The writings of Eduardo Mallea

John H. R. Polt

In Memory of
Allison Williams Bunkley

My interest in Eduardo Mallea was first stimulated by Professor Arturo Torres-Rioseco of the University of California, Berkeley; and I should like to express to him my most sincere appreciation for his invaluable guidance and encouragement. My thanks go also to my wife for her critical reading of the manuscript; to Professors Marianne Bonwit, Jacqueline de La Harpe, Fernando Alegría, G. Arnold Chapman, José F. Montesinos, and Warren Ramsey, for corrections, suggestions, and other assistance; to my friend Manuel de Ezcurdia, for the loan of an otherwise inaccessible volume; to the University of California, for the means of defraying clerical expenses; and to the publishers of works quoted, for their liberality in acceding to my requests. I am especially grateful to Don Eduardo Mallea for the interest in my work which he has been good enough to express, and for his kind permission to quote from his writings.

For such errors of fact or of judgment as may remain in this study in spite of the assistance which I have received, I, of course, assume the sole responsibility.

Eduardo Mallea entered the Argentine literary scene in 1926, with the publication of his first book, Cuentos para una inglesa desesperada; but his major works began to appear almost ten years later. He was born in Bahía Blanca, a city in the south of Buenos Aires Province, on August 14, 1903¹. Through his father, the doctor and writer Narciso Mallea, he descends from one of the oldest Argentine families², which Sarmiento mentions in his Recuerdos de provincia. His early education came from foreign teachers; and his school companions were, among others, the children of immigrants. The young Mallea seems to have felt himself different and slightly inferior among these «rubios silenciosos», although he was attracted to them³. Thus began his contact with Europe, which later developed into a love for and an absorption of European culture.

In 1914 Mallea was taken to live in Buenos Aires, where he completed his education, both formal and informal, the latter consisting in large part of voracious reading. In Buenos Aires the young Mallea could follow the course of the First World War, a catastrophe which filled him with anguish for the whole world, while his more direct sympathies were on the side of Britain and France⁴. Here, also, he could compare the second-generation Argentines he had known in Bahía Blanca with his Creole fellow students in Buenos Aires. In the latter he found none of the zeal for building a nation which animated the children of immigrants⁵. Mallea became aware of his Argentine nationality and of the world beyond Argentina. His youth, as he presents it, was one of growing concern for the problems of national and individual existence in a world plunging into chaos. His reading concentrated increasingly on the authors with whom he felt a spiritual kinship in anguish. From his early predilection for Dickens, he moved toward Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevski. In their books he sought life more than art life suffered, not described. In Buenos Aires he met Waldo Frank, whose concept of America and its role in the new world he found stimulating.

This period, extending into his thirties, was formative in Mallea's art and thought. In it he published only one book, although he helped to found a review, Revista de América, and collaborated in several others, including Revista de Occidente and Sur. In 1931 he began to direct the Sunday literary supplement of the newspaper La Nación of Buenos Aires, and he continued in this position until his recent diplomatic appointment. In 1934 he was invited to lecture in Rome and Milan, and at that time visited several European countries, with the notable exception of Spain⁶.

The years of Mallea's life and literary production have been critical ones for Argentina⁷. By the beginning of the present century, the economic growth of the country, based on livestock and grain, had attracted emigrants and capital from Europe. The government, in the hands of an «enlightened oligarchy» of landholders, encouraged these developments. Although its measures were often arbitrary and its power was based on systematic suppression of the suffrage, general prosperity was such that abuses were met with tolerance, if not apathy. Only the Unión Cívica, later Unión Cívica Radical, or Radical party, offered significant opposition to this regime.

The Unión Cívica, of which Mallea's father was a devoted adherent⁸, had its origins in 1889 and was led successively by Leandro N. Alemand, after his suicide in 1896, by his nephew, Hipólito Irigoyen (or Yrigoyen). Representing mostly nonagrarian interests, it sought to modify government by and for the landholders through abortive revolts in 1890 and 1905, and continually agitated for electoral reforms. Ironically, it was a Conservative president, Roque Sáenz Peña, who instituted such reforms; in the resulting free election of 1916, the Radicals under Irigoyen came to power. They maintained a scrupulous neutrality in the First World War and, while governing arbitrarily, sought to improve the lot of the previously disenfranchised classes.

In 1930, however, the government of Irigoyen, re-elected two years previously, was overthrown by a military coup; and the Conservatives returned to power for thirteen years. This period saw the publication of Mallea's first major works; in politics it was marked by corruption, lack of vision, and apathy. In spite of verbal attacks on its power, foreign capital prospered with the help of the government, to which the Radicals now offered only a disorganized opposition. Youth was submerged; unable to advance except through connections with the ruling clique, its political opinions tended either toward indifference or toward one of several extremist possibilities. Among the latter were various militaristic, Pan-Hispanic, anti-Semitic, or imperialistic groups, having in common their dislike of capitalism and liberal parliamentary democracy. These groups began to flourish with the coming of the Second World War, especially after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Ramón S. Castillo, in control of the government, declared a state of siege and suspended constitutional guaranties. Such steps operated to the disadvantage of liberal and pro-Allied elements, favoring their opponents while arousing dissatisfaction with the regime- a dissatisfaction heightened by inflation.

When it became apparent that Castillo's successor was to be Robustiano Patrón Costas, a Conservative of pro-British leanings, discontent in the army produced, on June 4, 1943, a military coup destined to become a thoroughgoing social and economic revolution. Among the insurgent elements was an officers' group under the influence of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, who eventually came to control the new government and maintained control until 1955. Under his regime, the power of the landed oligarchy was broken, foreign investments were nationalized, laws were passed to improve the conditions of labor, industrialization was promoted, and the country moved in the direction of autarchy, mercantilism, and the corporate state.

While the most recent events in Argentine history cannot yet be evaluated, the political climate that has surrounded Mallea is clearly discernible. He matured in the period of Radical rule and, during the next twenty-five years, witnessed the systematic destruction of liberal democratic institutions and processes, the corruption and authoritarianism of democracy's enemies and the weakness and disorganization of its defenders.

In 1935, after his return from Europe, Mallea began the publication of works dictated by his growing concern with the role of the nation and the individual in today's world. He had arrived at no clear-cut system of philosophy, but his passionate preoccupation made it imperative that he express his thoughts and attempt to arouse others. Thus appeared Conocimiento y expresión de la Argentina, Nocturno europeo, La ciudad junto al río inmóvil, and the unbroken series of works which continues to the present time.

The problems dealt with in these writings are various: one novel may emphasize questions of individual existence; another, Argentina; in yet another, the author seems to be concerned with the world as a whole. Yet these are not three separate compartments in Mallea's thought; they interpenetrate. It is almost impossible, in a study such as this, to isolate concepts and ideas which overlap in context. For Mallea, individual fulfillment presupposes consciousness of nationality and of the world; the nation must be composed of «authentic» individuals and has, in turn, its «authentic» role to play in the world; and the world can trace its difficulties in large part to the destruction of individual personality.

This problem permeates Mallea's work. It is forever discussed: solutions are sought; negative solutions are rejected. It is dealt with in essay, autobiography, and fiction. Thus it inevitably gives rise to an other and, from the aesthetic point of view, equally important problem, that of the integration of ideological content with fiction. The manipulation of metaphysical concepts in a novel affects its unity, characters, and development. Although the novel has moved toward greater freedom of form, a line of demarcation still exists between the novel on one hand and essay and biography on the other hand. Since the novel is primarily a work of fiction, its success depends upon the author's ability to suggest an independent existence. The novel is, in a sense, a new world, whether or not it resembles the «real» world. If this fictional world is to acquire a reality of its own, all its constituent elements must belong to it and be integrated into it, regardless of their origin or their significance in the world of fact. The difficulty of creating living fiction must, then, be particularly great if one of its elements is an ideology that has reference primarily to the nonfictional world. In the attempt at fusion, the creative imagination is forced to work within narrow limits and to resolve a duality of aims to the satisfaction of both aesthetic and ideological criteria.

For the novelist concerned primarily with ideological content, there is a conflict between that content and the form in which it is expressed -or, as Mallea would put it, a conflict between ethics and aesthetics. The writer, as Mallea sees him, is not only a man who produces works of «literature» for purely aesthetic purposes; he is primarily a man, living in his nation and in his world; and if he is different from other men, it must be because he has a more acute awareness of himself, his nation, and his world, and strives to express this awareness. Like Adrián, one of Mallea's protagonists, he feels, «de un modo muy agudo, su responsabilidad de agonista en la Tierra, de hombre a quien todos los problemas inherentes a su especie le interesan sin regateos»⁹.

The present study, dealing with Mallea's writings from 1926 to 1954¹⁰, seeks to avoid the fragmentation and bias of previous criticism, since partial approaches are inadequate in evaluating an author whose books explain and complement each other to a remarkable extent. We shall examine Mallea's unsystematic and repetitious thought to facilitate the understanding of individual works; and we shall then discuss the literary expression of this thought through characters, structure, and style.

The expression of Mallea's thought is contingent upon the demands of literary creation. In order to classify and rationalize it, we must examine all his writings and the juxtaposition of his attitudes and ideas. These concern the individual, the nation, and the world; but, since the problem of universal values and the world situation lends itself to discussion under the headings of «the role of the nation» and «the role of the individual», it will be presented in this fashion to avoid excessive subdivision of Mallea's thought. We shall begin by following Mallea in his view of Argentina and his search for authentic nationality.

Mallea's concept of the world and Argentina's role in it strongly influences and conditions his quest for national values. This is a dynamic and human concept, for Mallea's world consists not only of geographic facts and human beings living a purely physical existence on a physical planet. Man is primarily a spiritual being, subject to forces perhaps less numerous than those of nature, but equally real and constantly active. In our time especially, some of these forces attack human values long taken for granted, and menace our spiritual survival. If, therefore, man is to survive as man, and if the «new humanity» in which Mallea believes is to be born, it will be only through the efforts of men whose faith is strong enough to triumph over the forces of destruction and disintegration. Since, for Mallea, liberal rationalism and belief in science are dead, his generation is faced by the bankruptcy of a whole system of beliefs and values¹¹. Man, invaded by a spirit of violence and precipitation, clutches at anything that will offer him a basis for faith; after periods of hierarchical order and periods of humanism, he finds himself in «una noche en marcha hacia su vía de luz»: man has reached the limits of the self and must now surpass it¹².

Meanwhile, Mallea sees signs of «una multitud de ciertos peligros, ciertos venenos que habitaban el aire, ciertas miasmas venidas desde lejos, ciertas miserias sanguinolentas de ultramar»¹³. One of the most obvious of these pestilences is the plague of tyranny and dictatorship, accompanied by what Mallea calls the invasion of conscience, some thing more intimate and insidious than external coercion¹⁴. This is done partly in the name of nationalism; and, while Mallea declares that there is a spirit of nationality that is an integral part of man¹⁵, he warns that «no hay nada más lóbrego y terrible que el nacionalismo de los hombres de razón corta»¹⁶. Nationalism or patriotism must be based on a knowledge of what is essential and distinctive in the nation, and it must guide a people in a direction congruent with the constant characteristics of its history¹⁷. Unfortunately, nationalistic movements often concern themselves chiefly with the exterior aspects of national life -capital, foreign possessions on the soil of the nation, imperialism- and neglect the far more important interior aspects¹⁸. As for the dictatorial regimes of pre-1939 Europe, Mallea admires the self-abnegation they inspire in their peoples, but he deplores the channeling of such sentiments into the service of a pretended restoration of fundamental harmony which is in fact a violation of it. Fascism provides an order, but a purely external, artificial order; and the enthusiasm of its followers serves the interests of a rigid state¹⁹. The superstate brings with it, through repression, inhibition, and prohibition, the falsification of moral values and the loss of internal as well as external liberty²⁰. In fact, it destroys or atrophies every form of intellectual and emotional activity²¹.

Such repression cannot be tolerated by any «hombre generoso de corazón»; and, significantly, Mallea conceives of the Argentine people as being incapable of accepting tyranny²². Although it is possible to devise systems of frank and active banditry, to think of the world in terms of the conquest of the weak and the candid,

gracias a Dios, en el fondo de nuestro fuero y pese a todo lo que espectacularmente ocurra en el mundo, hay un modo de pensar las cosas dentro del cual no se puede concebir la grandeza sino fundada en la roca de una humana honradez. Se puede pensar que todo exceso mata al hombre y que su salud está en su honra y que hay un modo espléndido de triunfar que se basa, por oposición a la barbarie, en la honra misma y en las armas que ésta levante.23

This, then, is Mallea's answer to the Germanic versions of morality which have already caused two world wars. Nor is his attack confined to the tyrannies of the so-called Right; Mallea is opposed to both «los cesarismos y las deformaciones dogmáticas», and Adrián, the hero of Nocturno europeo, finds Stalin's dictatorship just as artificial, depressing, and contingent as the others²⁴. It must not, therefore, be imagined that Mallea's thought can, without divorcing it from its context, be twisted into arguments for either the «Left» or the «Right». Deploring the self-limitation inherent in any rigid dogmatism, he declares:

Por mi parte, les diré otra cosa: yo no soy marxista ni fascista porque no creo que el hombre pueda modificarse por su accidente sino por su naturaleza. Tendría temor de esta indeterminación, por lo que ella puede importar de tibio, si no me asistiera de un modo, les aseguro, tormentoso la preocupación por una humanidad que vive con vehemencia su gran desconcierto, su pequeña comedia, su gran hambre.25

Like others who refuse to be content with the surface appearance of things, Mallea is interested in men, not labels²⁶. All his work is a search and a cry for human values, a demand for authenticity rather than coercion. He is alarmed by those who, not content with physical conquest, invade the minds and consciences of men and pervert whole nations to acceptance of their bestial systems.

One product of tyranny is war, and Mallea is proud of the record of his nation in this regard. While he believes that some conditions of stagnation will eventually lead to armed conflict²⁷, through his character Tregua he rejects the glorification of war and death voiced by the sinister Baron Morgen²⁸. As examples of valid political figures, Mallea offers us Gandhi and Mariátegui, whose atemporal and prophetic concepts he finds more real than those of their persecutors or of the modern dictators²⁹.

Mallea agrees with Ortega that ours is a time of majorities, of collectivities; but he does not seem to consider this a serious or novel phenomenon, especially when compared with the increasingly desperate plight of the individual. Mallea seems to ignore Ortega's thesis that it is the individual who suffers most from the revolt of the masses³⁰.

As a result of these various developments in the modern world, man has been attacked in his most intimate personality, and all individual and moral values are jeopardized. The Europe of the nineteenth century, which imposed on the whole world an established pattern of life and belief, ended with the war of 1914; and Mallea, in the postwar period, finds a Europe in dissolution. His attitude toward it is marked by the continual interplay of a strong cultural attraction and a profound disillusionment.

Mallea early came into contact with foreigners and with foreign culture. From his writings we can compile a catalogue of the readings of his formative years, as well as of his favorite authors: Dickens, Stevenson, Blake, Chesterton, Melville, Whitman, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Papini, Kafka, Dostoevski, Claudel, Pascal, Rimbaud, Saint Augustine, Saint Theresa, San Juan de la Cruz, Unamuno, to name only a few. The preponderance of non Hispanic writers indicates that Mallea was from childhood attracted to cultural traditions other than his own. Eventually he visited those parts of Europe which most interested him, and the impressions he received were profound and lasting.

In Cuentos para una inglesa desesperada, written before the voyage to Europe, there is ample evidence of cosmopolitanism in the style and mood of the stories and the continual mention of foreign names and places: Ofelia, Neel, Greev, Texas, Quebec, Switzerland, Yale, Oxford. In the mature works, however, we can no longer speak merely of cosmopolitanism; Mallea had come to know parts of Europe intimately, chiefly Italy, France, the Low Countries, and England. In these places, above all in Italy, he feels the attraction of art; but, more than that, he is attracted by the sense of historical continuity which pervades the atmosphere of Europe and which is lacking at home, particularly in Buenos Aires. Europe has been the center of civilization for centuries, and it is impossible to travel there without seeing the remnants of the past and realizing that many generations have lived and died in these same surroundings.

En las primeras iglesias barrocas de Bahía ya se desata ese canto que el Atlántico mecerá dulcemente hasta ir a desarrollarlo del todo en la resuelta orquestación del genio europeo. Vamos desde este mutismo a ese golfo de palabras. Y después, cuando ya nos arrastra ese aire, todo es casamiento con el espíritu de sitios, cosas y personas.31

In Brussels the walls of the ancient houses remind him of men and years gone by. Flanders recalls medieval man with his fear of hell, and the omnipresence of death³². In Holland, France, and England, Mallea is impressed by tradition and the traces of the famous dead³³.

Mallea does not, however, love European tradition for its own sake, but rather the order which history has created. Argentina, Mallea believes, offers an inert homogeneity, formless and unexpressed, whereas Europe contains a diversity of types and tones³⁴. But this variety is an ordered one, symbolized by the Place de la Concorde: «En la plaza que tenía ante su vista "concordaban", reclamando su unidad en torno al obelisco, los elementos más heterogéneamente hermosos de una rigorosa armonía»³⁵. Paris in particular is an intellectual center, where the physical has a spiritual quality and where all is made to the measure of man³⁶.The landscape of Europe, especially of Italy, seems to partake of an order; it is part of an organic conception of the world³⁷. And if all in Europe seems to be made to the measure of man, the spirit of man adjusts to material objects, to the relics of civilization³⁸. Thus between man and his environment there is a subtle harmony that results from centuries of coexistence and mutual interaction. Mallea, deeply interested in civilization and in the relation of man to the soil, was captivated by the atmosphere of Europe.

Yet there is a danger in adjusting too much to things and forgetting the human element³⁹. This danger is more acute in Europe than in America. European culture, Mallea finds, has abandoned man; it is full of individuals, but they have destroyed the element in themselves which made them more than mere numbers in a series⁴⁰. And the proportion, the spiritual architecture which is the attraction of Europe, has been invaded by a deforming element which sterilizes the spirit, by «cierto cansancio, cierta impotencia de forma exasperada»⁴¹. Men are reduced to being «islas humanas». The ends have been lost sight of; everything glorifies the means. Philosophy no longer guides, it classifies. The novel is a continuous explanation and analysis of disorder (Proust, Gide, Joyce, Huxley); and poetry has been reduced to a methodology⁴². In the midst of a secular tradition of growth and order, Europe has become a place of confusion and conjectures⁴³.

Mallea embodies this condition in the characters which populate Brussels in La bahía de silencio. Ferrier and his friends of the Teatro d'Harcourt are the only remnants of the free intellect of Europe, yet their pathetic faith is placed in something that is ending, not something that is being born. Autoriello is a figure of the last century, lost in the modern world; Scariol, a «mentalidad prehistórica», is essentially negative; Atkinson is a lyrical personage, but ineffective; and Ferrier himself has become old and broken⁴⁴. These men, reared in an atmosphere of order and tradition, seem to find themselves at the limits of their world. They reject and resist new movements, which, they realize, are not developments from but violations of the historical order; yet they themselves have nothing new to offer. They cling to a past in which they can no longer fully believe, and they are tormented by the changes about them as well as by their own sense of stagnation. Theirs is a world in dissolution⁴⁵. Mallea points out its tiredness, due to the saturation of human, physical, historical, and economic frontiers. He senses war in the air, and a desire for war bred by the impotence and confusion which result from ignoring the spiritual and abandoning eternal values⁴⁶. Man has fallen into an abyss in which all his possibilities are diminished. He is confined in cynicism and civil aberrations. All this means to Mallea the coming of a catastrophe which will dwarf that of 1914⁴⁷.

The suppression and perversion of the human factor leads Mallea to reject Europe. The Old World, which created Western civilization, has become the breeding place of the stagnation and frustrations that threaten to destroy it. The attraction remains; but Mallea can find in Europe no hope for the new world he wishes to see, a world basically and fundamentally human.

Since the task of bringing about such a world can no longer be entrusted to Europe, it has become the mission of America. At the outset of the recent holocaust, Mallea, in Meditación en la costa, called on America to take up this role and destiny. He envisioned the growth of a new Atlantic civilization⁴⁸. Presumably it would include Europe; but the creative impulse was to come from America. La bahía de silencio (p. 488) expresses the same thought:

Pero algo se cernía en el mundo, insidioso, colérico, amenazador, y algo, frente a eso, se agostaba, se mostraba débil y pervertido y moribundo. La hora americana iba a sonar. Pronto. Inmediatamente después del hundimiento del mundo viejo en sus desastrosas victorias y en sus gritos proferidos por caras hambrientas y almas cansadas de privación, resentimiento y años. La hora americana iba a sonar inmediatamente después de eso. Si no sonaba esa hora fuerte, ¿qué justificación íbamos a dar a nuestra posición de pequeño país sin armas, y qué oposición a la suerte de eterna colonia? Y sin embargo, en este mundo nuevo, éramos todavía, entre nosotros mismos, en nuestros mutuos intercambios, demasiado jóvenes, demasiado imprevisores, demasiados [sic] desconocidos. Faltaba que, de nuestro confiado avance, hiciéramos un estado de tensión, un estado de fuerza, una conciencia casi violenta en su decisión y en su energía.

By «America», Mallea means all of America, not only Argentina and not only the United States. Like Waldo Frank, he wishes to see a new culture and a new synthesis arise from New York and Buenos Aires⁴⁹, joining Anglo-Saxon America and Hispanic America. This America, in order to fulfill its mission, must be itself, not a copy of Europe⁵⁰.

The contribution of America will be its «lección de sencillez, soltura, naturalidad, dignidad, parquedad, humanidad y proporción»⁵¹. Life in America is still essentially a conjugation of man and matter, without the intervention of the historical tradition which constitutes the charm and the dehumanization of Europe⁵². America's contribution lies, then, in the field of the human, which the American is equipped to cultivate because of the spiritual rhythm of his life and the solitude which has favored the growth of conscience⁵³. Young, generous, and heroic, he works the land, moving forward with the simple dignity of the laboring man⁵⁴. Lyrically, Mallea conceives of America not as an abstraction or a geographical term but as a song -«la alegre voz de los constructores en el desierto»⁵⁵.

Mallea does not, however, believe that America is ready immediately to take on the role of leader. The American order, which is to follow the European order, is still in process of formation⁵⁶. The American world consists, as yet, of «islands»; and the emotional reservoir of America has not yet been channeled⁵⁷.

Order is one of Mallea's aims. In painting he is impressed by the maintenance of the «fundamental categories»; in architecture, by the functionalism of the Gothic⁵⁸. He admires the ordered structure of the Middle Ages -not, I believe, as an ideal of social justice but as a perfect integration of functions⁵⁹. Order, for Mallea, is the natural state; our time is «una anarquía en marcha hacia un orden»⁶⁰. All excess and violence must eventually perish; nature tends inevitably toward homogeneity and equilibrium⁶¹. Consequently, Mallea seeks an order of which the «hombre adventicio», the unauthentic man, is incapable⁶². Speaking of himself, he says: «Ved, pues, a este hombre buscando, como un enamorado perdido en una inacabable noche de incertidumbre y de mal, el alimento de su hambre de un orden, de su aspiración por crear el orden armónico y el lenguaje original de un nuevo mundo»⁶³. The order which Mallea envisions cannot be a rigid, preconceived structure; it is a superstructure which takes shape as it is adapted to reality⁶⁴. Its harmony must be based on liberty and the consciousness of that liberty⁶⁵; in other words, it is the opposite of an imposed order of the Fascist type.

In America the necessary harmony does not yet exist, or, at least, is not yet expressed. Mallea speaks of the formlessness and diffusion of American reality, and he finds everywhere «una novedad horrenda y sin redención»⁶⁶. This formlessness is calling for a form; and the American world demands «conocimiento de sí y aplicación de este conocimiento a la integración y armonización de un orden. Para mí, conocimiento no es más que comprensión jerarquizada»⁶⁷. The search for Argentine reality thus becomes an effort to determine the role of Argentina in the new order, for, if America is to take the lead in civilization, Americans must discover what America is and which qualities will fit it for its task. It is necessary to examine one's own country to determine its particular function.

Argentina's role in the development of a new order is important for Mallea: «Hay en América, como es justo, países de misión máxima y países de misión mínima. Me alegra y estimula la convicción de que la Argentina es país de misión máxima en Hispanoamérica»⁶⁸. Mallea takes pride in the peculiar position of Argentina, and he calls on her to assert herself by being true to herself.

Lo que importa es el ritmo, la fisonomía del movimiento que seamos capaces de imponer nosotros al continente, esta operante fuerza. Que sea un gesto intenso, entero y único, donde se revele esa definida expresión que nuestra más alta literatura ha recogido y seguirá recogiendo. Si uno de los aspectos más trascendentales de lo argentino consiste en la conversión a la unidad de las mareas étnicas más díscolas, hagamos de esa unidad nuestro epicentro. Urge cuidar que nuestro hombre no se parcialice, que no reciba en sí propuestas de disgregación, de deformación, de enajenamiento, que no se aliene a ninguna ocasión de dependencia, por promisoria que ésta parezca, por alto que sea el precio que se insinúe, así sea de Oriente o de Occidente, sea del escollo de Escila o del remolino de Caribdis.69

Here Mallea agrees with Ganivet and Unamuno, who hold a similar concept of a national mission⁷⁰, but emphasis on the value of authentic nationality implies the existence of an unauthentic nationality, a superficial form which maybe mistaken for the true one. Mallea therefore establishes a contrast between two Argentinas, «la una, visible; la otra, sensible. La Argentina que habla y la Argentina que vive, siente, se agita y piensa sumergida»⁷¹. Physically he divides the country into two hemispheres, rural and urban. Morally, also, there are two hemispheres: «el hemisferio del ser arraigado y el hemisferio del hombre cuya región moral es el aire». The latter, spiritually inert, represents the economic activity and prosperity of the industrial centers⁷². Mallea finds that the prevailing spirit of Buenos Aires is contrary to the authentic nature of Argentina; although he declares that the distinction he makes does not depend on where a man lives, there is a geographic implication when he poses the problem in terms of whether a man has the moral physiognomy of the city or of the country⁷³. The supposition is, of course, that the latter is more «authentic» and therefore superior.

Mallea's first reaction to the «visible Argentina» is rejection. The surface of the nation is, for him, a tremendous falsehood, a living lie. Everywhere he finds men to whom life is a farce, who have no sense of its sacramental Christian value⁷⁴. They are the «social virtuosi of fraud»⁷⁵. In his search for national integrity, Mallea discovers that everything has become a fiction, and feels, increasingly, «la execración hacia los hombres impuros, hacia los falsificadores»⁷⁶. There is activity, or the appearance of activity, everywhere; but the driving force that created the nation no longer exists⁷⁷. Complacency and self-satisfaction have reduced life to the level of a general mediocrity⁷⁸. The faults of the United States, Mallea says, are due to the infantile state of the nation; but in Argentina, men are content with surface appearances and conformity to the standards and tastes of others⁷⁹. He finds an alarming tendency toward spiritual sterility, in which large areas of the personality are destroyed⁸⁰. Many live only for the means of life and not for its ends; the important thing for them is the gesture, behind which they hide, under an appearance of refinement, their intrinsic barbarism⁸¹. This collective conformity is characterized by «una facilidad visceral y triunfante de instalación en el país, de instalación en la vida»⁸². The whole nation has become «un inmenso país librado a la inmensa orgía de una inmensa complacencia de sí»⁸³.

The leading classes and groups of the capital come under Mallea's blistering attack, especially the class with which he is most familiar, the upper bourgeoisie. He sees it as engrossed in the pursuit of so-called material progress and content with its achievement of fuller bellies. Man, naked and face to face with the soil, has been forgotten in the accumulation of material wealth⁸⁴. Progress in physical comfort is undeniable, but there has been no corresponding advance on the level of culture and of the spirit⁸⁵. Money has gone into ostentation; the mansions in Las Águilas and Los enemigos del alma symbolize the aims of the middle class -the display of wealth in sumptuous imitations of European models in order to impress others. Don León Ricarte, builder of Las Águilas, had at least the merit of making something solid out of the land; but in La torre his grandson Roberto, while admiring this construction, is not satisfied with it. He desires to build a spiritual edifice, not a monstrosity of stone. The material and «visible» aspects of Argentine life are, in sum, a denial of authentic reality: «Lo argentino no está en ese cosmopolitismo "progresista" y visible, no está en esa fácil prosperidad, en ese progreso amonedado que constituye la naturaleza de las napas turbulentas de la metrópoli, que constituye la voz adjetiva de hombres absolutamente desprovistos de gravitación sustancial»⁸⁶. Mallea speaks of «felices oligarcas sentados como Budas panzones a la intemperie del verano nacional»⁸⁷. Two of his characters spend the dinner hour discussing the bourgeois around them, finding them discreetly limited in everything except their appetites. «Y uno se pregunta a dónde va a parar todo esto, toda esta falsificación, toda esta enfermedad de lo humano que es el aburguesamiento». It arouses a desire for «castigo por el látigo y el fuego»⁸⁸.

Mallea abhors those who accumulate honors and diplomas while losing personal integrity⁸⁹. They teach in the university, «sin sentido auténtico de la vida»⁹⁰. Like Cárdenas in La bahía de silencio (pp. 277 ff.), they would sell their own country to foreign interests to gain even greater wealth, more material «progress», for themselves. Cárdenas, especially, is of symbolic value; his wife represents the true or «authentic» Argentina, betrayed and sold by the «unauthentic». Belonging to the same fauna are «the professional sustainers of national virtue» -men whose private lives leave much to be desired but who loudly demand public purity⁹¹. Some, like Gómez in La bahía de silencio (pp. 43-44), collect boleadoras and silver spurs and preach conservatism, tradition, and xenophobia after making a fortune in the service of foreigners. Equally false are the Argentines who make the pilgrimage to Paris, like the Ricartes and their friends in Las Águilas⁹²; this species despises the products of Argentine art and culture merely because they are Argentine⁹³.

These types do not represent stupidity on the part of the porteño. On the contrary, Mallea says that the man of Buenos Aires has intelligence and the ability to assimilate culture, but is unable to transform this culture⁹⁴. Mallea sees a receptive blandness to every influence, and no authentic character to mold such influences into harmony with the essentially Argentine. He finds the language of Buenos Aires corrupted, colorless, undifferentiated, soft, and liable to imprecision⁹⁵. With the same essential softness Argentina receives the emigrant, who comes from Europe with serious spiritual and economic problems and meets only «la Argentina visible», which is incapable of assimilating him⁹⁶. He brings an understandable desire for material advancement⁹⁷, but this desire is not subordinated to an authentic pattern of Argentine life. On the contrary, commercialism and impurity have invaded the «visible Argentina»⁹⁸. Buenos Aires is «lleno de comerciantes y de comeriables»⁹⁹, and «la argentina especie reclamaba en la urbe el plato de lentejas. El espíritu estaba abajo, muy abajo; hondo, muy hondo en ese cuerpo apresurado»¹⁰⁰.

The evils which beset the country are politics in the service of the politicians, nationalism in the service of those enriched by foreign enterprises, the decline of the civil conscience, and, worst, «la violación y fatal quiebra de las categorías legítimas»¹⁰¹. Exactly what the «legitimate categories» are, Mallea never says; yet we gather that the supremacy of the flesh and of commercialism is not one of them, and that the author believes in an aristocracy of the spirit which is being denied its rightful place in society.

The decay of the authentic Argentina is not, however, a purely urban phenomenon. It is true that Mallea deals with it mainly in its urban manifestations; but in Historia de una pasión argentina he portrays a village, a seeming Arcadia, whose inhabitants, however, are dirty and indolent¹⁰². Though not really a part of the «visible Argentina», of the bourgeois commercial society of the capital, this village symbolizes the worst extreme of the colonial spirit -physical and moral decadence. Mallea does not ascribe these characteristics to all provincial life, but neither does he blind himself to the perversions that can exist in rural as well as in urban life. Sloth is not a desirable alternative to the frenzied search for material advancement. Both extremes ignore the spiritual values inherent in human life: if one is materialistic in the pursuit of wealth, the other is, in its way, equally materialistic in its preference for idleness, without any of the implications of the classical otium.

Nor does Mallea accept the gaucho as the true expression of the Argentine. Although the gaucho exemplifies many of the nation's virtues, he lacks the qualities of the Argentine patrician¹⁰³. Even the most idealized literary presentations reveal the limitations of the gaucho's physical and social position. Furthermore, he is too easily identified with the superficially folkloric and is therefore a limited and anachronistic ideal.

Mallea tends to depict the generation preceding his own as representative of the «visible Argentina». Thus Dr. Dervil, in La bahía de silencio (pp. 32-33), is an essentially good man, but he belongs to a generation which, lacking faith and confining itself to skepticism and cold reasoning, has been incapable of producing martyrs. Likewise, Román Ricarte, in Las Águilas (pp. 225-226), feels lost between the dynamic generation of his father and the potentially creative generation of his son. He himself, who has done nothing, feels that he is already past and judged. Román is a good man. But this is not enough; with all his patience and kindness, he has never shown moral strength. Mallea's attitude toward him is that of the Apocalypse: because he is lukewarm, he is to be spewed out¹⁰⁴. He lacks the creative urge, be it in the spiritual sense of the preoccupied youth or in the material sense of the men who first struggled with the Argentine soil. His generation is content to reap the fruits of the status quo, to embody that passive repletion which Mallea characterizes as «Budas panzones».

This, then, is for Mallea the «visible Argentina», the superficial aspect of the nation. It consists of fraud and farce, of a denial of true nationality and an attempt to be what one is not, or at least to appear to be what one is not. As long as this condition exists, the country can not expect, in Mallea's view, to take her rightful place in the world as a «país de misión máxima». The authentic individual, concerned with true values and with the existence of himself, his nation, and the world, must react against the fraudulent appearance, expose its falseness, and attempt to discover and hold to its opposite, the authentic.

The existence of this opposite is one of the major theses of Mallea's Work. He clearly defines the dual configuration of his country in La bahía de silencio, through the exclamation of Martín Tregua:

Aquel país [«la Argentina visible»] no era el país. Aquel país que veíamos no era el país que queríamos. Aquel país que tocábamos no era el país que esperábamos. Debajo de la púrpura queríamos ver el sayal. El sayal es to que está cerca de la piel y la piel es lo que está cerca de la sangre. En el país, la púrpura mentía.105

In Historia de una pasión argentina he traces his rejection, from an early age, of what elsewhere he calls «una vida nacional violentada en su voluntad y enturbiada en su superficie, negada en su profundidad, ensordecida en su sentimiento»¹⁰⁶. Mallea could neither accept what he saw as true, nor be content with it. Hence his conviction that another, more authentic Argentina must lie under the deceptive surface.

This attitude derives both from Mallea's passion for truth and from his concept of the nation's role. The contribution of a people must grow spontaneously from its own true nature. Mallea's literature is therefore not merely a rejection of the «visible Argentina», but also a search for the bases of true nationality. Here, and in his concept of the New World, Mallea is close to Whitman and, mutatis mutandis, might well say with the latter:

I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own, as the land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems to-day, and for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective.107

In all Mallea's works the attack on the «visible Argentina» is balanced by the quest for the true, the authentic, the «invisible Argentina». Mallea's writings are not meant to be satire, but prophecy.