The Seven Madmen

ARLT’S LIFE AND TIMES

Roberto Godofredo Christophersen Arlt was born in Buenos Aires on 26 April 1900. The family name came from his father, who was born in Poznan, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The first names came from his mother, who apparently chose Godofredo after reading Torcuato Tasso’s Jerusalem Freed. The couple were among hundreds of thousands of European immigrants who arrived in turn-of-the-century Argentina. Arlt’s father worked at a variety of trades without ever achieving much success; his mother had three children, but saw two of them die in the slum conditions of a chaotically expanding city.

Roberto’s father seems to have inspired fear and hatred in him: the “work of humiliation” that Erdosain describes in The Seven Madmen is apparently a painful memory of his own childhood. So unhappy was Roberto that he left home at the age of sixteen. He lived the rest of his teens in the smaller inland city of Cordoba, only to re-appear four years later in the capital, married and with a young daughter.

In the years at the start of this century, Argentina was at its most optimistic and economically powerful. Earnings from meat and grain exports placed it among the top ten wealthiest nations in the world. The Buenos Aires Arlt knew was rapidly being transformed from a small port in the far south of a still unknown continent, into a cosmopolitan city. Since the 1870s, Argentine governments had encouraged European immigration: from Spain, but also from Italy, from the Austro-Hungarian empire (among them the “Polish shoemakers” fascinated by spiritualism described in the novel), German and French people (including the much sought-after prostitutes also mentioned in The Seven Madmen) as well as a large influx of Jews chased from Russia by the pogroms. There was also a large “English” community, although like Arlt’s second wife they were usually Irish or Scottish. They ran the gas companies, the banks, the trams and the railways and set up enclaves in the suburbs of Buenos Aires like the railway junction Temperley where much of the action of The Seven Madmen takes place.

Many of these European immigrants came from an agricultural, village or small town background. They were attracted to Argentina by the promise of land to farm: the vast spaces of the pampas and Patagonia which had only recently been opened up by the crushing of the indigenous Indian groups. But this land was firmly in the hands of a few owners, so that nearly all the new arrivals found themselves forced back into the port city of Buenos Aires, perched on the very edge of the Atlantic seaboard. There they were crowded into the rented tenement houses or conventillos that Arlt grew up in, which also loom large in The Seven Madmen. Prostitution, violence and street crimes were rife in this unstable mixture of backgrounds and languages, as the newcomers struggled to establish themselves not only in a new hemisphere but in a hostile urban environment. Yet this mix of foreign immigrants also brought invaluable new elements to Argentine society: books (including Dostoevski, whose Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed are clear inspirations for this book), new ideas, religious and political movements that included everything from Spanish anarchism to Soviet socialism. This mixture gave rise to a vivid cultural life reflected in the creation of that quintessential Buenos Aires music the tango, in newspapers, literary movements, and a thriving publishing industry.

It was this emerging society that Roberto Arlt soon began to portray. After his return to Buenos Aires in 1920, he began work as a journalist, first on the crime pages of a newspaper, then with his own column of Aguafuertes porteñas (Buenos Aires Sketches). A first novel El juguete rabioso (The Enraged Toy) was published in 1926, but largely passed unnoticed. Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen), which ArIt considered his most important work, was published in October 1929, once again to little critical attention.

Arlt’s madmen are holy fools. Their dreams of finding paradise on earth are endlessly thwarted by a society that spurns their need for purity, and offers instead only incomprehension and constant humiliation. This process begins in childhood, as Erdosain confesses to his wife when she is about to leave him. Not only does the father savagely punish the boy, but by deliberately delaying the punishment until “tomorrow”, he succeeds in poisoning the future, leaving the wretched child with only fear and an overwhelming need to escape reality in imagination or in madness.

In the adult Erdosain, as in the other main characters of this novel, or with Silvio Astier in The Enraged Toy, this humiliation spawns both anguish and the rancorous desire “to do something to bring down this society”, governed as it is by “niggardly, stupid lies”. Their imagination is dominated by ways of getting revenge, of paying society back for all it has supposedly inflicted on them. But beyond this bitter desire, Arlt sees little real possibility of ushering in a utopia. The revolution according to the Astrologer will be a mishmash of everything from the racial suprematist visions of the Ku-Klux-Klan to Lenin’s brand of socialism. Even he does not seem to believe in any of the wild ideas put forward by the “apocryphal geniuses” he has attracted to him. Arlt himself certainly does not. By juxtaposition, by irony, by confusion (what finally is the status of this Major who may or may not be an army officer?) he shows his characters as inextricably part of a society which has no fundamental beliefs or sense of direction.

The continuation Los Lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers), which takes up the action immediately where it ends in the current novel, followed in 1931. El amor brujo (Love the Enchanter) appeared in 1932. When this was no more successful than the previous novels, actor friends appear to have persuaded Arlt to try his hand at the theatre. Over the next few years, in addition to continuing with his journalism, Arlt wrote several plays which were successfully performed at the time, but have rarely been revived since. Like Erdosain in The Seven Madmen, Arlt also considered himself an inventor, and in 1932 is recorded as having taken out a patent on a method to prevent ladders in women’s stockings.

None of these efforts brought Arlt stability or prosperity. His first wife died of tuberculosis, and he was remarried soon after to Elizabeth Mary Shine. He started to travel as a journalist: to Spain, Brazil, and Chile, but died suddenly of a heart attack in Buenos Aires in 1942, before his son Roberto was born.

By then, the Argentina of the early years of the century had changed dramatically. Just a few months after the publication of The Seven Madmen, the armed forces overthrew the civilian government of Hipólito Yrigoyen. From 1930 until 1983, political life in Argentina alternated between periods when the armed forces attempted to suppress these new forces in Argentine society, and explosive periods when the latter succeeded in pushing themselves to the fore, as under Colonel Juan Domingo Peron.

Arlt’s genius as a writer comes from the way he succeeded in capturing this conflict in Argentine society before it came to erupt. The only true emotion to come out of Arlt’s novels is one of anguish. This anguish eats away at Erdosain, as it does all Arlt’s main characters. In a seething, hostile city, Erdosain wanders the streets, trying in vain to see himself as part of the multifarious life going on behind dark doors. Denied purity, his imagination — like Hipólita’s, like Barsut’s — becomes twisted and negative, so that instead of even being creatively destructive and sweeping away all the rottenness perceived around them, in the end it contributes only to their own destruction. The most harrowing pages of The Seven Madmen are those where Erdosain struggles desperately to find the physical location of the soul that is causing him so much pain: if we live in a world without transcendence, how can something like the soul exist, and if it does, what shape does it take? Is it thinner and more dangerous than a sword blade? Arlt excels in this depiction of true anguish, felt in the bone, as he does in suggesting real madness when Erdosain is stuck up the acacia tree at dawn, raging like King Lear at the dumb beasts of the field.

Arlt often complained that he did not have the time or the quiet repose necessary to cultivate a proper “style”, and was the first to admit that he wrote “badly”. For many years, when the metaphysical disquisitions of writers like Jorge Luis Borges or Adolfo Bioy Casares were seen as the most perfect expression of Argentine literature he was a neglected figure. Yet there were always those who were concerned with the more sordid challenges that Argentine reality presented them. The Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti pursued the theme of big city alienation in books such as A Brief Life that owe much to Arlt’s example. In the 1960s, Julio Cortazar saw Arlt as a precursor, and returned to the explosive madness of Buenos Aires in his influential novel Rayuela (Hopscotch). Since then, a new generation of Argentine writers has seized on Arlt’s exploration of the still mysterious city of Buenos Aires, his use of its street slang, its crazy juxtapositions, its anguish enlivened by brief moments of exhilaration.

Critics have often complained of Arlt’s repetitions, his lack of grammatical accuracy, his wayward logic. The temptation as a translator is to straighten him out, to bring back a decent sense of order and common sense. In translating The Seven Madmen, I have tried not to do this, while at the same time avoiding adding any incoherencies of my own. I only hope that this crazy, disjointed, glorious book still has in English the power of a good sock to the jaw — as Arlt himself described the power of literature.