The Ironic Apocalypse in the Novels of Leopoldo Marechal (Monografías A)

Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 183

THE IRONIC APOCALYPSE IN THE NOVELS OF LEOPOLDO MARECHAL Leopoldo Marechal is a precursor of both the Spanish American nueva novela and the Argentine novísimos, but traditionally he has been read as a Christian apologist. This study finds instead that Marechal’s novels parody the grand narratives of religion and metaphysics. Close readings of Adán Buenosayres (1948), El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) and Megafón, o la guerra (1970) show that these novels radically subvert the teleological notions underpinning authoritarianism in both religion and politics, supporting instead a profoundly democratic cultural politics. This new critical perspective on Marchal’s novelistics throws light on his relevance to contemporary Argentine culture. NORMAN CHEADLE teaches in the Department of Modern Languages, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario.

NORMAN CHEADLE

THE IRONIC APOCALYPSE IN THE NOVELS OF LEOPOLDO MARECHAL

TAMESIS

© Norman Cheadle 2000 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2000 by Tamesis, London ISBN 1 85566 070 9

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cheadle, Norman, 1953– The ironic apocalypse in the novels of Leopoldo Marechal/ Norman Cheadle. p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografias ; 183) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–85566–070–9 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Marechal, Leopoldo, 1900–1970 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Politics in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ7797.M26 Z624 2000 863 – dc21 99–086336

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irony, parodry, satire . . . . . . . . Apocalypse in history and literature Problems in Marechalian criticism .

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1 1 4 9

2. Adán Buenosayres: parodic Revelation . . . . . . . Diremptive structures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beginnings and end(ing)s, prologue and epilogue Authors and (unreliable) narrators . . . . . . . . Adán’s personal apocalypse . . . . . . . . . . .

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18 19 23 29 31

3. Metahistory and the cycle of language . . . . . . . . Apocalyptic metahistory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The cycle of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modes of language in Adán’s interior monologue . Ironic motifs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adán’s poetry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adán’s poetics: Platonism and vanguardismo . . . Nominalism and realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The book of the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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41 41 45 48 55 58 63 67 70

4. Light against Darkness: poetry versus science Book Two: the tertulia . . . . . . . . . . . Book Three: adventures in Saavedra . . . . Schultze intervenes . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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74 76 78 82

5. Schultze and “El viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia” . Schultze as Adán’s teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cacodelphia: The Last Judgment as carnival. . . . . . . Rhetorical politics in Cacodelphia . . . . . . . . . . . . Mise en abyme: the story of Don Ecuménico . . . . . . The Paleogogue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6. Textual apocalypse: El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo . Metahistory: reprise and ricorso . . . . . . . . . . . Symposium as sainete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrés Papagiourgiou’s vision . . . . . . . . . . . .

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122 123 133 141

7. Coda and conclusion: Samuel Tesler’s last word in Megafón, o la guerra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

PREFACE This book is the result of what began as an investigation into the various ways the New Testament Apocalypse has been inscribed into Argentine narrative. It became immediately obvious that Leopoldo Marechal’s “apocalyptic” novels were strikingly different in tone and intent by comparison with the work of other Argentine novelists such as Roberto Arlt, Ernesto Sábato, and Eduardo Mallea, all of whom invoke apocalyptic motifs to convey themes of crisis and disaster in society and the world at large. In other words, these novelists use apocalypse in what must be called a conventional way, in accord with the “great code,” as Northrop Frye calls the typological rhetoric bequeathed us by the Christian bible. Marechal, by contrast, employs the heavy artillery of apocalypse in apparently banal contexts, evidently with ironic intent. Just how deep Marechal’s irony cuts and what it means is the question this study attempts to address. But is it justifiable to devote a monograph to the novels of Leopoldo Marechal? Marechal is not well known outside Argentina, though many critics have acknowledged – briefly, sometimes begrudgingly – his importance as a precursor of the nueva novela of the world-famous “boom” generation of Spanish American novelists. However, his influence extends beyond the heights achieved by the Spanish American novel in the sixties and seventies, and for this reason Marechal must be of more interest than ever. Ricardo Piglia, for example, one of the foremost writers in contemporary Argentina, includes Leopoldo Marechal among a pantheon of only three other literary forbears who, in his words, constitute “nuestra verdadera tradición” (Ficción y política 102). (The others are Macedonio Fernández, Roberto Arlt, and Jorge Luis Borges.) It is instructive that Piglia should choose Marechal as a precursor. Piglia’s critical and theoretical sophistication, as well as his political orientation, should be enough to alert us to the possibility of a new reading of Marechal, one that breaks with the tradition that views Adán Buenosayres (1948) as a totalizing narrative endorsing Augustinian and Thomist metaphysics. One of Piglia’s fictional characters, a renegade senator and oligarch, makes this observation about the official Argentine discourse grounded in authoritarian metaphysics: “se muestra ya la heterogeneidad de lo que nuestros enemigos siempre pensaron idéntico a sí mismo. Lo que podía pensarse unido, sólido, comienza a fragmentarse, a disolverse, erosionado por el agua de la historia” (Respiración artificial 61). The Piglia

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who celebrates, through his character, the fragmentation of the self-identical Subject, the rigid totality underwritten by conservative reaction, must certainly be reading Marechal’s apparently cranky Catholic theology à rebours, that is, ironically. The reading of Marechal’s novels outlined in the following pages does the same. Finally, then, this study will have been justified if it contributes in some small measure to a reassessment of the literary value of Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres. In 1975, David William Foster ventured to prophesy that Marechal’s chef d’oeuvre would eventually emerge “as either the most monumental disaster in Argentine letters or the most brilliant novel of the first half of this century” (Currents in the Contemporary Argentine Novel 18). Foster was at least partially right on both accounts. Twenty-odd years later, Adán Buenosayres appears to be at once a calculated disaster, inasmuch as it brings monumental metanarratives tumbling down, and a brilliant literary achievement whose significance reaches beyond Argentina, and even Spanish America, into the wider world of Western literature in the late twentieth century, where, in the shadow of the millenium, the old tropes of apocalypse once again flicker fitfully, garishly, parodically, across our rhetorical horizons.

Acknowledgement This book has been published with the financial aid of the Scholarly Subventions Program of the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

L’ironie a pénétré toutes les langues modernes . . . elle a pénétré les mots et les formes . . . L’ironie s’est glissée partout, est attestée sous tous ses aspects – depuis l’ironie infime, imperceptible, jusqu’à la raillerie déclarée. L’homme moderne ne proclame plus, ni déclame, il parle, et il parle restrictivement. Les genres déclamatoires se préservent principalement dans des moments constituifs du roman, des moments parodiques ou semi-parodiques. [. . .] Les sujets parlants des genres déclamatoires nobles – prêtres, prophètes, prédicateurs, juges, chefs, patriarches, etc. – ont disparu de la vie. Tous, ils ont été remplacés par l’écrivain, le simple écrivain, devenu l’héritier de leur style. Mikhail Bakhtin (1979, 351) 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)

La bestia humana, la más civilizada de las fieras, es la bestia del Apocalipsis. Augusto Roa Bastos, Vigilia del Almirante (123)

1 INTRODUCTION Leopoldo Marechal’s lyric poetry is known for its religious and metaphysical tenor. Marechal the novelist, however, in emulation of his master Rabelais, writes in irreverent carnivalesque mode and parodies the great texts of the Western canon. One of the principal targets of his parody is the Revelation to John, the final book of the Christian scriptural canon, as well as the grand apocalyptic narrative in which it is inscribed. It is the working hypothesis of this study that John’s Revelation is the principal intertext of an (ironically) apocalyptic cycle of novels. These include Marechal’s masterpiece Adán Buenosayres (1948), its eccentric sequel El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965), as well as a significant fragment of his postumous Megafón, o la guerra (1970).1

Irony, parody, satire 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.2 Their legacy in late modernity is still with us, especially in the theory of postmodernity, 1 Quotations from the three novels will be indicated as follows: AB for Adán Buenosayres; B for El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo; M for Megafón, o la guerra. All quotations will be from the Sudamericana editions listed under “Works by Marechal.” 2 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 vivendi for the writer and for writing in the modern ‘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).

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which is itself an ironic notion.3 About irony in general, J.A. Cuddon observes that most of its forms “involve the perception or 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.”4 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 strictly 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 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, epic, 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). To use Hutcheon’s terminology, the “ethos” or pragmatic intention of irony and parody is not always clearly marked, whereas in satire it usually is. Whether or not a given parody is satirical will also depend on the mindset and prejudices of the reader.5 My reading of Marechal emphasizes the elements of irony and parody, finding corrective satire only occasionally. For that

3 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. Postmodernity, 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. 4 J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1991) 460. 5 Parody and satire are often interactive modes. Due to this interdependence, it is not surprising that there has been in literary criticism a long-standing confusion between the two terms. Linda Hutcheon distinguishes parody from satire with the terms “intramural” and “extramural” (25); Elzbierta Sklodowska follows her lead, calling parody “intratextual” and satire “extratextual” (12). This means that parody targets literary

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matter, Marechal’s own concept of satire seems to admit the possibility of moral generosity. The last sentence of the prologue to Adán Buenosayres affirms that “la sátira puede ser una forma de caridad, si se dirige a los humanos con la sonrisa que tal vez los ángeles esbozan ante la locura de los 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, it must be borne in mind that Marechal evokes this hackneyed figure in a spirit of ludic parody. Furthermore, when the “author” Schultze attempts to practise satire in Cacodelphia (in Book Seven of Adán Buenosayres), his corrective intentions will often have a boomerang effect. Such is Marechal’s irony. Another serviceable, though less elegant, definition of parody is that of Margaret A. Rose: “parody may be defined 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’s novels appropriate the text of Revelation and make it function in new ways. As a pre-text to those novels, the Apocalypse lends form and meaning to both Adán 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 plot it is foregrounded so as to illuminate, usually ironically, the significance of what is happening. 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,6 its action 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 rhetoric.

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. 6 This is, in fact, Rose’s premise. Her book Parody/Meta-Fiction (1979) is devoted to “an analysis of the role of parody as a meta-fictional mirror to fiction,” for “to study such parody is to study the analysis of fiction made from within fiction itself” (13).

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Apocalypse in history and literature Apocalypse, the drama of the end of the world, the final triumph of good over evil, has always been both a theme and a structuring device in Western literature. The apocalyptic genre of religious narrative probably originates with the ancient Indo-European myth of the end of the world, upon which Zoroastrianism impressed the light–darkness, good–evil duality. Apocalypticism subsequently made incursions into Jewish prophetic tradition and entirely informed the vision of the primitive Jewish Christians, who like Daniel in the Old Testament saw the end of the world as the destruction of evil “Babylon” (the term now designating the Roman Empire) and the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth. As the Church militant became an established institution, however, it found this sort of revolutionary chiliasm inconvenient. The early church fathers Origen and Augustine read John’s Revelation anagogically as the journey of the soul to the City of God, recasting the apocalypse as a spiritual allegory and postponing the end of the world to some indefinite future (Cohn 13; Tuveson 17). The two readings of John’s Revelation mark an important distinction in perspective vis-à-vis the established order: an oppressed people’s apocalypse is subversive, revolutionary, historical; the priestly apocalypse is spiritual, apolitical, ahistorical. Despite the medieval church’s efforts to neutralize the incendiary aspects of the Johannine Revelation, the heretical monk Joachim de Fiore in the twelfth century reintroduced apocalypse into history, and in so doing decisively influenced the development of the Western historical imagination (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 – in all its religious, secular, fundamentalist, utopian, socialist, anarchist, and fascist manifestations – 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. In Spanish American novels, the Joachite model of apocalypse has been attractive as a way of framing narratives of revolutionary change.7 In Al filo del agua (1947), for example, Agustín Yáñez employs the apocalyptic paradigm to lend narrative form to the profound change wrought by the Revolu-

7 Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Writing the Apocalypse, speaks of the myth of apocalypse as ‘‘both a model of the conflictual nature of human history and a model of historical desire’’ (12). She discusses several novelists from the United States and Spanish America, including Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

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tion on life in provincial Mexico. In El otoño del patriarca (1975) by Gabriel García Márquez and La guerra del fin del mundo (1981) by Mario Vargas Llosa, the ideology of Leftist revolution in Latin America is present as an important subtext, which García Márquez and Vargas Llosa treat from opposite political points of view.8 Revolution and apocalypse, then, often go hand in hand, but in varying rhetorical configurations. For example, the feverish discourse in Roberto Arlt’s diptych, Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931), feeds upon Mussolini’s fascism, as well as the anarchism of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, though Arlt seems to be less interested in political revolution than in giving expression to the symptoms of contemporary socio-psychological pathology arising from acute social injustice. Arlt’s apocalyptic figurations may also be seen as participating to some degree in literary modernism’s project of writing the “everlasting gospel” mentioned in Revelation 14:6, according to the critical perspective developed by Frank Kermode in “Apocalypse and the Modern.”9 The typical modernist writer, to paraphrase Kermode, aspires to write with apostolic power and reveal the new age to itself. Accordingly, the writer – usually male in this mode – separates himself from the herd and assumes the esthetic posture of the artist as prophet, 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 (93ff). This is certainly Ernesto Sábato’s authorial pose in the trilogy comprising El túnel (1948), Sobre héroes y tumbas (1961), and Abaddón el exterminador (1974). Sábato is at his best when giving voice to the visionary psychosis of Fernando Vidal de los Olmos, whose incandes-

8 Their political difference is reflected in the narrative strategies of the two novelists. In El otoño del patriarca, García Márquez 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 García Márquez 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-modern 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 1971 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 reflect this difference. 9 According to Kermode, Joachim de Fiore extensively glossed this passage (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.

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cent lucidity justifies the novelist’s invocation of apocalyptic motifs better than do Sábato’s historical speculations. The same exalted ambition – though his authorial posture is strongly tempered by irony – motivates the Julio Cortázar of Rayuela (1963), in which Horacio Oliveira 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; the appreciative reader might be forgiven for revering certain passages of Cortázar’s great novel almost as textual shards of some everlasting gospel. But Horacio is also burdened with an ironic sense of the nature of language; the maverick intellectual struggles to free himself from words – “perras negras,” he calls them, “hormigas voraces . . . Logos, faute éclatante!” (484–5) – and to disentangle his consciousness from the cobwebs of rancid signifieds accumulated over the centuries. Horacio’s awareness of the problematicity of language sharply distinguishes him from Adán Buenosayres, the eponymous protagonist of Leopoldo Marechal’s novel. Adán is a poet with naïve religious-philosophical pretensions who, in the name of poetry and metaphysics, rebels against modernismo (AB 147), by which he means not the literary movement that went by that name, but rather the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world-view based on scientific positivism and the doctrine of progress. In love with a girl called Solveig Amundsen, Adán 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 Adán and accepts the suit of Lucio Negri, a defender of the “modernism” that Adán despises. This is less tragic than it is mock-tragic, and the allegory suggested by the names of the protagonists – 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 Adán’s disappointment in love and his ensuing crisis becomes a hilarious send-up of everything that Adán purports to believe in. Adán, habitual reader of Revelation, experiences his crisis as an apocalypse – a catastrophe and a personal Last Judgment. But it becomes a carnivalized Last Judgment when Adán 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 Adán nothing more than the Paleogogue, a hideous, shapeless mollusc representing both the source and terminus of all constructs of human language. The principal target of Leopoldo Marechal’s irony, then, is not the Joachite model of apocalypse, in either its historico-revolutionary or literary-prophetic forms (though the former does enter his sights on occasion), so much as the “priestly” version of apocalypse, the spiritual allegory of redemption. In my reading of the novel, Adán’s mock-apocalyptic experience represents the collapse of Platonist idealism, which in turn depends on a par-

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ticular mode of language based on the trope of metonymy.10 Through metonymy, the logos is elevated to a metaphysical category that stands a priori to concrete reality. Historically, the Greek logos became the divine Word of John the Apostle, a notion that flows into the Neoplatonic realism of Augustine, for whom the res intelligibiles are “the constitutive principles of things” (Carré, Nominalists and Realists 7). Adán 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 Adán’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 Adán finds himself is the construct of a different mode 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 Adán’s apparent death. In my view, the death of Adán 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. 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 Arcángelo (1965). A wealthy industrialist in the grip of a pseudo-mystical mania, Severo Arcángelo 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. 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 venían así, como si el Banquete de Severo Arcángelo debiera caminar sobre dos pies contradictorios, el de lo sublime y el de lo grotesco” (B 94).

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In the prologue to Banquete, Marechal makes it clear that this second novel is a thematic and dialectical sequel to the first. In effect, Banquete synthesizes and clarifies the discursive structure common to both novels. Thus, to some extent, it is appropriate to read the first novel in light of the second. Explicitly dramatized in Banquete is the theory of “metahistory,” a term first proposed by Schultze in Adán 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 Arcángelo’s enterprise consists of an elaborate dramatization of this metahistorical cycle. But, as I shall try to show, in both Banquete and Adán 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 must not take too seriously Severo Arcángelo’s ostensible aim to bring about the consummation of the world as it exists in 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 Arcángelo 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 finally becomes sterile, and the “dark age” of ironic language thus reaches its consummation. Marechal’s third and final novel, Megafón o la guerra (1970), breaks with this apocalyptic cycle, but contains a significant coda to it. Samuel Tesler, a character from Adán Buenosayres, reappears in Megafón to expound his “Teoría y Práctica de la Catástrofe.” 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 Megafón, Marechal has put aside his metalinguistic preoccupation, and his chief concern lies rather in the politics and history of Argentina.

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Problems in Marechalian criticism Marechal gives his reader plenty of signals to indicate his ironic and parodic modus operandi. The “Prólogo indispensable” to Adán Buenosayres is as rife with tricks as it is with keys to understanding the novel. The narrator of the main body of the novel 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 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 lead one to read Marechal’s novels in a way that radically diverges from the traditional pious reading of their content. 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. 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” (Andrés 57)? For anyone familiar with the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, as Marechal most certainly was, the phrase “cristiano viejo” evokes the spectre of the religious intolerance towards “cristianos nuevos” (converted Jews and Moors, and their descendants) and the almost paranoid obsession with “limpieza de sangre” that prevailed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish society. By calling himself a “cristiano viejo,” Marechal is certainly being provocative. In using 12 See Marcos Antonio Ramos’s article “Leopoldo Marechal como novelista cristiano.” 13 For example, “el Gran Oracionista” (AB 615–22); and the Hermanos Jonás and Pedro (B 245–55; 268–78). 14 For example, Bruno de San Yasea, the ghost of Adán’s idle fantasy who comes back to haunt him in the hell of Cacodelphia (AB 626–7).

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such a loaded term, does he wish to present himself as a racial and religious bigot, or perhaps as the type of Fascist that vitiated the Peronist movement? 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-play, one must nevertheless acknowledge it as such. In another interview, Marechal soberly abjures religious sectarianism with the comment: “Soy más metafísico que religioso porque la religión supone siempre una ortodoxia rígida que suele chocar con la universalidad de la verdad” (qtd. in Coulson, “Leopoldo” 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 believes 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-à-vis language and the various narratives 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 distinction must yet be made between the young poet and the mature novelist. Marechal 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 “Prólogo indispensable” to Adán 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 Adán 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 Adán Buenosayres treats his protagonist satirically, raising him to mock-heroic stature with his parody of epic forms, and insincerely praising the quality of Adán’s pretentious “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules.” The narrator’s insincerity reaches its climax when, at the end of Book Five, he relates with mock-pathos an episode facetiously suggesting that Adán is being saved by Christ. As it turns out, Adán is not saved at all, but rather ends up stranded at the bottom of hell. Adán, the naïve poet with metaphysical aspirations, dies at the behest of his author and creator, the ironic novelist Marechal. 15 Marechal explains that after writing the first pages of the novel in 1930, “[u]na honda crisis espiritual me sustrajo después, no sólo a los afanes de la literatura, sino a todo linaje de acción” (AB 10). He finished the novel in the 1940s. 16 See section entitled “Lo autobiográfico” (58–60) in Graciela de Sola.

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It has been observed that only a poet could have written Adán Buenosayres.17 It might 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, Adán Buenosayres is to Leopoldo Marechal as Don Quixote is to Cervantes. Only a former devotee of the libros de caballerías 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 fantasies. Instead of mastering the genre, Don Quixote lets himself be mastered by it. Cervantes, on the other hand, asserts his control by placing the topoi and conventions of the fantastic genre in an ironic perspective. Similarly, Adán 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 an ironic stance toward his unhappy protagonist. Indeed, Marechal parodies even his own poetry (see p. 55 n and 57 n). 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 critic. In his book of essays, Cuaderno de navegación, 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 fantasy. His “Cosmogonía elbitense,” for example, clumsily tries to reduce the findings 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 Adán Buenosayres,” on the other hand, appears solemnly to ratify Adán’s absurd Neoplatonic fantasies (Cuaderno 127); as a critic, Marechal completely misses the ironic genius of his own work. As Julio Cortázar commented in his review of Adán, “una vez más cabe comprobar cómo las obras evaden la intención de sus autores y se dan sus propias leyes finales” (24). The slant Marechal 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’s task to determine the final meaning of a literary work (Anatomy 5). Leopoldo Marechal is an accomplished parodist, but his capacity for critical thought is limited. Adán Buenosayres has assumed an important place in the history of the Spanish 17 “En última instancia, tal vez, sólo un poeta pudo haber escrito este libro. Pero un poeta que ha bajado al infierno de la realidad que transunta – al de los vivos, no al de los muertos – , real y fantástico, sombrío y apasionado, burlesco y apocalíptico” (Zum Felde 327).

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American novel for reasons that are quite beyond Marechal’s critical acumen.18 Remarkably enough, there has not been a great deal of extended criticism on Marechal’s novelistic work, despite the fact that this contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges has been recognized as anticipating the nueva novela of the Spanish American “boom.”19 At first, this dearth of critical attention was due to Marechal’s marginal position vis-à-vis the Argentine intellectual community, whose enmity he earned by supporting and working for Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s and 1950s. But even since his relative rehabilitation in the 1960s, there have been only five book-length studies devoted to his novels, two of which are doctoral dissertations.20 The most important monographs, in my view, are Graciela Coulson’s Marechal, la pasión metafísica (1974) and the team effort of Valentín Cricco et al. entitled Marechal, el otro: la escritura testada de “Adán Buenosayres” (1985). Coulson’s work 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 confined 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 René Guénon,21 a “traditionalist” thinker who conflates the metaphysical traditions derived from several major religions. 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, Valentín 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 Chris18 My position has been corroborated by Jaime Barylko’s “Apreciaciones críticas,” which have come to my attention only recently. Barylko asserts: “No hay que atender al autor y a sus opiniones respecto a su propia obra. Más conviene desatender . . . El Banquete, originariamente platónico, se ríe en la cara de Platón y de la metafísica, y de la física, y de todas las creaturas de la cultura humana. No por negatividad, sino por mero juego intelectual de antítesis floreciente y de ironía descollante. El lenguaje es aquí, en consecuencia, el principal protagonista” (52). 19 “Es indudable que [tanto] en el Sábato de Sobre héroes y tumbas como en el Cortázar de Los premios y Rayuela se encuentra la huella de Marechal” (Rodríguez Monegal 248). Javier de Navascués discusses the narrative elements that Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela has in common with Adán Buenosayres in his article “Sobre novela argentina . . .” 20 William J. Hardy, Life and Work of Leopoldo Marechal (Missouri, 1973); and Javier de Navascués, Las novelas de Leopoldo Marechal: Análisis narratológico (Navarra, 1991). Navascués’s doctoral thesis is the basis of his Adán Buenosayres: Una novela total (Estudio narratológico). 21 On inspecting Marechal’s personal library, Coulson found that “numerosos volúmenes de René Guénon” were among the books given pride of place (Marechal 8) and observes that the Frenchman was “enormemente admirado por Marechal” (97).

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tian or a more inclusive context)22 or, conversely, from 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 naïve Adán Buenosayres nor the authoritarian Severo Arcángelo is the novelist 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 Adán 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 about the fundamental ways language is used, which is what Cricco and his team mean with their reference to semiotic history. The tension between realism and nominalism which is reflected in Marechal’s writing “introduce un descentramiento irónico y paródico que pasa por el relativismo del signo hasta alcanzar el carácter cómico y burlón que Marechal toma de su maestro Rabelais” (12). From Cricco’s rich and suggestive essay, which deals only with Adán 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 co-writers in that I consider Marechal’s first two novels to form a single cycle, following the indication that Marechal gives in his brief prologue to El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo. He writes that, whereas in Adán Buenosayres he left his hero in the last circle of a hell with no exit, his second novel proposes a way out (B 9). Reading Banquete as a sequel to the first novel of the cycle, colours and limits the way one reads Adán Buenosayres. Thus the 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.23 Rather, my interpretation of Adán Buenosayres will be a textual analysis rooted in the metaphysical intertexts 22 Pedro Luis Barcia’s “Introducción biográfica y crítica” to his annotated edition of Adán Buenosayres (1994) inscribes itself in this traditionalist line of Marechalian criticism. Javier de Navascués’s narratological study also fails to question the Christian reading. 23 Adán Buenosayres elicited a good deal of negative reaction from his contemporaries because it can be read as a roman à clef satirizing the avant-garde generation of writers and artists associated with the literary review Martín Fierro. See Adolfo Prieto on martínfierrismo in “Los dos mundos de Adán Buenosayres.” There can be no doubt, however, that Marechal’s ambition went beyond a desire to create local caricatures. In an interview cited by Navascués, Marechal recalls: “Leyendo a los autores argentinos y a los autores universales llegué a decirme: ‘[. . .] Yo soy argentino, pero también soy un

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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 Adán Buenosayres. The template is already present in Adán Buenosayres, but is overgrown, as it were, with the luxuriance of Marechal’s baroque writing; in the sequel novel, Banquete, it stands out. It is immediately evident from even the most casual reading of El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo 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 Farías’s narration 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 on Apocalyptic Symbolism 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” (87–8). 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 Adán Buenosayres and El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo. [. . .] 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” (96–7). Smith’s reading of Marechal completely ignores his parody and irony. Nevertheless, it is interesting that she finds the apocalyptic element of the Last Judgment to be central to both novels. Though she does not say so, she has no doubt been led to underscore the apocalyptic symbolism of Adán Buenosayres because of its preponderance in Banquete. Graciela Maturo, in the article she devotes to the novel, observes that Banquete is modeled on the “género apocalíptico” (33). However, her argument that it is “una novela de intención marcadamente realista y agudo compromiso histórico” (34) is quite unconvincing, since she does not show

hombre, y si un hombre de Inglaterra, Francia, Italia, ha podido escribir grandes obras, por qué yo no puedo hacerlo. Y así, empezó en mí 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.

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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 práctica mesiánica; su lector, alma redimible, es el destinatario de un programa de salvación que él enuncia para sus compatriotas” (38). To attribute messianic aspirations to this ironic novelist seems 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 such a hermetic novel might actually convey such messianic propaganda. One is more inclined to take Marechal at his word, for once, when in an interview he protests: “yo les aseguro que al escribir la novela [Banquete], no tenía ninguna intención de referirme al peronismo ni al anti-peronismo” (qtd. in Coulson, Marechal 98). If Banquete is not a vehicle for political ideology or a messianic program for Argentina, what does the novel mean? Father Edmundo García concludes his study of the novel’s theology with a rhetorical plea expressing bafflement: “Maestro, explícanos esta parábola” (Andrés 119). If Banquete is a parable, its explanation is not to be found in Christian theology. Even when one widens the scope of inquiry to account for Marechal’s 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 desafío al lector y una versión sui generis del juego de la vida” (Marechal 104). Coulson’s thoroughness and caution are to be respected. Banquete, like Adán Buenosayres, deliberately challenges the reader and is certainly a unique novel.24 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 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 when its signifying power is turned completely back 24 In her article “El triunfo secreto de la novela argentina,” Marina Guntsche considers that Banquete – along with Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926), Alberto Aldecua’s Alamos talados (1942), and Osvaldo Soriano’s Una sombra ya pronto serás – participates in a tendency to reverse the decline of the novelistic genre announced by Ortega y Gasset by developing new suasive means to create illusion and adventure. However, her brief treatment of Marechal’s novel does not come to grips with either its content or the specifics of his novelistics.

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upon itself. When verbal signs no longer point to anything beyond themselves, meaning ceases, narrative movement is arrested, time comes to end. By thus 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 Arcángelo, Marechal tells us, proposes a “way out” of Cacodelphia where Adán Buenosayres has been stranded. This implies that Adán’s descent into hell will be redeemed by an ascent to the “Cuesta del Agua,” analogue of the paradisal New Jerusalem of Revelation. In other words, the diremption of Adán 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 Adán 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 Cortázar was the first one with the prescience to understand that Adán Buenosayres, more than a satirical roman à clef, represented “un acontecimiento extraordinario” (23) because of its treatment of language.25 Referring to the linguistic material of the book, he speaks of “capas geológicas a veces artificiosas” and, in the next breath, marvels at the “cataclismo [que] signa el entero decurso de Adán 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 in a metahistorical design. The “cataclysm” which Cortázar notes running through the text, unearthing those layers of language, is the effect of a fourth, ironic, mode of language. Marechalian irony finds its definitive narrative metaphor in the apocalypse. Chapter 2 of this study will analyse the complex structure and narratorial games of Adán Buenosayres, bearing in mind the intertextual presence of John’s Revelation, and thus clear the ground for the discussion in chapter 3 of the novel’s theoretical underpinnings both in terms of “metahistory” refigured as “metalinguistics” and the philosophical dichotomy of nominal25 “No sé, por razones de edad, si Adán Buenosayres testimonia con validez sobre la etapa martinfierrista, y ya se habrá notado que mi intento [to review the novel] era más filológico que histórico” (Cortázar 30).

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ism versus realism. Chapter 4 looks at how the novel treats apocalypticism in carnivalesque mode. In chapter 5, Schultze’s role as Adán’s teacher is discussed, as well as his “demiurgic” invention, Cacodelphia, with special focus on the theme of rhetorical politics, i.e. the implications of using and abusing various (pre)figurative strategies in language, as well as their attendant literary topoi. Chapter 6 revisits “metahistory” and other hieratic notions in a reading of the problematic El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo that retrospectively throws light on Marechal’s masterwork. Finally, chapter 7 deals with Samuel Tesler’s return in Megafón, o la guerra and what this means in terms of Marechal’s novelistic oeuvre as a whole.

2 ADÁN BUENOSAYRES: PARODIC REVELATION The story told in Adán Buenosayres parodies the Christian narrative of redemption, brought to a close in The Book of Revelation. As a story-type, this narrative is a romance. 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 of historical time has become many, and at the final reckoning there must be more than a few casualties: all non-Christians will be thrown into the lake of fire along with man’s antagonist, 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. Adán Buenosayres, if only by virtue of his name, is also a paradigmatic figure. Adán’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 Adán Buenosayres, means the irredeemable cleavage between his idealist desire and the way things turn out in reality. The mystical longings that Adán 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 “Prólogo indispensable” as an internally diremptive structure.

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Diremptive structures Before examining the formal structure of Adán Buenosayres, an outline of the story is in order. It can be resumed chronologically as follows. The young poet and schoolteacher, Adán Buenosayres, meets and falls in love with the 14-year-old Solveig Amundsen. She, however, chooses another suitor, a young doctor named Lucio Negri. On Thursday afternoon (28 April, 192– ) at the Amundsen tertulia, Adán 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 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 Adán’s rejection as a lover 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 “Prólogo 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. Adán’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 Adán wakes up in his room, to late Friday night, when Adán falls asleep after his ordeal in the streets. The “Viaje” (Book Seven) takes up the story at Saturday midnight, as Adán and Schultze head for Saavedra and Cacodelphia; Book Seven and the novel end when Adán and Schultze reach the lowest circle of hell. Finally, the prologue – which in terms of the plot is really an epilogue – informs us of Adán’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 1920s. 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 meaningful time (Kermode, Sense 47). Adán explains that in writing his notebook, “no 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

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time but rather as the absolute preterit of Genesis: he was “Adán en mi jardín o Robinson en mi isla” (AB 434). When he meets Solveig, it is a metaphorical springtime: “Fué primavera en Buenos Aires el día y la hora en que se me apareció Aquella cuyo nombre real no será escrito en estas páginas” (AB 445). The notebook’s very last words express Adán’s attitude toward his future; he hopes for “un día en que la sed del hombre da con el agua justa y el exacto manantial” (AB 467). This refers directly to Revelation, where Christ promises that the thirst of the faithful will be slaked: “And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone come who wishes to take the water of life as a gift” (Rev. 22:16). Adán’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). Adán’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 by the Apocalypse. The chronological vagueness of Adán’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 Adán 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 Adán Buenosayres después de su tertulia definitiva en Saavedra. Tengo ahora el texto manuscrito bajo mis ojos, y antes de transcribirlo contemplo sus líneas atormentadas, llenas de tachaduras y enmiendas, tan diferentes de aquellos renglones que forman la primera parte del Cuaderno y cuya pulcritud anuncia un lentísimo trabajo de artista. Empieza con una fábula o apólogo extravagante. Dice así:) (AB 463).

This parenthesis effectively breaks the “Cuaderno” into two sections, corresponding to before and after Adán’s “tertulia definitiva.” Adán, 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 find 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: “Siguiéronse días insonoros que desfilaban como autómatas frente a mi ser, trayendo por la mañana y llevándose por la noche su vieja y manoseada quincallería” (AB 465). The number of days is wholly imprecise. They could be two or three, or ten or twenty; the measure of their duration is not numerical but emotional. Adán’s depression is alleviated by what he claims to be a dream, though its portentous symbolism is more likely the invention of his “lentísimo trabajo de artista.” He gives a final temporal indicator in his concluding paragraph:

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“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 ordinary 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 Adán’s notebook; the “Cuaderno’s” ending, therefore, is possibly posterior to the ending of the “Viaje a Cacodelphia,” which is the ending of the novel. We cannot be sure of this, of course, for Adán’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 chronicle narrated in 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 chronology. In so doing, Adán’s notebook proposes a more inclusive, transcendental interpretation of the same events; the poetic time of the “Cuaderno” aspires both to include and to impose its own order on the chronos 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 “Cuaderno” interrupts the main novel, the latter irrupts into the “Cuaderno” through the gap opened by the editor-narrator’s parenthesis. In a few brief words, the fictional editor interprets the entire “Cuaderno” in terms of the events of Adán’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 Adán’s manuscript: the part written after the “tertulia definitiva” is tear-stained, laboriously worked and reworked. He passes editorial comment on the remainder of Adán’s text: it contains “an extravagant fable.” In sum, the world of crude reality rushes 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 “Cuaderno” 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

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matrix structure. The inherent contradiction forces the reader to make an interpretative choice: which version of the story is correct, the one implied in the matrix novel or Adán’s mystical one? Let us consider briefly how each of these versions ends. In the “Cuaderno,” Adán’s existential and spiritual crisis is resolved when in his “dream” a Christic figure intervenes to put Adán back on the mystical path. This personage seems to be the incarnation of the Divine Word; he presents himself to Adán: “Soy el que ha movido, mueve y moverá tus pasos” (AB 467).1 He instructs Adán to forget about Solveig and to seek “el único y verdadero semblante de Aquella,” meaning the mystical Madonna Intelligenza. (The neoplatonism of the “Cuaderno” will be discussed in chapter 3.) In the notebook’s last sentence, Adán expresses his faith in the mystical Madonna “cuya forma cabal y único nombre conoceré algún día, si, como espero, hay un día 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 novel, leaves Adán in the last circle of hell facing the ugly Paleogogue. This is certainly not the “agua justa” that Adán is looking for. It is thus ironic that Book Seven follows textually as a sequel to Book Six, and the more so in that Adán 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 Adán is author of his “Cuaderno” 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 Adán as he sleeps. We are led to believe that Adán’s redemption is imminent. Considering Books One to Five as a unit by itself, its ending achieves a very tidy closure, symmetrically related to the opening of Book One – a consideration that led Julio Cortázar (the pre-Rayuela Cortázar) 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. 1 The construction “ha movido, mueve y moverá 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 Cortázar reviewed Adán in 1949: “Los libros VI y VII podrían desglosarse de Adán Buenosayres con sensible beneficio para la arquitectura de la obra; tal como están, resulta difícil juzgarlos si no es en función de addenda y documentación; carecen del color y del calor de la novela propiamente dicha, y se ofrecen un poco como las notas que el escrúpulo del biógrafo incorpora para librarse por fin y del todo de su fichero” (24). That Cortázar later modeled the “architecture” of his famous novel on the game of hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963) shows how drastically his esthetic ideas changed and that Marechal’s

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Beginnings and end(ing)s, prologue and epilogue 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 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 contends that even the most resolutely antiparadigmatic texts, the nouveau roman for example, implicitly refer to the model of beginning, middle, and end (20). Likewise, Samuel Beckett’s mimesis 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, “Prólogo indispensable.” Its very first sentence announces Adán’s end, i.e. his death, as a fait accompli: En cierta mañana de octubre de 192., casi a mediodía, seis hombres nos internábamos en el Cementario del Oeste, llevando a pulso un ataúd de modesta factura (cuatro tablitas frágiles) cuya levedad era tanta, que nos parecía llevar en su interior, no la vencida carne de un hombre muerto, sino la materia sutil de un poema concluído. (AB 9)

Adán’s end is thus announced at the very beginning, creating expectancy in the reader, who will want to know how and why he died. Our desire for knowledge, however, will remain unslaked. Thus this End, far from casting the shadow of unitary meaning over the rest of the novel, only confirms the diremptive tendency of Adán Buenosayres. Adán’s death is riddled with ambiguity. This becomes apparent as soon as one tries to approach it through each of the divergent endings of Books Six and Seven. Let us assume for a moment that the “Cuaderno” is indeed the key to the novel and try to relate its ending to Adán’s end. According to the “Cuaderno,” Adán 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:

novel undoubtedly exercised a germinal influence. See Javier de Navascués, “Sobre novela Argentina: Rayuela y Adán Buenosayres” 79–80.

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La primavera reía sobre las tumbas, cantaba en el buche de los pájaros, ardía en los retoños vegetales, proclamaba entre cruces y epitafios su jubilosa incredulidad acerca de la muerte. Y no había lágrimas en nuestros ojos ni pesadumbre alguna en nuestros corazones; porque nos parecía llevar, no la vencida carne de un hombre muerto, sino la materia sutil de un poema concluído. (AB 9)

On this reading, Adán’s story resonates with the Passion of Christ. The poet has 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 “ambigüedad temporal” of the prologue and wonders why the funeral is six months posterior to the events of the novel: “Si Adán llega a Cristo en abril, ¿por qué ‘muere’ recién seis meses después?” (Marechal 86). Coulson resolves the problem by treating both dates as “entidades simbólicas.” 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 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 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 a violent disruption: six months separate Adán’s Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Black Saturday in April from his Easter-Sunday resurrection in October. Formally, Adán’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 Adán’s coffin is so light that it seems to carry “not the wornout flesh of a dead man, but the subtle matter of a concluded poem.” 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” (my emphasis in each case). Unlike the opposition “wornout-subtle,” the antinomy “heavy-light” is precise and refers more pointedly to the physical weight of the coffin. We are

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invited to read the second, parodic utterance not figuratively but literally. That is to say, there is in fact no dead body in the coffin. If “la materia sutil de un poema concluído” may be read as a metaphor for Adán’s soul, “la materia leve de un poema concluído” means exactly what it says: a poem on paper, which would be a light material object. This is perhaps the “Cuaderno” itself – concluded, finished, dead.3 This evidently flies in the face of the mystical reading of Adán’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 rebirth, however, is not resolved satisfactorily by a mystical reading of the novel. There is a missing body not yet accounted for. The fact is that nothing in the novel – aside from the dubious metaphorical evidence of the “Cuaderno” – indicates that Adán has ever left Cacodelphia, metaphor for Buenos Aires, Adán’s city by antonomasia. If Adán is alive and (not so) well, then why the funeral? Who or what has died? 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. Adán Buenosayres suffers a split in his very name: the paradigmatic Adam 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. Adán Buenosayres in effect begins and ends with the “Prólogo 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 3 Valentín 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 cópula secreta entre el pensamiento y la realidad” (28–9).

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Apocalypse closes a textual circle and thereby reaffirms the truth of the first text. In Adán 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 parautterance? 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 longer knows very well who in the Apocalypse lends his voice and tone 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 Adán 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 Adán Buenosayres, namely, the “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” and the “Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia.” In order that the reading public may achieve “una intelección 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 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 Adán Buenosayres and gives strong hints as to his identity. Writing in the first person plural, he includes himself among the pall-bearers at Adán’s funeral. He also emphasizes that he has been an eye-witness to the events that he will relate in his five Books, recalling “las figuras de sus [Adán’s] compañeros de gesta, y sobre todo las acciones memorables de que fuí testigo en aquellos días” (AB 10). The “gesta” to which he refers will be the night of drinking and mock-heroic adventures narrated in Books Three and Four, when Adán and his comrades undertake a journey through the lowlands of Saavedra (“el bajo de Saavedra”). The mock heroes are seven in all. They are Adán, Samuel Tesler, and Schultze, as well as the four members of the patota or “gang.” The latter are enumerated according to their lights: “Por orden riguroso de iluminación eran las que siguen: Luis Pereda . . .; Arturo Del Solar . . .; Franky Amundsen . . .; y el petizo Bernini, sociólogo al que veníamos 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 – veníamos llamando, “we used to call.” Thus he at once distances himself from and associates himself with this group of seven. Now, these same characters serve as pall-bearers at Adán’s funeral. With Adán dead, they are now six: “seis hombres nos internábamos en el Cementerio del Oeste . . . El astrólogo Schultze y yo empuñábamos las dos manijas de la

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cabecera, Franky Amundsen y Del Solar habían tomado las de los pies: al frente avanzaba Luis Pereda . . .; detrás 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 Adán’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 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 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. Bernini’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 Adán Buenosayres.4 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 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 difícil camino de los perfectos” (AB 10). But now it is as though he were Adán himself, the post-funeral Adán, writing about his old mystical self, the one who wrote the “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules.” Adán 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 Adán’s end and what the novel means. In his final observation, the narrator suggests that one more identity is his:

4 In Palabras con Leopoldo Marechal, the novelist speaks of “las planificaciones de Adán Buenosayres que yo realizaba paralelamente” (Andrés 32), i.e. concurrently with touristic activities in Paris. Referring to his Italian sojourn during the same European tour, he concludes: “todo ese proceso está muy vinculado a mi vida y por consiguiente a mi obra, y vuelvo a remitirme a las ‘Claves de Adán Buenosayres’ ” (35–6). After the death of his wife and Perón’s ascent to power in the mid-forties, Marechal resumed work on his novel: “Retomé mi cien veces postergada Adán Buenosayres, lo rehice todo y le di fin. ¿Y sabes por qué? Porque mi personaje había 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 L.M., “demoraron su ejecución [de esta obra]” (AB 10). The autobiographical basis of “mi personaje,” who has realized all Marechal’s experiences, is evident.

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Y una observación final: podría suceder que alguno de mis lectores identificara a ciertos personajes de la obra, o se reconociera él mismo en alguno de ellos. En tal caso, no afirmaré yo hipócritamente que se trata de un parecido casual, sino que afrontaré las consecuencias: bien sé yo que, sea cual fuere la posición 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”. (AB 11)

The narrator refers to “la obra” and its various components. Why does he mention Schultze’s hell in the same breath as “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. Adán’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 Adán Buenosayres. All of the foregoing becomes intelligible only on rereading the prologue after having read the novel. On the first reading, the reader will be able to understand much less: a certain Adán Buenosayres has died (a fact still devoid of significance); Leopoldo Marechal appears to present himself as the author of what promises to be a roman à 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 lies ahead. On the second, virtually obligatory, reading the reader’s new competence will allow him or her to read the “Prólogo indispensable” anew. What he or she reads the first 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 ironies 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 Adán 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 Leopoldo Marechal. If the architext of the “Prólogo indispensable” lays the foundations of the fictional universe of the novel, its para-text, in effect, destroys those foundations. Like Adán’s “Cuaderno” in Solveig’s hands, the verbal cosmos

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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 Adán Buenosayres, the words that reveal to him the end of his Platonist world.) This novelistic manoeuvre anticipates the flourish with which Gabriel García Márquez brings to a close Cien años de soledad (1967). Aureliano, the last of his line, reads the narrative history of the Buendía dynasty as it is written in Melquíades’s parchments, and as he does so, the world of the novel is consumed by an “huracán bíblico” (447). Aureliano’s reading is in fact a second reading, the first having been accomplished by the reader of the novel. García Márquez sets up a perfect concord between the end of the world and the ending of the novel: the end of a bibliocosm. What García Márquez’s text does explicitly, that of Marechal has already performed implicitly. Nevertheless, between the prologue and epilogue of Adán Buenosayres, there hovers a transient verbal cosmos that is both entertaining and instructive. That universe, however, is mined with pitfalls and must be negotiated with the astuteness of Cortázar’s lector cómplice.

Authors and (unreliable) narrators Marechal wrote Adán Buenosayres after Nietzsche had announced the death of God, but before Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author. When it comes to literary fictions, these two “events” are not unconnected. Marechal plays heavily on the metaphor of the book as world and the author as creator. If we are to assume the presence of an implied author who is ultimately responsible for the novel, then he must be similar to the God of medieval nominalist theology, who as Ulrich Langer has observed, “absolutely speaking, is unreliable from the creature’s point of view. He cannot be held to any laws he has set down, or rather, he can decide at any point to transgress them” (8; Langer’s emphasis). This is just how the implied author of Adán Buenosayres behaves: he transgresses the boundaries between reality and fiction, sets up narratorial practical jokes (as when the prologue’s narrator claims to be Bernini the pipsqueak), assumes various narratorial masks, and more, as we shall see presently. For the moment, it is possible to map out how the implied author – let us call him Leopoldo Marechal for the sake of convenience – has delegated responsibility for the various books (or book worlds) comprising the novel to various authors and narrators. In the Prologue, the narrator claims to have written the first five books. He also says that both the “Cuaderno” (Book Six) and the “Viaje” (Book Seven) were penned by Adán, but these two texts are very different both in nature and in their relationship to the novel as a whole. The “Cuaderno” is Adán’s spiritual autobiography as well as an exposition 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” is

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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 Adán through it; the “narrator” who insinuates his responsibility for Schultze’s hell; or Adán, who the narrator says has written the “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 Adán Buenosayres lets it be known that Schultze’s hell is ultimately his invention. Within the fictional world of the novel, however, Schultze the demiurge is the “author” of Cacodelphia. Adán 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 diegesis 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 Adán. 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 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 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. The most problematic narrator is the one who has already appeared in the Prologue and who narrates Books One to Five. As mentioned above, on the first reading of the “Prólogo indispensable,” the reader cannot be fully aware of how unreliable this narrator is. However, the second sentence of Book One, wherein the narrator addresses himself directly to the reader, should serve as a wake-up call: Lector agreste, si te adornara la virtud del pájaro y si desde tus alturas hubieses tendido una mirada gorrionesca sobre la ciudad, bien sé yo que tu pecho se habría dilatado según la mecánica del orgullo, ante la visión que a tus ojos de porteño 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

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and sarcastic: “Trenes orquestales entraban en la ciudad, o salían rumbo a las florestas del norte, a los viñedos del oeste, a las geórgicas del centro y a las pastorales del sur . . . Pero refrena tu lirismo, encabritado lector” (AB 15–16). Hence, the vocative “lector agreste” can by no means be innocent. The adjective “agreste,” meaning “relativo 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 mecánica 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 when he or she is being led by the nose. Passive, uncritical readers are clearly warned to stay out of this verbal world. As we follow Adán Buenosayres through the viscissitudes he experiences throughout Books One to Five, the advised reader must keep in mind who is telling the story.

Adán’s personal apocalypse The story of Adán’s trials and tribulations is informed by the guiding subtext of the Book of Revelation, which he is in the habit of reading late at night. His obsession with the Apocalypse revolves around one phrase in particular: Las tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis venían resonando en sus oídos desde la noche anterior: Sicut liber involutus [Apocalypsis 6:14]. Adán recordaba que, abandonando la lectura en aquella imagen, había contenido su respiración y escuchado el ominoso y duro silencio de la noche; y allá, en el corazón del silencio, le había parecido sorprender un ¡cric! de grandes resortes que se aflojaban, un crujido de formas que se anonadarían al instante, una sublevación de átomos que se rechazaban ya. (AB 22)

The image of the sky being rolled up like a book is associated in Adán’s 5 Joan Corominas qualifies agreste as a “voz culta”; Le Robert designates the French equivalent as “vieux ou littéraire.” The standard meanings of “relativo al campo” and the figurative “tosco, rudo, grosero” are listed in all of the standard Spanish dictionaries consulted, including María Eloísa Alvarez del Real’s El vocabulario actual de la América Latina y España (Panamá: América, 1976). No other special usage is cited in the dictionaries specializing in popular Argentine language.

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imagination with total destruction, both of forms and of matter right down to the atomic level. Later, a passing funeral procession incites Adán to meditate on death in terms of the Last Judgment at the end of time: “[el difunto desconocido] oirá la trompeta del ángel, y sentirá caer sobre sus hombros la última hoja del tiempo. Quia tempus non erit amplius” (AB 85). This citation from Apocalypsis (10:6) concerning the exhaustion of time inevitably leads back to the same obsessive Apocalyptic sentence: [Adán] miró el cielo que resplandecía en las alturas, pero ante los ojos de su alma la vio marchitarse y caer a jirones como la vieja decoración de un drama. “Y el cielo será retirado como un libro que se arrolla.” Tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis a medianoche. (AB 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 Adán, for they enable him to participate imaginatively in the same visionary powers as the seer of Patmos, words that through the magic of 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 Adán 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 card in his bid for her love by revealing to her his “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules.” In the “Cuaderno,” Adán has edified a second Solveig. Epigon of Dante, 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: Suavemente obligado a una confidencia, el Visitante [Adán] demostró la escasa realidad de sus amores, acerca de los cuales dijo, tras referirse a un misterioso Cuaderno de Tapas Azules, que sólo tenían la frágil esencia de una construcción ideal, aunque se basaran en una mujer de carne y hueso. [. . .] [Adán] admitió estar edificando una mujer de cielo sobre la base de una mujer terrestre. (AB 68)

Now Adán 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, “al leerlo [el Cuaderno de Tapas Azules], ¿se reconocería Solveig Amundsen en la pintura ideal que había trazado él con materiales tan sutiles?” On the other hand, “¿reconocería él a la Solveig ideal de su cuaderno en la Solveig de carne y sangre que lo había llamado y a la

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que se aproximaba en aquel instante?” In any event, “[l]a confrontación de ambas criaturas era temible” (AB 79). What matters to Adán is that the two Solveigs should harmoniously coincide. In order for this to happen, the flesh-and-blood girl, on reading his “Cuaderno,” ought to recognize his genius and then submit to the ideal form that he has created for her. In fact, he is not so concerned that she should recognize herself in the portrait, but that she should recognize his genius and submit to the ideal form he has created for her: ¡Bah! No era eso lo que le interesaba en realidad, sino el conocimiento que mediante aquellas páginas haría Solveig de un Adán Buenosayres prodigiosamente desconocido hasta entonces. “Acaso, al descubrírsele de pronto aquel extraño linaje de amor, ella se le acercaría con los 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, evidently, will be the ideal one that Adán has revealed to her. 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 Adán, 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). This catastrophe is heralded by the last adventure that befalls Adán before arriving at the Amundsens’ house in Saavedra. He “witnesses,” in his over-stimulated 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 opposing armies, as in the war of the end of the world, and amid “una furiosa trompetería de ángeles, la batalla se hace general y tremenda” (AB 119). At the height of the brawl, a phrase from the Book of Revelation is inserted into the text: Sin saber cómo ni en virtud de qué arte, el Carrero se halla en poder del vasco Arizmendi, el cual, lleno de santa furia, lo aprieta entre sus brazos de cíclope. La multitud deja oír un murmullo de asombro: se hace luego un silencio de media hora. Los dos héroes 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 so much commotion, it is impossible that suddenly there be a half-hour of silence. The quote from Revelation does make metanarrative sense, however, when interpreted in terms of Adán’s personal apocalyptic drama. The interpolated phrase is drawn from that passage of Revelation in which

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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? According to Nácar and Colunga the half-hour of silence serves as an “entreacto” after which “la escena pasa del cielo a la tierra y marca la ejecución de los juicios contra el mundo” (Sagrada 1281, n.8.1).6 In Adán 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 Adán’s imagination. This phantasmagorical episode interrupts the narrative line that follows Adán through the streets on his way to the Amundsens’ house. The thread is picked up again in Chapter Two after Adán 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 Adán’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 foregrounding in the next chapter, the account of the tertulia. After projecting his imaginative forebodings of Apocalypse onto the cosmos, Adán will experience catastrophe personally. When the interrupted narrative line is resumed in Chapter Two, Adán 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 Adán’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 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,” 6 Cf. Buttrick, Interpreter’s Bible XII (425): “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.” In the Book of Revelation, the opening of the set of seven seals is followed by a series of seven trumpets. In Adán Buenosayres, the mention of the half-hour of silence on page 118 is followed by the image of the “furiosa trompetería de ángeles” 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. It is not my contention that the narrative plan of Adán Buenosayres is modeled 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.

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as Adán himself allows – destroys Solveig celeste, who is Adán’s ideal creation. The irony of this is the more mordant since Solveig terrestre is sitting on a “diván celeste,” as is repeatedly mentioned. The earthly woman has usurped the heavenly position. On the other hand, Adán’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 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. Adán’s more identifiable rival is not reality but Lucio Negri. Symbolically, their rivalry is a battle of conflicting truths, that of poetry (Adán) versus science (Lucio). Solveig is the arbiter in this contest, and she has spoken. By rejecting Adán and choosing Lucio Negri, she has rejected poetry and endorsed the scientific world-view. Adán 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 Amundsen, falls into a sewage ditch and comes out covered in foul-smelling muck. When he asks for something with which to clean himself, Adán considers offering him “cierto inefable Cuaderno de Tapas Azules que había rescatado esa noche del poder de una ingrata; pero lo contuvo su infinita modestia, al recordarle que aquellas páginas no eran suyas, sino de la posteridad” (AB 230). Adán has admitted, at least internally, the defeat of the system of values contained in his “Cuaderno” 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 rueful sarcasm. Thus far, we have followed Adán’s “apocalyptic” experience as he himself has experienced. However, the narrator does not always limit himself to transmitting faithfully Adán’s interior monologue, but at times assumes an omniscience that allows him to impose his own interpretations on events. Such is the case in his presentation of the disastrous tertulia. In the following passage, the narrator speaks independently about Solveig and makes an indirect but unequivocal reference to John’s Revelation: Y Solveig adivinaba ya la posesión de una fuerza naciente, y vagos ensueños de dominio se abrían paso en su imaginación. La noche aquella en que la dejaron sola, ¿no se había puesto ella el vestido largo de su hermana Ethel, ese gran vestido negro con adornos de plata? ¿No había caminado ella frente al espejo, grave como una dama, y respondiendo con una leve inclinación de su rostro a las reverencias profundas que le dedicaba una invisible corte de admiradores? [. . .] Lo que le complacía en Lucio era, justamente, la lisonja reverencial de sus miradas y el cobarde

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temblor de sus voces cuando a ella se dirigía; y cada vez que Lucio bailaba con ella, se estremecía todo y entornaba los párpados, como su perro Nerón, aquella tarde, cuando tendida ella en la piel de carnero que mister Chisholm trajo de la Patagonia, le había palmeado el vientre liso y cálido, a la hora de la siesta. (AB 133)

Clearly, the narrator in this passage is no longer transmitting Adán’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 storyline, 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 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 Adán 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 “ensueños 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 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 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.7 If Solveig terrestre is evil because of her carnality, then Adán’s 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 7 The Whore of Babylon serves as a symbol of the evil of sex on another occasion. In the brothel scene in Book Four, Adán’s friend and comrade in amorous suffering, Samuel Tesler, denounces the institution of prostitution in the same terms: “¡Es la ramera del Apocalipsis, la más desnuda entre las vestidas! En mi tribu la llamaban Lilith” (AB 333).

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scientific materialism, represented in Lucio Negri, is in thrall to the evil influence of the passions of the body, Adán’s 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. On this reading, then, Adán’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 Adán’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 lapdog 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 Rabelaisian “tremendismo”8 – invites one to read hyperbolically. Indeed, one of Marechal’s favourite parodic strategies is exaggeration. A squabble between housewives 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 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 14-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 Adán’s story? The central crisis of the novel’s plot is that Solveig spurns Adán and his “Cuaderno.” This crisis can now be resolved by one of two different dénouements, which depend on two divergent readings of the Apocalyptic intertext. In one reading, Adán 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, Adán 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 artis8 Marechal writes in his essay entitled “Claves de Adán Buenosayres” that his readings of Rabalais left in him “una inclinación a la ‘gigantomaquia’ que se advierte no poco en Adán Buenosayres,” as well as “el gusto de un humor sin agresiones que oculta un sentido profundo bajo su máscara ‘tremendista’ ” (Cuaderno 131). The word “máscara” 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.

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tic-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 mindset, 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 womanhood, must be either Beatrice or the Whore of Babylon; there is no middle ground. Samuel Tesler “el filósofo” seems to interpret Adán’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 Adán’s “inefable historia de amor”: “[Samuel] evocó la figura de cierta mocosa [Solveig] que ya sabía darse humos entre las espigadas mujeres de Saavedra; y se dijo, en su alma, que sólo un ingenuo como el amigo Buenosayres podía encontrar en aquella endeble criatura la materia prima de una Laura o de una Beatriz” (AB 352–3). For Samuel, the brat who puts on airs is clearly unworthy, and Adán 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 righteous anger: “¡Es una bestia negra! – insistió Samuel –. ¡Había que verlo, arrastrándole 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 Adán 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 dénouements of Adán’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 Adán experiences (though he will gloss this over in his “Cuaderno”). It is Adán who is obsessed by the apocalyptic image sicut liber involutus; it is he who sees his ideal world destroyed as Solveig rolls up his “Cuaderno.” He has been judged and found wanting, both as a lover and more importantly as a metaphysical poet. In Book Five, we are again privy to his thoughts as he wanders the streets at midnight on Friday. As a result of his failure with Solveig, Adán 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 Adán falls asleep and dreams about him: “anda, se tambalea, cae de rodillas y vuelve a incorporarse un hombre que lleva una cruz. Y, ¡cosa extraña!, en aquel hombre azotado reconoce al linyera del umbral” (AB 425; Marechal’s emphasis). The linyera is a refiguration of Christ on the road to Golgotha. In

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the dream, the accompanying soldiers reflect images of the seven deadly sins in their physiognomies. Adán discovers to his horror that all these sins are in his own features. Thus ends Adán’s subjective experience in what he calls “esta noche final” (AB 412). Nevertheless, toward the end of Book Five, a second dénouement emerges to complete the other apocalyptic version of why Adán 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 Adán gives up, the narrator takes matters into his own hands and imposes his version of events. As Adán suffers, the narrator detaches his voice from Adán’s consciousness and creates a gaudy cosmic backdrop featuring a battle between the heavenly hosts of Light against those of Darkness for Adán’s soul, the outcome of which is predictable. Adán, 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 Adán’s interior monologue is very clear. Adán finishes a soliloquy full of self-recrimination with the words “¡Sólo un literato!” and then the narrator’s voice, clearly distinct from that of the protagonist, takes over: Espadas angélicas y tridentes demoníacos chocan sin ruido en la calle Gurruchaga: se disputan el alma de Adán Buenosayres, un literato; porque, según la economía suprema, vale más el alma de un hombre que todo el universo visible. Pero Adán no lo sabe, y es bueno que no lo sepa todavía. (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 Adán prays, his soliloquy is punctuated by the narrator’s voice recounting step by step the apocalyptic battle of the heavenly hosts: “Y, entretanto, espadas angélicas y tridentes demoníacos han suspendido su contienda; porque llegó la hora en que Adán Buenosayres debe combatir solo” (AB 423). And again: “Adán ignora que mil ojos invisibles están llorando por él en las alturas, y que los de la espada, en torno suyo, han comenzado a mirarse y a sonreírse, 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 más el alma de un hombre que toda la creación visible, y porque un alma está peleando bien junto a la reja de San Bernardo. Pero Adán Buenosayres no las oye, y es bueno que no las oiga todavía” (AB 423–4). None of this cosmic choreography, a verbal pastiche of the Gloria scene in medieval Christian art, forms part of Adán’s consciousness, as the narrator himself smugly points out. The protagonist has become a pawn in this narrator’s Christian morality

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play, in which Adán’s soul is struggling on the battlefield of a spiritual Armageddon, according to the Augustinian reading of Revelation.9 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 sería total ahora sin el susurro de la lluvia y el rechinar del camaranchón bajo Adán Buenosayres que se agita en sueños. Presencias torvas retroceden: huyen vencidas y como a regañadientes hacia los cuatro ángulos del recinto. De pie junto a la cabecera, Alguien ha bajado sus armas; y apoyado en ellas vigila eternamente. (AB 426)

After Adán’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 Adán 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 Adán’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 “vela de las armas.” This clumsy, transparent use of the theatrical cliché of the deus ex machina 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. One’s suspicions increase on recalling that the narrator is the same practical joker whom we have seen in the “Prólogo indispensable” and who opens Book One with a jocose, even sardonic, challenge to the lector agreste. It is to such a reader that the narrator’s mock-beatific ending is addressed. But he has given us fair warning in the way he has structured his account. If the ending of the novel refers us back to the prologue, the ending of Book Five closes a cycle begun in Book One. The narrator begins the story proper with Adán’s awakening in the morning. With perfect symmetry, he closes his narration after Adán has fallen asleep late at night. The narrator has had the first word (in the morning) and the last word (at night). But with his preliminary words – his “prologue,” as it were – he has mocked the reader as gullible. By virtue of the intimate connection between beginning and ending, prologue and epilogue, the narrator has deliberately called attention to the unreliability of his version of the end.

9 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).

3 METAHISTORY AND THE CYCLE OF LANGUAGE The Christian Apocalypse is subsumed under a larger ideological construct present in Marechal’s novels. The doctrine of “metahistory” as Marechal receives it from René Guénon is parodied in such a way that it suggests on another level an analogous cycle of language modes or phases, which can be outlined with the help of Giambattista Vico, Northrop Frye, and Hayden White. In Book One of Adán Buenosayres, this “metalinguistic” cycle can be clearly traced in the interior monologue of his protagonist. Thence it will be possible to undertake a discussion of Adán’s poetics, both in theory and practice.

Apocalyptic metahistory The structure of Adán 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 modern 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 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 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 Adán Buenosayres and El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo, by contrast, apocalypse signifies the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. 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.

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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 astrólogo,” but the theory it denotes is shared by the novel’s two other “metaphysical” characters, Adán Buenosayres and Samuel Tesler “el filósofo.” 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), Adán Buenosayres mentally recites “la elegía del buen Hesíodo, que ya en su siglo lamentaba esta Edad de Hierro: «Los hombres estarán rotos de trabajo y miseria durante el día, y serán corrompidos a lo largo de la noche. El uno saqueará la ciudad del otro: no se hallará piedad alguna, ni justicia, ni buenas acciones, sino que habrá de respetarse al hombre violento e inicuo»” (AB 150). In El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo, Professor Bermúdez quotes a similar version of the same passage from The Works and the Days (B 118–9), in which the Greek philosopher bemoans having to live in the miserable, iniquitous Iron Age. The most direct exposition of the theory of metahistory is the one presented by Bermúdez at the “Segundo Concilio del Banquete” (B 195–210). A Great Cycle is made 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 catastrófico” wiping out all trace and memory of the former ages. In Adán Buenosayres “the philosopher” Samuel Tesler expounds the same doctrine at the Amundsen tertulia: Según los hindúes – lo aleccionó Tesler –, la Edad de Oro tuvo una duración de casi dos millones de años. 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 fisonomía del planeta, ¡dígame si es posible que nos quedase alguna ruina para que se divirtieran los arqueólogos! (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 Tesler, citing the Hindu tradition in particular. In Banquete, one of the participants at the Segundo Concilio asks Bermúdez 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 carrying the most weight.

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Where did this model come from? It is my opinion that Leopoldo Marechal did not invent it, but rather borrowed it from the French writer, René Guénon (see above, p. 12 and n). During the “Viaje a Cacodelphia,” Schultze delivers a historical discourse in which his interlocutor maliciously points out the influence of “recientes lecturas de cierto metafísico gálico” (AB 571). This Gallic metaphysician is surely René Guénon, whom Marechal praises as a “filósofo de la historia” in his essay “Autopsia de Creso” (Cuaderno 53). Furthermore, Marechal cites Guénon as one of the influences determining his understanding of Dante, which in turn influenced the writing of Adán Buenosayres (Andrés 35). Here is how Guénon conflates the Hindu doctrine of the Great Cycle or Manvantara with Hesiod’s doctrine: La doctrine hindoue enseigne que la durée d’un cycle humain, auquel elle donne le nom de Manvantara, se divise en quatre âges, qui marquent autant de phases d’un obscurcissement graduel de la spiritualité primordiale; ce sont ces mêmes périodes que les traditions de l’antiquité occidentale, de leur côté, désignaient comme les âges d’or, d’argent, de bronze et de fer. Nous sommes présentement dans le quatrième âge, le Kali-Yuga ou “âge sombre”. (Crise 15)

In spite of his fondness for exotic traditions, however, Guénon’s cast of mind coincides very well with that of reactionary apocalypticism. He abhors the modern West for having strayed from the equilibrium embodied in “Tradition,” by which he means a theocratic society such as medieval Europe or classical India. In the twentieth century, explains the Frenchman, events are accelerating toward a crisis, meaning etymologically a judgment, which in turn means the last judgment, which will mark the end of an historical cycle, “la fin de la civilisisation occidentale sous sa forme actuelle” (Crise 7–13). For Guénon, cosmic and historical cycles correspond; the design of history participates in a cosmic design. This is what Schultze, too, means by “metahistory.” Elsewhere, Guénon 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 modern world is brought about” (Reign 201). Guénon’s words and apocalyptic posture are echoed by Samuel Tesler when he speaks of the “diabolical plan” of modern science (AB 127). The incidence of René Guénon’s ideas in the work of Marechal cannot be overestimated.2 Marechal’s essays continually echo Guénon’s thought, vocabulary, and even his penchant for highlighting the most significant nouns of each sentence with quotation marks. In Marechal’s novels, two 2 La Crise du monde moderne was first published in 1927, and again in 1946, just two years before the publication of Adán Buenosayres. The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times first appeared in French in 1945.

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related aspects of Guénon’s thought play an important role. Besides the Frenchman’s apocalypticism, his totally negative and metaphysically reactionary attitude towards late modernity,3 there is his 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 not be quite fair to place René Guénon 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. Guénon handles the vocabulary of all these arcane disciplines as so many symbols that can be conflated within one supreme priestly world view. René Guénon 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, according to which a unitary theological tradition dates back to a pre-Judaic source religion.4 This belief 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 Trismegistus, the Thrice Great One – as priest, magus, and law-giver.5 Hermes occupied the first link in a supposed chain of prisci theologi, namely: Hermes, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, and Plato. Though Guénon does not openly say so, he lets it be understood that after Plato comes René Guénon 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.

3 By reason of his apocalypticism, Guénon had some appeal for the great modernists of the first half of the twentieth century; even André Breton read and appreciated him (Batache 9–10). 4 Such thinkers as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno embraced this doctrine. See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1–43) for discussion of the Renaissance “philosopher-magus” and the prisca theologica. 5 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 (VIII, 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 (Yates 9).

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The cycle of language None of this is to say that Leopoldo Marechal the novelist adopts Guénon’s ideology uncritically and gives it expression in Adán Buenosayres. He borrows Guénon’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 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 Guénon’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 Guénon’s idea of history as a fall from “normality” in an accelerating plunge toward the nadir of the Dark Age or Kali Yuga: Me apresuro a decirle [to his interlocutor Rafael Squirru] que nuestra época, merced a su terrible y ya largo desequilibrio con respecto a toda “normalidad”, constituye algo así como una suerte de anomalía 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 época tendría una explicación más exacta en el “proceso descendente” del ciclo humano, sometido a una inquietante “aceleración”. Ahora bien, Rafael conoce la doctrina oriental de los Yugas . . . Quiero decir que podría yo ahora lanzarme con Rafael a esta pendiente rápida del Kali Yuga. – Pero esa es otra historia – le digo. – ¿Cuándo y dónde la veremos? – me pregunta él desde su mecedora. – En El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo. (Cuaderno 119–20)

In this essay, Marechal seeks to establish a correspondence between the cycles of art and the Hesiodic-Guénonian 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:

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El Romanticismo tiene la violencia de la reacciones ciclónicas, y también su escasa duración. Porque, habiéndose metido en otra desmesura, el arte no tarda en buscar nuevamente su “fórmula equilibradora” y la encuentra muy luego en otra estación del Clasicismo. (117)

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 René Guénon. Thus we are experiencing now “una anomalía 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 outré, 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, since 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 política; las atomizantes filosofías germanas y otras, en el orden del pensamiento; y los otros “ismos” inventados con tanta profusión 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 modern 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 championed in the twentieth century by René Guénon. By discussing the seasons of art, 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 más completo” (Andrés 103). All discursive practice is preceded by a fundamental posture vis-à-vis language, which Hayden White calls a “prefigurative (tropological) strategy.” According to White, “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 dominant trope whose mechanism determines the metadiscursive basis of that discourse.6 6

Indeed, White’s structuralist methodology is inspired not only by philosophers of

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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 modes of language: (1) the peoples of the age of the gods spoke in poetic characters; (2) in the age of heroes, the heraldic language of law and religion was spoken by nobles and priests; (3) in the age of men, language is vulgar (vernacular), using “words agreed upon by the people, a language of which they are absolute lords” (Vico 6, 20–1). At the end of a cycle of ages there follows a ricorso or retraversing of a new cycle; hence Vico’s ricorso is roughly analogous to the apocalypse at the end of Guénon’s metahistorical cycle. Vico’s “new science” 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 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 modern scientific world description; hence it is also called descriptive language.7 In order to draw out what is problematized implicitly in Marechal’s novels, I shall 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

history but also by “two literary theorists whose works represent virtual philosophical systems,” namely, Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke (Metahistory 3n.). 7 In Words with Power, Frye reconceptualizes 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 the contours of Marechal’s thinking.

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in Hayden White’s system and characterizes the final stage of historiographical strategy.8 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 distinction between the “naïve” 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 characterizations 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 characterization of the world of experience but also to the very effort to capture 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. 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 Adán Buenosayres. The novel’s primary “metatrope” is irony. But precisely because of its metatropological status, irony itself is not problematized in the novel. The “naïve” tropes can be ironized, but it is difficult to ironize irony. Thus in Adán Buenosayres, irony is strictly performative. The ironic mode is ubiquitous, but it can never stand above itself and critically reflect its own mechanism.

Modes of language in Adán’s interior monologue With this in mind, I should like to examine the opening pages of Book One of Adán Buenosayres, where a similar cycle of language modes or phases stands out. The metalinguistic cycle is dramatized through Adán’s narrated monologue and framed by thematic reference to Genesis and Apocalypse. 8 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).

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Adán wakes up in the morning and experiences his awakening as the creation of the world: “Como en su primer día el mundo brotaba del amor y del odio . . .: ‘¡Soy la granada!’, ‘¡Soy la pipa!’, ‘¡soy la rosa!’, parecieron gritarle con el orgullo declamatorio de sus diferenciaciones” (AB 18). In Adán’s consciousness, this process is likened to a parody of genesis: “Un sabor amargo en la lengua del cuerpo y en la del alma, eso era lo que sentía él [Adán] al considerar la parodia de génesis que se desarrollaba en su habitación” (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 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 “Cuaderno” Adán Buenosayres recalls his first poetic expressions as a child: “me valía de palabras incoherentes o voces en libertad, no por lo que significaban, naturalmente, sino por el valor intencional que yo les asignaba según el caso” (AB 435). Now, however, the adult Adán finds that he has been despoiled of this power enjoyed by the biblical Adam, the child in Eden. When Adán awakes and hears the world stuttering its first names to him – “el mundo . . . ya le balbucía sus primeros nombres” (AB 18) – it means that the procedure of determining significance has been reversed. Instead of Adán naming the world, the things of the world dictate their names to him. This reversal, for Adán, is responsible for the parodic nature of the morning genesis of his world. As the objects of the world seem to name themselves, Adán 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. Adán 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 Adán the individual’s parole. Adán finds 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 Adán is dissastified with the parodic genesis of the world, his next impulse is to destroy the world: Entonces, con el ánimo de un dios en vena de cataclismos, Adán cerró los ojos y el universo volvió a la nada. “¡Que se jorobe!”, refunfuñó, imaginando afuera la disolución de la rosa, el aniquilamiento de la granada y el estallido atómico de la pipa. Quizás, y al solo cerrarse de sus ojos,

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también la ciudad se habría disipado afuera, y se habrían desvanecido las montañas, evaporado los océanos 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. Adán himself attributes these imaginings to his “lecturas del Apocalipsis, a medianoche.” In effect, Adán 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 language of what Frye calls the poetic-magical or metaphoric mode. According to Frye, the most representative metaphor in this mode of language is the nature god of mythology: “The central expression of metaphor is the ‘god,’ 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 Adán 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. This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world’s childhood men were by nature sublime poets. (par. 186, 187)

Adán himself recognizes the childishness of his imagination and admonishes himself: “no era el caso de entregarse a un pavor infantil de génesis y catástrofes” (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 naïve metaphors of poetic myth. He will find the ideal trope in a particular species of totalized metonymy. Accordingly, Adán’s consciousness now leaves the primitive-poetic level and moves on to the level of abstract thinking: Lo cierto era, por ejemplo, que al cerrar sus ojos (y Adán lo hizo nuevamente) la rosa no se anonadaba en modo alguno: por el contrario, la flor seguía viviendo en su mente que ahora la pensaba, y vivía una existencia durable . . .; porque la flor pensada no era tal o cual rosa, sino todas las rosas que habían sido, eran y podían ser en este mundo: la flor ceñida a su número abstracto . . .; de modo tal que si él, Adán Buenosayres, fuera eterno, también la flor lo sería en su mente, aunque todas la rosas exteriores acabasen de pronto y no volvieran a florecer. “¡Rosa bienaventurada!”, se dijo Adán. ¡Vivir en otro eternamente, como la rosa, y por la eternidad del Otro! (AB 19)

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Adán 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 particulars” (Armstrong II, 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. Of the many definitions of metonymy, Nietzsche’s is the most useful for the way it links the trope directly to Platonic thought: 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 torn 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 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, 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

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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 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 Adán 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 día es como un pájaro amaestrado, reflexionó Adán, viene cada doce horas al mundo, por el mismo rincón del globo, y nos encaja en su eterna cancioncita; o más 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)

Adán 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 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 Adán is “una realidad sin vuelo que se daba todos los días, inevitable y monótona 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 Adán’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 Adán’s internal monologue, we have traced the evolution of three distinct phases in language, according to Northrop Frye’s scheme. In the first phase, the magical-poetic, Adán’s internal verbal activity leads him into the naïve, 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 Adán in the here and now of his contemporary social reality. Adán is forced to accept the third, descriptive, phase of language against his will:

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Adán Buenosayres abrió definitivamente los ojos, y al ver que los objetos le mostraban su cifra irrevocable, saludó al fin, descorazonado: “¡Buenos días, Tierra!” No deseaba romper aún la inmovilidad de su cuerpo yacente: hubiera sido una concesión al nuevo día que lo reclamaba y al que se resistía él con todo el peso de una voluntad muerta. (AB 19)

Adán is now fully present in the daytime of the concrete world, whose objects “show” him their cifra or code. The important point here, from Adán’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. The simile of the tiresome schoolmaster dictating carries a telling irony, for Adán himself is a teacher at a boys’ school. A portion of Adán’s identity, then, participates in the descriptive language-world that he rejects. Adán the metaphysical poet stands in opposition to Adán the schoolteacher. Adán affirms his poetic, metaphysical side by taking a double decision: “Adán resolvió en su alma: ‘¡No iré a la escuela!’ Esto es la rosa, meditó luego. ¡No! ¡La rosa era Solveig Amundsen, pese a lo que afirmara el día!” (AB 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 Adán they are really two aspects of a single affirmation. Having defied the language of the day, Adán wonders about his antipathy for daytime reality. His musings take the form of an internal dialogue: – ¿Sería él, acaso, un espíritu nocturno, emparentado con aves maléficas, 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 así, ¿por qué vivía de la noche? – Frecuentaba la noche porque en su siglo el día era incitador y antorcha de una guerra sin laureles, violador del silencio y látigo contra la santa quietud. (AB 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 of the Iron Age. The night, on the other hand, is “silenciófila,” a quality of capital importance because “el silencio es principio y fin de toda música.” The night, “destructora de cárceles,” stimulates “el amanecer de las voces difíciles y los hondos llamados que sofoca el día bajo sus trombones” (AB 28). In other words, the night favours the

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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 Adán 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. Adán is in love with Solveig Amundsen; his rival is a young doctor called Lucio Negri. In spite of his surname, Lucio is on the side of the day. Paradoxically, the daytime of the twentieth century is no day at all, but 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. Adán ruefully recalls his last meeting with the young doctor; by reciting Adán’s poetry, Lucio humiliated the poet in front of Solveig. To console himself, Adán foresees the vindication of his truth in the Apocalypse: “¡Bah!, pensó Adán malhumorado, Lucio Negri no ha de impedir que alguna vez el día pierda su gastado alfabeto ni que el mundo se tambalee como don Aquiles, el maestro ciruela de Maipú, cuando buscaba sus perdidos anteojos en las carteras de los alumnos; ni que, ¡ay!, la luna sea hecha como de sangre, ni que sea retirado el cielo como un libro que se arrolla.” Las tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis venían resonando en sus oídos desde la noche anterior: Sicut liber involutus. (AB 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, Adán 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 poetical-mythical. This image introduces the metaphor of the world as a book, a topos especially important to the metonymic or hieratic phase of language and central to Adán’s understanding of reality. Adán is a poet, but he also considers himself to be a metaphysician, as he makes clear later in the novel: “Schiller no era un metafísico. Yo voy más lejos que Schiller” (AB 309). Metaphysics for Adán means the metaphysics of metonymic language, which can be characterized generally as Platonist or Platonizing. In sum, Adán opposes descriptive language and champions the poetic and metonymic modes of language.

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Ironic motifs So far, the tropological strategies of language have been within the compass of Adán’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 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 critical awareness of the prefigurative mechanisms of language. The ingenuous Adán 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 retraverse the cycle of dominant tropes. In doing so, irony reverses the direction of their signifying value. No longer truth-affirming, the tropes 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 undermine 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 Adán 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 meaning. The first of these motifs 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 Adán’s own poetry: “El amor más alegre/ que un entierro de niños” (AB 20).9 Adán recalls these verses again midway through the novel, at the glorieta Ciro, when he is about to expound his poetics (AB 302). Finally, near the end of the novel, a character in Schultze’s hell confronts Adán with the absurdity of this same metaphor (AB 667). This “love happier than a children’s funeral” sums up Adán’s unhappy relationship with his beloved. The first time Adán recalls the unfortunate verses is when he thinks back 9 In his annotated edition of the novel, Barcia points out that these verses come from Marechal’s “Poema del indio” in Días 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).

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to one of the Amundsen’s tertulias, at which Lucio Negri recited the couplet and exposed Adán to public ridicule. All those who were present, including Solveig, found the verses shocking and laughed at their absurdity. Now, ruminating over his humiliation, Adán recalls the genesis of the metaphor. When he was a small boy, Adán once took part in a wake mourning the death of a child. But everyone was singing and dancing and laughing. When Adán asked why, the adults told him that they were celebrating because the child was not really dead, but living a blessed existence in God. Adán’s train of thought concludes: “Por eso debía ser alegre el entierro de un niño: era irse a vivir en otro eternamente, por la virtud eterna del Otro” (AB 21). The linguistic code here is that of metonymic language. Adán 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 Adán, then, the key to the analogy lies in the Christian-Platonist conception of the soul as an ideal form in the mind of God. Adán 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 Adán’s linguistic code is not the one that prevails in society. Adán’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 (child’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 contextualized in Adán’s interior monologue, their irony takes on a larger significance. 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 Adán: “Pero Solveig Amundsen no debió reírse con las otras muchachas, ni lo habría hecho, tal vez, si hubiera sabido que con su risa iniciaba el desmoronamiento de una construcción poética y la ruina de una Solveig ideal” (AB 21). Adán has created the ideal Solveig, like the ideal “rosa bienaventurada,” for he has proclaimed: “¡La rosa era Solveig!” The analogy between the blessed rose and the ideal Solveig is made quite explicit when Adán concludes his meditation on the child’s funeral: Por eso debía ser alegre el entierro de un niño: era irse a vivir en otro eternamente, por la virtud eterna del Otro. Y Solveig Amundsen lo ignoraba, sin duda; pero aquella tarde no debió reírse de Adán, porque también ella, sin saberlo, vivía en él una existencia emancipada de las cuatro estaciones. “Le llevaré mi Cuaderno de Tapas Azules”, resolvió Adán en su ánimo. (AB 21–2)

Just as the blessed rose lives eternally in the mind of God, the ideal Solveig

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lives in the mind of Adán, 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 Adán. 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. Adán’s unrequited love for Solveig is this “amor más alegre que un entierro de niños.” And just as Solveig will prove indifferent to Adán’s love and to the edification of his “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules,” so reality will spurn Adán’s metaphysics. Furthermore, the Leitmotiv of the happy funeral also resonates with the structure of the entire novel. Adán’s own funeral in the “Prólogo indispensable” is also the “entierro de un niño” which is celebrated jubilantly. The ingenuous “child” who wrote the “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” has passed away. As I suggested in chapter 2, however, it is not really Adán who has 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 Adán 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 Adán’s recurring premonition that he is being reeled in like a fish caught on a hook by the Pescador, meaning Christ the fisher of men. The fish/fisherman theme surfaces in Adán’s interior monologue in the context of thoughts about the Last Judgment, occasioned by a passing funeral cortège: Tremendas palabras del Apocalipsis a medianoche. Un terror sagrado que redobla sus tambores desde la lejanía, in crescendo, in crescendo, hasta romperme los tímpanos 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, Adán suffers a brief nervous crisis during the symposium at the glorieta Ciro and says aloud: ¡Es absurdo! Uno está navegando en ciertas aguas oscuras, y de repente se da cuenta que ha mordido un anzuelo invisible . . . ¡Y uno se resiste, forcejea, trata de agarrarse al fondo! Es inútil: ¡el Pescador invisible tironea desde arriba! (AB 318)

The same image, rendered in the same vocabulary, also occurs in Adán’s “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” (AB 443).10 In a state of spiritual crisis near the end of Book Five, Adán prays before the dilapidated statue, thinking to give 10 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: “¡Quién le dijera, para su consuelo,/ Que abajo estaba el pez en el anzuelo/ Y el admirable Pescador arriba!” (Antología [1950] 57). Marechal the novelist parodies the imagery of his own poetry, ironically inverting its significance.

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himself up to Christ. It is only then that the (tragi-)comic irony in the Leitmotivs becomes apparent: throughout the novel, Adán 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 Adán’s misguided expectations. The Last Judgment is deferred until the following evening, when Adán undertakes his initiatic journey to the 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 2.11 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 Adán. He is left to fend for himself. Thus the fictions of poetic language are undermined. But for Adán 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. Adán is obliged to confront the gap between language and reality. Irony, built into the atomic level of the novel’s text, results in an “estallido atómico,” the atomic explosion not of the pipe or the rose, as in Adán’s daydreaming, but of the rose which Adán insists is Solveig. Not the rose but the name of the rose undergoes apocalyptic disintegration.

Adán’s poetry Adán chief poetic creation is his “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules,” a very earnest exercise in Neoplatonism in imitation of Dante’s Nuova Vita. The poet declares that, in writing this spiritual autobiography, he will use the abstract “idioma de la geometría” and he affirms that “mi trabajo ha de parecerse al desarrollo de un teorema o a la consideración de un enigma (AB 436). This mention of a theorem and an enigma in the same breath points to Adán’s addiction to the mystique of neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism,12 two closely related schools of religious-philosophical thought that fall

11 Angel Núñez, 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-Adán en su anzuelo, y éste así lo descubre, reconoce y adora” (20). Nothing in the text of the novel, however, tells us that Adán discovers, recognizes and adores Christ. On the contrary, during his “dark night of the soul,” he finds only silence. The following evening he discovers Cacodelphia and the Paleogogue. 12 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).

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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). Adán is constantly talking about numbers in a way that is incomprehensible in modern usage: “la flor ceñida a su número abstracto” (AB 19), “los números del amor” (446), “el número de la paloma” (437; 438), etc. Everything in the world has its number which, metaphysically speaking, is a priori to the thing itself; hence Adán’s repeated references to the notion of “el admirable número 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 Adán 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 traslación en torno de la mujer suavísima, por el cual mi alma la cercaba en lentos giros, la medía y estudiaba con amoroso cuidado; y otro de rotación sobre su eje, gracias al cual mi alma iba estudiándose a sí misma en el modo y efectos de su contemplación. (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 Adán 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: Y aquí, a riesgo de parecer ocioso, necesito expresar el efecto que tan breves palabras obraron en mí: por primera vez oía yo en su boca las letras de mi nombre; y en aquel “Adán Buenosayres” que pronunciaba ella me sentí nombrado como jamás lo había sido, tal como si, por vez primera, lograra yo en aquel nombre la total revelación de mi ser y el color exacto de mi destino. (AB 462)

“Aquella” belongs to a higher sphere, to the intelligible or spiritual world; she is the transcendental conduit of the Logos, which grants Adán his being. “Aquella,” according to Adán, is not merely the girl Solveig. Or conversely, Solveig is not merely a flesh-and-blood mortal. In fact, for Adán the demonstrative pronoun “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 Adán’s image of Solveig, which he understands as an instantiation of that higher principle in the lower, concrete world.

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Adán 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 from it. In Chapter VIII of the “Cuaderno,” Adán meets Solveig (“Aquella”) for the first time. Immediately beforehand, in Chapter VII, he describes a mystical experience. In a dream, Adán has a vision of a celestial woman whose body forms the axis around which revolves a transparent planetary sphere, “que producía un sonido grave como de arco al rozar una cuerda” (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 perfección pasiva o femenina” (Cuaderno 126). Adán experiences ecstatic joy in contemplating her, and this experience stands as the prototype of what he later feels for Solveig. The image of the celestial woman, then, exists prior to Solveig, and Adán’s exquisitely composed narrative makes the nature of their relationship clear. After recounting the mystical dream of the celestial woman, Adán closes Chapter VII of his “Cuaderno” with this sentence: “Con este sueño 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 líneas” (AB 445). Clearly, then, “Aquella” comes into Adán’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, Adán devotes the rest of the “Cuaderno” to relating the vicissitudes he experiences in keeping his edification intact. Finally he must take drastic action: “Entonces concebí la empresa increíble” (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, fuí extrayendo de aquella mujer todas las líneas perdurables, todos los volúmenes y colores, toda la gracia de su forma; y con los mismos elementos (bien que salvados ya de la materia) volví a reconstruirla en mi alma según peso, número y medida; y la forjé 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 Adán to save his sense of the ontological order of life. The enterprise, says Adán, was “un movimiento del terror venerable, o tal vez la fecundidad de mi pena, o quizás el grito de la nunca enmudecida esperanza” (AB 463). Thus it is not surprising that Adán’s desperately hopeful project soon founders. Adán announces his “extraña obra de alquimia y de transmutación” at the end of Chapter XII. At this point (as discussed above in chapter 2), the narrator-editor intervenes to establish a narrative correlation between Adán’s

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notebook and what we already know from the main body of the novel. The narrator tells us that the last two chapters constitute “el final del Cuaderno de Tapas Azules, escrito, sin duda, por Adán Buenosayres después de su tertulia definitiva en Saavedra” (AB 463). According to what we read in Book Two of the novel, the disaster that befalls Adán at the tertulia takes the form of a confrontation between the two Solveigs, terrestre and celeste. The result is that the celestial Solveig is demolished. Adán, in his “Cuaderno,” 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 oposición entre la mujer de tierra, que se destruía, y la mujer celeste que iba edificando mi alma en su taller secreto. Y como la construcción de la una se hacía con los despojos de la otra, no tardé yo en advertir que, mientras la criatura espiritual adelantaba en crecimiento y virtud, la criatura terrena disminuía paralelamente, hasta llegar a su límite con la nada. Fué así como “la muerte de Aquella” se impuso a mi entendimiento con el rigor de una necesidad. (AB 464)

The “mujer celeste” is edified at the expense of the “mujer de la tierra,” so that logically “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, Adán attends the funeral of “Aquella” at the house in Saavedra. But perhaps Adán 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 Adán 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 Adán uses to recount the dream in which he finally gives up the corpse of his creation. In the final chapter (XIV) of Book Six, Adán 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 aquella forma 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). Adán’s alternating use of the words “body” and “form” reflect the uncertain status of “Aquella.” When Adán 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 coffin in Saavedra), but rather the imaginary body of his created Solveig. This means that what was once an ideal form – “líneas perdurables . . . toda la gracia de su forma,” all these elements “salvados ya de la materia” – has now become for Adán a dead body. This is a neat piece of metaphysical sleight-of-hand that enables him to salvage his Neoplatonic world-view. Only bodies can die, while ideal forms are eternal. He will simply have to seek the ideal elsewhere.

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Having rid himself of the dead body of his ideal woman, Adán is visited serendipitously by a numinous figure who shows him how to redeem this metaphysical scandal. This “vieja y andrajosa figura de hombre,” like the linyera in Book Five, seems to be another Christic figure, for he advises Adán 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 imágenes numerosas, y busca el único y verdadero semblante de Aquella” (AB 467). It is evident that when this numinous figure refers to “Aquella,” he does not mean the idealized Solveig but the celestial woman whom Adán witnessed in his visionary dream before meeting Solveig. In any event, this is how Adán interprets the advice: aquel hombre . . . me ordenaba proseguir el trabajo de la mujer celeste, sobre cuya excelencia me parecía escucharle tan encendidos elogios, que, arrebatado allí por una rara exaltación, desperté súbitamente, con el gusto de aquella música en el oído del alma. (AB 467)

This “music” recalls the music of spheres he heard when he had the vision of the cosmic woman. And yet, when Adán 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 visión de Aquella que, redimida por obra de mi entendimiento amoroso, alienta en mi ser y se nutre de mi substancia, rosa evadida de la muerte. (AB 467)

While “la visión de Aquella” points back to Adán’s original visionary dream, other elements of this description indicate instead Adán’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 Adán’s defiant affirmation in Book One that “¡Solveig es la rosa!” Keeping the distinctions blurry allows Adán to achieve a synthesis between the transcendental entity of Madonna Intelligenza with his own idealized version of Solveig Amundsen. The cycle as outlined in the narrative structure of the “Cuaderno” is thus complete. From the vision of the transcendental celestial woman, Adán descends to the corporeal world where he encounters the imperfect reflection of that ideal form in Solveig. When Adán attempts to correct the imperfect adjustment between the real Solveig 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 Adán understands it. Nevertheless, a closer examination reveals that once the ideal Solveig has been given the lie by events in the real world, Adán 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

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in concocting this Neoplatonic redemption of the split Solveig, Adán is fighting a losing, rearguard battle. His “certera esperanza en la visión 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 Adán stubbornly clings to his own detriment. It is costing him a disproportionate effort to maintain the Neoplatonic fiction intact against the incursions of reality.

Adán’s poetics: Platonism and vanguardismo In the “Cuaderno,” Adán 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, Adán expounds his poetics. Adán 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 universo” (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 Adán as a Christian poet, the Divine Word means first and foremost the Logos 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 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” 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

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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 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).13 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. Adán’s attitude to the word, like that of John the Evangelist, lies ambiguously in between these two positions. Adán’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 “el modo creador del poeta es análogo al modo creador del Verbo [Divino]”; hence, “el poeta, estudiándose a sí mismo en el momento de la creación, puede alcanzar la más exacta de las cosmogonías” (AB 307). Thus in the process of creation the poet undergoes two falls (“caídas”) 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, prelinguistic 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.14 This poetic “cos13 Kahn’s translation of Fragment #XCIV: “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” (John Sallis and Kenneth Maly, eds., Heraclitean Fragments. University, AL: U of Alabama P, 1980, 11). 14 Adán 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 distinción formal entre lo que me dice la belleza de un pájaro, de una flor, de una columna griega o de un movimiento sinfónico, pues todos esos homologados de lo bello no son para mí sino trampolines que me hacen saltar instantáneamente a la intelección y contemplación de una belleza más alta, sin forma alguna, indecible, deleitable, que se me aparece de súbito en el secreto vértice 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.” It can be inferred then that Marechal and Adán 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. Adán uses the word to describe the relation of the completed work of art to the poet who has produced it.

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mogony” is framed by the cyclical metaphor of breathing, for Adán presents it as “el secreto de la inspiración y expiración poética” (AB 307). Such are the bare bones of Adán’s poetics in what I am calling its metonymic aspect. If the poet names, say, a bird, he imitates not “el pájaro de carne y hueso, como se cree ahora, sino la ‘esencia’ del pájaro, su número creador, la cifra universal, abstracta y sólo inteligible que, actuando sobre la materia, construye un pájaro individual, concreto y sensible” (AB 305). Translating this notion into Saussurian terms, what Adán calls the “essence” may be said to correspond to the signified. Adán correctly observes that the poet “imitates” or evokes only the signified of the word “bird,” and not a flesh-and-blood bird. But Adán pushes this one step further by making the signified a priori to the real bird. Adán goes on to refer to the “essence” of the bird as its “ ‘idea’ platónica” or “forma sustancial.” The Platonic idea generates the flesh-and blood bird, and thus Adán’s doctrine illustrates the reversal of cause and effect that occurs in the trope of Platonic metonymy. But if the substantial forms are divine inventions, which the poet is limited to imitating, then a problem arises with some of Adán’s other ideas about the nature of poetry. Particularly problematic is his concept of the creative metaphor. Before expounding on his poetics, Adán gives this definition of poetry: “Jugar con las formas, arrancarlas de su límite natural y darles milagrosamente otro destino, eso es la poesía.” To illustrate his thesis, he gives the following example: “– Si ustedes comparan un pájaro con una cítara . . . la cítara, rompiendo sus límites naturales, entra en cierto modo a compartir la esencia del pájaro, y el pájaro la esencia de la cítara” (AB 302). On one hand, Adán holds that the poet is not an absolute creator because he “está obligado a trabajar con formas dadas” (AB 302), i.e. with the substantial forms ordained by the 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. Adán 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 sí, las libra en cierto modo de la limitación en que viven” (AB 301). Essentially, Adán here seems to be expressing an avant-garde poetics similar to ultraísmo or creacionismo. The cultivation of unusual metaphors is typical of the former. The young Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his “Manifiesto ultraísta” that “los poemas ultraicos constan, pues, de una serie de metáforas, cada una de las cuales tiene sugestividad propia y compendia una visión inédita de algún fragmento de la vida” (Torre 541). Adán’s idea of liberating things from their given forms recalls the decree of a founding figure of the avant-garde, Max Jacob:15 “una obra de arte vale por ella misma y no por las confrontaciones 15 Max Jacob wrote a book of poems entitled Le Laboratoire central (1921). The metaphor in the title is similar to Adán’s concept of the intelligence as a laboratory.

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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. Adán 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. Adán’s poet is just the kind that Plato would exclude from his ideal republic. Adán 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 reworks the substantial forms, thus usurping the creative role of the Divine Word or “Artífice Divino.” Then in his next breath, Adán makes an incredible leap of logic: Por eso la inteligencia, después de admitir que la relación establecida entre las dos cosas [such as the bird and the zither] es absurda en el sentido literal, no tarda en hallarle alguna razón o correspondencia en el sentido alegórico, simbólico, moral, anagógico. . . (AB 301)

The suspension points in the text are no doubt meant to draw our attention Adán’s logical non sequitur. He deliberately enumerates the four levels of interpretation recognized by medieval criticism and which Dante – for Adán a model of the faithful imitator of the Divine Word (AB 315) – summarized in his Convivio.16 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 poem is such a summa too. (326)

Does Adán 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? 16 Northrop Frye et al., The Harper Handbook to Literature (New York: Harper, 1985) 201.

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Adán’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 new signified. But why should this be so? What prevents the new signified from stepping outside the pattern of pre-existing truths enforced by official doctrine and even challenging those truths? What Adán has to say about poetry would not be very convincing to an orthodox guardian of the faith.

Nominalism and realism Another way of approaching the contradictions within Adán’s metaphysical poetics is through the traditional antagonism between (Platonic) realism and (Aristotelian) nominalism.17 In Adán’s case, the manifest Neoplatonism in his “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” would place him under the sign of realism, while his poetics betray distinct leanings toward nominalism. Notwithstanding this latter tendency, Adán, when expounding his poetics at the glorieta Ciro, tries to maintain a position that implies 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 (Prieto 52). In Adán’s view, Pereda is “un agnóstico de bolsillo” (AB 306), though significantly Adán will later defend his friend in Cacodelphia. Pereda, for his part, does not swallow easily Adán’s realist universals such as the “cifra universal” or “forma sustancial” of the bird: “¡Compadradas filosóficas no!” objects Pereda. “Imitar un pájaro, o la forma de un pájaro, ¿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 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, 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 Adán says, an agnostic. The difference between the lines of realism and nominalism, or Platonism 17 It may be recalled here that Marechal “estudiaba las líneas filosóficas Platón-San Agustín y Aristóteles-Santo Tomás de Aquino, todo lo cual influyó en las planificaciones de Adán Buenosayres” (Andrés 32).

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and Aristotelianism, is summed up incisively by Borges himself in a paragraph that he has reproduced in three different texts:18 Observa Coleridge que todos los hombres nacen aristotélicos o platónicos. Los últimos intuyen que las ideas son realidades; los primeros, que son generalizaciones; para éstos, el lenguaje no es otra cosa que un sistema de símbolos arbitrarios; para aquéllos, es el mapa del universo. El platónico sabe que el universo es de algún modo un cosmos, un orden; ese orden, para el aristotélico, puede ser un error o una ficción de nuestro conocimiento parcial. A través de las latitudes y de las épocas, los dos antagonistas inmortales cambian de dialecto y de nombre: uno es Parménides, Platón, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; el otro, Heráclito, Aristóteles, Locke, Hume, William James. En las arduas escuelas de la Edad Media todos invocan a Aristóteles, maestro de la humana razón (Convivio, IV, 2), pero los nominalistas son Aristóteles; los realistas, Platón. George Henry Lewes ha opinado que el único debate medieval que tiene algún valor filosófico 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, provocó a principios del siglo IX, que Anselmo y Roscelino mantuvieron a fines del siglo XI y que Guillermo de Occam reanimó en el siglo XIV. (Rest 54–5)

If Platonic realism epitomizes what I have been calling metonymic language, it does not necessarily follow that nominalism must be identified with the modern scientific world-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 he conceives of scientific knowledge only as “una creencia operativa, no como una comprobación forzosamente verdadera” (Rest 59). Nietzsche, whose definition of metonymy clearly aims at the deconstruction of Platonist realism, maintains a skeptical distance from the rigid structure of modern science (Gilman, Nietzschean 17). Nor does nominalism necessarily lead to a position of denying metaphysics, as does logical positivism; once again one may refer to the example of Borges, who “comparte con Schopenhauer la convicción de que el ejercicio de la metafísica es un impulso incontenible que el hombre percibe en su necesidad de sustentarse en medio del vacío 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 18 According to Jaime Rest, the passage figures in Borges’s prologue to William James, and in two articles of Otras inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1971), namely, “El ruiseñor de Keats” (167–8) and “De las alegorías a las novelas” (213–14).

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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 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 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 twentieth century, the poet consciously aspires to create a heterocosm to replace the real world, deliberately exploiting the schism between reality and language 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 2, this power to decree significance is a privilege enjoyed by the Edenic Adam and one that Adán 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 hieratic Platonic realism. A glance at the realist Augustine’s dualistic semiotics makes this even clearer. 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:

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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 a signum, but every signum is also a res . . . Everything in the world, thus, 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)

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 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. Adán has come to grief on the horns of this dilemma.

The book of the world 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 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).19 The topos of the world-as-book is of particular importance in Marechal’s novels, not least because writing and book metaphors abound in the text of Revelation. 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

19 Despite the prominence of the conceit of the world as book in the European Middle Ages, it did not originate there. Chevalier and Gheerbrant say that in the ancient Middle East, writing was considered to be of sacred origin. “Elle [l’écriture] est le signe visuel de l’Activité 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 and mystical doctrines.

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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 especially important. Christ opens the seven seals of the book of doom, 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 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.” And, of course, there is the book image that so fascinates Adán Buenosayres: “caelum recessit sicut liber involutus” (Rev. 6:14). In this and many other cases, John of Patmos was drawing on a long biblical tradition of scriptural metaphorics.20 Thus Marechal was not the first to recycle the metaphor of the sky rolling up like a book, 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 Adán is indicated right away in Book One, when Adán 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 Adán’s room: “Adán consideró 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 Adán 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, as in the mystical path of Islam.21 Adán 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, Adán’s remorse revolves around this very theme: ¡Señor, yo hubiera querido ser como los hombres de Maipú, que sabían reír 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 imágenes vanas, leyendo en el signo de las cosas mucho más de lo que literalmente dicen, y alcanzando en la posesión de las cosas mucho menos

20 The book of life occurs first in Exodus (32:32–3) and later in Psalms (69:28). The sky rolling up like a book is lifted directly from Isaiah’s vision (34:4) in which “complicabuntur sicut liber caeli” [the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll] (Curtius 310). 21 According to the Shahâda: “La création est effectivement envisagée comme un livre dont les créatures sont les lettres. ‘Il n’est rien dans le monde, écrit Abû Ya’qûb Sejestani, qui ne puisse être considéré comme une écriture’ ” (Chevalier 390).

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de lo que prometían. Porque yo he devorado la creación y su terrible multiplicidad de formas: ¡ah, colores que llaman, gestos alocados, líneas que hacen morir de amor!; para encontrarme luego con la sed engañada y el remordimiento de haber sido injusto con las criaturas al exigirles una bienaventuranza que no saben dar. Y luego este desengaño, ¡también injusto!, que me pone ahora frente a las criaturas como ante un lenguaje muerto. ¡No haber mirado, ah, no haber mirado! O haber mirado siempre con puros ojos de lector, como los que tenía en mi niñez, allá en el huerto de Maipú, cuando en la belleza de las formas inteligibles alcanzaba una visión de lo estable, de lo que no sufre otoño, de lo que no padece mudanza. Y ahí están la injusticia y el remordimiento: haber mirado con ojos de amante lo que debí mirar con ojos de lector. (AB 409)

Adán’s remorse, like his poetics, is typically confused. He regrets that he has not lived 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 más de lo que literalmente dicen.” The signs that Adán 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 her as signum indicating res divina, he has lost both the real girl and the Neoplatonic chimera. In the most telling phrase of this passage, Adán expresses his disappointment at finding himself before the creatures of the world as though before a dead language. What Adán does not understand is that the creatures are “dead” signs because their presumed transcendental referents have disappeared. The metonymic language with which Adán 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 Adán’s morning genesis, he saw that the world was a book. What happens to the book of the world when its language dies? Adán has witnessed Solveig’s gesture of rolling up his “Cuaderno” and he has correlated this gesture with the vision of the heavens being rolled up in the Apocalypse. Here Adán does read the signs correctly: he knows that his language-world of poetic metaphysics is coming to an end. It no longer has any 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.

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The book-of-the-world opens up very rich possiblities when the author writes as the God of nominalist theology, absolutely free from necessity (Langer 28), as indeed Adán defines Him in his theological-poetic discourse: “Dios es el principio inmóvil: ni desciende ni asciende. Es el Omniperfecto: está libre de necesidades . . . Y siendo así, ¿qué necesidad podría tener El de manifestarse luego por las criaturas exteriores?” (AB 313). Adán asks this question rhetorically, but he has not yet thought out the consequences of the matter. Other poets before him, however, did so. As Ulrich Langer shows in his book on Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance, the analogy of the author as Creator took on increasing importance for poets as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, and 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, is unreliable from the creature’s point of view. He cannot be held to any laws he has set 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. As we saw in the way the “Prólogo indispensable” has been structured, the novelist fully avails himself of his license to transgress the laws of his own fictional universe with his games of changing identity, playing from behind a series of masks. Unlike his earnest and confused protagonist, Marechal the novelist writes as a Nominalist author-of-the-world, reveling in his metaphysical freedom from doctrinaire realism to produce carnivalesque parodies.

4 LIGHT AGAINST DARKNESS: POETRY VERSUS SCIENCE Marechal parodies not only the specific text of Revelation but the apocalyptic genre in general, playing especially on its good/evil dichotomy. Apocalyptic admits of no shades of gray: absolute good must triumph over absolute evil as surely as light dispels darkness.1 In Adán Buenosayres, Marechal resignifies this Manichean dualism in carnival mode through the lively dialogues that take place during the Amundsen tertulia (Book Two) and the mock-heroic adventures in Saavedra (Book Three). In terms of cyclical “metahistory,” the polarity between light and darkness is figured in the opposition between the Golden and Iron Ages. The intermediate Silver and Bronze Ages are of no interest to the novel’s characters.2 As I suggested in the previous chapter, these “ages” have less to do with history than with modes of language. In Adán’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 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 favour in John’s Revelation and whose advent Adán considers to be announced (AB 358). Adán Buenosayres is not the only partisan of poetical metaphysics in the novel. He has two allies: Samuel Tesler “el filósofo” and Schultze “el astrólogo.” These three – poet, philosopher, and astrologer – form a block of “initiates” in Guénon’s sense, which stands apart from the rest of the novel’s

1 Apocalypticism “may be defined as the dualistic, cosmic, and eschatological belief in 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 righteous but whose power God will soon act 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).

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characters. The latter include Lucio Negri and his conversational ally Señor 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 the metonymic mode of language and are conversant with the priestly and/or mystical lore that this language has produced. Adán cultivates Neoplatonic mysticism in imitation of the medieval Fideli de amore, a cult which, according to René Guénon, 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 iniciático Hermes” (AB 303). Furthermore, Schultze possesses the “tranquilo imperio de un saber que ha descifrado el enigma de los Tres Mundos” (AB 185). The three worlds refer to the tripartite cosmos of Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism. Schultze’s most important visionary invention, the Neocriollo, will be a superhuman being whose language “será entre metafísico y poético” (AB 139). 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 Adán 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 Tesler, though something of a wild card, is at the lower end of the initiatic hierarchy. While Schultze and Adán, parodying Virgil and Dante, freely tour Cacodelphia, Samuel is one of the condemned of that hell. Adán, 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, Adán humours his friend with the title of “Effendi.” During their late-night dialogue in Book Four, when a very drunk Samuel becomes maudlin and verbose, Adán doubts whether “aquella confesión era obra de la sinceridad, de la borrachera o de la farsa en cuyo plano el filósofo se movía 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 tertulia. It is significant, then, that within the economy of the novel it falls to Samuel Tesler to castigate the “heresy” of the scientific

3 See Guénon’s L’ésoterisme de Dante (1957). Before writing Adán, Marechal read the “esoteric” book by Luigi Valli entitled Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei Fedeli d’Amore and compared it with Guénon’s Aperçus sur l’ésoterisme chrétien (Andrés 35).

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world-view produced by descriptive language. Samuel Tesler’s clownishness undermines the view that he himself represents. Marechal’s novel undertakes a critique of what Samuel calls “el plan diabólico” of twentieth-century science (AB 127) and what Adán refers to as “modernismo” (AB 147), but the black-and-white apocalypticism of that critique is deliberately hyperbolic and self-parodic. The result is that poetic metaphysics is pitted ironically against modern science and neither world-view is left standing intact.

Book Two: the tertulia Samuel Tesler engages Lucio Negri and then Señor 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 Génesis es un tratado de física. Naturalmente, mi abuelo Maimónides, que también era matasanos, conocía el idioma de los símbolos” (AB 124). The language of symbols is the hieratic, metonymic language par excellence and is so powerful that it can conflate myths with physics. This is the kind of knowledge that Samuel and the other initiatic characters consider to be “metaphysics.” (Hegel, by Samuel’s criteria, has “un cráneo inhabitable para la metafísica.”) The argument between doctor and philosopher 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 dirección ascendente del Progreso” (AB 146). For Samuel, technical progress has been won “a costa de la regresión espiritual más formidable que vieran los siglos” (AB 147), and his ally Adán supports him by affirming that man’s history follows the line of “una progresión descendente.” How does he know this? Lucio wants to know. Adán intervenes to adduce the doctrine of prisca theologia: “– Una tradición común a todas las razas . . . nos describe al primer hombre recién nacido de las manos de un Dios: obra divina, obra perfecta que se le echó a perder bastante con el andar del tiempo” (AB 147). Adán thus anticipates 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 secreción interna,” the philosopher farcically kneels before him: “– ¡Secreción interna! – le suplicó de rodillas –. Ora pro nobis!” (AB 126). Lucio Negri gets his own back by sending up the sacred notion of the Golden Age: – Figúrese usted – le explicó al señor Johansen – que en la Edad de Oro los hombres eran sabios de nacimiento. No necesitaban trabajar y comían gratuitamente los frutos de la tierra. Las fuentes no daban agua como

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ahora, sino vino tinto y blanco, a piacere. Corrían arroyos de leche pasteurizada y ríos 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 124–8 and 146–51), 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 metafísico del salón,” his ally, the uncultivated Señor 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 Señor Johansen, the Bear of Lappland (AB 159). With these monikers, the boxing match acquires a mock-apocalyptic dimension. The Lion of Judah, prophesied by Jacob in Genesis 49:9, is realized in Christ, at least according to 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 Señor Johansen have fallen to the level of pure 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 theism versus atheism. There is a moment in which the discussion rises above this level. Lucio exclaims that God is “un comodín verdaderamente cómodo” and this joker “está en la base de toda explicación absurda.” Samuel’s response is that Lucio prefers “su mono darwiniano. Es otro comodín, aunque bastante más feo” (AB 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 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 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).

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inkling of the fact that his world-view is only that: a view and not reality itself. Samuel Tesler seems to be 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.

Book Three: adventures in Saavedra The rhetorical nature of truth is an idea that comes out more clearly in Book Three, 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 caótico” which at night “no es más que una vasta desolación” (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 and the four spiritual lumpen of the patota – 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 where the heroes stand, he hears the “batalla de los ángeles” (AB 195). He describes this battle as taking place on two levels. The first is earthly: “Dos millones de almas que sostienen, la mayoría sin saberlo, su terrible pelea sobrenatural . . . oscilando entre los dos polos metafísicos del universo.” But the celestial battle is the more important: “Ahora bien, no sólo intervienen los hombres en ese combate metafísico: la verdadera batalla se decide arriba, en el cielo de la ciudad. Es la batalla de los ángeles y los demonios que se disputan el alma de los porteños” (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 says, is decided above. This is a transparent instance of the trope of Platonic metonymy. The categories of

5 The lowlands of Saavedra recall Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s characterization of the pampa: “es la tierra en que el hombre está sólo como un ser abstracto que hubiera de recomenzar la historia de la especie – o de concluirla . . . hacia el pretérito y el futuro se abren simas sin fondo; el pensamiento improvisa arias en torno de los temas conocidos, libre, suelto” (Radiografía 12).

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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. 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 científico.” Adán counters by saying that it has plenty of “rigor poético” (AB 212). The thesis in question forms part of the theory of what Schultze himself calls “metahistoria” (AB 213), and not surprisingly it derives from a book by Plato. Developing the myth of Atlantis as expounded in the 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 “civilización asombrosa” of Atlantis in remote antiquity (AB 211–12). 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 Adán means when he claims “poetic rigour” for Schultze’s ideas. Poetic rigour, in Adán’s usage, also means “metaphysical” rigour, in René Guénon’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 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 (AB 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 tertulia, the Flood marks the passage from the Bronze to the Iron Age. Shortly afterwards, Bernini presents the same maritime period of the pampa’s past in terms of the discourse of natural science: “ – El terreno pampeano . . . es de formación marítima. La pampa entera es el vasto lecho de un mar que se debatía contra los Andes y que se retiró luego” (AB 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 6 René Guénon endorses the doctrine that Atlantis was the original civilization (Crise 34; Reign 164).

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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. Bernini has thus had his position undercut by a creature produced by the very discourse he sponsors. Samuel Tesler, by contrast, considers himself vindicated: “Más que satisfecho quedó el filósofo villacrespense con la misteriosa profecía 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 “acabó por insinuar que la formación etnográfica de la llanura correspondería en mucho a su formación geológica” (AB 208–9). The extinct mammal declares that the pampa was “una gran llanura de destrucción” (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 “el terrible 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 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-à-vis America earlier at the tertulia. Adán, supported by Samuel Tesler, expressed the view that the European immigrants to Argentina had lost their traditional values. Adán 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 hacía 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 – prosiguió Adán –, ¿qué sistema de orden les ofreció el país a cambio del que perdían? Un sistema basado en cierto materialismo alegre que se burlaba de sus costumbres y se reía de sus creencias. (AB 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 Adán’s phrases – is destroyed by the diabolical “wind of history.” The

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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 “more than satisfied” with the Glyptodon’s prophecy for two 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 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 civilización. 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 diabólico”: Su [the gaucho’s] falta de ambición, 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 vísperas de un triunfo universal y las naciones caían de hinojos para besarle el upite. (Juan sin Ropa se dió aquí una 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.

7 Rosalba Campra argues that “Santos Vega aparece en este poema despojado de toda caracterización histórica. Es un payador legendario cuya única definición es justamente ésa: la de ser un poeta. La esencia del gaucho ha quedado reducido al canto; y en el canto se produce su derrota” (América 38).

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Schultze intervenes The intervention of Schultze in this discussion is particularly interesting, for the astrologer’s interpretation of the legend significantly alters the dialectical relationship between good and evil that has been dominating the episodic development in Book Three. For Schultze the initiate, “aquella fábula tenía un sentido esotérico; y Juan sin Ropa, vencedor en el combate lírico, sólo era una prefiguración del Neocriollo que habitaría 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 fulfil its design. The best way to describe the astrologer would be as a wonderfully creative, avant-garde charlatan. Lest he appear to be above the 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 Adán 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 modern languages, without success, and then ingenuously resorts to “un latín desastroso y más tarde un griego peor.” The linyera finally raises his head and responds laconically: “ – La puta que los parió” (AB 232). Schultze takes a great deal of ribbing over this episode: El astrólogo soportaba en silencio aquel diluvio de cuchufletas, y su corazón magnánimo compadecía la ignorancia de aquellos hombres que, desconociendo el horror de ciertas potestades ocultas, fluctuaban entre los polos del Bien y del Mal, desamparados como niños ante cualquiera irrupción de lo demoníaco. Pero, como las burlas aumentaran, el sentimiento caritativo de Schultze degeneró 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.

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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 Bernini’s scientific discourse mocks the Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic doctrine of the three worlds. Schultze asks the extinct mammal whether it is a mortal, immortal or 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 fósil” (AB 209). Similarly, when Schultze’s Neocriollo (another apparition) is requested to perform a miracle, the bizarre creature turned around, “apuntó con sus nalgas a los héroes y soltó un pedo luminoso que ascendió en la noche hasta el cielo de los fijos y se ubicó en la constelación 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.

5 SCHULTZE AND “EL VIAJE A LA OSCURA CIUDAD DE CACODELPHIA” Schultze plays an enormously important role in the novel. For one thing, he is Adán’s friend and mentor, and his function is to help the naïve 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 Martín Fierro.1 Adán, 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. Adán 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. In a verbal portrait of his friend and teacher, Adán Buenosayres sums up in his “Viaje a Cacodelphia” the various facets that Schultze’s character outwardly presents: había quienes lo imaginaban en el grado último de la iniciación védica, y quienes lo suponían flotando en las excelsas regiones del macaneo teosófico, amén de algunos que, demasiado suspicaces, lo reverenciaban como al humorista más luctuoso que hubiese respirado las brisas del Plata. (AB 474)

1 The apparent model in real life for the character Schultze is the avant-garde painter-poet Xul Solar, 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: Adán Buenosayres,” calls attention to the “papel preponderante [de] Xul Solar, pintor, astrólogo y poeta que tuvo curiosa influencia en un momento dado sobre el grupo martinfierrista” (65). In her discussion on modernity in Buenos Aires, Beatriz Sarlo attributes Neocriollo to Solar (14). Curiously, though, Marechal’s notebooks contain a signed pencil sketch entitled “El Neocriollo de Schultze,” reproduced by Andrés (80–1). Marechal appears to have “cannibalized” Xul Solar and his productions and refigured them as his own. Notwithstanding the charisma of his real-life model, Schultze is an indelibly Marechalian character.

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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. If he is sad, it will be because he is aware of the epistemological inefficacy of language that condemns all constructions of language to ephemeral transience. But the astrologer overcomes his loss of the illusion of philosophical realism. Like the clown 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 “había superado su propia teoría, y que actualmente trabajaba en otra más verdadera y menos pompier” (AB 197). The term “pompier” is a code word that the avant-garde martinfierristas of the 1920s used to designate the old Lugonian modernistas (Andrés 19). 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: será el producto natural de las fuerzas astrológicas que rigen el país” (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 mitológicas. 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 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 Adán, who for his part does not manipulate language so much as language manipulates him.

Schultze as Adán’s teacher The teacher/disciple relationship between Schultze and Adán sets up what might be called the narrative of initiation. Graciela Coulson discusses Adán as a hero who undergoes a “viaje iniciático” (Marechal 76ff). Referring to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Coulson isolates two of Campbell’s hero types as relevant to Adán Buenosayres: “son el

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viajero místico o espiritual – Ulises – y el civilizador – o maestro – Prometeo, Orfeo, Hermes, Zaratustra” (77). Coulson concentrates her analysis on Adán, the hero as mystical traveller. In my reading of the novel, Adán’s mystical journey has an ironic outcome, as discussed in chapter 2 above. Schultze as a “hero” 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 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.2 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 Adán 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, Adán’s eventual illumination is not one of mystical gnosis but rather a shattering of the neophyte’s illusions about the possibility of such gnosis. Schultze’s main lesson to Adán takes place in Book Seven when the astrologer leads the poet on an “initiatic” journey through the apocalyptic Cacodelphia (Book Seven). But even before that, the astrologer begins teaching Adán at the dinner conversation in Book Four, when he intervenes in Adán’s theological-poetic discourse. As we saw above, Luis Pereda challenges Adán’s Platonism. Adán, however, overrides Pereda’s objections, treating him as though he had not enough metaphysical sophistication to understand Adán’s Christian-Platonist poetics. Schultze, on the other hand, questions Adán’s discourse from a position of knowing all too well what ails the young poet. The clever astrologer does not directly challenge Adán’s Platonism but rather undercuts it obliquely. Schultze’s first important intervention comes when Adán has finished explaining the first moment of poetic creation, that of poetic inspiration. According to Adán, in the moment of inspiration the poet experiences a return to the “Caos primitivo”: En esa plenitud armoniosa que adquiere el poeta durante su inspiración, yo diría que resuenan a la vez todas las músicas posibles: resuenan todas ya, y 2 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.

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ninguna todavía, en cierta unidad extraña que hace de todas una y de una todas las canciones posibles, y en cierto “presente” de la música por el cual una canción no excluye a la otra en el orden del tiempo, porque todas hacen una sola canción inefable. (AB 309)

The atemporal, primordial chaos is the source of all form, and Adán 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 vacío del bostezo” (AB 310; emphasis in novel), the void of the yawn. He insists that everyone try the experiment of yawning. Adán is effusive about the results: “¡Notable! ¡El bostezo es una inspiración profunda! [. . .] ¡Formidable, Schultze! Y ahora recuerdo que la inspiración poética viene acompañada en mí de una inspiración física muy honda. [. . .] Y de un entrecerrarse de párpados, como cuando uno se duerme” (AB 310). Schultze concludes: “Así es. El caos es la concentración y el sueño de todas las cosas que todavía no quieren manifestarse” (AB 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.”3 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 catastrófico,” the feeling in Spain of impending catastrophe: ¿Qué es ese gran advenimiento, ese apocalipsis? Pues es la serpiente del mar, la fiera corrupta, la aurora boreal, el diluvio universal, el juicio final, la Intemerata, la de San Quintín, el disloque, el caos . . . Y es curiosa esa otra palabra: caos, que etimológicamente 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 catástrofe o revolución térrea.4

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 Adán’s concept of chaos by concluding

3 See “Chaos” in Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966). 4 Miguel de Unamuno, “El sentimiento catastrófico” in Ensueño de una patria: Periodismo republicano 1931–1936 (Ed. y pról. Victor Ouimette con la colaboración de María 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 crítico de la lengua española (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.

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that chaos is the dream of the non-manifest. As a fellow avant-gardist, Schultze can share Adán’s enthusiasm for creating from scratch, starting from the pre-ontological. Performatively, however, Schultze is showing the origin of this grandiose metaphysical concept denoted by the word “chaos.” It has its 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 Adán’s esoteric “poetic inspiration” is a metaphorical derivative of the physical act of yawning. Adán, victim of Schultze’s tacit irony, enthusiastically correlates the various symptoms of his poetic inspiration with those of yawning. If Adán 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”: 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)

Adán’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 Adán’s notion of poetic inspiration and chaos are revealed as derivative illusions. The really malicious irony in Schultze’s etymological demonstration stems from the connotations of yawning in ordinary, demotic language. While Adán waxes effusive about inspiration in terms of one code, his discourse is parodied through another code, such that all his talk about poetics – not to mention his poetry – provokes nothing more than a yawn of boredom. As the symposium proceeds, Schultze draws attention to the contradictions in Adán’s discourse. When the younger man concludes his exposition of the two “falls” of poetic creation, Schultze sets Adán a leading question: “¡Hum! ¿Nos habla de una caída en el sentido de ‘pecado’?” (AB 312). Adán answers no. “Pero usted,” pursues Schultze, “nos habló recién de alguna correspondencia entre la creación del artífice y la creación divina. ¡Cuidado! ¿Habrá que suponer en Dios una necesidad y un descenso parecidos?” Adán, anxious and unsure of himself, explains that God is the “principio inmóvil”

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who neither descends nor ascends, being free of necessity (AB 313). Pressed further by Schultze, Adán explains that God is: una perfección infinita, eterna y simple. De toda eternidad se conoce a sí mismo y se manifiesta en su Verbo interior, que por ser una entrañable expresión de la divinidad participa de la esencia divina y hace uno con Dios. Y siendo así, ¿qué necesidad podría tener Él de manifestarse luego por las criaturas? (AB 313)

Under pressure from Schultze, Adán presents God as being a kind of solipsistic entity 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. Adán then goes on to say that God has manifested himself and thus created the world through “un acto libre de su voluntad: creó porque quiso, cuando quiso y como quiso. Acto de amor le llaman los teólogos.” 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, Adán 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 Adán’s words with a single question: “¿Un acto de amor forzoso?” Then he drops out of the conversation for a while. All through the conversation, Schultze has been manoeuvring Adán into postulating a nominalist definition of God. Once Adán 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. Adán finds 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 Adán, 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 Adán concerning the analogy between divine and poetic creation, deliberately probing its weak points, in order to make Adán 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 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 innovándolo todo – le advirtió –. Primero el idioma de los argentinos, después la etnografía nacional, ahora la música. ¡Ojo! Ya lo veo con una llave inglesa en la mano, queriendo aflojar los bulones del Sistema Solar. – El Gran Demiurgo – le respondió Schultze – nos da el ejemplo al modificar incesantemente su obra. (AB 134–5)

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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 of Demiurge. His supreme arrogance is charmingly absurd, not to be taken seriously. Adán, 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. Adán 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 Adán is explaining how a poet like Dante will be awarded “algún premio divino” for his “ ‘fidelidad’ como imitador del Verbo.” Schultze queries doubtfully: “¿Está 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 Adán into a state of agitation, perhaps because it implicitly calls into question Adán’s “fidelity” as well. It seems to be the final turn of the screw, for Schultze’s question provokes a passionate reaction from Adán: “El verdadero poeta lo sacrifica todo a su vocación. (Dramático.) ¡Oigan bien, hasta su alma!” (AB 316). Schultze has finally pushed Adán 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. Adán, “en el colmo de la exaltación,” replies: “Vea, Schultze. Imagínese un rosal a punto de abrir una rosa en el instante preciso en que la trompeta del ángel anuncia el fin del mundo. ¿Se detendría el rosal?” The astonished Schultze is obliged to admit that he thinks not. “¡Así es el poeta!” concludes Adán “sublime” (AB 316). Why does it occur to Schultze at this point to ask Adán whether he would write in 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. Adán’s thoughts, however, are moving in a different direction. Reacting to Schultze’s suggestive image of an earth with no people left on it, Adán’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 unrequited love. The Leitmotiv of the rose refers to the idealized Solveig – “¡Solveig es la rosa!” – and Adán is the rose-bush who creates her. His world is coming to an end – he 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.

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This melodramatic outburst leaves Adán 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 Adán now is the idea of Redemption: “El poeta es un imitador del Verbo en ‘el orden de la Creación’, pero no en ‘el orden de la Redención’ ” (AB 317). The divine word not only creates, but also redeems that which has fallen away from the primordial cosmic unity, the unity of word and reality. By evoking images of the end of the world, Adán’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, Adán 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. Adán has not yet understood this “gay science.” He will have to be taken to the very last circle of the hell of Cacodelphia in order to learn it. Schultze’s next lesson to Adán 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. 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 parecía obedecer a un orden litúrgico” (AB 326–7). Schultze calls Adán’s attention to the young man, qualifying his ceremonial apparel as a “traje nupcial”: – Estúdielo bien – respondió Schultze, mirando furtivamente al Joven Taciturno – . Desde hace media hora ese muchacho es un arquitecto. – ¿Un arquitecto? – Eso es – insistió Schultze con amargura –. ¿Y sabe lo que construye ahora ese arquitecto? Un fantasma. – ¿Una construcción ideal? – Oigame bien – asintió Schultze –: yo no he visto a la mujer que oficia detrás de la puerta, ni él tampoco, sin duda. Pero créame que, cuando ese mozo esté adentro, se desposará con un fantasma. Adán Buenosayres guardó silencio, y la imagen de Solveig Amundsen cruzó por su mente: “Sí, el barro fragilísimo de una sutil arquitectura, o la materia prima de un sueño.” [. . .] – Es posible – contestó al fin, sin mirar al astrólogo. – Metafísica pura – le corrigió Schultze con severidad. (AB 327)

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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 Adán thinks of his own metaphysical-poetic work based on Solveig. Thus Adán has no difficulty in relating Schultze’s lesson to his own case. Just as the “Joven Taciturno” creates a phantasm out of a prostitute whom he has not even seen, Adán 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 Adán 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. Adán has imagined that Solveig is a reflection of Madonna Intelligenza. But whereas the taciturn young man merely imagines, Adán 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 nature by claiming to reflect a higher knowledge of reality.

Cacodelphia: The Last Judgment as carnival In Book Seven, Schultze takes Adán on an initiatic tour through a heterocosm of his own design, a creation he calls Cacodelphia. This infernal city, however, is supposed to form only one half of Schultze’s larger cosmovision. The other half would be Calidelphia. As Schultze explains to Adán, “las dos ciudades [Cacodelphia y Calidelphia] se unen para formar una sola. O mejor dicho, son dos aspectos de una misma ciudad. Y esa Urbe, sólo visible para los ojos del intelecto, es una contrafigura de la Buenos Aires visible” (AB 473). The concrete Buenos Aires stands 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 a scatalogical joke runs throughout: Cacodelphia might well be called “Excrement City.”5 Schultze takes Adán 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 5 For example, on being thrown out of the Circle of Gluttony, Adán narrates, “el astrólogo y yo miramos hacia la puerta que así nos rechazaba: era circular, e iba cerrándose ahora en movimiento centrípeto, como un esfínter gigantesco” (AB 541). The two travellers have been literally excreted.

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Calidelphia – “la ciudad gloriosa” (AB 472). However, the journey as well as the novel end abruptly 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 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 mood 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).6 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 final revelation to Adán will be nothing new and bright but rather the ugly old Paleogogue. Marechal the novelist places the “Viaje a Cacodelphia” in its matrix text, the novel Adán 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 Adán 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 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 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 método” that in planning a novel, “[yo] concreto las figuras de los personajes, las protagónicas y las no protagónicas, y trazo enteramente sus destinos en una síntesis de juicio final” (Andrés 102). The novel’s central protagonist is the eponymous Adán 6 In his article “Imágenes del Hombre Nuevo en la obra de Leopoldo Marechal,” Javier de Navascués seems to agree that, for Marechal, the notion of the “New Man” originates with St Paul by referring to it as “la expresión paulina” (88).

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Buenosayres, and the synthesis of his final judgment comprises three inter-related aspects. First, Adán faces his final judgment as a failed lover. Secondly, he is judged as a poet who has missed the mark. At a third level, Adán is led by Schultze 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 Agustín – , 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 los jueces, empezará 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. Adán Buenosayres – as an individual, as a poet, and as a paradigmatic figure – is not so much a slave to the res of the real world, as he is to numinous signa. As in traditional initiations, Adán’s liberation will entail a symbolic death, which is the meaning of the funeral recounted in the “Prólogo indispensable.” At the same time, Adán 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 Adán 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. While Schultze is the author and architect of Cacodelphia, Adán 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 Adán Buenosayres and Lucio Negri. The young doctor representing the black light of modern science has won the favours of Solveig, whose name contains the word sol, “sun” (Cricco 112). According to Adán’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 Adán. Schultze has allotted Lucio Negri his place in hell according to other criteria. His “sin” is his naïve materialism, a modern variant of realism. At the Amundsen tertulia, Lucio Negri denies the existence of the soul: “¡El alma!,” he snorts derisively. “¡Por favor! La he buscado con el bisturí, en la sala de disecciones” (AB 127). Now in the circle of Pride, the supreme sin, Lucio Negri has fallen prey to a manic compulsion to dissect cadavers in search of the human soul. His punishment is made complete when his

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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. 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 mística del cuerpo” with the result that “la humanidad entera vive hoy pendiente de nuestros bisturíes” (AB 708). The surgeon then raises the dreadful possibility that the Soul might return to the ring, a specter that produces shock among his audience: “Reinó 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 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 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 code. 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 diabólico” (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. 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 Adán has imagined when he was longing for revenge against his rival (see chapter 3). Were it so, the punishment of Lucio Negri would be symmetrically answered by the vindication and triumph of Adán’s position. Such is not the case at all. Adán is also judged and found wanting. In the same circle of Pride where Lucio Negri gets his comeuppance, Samuel Tesler accuses Adán of having perpetrated “el asesinato metafísico de cierta Solveig

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terrestre; pero no hay señales que todo eso haya trascendido los pobres límites de la literatura” (AB 691). On one hand, Adán, 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 Adán the poet is a “tejedor de humo,” the stuff of his metaphysical spinning and weaving is no more than the smoke of fantasy. Adán’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 Adán was in the thick of his spiritual crisis in the streets of Villa Crespo and he confessed aloud to himself: – ¡Imaginación! . . . ¡En cuántas posiciones inventadas me coloqué yo mismo, tejedor de humo, desde mi niñez! [. . .] Confieso haber ejercido la dictadura de mi patria, la cual, bajo mi férula, conoció una nueva Edad de Oro mediante la aplicación de las doctrinas políticas de Aristóteles. Confieso haberme dado al más puro ascetismo en la provincia de Corrientes, donde curé leprosos, hice milagros y alcancé la bienaventuranza. Confieso haber vivido existencias poético-filosófico-heroicolicenciosas en la India de Rama, en el Egipto de Menés, en la Grecia de Platón, en la Roma de Virgilio, en la Edad Media del monje Abelardo, en . . . ¡Basta! (AB 418–19)

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 Adán Buenosayres (Cricco 145). They return to mortify Adán 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, militar y sacerdotal,” Bruno would have harmonized the social classes “como si fuesen las cuerdas de un laúd, para que juntas y sin discordia levantaran el acorde unitario de la vida,” as “sesenta millones de almas emprendían el sabroso camino de la metafísica y alcanzaban todos los grados de la contemplación” (AB 626–27). The potential ascetic of Corrientes is Fra Darius Anenae (O.S.B.), who torments Adán by raving for a full two pages about his glorious career as a religious (AB 627–29). In order to avoid “este bochorno,” declares Adán, “hubiera querido hundirme bajo la tierra como un gusano” (AB 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 Adán just prior to his own comeuppance, for they represent the

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religious spirit in its most sclerotic condition. The fate of the oracionistas is a direct warning to Adán: 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 Adán, 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 “oracionista vermiforme” responds with the refrain: “¿Qué puedo saber yo, triste gusano de la tierra!”; when asked for the slightest effort: “¿Quién 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 Adán’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 Adán 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 the reward promised to the elect by the Book of Revelation. Schultze explains to Adán: el oracionista vermiforme caía mil y una veces en tan arriesgada complacencia, sobre todo en los anocheceres de esta gran Babilonia que es Buenos Aires, cuando, recorriendo la calle Florida entre tantos impíos y fornicadores, apenas lograba contener la risa, al verlos caminar hacia el infierno, mientras él, pobre gusano de la tierra, sentía ya en sus carnes el roce de la blanca vestidura que han de llevar los justos en el día de la cólera. (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 rest of humanity. Schultze describes him thus: Disposiciones alarmantes caracterizaban al oracionista de tipo aquilino: dueño de las alturas, peatón de la Vía Iluminativa y desde ya ciudadano de la Jerusalén Celeste, mostraba la hosquedad, el orgullo solitario y la fácil irritación del águila que abandona sus cumbres. Al descender a este planeta, solía manifestar asombros angelicales, como si de pronto se viera en un mundo ajeno; y ocasiones hubo en que sus discípulos, llorando de piedad, tuvieron que recordarle cuál era el uso de un tranvía o cómo se empuñaba un tenedor. Eso sí, ya en la tierra, el oracionista de tipo aquilino clavaba en la humanidad una pupila irritada, buscando trozos de hígado prometeano en que ejercitar la cólera celeste de su pico. Y a este linaje de oracionismo – concluyó Schultze – pertenece o ha pertenecido el hombre que tenemos delante. (AB 618)

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The aquiline oracionista whom Schultze and Adán have before them is called the “Gran Oracionista,” and in Schultze’s heterocosm, he is labeled 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 “extraño apóstol” who claimed for himself the title of Vice-Pope (AB 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 Adán’s circle of friends or the members of Martín Fierro.7 The humourless “Gran Oracionista” has nothing but contempt for the Vice-Pope: “¡un teólogo cuyo genio sólo podía navegar en océanos de cerveza! ¡Si hablaran los compartimientos del bar Jousten!” (AB 621–22). Referring to the Vice-Pope’s appointed “cardinals,” the oracionista expostulates: “¡Runfla de trasnochadores que bebían como templarios! ¡Frivolidad andante que no vaciló 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 únicos ebrios entre tantos sobrios – le recordó juiciosamente” (AB 618). Where the “Gran Oracionista” sees vice, Schultze sees virtue. Schultze recounts to Adán 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). Like the carnivalesque tales of Rabelais, the one told by the astrologer contains “un sentido esotérico” (the phrase Schultze uses with respect to the story of Santos Vega).8 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 Doña Escolástica” (AB 617). The Vice-Pope uses these Thomist “arms,” proper to metonymic language, in a ludic spirit, just as Schultze does

7 The episode of the Vice-Pope has its anecdotal origin in an avant-gardist caper realized by Leopoldo Marechal’s friend and colleague, César Pico (Andrés 39). 8 Cricco (23) cites this sentence from Rabelais’s Gargantúa y Pantagruel: “pues suele haber un sentido oculto que apreciar en todo esto que se dice como por casualidad y en cordial alegría.”

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with other hieratic vocabularies. From another point of view, the Vice-Pope’s attack on oracionismo echoes 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.9 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 allí golpes tan violentos, que las desquiciadas armaduras volaban en piezas, sembrando por el terreno los rubíes, las esmeraldas, los zafiros y los lapislázulis de que estaban guarnecidas con un primor que algunos dieron en calificar de barroco” (AB 621). One of the theses sustained by Valentín 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 paralleled in the writing of Adán Buenosayres (11). The same authors affirm that “Adán Buenosayres es el texto barroco por excelencia de nuestra [Argentine] literatura” (85).10 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 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 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 the Last Judgment theme. The “Gran Oracionista” tries to browbeat Schultze: “ ‘No juzguéis, por temor de ser juzgados.’ ¡Ya vendrá el Día del Juicio, en que serán 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 Adán:

9 The expression is attributed to Roscelin de Compiègne (1050–circa 1125): “general ideas, universals, are merely names, nomina, and even noises, flatus vocis” (Carré 41). 10 Cricco’s interpretation of this passage is that the “Gran Oracionista” is a double for Adán and the Vice-Pope represents Leopoldo Marechal (144).

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dejaba oír una música gangosa, como de organito, que se hacía o exageradamente rápida o demasiado lenta, de acuerdo con el ritmo de la rotación, y en la cual reconocí luego con bastante sorpresa el Dies irae gregoriano. Un concurso de hombres graves, cuya solemnidad no me pareció a tono con aquel pasatiempo infantil, . . . aparecían jineteando feos animales de madera pintada, entre los cuales identifiqué al Dragón Apocalíptico, a la Bestia de Siete Cabezas, a la Bestia de los Dos Cuernos, a la Gran Prostituta y a los 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 ofrecía y les negaba cierto demonio calesitero disfrazado de ángel” (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. The demonic merry-go-round operator maliciously plays with the pretentious 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 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 to whom Adán refers in his discourse on poetics11): “the history of the world is the Last Judgment.”12 The Last Judgment, recontexualized in the “Viaje a Cacodelphia,” is a continuous, revolutionary carnival, with no beginning and no end.

11 In response to Luis Pereda’s allusion to the German poet, Adán rejoins: “Schiller no era un metafísico. Yo voy más lejos que Schiller” (AB 309). 12 Quoted by Max Harold Fisch (xliii) in the “Introduction” to The New Science of Giambattista Vico.

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Rhetorical politics in Cacodelphia Besides being a coda or summation, the Book of Revelation contains a rudimentary politics, if one understands “politics” 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. (Conversely, a hegemonic power sees any potential threat to its supremacy as evil.) At the End of Days (the end of history), the evil empire will be brought low, the oppressed avenged and delivered. This apocalyptic paradigm is at the root of much revolutionary rhetoric down to the twentieth century.13 Leopoldo Marechal has declared in his essay “Claves de Adán Buenosayres” that the “Infierno de la Violencia” contains a politics (Cuaderno 130). Since strictly speaking 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 “los violentos del arte.” However, the exposition of a politics begins before that in the “Infierno de la Avaricia” or Plutobarrio. The politics apparently espoused there by Schultze could be construed equally well as either reactionary or revolutionary apocalypticism. It is my view, however, 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 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 Adán 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: “– ¿Cree usted – le había preguntado el señor Midas – que las iniquidades y despojos cometidos por la llamada clase burguesa, o tercer estado, aconsejarían su amputación del cuerpo social?” (AB 567). But a closer examination of the dialogue reveals 13 “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). Karl Mannheim 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 Utopia 190–7).

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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 occupies the “primer estado,” it is because “a través de la Historia, se ha cometido una doble usurpación” (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 astrólogo – que Brahma (¡loado sea mil veces!) distribuyó a los hombres en cuatro clases, estados o jerarquías: la primera es la del metafísico Bracmán, que por conocer las verdades eternas ejerce la función sutilísima de conducir a todos los hombres ya en la vía terrestre ya en la celeste; la segunda es la del aguerrido Chatriya, cuya vocación es la del gobierno terrestre y la defensa militar; la tercera es la del adiposo Vaisya, el burgués, que tiene la función de crear y distribuir los bienes materiales; y la cuarta es la del transpirado Sudra, que nació de los pies de Brahma (¡loado sea mil veces!). Cuando todas las clases guardan fidelidad a su vocación y se mantienen en su jerarquía, el orden humano reina, y la justicia tiene la forma de un toro bien asentado en sus cuatro patas. (AB 569)14

When Schultze refers to justice as “un toro bien asentado sobre sus cuatro patas,” Midas interrupts and upbraids him for this “balazo metafórico.” Schultze continues his argument in Latin, only to elicit another reprimand: “– ¡Señor, señor! – volvió a reprenderlo Midas –. ¡Exponga con llaneza! ¿O ha olvidado que se dirige al gran público?” (AB 569). 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 – aprobó el señor Midas –, aunque vulgar en la forma” (AB 570). When Schultze “venomously” reminds him that he is addressing the public at large, Midas grudgingly accepts his examinee’s demotic style. The king’s next criticism comes from a new angle. “– No está mal – dijo aquí el señor Midas. Y agregó ponzoñosamente: – Aunque su exposición acuse lecturas recientes de cierto metafísico galo . . .” (AB 571; original suspension points). The Gallic metaphysician is probably René Guénon, and this home truth provokes a violent reaction in Schultze: 14 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, pontífice 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 organización; Creso, el rico, llamado a producir y distribuir la riqueza material o corpórea que necesita el organismo; y Gutiérrez, el siervo, ayudante de Creso en sus operaciones económicas” (Cuaderno 51–2; Marechal’s emphasis). He goes on to attribute the gist of these ideas to René Guénon (53).

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Al oír aquellas palabras, el astrólogo enrojeció visiblemente, y no de vergüenza, según afirmaba luego, sino de justa indignación. – Vea, señor – le dijo tartamudeando –, si utilicé un esquema de otro, ¡y nada más que un esquema!, lo he revestido en cambio de una carnadura bastante original. Por otra parte, ahora viene lo de 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 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 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 metafóricos” 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 los 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 Adán: “Pero, si bien lo mira, estamos en un Infierno privado y hasta clandestino, sin patente ni oficialización alguna” (AB 497). He does not represent any consecrated priesthood, whether it be scientific or religious-metaphysical. He has set up his hell not only to judge the world, but also to assess critically the ways in which language is used and abused. Or better, he judges the world first and foremost through its various (ab)uses of language. Schultze’s demonstration of rhetorical mastery takes place at the spoken level. The astrologer is not a writer; his disciple Adán 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 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:

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De pronto se descolgó sobre la llanura un diluvio de papeles mugrientos, hojas de periódicos, revistas ilustradas, carteles llamativos; y la multitud, arrojándose sobre aquel roñoso maná, lo recogió a puñados, lo masticó y devoró con avidez. En seguida, ellos bajándose los pantalones y ellas levantándose las faldas, se pusieron en cuclillas y defecaron solemnemente, mientras, con voces de cotorras, declamaban ampulosas editoriales, gacetillas de cinematógrafo, debates políticos, noticiarios de fútbol y crónicas 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, “los 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 the 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 Ecuménico in the supreme hell of Pride, the writings of philosophy and traditionalist metaphysics are also carnivalized. The sector of “los violentos del arte,” located in the circle of Ire, is inhabited by poets or “pseudogogues.” According to Schultze the Neogogo, in this false Parnassus, “los pseudogogos abren metafóricamente sus colas de pavorreal, dirigidos por las falsas musas o Antimusas, como yo las llamo” (AB 664). It will be instructive to examine the discourse of the “pseudogogues” or false leaders with a view to seeing wherein lies their “error.” Adán converses with four pseudogogues, and the first 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 Adán as a fifí of the competing Florida literary school (AB 670) and accuses the angelic petizo of being “un frailón al servicio de la burguesía” (AB 669). The petizo’s poetics are a product of hieratic thinking: Entre las actividades humanas existe un orden jerárquico de valores que sería peligroso destruir. En razón de su trascendencia y universalidad, lo metafísico es superior a lo artístico, y lo artístico es superior a lo político. El arte puede servir a lo metafísico 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)

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This view is diametrically opposed to that of the Boedo poet, who proudly affirms: “Yo pongo mi arte al servicio de la justicia social” (AB 669). But since both poets find themselves in hell, one assumes that the points of view of both are mistaken. Adán intervenes in this polemic to take the side of the angel-winged petizo, telling Schultze that “el tunicado petizo dió en la tecla del asunto” (AB 670). Not surprisingly, Adán fully endorses this hieratic poetics. With the modernista poet, Adán discusses the rhetoric of metaphor. Adán sustains that in comparing one thing with another, one must not “rebajar lo superior a lo inferior, sino conseguir, por vía 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: “– ¿Y qué debemos hacer? . . . ¿Comparar 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 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 roñoso maná 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 “jerarquías del arte” (AB 669), for he and Adán 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 “serve” the higher truth of metaphysics. The corollary to this would be that politics must “serve” the truth of art, i.e. receive its structural norms from those of art and poetry. This 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

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“tunicado violeta” indulges in art for art’s sake; and the angelic petizo, with his “misticismo ramplón” and “divagaciones teológicas” and “simbolismos que ni Dios entiende” (AB 669), privileges a (degenerate) 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 Adán 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 está en que don Luis ha querido llevar a la literatura sus fervores místico-suburbanos, hasta el punto de inventar una falsa Mitología en la que los malevos porteños adquieren, no sólo proporciones heroicas, sino hasta vagos contornos metafísicos. (AB 665)

Apparently, Schultze has placed Luis Pereda in hell because the latter has dreamed up a “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 Adán, 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 for Schultze’s shabby treatment of him: “– ¡Las veces que le habré pagado el tranvía! – gruñó Pereda, mirando rencorosamente al astrólogo” (AB 665). Schultze may be the Neogogue and the Demiurge, but that does not 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.15 This interpersonal politics translates into an intratextual politics, based on 15 Similarly, Marechal himself has stooped to criticizing Borges as “inauthentic” and as a “falso mago” (Fernández 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 Adán Buenosayres, Marechal’s appeal to “authenticity” is quite hollow. (Noé Jitrik [44] protested as well at the portrayal of Borges as the intellectually deficient Luis Pereda.) In spite of their enmity, Marechal and Borges, as heirs of Macedonio Fernández, have something in common. Though Marechal’s sprawling, baroque novels contrast with Borges’s sly, minimalist short stories, both practise parody extensively. Marechal’s hilarious hyperbole and Borges’s ironic understatement are as two sides of the

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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 Adán to complain: Ya me venía resultando abusivo el hecho de que, contra todo uso y costumbre, se tergiversara el cómodo papel de mirón que sin duda me correspondía en aquel descenso infernal, para someterme a diálogos, controversias y disputas que no deseaba y que me convertían en otro actor del sainete schultziano. (AB 664)

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, Adán 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. 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 alemán del peor gusto” (AB 665). One of the denizens of the sector of the assassins aggressively proclaims that the inventor of this Hell “debe ser o un vanguardista o un chambón” (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 same coin, and their fictional universes coincide at some points. For example, Borges’s Tlön, the land where metaphysics is considered a branch of fantastic literature (Ficciones 24), is a place where Schultze would feel quite at home. Indeed, Xul Solar, Schultze’s real-life model, is mentioned in this very story (21). Marechal’s Don Ecuménico, if he ever recovers from his catastrophic bout of verbal indigestion, might comfortably retire to Borges’s “Utopía de un hombre cansado,” whose inhabitants, living sub specie aeternitatis, abhor the multiplication of unnecessary texts (Libro de arena 71). Where Borges gains the ascendancy over his compatriot is with his sure hand in the games of discursive reason. If Borges can elegantly pin down the problem of language in terms of the old nominalist/realist debate, Marechal is incapable of serious rational discourse, and his essays are an embarrassing joke. Borges has complete intellectual control over his ironic bifurcations; Marechal’s irony is performative. Borges is the high priest of irony, Marechal a lay practitioner.

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Schultze’s taste and judgment: “Y presumo que el inventor de esta risible arquitectura infernal debe de ser un chambón, un media cuchara, incapaz de ver los matices que diferencian un caso de otro” (AB 537). Franky Amundsen appears in the hell of Ire to denounce in literary terms Adán and his guide: “¡Un Dante de cartón y un Virgilio de opereta!” (AB 640). One of the vulgar Cuñadas, who were present at the funeral of Juan Robles in Book Three, also makes an accusation: “– ¡Andan metiéndose en vidas ajenas – cacareó Matilde –. ¿O a eso le llama literatura?” (AB 640). One of the surly boatmen in the hell of Envy declares Schultze to be “un Escipión de segunda mano” (AB 633), probably in reference to the Scipio Aemilianus and his literary, philhellenic circle, dramatized by Cicero in De Republica. 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 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 Adán 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 description of his past behaviour, and even passes favourable critical judgment on Schultze’s oratory: – No está mal – opinó [don Celso] – . Alguna influencia de Homero en el estilo: una influencia que, sin duda, se hará más visible cuando el narrador intente darme los contornos de un Polifemo a la moderna. Pero siga, joven Schultze: admito que su vis cómica es irresistible. (AB 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-à-vis his judge, who tries to justify his own shabby behaviour by accusing another. Thus the judge is judged by the condemned. 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 – susurró un guitarrero, encarándose con el astrólogo – . Vos eras un muchacho que se las daba de intelectual . . . Sí, hablabas en difícil con aquellos tres alemanes barbudos. Químicos, o quimistas, algo

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así me pareció que se llamaban. [. . .] – ‘Dissolvons, putrefions [sic], sublimons!’ – parodió el guitarrero en un francés detestable. El astrólogo se puso de todos los colores: – ¿Y cuál era tu ambición ridícula? – preguntó urgentemente al guitarrero, como si desease hacerle cambiar de tema. (AB 610–11)

While Schultze has condemned the pop entertainer for his artistic and personal vulgarity, 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 Adán takes his own Neoplatonic mysticism in earnest. Schultze the Neogogue, on the other hand, has got over all that. The only truth that Schultze can 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 los 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 former 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 miró fríamente y se volvió hacia mí: – No conozco a este hombre – me dijo –. Debe de padecer una ilusión óptica. – ¡Genuflexo! – le gritaba el hombre bomba –. ¡Desertó la bandera de Anarkos para lamer los pies elegantemente calzados de la burguesía! ¡Véanlo ahora! ¡Inventa un infierno, a imitación del Gran Burgués que pretenden hacernos adorar los curas! [. . .] El astrólogo, sudando a mares, ahuyentó a los 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 Adán’s indulgence, explains his behaviour: – ¡Yo era joven! . . . Lecturas perversas me habían inducido al culto de la destrucción simbolizada en Kali, la tenebrosa, quien, al bailar sobre los escombros del mundo, sacude bellamente sus tetas de novilla. [. . .] Creí hallar en estos hombres a los adeptos de Kali . . . ¿No los oía yo a toda hora conjugar el verbo destruir? (AB 646)

Schultze as a young man was obsessed with destruction on a grand scale and

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for this reason he was attracted to anarchism. The details of this past relate this astrologer to Roberto Arlt’s character dubbed “el Astrólogo.” In Los siete locos (1929) and its sequel Los lanzallamas (1931), “el Astrólogo” thirsts for the violent destruction of capitalist society and takes away Ergueta’s wife Hipólita. 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” (AB 647). In explaining the mentality of the Anarchists, Schultze also affirms that for them, “antes de iniciar la revolución, era necesario hacerse fuertes como Zarathustra y renunciar a todos los prejuicios de la burguesía” (AB 646). In both cases, Zarathustra refers to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.16 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” 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 with his young protegé Adán, 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 astrólogo me sonrió, como rogándome para ellos una brizna de caridad. – ¡Los excelentes hermanos! – dijo –. Son unos panes de Dios . . . Cierto es que malgastaban sus horas esbozando en el papel inofensivos descarrilamientos y voladuras, o mezclando substancias químicas del todo

16 The apocalyptic revolutionaries in Marechal’s play La batalla de José 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: “¡El camarada Zarathustra decía lo mismo: la eternidad es el opio de los infelices!” (88).

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inocentes. Pero daba gusto verlos en los pic-nics dominicales, cuando mordisqueaban sus piernas de gallina como pacíficos burgueses. (AB 647)17

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 hombres-bombas chase Schultze and Adán as unwelcome intruders from the “laboratorio de los dinamiteros.” The Demiurge becomes a fugitive in his own creation. Another politically revealing encounter takes place in the hell of Envy. There, Schultze has trouble with two insolent boatmen who must take him and Adán across a lagoon. The sixth circle of Schultze’s inferno consists of a parodic facsimile of the cosmos: Toda el área infernal parecía sugerir un contraste de cielo y suelo, de ordenación 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 hacían aceleradamente, con un ritmo artificial de Planetario, y cada una, en su rotación, producía un zumbido 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: “¿Quiere hacerme creer,” he asks Schultze, “que oye la música de las esferas?” “Hasta la última nota,” replies the astrologer (AB 633). Schultze the nominalist is pulling his creature’s leg by lying with the 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

17 There is a likely allusion here to a scene in Manuel Gálvez’s novel El mal metafísico (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 allí sus pic-nics.” The park is also frequented by “pequeños burgueses,” and Riga is depressed by “aquella mediocre e ingenua alegría dominical, un poco burguesa y un poco de bajo pueblo” (El mal metafísico [vida romántica], Col. Austral 433, 3a ed. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1962, 164–6).

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his artificial creation. He brings them round with his demiurgic power of persuasion, not without first losing his temper. Faced with their disobedience: el astrólogo se puso a insultarlos violentamente, haciendo uso de calificativos esotéricos entre los cuales dejó caer al fin el muy alado y musical de “putifilios”. Aquella palabra debía de tener algún sentido mágico, ya que, al oírla, los tripulantes, venciendo su natural resistencia, enfilaron hacia nosotros la proa. [. . .] – ¡Hijos de tal por cual! – tronó Schultze –. ¿Saben con quién están hablando? ¿La soberbia igualitaria los ha enceguido hasta impedirles reconocer al Neogogo? (AB 632–33)

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.18 The ignorant boatmen, far from recognizing the playful charlatanry in the astrologer’s discourse, treat him “con una solicitud casi adulatoria” (AB 634). Schultze 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 pícaro. He may fulminate against the “soberbia 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 (53–6). A disciple reminds Zarathustra 18 “– Se me reconocería como vástago del Sol y de la Luna – dijo [Schultze] –, si un exceso de modestia no me vedara llevar en la frente los dos cuernos del iniciado. El Príncipe de la Floración Oriental no me desmentiría, si yo dijese que he comido el hongo violeta, que he domado al tigre-mujer y al dragón-hombre, que monté a la cigüeña de copete rojo y bailé la danza de la cigüeña amarilla, que conozco el vergel de Leang, el estanque de las turquesas, las diez islas y los tres promontorios. Pero mi verdadera credencial es otra: los veintiocho signos del buey Apis, dibujados en este cuerpo que se ha de tragar la tierra” (AB 634).

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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. And especially above the heavens: for all gods are poets’ parables, poets’ 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 Adán learns to adopt such an attitude before the language-produced illusions of poetry, philosophy, and religion, he too will have been cured of “el mal metafísico” that afflicts him. An important discussion on the creator/creature dynamic takes place at the exit of the hell of Gluttony, where Adán and Schultze meet a fat woman personifying this sin. With grotesque coquetry, she holds out her hand to be kissed by Schultze. He refuses, alleging: “Yo soy el Demiurgo de este infierno, y dice la sabiduría: ‘No adorarás la obra de tus manos’.” The insulted woman barks an order to her Cyclops henchman: “¡Agárreme al Demiurgo, y échamelo afuera!” (AB 541). Having been indecorously thrown out, the Demiurge and his disciple sustain the following dialogue: – Amigo Schultze – le dije – , ¿cómo es posible que sus mismas criaturas no hayan reconocido en usted al creador? – Eso es posible, y hasta corriente – me respondió él –. Y si no, que lo digan los dioses inmortales: ¿qué negación teológica no han recibido Ellos de los hombres?, ¿qué rebelión no les aguantaron?, ¿qué impiedad no les sufrieron? Si bien lo mira, todo eso es halagador para un Demiurgo que se respeta. – ¿Halagador? – protesté yo, sintiendo aún en mis riñones la caricia del Cíclope. – 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 sí misma, libre de toda relación entre causa y efecto. Supongamos que Don Quijote, por ejemplo, negara la existencia de Cervantes: esa exuberancia de ser, que Cervantes dió a su héroe y por la

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cual se ve negado, ¿no sería el más agradable incienso que, como creador, pudiera recibir de su criatura? – ¡Hum! – observé – . Teorizadores menos peligrosos que usted acabaron en el fuego, cuando el mundo era más prudente. (AB 542–43)

Only the most naïve reader could join Adán in believing that Schultze is discussing a question of theology in this passage. His example of Cervantes and Don Quixote is literary and is taken almost certainly from another literary source, Miguel de Unamuno’s highly influential novel Niebla (1914), whose protagonist Augusto Pérez rebels against his author in an attempt to invert the ontological relations binding creature to creator, adducing Unamuno’s own pet conceit that the immortal Knight is historically more “real” than Cervantes himself.19 In Unamuno’s “nivola” the theological construct is present as a metaphorical substrate; the plane of reference is literature, which may be extended to include history as a form of literature. Schultze, however, is not a writer and he deploys the theological/literary metaphor to include the discursive production of all forms of human order whether they be political, moral, or esthetic. And yet Schultze the self-appointed Neogogue 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. His “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, then Schultze’s experience of being bodily ejected by the Cyclops dramatizes how easily God himself can be thrown off the metaphysical stage, victim of the revolution of his volatile creatures. For this reason, Adán, 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, Adán is quite right. In order to rationalize the failure of his

19 “– No sea, mi querido don Miguel – añadió [Augusto Pérez] –, que sea usted y no yo el ente de ficción, 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 mía propia. Vamos a cuentas: ¿no ha sido usted el que no una, sino varias veces, ha dicho que don Quijote y Sancho son no ya tan reales, sino más reales que Cervantes?” Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla (Col. Austral 99, 20th ed., México: Espasa-Calpe, 1983) 150–1. Unamuno’s presence is evoked again by Don Ecuménico: “Ignoro si esas manifestaciones pueriles acusaban en mí un ‘sentimiento trágico de la vida’ curiosamente prematuro” (AB 719).

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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 and thus subverts the very notion of orthodox authority. Adán 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 Adán’s own condition as a would-be creator: “– 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 sí misma.” 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 and referring specifically to Adán. The young poet, of course, is the creator of his Solveig celeste, a creature to whom, in his own view, he had fully endowed with being: “le había dado él 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], ¿se reconocería Solveig Amundsen en la pintura ideal que había trazado él con materiales tan sutiles? . . . “Acaso, al descubrírsele de pronto aquel extraño linaje de amor, ella se le acercaría con los 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 her, that he might be the creator of Solveig. As we have seen, Adán’s creation was doomed. The “real” Solveig, called by Adán Solveig terrestre, destroyed Adán’s ideal representation of her by simply ignoring it. Even if she had read the “Cuaderno,” 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 Adán’s failure as a creator. But is there, then, any difference in status between Schultze’s and Adán’s creations? Apparently, both men proceed in fundamentally the same way. Adán sets himself up as a creator within the sphere of literature and attempts to extend his sphere of influence to the hors-texte. Schultze appoints himself Neogogue, prototype of political 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 Adán a drink as soon as he gets

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of there.20 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 Adán, 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 otherness, he simply invents new ways of rationalizing his 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 at one point: “Todas las audacias del intelecto son aquí posibles y deseables” (AB 633).21 If Schultze lets nothing stop him, Adán, 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. Adán labours under a terrible disadvantage vis-à-vis his mentor. He is a superstitious slave to the grandiose “edifications” generated by the systematized metonymy of hieratic language. When he says or writes “Madonna Intelligenza,” for example, he believes that he touches the highest reality of the feminine principle, 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 own creativity and imposes 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 20 Adán earns his drink by defending his friend. “– ¡Gracias, pueblo! – me gritó Pereda, visiblemente conmovido –. Cuando salga de aquí te pagaré una ginebra en el almacén rosado de la esquina” (AB 666). Pereda parodies Borges’s verse “Un almacén rosado como revés de naipe,” in “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” (Obras completas 101). 21 The context of Schultze’s utterance here is, admittedly, more complex. He is referring in fact to Argentina, and makes his comment when passing through the hell of Envy. Thus he argues for nationalist pride and freedom from cosmopolitan envy. He concludes his remark with the proviso “aunque en este sucio chiquero se intente demostrar lo contrario” (AB 633). Paradoxically, the invention of Cacodelphia is an excellent demonstration of the audacity of intellect that Schultze calls for.

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defenceless. Adán 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. And 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. Adán’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 prisci theologi. Schultze shows him that such an edifice of truth is an invention of human language which must be continually reinvented.

Mise en abyme: the story of Don Ecuménico The episode in which Don Ecuménico 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 Ecuménico’s tale pointedly reflects Adán’s own situation and thus serves as an instance of mise en abyme. Don Ecuménico and Adán Buenosayres mirror each other in their names, which both have a paradigmatic quality. “Don Ecuménico” may be translated approximately as “Mr. Everyman.” Adán Buenosayres – which may be rendered as “Buenos Aires Man” – 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 Ecuménico 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 los Libros” and meets the “Bibliotecario que Miraba desde Brumosas Lejanías” (AB 728). Under the guidance of the mysterious Librarian, Don Ecuménico 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 (“empecé a devorarlo todo” [729]) the fictional worlds of literature – novels, poetry, and theatre. Only after repeated requests does the Librarian grant Don Ecuménico access to the library’s inner sanctum, unlocking for the unsuspecting novice a scarcely visible, small padded door. “En el recinto número tres,” Don Ecuménico finds: gruesos volúmenes de páginas amarillas y duros lomos: aquellos libros contenían todas las iluminaciones del alma, todas las locuras de la intelección, todos los razonamientos prudentes y las audacias blasfematorias a que había llegado el hombre mortal en su buceo de lo Absoluto. (AB 732)

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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 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 Ecuménico’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 Ecuménico’s is the search for the definitive revelation. However, we should be chary of interpreting this story as a parable admonishing us against Babel-like pride. The lesson is perhaps not about morality but language. Don Ecuménico 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 armas desiguales pero embriagadora en su misma desproporción” (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 Ecuménico 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 stomach (Rev. 10:10). Similarly, Don Ecuménico enjoyed the taste of so much priestly erudition, but found the after-effects rather bitter. At the same time, Don Ecuménico’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.22 Eating the heavenly text must be a metaphor for the conversion of the divine text into the earthly one, in other words, for 22 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

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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 Ecuménico 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 salí volando al aire libre, para descender a este Infierno” (AB 740). He seems to implore his listeners to supply an epilogue: Don Ecuménico había terminado su historia. Nos miró a todos en la cara, fija y ansiosamente, como si aguardase una objeción, acaso una pregunta o siquiera una mirada consoladora. Pero Schultze y Tesler se mantenían en su aire lejano, y no encontré yo palabra que decirle. (AB 740)

Schultze and Samuel are not directly implicated in Don Ecuménico’s misfortune, so they adopt a distant air. Adán, however, has a great deal in common with Don Ecuménico. Just as the latter has buried himself in priestly literature, Adán has spent long, solitary periods reading “libros de ciencias olvidadas, herméticos y tentadores como jardines prohibidos” (AB 387). The story of the insect-man is meant for Adán, 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 Adán, Don Ecuménico as a young man was disappointed in a platonic love affair with a girl named Dolores, who threw him over for an “obeso importador de vinos” (AB 725). While the poetic Don Ecuménico was abandoned for a vulgar businessman of pronounced corporeality, Adán has been rejected in favour of Lucio Negri, avatar of the demotic world-view and its mystique of the body. Don Ecuménico and Dolores conducted their relationship through the exchange of poetry. Don Ecuménico found out later, when it was all over, that Dolores had lifted her verses straight from Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. 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, Adán 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 Adán. Despite his disillusion, Don Ecuménico continues to

the scroll already betrays the priestly origin of the text. The exegetists only make explicit the metonymic structure that is implicit in the text.

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theorize about love in language that echoes the “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules”: “hay en el hombre una capacidad de amor esencialmente metafísica: es un ala de amor que yerra, se lastima y ensucia en este mundo, porque fué creada sólo para la navegación del cielo” (AB 723). Don Ecuménico’s metaphor “un ala de amor” echoes Adán’s phrase “un ala de paloma,” which he uses in his “Cuaderno” to describe his discovery of mystical love (AB 437–8). Both men are talking about a failure in love in similar terms. Adán’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 Ecuménico envisions the “wing of love” being dirtied in this lower world. The most striking point of similarity between the two characters is their reaction to existential crisis. Don Ecuménico 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 find the “heavenly book.” Adán, 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 Ecuménico and repeat the disastrous “navegación del cielo” that has brought the insect-man to grief. Don Ecuménico 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 Adán’s possible future.

The Paleogogue With the episode of Don Ecuménico, Schultze’s demiurgic game draws near its end. There remains only one final gesture to make, the supremely ironic revelation of the Paleogogo. He leads Adán to the edge of the Great Pit (“la Gran Hoya”) where Schultze’s hell ends. “Me asomé a la hoya,” Adán recounts, “y en el fondo vi estremecerse una gran masa como de gelatina, que daba la sensación de un molusco gigante, aunque no lo era” (AB 741). The Neogogue has led Adán 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: – Más feo que un susto a medianoche. Con más agallas que un dorado. Serio como bragueta de fraile. Más entrador que perro de rico. De punta, como cuchillo de viejo. Más fruncido que tabaquera de inmigrante. Mierdoso, como alpargata de vasco tambero. Con más vueltas que caballo de noria. Más fiero que costalada de chancho. Más duro que garrón de vizcacha. Mañero como petizo de lavandera. Solemne como pedo de inglés. (AB 741)

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With these final words, closing both the “Viaje” and the novel, Adán 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 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 otherness 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, Adán’s description of the Paleogogue shows a significant change in his language. He is no longer the earnest author of the “Cuaderno de Tapas Azules” who expresses himself with pretentious Neoplatonic language. Instead, he inventively plays with coarse, demotic language. Adán has given up metonymic-language abuse, renounced that form of inebriation which was the ruin of Don Ecuménico. Adán has avoided the fate of the insect-man, but his salutary awakening comes at a price. The old Adán has died and will be symbolically interred, as the “Prólogo indispensable” has already told us. The new Adam, informed by the revelation of the Paleogogue, speaks 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.

6 TEXTUAL APOCALYPSE: EL BANQUETE DE SEVERO ARCÁNGELO Leopoldo Marechal’s second novel, published 17 years after Adán Buenosayres, opens with a one-page “Dedicatoria prólogo a Elbiamor,” in which Marechal states that in writing Banquete, di con una manera de reparar una injusticia que me atormentaba: en Adán Buenosayres dejé a mi héroe como inmovilizado en el último círculo de un Infierno sin salida . . . El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo propone una “salida”; y a mi entender no fue otro el intento del Metalúrgico de Avellaneda. (B 9)

Marechal has decided to ignore Adán’s “funeral” and any kind of symbolic rebirth it may imply. For Marechal, Adán 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 Adán 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 reinvent ad hoc solutions. “El Gran Demiurgo,” claims the impudent astrologer, “nos da el ejemplo al modificar incesantemente su obra” (AB 135). 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 naïve rhetorical constructions and receives new truths with withering skepticism. Now Marechal appears to have repented of this ironic viewpoint: 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 Arcángelo’s “buenos propósitos” are to achieve this deliverance through an artificially staged apocalypse. In this chapter, it will be shown that the outcome of this project is extremely dubious. After discussing Severo Arcángelo’s enterprise on its own terms, I

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shall try to show how the text of the novel conspires to defeat this redemptive purpose. The text parodies itself and satirizes the doctrines proposed within it.

Metahistory: reprise and ricorso Severo Arcángelo, 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 Adán, 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” 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 Bermúdez, and the ex-journalist and first-person narrator Lisandro Farías. 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 los Fieles y el de los Negadores” (B 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 Avellaneda has modeled his artificial world on the initiatic-priestly metaphysics parodically mimicked by Schultze in Adán Buenosayres. Severo’s enterprise is underwritten by the Guénonian 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 Arcángelo 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 (B 259). This looks like a re-statement of Guénon’s doctrine of modern man’s accelerating plunge toward the apocalypse (Crise 15). Severo wishes to oppose this historical gravity, swim up-river against time, and retrace the steps of the fall: ¡Volver sobre los pasos del hombre y recobrar todo lo perdido en su fuga o descenso! ¡Recobrar los horizontes dejados atrás, los éxtasis

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abolidos, los templos ocultos en la maraña invasora y los alegres jardines clausurados! (B 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 Retrógrado 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 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 Farías’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 (B 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 it (B 251). The First and Second Councils serve to frame both the progress of the story and the metaphysical explanation of Severo Arcángelo’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. At the First Council, the astrophysicist Frobenius delivers a lecture on

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).

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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: – Señores aspirantes al Banquete: no hay duda de que nosotros, los bípedos 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 qué grado de vanidad pomposa o de ingenua ilusión pudo llevarnos esa gratuita jefatura. (B 105) He describes the tremendous magnitude of galaxies careening through the void at dizzying velocities: “– ¡Ahí están! – exclamó Frobenius –. ¡Astros y galaxias! En su aparente quietud los teólogos y los poetas vieron una imagen de la estabilidad consoladora, frente a las trágicas mutaciones que conmovían al bípedo humano. ¡Qué ilusos!” (B 109). At the conclusion of Frobenius’s discourse, Severo Arcángelo and his valet Impaglione intervene to draw the pertinent moral. The valet recites from a script written by his master: “– ¡Hemos inventado ultramundos y dioses para combatir esta frialdad cósmica y este vacío en que nos agitamos!” Severo himself adds: “– ¡Ante su increíble finitud, el bípedo humano (que así lo llamó con justo desprecio el sabio de la tribuna) concibió un Infinito donde reparar su lamentable naturaleza!” (B 112). The First Council demonstrates the scientific world-view. But more importantly, Severo Arcángelo 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 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 metafísica de la nada” (B 115), as Lisandro Farías concludes after attending the First Council. By implication, Severo Arcángelo excludes Schultze’s strategy of parodic inventiveness as a possible solution or way out of Cacodelphia. At the Second Council, Professor Bermúdez 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 (B 195). Bermúdez then expounds the doctrine of the cycle of ages: – La presente humanidad . . . ha vivido ya cuatro edades que aquí están simbolizadas por estos hombres metálicos: el Hombre de Oro, el Hombre de Plata, el Hombre de Cobre y el Hombre de Hierro, es decir el actual, cuya degeneración asombrosa conoceremos en seguida, ya que vive y

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habla, mientras que los otros yacen en sus tumbas prehistóricas desde hace millones de años. (B 195)

The relation between these symbolic “hombres metálicos” 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” (B 201). The Truth is defined as “la verdad absoluta de su [man’s] Principio.” The “hombres metálicos” form a chain of mirrors, each one reflecting with diminishing luminosity the image of the previous mirror. The Iron Age man is the “cuarta especulación que sólo refleja la imagen de la imagen de la imagen de la imagen” (B 201). Evidently, there is a radical discontinuity between Frobenius’s and Bermúdez’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 Bermúdez 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 Bermúdez’s anthropocentric discourse, human existence is coextensive with time itself. Had Frobenius outlined the Ptolemaic universe, then Bermúdez would have been justified in connecting the two discourses on the same plane. But in fact, the leap from the First Council to the Second Council represents a regression in the history of thought, which Bermúdez has turned into a dialectical progression through his rhetorical manoeuvre. This is in accord with Severo Arcángelo’s project of regressing metatemporally as a means of advancing teleologically. Bermúdez 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. Bermúdez, backed up by the “voz autoritaria” of Severo Arcángelo, claims that the “Hombre de Sangre” has already arrived (B 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 (B 206). In Bermúdez’s dramatized lecture, a hired actor named Johnny López plays the role of the Last Man. Prompted by members of the audience (the prospective commensals at the Banquet), Johnny López explains in vulgar porteño language the theory of evolution and expresses his belief in progress towards a “Paraíso Científico” (B 202–5). His position is the same as that of Lucio Negri in Adán Buenosayres, while Bermúdez holds the same view as Adán and Samuel Tesler. Thus the philosophical battle that has animated the tertulia in the first novel is echoed at Severo Arcángelo’s Second Council. In the

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former, however, there was something of a contest, a rhetorical sparring match between Samuel and Lucio, while in Banquete there is no contest at all. Johnny López is displayed merely as an object of ridicule. The priestly agenda of the Banquet satirizes Darwinism and the naïve scientism that created the materialist myth of progress. But it does not stop there. Following the example of René Guénon, the Banquet’s priesthood throws out the entire philosophical discourse of modernity. Severo Arcángelo 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 cliché (Paley 3–4). The last man on earth was a solitary Romantic hero in the 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 “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 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 “Paraíso Científico.” 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 literary persona values chaos as highly as do Schultze and Adán Buenosayres. The 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 último [Adán] 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, Bermúdez presents the “Hombre Final” first and then the “Hombre de Sangre.” The professor’s audience immediately suspects the Nietzschean connection and they react to the notion of the “Hombre de Sangre”: “– ¡Ojo!” cries one voice. “¡Nos está insinuando al Superhombre de Nietzsche! [. . .] – ¡No lo consentiré!” shouts another. “¡El Superhombre nietzscheano es un hijo esquizofrénico de la ‘selección natural’!” (B 206). Bermúdez quickly reassures them that the “Hombre de Sangre” is not “un producto de factura

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germánica” (B 206). He should not be so sure. The “Hombre de Sangre” may not be Nietzschean, but the “Hombre Final” almost certainly is. If Bermúdez 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 Arcángelo’s agenda is of course the Banquet itself. Essentially, it is meant to be an ordeal in which the Cacodelphian world is finally consumed. The Banquet is to be a cathartic event that will propel the elect into the mythical space of the “Cuesta del Agua.” The orchestra will play the cacophonous “Sinfonía de Robot.” After the commensals have eaten foul-tasting dishes, the “Mesa del Banquete,” 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 Colofón, the “creature” of the fire-and-brimstone preacher Jonás. The name of the human robot alludes again to the world-as-book topos, since a colophon is an inscription at the end of a book or manuscript. Thus the robot Colofón 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, Thelma has been submitted by the Organization to an “alchemical” transformation called “Operación Cybeles,” which has left her utterly brain-washed, perhaps even brain-dead, though in appearance more beautiful than ever. She is described as an “ ‘indeterminación’ total” and “una ‘negación’ activa que, desde su no-ser absoluto, nos estaba llamando y exigiendo una guerra y un viento y un río que la sacudiesen y llenasen” (B 232). Her effect on the 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 Bermúdez defines her with the same language that the narrator of Adán Buenosayres used when referring to the prostitute called Jova in the brothel episode. Bermúdez names Thelma: “– Afrodita . . . o Cybeles, o Astarté, o Penia, o Diana, o Prakiti: la de mil nombres y ninguno” (B 234). In Adán, 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

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bárbaros” (AB 325). It will be recalled that on this locus of indetermination, this absence of form and name, the “Joven Taciturno” constructs his ideal, in the same way that Adán 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 Bermúdez confirms, is meant to provoke “una conflagración” (B 236), a kind of trial by fire. Non-being is evil, according to Bermúdez and by extension his boss, Severo Arcángelo. This value judgment differs sharply from the way Adán and Schultze characterize non-being in Adán Buenosayres. In the first novel, non-being is associated with the primordial chaos, a pre-ontological plenitude that is accorded a highly positive value. It is true that Don Ecuménico came to grief when he discovered the concept of non-being, but that was because he did not know how to handle language. Severo Arcángelo and his Organization, in contrast to Adán 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 Arcángelo’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 Arcángelo’s Banquet (but 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 kairos, the turning point when one world ends and another begins. And yet immediately 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

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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 Bermúdez, under the direction of Severo Arcángelo, has announced the “Hombre de Sangre.” It turns out that this is Christ’s new name. This information is conveyed to Lisandro Farías in Chapter 30, wherein he receives his final indoctrination 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: “– ¡El Cristo! – volví a gritar –. ¡El Hombre de Sangre!” (B 274). Pedro, who insists on being called “hermano” rather than “padre” (B 269),2 tells Lisandro that he was the one who found the new name: “ – Lo busqué y lo hallé” (B 272). Pedro also explains why it was necessary to find Christ’s new name: – El Cristo – asintió el Salmodiante de la Ventana – : un Nombre que se nos reveló como superior a todo nombre proferido antes del suyo. ¿Y qué nos queda ya de un nombre que se fue gastando y muriendo en bocas mecánicas? También el Cristo es una “palabra perdida”. (B 271) Pedro alludes here to the old hieratic topos of the “lost Word.” Guénonian-style, priestly wisdom holds that the Word of the “Révélation primordiale” is reflected in the language of the “Révélations 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 Arcángelo has articulated the same problem in his Third Monologue: Todas las palabras han perdido ya su valor originario, su tremenda eficacia de afirmar o negar; todos los gestos han perdido su energía ritual o su fuerza mágica. Lo perdieron en nosotros; en nuestras bocas que

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 with you and your comrades who hold the testimony of Jesus’ ” (Rev. 19:10).

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hoy parecen duras cajas de ruidos y en nuestros pies de bailarines automáticos. No obstante, las palabras de vida están en nosotros, ¿lo están o no, mi alma? Sí, lo están, pero como en instrumentos grabadores que las repiten mecánicamente 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 Plato to denote the relation obtaining between the ideal form or Idea and the particulars 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 change of secondary metaphor, beneath which the fundamental tropological strategy of linguistic representation remains constant. In Plato, the metaphor is spatial: the immanent Idea is visualized as being located behind the mere appearance of the particular. In apocalyptic, the metaphor is temporal: the scandalous diremption that grows in history between the primordial Word and the fallen wor(l)d will be repaired at the end of time by the Parousia, the return of the Logos. In both cases, cause and effect are reversed, as in Nietzsche’s definition of metonymy (see chapter 3), to create powerful anthropocentric fictions. With his project of the Banquet, Severo Arcángelo 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

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).

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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 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 ríos del Paraíso ya trazan la expansión crucial hacia cuatro direcciones del Espacio y cuatro eras del Tiempo. Y justamente allí, en el punto central donde nacen los cuatro ríos, hay un Adán inmóvil, pero como ya tentado a la expansión o la fuga. (B 273)

The four eras are the same as Hesiod’s or those of the Manvantara. In the Edenic Golden 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 movement 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 Jardín en círculo a una Ciudad Cuadrada . . . También el círculo es figura de movimiento; y el cuadrado es figura de la ‘estabilidad’. La solución del teorema humano estaría, pues, en la cuadratura del círculo” (B 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

4 Pedro does allow that the Square City is three-dimensional: “Hablábamos de la Ciudad Cuadrada, o mejor dicho ‘cúbica’. ¿Y a qué se parecería esa construcción del Apocalipsis? A un gran silo” (B 276). The New Jerusalem is really a silo in which to store the human harvest: “Todo el misterio del Hombre se resuelve así 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.

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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’ sólo cuando actúan en él tres conciencias en armonía: la conciencia que el Hacedor tiene de su criatura Hombre, la conciencia que la criatura Hombre tiene de su Hacedor, y la conciencia que la criatura Hombre tiene de sí misma” (B 276). 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 no es más que un fantasma lleno de vistosidades externas” (B 277). 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 función central y centralizadora en este mundo, y los desequilibrios del Hombre inciden en el medio cósmico. Si el desequilibrio alcanza el grado tope, la catástrofe se desencadena” (B 278). It should be clear by now that Hermano Pedro is no brother at all but rather Severo Arcángelo’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 according to Augustine. Unless we can restore this ideal situation, the cosmos will plunge into catastrophe.

Symposium as sainete Thus far in this reading of El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo, I have been treating the novel’s priestly ideology, as expressed through the salient characters, at face value. Like the “lector agreste” of Adán Buenosayres, I have so far ignored Banquete’s shadow side, its irony and parody. Unlike the rich irony of Adán 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 Orecchia Havas to comment with respect

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to Banquete: “En este universo de maquinación . . . todo ha sido trucado, todo es falso, comenzando por los símbolos” (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 práctica sutil de la superstición” (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 Arcángelo and his manservant Implaglione. Lisandro Farsías is moved to reflect on this feat: Lo que ahora me desconcertaba era su “arte paródico”, manifestado en las imitaciones de Severo y de Impaglione que habían construido ellos en mis propias narices: nunca me gustó la parodia, ya que mi natural honradez abominó siempre toda mistificación o caricatura de la verdad. En el caso de Gog y Magog, el hecho se me antojaba más temible, pues yo no había dejado de observar que lo paródico se daba en ellos, no como un accidente circunstancial, sino como una marca “definitoria” de sus naturalezas. (B 244)

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 “mi natural honradez.” As for “mistificación,” he literally gets drunk on it on more than one occasion. Lisandro’s dipsomania, a recurring joke 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 Arcángelo’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 más, utilizando lo absurdo y lo verosímil en una mezcla de hábiles proporciones, Gog y Magog intentaban

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 parecía traslúcido como un juego de niños. [. . .] – ¿Y qué importa? – le grité en mi borrachera –. ¿Qué importa la finalidad si el drama es picante y lírico, además de necesario?” Such effusiveness is repugnant to Pedro the Jesuitical teacher: “– No pierdas la cabeza – me amonestó él” (B 275).

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destruir ante mis ojos una mitología 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 Bermúdez points out (B 75), are symbols. What they symbolize is the opposition that operates within the novel’s text as a cross-current to the 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 Farías to the fact that everything in Severo Arcángelo’s Banquet, beginning with the Metallurgist of Avellaneda himself, is empty farce: “El Viejo Truchimán,” says Gog in reference to Severo Arcángelo, “ya le ha representado sin duda su farsa de malandrín arrepentido” (B 80). As well, the clowns reveal Severo Arcángelo’s past as a bad amateur actor (B 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 through the novel, in Chapter 17, Severo Arcángelo commissions Lisandro to write the libretto for a “show” (Severo uses the English word), of which the theme will be “la Vida Ordinaria” (B 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 Arcángelo’s Banquet. What is this genre that Lisandro has selected? Angel Núñez defines the sainete as it developed in Argentina: “Arte popular por excelencia, el sainete fue espejo burlesco sin desdeñar ciertos toques dramáticos (melodramáticos también), donde quedó reflejado el aluvión inmigratorio en sus variantes más típicas” (Historia/3 1013a). The sainete’s defining elements are the burlesque, melodrama, and stereotypical characters. This is not high dramatic art. The sainete was a very popular form in the Argentina of the 1920s and 1930s. Its very popularity brought about its decadence, for it became formulaic: “los autores,” writes Núñez, “se limitaban a reeditar viejas fórmulas, justificadas y hasta originales en su momento pero ahora obsoletas” (1013b). Raúl Héctor 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 éxito en determinado escenario, es imitado hasta el cansancio, y sin escrúpulos, en todos” (121). A key figure in this process was the sainetero Alberto Vacarezza. A kind of modern-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 genre of the sainete: “Vaccareza [sic] . . . usufructó el género hasta agotarlo y fue quien lo

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mineralizó en fórmulas, las cuales presentadas, en sí, como ‘nuevo arte de componer sainetes’, en sus consecuencias incubarán 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 Farías 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 virtud de la ‘santa Pedagogía’ resolví conservar mi ratonera y sus desdichados cautivos” (B 174). Lisandro aims to make his show at once funny and edifying. The moral lesson has already been stipulated by Severo Arcángelo: “la Vida Ordinaria, en su aparente seguridad, sólo es una formidable ilusión 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 ocurrió poner en las alturas del escenario un ángel con su trompeta, el cual anunciaría en su hora el final de la Vida Ordinaria, la destrucción de la ratonera y el pánico de los ratones” (B 174). The realistic illusion of ordinary life 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, naïve 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 Arcángelo’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 ilusión tenía su nombre,” comments Lisandro in a moment of nominalist lucidity, “y acaso no era más que un nombre: la Cuesta del Agua” (B 136). But if Lisandro’s apocalypse formally mirrors that of the Severo Arcángelo’s Banquet, it does not necessarily follow that this specular relation can be extended to the novel of that name. As we shall see, the moral lesson dictated by the metallurgist to his dramatist Lisandro Farías 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:

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Pero tendría yo, en cambio, el gusto de meter en la ratonera, y contra su voluntad, a todos mis enemigos de ayer, a los que me torturaron con su juiciosa imbecilidad o me hirieron con su estúpida suficiencia: los haría cumplir gestos de un ridículo inexorable, y los encararía en diálogos y monólogos de sesudos ratones, cuyo poder hilarante fuera capaz de hacer que la Mesa del Banquete desmoronara de risa. (B 174)

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 Arcángelo’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 Avellaneda himself, Bermúdez, Frobenius, Hermano Pedro, as well as another Brother whom we shall consider presently, “el Hermano Jonás.” 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 Farías, first-person narrator, has set up the episode of his interview by drawing attention in advance to the capital theme of Pedro’s discourse, the Apocalypse. Describing the small room where he awaits his interview, Lisandro notes: “Lo que desentonaba en el cubículo era un gran atril, al parecer de oro, sobre el cual, y abierta en el Apocalipsis, descansaba una Biblia de notable antigüedad” (B 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: “Yo era capataz en un frigorífico de La Ensenada, y el Nombre se me reveló entre medias reses de vacunos” (B 272). The 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 in medias res. 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] los que hallaron el Nombre perdido y a él se agarran como a un barril flotante . . . ¿Qué los anima? La promesa de una Ciudad Cuadrada, el pan y el vino de la exaltación en los blancos manteles del Reino. Sus últimas palabras rodaron en el vacío: me dormí profundamente, y en sueños me pareció que descendía yo a grandes y tranquilizadoras honduras. (B 272)

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The mystical Name is compared to a floating barrel, i.e. to a hollow, empty vessel. The theme of emptiness is underlined when Lisandro resumes his narration: Pedro’s words rolled (like barrels) “en el vacío,” for his stream of empty verbiage has put Lisandro to sleep. Apocalypticism receives its most burlesque treatment in the episode of “el Hermano Jonás” and his creature Colofón, 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.” Jonás 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 Revelation 11:3. “¡Lo dice la Palabra!” exclaims Jonás. “Luego el Gran Mono será precipitado al Averno, entre una rechifla de ángeles” (B 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, Bermúdez’s concept of “Hombre Final,” dramatized at the Second Council by a hired actor called Johnny López, does not go far enough in portraying the absolute iniquity of the final stages of the Iron Age: “– ¿Johnny López? – exclamó Jonás con desprecio –. ¡No es un finalista! Es el hombre actual y algo así como el tatarabuelo de Colofón” (B 248). According to Jonás, Johnny López still retains a residual consciousness of his “Principio Creador,” whereas that consciousness will have been erased entirely in Colofón. The Human Robot will be the puppet of “el Gran Mono,” or metaphysically speaking: “El de Colofón será, pues, un ‘vacío de la Divinidad’ ” (B 250). 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 Jonás 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 años vecinos a la Parusía” (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 edifice of the Banquet’s discourse, but a gargoyle that forms part of a supporting pillar. Ironically, Jonás 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, “hará una parodia grotesca del Evangelio” (B 249). In reality, it is Jonás who grotesquely parodies the language of the apocalyptic Gospel, as well as the ideological premises of the Banquet. The final irony of

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the preacher’s discourse is that he himself has literally created Colofón. Through a process left unknown, Jonás 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 (B 255), whom he treats with “una solicitud casi paternal” (B 247). Jonás is quite enamoured of his apocalyptic vision, which is not a revelation but his own imaginative creation. He is demented because he cannot distinguish 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 Jonás and Colofón, 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 Arcángelo’s Banquet. When Jonás first arrives at the clowns’ hut, he recognizes them right away as agents of evil: “¡Azufre! . . . Yo sé olfatear al Enemigo hasta en un sainete de Vacarezza” (B 246). His observation is significant. The Brother himself, along with the clowns, behaves and speaks as a burlesque type in a “sainete de divertimiento y 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 increíble: vi a un Gog que, acercándose de nuevo al Hermano, caía de hinojos a sus pies y le calzaba el zapato volante. Sin dar muestras de haber ponderado aquel gesto devoto, el presunto cura se dirigió nuevamente a mí” (B 253). Jonás misses the significance of the gesture. The clowns in fact understand who and what Jonás is better than he does. Beyond the theatre metaphor, the emptiness of the sainete played out by Jonás 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 attitude that underwrites it. 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 ángel a su siervo Juan, el cual da testimonio de la palabra de Dios y el testimonio de Jesucristo sobre todo lo que él ha visto. (Apoc. 1:1–2)6

6 The Spanish Apocalipsis is quoted here to allow a more transparent view of the intertexuality between it and Lisandro’s narration.

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After the Introduction, John uses the following formula to present the main body of his account: Yo, Juan, vuestro hermano y compañero en la tribulación, en el reino y en la paciencia en Jesús, hallándome en la isla llamada Patmos, . . . oí tras de mí una voz fuerte, como de trompeta, que decía: Lo que vieres, escríbelo en un libro y envíalo 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, Jesús, envié a un ángel para testificaros estas cosas sobre las iglesias” (Apoc. 22:16). In Banquete, Lisandro Farías 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 Farías, nacido en la llanura, muerto en Buenos Aires y resucitado en la Cuesta del Agua, me propongo iniciar la narración del Banquete cuyo epílogo se ha recatado en esta dura provincia como un secreto en forma de almendra . . . pues el signo de Severo Arcángelo es inflexible. (B 13)7

Lisandro returns to this declamatory formula throughout his narration. He introduces the episode of the Second Council with it: “Yo, Lisandro Farías, juro que todo lo que pinto ahora y pintaré hasta el fin es verdadero y sucedió en la casa de Severo Arcángelo” (B 194). And he closes his account: “Y el Banquete ‘fue’. Y yo, Lisandro Farías, nacido en la llanura, muerto en Buenos Aires y resucitado en la Cuesta del Agua, doy testimonio de los hechos” (B 289). However, the same formula is given burlesque treatment on another occasion: “Yo, Lisandro Farías, nacido en la llanura, muerto en Buenos Aires y resucitado en la Cuesta del Agua, soy, como dije ya, un antiguo y conmovedor aborto de la literatura” (B 261). In the immediate context, Lisandro means that he is a failed writer.8 Severo Arcángelo has reminded him of his “antigua y fracasada vocación poética” (B 156). Lisandro himself alludes on another occasion to his “risibles ensayos poético-filosóficos” (B

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 Farías is a recombination of two Marechalian characters: Liberato Farías, the horse-breaker from Adán Buenosayres and Lisandro Galván, protagonist of the play Antígona Vélez (Maturo 35). It is the clowns who draw attention to Lisandro’s status as a literary character. When Lisandro tells them his name, Gog remarks “con insolencia”: “– No es una recomendación” (B 79). The clowns

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115). 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 Oposición al Banquete” (B 169). Lisandro plays off the clowns against the official Junta. His attitude hardly behooves a witness of Revelation. Pablo 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” (B 170). Likewise, 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.

Andrés Papagiourgiou’s vision There is one character, however, who stands outside the Manichean division between the Banquet’s Organization and its Opposition. Nominally, Andrés Papagiorgiou is a prospective commensal at the Banquet, but the clowns point out that “el griego chiflado no está en la Junta del Banquete” (B 147). Papagiorgiou challenges both the First 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 López, 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 imaginación en prosa” (B 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 is an eccentric, an outsider, a loner. Just as Don Quixote sallied forth into the world three times, Papagiorgiou, “el Navegante

correctly diagnose the utter emptiness of Lisandro’s character and, more importantly, his discourse.

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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 imaginé a nuestro planeta igualmente difunto, sin verdores ni sonidos, como la luna, sin ontologías animadas ni entes capaces de inteligir y de expresar. Y en mi alucinación vi a la Tierra como un libro de texto borrado, sin palabras ni lectores. ¿Entienden? (B 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 naïvely the way Adán Buenosayres does. The Greek is not in thrall to 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 finds himself: “el libro de texto borrado” is the text of El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo. Thanks to Papagiorgiou’s intervention, we can perceive more clearly the self-cancelling irony inherent in Severo Arcángelo’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 some primordial Word. In these dark times, he laments, we are like mere recording instruments that mechanically repeat empty words (B 149). But for the novel’s characters, 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 Adán Buenosayres borrows from John’s Revelation) 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 Farías meets the fictional Leopoldo Marechal in the hospital, and the dramatic fiction engineered by Severo Arcángelo and his Organization (which is reflected ironically by a third fiction placed en abyme,

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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’ ” (B 289). Because these ends and endings are very nearly superimposed one upon the other, the illusion is fostered that they stand within a single harmony, as though in virtually transparent layers. This illusion is 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 reread 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 también hizo destacar para mí los nombres de Gog y de Magog vinculados a los últimos tiempos y en la línea non sancta. ¿Era un simple alarde literario el hecho de que la Dirección del Banquete diera esos nombres a los dos payasos que habitaban la choza? [. . .] ¿No se intentaría en el Banquete un formidable juego de símbolos? Me respondí que no, y las cosas del Banquete se iban dando en una realidad cruda y llena de intolerables absurdos. ¡Cuán errado andaba yo al formular esas distinciones! Más adelante, en la Cuesta del Agua, me hicieron entender la energía viviente de los símbolos. Porque hay símbolos que muerden como perros furiosos o patean como redomones, y símbolos que se abren como frutas y destilan leche y miel. Y hay símbolos que aguardan, como bombas de tiempo junto a las cuales pasa uno sin desconfiar, y que revientan de súbito, pero a su hora exacta. Y hay símbolos que se nos ofrecen como trampolines flexibles, para el salto del alma voladora. Y símbolos que nos atraen con cebos de trampa, y que se cierran de pronto si uno los toca, y mutilan entonces o encarcelan al incauto viandante. Y hay símbolos que nos rechazan con sus barreras de espinas, y que nos rinden al fin su higo maduro si uno se resuelve a lastimarse la mano. (B 257–8)

The “Cuesta del Agua” is the realm of symbols, the cyberspace in which their “energía viviente” determines reality. Symbols are not inert signs, but active nuclei of energy. Likewise, Jean Chevalier proposes that a living symbol is a kind of “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 Adán Buenosayres in his

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theological poetics. Thus the “Cuesta del Agua” is something like Adán’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” Adán believed in too earnestly, and of the language, “entre metafísico y poético” (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 Arcángelo’s transcendental project to retrace the steps of metahistory back through the cycle of language to a metatemporal source, which must also 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 Farías 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 Farías, 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 papelerío – rezongó él [Lisandro] como en la evocación de una molestia retrospectiva” (B 16). As it is reflected in this comment, the paradise of virtual reality does not sound so heavenly, nor the “energía viviente” of its symbolism quite so vivifying. Rather than the spiritual “concentración definitiva” that Pablo Inaudi claims it to be (B 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 Arcángelo’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 54–5). The first diegesis, then, neutralizes with ambiguity the import of Severo Arcángelo’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 Farías is summoned by Pablo Inaudi and “saved” at the

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moment of his death.9 The narrator-protagonist cries: “¡Y todo recomienza! No por nada uno fue crucificado alguna vez, aunque sólo haya sido en una cruz pintada con alquitrán. ¿Que ya es hora? ¡Sí, Pablo, ya voy!” (B 291). Where is Lisandro going besides his death? Back to the “Cuesta del Agua”? But is that such a desirable destination? On the one hand, we are invited to read this as the happy ending of the Christian drama of redemption, ironically frustrated in Adán 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” (B 261), it is likewise true that the significance of his words has also been aborted. His effusive final utterance finds 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 crucifixion can strike a spark of significance from his final speech. Nor do the musings of the narrator of the “Epílogo del autor” give us any real clues. He wonders about the possible significance of the Banquet: “¿se originaba en la premonición de otro desastre cíclico en la historia del Hombre, cuya inminencia exigía la construcción de un Arca o refugio?” (B 291). The answer to this question would be yes, but for the circumstance that the text’s irony has already dismantled the Guénonian doctrine of metahistory and the discourse of Platonist 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” (B 292). 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 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: “Tomé, abandoné y retomé no pocas veces El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo: era el arte por el arte, ¡nadie me lo publicaría!” (Andrés 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 ‘función 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 ‘respiración artificial’, creador solitario en su torre sola, que sólo ejercitaba su arte para sí mismo y para una élite de ‘torreros’ en minoría y tan

9 Pablo Inaudi has foretold that at the instant of his death, a voice will whisper in Lisandro’s right ear: “Está salvado” (B 170).

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asfixiados como él” (Cuaderno 82). Marechal wrote this essay, as well as Banquete, during his ten-year proscription from Argentine intellectual life after the fall of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955. Like his cameo character Andrés 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 Arcángelo is a product of that time, the eccentric result of a lonely exercise in artificial respiration.10

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 of Argentina, she speculates: “Pero ignorar la circunstancia histórica, ¿no es tal vez la mejor manera de repudiarla, de asentar una condena implícita y una desilusión profunda? No es improbable, al fin, que la sátira, la farsa, la incongruencia, el absurdo resulten del olvido en que se tuvo a Marechal durante tantos años. Por eso El banquete [sic] es, en cierta medida, la obra de un «marginado social»” (Marechal 107). 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.

7 CODA AND CONCLUSION: SAMUEL TESLER’S LAST WORD IN MEGAFÓN, O LA GUERRA Having written El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo, Leopoldo Marechal seems to have got his obsession with apocalypse out of his system. His third novel, Megafón, 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. Megafón 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 political messianism, but the Messiah is only a secondary feature of apocalyptic literature (Buttrick, Interpreter’s Bible XII 350b). The eponymous protagonist, Megafón, is a messianic figure whose vision for Argentina has much more to do with Peronism than with apocalypticism. Megafón as a novel therefore remains outside the purview of this study, with the exception of one episode. This is the reappearance of “el filósofo” Samuel Tesler with his teaching of the Teoría y Práctica de la Catástrofe. 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 confidence” (qtd. in McGinn 49). Thus the Millennium will be inaugurated.2 The Sibylline tradition seems to be the soil out of

See M 15–18. The motif recurs throughout the text. It is significant that the biblical quotation in this Sibylline text comes from the Old Testament (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. Joachim de Fiore devoted to the problem of the conversion of the Jews an entire book, Adversus Iudeos (McGinn 134, 138, 317 n. 58). With the expansion of the Roman Church’s imperial hegemony during the Middle Ages, this longing turned aggressive. Roger Bacon casually places the Jews under the sign of Gog and Magog and the Antichrist in his Opus Majus (1266) (McGinn 157). The Franciscan Spirituals held that after the death of 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). Jeremy Cohen finds that mendicant friars such as the Spirituals played a key role in fomenting anti-Jewish feeling. Referring to Walter Ullman, Cohen suggests that the mendicants 1 2

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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, Adán Buenosayres alludes to this legend in his late-night conversation with the Jewish philosopher, who vehemently denies that Jesus was the Messiah. According to Adán, the Jews are suffering “la maldición del Crucificado,” and the Christian poet knows exactly how long Christ’s curse will endure: “– Hasta que los judíos reconozcan en masa que crucificaron a su Mesías – le contestó Adán –. Entonces . . .” (AB 361). And then, what? Read naïvely, 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 Megafón) explains to Megafón what has become of the philosopher: “– Vive aún . . . Usted recordará que lo dejé yo en el Infierno de la Soberbia. No bien equilibró allá su balanza, el noble filósofo volvió 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 vía pública. Y lo encerraron por locura mística” (M 24). We are given to understand that this incarceration in a mental asylum is unjust, for Megafón 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 metaphysician. Having received the “Good News,” the philosopher fortunately does not change a

“manifest the outlook of a society which one prominent historian of the Church has characterized as totalitarian” (16). 3 Noé Jitrik (42) attributes Adán 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 Adán Buenosayres involving Jewish characters (245–8).

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whit. He has retained his Rabelaisian exuberance and his comically supercilious 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, geométricamente hablando” (M 136). He still despises “los hombres de ciencia: ¡les faltaba una ‘dimensión’ en sus computadoras!” (M 136). It is evident that if Samuel is crazy, it has nothing to do with 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 legends 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 of view of this study, is irrelevant. What interests us here is the philosopher’s Teoría y Práctica de la Catástrofe and what this theory says about the Apocalypse and language. It is unclear in the text whether Samuel’s Teoría 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 finalistas” (M 136), the burlesque philosopher takes this prophetic responsibility upon himself: “Haciendo un análisis de sus contemporáneos y mirándose largamente en el espejo, el filósofo advirtió que nadie, como él, alzaba una estatura de profeta” (M 136). Marechal’s sly irony is again at work here. Samuel would see in the mirror a short-legged figure (AB 184), an image quite at odds with his metaphorically elevated stature as a prophet. In order to assure himself of an imposing 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 Río de la Plata. The content of Samuel’s discourse resumes the priestly notion 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-à-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. Samuel repeats the prediction he made in Adán Buenosayres that the world will be destroyed by fire, suggesting quite directly a global nuclear war: “La desintegración atómica libera temperaturas increíbles: hermanos, a mi entender, este mundo será 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

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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, 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. 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 filósofo adivinó 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 unsophisticated listeners. Samuel directly equates “el Padre” of the Christian Trinity with “la parte más excelsa del hombre, vale decir . . . su región 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 Intelligenza, 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: – Estoy en mi cama – prosiguió Samuel –, y siento de pronto que los metales, los ladrillos y las maderas están ablandándose a mi alrededor, encima y abajo. ¡Se agrieta el techo, se resquebrajan las paredes y 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 VI 466). John of Patmos continues the tradition. Three and half years is the period of time the two witnesses will prophesy (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).

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oscila el piso: toda la casa está por derrumbarse! Abandono corriendo mi habitación, salgo a las calles y veo que los monoblocs ya se tambalean como borrachos antes de caer. Miro al cielo y busco las metáforas del Apocalipsis: ¡no, las estrellas no se desprenden arriba como los higos de una higuera! ¡Sería demasiado hermoso! Lo que veo en lo alto son explosiones de materia cósmica y una pulverización de átomos radioactivos. ¡Hermanos, la poesía también 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 Adán Buenosayres. As we saw above in chapter 2, the poet’s angst 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 Tesler, 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 Adán’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 world of Leopoldo Marechal, Adán Buenosayres was the last man to be able to think and feel naïvely through poetry. This element of naïveté 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 Adán’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 Adán 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 metáforas del Apocalipsis”: he is aware of the rhetorical status of those verbally produced images. Unlike Adán, 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.

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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 reappropriate the tropological strategies informing the other modes of the metalinguistic cycle and to redeploy those strategies subversively. His use of metonymy is in reality a form of 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 finds 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 end they sputter out like sparks in a void. This is exactly what happens to Samuel’s Teoría y Práctica de la Catástrofe. After the philosopher has announced the imminent end of the world by fire, Berón the cook answers by announcing dinner, with the result that the plug is pulled out of Samuel’s verbal balloon: – Señores – dijo –, con licencia del profesor y si todavía nos queda tiempo, ¡a la carga! Los asados están listos. ¡Gran Dios, era la hora de la verdad! ¿Y qué nos venían a nosotros con el fin del mundo y su cohetería de reventaduras atómicas? Cuchillo en mano, el filósofo y sus oyentes en plena catarsis avanzaron hasta la parrilla y la despojaron de sus frutas carnosas. [. . .] Las dentaduras entraron en actividad: cortaban los incisivos, desgarraban los caninos y trituraban los molares. ¡Pobres idiotas, el mundo recién empieza! Hubo un alegrón unánime cuando el piloto llenó los vasos con el tintillo de la costa y su picante sabor a uva chinche. (M 144) Thus ends Samuel Tesler’s attempt to preach his Teoría y Práctica de la Catástrofe. 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 apocalypticism is consummated at a cordial and mundane barbecue.

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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 admiró a esos hombres en solidez y tan ajenos a los fenómenos nucleares. “Padre – oró en su alma, – ¿cómo dejarías caer en ellos la mano de tu rigor y no la de tu misericordia?” Y lagrimeó de ternura sobre medio chorizo ensartado en su tenedor. (M 144–5) Only the “lector agreste” could take the philosopher’s “prayer” and its priestly 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 Megafón 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. Nevertheless, Samuel Tesler is given the last word even in this third novel, which ends with his mock beatific deathbed 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 ubicó entre sus nalgas y le soltó un pedo monumental que nos dejó aterrados: era un pedo barroco, exultante en escalas cromáticas, fugas y contrapuntos.” All present agree that “jamás habían oído 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 the philosopher: “ ‘En la existencia universal no hay puntos finales – decía Samuel Tesler –: sólo hay puntos suspensivos’ ” (M 366). There is no first or last Word, only a succession of fictions that rise and fall as language grapples with reality. Samuel Tesler is the most enduring of Marechal’s personages, a fact that must surely have some significance. Of his three truly memorable characters, Marechal the novelist distances himself most from Adán Buenosayres. He condemns the poet to symbolic death and at his funeral puts the limelight on Samuel Tesler, who wields “un gran rosario de cuentas negras que manoseaba con ostentosa devoción” (AB 9). The philosopher’s buffoonery

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with the beads mocks Adán’s Christian piety. Closer to Marechal is Schultze. Though not his doppelgänger, the astrologer does serve as Marechal’s fictional vicar, inasmuch as he is the “author” of Cacodelphia, as well as Adán’s teacher. Schultze shares Marechal’s audacious, parodic inventiveness, and the ludic spirit exemplified in Macedonio Fernández, the chosen precursor of the martinfierrista generation. Only Samuel Tesler, however, survives the literary black hole of El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo. The philosopher personifies what Marechal himself calls his “tremendismo” and his bombastic, ribald buffoonery. Not only is it given to Samuel to declaim the Rabelaisian last “word,” but the closing words of Marechal’s final novel are his as well. By denying the last period and refusing the claim of the final Omega, Samuel’s aphorism 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 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.

Conclusion Adolfo Prieto once wrote that the internal structure of Adán Buenosayres is forged from Catholic theology; suppress the latter, he said, and the novel’s ordered world will dissolve into chaos (34). From my point of view, Prieto comes close to the mark in two respects. Marechal’s great novel is indeed structured on the Augustianian version of the Apocalypse, the spiritual allegory of the soul’s redemption, but in conjunction with Guénonian metaphysics, in particular the doctrine of apocalyptic metahistory. The second part of Prieto’s observation is also a near hit: Marechal intends his novel’s ordered world to dissolve into chaos. He uses the defective building materials of recycled theology to erect a structure whose integrity is rotten with irony, and then steps back to watch it fall down to the ground, celebrating the spectacle with Rabelaisian hilarity. He shows the journey to the City of God, Calidelphia, to be a text woven from smoke, which in turn he parodically inscribes into his own, ironic, texts. But the Apocalypse, with its chiaroscuro dynamics, its absolute beginning and end, stands as a prototype of all grand narrative, theological, metaphysical, philosophical, historical, just as Adán is a paradigmatic human figure. Thus is Marechal’s scriptural gesture: Ecce homo, tejedor de humo. Marechal’s performative irony becomes instructive when it reflects the politics inherent in the various ways we use language. If El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo pushes the metatrope of irony literally to the point of meaninglessness, it is nonetheless useful for retrospectively elucidating the rhetorical politics played out in Schultze’s Cacodelphia. One thing is clear:

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Marechal cannot be seen to uphold any form of authoritarian orthodoxy, whether it be in religion, politics or culture. His solidarity with the pueblo of Argentina is most eloquently demonstrated through his brilliant use of popular porteño language. Nevertheless, there remains the question of what is the specific nature of that solidarity as it is evidenced in Marechal’s novels. That I have only touched Megafón, o la guerra with a prophylactic ten-foot pole, as it were, is not entirely due to its relative literary inferiority. The populist messianism figured in the protagonist Megafón is disturbing, though the (self-)parodic mode of Marechal’s writing makes it difficult to determine with certainty that novel’s pragmatic ethos. However, on the basis of his rhetorical politics, one may at least deduce that Marechal could never have endorsed Peronism’s brutal right wing. It is easy to picture someone like the sinister José López Rega, “el Brujo,” with his bizarre occultist mania, riding the apocalytic merry-go-round in Cacodelphia. For that matter, it is not such a stretch to imagine, in another circle of Schultze’s hell, the contradictory Juan Domingo Perón himself engaged in cordial conversation with, say, King Midas: “Los argentinos, como usted sabe, nos caracterizamos por creer que tenemos siempre la verdad. A esta casa vienen muchos argentinos queriéndome vender una verdad distinta como si fuese la única. ¿Y yo, qué quiere que haga? ¡Les creo a todos!”5 These words, uttered by the general himself to Tomás Eloy Martínez, might just as easily have issued from the pen of Leopoldo Marechal. In any event, it is by no means certain that one could establish a stable, consistent relationship between Marechal’s novelistics and his political options in Argentine society. As he shows us in Cacodelphia, the ground is always shifting, the “correct” position is ever elusive, but at the same time one can never rest in the neutral posture of a “mirón cómodo,” as Adán complained. Marechal the man never shirked the difficult responsibility of choosing and paying for his choices. Here, finally, is where citizen and writer do share a common ground: this great novelist’s irony is never cynical; if it satirizes human folly, it is because it is informed by a profound moral sense.

5 Epigraph to Tomás Eloy Martínez, La novela de Perón (2a ed. Biblioteca del Sur. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Leopoldo Marechal Adán Buenosayres. 1948. Col. Narrativas Argentinas. 14a ed. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Ed. Pedro Luis Barcia. Clásicos Castalia 210. Madrid: Castalia, 1994. Antología poética. Col. Austral 941. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1969. Antología poética. Selección y pról. Alfredo Andrés. Buenos Aires: Flor, 1969. El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo. 1965. 9a ed. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1985. La batalla de José Luna. Col. Letras de América 3. Santiago de Chile: Universitaria, 1970. Cuaderno de navegación. Col. Perspectivas. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1966. Descenso y ascenso por la belleza. 1939. Buenos Aires: Citérea, 1965. Megafón, o la guerra. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1970. El poema de Robot. Buenos Aires: Américalee, 1966. “Poesía religiosa española.” Sur 49 (Oct. 1938): 63–5.

Criticism on Marechal Andrés, Alfredo, reportaje y antología. Palabras con Leopoldo Marechal. Buenos Aires: Carlos Pérez, 1968. Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo, ed. Leopoldo Marechal: Homenaje. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1995. Barcia, Pedro Luis. “Introducción biográfica y crítica.” Adán Buenosayres, by Leopoldo Marechal. Clásicos Castalia 210. Madrid: Castalia, 1994. 9–138. Barylko, Jaime. “Apreciaciones críticas.” Juan Jacobo Bajarlía, ed. Leopoldo Marechal: Homenaje. 47–55. Barreiro, Graciela del Carmen. “Nota sobre Adán Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal.” XVII Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Madrid: Cultura Hispánica del Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1978. 1049–66. Barros, Daniel. Leopoldo Marechal, poeta argentino. Col. Hombres y Sus Ideas 7. Buenos Aires: Guadalupe, 1971. Benavides, Washington. “Indice episódico y temático del Adán Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal.” Leopoldo Marechal et al. Interpretaciones. 85–159. Campra, Rosalba, ed. La selva en el damero: Espacio literario y espacio urbano en América Latina. Collana di Testi e Studi Ispanici, II: Sagi. Pisa: Giardini, 1989.

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Cappelli, Laura et al. “Viaje a través de Buenosayres.” Rosalba Campra, ed. La selva en el damero. 249–64. Carballo, E. “Diálogo con Leopoldo Marechal.” Revista de la Universidad de México 21.8 (April 1967): 6–8. Carricaburo, Norma. “La estructura circular de Adán Buenosayres.” Letras: Universidad Católica Argentina 25–26 (Sept.–Dec. 1991): 57–65. Cavallari, Héctor M. “El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo, de Leopoldo Marechal: un análisis ideológico-estructural.” Vórtice 2.1 (1978): 78–95. ———. “Leopoldo Marechal: de la metafísica a la revolución nacional.” Ideologies and Literature 2.9 (1978): 3–33. ———. “Adán Buenosayres: discurso, texto, significación.” Texto Crítico 16–17 (1980): 149–68. ———. “Discurso metafísico/discurso humanista: ideología y proceso estético en la obra de Leopoldo Marechal.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 7.13 (1981): 23–8. ———. “La configuración discursiva de Adán Buenosayres.” Mónica Elena Serra de Bett, ed. Estudios de literatura argentina, I. Sección Crítica-Segunda Serie 7. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Literatura Argentina “Ricardo Rojas”, 1982. 27–52. ———. “Leopoldo Marechal: ideología, escritura, compromiso.” Félix Menchacatorre, ed. Ensayos de literatura europea e hispanoamericana. San Sebastián: Universidad del País Vasco, 1988. 109–14. Centro de Investigaciones Literarias de Buenos Aires. “Pruebas y hazañas de Adán Buenosayres.” Jorge Lafforgue, ed. Nueva novela latino-americana, II. Letras Mayúsculas 13. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1972. Ciordia, Martín. “El decir y el amar en Adán Buenosayres.” Revista del Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Españolas 12.1 (1996): 38–55. Colla, Héctor Fernando. “Realidad e idealidad en Adán Buenosayres.” Río de la Plata 2 (1986): 97–106. Cortázar, Julio. “Leopoldo Marechal: Adán Buenosayres.” Leopoldo Marechal et al. Interpretaciones. 23–32. Coulson, Graciela. “El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo o la vida como iniciación.” Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana 3.2 (1973): 95–103. ———. “Leopoldo Marechal: la aventura metafísica.” Hispamérica 3.7 (1974): 29–39. ———. Marechal, la pasión metafísica. Buenos Aires: Fernando García Cambeiro, 1974. Coulson, Graciela and William Hardy. “Contribución a la bibliografía de Leopoldo Marechal.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 5–6 (1972): 313–33. Cricco, Valentín et al. Marechal, el otro: la escritura testada de “Adán Buenosayres”. Buenos Aires: Serpiente, 1985. Dumitrescu, Domnita. “Adán Buenosayres: metáfora y novela.” Texto Crítico 16–17 (1980): 169–81. Fernández Moreno, César. “Distinguir para entender (entrevista con Leopoldo Marechal.” Oscar Collazos, ed. Los vanguardistas en América Latina. Barcelona: Península, 1977. 41–8. Foti, Jorge A. Aproximación al “Banquete” de Leopoldo Marechal. Col. Ensayos Breves 14. Buenos Aires: CELA, 1983.

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Fuente, Albert de la. “La estructura interna de Adán Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal.” Hispania 58 (1975): 260–6. García Núñez, Fernando. “Cristianismo y escolástica en Adán Buenosayres.” Abside 43.1 (1979): 24–44. ———. “Marechal, poeta ultraísta.” Explicación de Textos Literarios 8 (1979–80): 153–8. ———. “Soteriología en las novelas de Leopoldo Marechal.” Cuadernos Americanos 6 (nov.–dic. 1984): 208–15. González, Manuel P. “Leopoldo Marechal y la novela fantástica.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 151 (1967): 200–11. Guntsche, Marina. “El triunfo secreto de la novela argentina contemporánea.” Cincinnati Romance Review 15 (1996): 127–33. Gusmán, Luis. “Adán Buensoayres: la saturación del procedimiento.” Revista Iberoamericana 49.125 (Oct.–Dec. 1983): 731–41. Hardy, William Judson. “Life and Works of Leopoldo Marechal”. Diss. U of Missouri, 1973. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1974: 749940. Jitrik, Noé. “Adán Buenosayres, la novela de Leopoldo Marechal.” Contorno 5–6 (Sept. 1985): 38–45. Jofré, Manuel Alcides. “El motivo del viaje en Adán Buenosayres, de Leopoldo Marechal.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 5–6 (1972): 73–109. ———. “El mundo metafísico de Adán Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal.” Narrativa argentina contemporánea: Representación de lo real en Marechal, Borges y Cortázar. La Serena, Chile: Universidad de La Serena, 1991. 4–143. Marechal, Leopoldo et al. Interpretaciones y claves de “Adán Buenosayres” de Leopoldo Marechal. Col. Estudios Críticos 1. Montevideo: Acali, 1977. Maturo, Graciela. “La historia y la novela: El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo de Leopoldo Marechal.” Letras 14 (1981): 31–40. Melis, Antonio. “Infierno del alma y fiesta del lenguaje: la ciudad de Adán Buenosayres.” Rosalba Campra, ed. La selva en el damero. 225–34. Navascués, Javier de. “Sobre novela argentina: Rayuela y Adán Buenosayres.” Revista del Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Españolas 6.1 (1990): 65–82. ———. Las novelas de Leopoldo Marechal: Análisis narratológico. Diss. U de Navarra, 1991. Pamplona, Spain: E-31080. ———. Adán Buenosayres, una novela total: estudio narratológico. Pamplona: Navarra UP, 1992. ———. “Fin y final en tres narraciones hispanoamericanas.” Revista del Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Españolas 9.1 (1993): 44–55. ———. “Imágenes del hombre nuevo en la obra de Leopoldo Marechal.” Letras: Universidad Católica de Argentina 27–28 (Jan.–Dec. 1993): 88–98. ———. “Presencias cervantinas en Adan Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal.” Luis Martínez Cuitino, ed. Actas del III Congreso Argentino de Hispanistas “España en América y América en España”. Intro. Ana María Barrenechea. Buenos Aires: U de Buenos Aires, 1993. 724–32. Núñez, Angel. “Leopoldo Marechal.” La historia de la literatura argentina. Capítulo 93. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1981. 1–24. Orecchia Havas, Teresa. “En torno a El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo.” Lía Schwartz Lerner and Isaías Lerner, eds. Homenaje a Ana María Barrenechea. Madrid: Castalia, 1984. 505–12.

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Paternain, Alejandro. “Leopoldo Marechal o la alegría.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 229 (1969): 111–30. Podeur, Jean-François. “Papel del autor en las novelas de Leopoldo Marechal.” Iris (1991): 77–92. Prieto, Adolfo. “Los dos mundos de Adán Buenosayres.” Leopoldo Marechal et al. Interpretaciones. 33–54. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. “Adán Buenosayres: una novela infernal.” Narradores de esta América, I. Montevideo: Alfa, 1969. 236–48. Ramos, Marcos Antonio. “Leopoldo Marechal como novelista cristiano.” Círculo 8 (1979): 143–50. Rosbaco Marechal, Elbia. Mi vida con Leopoldo Marechal. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1973. Saad, Gabriel. “Tradición popular y producción de ideología en Adán Buenosayres de Leopoldo Marechal.” Rosalba Campra, ed. La selva en el damero. 235–48. Schmitt, Esther. “El discurso narrativo en El banquete de Severo Arcángelo.” Juana Alcira Arancibia, ed. Literatura del mundo hispánico: VIII Simposio Internacional de Literatura. Westminster, CA: Instituto Literario y Cultural Hispánico, 1992. 361–70. Senkman, Leonardo. “Discurso histórico y ficción en Adán Buenosayres.” Hispamérica 61 (abril 1992): 3–21. Smith, Samuela Dare Davidson. “Apocalyptic Symbolism in the Argentine Novel”. Diss. U of Kentucky, 1976. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1977. 7715975. ———. “La novela argentina de apocalipsis.” Trans. Alicia Schniebs. Mónica Elena Serra de Brett, ed. Estudios de Literatura Argentina, I. Sección Crítica-Segunda Serie 7. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Literatura Argentina “Ricardo Rojas”, 1982. 237–46. Sola, Graciela de. “La novela de Leopoldo Marechal: Adán Buenosayres.” Leopoldo Marechal et al. Interpretaciones. 55–84. Valderrey, Carmen. “Leopoldo Marechal: Adán Buenosayres a la búsqueda del absoluto.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 310 (1976): 151–60. Valdivieso, Jorge H. “Adán Buenosayres: su estructura, caracterología y estilo.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 462 (Dec. 1988): 144–50. Verbitsky, Bernardo. “Leopoldo Buenosayres.” Hispamérica 1 (1972): 74–6. Viñas, David. “Cotidianeidad, clasicismo y tercera posición: Marechal.” Literatura argentina y realidad política. Buenos Aires: Siglo XX, 1971. 103–9. Zarate, Armando. “Leopoldo Marechal: La poética en Adán Buenosayres.” Explicación de Textos 2 (1974): 143–9. Zonana, Víctor Gustavo. “Breves notas sobre la metáfora vanguardista en Días como flechas de Leopoldo Marechal.” Revistas de Literaturas Modernas 24 (1991): 271–80. Zum Felde, Alberto. La narrativa hispanoamericana. Madrid: Aguilar, 1964. 324–8.

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General Bibliography Alexander, Paul J. “Medieval Apocalypses as Historical Sources.” The American Historical Review 73.4 (April 1968): 997–1018. Amores de Pagella, Angela Blanco. Motivaciones del teatro argentino en el siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Culturales Argentinas, 1983. Armstrong, D.M. Nominalism and Realism. Vol. I: Universals and Scientific Realism. Vol. II: A Theory of Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Esthétique de la création verbale. Trans. Alfreda Aucouturier. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. ———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Prol. Michael Holquist. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Bal, Mieke. “Mise en abyme et iconicité.” Littérature 29 (1978): 116–28. Batache, Eddy. Surréalisme et tradition: la pensée d’André Breton jugée selon l’oeuvre de René Guénon. Paris: Traditionnelles, 1978. Beardslee, William A. Literary Criticism of the New Testament. Guides to Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Series. 1970. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971. Behler, Ernst. Irony and the Discourse of Modernity. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1990. Berdyaev, Nikolai. The Divine and the Human. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. Bloomfield, Morton W. “Joachim of Flora: A Critical Survey of his Canon, Teachings, Sources, Biography and Influence.” Traditio 13 (1957): 249–311. Blumenthal, Henry J. “Neoplatonic elements in the De Anima commentaries.” Richard Sorabji, ed. Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. 305–24. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1967. ———. Ficciones. 1956. El Libro de Bolsillo 320. Buenos Aires: Emecé; Madrid: Alianza, 1974. ———. El libro de arena. 1975. El Libro de Bolsillo 662. Buenos Aires: Emecé; México: Alianza, 1984. Butler, Basil Christopher. Number Symbolism. London: Routledge, 1970. Buttigieg, Joseph A. “The Struggle Against Meta(Phantasma)-physics: Nietzsche, Joyce and the ‘excess of history.’ ” Daniel O’Hara, ed. Why Nietzsche Now? Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 187–207. Buttrick, George Arthur et al., eds. The Interpreter’s Bible I–XII. New York: Abingdon, 1951–57. Buttrick, George Arthur, ed. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible I. Nashville and New York: Abingdon, 1962. Campra, Rosalba. América Latina: la identidad y la máscara. México: Siglo veintiuno, 1987. Carré, Meyrick H. Realists and Nominalists. 1946. London: Oxford UP, 1961. Castagnino, Raúl Héctor. Literatura dramática argentina 1717–1967. Buenos Aires: Pleamar, 1968. Chassard, Pierre. Nietzsche, finalisme et histoire. L’Or du Rhin 1. Paris: Copernic, 1977. Cherniss, Harold. Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato and the Academy, I. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1944.

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INDEX Andrés, Alfredo 9, 15, 27 n, 43, 46, 67 n, 75 n, 84 n, 85, 93, 98 n, 145 apocalyptic genre 4, 14, 74, 131 New Testament 126 gnosis 131 irony 7 merry-go-round 100 metahistory 41–4, 154 mind-set 38 narrative 1, 91, 97 Christian 129 numerology 150 paradigm 14, 23, 101 politics 101 revolutionaries 110 n symbolism 14 apocalypticism 4, 147 burlesque treatment of 138 carnivalesque 17 Christian 41, 93 definition 74 n medieval 101 n Messiah 147 millenarianism 41 n Platonist 137, 145 reactionary 43 revolutionary 101 apocalypse (general definition) 4 Adán’s personal apocalypse 31–40, 90 Apocalypse in history and literature 4–8 artificially staged (in El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo) 122 as spiritual allegory of redemption 4, 154 metaphor for revolution 4–5 and n, 87 priestly vs. popular 4 textual 16 in Andrés Papagiourgiou’s vision 142 Apocalypse (see Revelation, Book of)

Ariosto, Ludovico 73 Arlt, Roberto 5, 15 n, 110 Armstrong, D.M. 51 Augustine, Saint 4, 7, 40 n, 44 and n, 69–70, 94, 133 Bal, Mieke 19 Barcia, Pedro Luis 13 n, 55 n baroque (or barroco) 14, 99, 138, 141 Barthes, Roland 29 Barylko, Jaime 12 n Batache, Eddy 44 n Behler, Ernst 2 n, 3 n Bloom, Harold 103 Bloomfield, Morton W. 4 Blumenberg, Hans 69 Borges, Jorge Luis 12 and Leopoldo Marechal 106 n as Luis Pereda 67, 106, 115–16 and n “Manifiesto ultraísta” 65 nominalism and realism 68 and n, 144 Breton, André 44 n Butler, Basil Christopher 59 Buttrick, George Arthur 26, 34 n, 36, 41 n, 74 n, 118, 147, 150 n Campbell, Joseph 85 Campra, Rosalba 81 n carnival (or carnivalesque) mode 1, 17, 74 Cacodelphia: The Last Judgment as carnival 92–100 carnivalesque encounters in Saavedra 78 carnivalesque gesture (Samuel Tesler’s last) 153 carnivalesque parody 73, 95 carnivalesque tales of Rabelais 98 hieratic lore carnivalized 83 overturning of official hierarchy 100 scatalogical treatment of 83 Carré, Meyrick H. 7, 99

168

INDEX

Castagnino, Raúl Héctor 135 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 11, 113–14 and n Chassard, Pierre 131 n Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant 70 n, 71 n, 130, 143 Cohen, Jeremy 147 n Cohn, Norman 4 Cortázar, Julio 6, 11, 12 n,16 and n, 22 and n, 29 creacionismo 65, 66 Curtius, Ernst Robert 66, 70, 71 n Coulson, Graciela 12 and n, 15, 24, 85–6, 146 n Cricco, Valentín 12–13, 25 n, 94, 96, 98 n, 99 and n Cuddon, J.A. 2 Dane, Joseph A. 69 Daniel, Book of 4, 149–50 and n Dante Alighieri 6, 32, 43, 58, 66, 70, 75 and n, 90, 108, 136 Derrida, Jacques 3 n, 26 diremption 22 as opposed to redemption 7, 16 between Word and wor(l)d 131, 132 Diremptive structures 19–22 mode of story emplotment 18 Eco, Umberto 44 Ezekiel, Book of 118 Fernández, Macedonio 106 n, 154 Fernández Moreno, César 106 n flatus vocis see nominalism Foster, David William viii, 84 n Frye, Northrop 3, 11, 32, 50, 51, 52, 93 theory of modes or phases of language 16, 41, 47 and n, 63 Gálvez, Manuel 111 n García Márquez, Gabriel 4–5 and n, 29 Genesis, Book of (see also Revelation, Book of) parody of 49 Gheerbrant, Alain see Chevalier, Jean Gilman, Sander L. 112, 113 Guénon, René 12 and n, 46, 79, 127, 145 apocalyptic metahistory 41, 43–4 and n, 47, 123 Atlantis 79 n Neoplatonic mysticism 75 and n parodied by Marechal 45, 102 and n

Guntsche, Marina

15 n

Hastings, James 131 Heraclitus 63, 64 and n, 85 Hermes Trismegistus 44 and n, 75, 86 and Hermetica 86 n Hesiod 8, 15, 42, 43, 74 n, 123, 132 Hutcheon, Linda 2 and n, 24, 55 n irony (see also White, Hayden) and the baroque 99 authoritarian repression of 133 exhausted 8 in Cortázar’s Rayuela 6 in cycle of language 47–8, 55 in Marechal vis-à-vis priestly apocalypse 6–7, 154–5 Ironic motifs 55–8 Irony, parody, satire 1–3 Marechal vs. Borges 107 n structural (in Adán Buensoayres) 21 situational in Adán Buensoayres Adán as schoolmaster 53 Schultze’s vacío del bostezo 87–8 Solveig celeste vs. Solveig terrestre 34 in El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo Severo Arcángelo’s Third Monologue 142 unwitting in discourse of Pedro and Jonás 137–9 in Megafón, o la guerra Samuel Tesler’s stature 149 Jacob, Max 63 n Jakobson, Roman 7 n Jitrik, Noé 106 n, 148 n Joachim de Fiore 4, 5 n, 101 n, 147 Kahn, Charles H. 64 and n Kermode, Frank 5, 14, 20, 23, 70 Lactantius 44 and n, 77 n Langer, Ulrich 29, 69, 73 language, cycle of (see also Frye, Northrop and Vico, Giambattista) 8, 15, 45–8, 55 in Adán Buenosayres’s interior monologue 48–54 logos 6, 18, 59, 63–4, 131, 132

INDEX

as Christ 18, 22, 58, 70, 130 as divine artificer or demiurge 65–6 as trascendental principle 47 as (divine) Word 2, 3, 89, 90, 117 in Gospel of St John 7 in Revelation 7, 22 n, 129 lost Word 130 Mannheim, Karl 101 n Martínez, Tomás Eloy 155 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel 78 n Martín Fierro (revue) and martinfierrismo 13 n, 84, 85, 98, 154 Maturo, Graciela 14–15, 140 n McGinn, Bernard 147 and n Messiah see apocalypticism metahistory or metahistoria (see also apocalyptic) 8, 16, 74, 79–80, 149 book by Hayden White 47 n Metahistory: reprise and ricorso 123–33 metonymy (see also Nietzche, Friedrich) 7 and n, 47, 48 and n, 52, 118–19, 152 Platonic 65, 78, 88, 99 systematized 116 totalized 50 millenarianism see apocalypticism Muecke, D.C. 1 and n Navascués, Javier de 12 n, 13 n, 22 n, 93 n Neoplatonism 63, 67, 94, 126 and Neopythagoreanism 58–9, 75 Madonna Intelligenza 22, 60, 117, 150 Neopythagoreanism see Neoplatonism New Man (or hombre nuevo) 82, 92 and n, 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7 n, 11, 29, 88, 112–13, 125 last man topos 127–8 metonymy 51, 68, 131 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 110, 125, 141 nominalism and (Platonic) realism (see also Borges, Jorge Luis) 13, 16, 67–70, 141 deus absconditus 69, 73, 89 flatus vocis 99 and n numerology see apocalyptic Núñez, Angel 58 n, 135 Obligado, Rafael

81

169

Orecchia Havas, Teresa 133 Origen (Church Father) 4, 40 n Paley, Morton D. 127 Parkinson Zamora, Lois 4 n parody (see also irony) Gog and Magog as agents of 134–5 parousia 126, 138, 141, 144, 152 in Plato 131–2 and n Peronism 13, 15, 147, 155 justicialismo 15 Marechal as Peronist 9–10,106 n Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon 7 Piglia, Ricardo vii Plato see apocalypticism (Platonist) and metonymy (Platonic) and nominalism and realism and parousia and prisci theologi Posadas, Abel 136 postmodernity 1–2 Prieto, Adolfo 13 n, 67, 154 prisca theologia 44 and n, 76 prisci theologi (including Plato) 44, 117 Rabelais, François 1, 13, 37, 73, 98 Ramos, Marcos Antonio 9 n realism, Platonic (see also nominalism) 51 redemption (see also apocalypse and diremption) allegory of (in Apocalypse) 6, 154 at Christ’s second coming 131 Christian narrative of 7, 14, 18, 58 n, 145 in Adán Buenosayres Adán’s religious concept of 91 for Adán personally 22, 58, 121 for Solveig 61, 63 in El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo 16 in Megafón, o la guerra for Samuel Tesler 148 Rest, Jaime 68 n Revelation, Book of (or Apocalypse) see also logos as coda to Christian canon 93 as explosive literature 110 as intertext 1, 14, 95 as pre-text 3 as prototype of grand narrative 154 as story-type 18 as subtext 3, 31, 34

170

INDEX

esoteric symbolism 44 narrator of 26 declamatory style 139–40 relation to Genesis 18, 25–6, 41, 77, 132 themes and figures of Armageddon 33–4, 40, 95, 129 Antichrist 36, 138, 147 n Beast 36, 37, 38, 41, 100, 138 Christ as knight on white horse (or Knight Faithful and True) 7, 40, 129 Christ’s new name 71, 129–30 Dragon 36, 100, 150 n eating the book 118 everlasting gospel 5 Gog and Magog (see also parody) 100, 123, 133, 143, 147 n half hour of silence 33–4 and n, 95 Last Judgment (or Juicio Final) according to René Guénon 43 according to Samuel Tesler 149, 152 according to Unamuno (ironic) 87 at Severo Arcángelo’s Banquet 128 executed according to books 71 in Adán Buenosayres 6, 14, 32, 37 Cacodelphia: Last Judgment as carnival 92–100 New Jerusalem and Celestial City 25 and Christ’s eternal rule 41 and Christ’s new name 71, 129 and ‘‘Cuesta del Agua’’ 16, 122, 124 and Eden 18, 132 and n and the elect 38 and oracionismo 97, 100 Philadelphia and Philadelphians 74, 129 sicut liber involutus 29, 31, 34–5, 38, 54, 71 and n stars fall as figs from tree 50, 151 water of life 20 Whore of Babylon (or Scarlet Woman or Gran Ramera) 100 as non-being 128–9 associated with Solveig 36–8

Rodríguez Monegal, Emir Romanticism 46 Rose, Margaret A. 3, 45 Ross, David 131

12 n

Saad, Gabriel 148 n Sábato, Ernesto 5, 12 n sainete 135–6 Symposium as sainete 133–41 Santos Vega 30, 78, 81 and n, 82, 98 Sarlo, Beatriz 84 n Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 81 satire (see also irony) in Cacodelphia 93 in clowns’ opposition to Severo Arcángelo’s Banquet 135 Saussure, Ferdinand de 49, 51, 52, 65 Schopenhauer, Arthur 68 Schultz Solari, Alejandro (or Xul Solar) 84 n Senkman, Leonardo 148 n Shelley, Mary 127 Sibylline Oracles 36, 147 and n Sklodowska, Elzbieta 2 Smith, Samuela Dare Davidson 14 Sola, Graciela de 84 n Solar, Xul see Schultz Solari, Alejandro Torre, Guillermo de 65, 66, 99 Tuveson, Ernest Lee 4, 77 n ultraísimo 65 Unamuno, Miguel de and n

87 and n, 114

Vacarezza, Alberto 135, 139 vanguardismo and Platonism 63–7 Vargas Llosa, Mario 5 and n Vico, Giambattista 41, 50 cycle of language 47 ricorso 47, 55, 124 and n White, Hayden 18, 41, 46 and n discussion of irony 48 and n William of Okham (or Guillermo de Occam) 68, 69 Yáñez, Agustín 4 Yates, Frances 44 n, 86 n zoroastrianism 4 Zum Felde, Alberto

11 n