grotesques of the neoliberal street – 2024-08-25 01:53:04

The phenomenology by Roberto Arlt reveals a repertoire of urban neologisms, migratory jargons, from a lingua franca, port and serial, against the edifying lives of modernity (Coppola & Zubiría, 2000). The hotbed of races -mixtures- in Argentina in 1900, precipitated an aesthetic disillusionment expressed in hyperbolic and unknowable characters, thrown into mutual contempt. It is common to name The Seven Madmen y The flamethrowers as “crisis texts” and doomed to failure (Beatriz Sarlo, 2000). A urban epistemology -street and rage in the neoliberal city- is a state of shadows, lights and vileness. The city would be a porous zone between the “significant comic” and the “absolute comic” of the meaningless. The cry of the street in Chile, the 2019 revolt – as a form of political theatre – could be an empire of laughter and excessencouraged by paroxysmal grotesque -mass euphoria- that raised messianisms (redemptive) hiding their critical narcissisms and two-faced agendas. Added to this is the measured-adaptive criticism (“grotesques of progressivism”) that under the same events condemned violence and claimed common sense, and a curatorial spokesperson -corporations- dedicated to sublimate all realism (pax). Although the scripts are not symmetrical in power relations, the erasure of the limits was a matter of months and has a face laughableThe sequence that goes from fervor to security – “powerful enemy” – took a year to distill another Chile. A plot where flattery and contempt for the social outbreak, lily and delirium, It comprises a “vaporous border” that combines disparate figures, the exultant (“First Line”), the altered efforts of the Constitutional Convention to an order with guns – security passivity – which leads us to comic words –comical verb. He grotesque scenic, is that “liminal creature” (“hyperbolic”) which, in its transgressive emptiness, becomes adaptive to each era, context or event. Here the semantic polices that go from the utopian-contestant (revolt) to the anomie-discomfort (order) imply a social body dislocated(comedy). The tense filigree between “tragedy” and “comedy” that disarticulates all normality is key in Rioplatense literature. In short, the Argentine chronicler naturalizes forms of violence and cultivates the sad energies that spread in daily routines. The street would be the existential sadness of an era. But not everything is sadistic enjoyment in Arlt, nor is it possible to deny the lunfa-speaking (tano-dialectal) society that the author subjected to psychoanalysis to account for the itinerant human condition. It is not just any literary invention. Mirta Arlt once recalled that “If Borges, as someone has rightly said, was our luxury, Roberto Arlt [ha sido] our reality”. Despite the material conditions that allow us to decipher existential pathologies (Arltian pen) a zone of nihilism prevails that leads to the annulment of meaning (To be).

The play by Armando Discépolo, “Babylon. An hour among servants” (1925), was the condition of possibility -of his existential prose- to impute the disaffection in his infinite immanence. The underworld of a liminal work favors a writing impulse for the comedy, the buffoonish and pathologies of untranslatable passers-by each other. Babylonlike the face of a mourning era, reveals a home of Porteños crowded togetherwhich begins in the kitchen and ends in a living room. A vulgar spectacle that reveals the degradation “hidden in all those puppets” that are the beasts without class differences. Babylonas plot disciple -dystopia- was a real revelry “thanatically sublimated” in the novel tragic of Arlt. This exposes the vileness of all emotional experience that does not differentiate between servants, but the drop of every subject as a hostage of incorruptible baseness. In his repudiation of the literary canon, the abyss appears invoking existences of cruelty that reveal the parricidal condition in order to enjoy the parents. The pathos of the grotesques invokes infernal forces, making them present in “our world”. Arlt, and his dissonant prose, never stops splintering existential anguish and vernacular sadness. The author of Porteño Etchingsin the “depth is where these mean and sympathetic souls are animated at the same time (…) the ferocity that is hidden in all those living puppets, with whom we rub shoulders at the club, at charity parties and at spas”. And he adds (1925), “it is the fourth or fifth time in these days that I have seen the representation of Babylon at the Teatro Cómico… I think it is the masterpiece of [Armando] Discépolo”. The question is, was there an aesthetic pact between Armando Discépolo and Roberto Arlt’s psychoanalysis? It was Horacio González who warned us that, unlike Armando Discépolo’s criticism of oligarchic myths, Arlt assumed the decadence and mists of a lumpen (neoliberal) city.

Babylon It would be a period metaphorwhere Arlt punishes the mute life. Then, he declares the destruction of everyday life, discards the leviathan agreements of a solitary contractuality and demystifies betrayal. Finally, he embraces an infinite poetics of crisis. In the Babylon For Armando -playwright- there is no original language, but rather a link of expressive flows that oscillate between a representational mask and a true face.

In the Argentina of the Centenary, after the almost obligatory passage through the Hotel de Immigrantsthe port subjects, without any feeling of Italianness are grotesque, lewd, deformed from the tenement, that cultivate aesthetic waste. A degraded city characterized by the underground cornering where criminal subjectivities pile up. In effect, an art of waste that manages a factory of servants, where submissive, tired and destitute bodies appear. deformedThe terrible, disturbing and obscene erupts.

Babylon As a statement that reveals an epochal exhaustion, it can not only be conceived from a transitional text of Argentine drama, but as a fundamental element in a peninsular untranslatability -regional- that unfolds within the aesthetic tensions of the simulation (farce) and a documentary rejection. In addition, there are many idiolects that identify nationalities -separatisms- in various buffoonish characters. In this way, numerous racial confrontations occur: Galician-Italian, French-German, Italian-Creole, among others. The immigrant suffers from a exilic temporalitywhere exile will be the expulsion from the place of belonging. Then comes abandonment, where only what can become one’s own appears, namely, the “impossibility of living and dying.”

The hyperbolization from the descriptions it implies that crying is laughing in the same gesture. grotesque It is when the comic is nothing but the tragic seen from behind. Armando Discépolo describes an identity tragedy. What runs through here was the expression of the subjects of uprooting, whose only possibility of recognition was -and is- the humiliation described in the pen –rabid– by Roberto Arlt. Italians trapped in dialects of the intraductionwhich are usually characterized by grotesque movements (somewhat manly, a little doll-like, a little beastly with clumsy or exhausted movements). Finally, a city soaked in cunning, alibis, lies and popular vileness. Arltian dramaturgy projects Babylon like that mirror in whose projection no one wants to see themselves portrayed.