Reading the frank anti-Semitism on display in a few passages of Adán Buenosayres is a complicated business, not only because of the paradox of anti-Jewish philo-Semitism but also because of the novel’s polyphony. The shifting and parodic narrative voice makes it hazardous to ascertain precisely the pragmatic ethos of any given passage. What is certain, however, is that Adam Buenosayres dies and Samuel Tesler lives on to play a part in Marechal’s third novel, Megafón, o la guerra (1970), the only one of his fictional characters to do so.24
From a strictly stylistic perspective, one finds another index of diversa desmesura in the juxtaposition of the earnest, spiritualist, neo-Dantian prose of Adam Buenosayres’s “Blue-Bound Notebook” with the novel’s Rabelaisian tremendismo, to use Marechal’s own term for his conscious emulation of Maître François. The humorous contrast of high and low, the spiritual and the coprological, stems as well from Miguel de Cervantes’s legacy, worth recalling here for the benefit of English-speaking readers.25 Besides the Cervantine device of the “found manuscript” mentioned above, Marechal, as Cervantes does in Don Quixote, interpolates into the text lengthy stories that serve as functional instances of mise-en-abyme; the stories told in Cacodelphia by The Man with Intellectual Eyes and by Don Ecuménico are salient examples. Another meta-literary technique bequeathed by Cervantes is to provide commentary, either directly or by allusion or by parody, on diverse texts of various genres, literary and otherwise. The Argentine component of Adán’s meta-literary discourse is what particularly struck Piglia: “A novelist constructs his own genealogy and narrates it; literary tradition is a family saga. In Adán, origins, relationships, endogamic successions are all fictionalized. Marechal treats the struggle among various Argentine poetics with the ironic tone of a (Homeric) payada [literary duel in the gauchesque tradition]” (xvi).
In the notes accompanying this edition of the novel, the reader will find explicated many — not likely all! — such allusions to Argentine literature. For example, José Mármol’s foundational novel Amalia (1851) — a Manichean melodrama pitting noble unitarios against the evil federales of the Rosas regime — is prominently referenced at the outset of Adán Buenosayres. Equally significant, perhaps, is that another foundational text of Argentine literature — Esteban Echeverría’s short story “El matadero” (circa 1939) [The Slaughterhouse] — is seemingly effaced from Marechal’s literary genealogy. Echeverría memorably made the slaughterhouse a symbol of the bestial ferocity of the Rosas regime and its supporters (the Church and the lower classes). But Marechal, on the first page of Book One, evokes the slaughterhouse merely as a feature of the urban landscape and a symptom of “the world’s voracity.” If his image of the slaughterhouse carries any political valence at all, it refers not to the context of Argentine national politics, but rather to the geo-economic/political order: chilled beef — the term appears in English more than once in Adán — was being shipped from the refrigerators of the slaughterhouse in Buenos Aires to “voracious” Europe.
ADÁN BUENOSAYRES
AND THE VISUAL ARTS
When he speaks of the fictionalization of competing poetics in Adán, Piglia is likely referring to the fantastical adventures of Book Three (chapter 1), when a succession of national-literary characters and sociocultural stereotypes visit the seven drunken adventurers and provoke heated discussion among them. These episodes, and other flights of fancy in the novel — the street brawl as a Battle of Armageddon (Book One, chapter 2), Adam’s imaginary rampage as a mad giant in the streets of Villa Crespo (Book Two, chapter 2), and any number of scenes from Cacodelphia — could also be considered from the aesthetic perspective of the visual arts and their impact on Marechal’s novelistics. Marechal was always interested in the plastic arts, and it is no accident that the astrologer Schultz — based on polymath and avant-garde painter Xul Solar — is so important a character in the novel, both as Adam’s guide and mentor, and as the architect of Cacodelphia. Xul’s biographer, Álvaro Abós, does not hesitate to resort to Marechal’s novel to round out his account of the unclassifiable painter; just as Adam constantly converses with Schultz, avers Abós, so Marechal’s novel is an extended dialogue with Xul Solar (Xul 183). More interesting still than the two characters’ conversations about aesthetics is the performative dialogue between novelist and visual artist. Xul Solar’s sui generis watercolours have impressed Beatriz Sarlo for certain qualities that can likewise be discerned in Marechal’s novelistics. Sarlo speaks of the “semiotic obsessiveness” in Xul’s art, as well as the deliberate absence of perspective that recalls both primitive painting and cartoon strips (Una modernidad periférica 14). Sign and image commingle, and the distinction between graphic and iconic representation is blurred and at times completely effaced, as in Xul’s Grafía (1935) [Graphemes] or Prigrafía (1938) [Pre-graphemes?].26 The perspectival flatness of Xul’s paintings gives them the appearance of creative texts rather than mimetic representations. Caricatural forms, products of a deliberate abstraction, collide in a two-dimensional space and easily recombine in outlandish hybrids such as Mestizos de avión y gente (1936) [Hybrids of Airplanes and Persons]. In Marechal/Schultz’s Cacodelphia, we find similar hybrids: homokites or kite-men, homoglobes or balloon-men, homoplumes or human feathers, bomb-men, and tabloid-men who, crushed by rotary presses, turn into newspapers and then back into humans. In the tabloid-men, body becomes text becomes body.