The Mad Toy

Introduction

There’s a point in the middle of the third chapter of The Mad Toy at which the reader is given for the first time the narrator’s full name: Silvio Drodman Astier. When I first read the novel, my initial reaction was to wonder if it was an anagram of the author’s real name. Of course it isn’t (no ‘B’, for starters, which is a problem if the name you’re looking for happens to be ‘Roberto’), but the impulse was excusable: one of the most immediately appealing things about Arlt’s novel is the sense it gives of being a record of events that we feel must actually have happened.

Where does this immediacy come from? In part it must derive from the way in which The Mad Toy, as is also the case with Arlt’s other novels, pins itself down firmly to a particular time and a particular place. If you take the time to look up on a map of Buenos Aires the street names Arlt mentions, you will see that most of the action of the novel takes place in a fairly small segment of a large city, the central districts of Caballito, Flores and Vélez Sársfield (where Arlt himself was born), with a couple of brief excursions to the docks and the Colegio Militar in El Palomar. For all his dreams of escape to London or Paris, dreams that are eventually only fulfilled to the extent that Silvio is offered a post in Comodoro, about 1,000 miles to the south of Buenos Aires, The Mad Toy is a local novel, alert to the detail of Silvio’s neighbourhood, the walls and alleyways, the cul-de-sacs, the milkbars, the green street lamps.

But the apparent realism of The Mad Toy serves to reveal the skill of the journalist, the professional observer of life. It is possible to be taken in by Arlt’s artistry to the extent of believing that Silvio must be an alter ego, but it is to do Arlt a disservice to think that Silvio is simply copied from life: the seemingly shapeless, picaresque nature of The Mad Toy is a grimy mask for an extremely carefully developed and formally patterned novel, in which the superficial story of Silvio’s adventures is also a detailed psychological portrait of Silvio himself. Of course, to a certain extent Silvio is inspired by Arlt: what first novel isn’t autobiographical to at least some degree? But it is more correct to say that Arlt managed to dissociate himself from the adolescent he had been, and created, with the benefit of hindsight, a fantastic version of his youth.

Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in 1900. He was the son of immigrants: his father was a Prussian, and so strict as to be perceived as unnecessarily cruel by his son; Arlt’s mother was from Trieste. Arlt had two sisters: one of them died in infancy; the other in 1936; both from tuberculosis. At the age of eight, Arlt was expelled from school, and his formal education ended. He worked at a number of jobs: he was employed for a while in a bookshop, but he was also a housepainter, a mechanic, a dock worker, a factory hand… Eventually the newspaper El Mundo employed him to write a column: his so-called Aguafuertes (‘Etchings’) of contemporary Buenos Aires formed a witty commentary on the city’s low-life. He also worked as secretary to the novelist Ricardo Güiraldes. His first novel, El juguete rabioso (The Mad Toy) was published in 1926, and was followed by Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen, 1929), Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers, 1931) and El amor brujo (Bewitching Love, 1932). In the 1930s Arlt began to write for the theatre, and by the end of his life was more or less exclusively a playwright. He died of a heart attack in 1942. Pieces of this biography crop up in The Mad Toy: Silvio’s sister is also called Lila and Silvio works in a bookshop for a while, but direct connections between Silvio and Roberto Arlt are few. However, there are a great number of subtextual connections, points at which Silvio can be seen as a projection of Arlt’s desires. Perhaps most significantly, as an act of revenge against his sadistic father, Arlt chooses to have Silvio’s father commit suicide: ‘my father killed himself when I was very young.’

Rather than being noticeable for its fidelity to real life, one of the most striking things about The Mad Toy is the occasional irruption of fantasy into the realist texture of Arlt’s prose. This is visible on certain obvious occasions, for example the disturbing dream sequence in chapter three: Silvio pursued across an asphalt plain by a gigantic bony arm. However, there is also an admixture of fantasy into supposedly realistic scenes. Following this nightmare, once Silvio wakes up, the prose deliberately treads the line between reality and fantasy. His encounter in the hotel room with the young man who tries to seduce him, although full of realistic details (the dirty clothing, the sordid environment of the hotel where the meeting takes place), is extremely oneiric: the description of the homosexual’s neck with its ‘triangle of black hair’ is an obvious sexual metonymy, and the shouts of the invisible guests fighting outside add to the dreamlike nature of the meeting. During the night, Silvio observes the homosexual and feels ‘a horror’ that gradually turns into ‘conformity’. One of the details Silvio notices about the homosexual is how a ‘lock of his carefully-arranged hair fell down’ when he turned his head. The next morning when Silvio wakes up, the bed where the homosexual had been is empty: more than that, ‘there was no trace that anyone had even slept in his bed’, and Silvio notices that his own hair is hanging down over his forehead.

It would be possible, and not too far-fetched, to read the whole sequence as a dream, a manifestation of Silvio’s buried desires (see also his homoerotic relationship with Enrique Irzubeta in chapter one, a chapter which climaxes with a naked Silvio hugging Irzubeta as both of them hide from the police). What is beyond a doubt is that Arlt uses, as few Latin American writers before him had done, the fantastic and the dreamlike as keys to a heightened realism, ways to give us a fully-rounded portrait of Silvio Astier. Silvio, with his love/hate relationship with Europe, his conviction that he is cut out for great things, his essential confusion and his frustration, is one of the first iterations of the modern Buenos Aires archetype, but in The Mad Toy the archetype is new, and Silvio is impressively individual.

Arlt is often celebrated as a writer who brought the language of the street into Argentinian letters, but this is not to suggest that he is an extremely colloquial writer: rather, he is a reporter who doesn’t soften the edges of the events he observes. Perhaps the closest comparison in English is with the early work of William S. Burroughs (Junkie, Queer), which presents low-life scenes in neutral prose, and reserves its linguistic innovation for the direct reporting of dialogue. Arlt’s dialogue is sparkily accurate, and stands slightly at odds with the occasionally clumsy soul-searching of Silvio’s conscience-stricken inner monologue. (The reader will have to decide if this clumsiness is authentically adolescent, or just… clumsy: I vote for the first option.)

One of the great things about Arlt’s accuracy in transcribing dialogue is that he is able to give the flavour of a particular character without resorting to stereotype or linguistic cliché. Think for example of the long complaint by Rebeca Naidath, which manages to capture a particularly Jewish style of narration without resorting to clichéd interpolations of Yiddish: ‘schleps’ or ‘schnozzes’ or ‘oy veys’. Of course, this makes Arlt tricky to translate: I should like to note here a major debt to my wife Marian Womack for going through the translation with me several times, on occasions word by word, always to its benefit. Mistakes and infelicities that remain are all mine, of course.

Finally, a note on the title. The original Spanish title of Arlt’s novel is El juguete rabioso. ‘Rabioso’ normally means ‘angry’, or ‘wild’: my choice of ‘mad’ has here to be taken in the sense of ‘that drives me mad’, or ‘don’t it just make you mad?’ — annoyance rather than insanity. I understand Arlt’s title as suggesting something of the dehumanising fatalism of Gloucester’s ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’: one can be as angry as one wishes, but our lives are controlled by forces we are unable to dominate. Certainly, the description of Silvio’s career, with its highs and lows, moments of great fortune and periods of despair, gives an overarching impression of an individual being shuttled helplessly from event to event.

— James Womack, 2013