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Leopoldo Marechal has become a chosen precursor of many contemporary Argentine writers, cineastes, and intellectuals, and so his novels - universally recognized but rarely studied - demand treatment from a contemporary critical sensibility. This study departs from the line of criticism that reads Marechal as a Christian apologist, arguing instead that Marechal's metaphysical' novels are really metafictional, ludic exercises informed by ironic scepticism. Adan Buenosayres (1948) inverts the Christian-Platonist narrative of redemption through the Logos; in El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo (1965) Marechal, tongue firmly in cheek, leads his readers on a metaphysical wild-goose chase; and in Megafsn, o la guerra (1970) he finally lays apocalypticism to rest. The close readings of his novels presented in this book help to lay the theoretical groundwork underpinning Marechal's reinscription in contemporary Argentine culture.
List of contents
Introduction - irony, parody, satire, apocalypse in history and literature, problems in Marechalian criticism; "Adan Buenosayres" - parodic revelation -diremptive structure, beginnings and end(ing)s, prologue and epilogue, authors and (unreliable) narrators, Adan's personal apocalypse; metahistory and the cycle of language - apocalyptic metahistory, the cycle of language, modes of language in Adan's interior monologue, ironic motifs, Adan's poetry; Adan's poetics -Platonism and "vanguardismo", nominalism and realism, the book of the world; light against darkness - poetry versus science - the "tertulia", adventures in Saavedra, Schultze intervenes; Schultze and "El viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia" - Schultze as Adan's teacher, Cacodelphia: the last judgement as carnival; rhetorical politics in Cacodelphia, "Mise en abyme" - the story of Don Ecumenico, the Paleogogue; textual apocalypse - "El Banquete de Severo Arcangelo" - metahistory - "reprise" and "ricorso", symposium as "sainete", Andres Papagiourgiou's vision; coda and conclusion - Samuel Tesler's last word in "Megafon, o la guerra".
About the author
NORMAN CHEADLE teaches in the Department of Modern Languages, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario.
