Another clear source of inspiration is Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which traces Leopold Bloom’s itinerary through Dublin for a single day (16 June 1904).9 Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres takes place over three days, April 28–30, in an unspecified year in the 1920s. The novel opens at 10 a.m. on Thursday the twenty-eighth, as Adam wakes up. On Saturday the thirtieth at midnight, he and Schultz begin their descent into the infernal city of Cacodelphia. Meanwhile, we follow Adam and his friends around Buenos Aires; their adventures are recounted in Books One to Five by a Protean third-person narrator who, as in the case of Ulysses, assumes different voices in different contexts. These five “books” could stand alone as a traditionally structured novel. Books Six and Seven, on the other hand, are presented in the “Indispensable Prologue” by the quasi-fictive narrator as “found manuscripts” (an old Cervantine trick). Both these texts are narrated in the first person by Adam himself, and both take as literary models texts by Dante Alighieri. Book Six, “The Blue-Bound Notebook,” is Adam’s spiritual autobiography, an earnest account of his love and its transformation along the lines of Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita nuova. It is in Adam’s Notebook, far more than in the clownish misogyny of Samuel Tesler or Franky Amundsen, that the entire rhetoric predicated on gender divisions becomes interesting; a close study of Adam’s Neo-Platonist text from a gender studies perspective would surely produce worthwhile results. Finally, Book Seven — at once social satire and a great meta-literary romp — recounts the journey to Cacodelphia, jocosely parodying Dante’s Inferno.
Borges complained that Joyce’s Ulysses, with its “arduous symmetries and labyrinths,” was “indecipherably chaotic” (“Fragmento sobre Joyce” 61). By contrast, the structure of Adán Buenosayres is quite orderly. Notwithstanding the young Cortázar’s astonishment at the novel’s apparent “incoherence,”10 the plot unfolds in a clear and simple temporal line: from Thursday morning to Friday night (Books One to Five), then Saturday night (Book Seven), and thence to the sunny, springtime morning when Adam’s funeral is quite literally celebrated, in a rite of distinctly paschal overtones, in the novel’s “Indispensable Prologue.” This temporal sequence echoes the narrative paradigm of the Passion of Christ as ritually codified in the Christian liturgical calendar, from Holy Thursday through the Crucifixion to the subsequent Resurrection.
The novelist does, however, impose a couple of structural displacements on this linear paradigm. First of all, the ending (Adam’s funeral) is announced at the textual beginning. Second, there is a hiatus of six months between the descent into hell on a Saturday night in April and Adam’s funeral on a Sunday-like morning in October — spring, the paschal season, comes in October in Argentina. Third, Adam’s notebook, his spiritual autobiography, wedged between Books Five and Seven, textually pries open the linear plot but in a sense contains the rest of the novel. Depending on one’s perspective, “The Blue-Bound Notebook” is either a poetic diversion from the novel or both its centre and circumference.11 There is no narrative “chaos” here: the displacements are easily recognizable, and the reader has no need to resort to a complex scholarly roadmap of the kind Stuart Gilbert drew up for Joyce’s Ulysses. If one wishes to speak of “incoherence,” it will have to be on the level of interpretation: what do these clearly marked cleavages mean? Does Adam end up stranded at the bottom of hell, as the novel’s last page seems to suggest?12 Or does he spiritually climb out of the hole and achieve some sort of “resurrection”? But then, why has he died? Marechal’s narrator provocatively addresses his narratee as lector agreste “rustic reader,” clearly putting readers on notice: it will be up to the them to negotiate the novel’s narrative gaps, come to terms by their own lights with its built-in aporias. As in a Borges story, a structure of crystalline clarity is deliberately rent: readers are led to make their own intellective or imaginative leaps.
Much has been made of Adán’s debt to Joyce, often by Marechal’s irate detractors. He read Portrait very attentively, as evidenced in his personal copy of Alonso Dámaso’s 1926 Spanish translation; later, when in Paris in 1929–30, he read Valery Larbaud’s French translation of Ulysses hot off the press and forthwith began work on the chef d’oeuvre that took eighteen years to come to fruition. According to the author, after writing the first few chapters in Paris in 1930, he dropped it for a long while before taking it up again in 1945, perhaps not uncoincidentally the year that Argentine José Salas Subirat’s first-ever Spanish-language translation of Ulysses was published in Buenos Aires. However, according to his lifelong friend, the poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez (glimpses of whom can be seen in Franky Amundsen in Adán), Marechal was already planning the novel in his imagination as early as 1926 (Bernárdez 2). This claim cannot be concretely documented, but it is plausible. The echoes of Joycean material in Adán derive largely from Portrait, plus the “Telemachus” section that opens Ulysses and focuses on Stephen Dedalus; in terms of content, Marechal’s interest was drawn to the narrative of the Stephen cycle, not to the adventures of Leopold Bloom. This is not, however, to deny Marechal’s evident uptake of Ulyssean narrative technique.13 Indeed, Adán Buenosayres is the first Joycean novel to be written in Spanish-language literature. When in the 1960s Cortázar’s Hopscotch was being hailed as the “Spanish American Ulysses,” it was José Lezama Lima — author of Paradiso (1966), another major novel deemed Ulyssean — who opportunely reminded his interlocutors that the clearest antecedent of Rayuela was Marechal’s Adán, never mind Joyce (Simo 57).14 The Joycean lineage that earned accolades for Cortázar brought mostly scorn upon Marechal, at least when Adán Buenosayres first came out in 1948. In a review that Piglia later termed an “infamous screed” (xvii), Eduardo González Lanuza described it as a pietistic imitation of Ulysses but “abundantly spattered with manure”;15 Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Enrique Anderson-Imbert, two major critics who would subsequently exert great influence in the North American academy, followed suit (Lafforgue xiii). The violence and incoherence of their ad hominem attacks are clear signs that something more than differences in sensibility and literary taste was at stake here.16
The troubled history of Adán Buenosayres’s reception is a direct consequence of what might be called the mid-twentieth-century Argentine culture wars or, following historian Loris Zanatta, the “ideological civil war” cleaving Argentina during the thirties and forties (13). To some degree, this civil war is a reprise or recrudescence of political-ideological divisions dating back to Argentina’s birth as a nation in the nineteenth century, which was followed by a long civil war between federales and unitarios — between traditional, Catholic, Hispanophile Federalists, on one side, and liberal, anti-ecclesiastical, Europhile Unitarians, on the other. The latter eventually won out, and a modern liberal constitution was put in place in 1853. Culturally, modern nineteenth-century Argentina looked to France, England, and the United States; economically, it was friendly to the influx of British capital, while the immigration from impoverished Catholic countries, Italy and Spain, was uneasily tolerated by the liberal-patrician elite. After a triumphal celebration of the nation’s centenary in 1910, however, the liberal model began to show cracks and, with the 1929 economic crash, Argentina lurched into crisis. By the mid-thirties, after brewing since at least the early twenties, Catholic nationalism was becoming a powerful cultural and, eventually, political force. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the Second World War three years later, further polarized the nation’s writers and intellectuals. By the time Church-supported Juan Domingo Perón became president of the nation in 1946, the divorce was absolute. As a Catholic nationalist and a Peronist functionary, Leopoldo Marechal, along with a few other writers, was at loggerheads with the now-alienated liberal literary establishment, whose leading light was Jorge Luis Borges. Hunkered down, as it were, in the fortress of SADE (Sociedad Argentina de Escritores; Argentine Society of Writers), the liberals, guerrilla-style, maintained a coded war of words against what they hyperbolically called the “Nazi-Fascist-Peronist dictatorship.” In return, Borges was unceremoniously removed in 1946 from his position at the Miguel Cané municipal library and named Inspector of Markets.17 Meanwhile, according to one cultural historian, Marechal had become enemy number one of SADE (Fiorucci 184n). Into this poisoned context was born the novel Adán Buenosayres.