Preface

This book is the result of what began as an investigation into the various ways the New Testament Apocalypse has been inscribed into Argentine narrative.It became immediately obvious that Leopoldo Marechal's "apocalyptic" novels were strikingly different in tone and intent by comparison with the work of other Argentine novelists such as Roberto Arlt, Ernesto Sábato, and Eduardo Mallea, all of whom invoke apocalyptic motifs to convey themes of crisis and disaster in society and the world at large.In other words, these novelists use apocalypse in what must be called a conventional way, in accord with the "great code," as Northrop Frye calls the typological rhetoric bequeathed us by the Christian bible.Marechal, by contrast, employs the heavy artillery of apocalypse in apparently banal contexts, evidently with ironic intent.Just how deep Marechal's irony cuts and what it means is the question this study attempts to address.But is it justifiable to devote a monograph to the novels of Leopoldo Marechal?Marechal is not well known outside Argentina, though many critics have acknowledged -briefly, sometimes begrudgingly -his importance as a precursor of the nueva novela of the world-famous "boom" generation of Spanish American novelists.However, his influence extends beyond the heights achieved by the Spanish American novel in the sixties and seventies, and for this reason Marechal must be of more interest than ever.Ricardo Piglia, for example, one of the foremost writers in contemporary Argentina, includes Leopoldo Marechal among a pantheon of only three other literary forbears who, in his words, constitute "nuestra verdadera tradición" (Ficción y política 102).(The others are Macedonio Fernández, Roberto Arlt, and Jorge Luis Borges.)It is instructive that Piglia should choose Marechal as a precursor.Piglia's critical and theoretical sophistication, as well as his political orientation, should be enough to alert us to the possibility of a new reading of Marechal, one that breaks with the tradition that views Adán Buenosayres (1948) as a totalizing narrative endorsing Augustinian and Thomist metaphysics.One of Piglia's fictional characters, a renegade senator and oligarch, makes this observation about the official Argentine discourse grounded in authoritarian metaphysics: "se muestra ya la heterogeneidad de lo que nuestros enemigos siempre pensaron idéntico a sí mismo.Lo que podía pensarse unido, sólido, comienza a fragmentarse, a disolverse, erosionado por el agua de la historia" (Respiración artificial 61).The Piglia

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