La literatura y el sacrificio. La mirada de Orfeo en Marechal y Castillo

Abstract

The article reads the correspondences and continuities between Leopoldo Marechal and Abelardo Castillo, highlighting the importance of the Orphic myth and authorial sacrifice in both authors. Focusing on their monumental novels Adán Buenosayres (1948) and Crónica de un iniciado (1991), the analysis points out their intimate relationship and mutual contribution to the Künstlerroman genre, which in both cases reflects authorship and poetic writing from a rewriting of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The analysis is based on the assumption that, just like Orpheus, the authorial figures Adán Buenosayres and Esteban Espósito embody the paradox of the author as victim and victimizer of his own writing. This writing becomes pharmakon –a remedy that cures and poisons at the same time– and affects both the subject who writes and the represented object. Putting into practice the Marechalian poetics of the “descent and ascent of the soul through beauty” (cfr. Marechal, 2016a) —which I bring closer to the Orphic descent—, both Adán and Esteban Espósito descend into the world of shadows to recover the object of their desire (Solveig, Graciela). However, they finally fail in their attempt of salvation, symbolically killing the woman they love so that their work can be born. Thus, both the authorial figures and the personifications of the poetic ideal become present-absent in the text, which serves both as a medium of memory and oblivion, a re-presentation and tomb of the subject and object of writing, and becomes an eternal work in progress or perpetuum mobile that links the end to the beginning.

In this way, the article also shows how the mise-en-scène of the scriptural and authorial paradox reworked by Marechal is rewritten in the Argentine novel tradition and takes shape especially in Abelardo Castillo. In a comparative study that starts from a literary topos (the gaze of Orpheus) and a narrative genre (the Künstlerroman), Crónica de un iniciado is presented as a direct continuation of Adán Buenosayres. Thus, Castillo manages to look back and save his Eurydice from the shadows. In a pharmakon-writing that stages the dangers of re-presentation, he rewrites Marechal's novel and reintroduces it into the literary canon from which it had been so unfairly excluded.