View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IUScholarWorks CRITICAL DISAGREEMENTS: CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN THE ARGENTINE NOVEL Matthew Steven Johnson Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University May 2019 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee _____________________________________ Patrick Dove, Ph.D. _____________________________________ Anke Birkenmaier, Ph.D. _____________________________________ Alejandro Mejías-LópeZ, Ph.D. _____________________________________ William Rasch, Ph.D. _____________________________________ Estela Vieira, Ph.D. December 5, 2018 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my director, Patrick Dove, for his support throughout this process. He has been generous with his feedback and has carefully read my chapter drafts despite their often imposing length. I have learned important lessons about brevity and organiZation while writing this dissertation, and I thank him for being an ever-patient reader as I was learning those lessons. My committee members have also provided crucial support, both emotional and intellectual. I thank Alejandro Mejías-LópeZ, Anke Birkenmaier, William Rasch, and Estela Vieira for their ideas and encouragement in seeing this project through. I also thank my friends, colleagues, and professors in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for their help through the years. Justin Knight, Gaëlle Le CalveZ, and Tamara Mitchell read portions of this dissertation and provided feedback, for which I am grateful. A great number of additional people, including faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and staff members in my department and across the campus have contributed in both small and large ways to this dissertation. I wish to thank them all, even if their names are not listed here. At the institutional level, fellowships from the Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) program and from the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences provided financial support and gave me time to focus on my research. Travel grants from my department and other entities on campus have also allowed me to travel to present my work. I cannot imagine completing this dissertation without the support of my family. My parents, Steve Johnson and Jennifer Deam, and my sister, Verity Johnson, have provided untold help and encouragement through the years. Finally, my partner Rachel Kirby has given me her endless love, support, and patience. I could not have done this without her, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart for always being there for me. iii Matthew Steven Johnson CRITICAL DISAGREEMENTS: CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN THE ARGENTINE NOVEL Critical Disagreements contributes to the re-thinking of aesthetic modernity in Latin America by studying the literary projects of three foundational Argentine novelists: Macedonio FernándeZ, Roberto Arlt, and Ricardo Piglia. It works from an initial opposition between two prominent narratives used in the historiography of modernism in the arts: a narrative of autonomiZation of art from life, in which modernism is driven by the impulse of purifying itself of external influence, and a narrative of reintegration of art with life, in which the principal objective of modernism is to lay bare, overcome, or erase the gap separating art from everyday social intercourse. While studies of modernism often begin by proposing that either one or the other of these narratives constitutes the primary impulse guiding the historical process of artistic modernism, my dissertation maintains them in a relation of constitutive tension. It proposes that modernism is guided by a double imperative that takes the form of a paradox: art must become autonomous; art must become one with life. Working from this basic thesis, my dissertation re- reads the works of the two most significant Argentine novelists of the early 20th century (Macedonio and Arlt), as well as the reception of their works by writers of later generations, showing how their works navigate this paradox and resist reducing the relationship between art and life to an either/or question of autonomiZation or reintegration. In recent scholarship in Latin American literary studies, increasingly strident assertions of art’s essentially non-autonomous relation to contemporary life have repeatedly been challenged by critical perspectives that continue to insist that, in the words of German philosopher Theodor Adorno, “art’s autonomy is irrevocable” (1). Critical Disagreements traces a genealogy of these iv divergent understandings, using a revision of the literary history of Argentina to show how the relationship between autonomy and integration has been constitutive of the historical movement of modernism itself. v Table of Contents Introduction: Critical Disagreements ...................................................................................... 1 The Argentine Novel, from the 1920s Avant-Gardes to the Present .......................................... 7 General Theoretical HoriZon: Jacques Rancière and the Aesthetic Regime of Art .................. 18 Interlude: Roberto Arlt in the Aesthetic Regime ...................................................................... 24 Chapter 1: Art, Life, and the Museum of the Novel: Macedonio Fernández’s Avant-Garde Poetics .................................................................................................................................. 33 “Maximalist” ModerniZation, Artistic autonomy, and its consequences .................................. 38 The Conquest of Buenos Aires: The “Avant-garde” plot of Macedonio’s Museo .................... 53 The second plot of the Museo: the autonomiZation of the Macedonian novel .......................... 68 Conclusion: Macedonio’s paradoxical emplotment of autonomy and heteronomy .................. 97 Chapter 2: Cinema and Simulation in the Novels of Roberto Arlt ....................................... 106 Ambivalent Enchantments: The Argentine Novelist in the Age of Cinema ........................... 111 Cinema’s place in Arlt’s novels: Literature and the Cinematic Way of Seeing ..................... 117 Arlt’s Moviegoers: Cinematic Bovarism in his Four Novels .................................................. 127 Conclusions: Arlt and Flaubert; cinema, simulation, and madness ........................................ 154 Chapter 3: Los dos Piglias: From a Revolutionary Avant-Garde to a “Postmodern” Conspiracy ......................................................................................................................... 169 For a revolutionary avant-garde, a revolutionary Roberto Arlt .............................................. 183 “Homenaje a Roberto Arlt”: literature and the limits of the ideological gaZe ........................ 195 ¿Hay una historia? Respiración artificial, from the cited statement to the cited relato ......... 206 “Hay que construir un complot contra el complot”: Piglia’s “Postmodern” Theory of the Conspiracy ............................................................................................................................... 214 La ciudad ausente : The NietZschean conspiracy of Macedonio FernándeZ .......................... 223 Part I: Macedonio’s NietZschean machine .......................................................................... 229 Part II: Elena’s NietZschean delirium .................................................................................. 236 Part III: Impulses, phantasms, simulacra, and the NietZschean “economy of the soul” ..... 240 Part IV: Piglia’s neo-Macedonian conspiracy, or, Conspiring against Neoliberalism ........ 247 Conclusion: On the “when” of autonomy in the cycle of artistic production ......................... 253 Conclusion: Once Again, in a Borgesian Key ..................................................................... 259 “RadicaliZed Aristotelianism”: Borges in the Aesthetic Regime of Art ................................. 262 vi Piglia: From Macedonio and Arlt to Borges, and back again (and again) .............................. 275 Final remarks: The Argentine novel in the aesthetic regime of art ......................................... 281 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................ 284 Curriculum Vitae vii Introduction: Critical Disagreements For decades, the historiography of modernism in the arts was dominated by a narrative of autonomiZation: in modernism, each art, it was thought, progressively dedicates itself to pursuing the intrinsic qualities of its medium, autonomiZing itself from the other arts and from the prosaic content of everyday life. Painting pursues the essence of painting, poetry the essence of poetry, and so on. The pursuit of abstraction in abstract expressionist painting and Arthur Schoenberg’s invention of the twelve-tone technique of musical composition can be understood as landmarks in this process, as can Vicente Huidobro’s poetic works, which in the words of Jorge SchwartZ carry out a journey from the referent to the sign, “[negando] la poesía imitativa y de cuño referencial … para incorporar el referente dentro de un sistema poético autónomo” (33).