. InAdcin Buenosayres, Marechal stands that paradigm on

its head. In the apocalyptic romance of redemption, Christ as the Divine Word redeems

the fallen and long-suffering Adam. Adan Buenosayres, on the contrary, does not find

redemption in such notions but rather ends up face to face with the Paleogogue, which lies c like the Beast in the bottomless pit. That language which, like Plato's ideas, pretends to represent the mold and ontic source of reality turns out to be a tissue of smoke, an

evanescent text emanating from the Paleogogue. The purely symbolic death of Adan,

"tejedor de humo," represents the death of linguistic innocence. Adan discovers to his

dismay that the smoky signifieds encoded in language are not identical with reality, much

as our human desire would have it so. Leopoldo Marechal does not share the innocence

of his protagonist; when he weaves with smoke, he employs the duplicitous language of

irony. Marechal is an ironist and a parodist, not a self-important prophet or an edifying

moralist. Any ostensible intention to "edify" is mined with irony. With the porous and

friable material of ironic language, this novelist builds an immense, baroque structure of

words and then reveals to us that his edifice has no foundation.

0 In order to appreciate how deep Marechal's irony runs in Adan Buenosayres, it is 270

essential to understand the narratorial attitude informing the main body of the novel. The

narrator of the "Pro logo indispensable" and of the first five of the novel's seven Books is

in fact a trickster. He lays traps for the reader in the prologue and sardonically challenges

him/her to see through his game. Thus, when he ostentatiously sets up a redemptive,

Christian ending to Adan' s ordeal at the end of Book Five, we must understand that the

novel's implied author, Leopoldo Marechal, is deliberately playing us false in a spirit of

irony. This becomes clear when the trickster narrator's contribution is considered within

the total economy of the novel. He retires at the end of Book Five; the rest of the novel

gives the lie to his false suggestion that Adan is redeemed by the apocalyptic Knight

Faithful and True, whose name is called the Word (Rev 19:13). 0 Marechal does not render the story of Adan's disillusionment with pathos. Adan cuts a foolish figure, and a fool cannot be a . Adan's very human folly leads

him to undergo a genuine existential and metaphysical crisis, but the young poet's drama

is more farcical than it is pathetic. Marechal heightens the humour of Adan' s plight by

repeatedly making parodic reference to the book of Revelation. Adan himself has

internalized this text and so he experiences his misfortune as the end of the world. By

bringing the apocalypse into his narrative, however, Marechal is not merely indulging in

burlesque hyperbole. Adan literally watches his fatuous metaphysical world being rolled

up like a scroll, just as happens to the sky in Revelation 6:14. Marechal is not just making

fun of his unhappy protagonist; his parody of Revelation deliberately centers on that

book's abundant writing metaphors in order to point up the way we construct our world

0 with words. The world thus constructed, of course, is fragile and ephemeral. In this 271

sense, the end of the world is always at hand, a state of affairs which the ironic Marechal

treats with Rabelaisian humour.

At a deeper level, the novel becomes an exploration of how we build the world

with words, an investigation of the fundamental rhetorical strategies informing our use of

language. In Book One of Adan Buenosayres, Marechal demonstrates through his

protagonist's interior monologue a series of three modes of language use. In this thesis,

these modes have been identified according to the nomenclature of Northrop Frye: poetic

language based on metaphor, hieratic language based on metonymy, and descriptive

language based on simile. The fourth, ironic, mode, as it is theorized by Hayden White,

completes the metalinguistic cycle. Irony is beyond Adan's competence but serves as c Marechal' s modus operandi. Besides showing performatively how the cycle of language works through Adan's

internal verbalizations, Marechal also suggests it by parodying Rene Guenon's cyclic

theory of metahistory, which postulates a descent from an original golden age to a corrupt

iron age ending in an apocalypse. One may infer that Marechal, linking historical cycles

and language as did Giambattista Vico, implicitly poses a golden age of poetry, a silver

age of priestly metaphysics, a bronze age of descriptive language, and an iron age of

irony. Marechal sends up the reactionary, authoritarian metaphysics of Guenon, but not

with the intention of satirically annihilating the Frenchman's ideas. He wishes rather, in

Margaret Rose's phrase, to "comically refunction" Guenon's material, i.e. to transpose its

significance and treat it from a different perspective. Marechal pokes fun at poetry and

0 Platonist metaphysics, subverts the positivist ethos of descriptive language, and celebrates 272

irony in the way he writes. Thus he ironically inverts the value scheme ordinarily

supposed in the paradigm that pines for a past golden era and deplores the present evil age.

Adan Buenosayres, in contrast to the novelist, is an anachronistic Neoplatonist who

naively believes in the golden age of poetry and metaphysics, opposing it to the dark age

of positivist science ruled by descriptive language. In Adan's estimation, his rival Lucio

Negri is the dark champion of the benighted modern age. Adan and Lucio compete for

the favours of Solveig Amundsen; though Lucio Negri triumphs, he too cuts a quite

inglorious figure in the novel. Lucio's minor success is not symbolic of any moral or

epistemological victory of what he stands for, whereas Adan's defeat clearly entails the

humiliation of his Platonizing tendencies. Marechal, assuming an ironic distance from his c protagonist, sets up a mock -apocalyptic struggle between the "good" of poetry and the "evil" of science, between "poetic rigour" and "scientific rigour." He shows them to be

two opposing rhetorical strategies, two antagonistic ways of creating the world with

language. Employing the strategy designated by D.C. Muecke as double irony, Marechal

lets the two conflicting world-views cancel each other out.

If Marechal appears to satirize scientism, following an old Romantic-Modernist

tradition, he gives this conventional posture a new twist. It is nothing new to condemn

the utilitarian values informing positivist science and to defend the "spiritual" values

represented in poetry. The nineteenth-century Symbolists in Europe dabbled in theosophy

and occultism, in part as a rhetorical protest against the official discourse, and that gesture

produced a strong echo in the literary life of the Buenos Aires. Likewise, the Surrealist

0 Andre Breton would have interested himself in the production of Rene Guenon precisely 273

because the latter was such an outre crank with his claim to be the initiate of an absolute

metaphysical orthodoxy. Guenon's equivocal appeal lies in his reactive heterodoxy, his

rejection of the official discourse of bourgeois civilization. Leopoldo Marechal, for his

part, fmds it convenient to take up Guenon' s doctrines and oppose them to the prevailing

Western ethos of his time. However, it would be a mistake to assume that Marechal is a

pious defender of the Frenchman's warmed-over prisca theologica. In Addn Buenosayres,

Marechal does not intend to condemn satirically a "false" discourse in terms of another

"true" one, but rather to pit ironically one against the other, to let one contaminate the

other. The exercise is not one of corrective satire but rather of ludic parody, though it is

true that Guenon's pretentiousness suffers a comic deflation as a result. Marechal is not c a partisan of theosophy, occultism or any other traditionalist "metaphysics," but rather employs them for his own ironic purposes.

Besides Adan Buenosayres the poet, two other characters are adepts of priestly

language: Samuel Tesler the "philosopher" and Schultze the "astrologer." The former,

who bombastically expounds Guenonian doctrine and predicts the apocalypse, is a

carnivalized version of the philosopher, the figure of the philosopher as clown. Schultze,

for his part, is a charming charlatan who, in the spirit of the avant-garde, playfully invents

outlandish worlds. The astrologer plays an important role in the novel as Adan's mentor.

The crucial difference between Schultze and his charge is that the astrologer knows he

invents with language, whereas Adan is language's dupe. Schultze manipulates words;

words deceive Adan. In his pose as the Neogogue and prophet of the Neocriollo, Schultze

0 deliberately parodies St. Paul's apocalyptic discourse on the "new man" without taking 274

himself seriously. Adan fatuously imitates Dante's Neoplatonism in deadly earnest. It is

Schultze' s role to teach Ad.An about the true status of language by leading him to the alpha

and omega of all language, the Paleogogue lying at the bottom of Cacodelphia.

Schultze proudly claims the hell of Cacodelphia as his own invention. On the one

hand, the trip through Cacodelphia is a carnivalized Last Judgment, whose emblematic

image is a merry-go-round painted with the figures of the Apocalypse. Schultze, acting

as Marechal' s proxy, calls to account all users of language by subjecting them to the

grotesque distortion of his visionary powers, a heady mixture of avant-garde esthetics and

the lore of occultism. On the other hand, the infernal journey becomes an exploration of

the politics underlying all rhetorical strategies. Schultze borrows the Platonic notion of c the Demiurge to designate himself supreme author of the Cacodelphian world and its creatures. But he is really the "demiurge" in Corax's sense of the word, i.e. a master of

rhetorical persuasion. When touring his own creation, Schultze' s own "creatures"

continually challenge his authority and he must repeatedly resort to his rhetorical prowess

in order to overcome them. Nevertheless, the groundlessness of Schultze's absurd

authoritarian posture becomes hilariously obvious. At the level of rhetorical politics --and

by extension that of politics tout court-- Marechal shows us that the creator/creature

dichotomy is an unstable one and may be inverted at any time. The "creator" or demiurge

of persuasion who subjects the other to his discourse does so at his --or her-- own peril.

For every authoritarian Nobodaddy there will arise in revolt a William Blake to denounce

him. With the episodes of the irascible dynamiters, Marechal couches this truth in a

0 parodic refunctioning of that apocalyptic structure called by Northrop Frye the culbute 275

generale. On the Day of Wrath, the oppressed will be avenged and turn the tables on their

oppressors. But in the Marechalian vision, their revolutions will never bring the New

Jerusalem. Upheaval is constant but will never end in a definitive configuration. The only

enduring reality is the Paleogogue, the blind slug of human desire and the texts of its

restless dreaming.

From another point of view, the logolatry of the book of Revelation is directly

subverted by the spectacle of Schultze's demiurgic antics. Neither Schultze nor anyone

else speaks with the authority of the Word, the rhetorical claims of John of Patmos

notwithstanding. In other words, there is no supreme Word, author of the world, but only

language serving a conflictive web of human needs and desires, dreams and ambitions. c In his second novel El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo (1965), Marechal begins by promising that Severo Arcangelo will lead us out of Cacodelphia and then proceeds

systematically to betray his pledge. The ostensible project of the authoritarian Severo

Arcangelo is to move back in time to a golden age or Eden, which in his trascendentalist

dialectic means also to move forward to the "Cuesta del Agua," an evident analogue of the

New Jerusalem. The crucial event, the Banquet itself, is left untold and its results are

quite inconclusive. The novel is modeled on the apocalyptic paradigm in that the narrative

moves teleologically toward an end that coincides with its textual ending. But the

eschatological desire evinced at the novel's beginning is frustrated in the end. Marechal's

burlesque parody of the book of Revelation's narrative style signals in advance the novel's

ironic ending: the end, the longed-for telos, turns out to be a vacuous nowhere.

0 Banquete is a strangely cold and barren text, in spite of its veneer of robust 276

hilarity. Even Marechal' s most sympathetic readers have not known how to take this

noveL Unlike Adtin Buenosayres, it is a text that seems to allow for no engagement with

any reality outside itself. The novel's irony is very heavy handed, exacerbated to such an

extent as to nip all significance in the bud. Rather than deflect meaning in an unexpected

direction, irony manages to cut off meaning at the level of the signifier and thus annul the

signifying power of language. Hence the conclusion arrived at in this dissertation:

through excessive irony, the novel erases its own text and achieves a sort of textual

apocalypse. More briefly, the novel is deliberately meaningless.

The chill sterility of Banquete is most striking in the novel's two-dimensional,

utterly dehumanized characters. As a group, they stand in marked contrast to the gallery c of sympathetic rogues and fools who populate the pages of Addn Buenosayres. There can be no doubt that in Banquete Marechal deliberately draws caricatures instead of characters.

It serves his ironic purpose to draw upon the stock types of the sainete; their presence

offsets and contaminates the priestly propaganda purveyed dramatically by the Banquet's

official Organization. But did he intend these shallow puppets to evince laughter, or was

their jarring inauthenticity meant to inspire our disgust? Maybe Graciela Coulson was

right in speculating that Marechal' s long proscription from Argentine intellectual life

affected him negatively. Perhaps the author of El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo was a

deeply embittered man, and his novel a hollow guffaw echoing his alienation from his

fellows.

Though of scant interest in itself, Banquete does serve to lay bare the whole

0 ideological apparatus of Guenon's metahistory, for the purpose of the Banquet's c 277 Organization is to demonstrate this body of priestly doctrine with didactic drama. Since

Marechal indicates at the outset that Banquete is a dialectical sequel to his first novel, one

may infer that the Guenonian material is an important part of the infrastructure of Adcin

Buenosayres and that the Platonist-apocalyptic metanarrative in which Guenon's work

finds its ground is fundamental to Marechal' s novelistic project. That metanarrative, as

I have tried to show, is parodied by Marechal, fruitfully in Adcin Buenosayres and barrenly

in Banquete.

Marechal's third novel, the posthumous Megaf6n o la guerra (1970), remains

outside the purview of this thesis, except for Samuel Tesler's "Teoria y pnictica de la

catastrofe." Samuel comes back to literary life as a born-again Christian, but the fact that c he has accepted the Christian Word into his heart has not altered his madcap character in the slightest. He is the same clownish philosopher whose bombast provokes everyone in

Adcin Buenosayres. Samuel delivers a speech rife with the topoi of priestly language and

evokes the spectre of an imminent apocalypse. But his absurd harangue is cut short when

a repast of greasy sausages and rustic wine is served. The generous fellowship of a crew

of simple sailors dissipates the phantasmagoria engendered by Samuel's discourse. The

plain banquet they share is concrete and material; it may bear some resemblance to the

agape of the primitive Christians, but it has nothing to do with the "marriage supper of

the Lamb" (Rev 19:9), nor with the parodic literary Banquet that plays off this apocalyptic

image.

The portrayal of Samuel Tesler as a clownish figure is one among several reasons

0 that have led some critics to accuse Leopoldo Marechal of anti-Semitism. In Megaj6n, it c 278 appears to be suggested that Samuel's mental health has been cured by converting to

Christianity, as though his problem all along had been his Jewishness. The myth that the

Jews are cursed for having crucified Christ and that the redemption of world depends on

their final conversion is one of the most sinister legacies of Christian apocalyptic. I would

argue, however, that Marechal carnivalizes the myth by parodying the discourse that

propagates it. In his first novel, the foolish Adan Buenosayres alludes to the same myth

as "la maldici6n del Crucificado" which will endure until the Jews acknowledge en masse

their guilt (AB 361). But it would be erroneous to assume that Marechal the novelist

shares Adan' s opinions. On the contrary, the novelist places his character at an ironic

distance and allows the poet's sanctimonious nonsense to be revealed as such. Not for c nothing does Adan symbolically die, while Samuel Tesler attends his funeral "exhibiendo un gran rosario de cuentas negras que manoseaba con ostentosa devoci6n" (AB 9). The

philosopher's buffoonery with the beads mocks Christian piety.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that Samuel Tesler is the most enduring of

Marechal' s personages. Though he establishes a degree of ironic distance between himself

and all his characters, the novelist is close in temperament to two of them, Schultze and

Samuel Tesler. (Adan Buenosayres is at the greatest critical distance from Marechal.)

Schultze is not only Adan's teacher but also the "author" of Cacodelphia; as such, he is

to a large extent, if not Marechal' s doppelganger, then at least his fictional vicar. Schultze

shares Marechal's audacious, parodic inventiveness, as well as the ludic spirit exemplified

in Macedonia Fernandez, the chosen precursor of the martinfierrista generation. Samuel

0 Tester, on the other hand, personifies what Marechal himself calls his Rabelaisian 0 279 "tremendismo" and his bombastic, ribald buffoonery. Of these two memorable figures,

Schultze and Tesler, only the philosopher survives the literary black hole of El Banquete

de Severo Arcangelo. Not only does Samuel resuscitate, but he is even given the last

"word" in Marechal's final novel. Megaj6n in fact ends with Samuel's death-bed scene.

The philosopher's crowning Rabelaisian joke is to pronounce his "last words" by loudly

breaking wind. The closing words of the text, however, are also Samuel's: "no hay

puntos finales ... solo hay punto suspensivos" (M 366). In denying the last period and

refusing the claim of the final Omega, these words might also stand as an epitaph to the

parodist of apocalypse, Leopoldo Marechal, whose own death must have followed closely

upon the redaction of this closing passage of his posthumous novel. In his attempt to come c to an arrangement with life through his verbal art, Marechal very nearly managed to die at the same time as the character who in the end was perhaps closest to his own heart.

To close this discussion, it may not be amiss to sketch out briefly how Marechal's

recycling of apocalyptic material compares with that of other twentieth-century novelists

from Spanish America and from Argentina in particular. To simply this task, one may

resort initially to two basic critical notions under which to group the fictional use of

apocalypse: writing the apocalypse to represent history (Lois Parkinson Zamora) and

writing the "everlasting gospel" of modernism (Frank Kermode). Both these critical views

are the result of studying literary fictions imbued with the apocalypticism of the Joachimite c tradition. The twelfth-century Joachim de Fiore projected the message of the book of c 280 Revelation onto history, and in so doing decisively influenced the development of the

Western notion of history (Bloomfield 308-9). Briefly, he envisaged history as a

succession of three ages corresponding to the persons of the Trinity. The first two ages,

those of the Father and the Son, have been completed. Joachim felt he was living on the

cusp of the third age, the dispensation corresponding to the Holy Ghost. For nearly eight

hundred years now, apocalyptic discourse has been speaking from that crucial juncture

between the old era and the new one about to dawn, revisioning the transition in countless

different times and contexts.

Lois Parkinson Zamora speaks of the myth of apocalypse as "both a model of the

conflictual nature of human history and a model of historical desire" (12). 1 Under this c perspective, one may place many Spanish American novels dealing with revolutionary change. InAlfilo del agua (1947), for example, Agustin Yafiez employs the apocalyptic

paradigm to lend narrative form to the profound change wrought by the Revolution on life

in provincial Mexico. El otofio del patriarca (1975) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and La

gue"a del fin del mundo (1981) by Mario Vargas Llosa are two more obvious examples

of the historico-apocalyptic model of fictional narration. In the two latter novels, the

ideology of socialist revolution in Latin America is present as an important subtext, which

Garcfa Marquez and Vargas Llosa treat from opposite political points of view. 2 The cult

of revolution in modem times is the heir to the millennialist heresies that sprang up in the

apocalyptic climate of the late Middle Ages, and as such has found fertile ground in Latin

America. This phenomenon is in turn reflected in literature; thus, in the Spanish

0 American novel, revolution and apocalypse often go hand in hand, in varying rhetorical c 281 configurations. Marechal, however, is not writing about revolution.

Another important critical perspective, developed by Frank Kerrnode in his article

"Apocalypse and the Modem," recognizes the apocalyptic element inherent in modernism.

Kerrnode finds that this element is bound up with the notion of the "everlasting gospel"

mentioned in Revelation 14:6, a verse extensively glossed by Joachim de Fiore (88). In

the monk's view, a third world-epoch about to begin will require a new gospel, just as the

first two eras were the respective dispensations of the Old and New Testaments. In

Kerrnode's view, the project of literary modernism is to write the everlasting gospel and

reveal the new age to itself. The typical modernist writer, to paraphrase Kerrnode,

separates himself from the herd and assumes the esthetic posture of the artist as prophet c of the Holy Spirit, a pose only faintly tinged with irony. Then, splendidly isolated in the lucidity of his own imagination, the writer bears witness to the collapse of the world,

while from his pen issues, in words of fire, the text of the everlasting gospel (93ft).

In Argentina, this modernist ethos puts the fire into Roberto Arlt' s novels Los siete

locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931), and it still prevails, a bit shabby and shop-worn

by the end, in Emesto Sabato's trilogy comprising El tunel (1948), Sobre heroes y tumbas

(1961), and Abaddon el exterminador (1974). The same exalted spirit is also strong,

though substantially tempered by irony, in Julio Cortazar's Rayuela (1963). Roberto Arlt,

utterly without humour, manages with the sheer violent intensity of his prose to convince

us of the reality of apocalypse as a socio-psychological phenomenon in the urban world

as it is experienced by the marginalized. Emesto Sabato is at his best when giving voice c to the visionary psychosis of Fernando Vidal de Ios Olmos, whose incandescent lucidity c 282 justifies the novelist's invocation of apocalyptic images better than do Sabato' s historical

speculations. Cortazar's Horacio Oliveiro actively seeks revelation and longs for his

utopian "kibbutz of desire." Rayuela manages at times to combine lyricism with playful

wit to create astonishing esthetic configurations; an appreciative reader could be forgiven

for considering certain passages of Cortazar' s great novel as being textual shards of some

everlasting gospel. Leopoldo Marechal does not partake of the exaltation of his literary

compatriots. His characters are not vehicles for conveying existential passion; they are

instead either self-conscious talking heads (Schultze), histrionic provocateurs (Samuel

Tesler) or risible ghosts (Adan Buenosayres). Only Cortazar has developed a sense of

irony that comes near to Marechal's, but the author of Rayuela invests his protagonist with c his own awareness. Whereas Adan Buenosayres is innocent of Marechal' s irony, Horacio Oliveira is burdened with an ironic sense of the nature of language. Adan the poet is a

victim of language and goes like a lamb to the slaughter; Horacio the maverick intellectual

struggles to free himself from words --"perras negras," he calls them, "hormigas

voraces ... Logos,jaute eclatante!" (484-5)-- and to disentangle his consciousness from the

cobwebs of rancid signifieds accumulated over the centuries. In Coruizar, one might say,

Arlt's passion meets Marechal's irony.

Neither of these critical approaches, then, can properly account for the specificity

of Leopoldo Marechal's treatment of apocalypse, for he writes neither apocalyptic history

nor the modernist gospel. True, a serious attempt could be made to relate Peronist

ideology to the historico-apocalyptic content of Marechal's novels (Megaf6n in particular),

0 but such an investigation would likely yield inconclusive results, in part because of c 283 Peronism's ideological inconsistencies and the divergencies that have fragmented the

Peronist movement. But Marechal qua novelist is much more interested in "metahistory"

than in history. He is temperamentally incapable of presenting a coherent historical

scheme without veering off into burlesque parody. (Even Megaf6n is heavily overlaid with

"metaphysical" phantasmagoria.) History, that story which by consensus we consider to

be the real story and which many of us confuse with reality itself, is for Marechal a

Cacodelphia of competing discourses, none of which he takes seriously. The apocalyptic

ideologies of revolution are nothing more than material to be parodied.

On the other hand, Marechal, in spite of his avant-garde predilections, is curiously

distant from the modernist ethos as it is evidenced in his fellow Argentines. The reason c for this may be that the apocalyptic narrative with which he works is not primarily the Joachimite version but the a-historical, theological interpretation of the book of Revelation.

The early Church Fathers Origen and Augustine were the first to take the chiliasm out of

Christianity and to read Apocalypse as a spiritual allegory about the journey of the

individual soul. It is their de-politicized, non-eschatological version of Revelation, the

soul's voyage to the City of God, that underwrites the fictional universe of Addn

Buenosayres. That structure is evoked only to be undermined by irony. Adolfo Prieto has

pointed out that Addn's internal structure is forged from Catholic theology. Suppress the

latter, Prieto writes, and the novel's ordered world will dissolve into chaos (34). But is

this not Marechal' s intention? He uses the defective building materials of recycled

theology to erect a structure whose integrity is rotten with irony, and then steps back to

0 watch it fall down to the ground, celebrating the spectacle with Rabelaisian hilarity. To c 284 use Marechal' s own metaphor, he shows the allegory of the soul's apocalyptic journey to

the City of God to be a text woven from smoke, which in turn he parodically inscribes into

his own, ironic, texts.

This does not mean that Marechal wishes satirically to attack Catholic theology.

His purpose is more general: to point up the workings of the metonymic language that

produces theology, the language of revelation. The tropological strategy of this linguistic

mode, the reversal of cause and effect, makes possible its rhetorical claim for the a priori

reality of the things that it invents. Thus, Marechal's parody targets not Catholic theology

but the Platonist-apocalyptic metanarrative in which it is grounded. Nor does this mean

that he rushes to embrace the truth of the Aristotelian-scientific discourse couched in c descriptive language. On the contrary, to this discourse --especially in its positivist manifestation-- he brings the same subversive irony to bear, making the petizo Bernini its

feckless champion: the overwhelming hegemony of modem positivism is sustained by

nothing more than the arguments of a pipsqueak.

One more notable Argentine must be mentioned. Jorge Luis Borges is another

profoundly ironic writer who shares much more with Marechal than the latter would have

liked to admit. 3 Though their styles are polar opposites --Marechal' s tremendismo and

sprawling, baroque novels contrasting with Borges's sly understatement and minimalist

short stories-- they are one and the other the legitimate heirs of their common mentor,

Macedonio Fernandez. Both play with writing, both practise parody extensively.

Marechal' s hilarious overstatement and Borges' s ironic understatement are different means

0 to the same end: to parody metaphysical discourse in order to underscore the problematic 285 c 1 nature of language. Borges S Tlon, the land where metaphysics is considered a branch of

fantastic literature (Ficciones 24), is a place where Schultze would feel quite at home. 4

Marechal's Don Ecumenico, if he ever recovers from his catastrophic bout of verbal

indigestion, might comfortably retire to Barges's "Utopia de un hombre cansado," whose

inhabitants, living sub specie aeternitatis, abhor the multiplication of unnecessary texts

(Libra de arena 71). The fictional universes of the two Argentine confabulators coincide

in many points.

Borges gains the ascendancy over his compatriot for his sure instinct in the games

of discursive reason. It is Barges who elegantly pins down the problem of language in

terms of the old debate between philosophical realism and nominalism, Plato and Aristotle. c Marechal is incapable of serious rational discourse, and his essays are an embarrassing joke. He can, however, demonstrate this same old philosophical controversy through the

monologues and conversations of his characters. Whereas Marechal's writing is

performative, tracing out metalinguistic patterns to be apprehended by the reader, Borges

has complete intellectual control over his material. Thus Barges is his own best critic;

Marechal, unfortunately, becomes his own worst enemy when he attempts literary self­

criticism. The irony in Barges's fictions is always pointed and precise, its bifurcations

neatly plotted. Marechal' s irony, for its gestura! hyperbole, tends toward nebulous

ambiguity, and his Addn Buenosayres will always be open to reinterpretation. If Borges

is the priest of irony, then Marechal is an inspired layman, a singer of opera buffa

delivering the ironic apocalypse. 0 c 286 NOTES

1. This concept serves Parkinson Zamora, in her Writing the Apocalypse, to launch discussions, under various perspectives, of the work of several novelists from the United States and Spanish America. The latter include Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes.

2. Their political difference is reflected in the narrative strategies of the two novelists. In El otoiio del patriarca, Garcia Marquez sets up the pueblo (the common people) as the chief narrator and privileges their point of view. The people's historical desire is fulfilled when the tyrannical patriarch dies: his corrupt world comes to an end and they achieve liberation. The story could stand as a parable of the Cuban Revolution, which Garcia Marquez has always firmly supported. La guerra del fin del mundo is narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator. This strategy reflects the distance mediating between Vargas Llosa and his material: a rebellion in nineteenth-century Brazil, anachronistically inspired in a millennialist cult of medieval stamp. By introducing an anarchist into the story, Vargas Llosa can compare and contrast pre-modem apocalypticism with modern leftist ideology, much to the detriment of the latter. Vargas Llosa, of course, has been critical of the Castro regime ever since the Padilla case in 1974 and has repented of his early Communist beliefs. The two famous novelists find themselves on opposite sides of an ideological divide, and their respective ways of handling the politics of apocalypse c reflect this difference.

3. Noe Jitrik protested, and with good reason, at the portrayal of Borges as the intellectually deficient Luis Pereda in Addn Buenosayres (44). Marechal resented Borges for political reasons (they were on opposite sides of the Peronist divide), and no doubt Borges' s enormous success, as opposed to Marechal' s relative obscurity and marginalization, did not help matters.

4. It is a remarkable coincidence that in this , "Tl6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Borges mentions Xul Solar (Ficciones 21), the avant-garde figure from real life on whom Schultze is supposedly based.

0 0 287 WORKS BY LEOPOLDO MARECHAL

Adan Buenosayres. 1948. Col. Narrativas . 14a ed. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1992.

Adan Buenosayres. Ed. Pedro Luis Barcia. Chisicos Castalia 210. Madrid: Castalia, 1994.

Antologfa poetica. Col. Austral 941. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1969.

Antologfa poetica. Selecci6n y pr6l. Alfredo Andres. Buenos Aires: Flor, 1969.

El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo. 1965. 9a ed. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1985.

La batalla de Jose Luna. Col. Letras de America 3. Santiago de Chile: Universitaria, 1970.

Cuademo de navegacion. Col. Perspectivas. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1966. c Descenso y ascenso por la belleza. 1939. Buenos Aires: Citerea, 1965. Megafon, o la guerra. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1970.

El poema de Robot. Buenos Aires: Americalee, 1966.

"Poesia religiosa espafiola." Sur 49 (Oct. 1938): 63-65.

CRITICISM ON MARECHAL

Andres, Alfredo, reportaje y antologia. Palabras con Leopoldo Marechal. Buenos Aires: Carlos Perez, 1968.

Barcia, Pedro Luis. "Introduce ion biografica y critica." Adtin Buenosayres. By Leopoldo Marechal. Clasicos Castalia 210. Madrid: Castalia, 1994. 9-138.

Barreiro, Graciela del Carmen. "Nota sabre Adan Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal." XVII Congreso del Instituto Intemacional de Literatura lberoamericana. Madrid: Cultura Hispanica del Centra lberoamericano de Cooperaci6n, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1978. 1049-1066.

0 Barros, Daniel. Leopoldo Marechal, poeta argentino. Col. Hombres y Sus Ideas 7. 0 288 Buenos Aires: Guadalupe, 1971.

Benavides, Washington. "Indice epis6dico y tematico del Addn Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal." Leopoldo Marechal et al. Interpretaciones. 85-159.

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