Abstract
This chapter examines journalistic chronicling in the 1930s Argentina as a reworking of a French genre catering to the distinct Argentinian circumstances of the time. Working from a series of reportages written by one of Argentina’s foremost avant-garde poets, Raúl González Tuñón, the chapter draws attention to the retooling of the genre for the constitution of an Argentinian vernacular modern literariness based on periodicalism. The chapter also shows the overlapping of reportages and avant-garde poetry in both themes and techniques. The essay argues that literary modernization was the result not only of the highbrow European Modernism, but also of exchanges across borders of high/low culture, of genre, and of national polities, at a time when the rise of mass culture coincided with the rise of avant-garde art.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The chronique as a genre emerged in France by the middle of the nineteenth century, although its roots can be traced to the sketches of manners of the previous century in England.
- 3.
The Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación began telegraphic service in 1877.
- 4.
Pierre Giffard’s Le Sieur de Va partout: souvenirs d’un reporter (Paris: M. Dreyfous, 1880) is a milestone of this process in French journalism.
- 5.
Crítica, founded by Natalio Botana in 1913, developed a reputation as “the people’s newspaper” by the 1920s, emphasizing the features that had guaranteed the success of mass journalism since the beginning of the century: a diverse structure, topical photographs, fictionalized news, graphic satire, support from advertising, regular payments to authors and producers, and attractive special issues with unprecedented print-run surges. It used sensationalism to cover crime news and to criticize social problems, and also covered the lives of workers and the world of poverty from a point of view that sought to be in tune with the most vulnerable sectors of the population. Declaring itself “on the people and for the people,” the newspaper demonstrated a strong interest in “the popular,” which in Argentina was beginning to be correlated with the masses. From 1925 onward, Crítica added several writers who had links to the aesthetic avant-garde of the Martín Fierro magazine to its editorial staff. In 1931, Crítica was shut down by the military government, which it had previously supported; its director was imprisoned and then forced into exile. In February 1932, Natalio Botana was able to return to the country and reopen the paper (Saítta 1998).
- 6.
Martín Fierro (1924–27), whose subtitle was “Bimonthly newspaper of art and free criticism,” was the main organ of the aesthetic avant-garde of the Florida group, which gathered the most important young innovative writers of the time, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Raúl González Tuñón and Oliverio Girondo. Its program was based on interest in formal innovations, the desecration of art, a simultaneously local and cosmopolitan inflection and anti-Hispanism. Although its concrete acts were less radical than its declarations, its Manifesto rejected academic solemnity in favor of a search for the new and a redefinition of the idea of art. In order to be reaffirmed as modern artists, the writers of the so-called “new sensitivity” rejected the mass culture with which they were actually linked. Their concrete practices, including the newspaper Crítica’s hiring of several avant-garde writers to its editorial staff, demonstrated a productive exchange of resources between modern art and mass culture.
- 7.
See “Tres poemas de algún país,” “Poemas de la vidriera de una juguetería” (González Tuñón 1930).
- 8.
Porteño (slang): from Buenos Aires.
- 9.
Here are abundant references in this work to the roaming nature of the poet (walker, stroller) and of his production “on the way”. In the same year Todos bailan was published, the first issue of the magazine Caballo verde para la poesía included “Sobre una poesía sin pureza” (“On Poetry with No Purity”) by Pablo Neruda and “Poema caminando” (Poem Walking) by Raúl G. Tuñón.
- 10.
The poem “Las brigadas de choque” had been published in 1933 in the magazine Contra. La revista de los francotiradores. A group of important writers and artists, including Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, León Felipe and Miguel Hernández, among others, signed a declaration against the censorship of Tuñón’s poem and against the judicial persecution of the poet (Orgambide 1998).
- 11.
See “El general Flor Intrencherado” and “Los seis hermanos rápidos dedos en el gatillo” (González Tuñón 1935a).
- 12.
La rosa blindada was published by Horizonte in 1962. The most recent single-volume edition is almost impossible to find today (Tierra Firme 1993). Until fairly recently, it was included in Poesía Reunida (Seix Barral 2011); though this collection did include the complete text, it did not include the dedications or the prologues in previous editions.
- 13.
The poet Juan Gelman, winner of the Cervantes Prize, considered Raúl González Tuñón as one of the main influences in his writing, and called him “the initiator of a path that great Latin American and Spanish poets – Vallejo, Hernández, Neruda, Alberti – would tread later” (1997, 113–114).
- 14.
- 15.
See “La historia viva bajo el acueducto inmortal” (González Tuñón 1936a).
- 16.
See “Cementerio proletario (Jean Allemane)” (González Tuñón 1936a).
- 17.
- 18.
Emphasis is mine.
- 19.
Emphasis is mine.
- 20.
See “Desocupación” (González Tuñón 1935b).
- 21.
See the unsigned review “Un libro acerca de la Patagonia, por A. S. Exupery,” Crítica, 26 April 1932.
- 22.
- 23.
La Rosa Blindada was printed in May 1936.
- 24.
“La primera bomba en el corazón de la cuenca,” series “Redescubrimiento de España” in El Suplemento, 29 April 1936.
- 25.
In Manifesto of Surrealism (1924/1969), André Breton notes, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is a quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.” See also “Lo real y lo fabuloso” and “Más sobre lo real y lo fabuloso” (González Tuñón 1932d, e).
- 26.
“Towards the middle of October or when the shower of the coal falls on the rails and a red lantern casts a cold ray on the roof that covers the bones of summer. / When all the butterflies of small forests and blue mountains have already died. / […] Up, on the truck, he sets off towards the low voice of the desolate kitchens, and the heads of dreamless children roll, under the old coal moons, oh, dead rays […] / I have heard him tell some survivor, and I knew that at the edge of the bloody, burst up, children, at the edge of the mothers with maggots, pigeons and roots, stones and flames, needles and knives, oh mothers of the land of coal and gold, the guards were executing the dead” (“Dos historias de niños,” in González Tuñón 1936a).
- 27.
See the unsigned article “Sobre una poesía sin pureza.” Caballo verde para la poesía no. 1, October 1935 (Dir: Pablo Neruda).
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Rogers, G. (2020). Between Poetry and Reportage: Raúl González Tuñón, Journalism and Literary Modernization in 1930s Argentina. In: Aliakbari, R. (eds) Comparative Print Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36891-3_5
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