LITERATURE: Recognition Comes late for Argentine Writers

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 16 1999 (IPS) - Argentina’s most famous writers during this century all suffered from belated literary recognition – sometimes achieving fame only after death.

Other writers like Adolfo Bioy Cesares had to wait many years for local critics and the public to acknowledge their work, often written half-a-century ago, or even longer.

“Before, my work was disparaged; now I feel that the praise is exaggerated”, said Bioy Casares, shortly before his death earlier this month at the age of 84.

“I only realized I was a writer with a certain degree of success when I received the Cervantes prize in 1990,” he confessed. The people then started hugging him on the street.

Jorge Luis Borges also never understood the reason for the capricious devotion he received in his later years. His rejection of Peronism – the movement founded by Juan Peron in the first half of the century – and his meetings with former dictators during the regime in the 1970s, won him the antipathy of many of his fellow citizens, who chose to ignore his work.

Bioy Casares, however, was considered to be an “aristocratic” writer, especially at the beginning of the “boom” of the Latin American novel in the 1960s, led by writers who were committed to the defense of marginalized sectors.

He was part of the educated, erudite class of authors that appeared to distance itself from political causes. Nevertheless, their literary work was far more significant than the political positions that they took, and closer to the desires of the readers that ignored them.

Few could match Bioy Casares in describing the peripheral neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, the duels of the “compadritos”, or the tango, when the dance was considered “evil” and nearly outlawed. Bioy Casares managed to write the way the people of Buenos Aires spoke, a quality that often made translation very difficult.

Few love novels in the history of Argentine literature transmited the passion breathed in the pages of Bioy Casares’ “Sleeping in the Sun”. Yet many readers, in the name of loyalty to popular genres, avoided the “frivolous” writer.

Bioy Casares was one of the last representatives of a generation of illustrious narrators who did not enjoy the limelight into which they were thrust at the end of their lives.

Interviews and fame appeared either to intimidate or amuse him like a child – particularly when some press critics insisted on exalting his success with women more than for his books.

He insisted, however, that “women taught me that some ideas commonly accepted by men, are false. They educated me, they broadened my understanding, they fine tuned my judgement and helped me to distinguish what is authentic from what isn’t.”

The author of “The Dream of the Heroes” was born into a family of ranchers and he never needed to work. But as theater critic Alberto Ure said, “that alone is not enough to be a writer”.

A neighbor of his ranch “The Old Corner” – the author’s most beloved place, which inspired many of his works – recalled that the people of the nearby village of Pardo (with a population of no more than 400) loved the simple and quiet man of the countryside, even if hardly any of them knew his writing.

Poet Marcelo Pichon Riviere, author of “Invention and Plot” – a magazine that compiles and comments on Bioy Casares’ writings – recalled that the author of “Morel’s Invention”, and “Evasion Plan”, written in the 1940s, began receiving recognition in the 1980s, in an “act of belated justice”.

That acknowledgment is even underestimated today, according to Pichon Riviere, by sectors that believe that his writing have a strong influence of his social class and an excessive concern for telling a story, placing him in an inferior level with respect to Borges.

“The stigma of belonging to the upper classes and being politically conservative made him lose some readers, and at certain times, like in 1945 and in 1969, he was ignored”, recalled Pichon Riviere.

Bioy Casares, however, not concerned. Quite the contrary. “Nothing was more stimulating to him than the fact that no one was expecting his next book”, Pichon Riviere said.

The case of Ernesto Sabato is different. The author of “About Heroes and Tombs” is enjoying success that he says cannot understand for his last book “Before the End.” He also was a militant Communist and later an anarchist – commitments that brought him alternately closer and further to Borges and Bioy Casares.

Today, Sabato still has to explain his political positions and declarations, but he is better known and more popular for his positions on the defense of human rights than for his work, written and prized years ago.

One writer who could not escape the effects of Argentina’s stormy political history was Julio Cortazar.

The author of “Hopscotch” was forced to leave the country in 1951 when Peronism “deafened” him, and he went to live in Paris. The coup d’etat in 1976 made him prolong his stay for so many years that many people thought he was French.

But shortly before his death, he acknowledged that he still carried Buenos Aires within him, and that is why he could describe its streets, the tango or even boxing matches, and the literature of Borges, Roberto Arlt, Leopoldo Lugones and Leopoldo Marechal.