An examination of the period known as El 80 in Argentina is essential to any study of Latin America’s process of modernization. The 1880s represented a complete historical disjuncture: the annihilation of the Indians, the end of civil war, political and jurisdictional unification by the liberal state, and entry into the world market—the zenith of capitalism for a Latin American country. This constituted both enormous historical change and a modernizing leap taken by the state (in the peripheries, the state orders society from above, in the absence of a powerful, autonomous bourgeoisie).
But the 1880s also ushered in a new literature in Argentina, created by a group of young, university-educated writers (average age: 35; the country’s president at the time was 38) whom critics called the Generation of 1880.1 One thing that characterized the group was their appropriation of Western, particularly European, literature; this not only changed the relationship between Argentinian Spanish and foreign languages but also founded translation as a literary genre. These writers created fragmented, conversational, imaginative, Francophile, ironic, elegant, substantially cultured, and refined literature: “aristocratic,” in short (yet in a Latin American country). The 1880 group founded national high culture. Their common ground included liberalism, positivism, the Club del Progreso, Colón Theater, Sud-América newspaper, and a few carnivals.
One of the key moments in the definitive formation of the Argentinian state occurred when lay education and civil registry legislation was proposed in 1883 and 1884 (and President Julio A. Roca defied the Church and expelled the papal nuncio). The Generation of 1880 was directly represented in the creation of this legislation via Eduardo Wilde, the most fractional and humorous member of the group, who was at the time Minister of Education. Later, when civil matrimony was legalized, he became Minister of the Interior under President Juárez Celman.
The members of El 80 wrote sets of autobiographical “tales” based around these laws that were used by the liberal Latin American state to define itself, to take charge of the birth, education, marriage, and death of all of its subjects. These narratives included both reality and fiction—novels, stories, memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, notes, chronicles, and travelogues. The tales of education centered on specific school-age episodes that were written as autobiographies. (Classics like Juvenilia (1882) by Miguel Cané and La gran aldea (1884) by Lucio Vicente López, both from the group’s patrician sector, are good examples.) And the tales of matrimony—told in a different space, time, person, or world—centered on the marital problems of a friend or relation close to the narrator.
New subjects—what we could term “the subjects of the liberal state”—appeared with this literature, alongside these tales of education and matrimony. The group’s patrician writers, who held posts in the new state, adopted traditional postures and created first-person fiction about public identity, with subjects like the memoirist, the hero from Buenos Aires, the diplomat, and the columnist.
This was the height of capitalism in a Latin American country that was also in the midst of modernization: new subjects required new systems of taxonomy, and new fables of national identity had to be written. The present had to be narrated in a depoliticized, more specifically cultural, independent way. Literature that told other tales, “modern,” “private” tales of education and matrimony, had to be written. With his avant-garde style, Eugenio Cambaceres (1843–89) wrote just that, inventing the modern Argentinian novel and the gazes of the dandy and of the man of science.2
Cambaceres, a first-generation Argentine and member of the economic aristocracy (in his latter novels he portrayed land ownership and its attendant dramas), was unique among the writers of the 1880s because he constituted their literary and ideological vanguard. Pot Pourri, his first novel, presents the narrator as an anonymous actor playing a dandy who finally ends up “acting” as head of state. With this multiple subject, Cambaceres created a new literary language—an “aristocratic” Buenos Aires slang—and a new fable of identity for Argentina’s high society.
Cambaceres was not a state civil servant, like many of the generation’s writers (deputies, ministers, and diplomats), nor was he the son of exiles from the Rosas reign, like patricians Cané and López; rather he was the son and heir of a rancher—the point of entry into the world market—who became a millionaire during the Rosas era. His father was a young French chemist who met the Argentinian consul, Larrea, in Paris and came to Argentina in 1829 to invest his inheritance in land, slaughterhouses, and salteries.
Eugenio Cambaceres was a lawyer but never practiced law: he earned his degree in 1869, after writing a pragmatic, capitalist dissertation called Utility, Value and Price. By 1880 he was off the political scene, having proved himself too liberal—or too modern—to legislate in pre-1880 Latin America. As a young man he was a pure, Jacobin republican (who, according to Paul Groussac, was erroneously credited with a French grandfather: Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, the famous legal adviser and delegate appointed foreign minister and duke of Parma by Napoleon I).3 The “French” Cambaceres, like many others, was so radical that he had to abandon the political arena altogether. As a deputy in the Convention of Buenos Aires Province in 1871 he had presented, and lost, a proposal for the separation of church and state. The proposal was based on a strictly economic liberalism: why should the state maintain the Catholic church with taxes paid by citizens of all religions?4 Then in 1874, as a national deputy and out of strictly political liberalism, he denounced the electoral fraud of his own party—yet was ignored. He had, at that point, hit the limits of the Argentinian or Latin American state; he renounced his seat and retired from politics in 1876. From then on he alternately lived at his Buenos Aires palace,5 his ranch (El Quemado), and his Paris home. Cambaceres wrote four novels between 1881 and 1887 and died in Buenos Aires in 1889.
He didn’t marry an Argentinian woman (as the “actor” from Pot Pourri’s stage asks: Why are women here not educated like they are in the United States? Why do we follow the ancient Spanish tradition?),6 but rather, forever performing, he wed the Italian lyric singer Luisa Bacichi whom he met in Paris. She was 17 years his junior and died in 1924.
The vicissitudes of Cambaceres’s life were indicative of one of the paradoxes of modern, liberal, post-Enlightenment thought in Latin America: just when these new ideas came to the fore in modern Latin American states, they were shown to be unworkable, and then shelved. And that was when Cambaceres closed the book on politics and opened a new one on literature.
At the ideological vanguard of the Generation of 1880, Cambaceres was the one who had lived out the differences between the Latin American, French, and North American liberal states. He himself had fought the boundaries and limitations of the periphery and, analogously, his fictional subject was one who failed at everything: “There is naught to be done about it, no matter how my pride screams: I am completely raté.” So in the 1880s, when the liberal state was established, he made a clear-cut distinction between the political portion of his life—which he situated in the past and as failure—and the literary, “theatrical” part: Pot Pourri and the present, in which the “actor” is a depoliticized subject who ends up enacting political power as his final role.
The Generation of 1880’s cultural coalition wove specific spaces and texts together into a common fabric.
Miguel Cané, referring to Cambaceres’s role at the Colón Theater, said “Best seat in the house! Eugenio Cambaceres, with the allure of his talent, his artistic taste, his exquisite culture, his wealth, his looks, why he had it all; that man, who seemed to have been born under the protection of a fairy godmother, was the undisputed boss.”7
A patrician—and a state civil servant—Cané proclaimed Cambaceres the “boss” of the Colón, to which El 80 men went with their wives or to look for wives. And he said Cambaceres had it all, because he was in charge of a purely cultural and artistic institution, of the representation that was the other face of the liberal state, its fiction, its other self. In the 1880s, when politics could no longer be equated with war, the Colón came along with its ludic, illusory space in which literature was acted out, and the coalition reproduced scenes from the liberal state.
Theater and performance—fictionalization, representation, simulation, and disguise—were not just used as a way of thinking about the liberal state and its politics of representation.8 They were also a way of thinking about its new literature, and what Cambaceres founded was exactly that: the liberal state drama. Pot Pourri: Whistlings of an Idler first came out anonymously in 1882, with an Argentinian dandy (or gentleman, or señorito) as the subject of Cambaceres’s autobiographical fiction. He called the dandy an “actor” and “small-time musician”; or inversely: he chose an “actor” and an “idler” who played a dandy as his subject. Using this multiple subject, he theatrically told a “tale of matrimony,” and within it created the liberal Latin American fable of identity: private, “aristocratic,” masculine.
Cané, in Prosa ligera, situates Cambaceres in “real life” at the Colón, using his name and presenting him as the man who “has it all.” In the fictional Pot Pourri, Cambaceres’s actor-narrator places Cané and the coalition at the Club del Progreso carnival ball, complete with real names, but chooses to remain anonymous himself; Cambaceres’s characters receive generic names: Juan, María, Pepe. There at the Club, the women, the maskers, choose partners:
In the immediate vicinity of the orchestra (and take note, as this is the most strategic point, the part of this human pond in which the most fishing is done), they spend the sleepless night like wallflowers on the prowl, without so much as a slap from the hand of God to say: “Take that, you miserable wretches!” and in exchange for dislocating their jaws, Miguel Cané, Lucio V. López, Manuel Láinez, Roque Sáenz Peña, and others of their lot—rascals and imbeciles one and all—mill about the salons, find themselves chased, assaulted, and fought over by the blessed maskers like flies on a pot of jam.
Tell me with whom thou goest.… No comment. (pp. 85-86)
Compare Cané’s tone in referring to Cambaceres at the Colón with Cambaceres’s tone when referring to Cané and the Club’s coalition. The patrician is eulogistic, solemn, and reverent; the dandy is—how to put it?—amused, and uses an exceedingly modern, oral language to laugh at the coalition. We might say that this difference is what separated the coalition’s patricians from the vanguard dandies.
I would like to think that the Generation of 1880 did not forgive Cambaceres for poking fun at the boring, old wallflowers and for this reason did not welcome him into their ranks until 1885, after he published Sin rumbo—which lacks his prior satirical tone and “aristocratic” Buenos Aires slang—and after he was vehemently attacked by the Catholics. That was when Martín García Mérou, the coalition’s official critic, called him “the founder of the national novel” in Sud-América, the state newspaper, writing: “The author of Whistlings of an Idler has founded, within our ranks, the contemporary national novel.”9
Cambaceres wrote the first theory of literary “modernity” when Argentina’s liberal state was emerging in 1882. He was at the literary vanguard of the Generation of 1880 and founded the modern novel. In doing so he separated literature from party politics, radically autonomizing the former. He was the first Argentinian writer to use the liberal state as a metaphor for theater and performance. In Pot Pourri, while the anonymous dandy travels to his friend Juan’s ranch on a British train, he “performs” politics as a four-act republican farce: act one, the election farce; act two, the low theater of the legislative assembly; act three, the military uprising simulacrum; and finally, act four, the voice of the people. (Recall Cambaceres’s political cleanup campaign and proposal for the separation of church and state.)
Pot Pourri is a novel comprising every type of 1880s prose: memoirs, autobiographies, letters, travelogues, stories, and newspaper excerpts (all written in a theatrical, satirical, farcical style). Cambaceres was the cultural coalition’s anti-fragmentary writer as well as the one who created a novel using fragments, pulverizing them into one piece. A tale of adultery, one of the central themes of contemporary French theater and fiction,10 strings together the series of fragments in a literarily modern fashion. (The history of the Latin American novel could be read as the history of sexuality in Latin America. As Foucault said, “The history of the novel cannot be understood as separate from the history of sexuality.” But this is also true of the history of the state.) Adultery was seen as a breach of that all-important contract that upheld everything—all others being dependent upon it—and that maintained the entire system: I am here referring simultaneously to the text, the literary system, and the political-state system. Cambaceres’s fictional adultery is located in the present, with the insolent language and gaze of the actor playing an Argentine dandy: a rich, cultured, idle, “aristocratic,” jaded bachelor who had everything he could wish for (and who also appeared in Lucio Vicente López’s 1884 La gran aldea).
Pot Pourri was the 1880s’ first vanguard novel (and the first “theory”) because, like Pirandello later, Cambaceres clearly separated author, actor, and character. But the book was also the first best-seller and the first literary scandal of Argentinian modernity. The author was at the forefront of the Generation of 1880 because he directly Argentinized contemporary European literature: French fin de siècle boulevard theater, realism, naturalism, and modernism-decadentism. He superimposed, exaggerated, and amassed styles. He did the same with foreign languages—Italian, French, Latin, and English—to invent a carefree, aristocratic, pompous orality: what Martín García Mérou called “porteño [Buenos Aires] slang” and Paul Groussac disdainfully referred to as a “creole-aristocrat dialect.”
The coalition of El 80 founded Argentine “high” culture and established translation as a literary genre; Cambaceres’s stance was both different and the same because he plagiarized—imported ideas, sayings, attitudes, ways of narrating—European genres and postures, but he also put them all in an utterly Argentinian space, tone, and language, literarily “translating” them. He nationalized not only foreign languages, but everything he touched: the dandy (Pot Pourri, 1882), fin de siècle malaise and sexuality (Música sentimental, 1884, with the same dandy narrator), spleen, tedium, loss of faith, depression, and suicide (which he located on a ranch to which the hand set fire (Sin rumbo, 1885)). And he used naturalism and scientific laws of heredity to Argentinize second-generation immigrants and to tell the tale of their education and matrimony (En la sangre, 1887).
In Pot Pourri’s series of responses to high society’s “private life,” the dandy’s stance oscillates between transgression/scandal after the first carnival ball (the “actor” places himself on the divide and exposes sexual inequality and injustice) and convention/conformity after the second (in “arranging” a solution to the adultery issue, he acts as “the law”). The subject’s position—gentleman, dandy, caballero—and that of the Generation of 1880 vanguard are the poles between the two extremes of transgression and enactment of the law.
But Cambaceres not only wrote Argentina’s first modern novel, he also leapt so far forward that his echoes can be read in Manuel Puig in the 1960s and 1970s. In Puig and his precursors, we see the specifically literary role of performance: for Cambaceres, the theater (Colón, Comédie Française, and boulevard theater); for Puig, Argentinian radio and North American cinema.
Both worked from a minimalist theory of representation, with fragments and a proliferation of discourses, dialogues, and quotations: “staged” dialogues, newspaper clippings, social gazettes, letters, advertisements, interior monologues and discourses, and footnotes. And they tied them all together with a “familiar” orality and a simple, melodramatic tale whose story line was taken from popular film or theater. Cambaceres invented both a theory of representation for contemporary high society and an “aristocratic” language and tone to express the anonymous subject’s verbal detachment (Puig does the same for the middle classes), creating a language of clichés, sayings, proverbs, the most familiar aspects of the language of the people. So, really, to tell the tale of a breach of contract, Cambaceres wrote a discourse on the language and on dit of the 1880s.11
First, the author of the farce. Cambaceres was 38 when his “slap in the face of good taste” came out. Pot Pourri: Whistlings of an Idler was first published anonymously in 1882 in Buenos Aires by Biedma. (Música sentimental was also published anonymously, but in Paris.) It was a spectacular success: the first “anonymous” book of the Generation of 1880 and the first best-seller, first scandal, first literary transgression. It was attacked, reprinted, and parodied.12 The book sold out the first year and there followed a second edition; in 1883 the third edition was published (Paris, Denné), still anonymous but with “a few words from the author.” The anonymous author was a wealthy man of leisure who referred to the scandale created by the first edition and to the fact that he had been called a criminal; he claimed not to be the flâneur, the whistling idler; he set out his avant-garde project to demolish institutions; and finally, he also presented himself as a failure (this time, as the “failed author” of a farce in which the “truth sings out clearly”). His rapid-fire, conversational language, simultaneously so creole, so native, and so French, was the picture of the “aristocratic” 1880s Argentine who has seen it all, the new subject of the liberal state:
One morning I awoke feeling adventurous and, fed up to the gills with the tedious routine of my life (rise at noon, luncheon at one, wander aimlessly along Calle Florida, eat wherever I chanced to be at the appointed time, play a hand of bezique at the Club, set off for the theater, etc.), I thought I might well fancy a change in direction, inventing something new—the first thing that popped into my head—so long as it took my mind off this beastly ennui, whereupon I was struck by an idea as absurd as any: that I should contribute to the enrichment of the nation’s literature.
To contribute to the enrichment of the nation’s literature, I told myself, one need only be in possession of pen, ink, and paper, and not know how to write Spanish; I discretely meet all of these prerequisites, and thus there is no reason why I should not contribute to the enrichment of the nation’s literature.
And in my spare moments—in between yawning wide as an ocean and smoking a packet of Caporal—I managed to fabricate the concatenation of nonsense with which you are already familiar and which has raised such a storm, such an outcry, such furore against a certain third-rate specimen of humanity: the author.
Frankly, it wasn’t worth it: le jeu n’en valait pas la chandelle. (pp. 1-2)
But you see, one does not dig trenches or take up a pickax to mine the foundations of an edifice with impunity, even if it threatens to collapse and one works with the Christian intention of preventing—should it suddenly come crashing down—broken arms and legs, of avoiding the owner’s becoming churlish, complaining that his chattels are being assaulted and his home violated. (p. 6)
But, really, I never imagined that they would take it so seriously and would shout themselves hoarse, crying: à la garde, au voleur, à l’assassin! before a defenseless fellow, an unhappy player who steps out into the open with his hat in his hand, who does not flee from justice as he is neither thief nor assassin and whose only crime is to have written a farce, to have composed a pot pourri in which the truth sings out clearly.
I conclude.
I tried to induce laughter and instead induced rage.
Total fiasco; that was not the aim.
Like all mocked maestros, I want to smash my instrument against the floor … and yet … the love of the art …
Will I offend again?
Who can say? (p. 6)
Of course he offended again. This was the failed author who, with his truthful farce, reached the limits, hit the literary boundaries of the periphery, somewhere between transgression and “verbal crime.” The public could not comprehend the avant-garde contract: to “mine the foundations of an edifice … even if it threatens to collapse.” They did not grasp the fact that the contract’s truth was what held the whole thing up.
Next, the farce’s “actor.” Pot Pourri was the first autobiography-manifesto by a multiple, anonymous subject (or a subject who was anonymous because he was multiple) who seemed always to be the same (Cambaceres himself): an “aristocrat” who inherited a great fortune, a rentier like Flaubert (Cambaceres also liked to épater le bourgeois and later, in exasperation, liked using free, indirect discourse to put himself in other selves without giving them a true voice), and an idler who “germinated” because he had a drama: personal realization. He was heir and rentier of the family who thwarted his plans to traipse the boards.
“Yes, sir; I was born to act,” he says, and tells not only of his calling but of his perfect actor’s talent: plagiaristic intelligence, a bohemian inclination to seek out life’s pleasures, good looks, and an ability to interpret “any manner of outpourings of the soul.” But, “Unfortunately, the high social standing of my family coupled with the scorn the world heaps onto a thespian—an absurd remnant of the times in which the mask of the buffoon degraded the practice of this noble art—assaulted my natural impulses, whereupon I was forced to renounce my most cherished predilection.” (p. 8)
This anonymous subject, who tells of his education, does not have a political identity—as do characters in the tales of education by the impoverished patricians Cané and López—but rather an economic and social one. The two fictionalities—one of the failed author and the other of the frustrated actor—come together in the fable of identity of the new subject of the liberal state: torn between the economic and the social in peripheral, marginal regions, he finally becomes a writer. (Interestingly, this was also the position Victoria Ocampo set out in her autobiography, in a different set of relationships between cultural coalitions and liberal Latin American states. For her, too, adultery and anonymous, passionate love formed the center around which the system’s fragments were articulated.)
Like Prince Machiavelli, the actor—who plays the dandy who is perpetually performing and sees the world as a stage—uses different masks. This act transgresses the family prohibition of his entry into the theater. But his stance is simple; he places himself above and beyond conflict (refusing to marry),13 and oscillates between two opposing poles (or between the boundaries or limits of the periphery).
At the magnificent dance held by society’s élite in chapter III, the be-gloved dandy—having seen it all before—disdainfully watches the drama of Argentine high society unfold before him, feeling “gossip’s evil spirit” overcome him. Part of the “theory of the dandy,” this is a traditional characteristic of the historical dandy: Baudelaire’s “aristocratic pleasure of displeasure.” “I was then experiencing just such an ill-fated moment, and gossip’s evil spirit was goading me on.
I felt an evil disposition, caustic and biting, awaken within me; I would have sunk my teeth into the virgin’s white tunic to tear it asunder, and through the frenzied desire to wreak harm that assailed me, I saw everything round me painted in the most odious of manners.” (p. 18)
The dandy-actor’s gaze and stance constitute the Argentinization-translation (parody?) of the historical dandy, who is ascetic, malicious, misogynist and androgynous, distant, frivolous, impertinent, intelligent, provocative: somewhere between cynical and sadistic.14 Lashing out against members of Argentinian high society, this dandy exhibits a fundamental trait of Argentinian high culture: the critique of his own culture, cultural self-criticism. That criticism from within, that stance (the position and voice), lies between two extremes, two boundaries or languages: on the divide between masculine and feminine. The feminine belongs to a “woman-friend” who is “commonly known as a viper-tongue” and “has made up vile deeds, told disgraceful tales, concocted atrocities.” He listens to her tales and, a rhetorical-verbal accomplice to the crime, he watches various characters parade by. The viper-tongue’s cultural criticism uses metaphors involving the theater, actors, and the stage—showing liberalism as theater’s double—to touch on hypocrisy, farce, and crime in the private lives of the “aristocratic” guests there present. She shows what is behind the beautiful exterior of the middle classes: a vile, utilitarian spirit, vulgarity, and conformity.
Later we see the other extreme. When the narrator becomes disgusted by his friend’s stories, he leaves her behind and then happens to see a young journalist. “Overflowing with talent from head to toe, he is as brilliant, dangerous, and sharp as a straight-edge razor,” his “eyes sparkled with a pernicious mischief,” and his “expression, quite peculiar to himself, was one of permanent sarcasm.” At the end of the chapter, the dandy takes him by the hand and the pair go for a “breath of the fresh night air.” Lying somewhere between the vindictiveness of the two genders, the dandy’s proof of cultural modernity is his critique of the culture of modernity. Or, to put it another way, what defines his cultural modernity is the rejection of bourgeois modernity. Of course, this ideology has both leftist and rightist connotations; it can also fluctuate between two languages, two extremes.
The “character” who plays the dandy (or the dandy who plays the actor) is an exasperatingly eccentric “spiritual aristocrat” who places himself above the marriage conflict so that he can tell the truth about (depoliticized) modern private life. In doing so, he invents a masculine, “aristocratic” fable of identity and a gender code for the liberal state’s marriage contract. This then allows him to fulfill another of the coalition’s aims: to formulate a “private,” “aristocratic” (sexual) identity to oppose the public, national, patrician fictions of identity.
The dandy tells Juan and María’s tale of matrimony in this order. First, his “research trip” to the ranch at which they spent their honeymoon (and where María was already getting bored). Second, the first carnival ball, at which María suspiciously exchanges cloaks with a friend and then disappears. Third, the second carnival ball where the oafish Taniete (the dandy’s servant-cum-spy) follows María and discovers that Pepe, Juan’s confidant and secretary, is the “intruder.” And fourth, his own intervention on two occasions: first by writing a letter to María, and second by naming Pepe consul in Monaco.
The strategy he adopts to resolve the María-Pepe problem for Juan involves multiple steps and several oscillations, depending on to whom he’s talking. He swings between the boundaries of “feminine” and “masculine,” “left” and “right,” moving between transgression and representation of the law, like the Argentinian vanguard of 1880.
First, the transgression. Amongst equals (i.e., male friends), he tells the truth about sex: he shows the natural equality and social inequality between the sexes (he transgresses, puts himself in the “feminine” position). He speaks with Juan after the first carnival ball, once he is already suspicious of María:
“It’s fine that man marries and together with his wife traverses the path of life, but really! Up to a certain point!
“Man is like a horse: from time to time he needs to take to the fields, twitch his tail, frolic and roll around in the mud, if there’s no sand around.”
“If man is like a horse, then of course woman must be like a mare, who switches her tail, frolics, and rolls around as well.
“What would you say if your wife used your logic?”
“Stop right there! Man is man and woman is woman; she dons skirts and he wears the trousers.”
“Oh, how we men, made in the image and likeness of our Lord, mete out justice in this vale of tears!” (p. 102)
Second, the law. After the second carnival ball he writes to María, calls her a trollop, and tells her that if she doesn’t forget about Pepe he’ll tell all to Juan. He delivers the letter to her and then in a monologue which he mentally directs to María, he tells her “the truth,” reformulated in a “male” version and from a purely economic, liberalist perspective. Thus he explains the new civil marriage contract:
Do you know what you have done by getting married?
You have transferred the use of your person, you have signed a rental agreement; that is exactly what you have done, as if you were a dwelling; it is a contract in which you cannot be occupied by any objects aside from those your tenant chooses.
Juan has taken you in order to inhabit you, and as Juan possesses his fortune one can only suppose that he does not want to share you with anyone else, especially when the intruder is not even paying rent and is, moreover, actually cheating him out of it like a swine.
In a word, you are not your own but another’s chattel, and having usufructed yourself clandestinely by a third party you fall—under the precepts of the aforementioned Astete Code—into mortal sin, committing the offence of robbery; and therefore you are naught but a thieving sinner who deserves no pardon from our Lord. (p. 135)
So El 80s first “anonymous” book, first best-seller, is the first literary scandal, the first offense. One of the main reasons for the scandal was Cambaceres’s purely economic liberalism in his discourse on the separation of church and state, in view of the “legal” marriage contract. Feminine sexuality became the biological equivalent of capitalism: woman’s body was property—furniture or chattel—and robbery, the maximum breach of contract.15 Only Juan, he imagines telling María, is naturally free, and equates time and money:
But let us admit for a moment that as a son of Adam, it runs in the family, and he will often be of a mind to close the book of matrimonial duties and decree his time off and his holiday periods.
Where is the harm in that? How can it wound you?
Do you fear, perhaps, that your husband might forget you or love you less?
Nonsense, señora! Men’s hearts are very large: there is comfortably room for many of you within them, simultaneously.
Our Lord Father and Mother Nature, in their infinite knowledge, have made it so. Why, look no further than cocks and other quadrupeds for proof of what I say.
I once met a man, verbi gratia, who used to spend his nights at his mistress’s house and yet, one fine day, to save his father-in-law from a fraudulent bankruptcy, he gave his entire fortune to his wife.
To his lover his time, to his wife his money; and since time is money, it made no difference which; and since love is measured according to the benefits it brings, then by giving to both of them he loved both of them in equal measure. (pp. 135–36)
He thus resolves the money-sex-marriage equation with liberal capitalism, thanks to his position as “legal representative.”
Pot Pourri, with its actor and his performance, acts complicitly as the state’s double. Theater becomes the state’s other, its fiction, its transgression, and also itself: the actor represents it, he performs its functions. Speaking in both the masculine and the feminine, in the end he comes to embody the head of state who wards off the threat to Juan’s marriage by elegantly expelling the “intruder” Pepe from “the nation.” Juan will never be the wiser.
But first Pepe is given the option of taking the honorable route and fighting a duel with Juan. If he owns up to the affair (“if it is serious and the flames of passion burn intensely within your soul”), the dandy will call Juan, tell him everything, and give each of them a revolver so that Pepe cannot claim he was “shot like a defenseless dog.” Or, if he “couldn’t give a bean about the woman,” if he has no honor and is a coward—which is the case—then l’état, c’est moi, and he will be expelled from the country, from “home”:
“I have foreseen the event and fitted myself out with this case, containing one thousand francs in cash in twenty-franc denominations, this passport in your name—ordering the national authorities and begging the foreign ones to place no obstacle in the way of your transit—and finally, this appointment for your distinguished self to occupy the demanding post of Argentine consul in … Monaco.
“Go, my young friend, go and join the ranks of those who, with a few honorable exceptions, nobly and worthily represent the republic abroad.
“I recommend roulette in Monte Carlo.” (pp. 142–43)
Thus, with the actor-dandy enacting his role as head of the liberal state, the literary vanguard novel of the 1880s is founded and draws to a close. This new subject is perhaps the most powerful—the one who has it all, the head of the Colón—the only one who dared to “represent” the head of state. He can name consuls and ambassadors because his position—both the physical distance and the gaze that separates him from the rest of the world—assures his control.
The liberal state is the limit of this subjectivity and this fable of identity. And the 1880s Argentinian dandy acts as a constant transgressor of limits, thereby making him part of the liberal state’s cultural coalition: their legal subjectivities have a boundary that is occupied by the state itself (its representative, its “actor”). By hitting that boundary, reaching the limits, the dandy reformulates the masculine code of honor: an “aristocratic” code that places the caballero, the gentleman (the “high” masculinity of Juan and the dandy’s own ascetic masculinity16) on one side, and Pepe’s “low” masculinity (or that of any old Pepe17), that of the coward and traitor (after all, Juan paid for his education!) on the other. What we have here is a (Latin American) masculine pyramid of patronage, a means of defining the “true gentleman.”
So the dandy’s fiction is, in short, both the representation of gender codes in the legal, economic marriage contract of the liberal state, and a fable of private, “aristocratic,” masculine (sexual) identity, as opposed to the national, public identity of the patricians.
Marriage-adultery—the contract and breach of contract that threatens social order, trespasses borders, and implies contamination and pollution18—became the central narrative institution of the Argentine novel in the 1880s. Analogous to civil law, this binary marked the abandoning of politics and stressed the precedence of private life, constructing a purely cultural and social universe. It also furnished themes, events, and ways of opening and closing stories. Pot Pourri’s tale of matrimony provided a whole series of narrative links that were later seen in other Generation of 1880 texts (La gran aldea from 1884, for example): announcing a marriage at the beginning of the story (for Cambaceres, the autobiographical subject is the groom’s friend; for López, the nephew); committing adultery by switching costumes or dominoes during carnival celebrations (doubles representing both feminine transgression and liberal theater); and resolving the dilemma by evicting the “intruders.” The new dandy subjects in Pot Pourri and La gran aldea—embodying honor and the aristocratic masculine code—banish different characters not only from the realms of honor and truth, but also from the nation. Acting as the president who names foreign civil servants, Cambaceres’s actor-dandy banishes the secretary who broke into Juan’s house—and robbed him of his honor, after everything Juan had done for him!—from the country. The womanizing “gentleman” in La gran aldea similarly evicts the Jew—in whose cave his friend-protégé may lose his honor—from truth, honor, masculine distinction, and Latin American “aristocratic” culture. He, too, is expelled from the country. With the Jew representing money, a clear distinction is also drawn between material wealth and honor.
These new subjects, founded in tales of matrimony, depict a private, marital space alongside a purely social, cultural, public space that serves as a map, fiction, or specter of the liberal state. They portray contemporary writers at social events: at the Club del Progreso, the Colón, carnival balls, and wedding parties. They criticize modern culture from within for the inauthenticity of its values, its utilitarianism and hypocrisy. And they provide alternatives (“solutions”) to the scandals of adultery, sexuality, and money, creating a new fable of (private, gendered) identity for the coalition and the state. An “aristocratic,” masculine fable for the liberal Latin American state that evicts those who are licentious or threaten honor—Pepes and Jews—from the nation, from their homes. The Generation of 1880 dandies show a depoliticized, masculine subject who displays exemplary ethics with regards to money, honor, and truth; thus they culturally represent the state and, by extension, its exclusions. The theater of private life, therefore, becomes the only adequate arena in which to act out “domestic” issues that the nation-states sideline.
—Josefina Ludmer
1. Argentina’s so-called “Generation of 1880” was made up of minor writers who were classics within national borders but almost entirely unknown outside them, since peripheral cultures only tend to transcend borders with a quota of two or three “masterpieces” per country, or per century per country. The inverse, of course, is not true: secondary classic writers from dominant cultures are, in general, read and admired in peripheral countries, and being familiar with them is seen as a sign of “high” culture. Borges was one Argentine writer who advocated reading secondary classic writers from dominant cultures.
These 1880 writers, founders of Argentina’s “high” culture, were diplomats, deputies, ministers and senators, and they wrote political tracts, memoirs, stories, fragments, travelogues and cultural chronicles. In my book El cuerpo del delito. Un Manual (Buenos Aires, Perfil, 1999) I call them “the liberal state’s cultural coalition” and analyze their writings as state fictions created by “subjects of the liberal state.” This coalition was comprised of a patrician sector, including Miguel Cane and Lucio Vicente López; dandies like Eugenio Cambaceres and Lucio V. Mansilla; and a scientific sector, including Manuel Podestá and other medical writers like José María Ramos Mejía.
2. Cambaceres wrote four novels: Pot pourri (1882), Música sentimental (1884), Sin rumbo (1885) and En la sangre (1887). He used two narrative stances as vehicles for the protagonists in these books, both linked to theater performance: the dandy in the first two and the scientific naturalist in the last two. The dandy’s theater or balcony, where the “self” is enormous and absolute, and the scientist’s laboratory, which has no “self.” In both cases, the subjects’ gazes are distanced, one “aesthetic” the other “scientific”; the difference lies in what he sees: the dandy looks only at what is around him, at members of the high life, and the scientist looks down on those below.
3. Paul Groussac referred to that “lie that was concocted in far-off lands” and then immediately attacked the writer: “having pretended to be a novelist with the publication of scandalous anecdotes, told, as if sitting around the club, in an aristocratic-creole dialect, he was naive enough to want to carry on—with the success he imagined—in this literary vein, as artificial as his old-world nobility.” (“Trois pionniers du progrès,” Le Courrier de la Plata, December 16, 1917, quoted in Claude Cymerman, 53).
I have taken Cambaceres’ biographical information from works by Claude Cymerman (“Para un mejor conocimiento de Eugenio Cambacérès,” Cuadernos del idioma. Buenos Aires, year 3, no. 11, 1969: 62) and Rodolfo A. Borello (“Para la biografía de Eugenio Cambacérès,” in Revista de Educación, La Plata, Semester A, 1960).
4. Taken from “Separación de la Iglesia y del Estado. Discurso del Sr. Dr. D. Eugenio Cambacérès. En la sesión de la Convención de la Provincia para la reforma de su Constitución del 18 de julio de 1871” (in Revista del Río de la Plata, no. 2, 1871: 275–289).
In a plea for total religious freedom, free from favoritism, Cambaceres said:
That political miscarriage known as state religion must not be legitimized in the eyes of the Republic!
What is the state? indeed, Mr. President:—in its political sense, the state is the assembly of public powers; and since those powers are constituted by delegates, by the leaders of the people, the state is no more than the expression, the manifestation, as it were, of the people themselves.—Starting from this point and given that people profess, as they do, different religious beliefs, what right does the Legislator have to declare an official religion? How can the state be legally justified in saying, I am Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan? How can it then, in turn, represent the Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Mohammedans?—Clearly, sir, such a declaration presents the most tangible of contradictions, and with flawed foundations, the consequences will also be flawed.
If this is not so, then justify supporting the Catholic faith, paying their ministers, building and repairing their temples, etc., with the people’s money.—Prove that it is fair and just to tell a Protestant, for example, who is as much a citizen as a Catholic: you have the power to be Protestant, if you wish, but at the same time you must pay taxes and all sorts of contributions that will subsidize a religion that is not yours; so, purchase your right to be Protestant by paying the Catholic tab.—No, Mr. President, the very articulation of such a doctrine, consecrated in the same law that grants each citizen the right to freedom of worship, is itself the most eloquent refutation of it that one could provide.
And he concluded:
Based on these considerations and adhering to a deep conviction, I propose to the Honorable Convention an amendment to the article under discussion, adding the following words, or words to this effect: “the state neither has nor subsidizes any religion.”
According to Cymerman this proposal “made him an enemy of the entire Catholic party, led by Estrada and Goyena,” to such a degree that La Union newspaper, their press organ, requested on November 1, 1885, that Sin rumbo be banned and its author be fined. And Cymerman quotes from the Catholic La Union (p. 1, col. 6): “The Mayor … has taken no measures designed to block the sale of don Eugenio Cambaceres’s new book, Sin rumbo, regardless of the fact that it is a highly immoral publication. …” The paper went on to demand that the author be fined and that “the copies currently on sale in all the Capital’s bookstores” (p. 48) be removed from the shelves.
When the “Catholic party” demanded the prohibition and confiscation of Sin rumbo (and when Cambaceres relinquished his satirical tone and fragmented novels), in 1885, the patrician cultural coalition welcomed him into their literary ranks with open arms.
5. Cymerman (p. 57) notes that a description of Cambaceres’s palatial home appeared in Sud-America (p. 1, col. 5) on July 15, 1886: the house, which stood just where Calle de Buen Orden, now called Bernardo de Irigoyen, turned into Avenida Montes de Oca, looked
just like a miniature castle sitting atop a hill. … Its marble staircase leads into a salon covered in beautiful Gobelin tapestries; a painting here; an invaluable piece of furniture there; a splendid Venetian mirror further on; armchairs and furnishings that induce the sweet voluptuousness of true languor; yonder a window covered by heavy, luxurious curtains … Cambaceres leads a life that is simultaneously active and subdued—he has the sybaritic tastes and nervous habits of an industrial entrepreneur; he is a mixture of wealthy gentleman and poor chap fighting his luck to eke out a fortune. The fortune he is now in search of, clearly, is fame, which he very nearly conquered with his previous books, and which will crescendo marvelously with successive ones.
6. While watching a young Argentinian woman at an élite ball, Pot Pourri’s dandy says:
His dance partner was a lovely creature some fifteen years of age who possessed all the charming graces and southern spirits of a native-born girl but who was hollow, superficial and ignorant in the manner typical of Argentinian women, whose intelligence is a veritable swamp thanks to the tender and exemplary concerns of the paterfamilias. (p. 21)
Yet draw closer with the aim of passing but one half hour in her amiable company; either you shan’t make it ten minutes, pummeled by boredom as if by a club, or you will be obliged to partake in utter triviality: providing merriments or receiving them of her; prattling on about boyfriends, about who says that So-and-so is courting such-and-such a girl and shall ask her hand; discussing who left some other boy high and dry; or, as a last recourse, drawing out the knife and stabbing it repeatedly into the back of whomever’s path it should cross.
And as if woman were a weed in the park, something well-nigh indifferent that should hold no sway over the family and, therefore, over society and its improvement, this is how we try to raise her moral standard.
What do we care if in other places—in the United States, for example, which we are proud to ape—often with neither rhyme nor reason, monkey-like, they award her the dignity of worrying about her political rights and allowing her to be a lofty public servant, doctor, lawyer, etc?
It suits us to have her know her place and station, hang it! And that is the way we want to keep it, by god.
Why?
Because. Because routine is a vice that flows through our bloodstreams and because that was the tried and true custom of our Spanish forefathers. You made your bed, now lie in it; let the dance continue, and long live the revolution! (pp. 21–22)
7. Miguel Cané, “La primera de Don Juan en Buenos Aires,” in Prosa ligera, Buenos Aires, “La cultura argentina,” Vaccaro, 1919: 89 (though the text is from 1897, these are Cané’s recollections; Cambaceres was already dead when the piece was written).
In Lucio Vicente López’s novel, La gran aldea (1884), we read: “A night of classic opera at the Colón draws the cream of Buenos Aires’s men and women. Just cast a glance round the salon’s semicircle: president, ministers, capitalists, lawyers and celebrities, they’re all there.” (Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 1960: 142)
8. Eduardo Rinesi (Ciudades, teatros y balcones. Un ensayo sobre la representación política. Buenos Aires, Paradiso Ediciones, 1994) analyzes the concept of liberalism as representation (both political and theatrical). His basic thesis is that “the theater metaphor is a purely functional way to think of politics within a certain hugely important Modern philosophical-political tradition: liberalism” (p. 63). Rinesi analyzes the logic of privatization inherent in the metaphor and critiques the representationalist, theatrical paradigm, because there is no truth or reality behind the vision; what one sees is not hiding anything, it is reality (p. 106). So, “to think against the theater-politics analogy is to think in favor of democracy.” (p. 65)
9. Martín García Mérou’s study, “La novela en el Plata -Pot pourri-Silbidos de un vago -Música sentimental -Sin rumbo (study) by Eugenio Cambacérès” appeared in Sud-América on December 7, 1885 (p. 1, cols. 2–5). The following year it also appeared in Libros y autores by the same author (Buenos Aires, Félix Lajouane Editor, 1886: 71–90) with the title “Las novelas de Cambacérès.”
Martín García Mérou says that Pot Pourri:
… has roused our emotions and literarily charmed us…. What originality this profoundly human book displays: so vivid, like an endless string of humorous paradoxes and bizarre reflections! Society, politics and the press file by, life is shown buzzing around us, and it is all reproduced like an unrelenting daguerreotype! … The most outstanding quality of Cambacérès’s writing is the strength, the vigor of both thought and word! … His incisive, cutting, harsh, sharp-tongued paragraphs possess an icy spirit, terrible satire, and an almost dithyrambic hatred.
To conclude, let us mention two overriding characteristics seen in the works that concern us. First, the style. The author of Whistlings of an Idler has founded, within our ranks, the contemporary national novel … Second, the language. It is true porteño [Buenos Aires] slang, as a clever, young critic has noted. The most familiar locutions, terms we currently use in conversation, local jargon, like semi-French, semi-indigenous upper-class argot, are the bits and pieces that comprise the intrigue of the picturesque, genuinely national, expertly handled language of these books…. Cambacérès, in short, is an original literary personality, endowed with true talent. He is destined to play an important role in our limited intellectual life and to blaze the future trail of the Argentinian novel. (p. 89, my emphasis)
García Mérou’s article was written in 1885, after the publication of Cambaceres’s third novel. It is an absolutely fundamental critique in that it openly indicates that the writer has been adopted by the coalition, by the Generation of 1880. Sud-América was the coalition’s official organ. Founded by Lucio V. López and others (Pellegrini, Gallo, etc.) in 1884 to back J. Celman’s candidacy, the paper serialized En la sangre, Cambaceres’s final novel, in 1887 after a publicity campaign. According to Claude Cymerman: “Between March and September 1887, Sud-América announced the impending publication, repeatedly postponed, of En la sangre, thus piquing readers’ curiosity.” Cambaceres received 5,000 pesos for the rights, which was a considerable sum at the time.
10. Contemporary French drama gave Cambaceres the themes of adultery and money. Lucio V. López, in Recuerdos de viaje (1881), the Generation of 1880’s first travelogue (Buenos Aires, La Cultura Argentina, 1917), wrote in “La Comedia Francesa” (dated August 19, 1880 in Vichy): The Molière school inspired modern drama…. Adultery was Alejandro Dumas’ muse, and Augier’s heroines were cocottes.” But he criticized the “dramatic literature of our day” because, he said, the theater of Sandeau, Feuillet, Augier and Sardou was a “school of moral decadence. These men who are supposedly going to rebuild society start by demolishing what we already have without rebuilding anything in its place.” According to López, Sandeau’s Le gendre de Monsieur Poirier, very similar to Cambaceres’s En la sangre, was about a “repugnant scoundrel who marries a delicate woman he does not love just to get at Monsieur Poirier’s millions.” And he asks: why attack the bourgeoisie and not the Jesuits or the tabloids—who fan the flames of 1871—if they want social and political battles? (pp. 184–86).
11. The only complete study of the language of Pot Pourri is Marta Cisneros’s Según decimos en criollo … (Un “pot pourri” de Eugenio Cambaceres). Río Cuarto (Argentina) Fundación Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, 2000. She surveys all of Pot Pourri’s speech-related phrases: as it were, as they say, as they now insist on calling it, as the saying goes, as the Italians say, as the rude women say, as tenors say, as old women say, etc. Cisneros highlights the text’s self-referentiality (and linguistic self-awareness), the number of discourses present—journalistic, political, epistolary, poetic, euphemistic, rural—and the way they coexist. She makes a study of Pot Pourris informal and “vulgar” language (sayings, proverbs, idioms, clauses, terms, vocabulary, barbarisms, foreign words, syntactic features) and a survey of textual expressions (pp. 107-152). Her hypothesis is that the book’s tone is delineated by speech and not by the literary tradition of the written word (pp. 34–37), and that this constitutes another “literary language.” Cisneros also establishes Cambaceres’s literary modernity, his avant-garde character in Argentinian literature (maintaining that he was a precursor to Julio Cortázar, Leopoldo Marechal, Arturo Cancela, and Juan Filloy). Finally, she comments on the relationship between Pot Pourri—a re-working—and The Cuckold by Charles Paul de Kock, a “second-rate” French feuilleton writer.
I would add that Pot Pourri critics do not mention Voltaire’s Pot Pourri (1765), one of his Contes written in the form of a pamphlet, which compares Christianity to a puppet-making factory. The central character, Polichinelle, goes on tour with a troup of puppeteers, putting on farces in country towns. See Voltaire, Romans et contes. Paris, Garnier, 1960: 408–423.
12. Attacked: Cymerman repeats what the limited number of earlier critics and biographers had said (Carlos A. Leumann, E.M.S. Danero, Alberto Oscar Blasi): that Cambaceres was called a “Mason, a heathen and an atheist.” And he adds that he was surrounded by “scandalous unconformity” and a bad reputation in the “bourgeois, prudish mood of the times.”
Parodied: critics mention the author Suárez Orozco, who using the pseudonym “Rascame-Bec” published Música celestial (193 pages, París, José Jola, 1885). See Cymerman, op. cit., 51.
13. I shan’t marry, says the dandy:
“That is a cross I could not bear!
“To bring a strange being into my home, some Joan of Arc to share my things, my table, my bath and, far more serious, my bed, where … armed with her legitimate title … she would attempt to sleep every night and every day without my having recourse to kick her out when it struck my fancy were I not in the mood for her company.” (p. 71)
14. The “actor” presents himself as a classic or historical dandy. So, is his translation, his Argentinization, a parody? Does importing that European cultural myth to Latin America change its function? Does it attack the model, or mix in local traits that corrode it from within? Perhaps the difference lies in the lack of a true aristocracy in Latin America, the presence of which is what allows the European version to make sense.
Gloria Ortiz (The Dandy and the Señorito. Eros and Social Class in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. New York & London, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991) separates the historical dandy (“the quintessential dandy”) who she says was not a seductor, from the Spanish and Latin American señorito who, with rare exception, is. In the señorito’s case, Ortiz says, the dandy’s legacy was confined to clothing, appearance and a leisurely lifestyle. Pampered and narcissistic, he is an active seductor who conquers women to feed his self-esteem. She adds that the señorito tends to be young; he has an aversion to work; he sometimes has a job requiring minimal effort, such as some political appointment or other acquired through connections; he places huge importance on clothes and relies on them to give an appearance of economic well-being and social distinction that are sometimes fading or nonexistent. Being a señorito seems to be more of a mental state that implies falsifying one’s worth, Ortiz concludes.
Nineteenth-century dandyism is above all an intellectual stance which is presented as the “destiny of the modern artist” says Hans Hinterhäuser (Fin de siècle. Gestalten und Mythe. Fink: München, 1977. Fin de siglo. Figuras y mitos. Trans. by María Teresa Martínez. Barcelona, Taurus, 1980).
In essays by Balzac (“Traité de la vie élégante,” 1830), Barbey d’Aurevilly (Du dandysme et de George Brummell, 1844), and Baudelaire (Un peintre de la vie moderne, 1859) the dandy is seen as a person who embodies social protest and rebels against hypocrisy and conformity, against the masses hostile to art and the spirit. Though these three versions of the French dandy differ we can synthesize their traits into a “philosophy of dandyism” as determined by them and as set out in the classic anthology by Emilien Carassus, Le mythe du dandy (Paris, Armand Colin, 1971), which contains an introduction and the most important works by and about dandies—Balzac, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Théophile Gautier, Byron, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, amongst others.
Jessica R. Feldman (Gender on the Divide. The Dandy in Modernist Literature. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1993) says: “Dandyism exists in the field of force between two opposing, irreconcilable notions about gender. First, the (male) dandy defines himself by attacking women. Second, so crucial are female characteristics to the dandy’s self-creation that he defines himself by embracing women, appropriating their characteristics” (p. 6). Feldman’s central point is that in a culture that places genders in binary opposition, dandies “poise precisely upon, or rather within, this divide: the violence of such self-placement generates the energy of dandyism as a cultural form” (p. 7).
Feldman examines European dandies in the works of Gautier, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire, and North American dandies in the works of Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, and shows that these writers simultaneously reject and pursue women because they take on a self-dividing project: “living within dominant cultural forms while imagining new forms taking shape in some unspecifiable beyond” (p. 7). The cultural shift might begin, Feldman says, with these individuals who see things in a “new (and often illogical or crazy-seeming) way” (p. 7).
“In fact, the literature of dandyism challenges the very concept of two separate genders. Its male heroes … relocate dandyism within the feminine realm in order to move beyond the male and the female, beyond gender dichotomy itself.” This requires us to understand “the dandy as neither wholly male nor wholly female, but as the figure who blurs these distinctions, irrevocably” (p. 11).
15. Walter Benn Michaels (The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987) establishes a series of relationships between the self as property and the feminine body “as the utopian body of the market economy, imagined as a scene of circulation” (p. 13). In late nineteenth-century, North American naturalism (for example, in Frank Norris’s “corporate fiction” The Octopus—and the octopus that closes Julián Martel’s Argentinian novel La Bolsa (1890)—and Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier) Michaels establishes a series of relationships between capitalism, a specific system of representation—the photo or daguerreotype—and woman (or slave) treated like property. Female sexuality becomes the biological equivalent of capitalism and the marriage contract, what Michaels calls “the phenomenology of the contract,” becomes a strategy to contain (and repress) her disorder, because desire can subvert social order and is a threat to realist fiction (p. 125 and following).
16. James Eli Adams (Dandies and Desert Saints. Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1995) refers to Carlyle’s hero in Sartor Resartus and says that “… the persistence of the dandy as a shadow of both prophet and capitalist reflects a paradox within the regime of what Weber called inner-worldly asceticism.” The dandy, “like the desert eremite, … is constantly on display even in the midst of solitude…. Ascetic discipline dictates the presence of an audience…. [so] from this point of view dandyism is an exemplary asceticism. In Baudelaire’s canny description it is ‘a kind of religion’ governed by discipline ‘strict as any monastic rule,’ but one that openly acknowledges a public gaze…. And it is for this reason that the dandy is such a tenacious and central presence in Carlyle’s writings—as in so many Victorian discourses of middle-class masculine self-fashioning” (p. 35, my emphasis).
These struggles for masculine authority have a still more mundane and pervasive analogue in the incessant Victorian preoccupation with defining a true gentleman… [and] distinguishing between sincerity and performance. If the status of gentleman is not secured by inherited distinctions of family and rank, but is realized instead through behavior, how does one distinguish the “true” gentleman from the aspirant who is merely “acting” the part? This was less of a challenge for the Augustan age, not only because of more circumscribed social mobility, but also because the gentleman’s role accommodated a degree of theatricality,” says James Eli Adams (p. 53, my emphasis).
17. The narrator’s adolescent visit to the Pepes’ household clearly shows the difference in status implied by names. This is the only time that “Pepe” is pluralized, with Doña Pepa, Don Pepe and their daughters. Pepe, of course, is also the man held in confidence by Juan, the dandy’s friend and protégé, who broke into Juan’s house to get to his wife. When the dandy, as a teen, goes to “the Pepes’,” in a Chaplinesque foray, the situation degenerates into bodies, smells and ridicule. At the Pepes’ he sees: “Kidskin boots with Louis XV heels, low-cut necklines, teeny little gloves for great big hands and every other imaginable high-life flourish of the times: it was a tour de force of finery unlike anything seen nowadays.” Especially noteworthy is the Pepes’ family library, where the young dandy tries to pull down a copy of Don Quijote in order to quote from it and ends up demolishing the entire “library”: it was nothing but a “cheap decoy.”
18. Tony Tanner (Adultery in the Novel. Contract and Transgression. Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) says that although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels tended toward marriage and genealogical continuity, their narrative force was derived from an energy that threatened to break the family stability seen as forming the basis of society. It is therefore paradoxical that a text could subvert what it seems to celebrate, because adultery, the act of transgression that threatens the family, is “an attempt to establish an extracontractual contract, or indeed an anticontract, that threatens precisely those continuations, distinctions and securities” (p. 6, my emphasis). What is worth exploring, Tanner says, are the relationships between a specific type of sexual act, type of society, and type of narration (pp. 3–6). Adultery as a phenomenon has appeared in literature since the start, as in Homer, and Tanner maintains that “the unstable triangularity of adultery, rather than the static symmetry of marriage, is the generative form of Western literature” (p. 11). It is the dominant trait in the chivalrous novel and in the works of Shakespeare, but it “takes on a very special importance in the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel” (p. 12, my emphasis). Many of the nineteenth-century novels that have been canonized (Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, and Anna Karenina) have adultery as their central theme. In these novels, marriage is the “all-subsuming, all-organizing contract,… the structure that maintains the Structure.” By confronting adultery and marital problems, Tanner says, the novel must confront not only the provisional character of law and social structures, but also that of its own procedures and affirmations. Because when marriage is seen as man’s invention, and the central contract upon which others depend in some way, adultery becomes not an incidental deviation from the social system, but a frontal assault on it. Divorce is the way society confronts adultery, but it is worth noting that in none of these novels is there ever a divorce, “nor is it felt to offer any radical solutions to the problems that have arisen,” Tanner writes (pp. 14–18).
Blasi, Alberto Oscar. Los Fundadores: Cambacérès, Martel, Sicardi. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1962.
Borello, Rodolfo A. Habla y literatura en la Argentina (Sarmiento, Hernández, Mansilla, Cambaceres, Fray Mocho, Borges, Marechal, Cortázar). Tucumán (Argentina), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Tucumán, 1975.
————“Para la biografía de Eugenio Cambacérès,” in Revista de Educacion, La Plata, Semester A, 1960.
Cané, Miguel. “La primera de Don Juan en Buenos Aires,” in Prosa ligera, Buenos Aires, “La cultura argentina,” Vaccaro, 1919: 89.
Cisneros, Marta. “Según decimos en criollo…” (Un “pot pourri” de Eugenio Cambaceres). Río Cuarto (Argentina), Editorial de la Fundación Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, 2000.
——— “Cuestiones de re-lectura: Pot pourri de Eugenio Cambaceres.” Borradores, year 1, no. 1, Departamento de Lengua y Literatura, Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, 1991.
——— “Del texto a la problemática literaria,” Actas IV Congreso Nacional de Literatura Argentina, Universidad Nacional de Mendoza, 1986.
Cymerman, Claude. “Para un mejor conocimiento de Eugenio Cambacérès.” Cuadernos del idioma. Buenos Aires, year 3, no. 11, 1969: 62).
García Mérou, Martín. “La novela en el Plata—Pot pourri-Silbidos de un vago -Música sentimental -Sin rumbo (estudio) por Eugenio Cambacérès” appeared in Sud-América December 7, 1885 (p. 1, cols. 2-5). It also appeared the following year in Libros y autores by the same author (Buenos Aires, Felix Lajouane Editor, 1886: 71-90) with the title “Las novelas de Cambacérès.”
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