When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.1
Haroldo Conti: Voyager
Los lugares son como las personas. Comparecen un buen día en la vida de uno y a partir de ahí fantasmean, es decir, se mezlcan a la historia de uno que se convierte en la quejumbrosa historia de lugares y personas. Esto es, los lugares y las personas se incorporan en los adentros y se establecen como sujetos persistentes.
[Places are like people. They turn up one fine day in life, and start to prance around and boast, which is to say, they weave themselves into your story, which becomes the grumbling history of people and of places. Which means the places move themselves inside you, becoming what will be persistent subjects.]2
The sujeto persistente of Haroldo Conti’s writing, as Jon Lindsay Miles so eloquently maps the terrain, is the river. Southeaster (South-East in the 2013 edition of this translation) was Conti’s first novel, and the chronicle ‘Tristezas del vino de la costa, o la parva muerte de la Isla Paulino’ [Sorrows of the Wine from the Coast, or, the Dead, Unthreshed Grain of Isla Paulino] was his last extensive article, published in April 1976. ‘Tristezas’ was based on a research trip — camera and tape recorder in hand — to Isla Paulino, close to the coastal city of La Plata, in December 1975 and January 1976. We are immediately, recognisably, in the world of Haroldo Conti: the very precise description of landscapes; an attention to the way things work (boats and engines); a blend of popular culture (a song by the folklorista Chango Rodríguez acts as a leitmotif); an analysis of past history and current conditions through the voices of different interlocutors, mainly ordinary people, met along the journey; a sense of loss (tristeza/parva muerte) but also a hope for change, and a very strong sense of bringing what is considered marginal — both geographically and in terms of literature — into strong focus. As he leaves the island, Conti remembers the first Spanish explorer and conquistador in the region, Pedro de Mendoza y Luján, who ‘founded’ Buenos Aires in 1536:
Y pienso, antes de girar la llave de contacto, con una punta de la isla en el espejo retrovisor, que si don Pedro de Mendoza le hubiese chingado por unos grados habría fundado Buenos Aires en la isla, lo cual habría sido peor para ésta que la creciente del 40, y yo en este momento estaría partiendo de la tumultuosa ciudad de Paulino hacia un lugar nostálgico y desconocido llamado Buenos Aires.
[And I think, before I turn the ignition key, with one tip of the island in the rear-view mirror, that if Don Pedro de Mendoza had been a few degrees out, he would have founded Buenos Aires on the island, which would have been worse news for the island than the floods of 1940, and I would now be setting out from the tumultuous city of Paulino for that wistful and little-known place called Buenos Aires.] 3
This afterword places the work of Haroldo Conti within a broad account of Argentine literature from its early foundational moments, before going on to present Conti’s views on the nature and function of writing.
Haroldo Conti and Argentine Literature
Accounts of Argentine literature offer a defining place to the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in particular his vertebral Facundo: Civilisation and Barbarism (1845). In this hybrid text — part literary evocation, part political tract — Sarmiento sets out a vision of post-Independence Argentina which seeks to promote a dynamic export economy linked to the expanding British Empire. The export trade would pass through the city and port of Buenos Aires and yield a high revenue which, he argued, would benefit all areas of the country. The central city of Buenos Aires would thus control a process that would encourage foreign investment, technology and immigration.
Refracted through the Romantic prose of Sarmiento, this dichotomy between liberalism and autarchy was expressed in terms of a struggle between civilisation and barbarism. Barbarism was equated with the backward interior of the country, with local caudillos (strong men) and the Argentine plainsman — the gaucho — as the inferior social types who represented introverted nationalism. Despite Sarmiento’s sneaking regard for the gaucho and his accomplishments, he argued that civilisation could only be found by way of the adoption of European patterns in political, social and cultural spheres. Argentina had to open its trade to the rest of the world, attract European migrants and, at the same time, acquire values of sociability and respectability which would lead the country out of fragmentation into being a well-organised nation.
Rivers — as opposed to the pampas — play an important part in Sarmiento’s imagined nation and political project, insofar as they allow a flow to ever-widening estuaries and to the sea, and link Argentina as a primary producer to world commerce.
Sarmiento was an early traveller to the Paraná Delta. He led an expedition there in 1855, and later bought an island and built a house, and he looked to encourage migration to the islands and their commercial exploitation. Unlike the unproductive, feckless gauchos, the local inhabitants — the carapachayos, he called them, after a key river connecting the River Luján with the Paraná de las Palmas — were perfectly and productively integrated into the landscape. In Sarmiento’s always exuberant, hyperbolic use of analogies, he felt that the Delta could be to Argentina what the Nile is to Egypt, or a Venetian community, or the promise of a Far West, a California, but on one’s doorstep.4 Sarmiento’s encouragement did help open the region to commerce and to migration from the late-nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century, before that economy collapsed.
Haroldo Conti’s world is full of traces of the broken memories of those former times: abandoned houses, the shells of boats. His own modest house, built in the 1950s, sits close to Sarmiento’s wooden house, constructed almost a century before; both are now preserved as museums.
As Argentina from the 1860s was to develop in line with Sarmiento’s project, so the dominant images of Argentine identity in literature would portray the tension between civilisation and barbarism, Europe and America, the port city and the country. There is little equivalence to the foundational novels of the United States — the fishermen and whalers in Moby Dick or the Bildungsroman of a nation that is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes rewrites Huckleberry Finn in the early twentieth century,he puts his boy-narrator as apprentice to a gaucho, the mysterious Don Segundo Sombra (Don Segundo Sombra, 1926), and their journey takes them across the pampas, not down a river akin to the Mississippi.
The River Plate is present in many narratives but primarily as a place for the arrival of immigrants in their millions, mainly from southern Europe, or of travellers and visitors. It also offers the embarkation point for journeys to Europe. Memoir accounts of the early twentieth century would be full of descriptions of elite travellers to Europe. The writer and cultural Maecenas, Victoria Ocampo — who later promoted Conti’s Southeaster in the pages of Sur, the magazine she both funded and edited — wrote engagingly of the way her family would visit Europe almost as a biblical exodus. They would load onto the ocean liner all manner of family, staff and provisions, including cows to give milk on the journey and in their subsequent lodgings in the best Parisian hotels.5 Ocampo was a lifelong cultural bridge-builder, and it was fundamental to her concerns to bridge the span of the ocean, bringing together like-minded intellectuals from Europe and the Americas.