Copyright by Nicolas Matthew Poppe 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Nicolas Matthew Poppe Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Assembling Place: Buenos Aires in Cultural Production (1920-1935) Committee: Nicolas Shumway, Supervisor Leopoldo Bernucci Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba José Manuel Pereiro Otero Leo Zonn Assembling Place: Buenos Aires in Cultural Production (1920-1935) by Nicolas Matthew Poppe, M.A., B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2009 Dedication To my family, but most of all to my dear parents Acknowledgements Delineating the influence of the intellectual and personal relationships that helped me realize this project— both mentally as an assemblage of ideas and materially as a text, itself a complex assemblage—is an impossible task. As Borges reminds us in the story “El congreso”, “Las palabras son símbolos que postulan una memoria compartida.” In many ways, this project is the materialization of words and ideas that belong neither to me nor to others. I would, however, be remiss to not take the opportunity to demonstrate my profound debt to a number of people. Without the support of my dissertation director, Nicolas Shumway, I cannot imagine arriving at the place in which I am today. Additionally, I am deeply grateful to the members of my dissertation committee— Leopoldo Bernucci, Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, José Manuel Pereiro Otero, and Leo Zonn— for their impact on me. Not only has my thinking been shaped, but so has my trajectory through life. I cannot adequately express my appreciation. Nor do I feel myself capable of conveying the ways in which others have helped me. To do so, would be overly reductive. Despite this, I would like to show my appreciation to Rocío del Águila, Jutta Albus, Jossianna Arroyo Martínez, Alanna Breen, Pearl Brilmyer, Steve Byrd, Cristina Carrasco, Marcelo Casarin, Leo Chiachio, Lilian Contreras-Silva, Christian Cousins, Lori Czerwionka, Enrique Fierro, Patricia Fischer, v Francisco Foot Hardman, Jorge Garcia, Roy Germano, Karla González, Jacqueline Henkel, Mónica Landro, Jennifer Lang, María Elena Legaz, Naomi Lindstrom, Joseph Mankin, Erica Martínez, Daniel Mellone, Justin Ohrenberger, Dan Olson, Joseph Palis, Roxana Patiño, Joe Pierce, Renata Ponte, Marina Potoplyak, Brian Price, Karyn Rayburn, Paolo Ricci, Laura Rodríguez, César Salgado, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Miguel Santos Neves, Stephanie Rosen, Jillian Sayre, Ryan Schmitz, Scott Spinks, Mónica Vallin, and Alejandra Zambrano. Finally, this project would not be what it is without spaces and places. It was inspired by or developed in Austin (Benson Latin American Collection, Caffé Medici, Clarksville, Flightpath Coffeehouse, Green Muse Café, Harry Ransom Collection, Perry- Castañeda Library, Progress Coffee, and Once Over Coffeebar), Boston (Copley Place), Buenos Aires (Café Banderín, Congreso, De la Mancha Libros, El Gato Negro, Florencio, La línea A, and La Puerto Rico), Granville (Denison University, River Road Coffeehouse, and West Maple), México D.F. (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), San Antonio, and Washington (Mount Ranier National Park, Puyallup, and Seattle). vi Assembling Place: Buenos Aires in Cultural Production (1920-1935) Publication No._____________ Nicolas Matthew Poppe, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2009 Supervisor: Nicolas Shumway In works of cultural production, interpretations of the built, natural, and social environment engage a hierarchy of readings of place. Formed by a totality of interpretations—accepted/unaccepted, dominant/subordinate, normal/abnormal, and everything in between—this hierarchy of readings frames place as a social understanding. Interpretations of place, therefore, are social positionings: kinds of individual delineations of the meaning of place as a social understanding. Collectively, these social positionings compose and comprise our understanding of the meaning of a place. In this study, I examine the different ways in which the understanding of Buenos Aires as a place shapes and is shaped by the avant-garde urban criollismo of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry of the 1920s, the five plays of Armando Discépolo’s dramatic genre of the grotesco criollo, Robert Arlt’s dark and portentous binary novel Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas (1929/1931), and three early Argentine sound films [Tango! (Mogila Barth 1933), Los tres berretines (Equipo Lumiton 1933), and Riachuelo (Moglia Barth 1934)]. To get at the mechanisms that drive the interaction between these works of cultural production, which are social positionings, and the social understanding of Buenos Aires as a place, I draw vii from Manuel De Landa’s notions of assemblage theory and non-linear history. Wholes such as porteño society of the 1920s and 1930s are assemblages of an almost limitless number of parts whose functions within the greater entity are not always clear. Place, therefore, is an assemblage whose meaning is made up of indeterminable interpretations of space. It is also a non-linear social understanding in that its meaning is irreducible to its components (i.e. social positionings). The mutual interactions and feedback within assemblages such as Buenos Aires are indicative of how meaning is ever changing through processes of destratification, restratification, and stratification in its components, including Borges’ early poetry, Discépolo’s grotesco criollo, Arlt’s Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas, and the films Tango!, Los tres berretines, and Riachuelo. viii Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................1 Place and Buenos Aires in Argentine Cultural Production (1920-1935)................1 Space and Place in Cultural Production........................................................3 Place as an Assemblage, a Non-Linear Social Understanding ......................9 Assembling Buenos Aires..........................................................................14 Chapter One.......................................................................................................21 Dwelling and the Avant-Garde Urban criollismo of Jorge Luis Borges’ Early Poetry ..................................................................................................................21 Dwelling: A Metaphysical Sense of Place..................................................26 Dwelling and Buenos Aires in Borges’ Early Poetry..................................31 Porteño Interiors...............................................................................34 Blurred Spatializations......................................................................40 Out and About in Buenos Aires.........................................................44 Dwelling and “La fundación mitológica de Buenos Aires”................56 Outside Buenos Aires ................................................................................61 Dwelling in Extra-Spatial Poems ......................................................62 Mirrored Images: Buenos Aires | Other Places ..................................67 Dwelling in Buenos Aires..........................................................................72 Chapter Two ......................................................................................................75 A Disintegrative Sense of Place: Armando Discépolo’s grotesco criollo ............75 Miguel and the Betweeness of Place in Mateo (1923)................................80 Saverio and Topophobia in El organito (1925) ..........................................90 Place Lost: Promise and Failure in Stéfano (1928)...................................100 Home Fragmented: the Conventillo, Place, and Social Mores in Cremona (1932) .......................................................................................................111 Affective Displacement in Relojero (1934)..............................................120 Place, Perception, and Experience in the grotesco criollo ........................128 ix Chapter Three ..................................................................................................131 Buenos Aires, Fissured: Place in Arlt’s Los siete locos / Los lanzallamas.........131 The Two Novels of Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas: Erdosain, the Astrologer, and Perspectives of Place................................................................137 Erdosain: Projection, Place, and Humilliation .................................140 The Astrologer: Place, Power, and Simulacrum ..............................156 Perspectives of Place and the Two Novels of Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas............................................................................166 Buenos Aires, Fissured ............................................................................167 Chapter Four ....................................................................................................170 Siteseeing the Modern Metropolis: Buenos Aires in Early Sound Films............170 Siteseeing in Tango!, Los tres berretines, and Riachuelo................174 Buenos Aires, donde Tango! nació: The Dawn of the Sound Film ...........177 Public and Private Space in Tango!.................................................181 Inside/Outside the Metropolis: From the Margin to the Center to the Margin ...................................................................................188