21st century Argentine literature moves from antagonism to generosity

almost twenty years ago Caesar Aira said in an interview that Ricardo takes he was more of a teacher than a writer. and the author of artificial respirationthis masterpiece which for Aira is a minor novel, as soon as he had the opportunity he took the opportunity to paraphrase Macedonio about Gálvez and suggest that Aira did not exist, which was the pseudonym with which he signed the novels that were sent to him by “bad Argentine writers”.

At that time I lived in Rosario, I religiously read all the cultural supplements and met from time to time for coffee with editors like Adriana Astutti journalists love Osvaldo Aguirre, so that surely I commented on the controversy with other hurt letters. This seemed to me the umpteenth example of the geopolitics of River Plate literature, always between irony and calculation.

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The feeling was quite divided in those years: the polarization between Pick up y Aira, in line with another binary, that of the writers of Florida and Boedo, and in the context of the debate on how and what to write after Borges, was a vestige of the 20th century that no longer made sense in the polycentric 21st . In Spain, something similar happened with Javier Marias y Antonio Munoz Molina. The insistence of cultural journalism on a few figures has prevented others, equally or more interesting, from finding readers. And, above all, it impoverished the conversation.

The scene of the confrontational strategies of the literature of Buenos Aires of the second half of the last century has been described with great intelligence and bad humor. Roberto Bolano In strong drifts. I also never understood the Piglian operation to raise Roberto Arlt to the center of the canon, as an alternative to Borges, because Borges is the center of the solar system and does not admit a planet B.

says the author of wild detectives“With that, I don’t mean that Arlt he’s a bad writer, on the contrary, he’s very good, and I’m not trying to say that Piglia is either, on the contrary. Pick up He seems to me to be one of the best current narrators in Latin America. What’s happening is that I can’t stand the nonsense – gangster nonsense, the heavy kind – that Piglia spreads around Arlt, probably the only innocent in this case”.

That Bolano denounced was something deeper, therefore, something that went beyond specific works and poetics. He showed how Argentine literature configured a literary field based on antagonistic and irreconcilable currents. In exclusion From, often, more than debatable movements.

That is why, when I collected my essays on the literature of the Southern Cone in a volume of the Editorial light yearsI titled it geopolitics. Maybe I should have added the adjective “masculine”. Because, indeed, in those years, it seemed that there were no women writers in Argentina. The best critics, the most gifted readers, like Beatrice Sarlo, Josephine Ludmer oh Graciela Speranza, they also mostly write about a canon of writers. And the emphasis on the tactics of rereading and reformulating the literature completely eclipsed another equally or more important dimension that ultimately prevailed: that of generosity, diversity, inclusion.

The international recognition currently enjoyed by the authors as Mariana Enriquez, Samantha Schweblin, Camera Gabriela Cabezon, Camila Sosa Vilada oh Claudia Pineiro signals a drastic change in the landscape. It is difficult to detect in their interventions – as in those of the Andrew Neumann or those of Pedro Mairal, to quote other writers also widely translated and widely read, these movements to impose certain readings and certain genealogies and tendencies. The new temperature of the conversation, on the other hand, that we can take on social networks, is less polemical than generous, less closed than open.

Journalism and academia have also opened up to this plurality. Leila Warrior profiled for babeliathe cultural supplement of The countryand other media, teachers and contemporaries (he collected his portraits in books such as american plane and edited Enríquez’s articles in the volume The other side). And academic journals have promoted studies on hitherto ignored poetics, such as trans or feminists.

It is undoubtedly the vigor of feminism in recent years – around this social and virtual tidal wave that has been the approval of the Abortion law– one of the factors of this political turning point in the literary field, within a global framework of interest in the literary voices of women.

But, in reality, generosity and cooperation are part of the genetics of Argentine literature of the last century with as much force as the strategies of generational replacement or the operations of delegitimization and new prestige.

At least since the last military dictatorship, since the university of the catacombs, writers and writers have opened the doors of their houses to give writing workshops (among the references are Abelardo Castillo, Liliana Hecker, Maria Negroni, Fabien Casas or more of the names I have already mentioned). Hope and her husband, Marcelo Cohenthey built with the magazine Other part a veritable school of systematic readers. AND Martin Caparros meets every year, with the complicity of the Gabo Foundationa workshop in which he publishes books by chroniclers from many countries.

The best writers therefore shared their experience, their knowledge and their profession. Piglia himself promoted the publication of the works of his contemporaries in the collections he directed, guided hundreds of students and starred in one of the most defining moments in the history of cultural television, his course on Borges. Aira’s solidarity with young publishers in her country is legendary.

Maybe the look should be changed. Reread the history of Argentine literature not in the key of competition and the art of war, but of collaborative networks, anthologies, workshops, shared readings, gratitude, complex traditions.

Do it, in short, according to the moral of the story with which I will end this article. Not long ago, a person, who was deliberating in Bogotá to grant the Gabriel García Márquez Hispanic American Short Story Awardtold me that the year the big favorite was Schweblin For seven empty houses was part of the jury There is Uhart. The veteran Argentinian writer said from the start that she was ready to talk about any other possible winners. But I would never accept that the prize was won by this book. I told Samanta the other day in Barcelona. He told me that it seemed to him that he had already been told this anecdote. That she doesn’t understand the reasons for this animosity (perhaps she inherited it from one of her teachers?). But the important thing is not that, but all that she learned by reading Uhart. Your debt. Very similar, I’m sure, to the feelings of young writers who passed through his studio in Berlin. Your recognition.

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