French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

A French poet who was born in Uruguay, a Uruguayan who became a French poet: both descriptions fit Jules Supervielle, and yet, in some way, each contradicts the other, or at least seriously calls it into question. Born in Uruguay in 1884 to French parents who died accidentally that very same year, brought up by relatives who resettled in France ten years later, married to a Spanish-speaking Uruguayan to whom he always spoke in French, living in France and writing in French yet spending long periods in Uruguay and maintaining close intellectual ties with Uruguayan and Argentine writers, perfectly bilingual and bicultural: Supervielle was, by his own definition, a “poète des deux rivages,” a poet of the two shores.¹

A photograph of Supervielle, showing him and his family on horseback during one of their many visits back to Uruguay, brings this doubleness home. Supervielle is astride a horse and holds his young son on the saddle in front of him. He is dressed formally in what appears to be a suit and a tie—no bombachas, or loose riding pants, no kerchief around his neck—and he is wearing a hat. The hat is neither the soft gaucho hat nor the Basque beret commonly worn on the pampa that Supervielle took to wearing in later years, but a regular city fedora. On seeing this photograph recently, I was struck by the incongruity of the pose as never before. I showed it to a friend who agreed there was something odd about it. “Parece trasplantado al caballo,” she said of Supervielle’s appearance. “He looks as if he’d been transplanted onto the horse.” The perfectly anodyne Spanish expression suddenly acquired new meaning, fitting Supervielle, that perpetual misfit, to a tee (a tee for transplant?) and not only when astride a horse.

Indeed, the metaphor not only suits the man but also illuminates his work, as the recent publication in Spanish of Supervielle’s L’homme de la pampa (Man of the Pampa, first published in France in 1923)² shows. The novel had already been translated once into Spanish, in 1925, by the avant-garde Uruguayan poet Juan Parra del Riego, who went so far as to translate the author’s name: Julio Supervielle. The 2007 Hombre de la pampa, however, is an entirely new translation, brought out by Interzona, an Argentine publishing house specializing in innovative, experimental fiction, and translated by its director, Damián Tabarovsky, a critically acclaimed young novelist not averse to iconoclasm and polemics. Not only has the book been extremely well received, but it has also been reappropriated or, one might say, transplanted yet again. One Argentine critic praises it for its “malicioso humor rioplatense,”³ its malicious River Plate humor; another, a young Argentine reviewer—Argentine, not Uruguayan—greets it as a new national novel, “una nueva novela de la patria.”⁴

If the photograph showed a “transplanted” Supervielle, so does this new translation of the novel. Why would a young, experimental writer like Tabarovsky look to Supervielle? More to the point: why was the book so successful in Argentina in 2007 when it only obtained a succès d’estime there in 1925 and when in France it is remembered (if at all) as a quaint novel of the 1920s in which reality and fantasy mingle in an exotic setting? And why, finally, at a time when literary nationalisms seem a thing of the past, would a reviewer call it a “novela de la patria,” reclaiming it for a homeland? A reviewer, furthermore, who is an Argentine not a Uruguayan, and therefore does not exactly share a patria (although he may share an imaginary) with Supervielle?

The notion of transplant implies an uprooting and a rerooting, an adaptation of sorts, a becoming other in a different setting. The Greek Jean Moréas becomes a French writer, as do Romain Gary (born in Lithuania) and Hector Bianciotti (born in Argentina); Joseph Conrad becomes an English writer and Nabokov becomes an American one, all the while continuing to be Greek, Russian, Argentine, or Polish, as the case may be. There is, supposedly, a moment of choice: le choix de Moréas. Often perceived as an act of heroism or conversion, the choice also implies sacrifice, loss. The newcomer—the hors-venu, to use the felicitous expression Christian Sénéchal applies to Supervielle⁵—must fit into a language, a literature, a cultural ideology. A good deal of the most fervent nationalist literature in Argentina in the early twentieth century, for instance, was written by immigrants or first-generation Argentines of European descent. To cite but one example: Los gauchos judíos (1910), the Jewish gauchos, by Alberto Gerchunoff. Such is, at first glance, the case of Supervielle, writing to fit into French literature. Or is it?

“Supervielle” writes the French critic René Etiemble, “s’est choisi poète français,” chose himself as a French poet.⁶ While it is true that Supervielle chose to write in French and was obsessed by the thought that he might inadvertently let in a hispanism, his “choice” is less simple than Etiemble would have it, even when he proclaims his decision in unambiguous terms:

J’ai toujours délibérément fermé à l’espagnol mes portes secrètes, celles qui ouvrent sur la pensée, l’expression et, disons, l’âme. Si jamais il m’arrive de penser en espagnol, ce n’est que par courtes bouffées. Et cela se traduit, plutôt que par de phrases constituées, par quelques borborygmes de langage. Je parle, je pense, je me fâche, je rêve et je me tais en français.

[I have always deliberately closed my secret doors to Spanish, the doors that open onto my mind, onto my words, in sum, onto my soul. If I ever think in Spanish it is by fits and starts and it only translates into a few linguistic burps. I speak, I think, I get angry, I dream and I am silent in French.]⁷

For all its apparent finality, the choice of French, for Supervielle, is far from straightforward; not so much an uprooting the better to take root “naturally” (to pursue the agricultural metaphor), it is a means of destabilizing the two cultural and linguistic poles between which his writing evolves. While he may close his secret doors to Spanish, or ostentatiously announce that he does, the doors are far from locked. More interesting than his apparent abjuration of Spanish in the name of literary monolingualism is the place he assigns to the “other” language in his literary system, where it endures as a provocative ghostly remainder:

Connaître bien deux langues . . . les parler couramment peut servir un écrivain [lui permettant] de voir un peu du dehors, avec l’émerveillement du spectateur, la langue qu’il écrit et dont les mots, même les plus simples, prennent un air quasi miraculeux.

[To know two languages well . . . to speak them fluently may serve the writer well, [allowing him] to see the language in which he writes a little from the outside, with an onlooker’s sense of wonder as the simplest words take on a near miraculous air.⁹]

“Seeing a little from the outside,” a crucial tenet of Supervielle’s aesthetics, is not unrelated, of course, to the avant-garde principle of estrangement. At the same time, it does not exactly coincide with the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostranenie, that is, the artistic technique of making the audience see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way. Supervielle’s voir un peu du dehors not only makes for the spectacle of the strange, l’étrange; it makes, quite literally, for the spectacle of the foreign, l’étranger, that which belongs somewhat—but not entirely: un peu—elsewhere: “Ni tout à fait le même, ni tout à fait un autre,” not quite the same, not quite another, one might say, paraphrasing another poet, Paul Verlaine. In addition, the estrangement is effected purely by (and in) language: not so much by a particular use of the language one chooses as by the attempt to silence the other language, which remains nonetheless very much there, to haunt what one writes.

Unlike the predecessors he is so often compared to, Lautréamont and Jules Laforgue (both of them born in Uruguay of French parents), Supervielle’s insertion in both cultures, French and Uruguayan, is unquestionable, his ties to writers on both sides sustained, his interlocutors many and varied, and his literary presence, in Uruguay, not merely symbolic. In the Enciclopedia ilustrada de la lengua castellana, under Supervielle, one reads: “Poeta uruguayo nacido en 1884. Ha residido en Parisy escrito sus obras en francés [Uruguayan poet born in 1884. He lived in Paris and wrote his work in French].” The same dictionary does not even mention Lautréamont or Laforgue.

The inscriptions of Supervielle’s early books are interesting in this respect. Supervielle dedicates a very early, uneven book of poems, Brumes du passé (Mists from the Past, 1901) to both his parents, who died the very year he was born: “A la mémoire de mes parents.” Eighteen years later, when he publishes what may be argued is his first mature collection, Poèmes, he dedicates the new book once again to the memory of his (French) mother, but the other recipient is no longer his dead father: “à la mémoire de José Enrique Rodó.” In replacing a biological father by the most influential Uruguayan writer of the early twentieth century, indeed a literary father who marked a generation of Latin American writers, Supervielle is not only toying with his family romance, but he is also resolutely inscribing his doubleness at the very threshold of his oeuvre. An “Ulysse montévidéen,” as he referred to himself in one of his poems,¹⁰ in perpetual transatlantic motion, Supervielle is never quite at home on either side; he is a “Mister In-Between,” to quote Johnny Mercer as channeled by Homi Bhabha.¹¹ As we know, Mister In-Between is not to be messed with; but of course readers mess with him anyway, finding it hard to accept the precarious balance—or, perhaps better, the instability—that Supervielle proposes. Ester de Cáceres, an Uruguayan critic, writes: “Supervielle lives in France for an extended period, becomes a writer there, writes in French; and yet he is still one of our writers; our landscapes, our people, our way of life, live on in his work.”¹² And the French critic Robert Weibel-Richard writes: “Supervielle is a French poet from America. This is not a mere biographical fact but an illumination of his poetry.”¹³ Note that both critics recognize the other culture—France, America—but note also that both, unwilling to allow for fluctuation, finally “choose” for Supervielle and pull him to their side: he is still “one of our writers” says the Uruguayan critic; “Supervielle is a French poet,” says the French one.

Those two perspectives—those two ways of “seeing a little from the outside,” at times conflicting, at times complementary—make for a double reading of L’homme de la pampa. Indeed, they demand it. Let me briefly recall the story. Juan Fernándezy Guanamiru, a rich Uruguayan living in the Uruguayan pampa with his thirty illegitimate children, is bored and, to break the monotony of life on the prairie, he decides to build a volcano on his property. Once the volcano is built, however, he continues to be bored and decides to go to Paris to show off his invention. The volcano is pulled apart and crated for the voyage, but gets ruined in the process and cannot be moved. Guanamiru leaves for Paris without it, or so he thinks; once on board, he discovers that a miniature replica of the volcano has sneaked into his suitcase, a quite articulate volcano emitting sounds and scents to communicate with Guanamiru. Once in Paris, things start going wrong—very wrong. Monuments seem “beaucoup plus comme des reproductions assez fidèles que comme des originaux: des presse-papier monstrueux ou de géantes cartes postales [more like reasonably faithful reproductions than like originals; like monstrous paperweights or gigantic postcards].” People look like puppets; the whole city is a simulacrum. Guanamiru falls in love with a woman who disappears and reappears at odd moments; he cannot get the Police Commissioner to approve the exhibition of his volcano; he takes the métro, for distraction, and ends up in Mexico; he returns to Paris, goes to the movies, and watches a film that puts him back in the Mexico he has just left; he starts to grow, and grow, becomes a giant; then goes back to normal; then grows again. The woman he loves dumps him; the volcano dumps him. Finally, in one of his periods of gigantism, he himself erupts, projecting Latin American birds, plants, cattle, horses into the streets of Paris. He dies “par éclatement de mégalomanie éruptive, parmi des nuages de cendre, de souffre volcanique, et une horrible lave [in a burst of eruptive megalomania, amidst clouds of ash, volcanic sulphur, and horrible lava].”¹⁴

Read in a French context, L’homme de la pampa appears to be an exercise in surrealist dream logic (despite Supervielle’s declared antipathy toward surrealism) or else an experiment in magic realism avant la lettre, resorting to the use of the exacerbated and burlesque local color that Borges would call, a few year later, “a European cult.” Playing the role of the native informant for the benefit of uninformed First World readers, Supervielle, as a writer from Latin America pandering to First World preconceptions of the other, resorts to irony and creative distortion. In fact, he had already engaged in exercises of this kind before. The poems of “Le goyavier authentique,” in Débarcadères (1922), vigorously construct an archaic, mixed African–Indian–Spanish Colonial Latin America, made up of childhood recollections, hazy memories of trips, and, especially, lots of imagination. Set in the city of Créolopolis, a city where anachronistic espagnolade, or parody of things Spanish, combines with downright buffoonery, the poems lay the foundation of Supervielle’s “Amérique d’hyperbole.”¹⁵ While the Uruguayan emotionally evokes the pampa, the Frenchman delights in distorting it, willingly espouses “authentic” cliché-ridden exaggerations. A few years later, L’homme de la pampa continues this quirky manipulation, takes it to grotesque extremes and then, to complete the exercise in displacement, throws the whole thing back at Europe. The volcano taken to Paris in a suitcase and Guanamiru’s final, magnificent eruption disseminating bits of Latin America throughout France and the world are a way of writing back to the metropolis, of returning magic realism to where, after all, it was invented. Let us not forget that magic realism, or Magischer Realismus, as a critical concept, originated in Europe during the 1920s in the writings of the German art historian Franz Roh.

From this perspective, L’homme de la pampa might be considered by French readers together with other fictions of playful displacement of the period, for example Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa, 1910), a delirious, whimsical recreation of a continent the author had never visited, with detailed descriptions of peculiar objects—a railroad whose links are made from calf ’s lungs, for example—as freakish as Supervielle’s own. L’homme de la pampa would then be read as a parody, a text that, while ridiculing its subject matter, confirms what French readers think they know. Far from being nulle part, nowhere, like Jarry’s Poland, Supervielle’s hyperbolic South America coincides more or less with the French reader’s benignly uninformed idea of the region; a little exaggerated perhaps, like Carmen Miranda’s headdress of tropical fruit, but essentially ringing “true.”

Read in an Uruguayan/Argentine context, however, the book tells a different story. There, L’homme de la pampa, published in 1923, would doubtlessly not have evoked reminiscences of Roussel at the time but would probably have been read in relation to Uruguayan/Argentine regional literature of the period. Two novels come to mind, Raucho (1920) and Don Segundo Sombra (1926), by the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes, not accidentally a good friend of Supervielle’s. Both are, in a sense, homecoming novels. Raucho tells the story of a typical rich young landowner, much like Güiraldes himself, who goes to Paris looking for pleasure, is dazzled by the decadent city, abandons himself to pleasure, falls sick, and returns home to embrace, quite literally, a sheltering pampa. The very last sentence of the novel reads: “Raucho, inefablemente quieto, se duerme de espaldas, los brazos abiertos, crucificado de calma sobre su tierra de siempre [Raucho, ineffably quiet, falls asleep on his back, his arms wide open, calmly crucified on the land to which he has always belonged].”¹⁶ Güiraldes’s second novel, Don Segundo Sombra, published six years later, would do more for Argentine nationalism and conservative nativist ideology than a thousand Argentine flags. It is the story of a country orphan of unknown heritage, mentored by an old gaucho who spends time teaching the boy the manly virtues of the man of the pampa and then moves on. The orphan at that point discovers that he has inherited a fortune from a rich landowner father he never knew; despite this change of status, however, the boy will not forget the old gaucho’s teachings and continues his patriotic pedagogy. The old and noble gaucho, in retrospect, becomes the repository of national virtue.

Appearing in 1923, precisely halfway between Raucho and Don Segundo Sombra, Supervielle’s L’homme de la pampa questions and even mocks the premises of both novels. There is no heavily meaningful return home in Supervielle, no lying down to rest on native soil, precisely because home is never stable, best perceived from a distance: “Ces grandes plaines ne me sont indispensables que si j’en suis à plus de 200 kilomètres [Those great plains are only indispensable to me when I’m more than 200 kilometers away].”¹⁷ Supervielle does not indulge in exalting or spiritualizing the pampa, which more often than not is seen as a boring place calling for intervention—building a volcano, for example, or fathering thirty children and inventing a rudimentary GPS device to track their whereabouts. Nor is the pampa a haven of noble toil and manly virtue: Supervielle’s gaucho, far from being a godlike, tutelary presence, is, more often than not, a bit of a rascal, often in the town bar, playing a protracted game of pool of gigantic proportions:

Un groupe d’hommes montés sur de rapides chevaux jouaient sur un billard infiniment long ou les billes mettaient parfois huit jours à s’atteindre. Il leur fallait faire jusqu’à cinquante lieues. Parfois les joueurs s’arrêtaient de galoper pour faire boire leurs chevaux. On servait de l’eau-de-vie aux spectateurs de cette étonnante partie. Des matelas aux couleurs nationales étaient disposés par terre pour la nuit.

[A group of men on swift horses were playing pool on a table so immense it sometimes took balls eight days to reach one another, traveling as they did for up to a hundred and fifty miles. At times the players stopped galloping to let their horses drink. Spectators of this incredible game were served brandy. Mattresses bearing the national colors were set out on the floor for the night.¹⁸]

From a French and, more generally, a European point of view, Supervielle’s engagement in magic realism produces a novel that is ironic, mischievous, just a tad disquieting and above all nonthreatening ; a novel that lightheartedly confirms clichés about Latin America while exaggerating them. From a Uruguayan, Argentine, and more generally Latin American viewpoint the novel is, yes, ironic and funny, but it also operates as a salutary counterpart, an antidote of sorts, to novels that would nationalize space and sacralize “the man of the pampa,” making him a symbol of the nation and endowing him with ideological importance. In France, then, L’homme de la pampa confirms what readers think they know about this hyperbolic America, even perhaps awakens, in a canny European reader, the suspicion that he is being taken for a ride. In Uruguay, Argentina, and probably throughout Latin America, L’homme de la pampa turns into a vehicle for irreverence and skepticism, an incisive ideological tool with which to question notions of national belonging, national literature and monolithic, invariably exclusionary constructions of the nation.

The recognition of this ideological effectiveness, neglected at the time L’homme de la pampa was published in Spanish the first time, is, I would suggest, the reason why this book has enjoyed such success in Argentina and Uruguay today, at a time when nationalisms, both political and more generally cultural, have shown their pitiful, not to mention dangerous, shortcomings. Supervielle is read not with Güiraldes, whose time is definitely past despite regular attempts to revive the worn-out national mythology his novels celebrate, but with the many Argentine and Uruguayan writers who, in recent years and from deliberately eccentric positions, have deconstructed formulaic nationalisms and exploded national myths after years of unbending political violence. Supervielle thus becomes a writer in conversation with César Aira, Sergio Bizzio, Lucía Puenzo, and his translator Tabarovsky himself, who not only claims him as a precursor but also welcomes the novel’s ideological strength: “I find it interesting that an old text still might have power of intervention over the present, that it make that present tense, that it make it creak.”¹⁹

I have polarized the two possible readings of L’homme de la pampa for effect, fully aware that neither intentionality nor reception can be determined in such a clear-cut manner; trying to do so would counter Supervielle’s aesthetics in a serious way. Supervielle did not have in mind two separate readings, no more than he thought in terms of separate publics, separate countries, or, for that matter, separate selves. Readings of Supervielle will be as mixed as he himself was, mâtiné, crossbred, to use the verb he chose to describe himself: “Je suis un Basque, un Béarnais, / Un mâtiné d’Uruguayen, / C’est le pays où je suis né [I am a Basque, a Béarnais, crossbred with an Uruguayan, / That’s the country where I was born].”²⁰

“J’apprends ce matin qu’ily a une vache dans les armes de la ville d’Oloron,” writes Supervielle in his memoir, Boire à la source (1951). “Je suis heureux de retrouver ici une vache, et à la meilleure place. De même qu’ily a un taureau dans l’écusson de l’Uruguay. Et je ne rougirais pas d’avoir été entre ces deux bêtes, avant moi très éloignées, un intermédiaire plein d’espérance [I found out this morning that there’s a cow on the coat of arms of the city of Oloron, and in the best place too. I’m happy to find a cow here, in the same way that there’s a bull on the coat of arms of Uruguay. I will not be ashamed to have served between these two animals, so distant from one another before I came along, as a go-between full of hope].”²¹