It would be wrong to argue that the attention given to particular writers distorted the market, because the readership for Latin American literature as a whole grew throughout the sixties, both at home and abroad. But it would be fair to say that, in their excitement to promote the boom, publishers and critics in the sixties paid less attention to the quieter, seemingly less ambitious narratives like those of Conti. Readers in Latin America and beyond are today far more likely to bring to mind the trips down the Magdalena River described by García Márquez in Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989), or the Amazon as described by Vargas Llosa in The Green House (1966).
If there is one travel image that might be said to represent this sixties boom — and despite the writers’ own attested fear of flying — it would be the fast-paced mobility of jet flights that looked to shrink the spaces between Buenos Aires and Paris, Mexico City and New York, Havana and London. By contrast, as Eduardo Galeano puts it: Para entender a Haroldo Conti hay que estar en el Tigre y ver el río correr despacito. Ese es su ritmo [To understand Haroldo Conti, one has to be in Tigre and to see the river running slowly on. This is his rhythm.]11
Let us hope that, fifty years after the first publication of Southeaster, this first translation into English can offer a similar place in our imagination to the Paraná River and its Delta.
It is not the intention of this afterword to offer a context for the entire scope of Conti’s writings up to 1976, but rather to situate the moment of Southeaster’s publication and its immediate aftermath. (It might however be of interest to note that the boom writers themselves certainly read and admired Conti’s work: in 1971 he was awarded the Barral Prize for his novel En vida, and two of the jury members were García Márquez and Vargas Llosa.)
We have looked to place Southeaster where it belongs in the history of Argentine and Latin American literature, as one of the most original contributions to what Conti himself would term, in an interview in 1974, ‘a stylistically and imaginatively Argentine literature.’12
Conti on Conti: A Ship’s Log
When the writer Juan Carlos Martini was compiling the interview with Conti from which we have just quoted, he spoke of how difficult it was to get Conti to talk about himself and his own work, and of his phobia about being interviewed.13 Yet, when coaxed into speaking in interviews, he would give very measured and insightful comments on his work. One such interview, made at the time of the publication of Southeaster, is published in the first book-length study of his work, Rodolfo Benasso’s El mundo de Haroldo Conti (Buenos Aires, 1969). The following pages present Conti’s illuminating reading of the novel and its different contexts.
When asked if he felt himself to be a figure in the literary world we have outlined above, he replied:
No sé si, después de todo, he llegado a ser un escritor, pero lo que indiscutiblemente no soy es un literato. Cuando escribía Sudeste, vivía prácticamente en las islas y, aparte del hecho de empuñar una lapicera y sentarme frente a una hoja de papel, la historia salió de la gente y las cosas, casi a mi pesar. Por ese entonces no conocía a ningún escritor.
[I can’t say if, at the end of the day, I’ve come to be a writer, but one thing I am unarguably not is a man of letters. At the time I was writing Sudeste, I practically lived on the islands and, aside from the act of my picking up a pencil and sitting in front of a piece of paper, the story itself came from other people and things, and almost in spite of myself. In those days I didn’t know a single writer.]14
This isolation would change, of course, and might be slightly exaggerated, for he won a prize for Southeaster, and the novel appeared on the bestseller lists in the newly founded Primera Plana.15 But his sense of being marginal to dominant literary currents is further emphasised by his comments on the state of much Argentine literature. He is opposed to:
la pretensión de una novela que abarque y agote de una vez y para siempre una supuesta realidad nacional. Lo que podría llamarse la novela monumento o la literature de bronce. Todo lo que se ha logrado con esto es acentuar todavía más el divorcio entre la literature y el país. La Argentina es una suma de realidades, a menudo incomunicados entre sí, en perpetuo cambio todos ellos…
[the pretension of a novel that embraces and exhausts once and for all some supposed national reality. What one might call the monumental, or iconic novel. All that’s been achieved through this is to accentuate still further the divorce between the literature and the land. Argentina is the sum of its realities, which often don’t speak to each other, and are all in constant movement…]16
This awareness of the diversity of Argentine cultures, and the lack of communication between these cultures, is fundamental to Conti’s writing.
He goes on to speak of the writers with whom he finds affinities:
Entre la literatura y la vida, elijo la vida… Pocos libros valen una hoja de ese loco vagabundo, de Jack Kerouac, que con su mochila al hombro corre de una punta a otra de esa gigantesca tierra que gime, canta o resopla a través de su sangre… Pocos libros valen una página de Hemingway, ni media de Sillitoe, ni una línea de Morosoli.
[Between literature and life, I choose life… Few books are worth one printed spread from that crazy vagabond, from Jack Kerouac, who with his pack on his back runs from end to end of that giant land, that howls and sings and snorts through his blood… Few books are worth a single page from Hemingway, nor a half-page from Sillitoe, nor a line from Morosoli].
All these references will be familiar to an English reader, except perhaps that to the little-known Uruguayan writer Juan José Morosoli, who had a similar interest in portraying liminal characters in a landscape of rivers and ports. Conti would speak of another Uruguayan writer, Juan Carlos Onetti, whose novels and stories were often set in the invented town of Santa María and its environs, on the banks of the River Plate; Onetti’s famous novel The Shipyard was published in 1961. Conti would often refer to the Argentine poet of the Paraná River, Juan L Ortiz. Added to this list of admired writers was the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa, whose complex novels and short stories would, in the main, map the backlands of Brazil, but which moved beyond mere regionalism in their philosophical content and radical linguistic experimentation.
Conti would pay an extended homage to Ernest Hemingway in an article written after a trip to Cuba in 1974. He describes his visit to different sites in Hemingway’s Cuban landscape: the room in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana where Hemingway wrote, and the fishing village and the fishermen immortalised in The Old Man and the Sea. There he swapped stories about navegaciones y peces y amigos, todos esos blandos temas que alivian el tiempo, lo tornan a uno vaguedad, espuma, pájaro forastero [sailing trips, fishes and friends, all those gentle subjects that lighten the time, that turn one to vagueness, to froth, into a strange bird]. The fishermen stories trigger memories, evoke other rivers and seas:
De un vistazo veo yo allí, superpuestos tiempos y lugares… al Nene Bruzzone del Tigre, al siempre capitán Marcelo Gianelli, al Vasco Arregui que en este momento debe estar pescando la centolla a bordo del Cruz del Sur en el Beagle…