In “Death and the Compass,” the Borgesian attempt at a detective story that destroys the conventions of the genre, the character of the detective maintains that hypotheses are only obliged to be interesting. I draw on that conviction of fictional antecedents to reconstruct the willingness to speculate by a group of female Argentine narrative writers who skirt around the edges of criticism in their exercises of erratic cataloguing. I venture one step further in the face of what I consider a finicky researcher’s wavering, although to avoid sounding provocative I maintain a questioning tone: what if contemporary criticism resided less in the variations of the essay that used to accommodate it than in the avatars of the crónica? I devote the following paragraphs to justifying such boldness by contemporary women authors.
Mariana Enríquez: Wunderkammer
The celebrated writer of Los peligros de fumar en la cama (2009; The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, 2022) and Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (2017; Things We Lost in the Fire, 2017), winner of the Anagrama prize in 2019 for Nuestra parte de noche (Our Share of Night, 2023), took up the crónica as a way to earn a living. The compilation El otro lado (2020; The Other Side)Footnote1 gathers texts that appeared in journals such as La mujer de mi vida and especially the newspaper Página/12, where her work appeared alongside the back-page columns of Juan Forn, who included her first novel in the Biblioteca del Sur de Planeta collection at the beginning of the ’90s. Her compilation carries the same connotations of a dark zone that dominate her narratives and which she sums up as permanent obsessions: vampirism, personal demons, an occultist relapse that references and nourishes the Argentine Gothic and is immersed in what an early review labeled, perhaps as a reproach, “dirty realism” (2020: 21), with the irrepressible loftiness of those who prefer to invent categories than to argue competently or linger over the rigor of the writing.
If we’re talking about writers of crónicas, it seems impossible to avoid referring to María Moreno, whose publishing success in recent years represents more a rediscovery than a revelation. Enríquez shares with her a suspicion of feminism, except where Moreno inscribes the irreverent phrase “keep calm, feminists, I’ve already passed on the warning,” Enríquez refuses to enclose herself in “a ghetto, although it may be a pleasant one” (2020: 22) and resists “reading Monique Wittig and Silvia Federici at the bullfights” (Ibid.) before academics suitable for the task. Another contingency of the small circle invokes its predecessor: the gallery of freaks that updates the Wunderkammer of Renaissance times and grants it a spirited dimension in dodging objects and taxidermies in order to opt for characters who are alive or recently departed.
Thus, the crónicas acquire aspects of life stories and settle in after ostentatious or ambiguous titles, whose correct decoding depends on immersion in the condensed biographies: “Esa rubia debilidad” (That Blonde Weakness) mixes up the film starring Kim Basinger to respond to Kurt Cobain; “Cicatrices” (Scars) dispenses with the echo of Juan José Saer to propose entering New York as a “territory of the imagination” (108) and restoring the obstinate documentarian of the monstrous that was Diane Arbus; “Estrella distante” (Distant Star) forgets the horrors related by Roberto Bolaño in the story of that name in order to define Charlie Sexton, guitarist for Bob Dylan.
Occasionally, Enríquez gives off a whiff of Pedro Lemebel, for example, in “La loca de la gata” (The Crazy Lady with the Cat) when she refers to the fate imposed on her own animal, Emily, a mix of Dickinson and Brontë which shows the weight of that name by way of a self-inflicted allergy (and it’s strange that that doesn’t happen in the association with The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, which is ironic considering his mummifying passion for pets). In other cases, the gothic aspect sets the terms in “Bella tenebrosa” (Dark Beauty) which, in opposition to the actress Asia Argento, aligns with the verse from Nerval’s sonnet “El desdichado” (The Unlucky One), taken up eagerly by Julia Kristeva in Soleil noir (Black Sun).
Enriquez’s most critical stance occurs in her biography of Silvina Ocampo, La hermana menor (2014, republished in 2018; The Youngest Sister), although her depiction of the chosen figure and the material gathered—testimonies, bibliography, facts—promised a less conventional tone than what marks the whole work. It’s true that some excessive clarification (such as that Norah Borges is the writer’s sister) shows that the first edition (Chilean) was not directed at Argentine readers. Certain slip-ups seem inevitable: the biographical reading of the stories, the short chapter devoted to Victoria Ocampo, the speculations about the ties between Silvina and Marta Casares, the references extracted from academic critics (for example, the reviews of Viaje olvidado [Forgotten Journey], Silvina’s writing debut, come from a text by Judith Podlubne).
Others were avoidable; so, it’s surprising that Enríquez doesn’t recognize the quotation from a Borges story in María Esther Vázquez’s words (100) or from a Freudian category in her description of Edgardo Cozarinsky (111), or that she repeats chronological errors from the evocative bootblack; on the other hand, it’s not strange that she invokes the condition of “witch, seer, sorceress” (2018: 69) in the youngest Ocampo and that she attends to Silvina’s relationship with Alejandra Pizarnik, too tempting a ghost—summoned in the crónica “La casa y los espíritus” (The House and the Spirits), where she attributes an irreverent comment more fitting of Néstor Perlongher’s Evita than of the poet of Los trabajos y las noches—for the gothic relapses of the biography.
María Gainza: Acuteness and Art of Ingenuity
Alternative titles also seduce María Gainza, inventor of a new reader more than of an original genre—an “essay on visual arts,” as Rafael Cippolini puts it in his prologue to Textos elegidos 2003-2010 (Selected Texts), reproduced in the expanded edition of Una vida crítica that covers through 2017.Footnote2 Maybe her frequenting of Página/12, a paper distinguished by the ostentatious, ironic, and even sarcastic headlines of its notes and news, has a bearing on that pleasure of the rubric which is the first sign of reluctance toward academic criticism.
Each article in Una vida crítica is preceded by an image, although in the book the chosen work loses the character of “illustration” which the newspaper supplement confers on it to become a precious reference; its register abandons the documentary in favor of the decidedly referential. “Federico el Grande” (Federico the Great) is therefore not the Prussian emperor but rather Federico Peralta Ramos, pure performer whose “character consumed him” (2020: 19) until, as in Enriquez’s Silvina, his life and work became indistinguishable. Belonging to the same order of provocative titles are “Pánico y locura en De la Vega” (Panic and Madness in De la Vega) and “Romerías” (Pilgrimages), which examines a “baroque” biography (2020: 160) of Jorge Romero Brest.
In Gainza, comparison and equivalency are strategies of knowledge more than rhetorical figures; that’s how they operate in Peralta Ramos and also with Roberto Aizenberg, when the accumulation of anecdotes denounces the condensation of an evasive figure and the mode of access to the creative condition of a subject. The critique becomes salutary in the referential mixture that beguiles an unspecified public, able to recognize at the same time the film Monsters Inc., the extinct Italpark in Buenos Aires, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, filmed by the ex-Monty Python Terry Gilliam. Regarding Alfredo Guttero, the chaos results in the rampant analogies that cross, in the Anunciación of 1927, “a flapper from the ’20s with Lolita’s chest and the broken neck of Linda Blair” (188). In Florencia Bohtling she perceives images from Cuentos de la selva (Jungle Tales) by Horacio Quiroga joined to a stylistic mashup of the douanier Rousseau together with Humboldt’s sketches and Turner’s watercolors; in Gyula Kosice, nicknamed “Aquaman” by the prominence of water in his kinetic art, she laments that the autobiography is oriented toward Gradus ad Parnassum and gives up on an esthetic phenomenology.
Repeatedly, this “dubious art critic: lazy about roles” (2020: 317) leans into a collection of failures that would not be out of place in Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas (the case of the painter Rodolfo Azaro, union organizer of the unprotected), which incites her to come up with the clever phrase in which judgment suspends the virulence of the lash to become established in the peaceful ways of someone who’s gotten used to modesty: so the works of Azaro, without denying the characterizations of brutalism that Arturo Carrera or Alfredo Prior saw in him, come down to “the agenda of a bored adolescent in Civics class” (57).
A woman of her time, despite her use of eventual anachronisms including the mention of spaces in Buenos Aires that are already ancient history, Gainza also shows—like Enríquez—the influence of Moreno. There is the piece “Fondo blanco” (White Background), about Alejandro Kuropatwa, placed between cocktail recipes to get past Moreno’s way of reporting about the same personage, or “La leyenda dorada” (The Golden Legend) to discuss Liliana Maresca, another collectible iconic artist for the reliquaries of Loquibambia (2019) or A tontas y a locas (2002; Willy-Nilly) by Moreno, Royal Chronicler, without any real designation. She too gives rise to sophisticated theoretical readings that affect designations like “Contra la interpretación” (Against Interpretation) and “Opus nigrum,” which alludes to Marguerite Yourcenar to support a Borgesian idea: instead of reviews of unwritten books, an exhibition of Roberto Jacoby’s work in 2005 allows us to recall that plan laid out in 1966 by Jacoby, Escari, and Costa for “a show that would be only the story of a show” (138).
Ariana Harwicz: Zeal for Aphorisms
Enríquez’s personal obsessions and Gainza’s uncertainties end up as a tone of smugness in Ariana Harwicz, who turns her books of dialogues—Tan intertextual que te desmayás (Valencia: Ediciones Contrabando, 2013; So Intertextual You’ll Faint), with Sol Pérez; Desertar (Buenos Aires: Mardulce, 2020; Giving Up), with Mikaël Gómez Guthart—and their theoretical offshoots—El ruido de una época (Buenos Aires: Editorial Marciana, 2023; The Noise of an Era)—into positive intentions. The conversation with Pérez quickly degenerates into a succession of witty jabs ripe for quoting: “Young people are the guinea pigs of the cruel art” (2013: 19), “The pleasure of morbid art is a genre of youth” (20), and “Hedonism is an antidepressant” (23), without being leery of simplifications and stating the obvious.
Instead of the visual arts, musical associations predominate in Harwicz, sometimes luxuriating over recorded versions and in other cases with a superficiality that indicates a dramatic finish, as with Jacqueline du Pré, unknown as an artist, frequented after some infamous family memoirs and polished off by Pérez’s impromptu comment: “Life chooses some people to make you cynical” (2013: 87). The Dictionary at the end of the volume, kept to a few ambitious expressions spilled during the conversation, falls into a vice that other contemporaries indulge in as well: that of writing with an eye toward a concentrated public that is the fauna of Humanities faculties.
Harwicz is not afraid of contradictions and her defense of paradox seems to protect her from reproaches of that sort. She insists on destroying identities and to see them as useless junk but emphasizes her own Jewish condition and her education in Hebrew, and she even trots out Adorno’s celebrated remark about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz (it would be too presumptuous for a European to consider that, on the theme of massive crimes and horrors, the conquest of America is maybe a more overwhelming example). It’s surprising that the referentiality, so maligned in El ruido de una época, becomes a criterion of judgment when it’s convenient, and the appeal to duality (“two irreconcilable styles”: independent literature and ideology, 46; two enemies of the writer: professionalization and imposture, 65) has the aim of arriving at a conviction. Double vision of perception/uniqueness of the aphorism could be the formula of this critical drift. The other point that stands out in her books is the attention to language, starting with the wordplay of “conversos conversing” (Desertar, 9) to circle round the question of translation, and in El ruido de una época she has fun with notes handwritten in French, faithfully reproduced in the book, alongside photos of Glenn Gould.
Sonic Landscape
Harwicz’s desire in her last intervention is to define a sonic landscape determined by the language of an era. In the scant characterization of the zone of criticism and crónica, of essay and fiction that I attempt in these few pages, I summon Pola Oloixarac and Samanta Schweblin. Rather than let the Borgesian quote pass by, like Enríquez, Oloixarac takes up the predictable reference for the happy few, in Las teorías salvajes (2008; Savage Theories), in an aura of abominable mirrors and couplings. Like Harwicz, she intersperses images to no greater purpose (Abel Gance’s Napoleon, an armed Ursula Andress in bikini: ostensible film club symbols) and contaminates the noise of the era with a festival of italics devoted to English, French, and Latin, but not Portuguese, which is found in footnotes.
Equally strident is the banalization of 1970s militancy, which evades any balanced revision to explode in mockery, the same fate served up to the small world of the Philosophy and Letters department at the University of Buenos Aires and even, in her brand-new Galería de celebridades argentinas (2023), dedicated to tossing out national political figures, the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires in the figure of one of its graduates with aspirations of eminence. Her effort ends up moving at times, hardly pertinent at others: discrediting Argentine leaders with a web of allusions and homologies (as when she identifies Martín Lousteau with Patrick Bateman from American Psycho and Sergio Massa with the traitor/hero in Borges’s story) assumes as a mission the memorable title by Alberto Laiseca, Matando enanos a garrotazos (Killing Dwarves with a Club). Oral tradition attributes to Borges himself the boutade. according to which, on hearing the phrase, he asked if it was a history of Argentine literary criticism.
Samanta Schweblin, whose publishing success guaranteed her constant attention from both critics and filmmakers (take for example Claudia Llosa who directed Distancia de rescate), declined every strategy already discussed here, from hyperintellectualization to mockery, from the biography of the supposed marginal woman to life stories of forgotten artists, to return to the security of the creative writing seminar and residence in Berlin, where the coveted free time is found at less cost than in Latin America or in the French-Spanish environment. In terms of sonic landscape, she admits that her Spanish is “very tainted” but more from living with other Spanish speakers than by the evident exigencies of publishers based in the Iberian peninsula.
I left the men for the end, sidelined by a market that attends more to women, partly out of a debt of political correction and because the ambient sound favors female circulation. At the antipodes of Oloixarac’s irreverence for seventies political militancy, Patricio Pron takes up the subject, despite his El libro tachado. Prácticas de la negación y del silencio en la crisis de la literatura (2014; The Book Crossed Out: Practices of Denial and Silence in the Crisis of Literature), because he cannot manage to rid himself of that history or of the effects it produced in his family. Perhaps to understand such a condition, it’s fitting to look at Alejandro Zambra, coming from a Chile where Pinochetism distilled its extermination until 1990 and left traces of the state of siege and curfew as an unrepentant sound. I will close here, because Zambra, lucid in No leer. Crónicas y ensayos sobre literatura (2010, enlarged in 2018; Not to Read: Chronicles and Essays about Literature), adheres to the lyric stream with Poeta chileno (2020), in a series closer to the centrality of Neruda, to the works of Jorge Teillier and Enrique Lihn and to recognizing Raúl Zurita, instead of aligning with the versions of critical narrative practiced by Diamela Eltit, Cynthia Rimsky, or Nona Fernández Silanes, to condense in a transAndean triumvirate the possibility of the hybrid genre that I’ve tried to explore here.
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Notes on contributors
Marcela Croce
Marcela Croce directs the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de América Latina in Buenos Aires. She conducted the research that resulted in the six volumes of the Historia comparada de las literaturas argentina y brasileña (2016-2019; A Comparative History of Argentine and Brazilian Literature). Her books include David Viñas: crítica de la razón polémica (2005; David Viñas: A Critique of Polemical Reason), La seducción de lo diverso (2014; The Seduction of the Diverse), and Latinoamérica: ese esquivo objeto de la teoría (2018; Latin America: That Elusive Object of Theory).
Jason Weiss
Jason Weiss is the author, most recently, of Listenings (2023).
Notes
1 Mariana Enríquez, El otro lado. Retratos, fetichismo, confesiones, ed. Leila Guerriero (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2020).
2 Una vida crítica (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2020).