MARTINFIERRISMO
AND
CRIOLLISMO
In the glory years of the literary review Martín Fierro (1924–27), Marechal and Borges had been friends who wrote admiring reviews of each other’s books of poetry. Politically, too, they saw eye to eye; in the run-up to the 1928 presidential elections, they struck the Intellectuals’ Committee for the Re-election of Hipólito Yrigoyen, with Borges as president and Marechal as vice-president (Abós 135–6). In her historical novel Las libres del sur (2004) [Free Women in the South], María Rosa Lojo — better known as a judicious literary and cultural critic — portrays the two young writers as fast friends who shared adventures. By the end of the decade, however, a rift was already perceptible. Marechal, Bernárdez, and Borges planned to revive the martinfierrista spirit in a new review titled Libra, but for reasons that remain murky Borges did not participate (Corral 26). In spite of the involvement of the prestigious Mexican, Alfonso Reyes, then resident in Buenos Aires, the review managed only a single issue, in 1929. The party was over. A military coup inaugurated the “Infamous Decade” of 1930s Argentina. Marechal and Bernárdez underwent personal crises — the spiritual crisis mentioned in the “Indispensable Prologue” of Adán — and joined the Cursos de Cultura Católica, an institute founded in 1922 that served as the stronghold of Catholic nationalism. The in-your-face vanguard journals of the twenties gave way to the more serene literary review Sur (founded in 1931); attempting to stay “above the fray,” Sur managed to provide a pluralistic venue for intellectuals from the Americas and Europe before finally succumbing toward the end of the decade and taking sides in the national ideological divorce (King 75). Victoria Ocampo, writer and wealthy patroness of the magazine, is caricatured quite unkindly in Cacodelphia, whereas ten years earlier, in 1938, Marechal had contributed to Sur a respectful article on “Victoria Ocampo and Feminine Literature.” The insult to Ocampo — in a passage surely written after 1945 — seems like a parting shot at his erstwhile colleagues at Sur, a grenade lobbed from Marechal’s side of the barbed-wire fence.
However, the period evoked in the broad canvas of the novel is generally not the nasty thirties and forties, but rather the culturally effervescent twenties. Buenos Aires was directly plugged into the international network of the artistic and literary avant-garde. Just back from Europe in 1921, Borges and a few others, including Norah Lange, “published” the first issue of the review Prisma as a series of posters tacked to trees and pasted to walls throughout the city. This playful and provocative gesture set the tone for the decade to come. The short-lived Prisma was succeeded by Proa, in which Borges precociously wrote a review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1924. Patronized by wealthy Argentine author Ricardo Güiraldes, a friend of Joyce’s translator and promoter Valery Larbaud, Proa gained international prestige and notoriety. Though the young avant-gardists rhetorically challenged the previous generation of writers, such as Manuel Gálvez, Ricardo Rojas, and Leopoldo Lugones, they adopted as their presiding genius the elderly Macedonio Fernández, an eccentric philosopher and exquisite humourist. Proa endured for two short spurts (1922–23 and 1924–26). Meanwhile, Martín Fierro (1924–27) came into being. The finest flower of the contemporary avant-garde, it was the review that gave a generation its name — the martinfierristas. Their manifesto (attributed to Oliverio Girondo) began like this:
Faced with the hippopotamic impermeability of the “honourable public”;
Faced with the funereal solemnity of the historian and the professor, which mummifies everything it touches; […]
Faced with the ridiculous necessity to ground our intellectual nationalism, swollen with false values that deflate like piggy-banks at the first poke;
[…]
Martín Fierro feels it essential to define itself and call upon all those capable of perceiving that we are in the presence of a NEW sensibility and a NEW understanding, which, when we find ourselves, reveals unsuspected vistas and new means and forms of expression;
[…]
Martín Fierro knows that “all is new under the sun” if looked at with up-to-date eyes and expressed with a contemporary accent. (Revista Martín Fierro, XVI; my translation)
The basics of martinfierrista ideology and rhetoric can be gleaned from this brief excerpt: the cult of the new and of youth (common to the international avant-garde of the period), a taste for provocative hyperbole, an aggressive attitude that doesn’t take itself in complete earnest, but also a sort of soft cultural nationalism that deserves some commentary. The review is named after a nationally iconic literary figure. José Hernández’s El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) [Martín Fierro the Gaucho] and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) [The Return of Martín Fierro] comprise a two-part poem recounting the tragedy of the gaucho, cowboy of the pampas, whose way of life was being eroded by modernization. In El payador (1916) [The Gaucho Minstrel], Leopoldo Lugones consecrated Hernández’s work as the Argentine national epic and the gaucho as a symbol of Argentine national identity. But Lugones’s ideological manoeuvre is complicated, if not outright contradictory, for in the same breath he celebrates both the gaucho’s contribution to Argentine identity and the historical disappearance of this ethnic type tainted by “inferior indigenous blood” (83). Though racially mixed, the gauchos always self-identified culturally as cristianos and criollos rather than indios. The archetypal literary gaucho, Santos Vega, had long been a paradigm of telluric nobility. (To this day, the phrase hacerle a alguien una gauchada in rural Argentina means “to do someone a right fine favour,” as a real gaucho would do.) Martín Fierro becomes a new archetype: the noble gaucho with attitude.