SOURCE: Piglia, Ricardo. “Sarmiento the Writer.” In Sarmiento, Author of a Nation, pp. 127-44. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Piglia contends that Sarmiento played a key role in the development of Argentine literature and that his writing reflects changes in the burgeoning country.]

To speak of Sarmiento the writer is to speak of the impossibility of being a writer in nineteenth-century Argentina. The first problem: one must visualize within this impossibility the state of a literature with no autonomy; politics invades everything, there is no space, functions are intermingled, one cannot be only an author. The second concern: that same impossibility has been the condition for writing an incomparable work. Sarmiento was able to write some of the best texts in Argentine literature because to be a writer was impossible. His greatest works (particularly Facundo) express within their forms this central paradox.

The euphoria felt by Sarmiento regarding the power of his written word is part of the same contradiction. His linguistic megalomania seems to be an example of the arrogant ideology of the failed artist, as analyzed by Philip Rieff in various contemporary politicians. If it is true that the politician triumphs where the artist fails (the case of Mario Vargas Llosa comes to mind), we might say that in nineteenth-century Argentina, literature can exist only where politics fails. Indeed, political eclipse and defeat are at the origin of the founding works of this nation's literature. Facundo, Martín Fierro, Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, and the novels of Eugenio Cambaceres were all written under the conditions of a forced autonomy or trial.

In the case of Sarmiento, his literary writing can be dated (1838-1852), and it is not able to survive his triumph. After the fall of Rosas, Sarmiento can no longer write. He turns to other fields, as his fifty-two volumes of Obras completas cannot fail to show. (There is a particular scene in which Sarmiento narrates this termination: “That night I went to Palermo and, taking pen and paper from the desk of Rosas, I wrote four words to my friends in Chile with this date, Palermo de San Benito, February 4, 1852.” A decisive moment, a symbolic gesture: his writing has reached the plateau of power, and from this moment on there will be almost no room, separation, or place for literature.¹)

José Hernández, half fugitive, half hidden in a room at the Hotel Argentino after the defeat of Ricardo López Jordán, writes Martín Fierro in order to kill “the tedium of hotel life.” Lucio V. Mansilla, relieved of active duty while being tried for the execution of a deserter, awaits the verdict and during this empty time writes Una excursión a los indios ranqueles. The clearest and most deliberate example of the construction of such distancing is that of Eugenio Cambaceres, who in 1876 resigns his seat in the House of Representatives and abandons his political future so as to dedicate himself to literature. (And the Argentine novel owes a great debt to that resignation.)

During the nineteenth century, Argentine writers seem to live a dual reality. There is a secret interior to their public lives: they are ministers, ambassadors, representatives, but they cannot be writers. (“I am well, relatively well, but I shall be happy only when I begin writing novels,” Eduardo Wilde says to Miguel Cané.) Argentine literature of the nineteenth century might have been the metaphor of Hell for a writer like Flaubert.

Indeed, there is a close contemporaneity between Flaubert's well-known letter to Louise Colet, written in January of 1852, in which he expresses his desire to write a book about nothing, and Sarmiento's writing of Campaña en el Ejército Grande. Flaubert's desire synthesizes the highest point in the independence of literature: to write a book about nothing, a book that searches for absolute autonomy and pure form. And it is within that private letter from Flaubert to his lover that we find contemporary literature's manifesto. A historical process is condensed: Marx and Flaubert are the first writers to speak of the opposition between art and capitalism. The unproductive character of literature is antagonistic toward bourgeois reasoning, and Flaubert's artistic conscience is an extreme case of this opposition. He creates a book about nothing, a book that would be good for nothing, that would be beyond the register of bourgeois utility: the maximum autonomy in art is at the same time the most acute moment in its rejection of society. Quite the contrary, in January of 1852 Sarmiento searches within the effectiveness and utility of the written word. In Campaña en el Ejército Grande he argues with Justo José de Urquiza (who neither listens, nor recognizes him, nor answers much, and who finally intimidates him with his dog, Purvis) and futilely attempts to convince him of the importance and social power of the written word. Campaña narrates this conflict and in truth represents an explicit debate (a campaign) about the function and utility of writing.

The asymmetry between Sarmiento and Flaubert (each representing the best writing in his respective language at the time) summarizes the problems of that incongruence in contemporary culture which has defined Argentine literature ever since its beginnings. The fringe and desert positions of this literature² (distanced from both colonial heritage and pre-Hispanic tradition, and Europeanized from the margins) are made manifest in shapes of scission and dual temporality. Things appear concurrently contemporaneous and outdated. The first readings of the Salón Literario (1837) seek to define a strategy to permit both the disintegration of this distance and the materialization of present culture. The dominant cultural tradition in Argentina up to the time of Jorge Luis Borges is characterized by the tension between anachronism and utopia. (Obviously, Borges understood how to explore the combination of anachronism and utopia to the utmost, and he built on it both his fictions and his theory of reading. This combination represents the fundamental material of “Pierre Menard.”) So we find the basic question always to be, Where is the present? Or, better yet, How can one be in the present? And this question is a central theme in the works of Sarmiento.

In the origins of Argentine literature, this nonsynchrony is evident above all in problems having to do with the autonomy and function of literature. While European literature has achieved an institutionalized separateness in literary practices and categories, in Argentine literature these issues exist only in the conscience of writers and in their will to establish a national literature. We might say that in Argentina there exists a dual history of the place of literature.

On the one hand, Argentine literature responds to general logic and defines its function in relation to other social practices. In the nineteenth century, the practice that determines the place of literature is politics. (There exists a close relationship between the history of the autonomy of literature and the history of the constitution of the state.) Argentine literature is a selfautonomizing force; it tends to dissociate political power from another power that transcends it (“the intelligentsia”). It is here that the specific function of writing is defined. On the other hand, we discover the attempt to create an emancipated literature whose autonomy is defined in relation to foreign literature. Argentine literature is autonomous because it seeks to sever links with the Spanish tradition and to carry out in literature the same revolution undertaken in politics and economics. However, this emancipated literature is constructed in alliance with one foreign literature (already autonomous): French literature taken as world literature.

This dual relationship—with political practices and foreign literature—represents a unique method of autonomization of literature and its function. The definition of what it means to be an author is developed in this double bond. “One must keep one eye on the French intelligentsia and the other fixed on the entrails of the nation”: Esteban Echeverría's motto synthesizes this dual process. Strabismic vision represents the true national tradition: Argentine literature is constituted within a double vision, a relationship of difference and alliance with other practices and other languages and other traditions. One eye is on the Aleph, the very universe; the other eye sees the shadow of barbarians, the fate of South America. The strabismus is asynchronic: one eye sees the past, the other is on the future.

The history of Argentine literature is marked by separation, double temporality, two autonomies, by strabismus.

I would now like to analyze this pattern in the figure of Sarmiento the writer. For a certain indecisiveness of place determines an uncertain aspect within his works: the displaced use of fiction. Sarmiento himself, in Recuerdos de provincia, so defines his entrance into the world of writing: “With ‘La pirámide’ the fantastic fictions of the imagination helped me for the first time to mask the indignation of my heart.” The question, of course, is, On which subsequent occasions was this also true?

In the use of fiction in nineteenth-century Argentina, the tension between politics and literature becomes coded, and one could say that the difficulty of autonomy in this literature is made manifest in the form of resistance to fiction. During the birth of Argentine literature, fiction is antagonistic toward the political use of language. For the effectiveness of words is bound to truth in all its forms: responsibility, necessity, seriousness, the morality of deeds, the weight of reality. Fiction becomes associated with idleness, gratuitousness, a squandering of the senses, that which cannot be shown. “It would have been simple for me,” says Marcos Sastre during the inauguration of the Salón Literario, “to have gathered together a great number of those books which so praise youth. That multitude of useless novels piling up daily in the European presses. Books that should be viewed as a truly barbaric invasion in the midst of civilization. Vandalism that seizes from the light of progress an immense number of virginal intellects and perverts a thousand pure hearts.” Sarmiento uses similar terms, and in Viajes he refers to the “mob” of novelists “who possess those agitated spirits which make a childish society out of Paris, as they listen with gaping mouths to those tellers of tales who entertain children, Dumas, Balzac, Sue.”

The keenest example of this reading of the period can be found in the fate of El matadero by Esteban Echeverría. Argentine literature's first fictional text remained unpublished for more than thirty years. It should also be stated that this text failed to be published precisely because it was fiction, and fiction had no place save as a private, secret writing. Within the pages of El matadero, written in 1838 and lost among Echeverría's papers until its publication in 1871, one finds hidden a metaphor of the displacement of fiction in Argentine literature.

To attempt to create a history of this place of fiction is to trace the history of Argentine fiction's double autonomy: on the one hand, its relation to political discourse; on the other, its relation to foreign forms and genres of an already autonomous fiction (in particular, the novel). Sarmiento's writing is defined within this dual bond.

1

It should be said that the history of Argentine fiction begins twice. Or perhaps it is better to say that the history of Argentine fiction begins with the same twice-told scene of terror and violence. Initially, on the first page of Facundo, which is to say the first page of Argentine literature, and at the same time (but in a displaced fashion) in El matadero by Echeverría.

Recall the anecdote that opens Facundo. Sarmiento chooses a decisive moment in his life:

Toward the end of 1840, I left my native land, banished because of shame, crippled, full of bruises, jabs and blows received the day before in one of those bloody bacchanalias staged by soldier-types and political gangs. Upon passing by the baths of Zonda, under the nation's coat of arms which on happier days I had painted in a salon, I wrote with coal these words: On ne tue point les idées. The officials who received word of the deed sent a commission assigned to decipher the hieroglyphics, which were said to contain ignoble outbursts, insults, and threats. Once the translation was heard, they said, “Well, what does that mean?”

A story both comic and pathetic, this is the tale of a persecuted man who flees into exile and writes in another language. He takes his body, marked by the violence of barbarism, but also leaves his mark: he inscribes a hieroglyphic in which culture is coded, thus creating a microscopic counterpart to the great enigma that he endeavors to translate by deciphering the life of Facundo Quiroga. The opposition between civilization and barbarism is crystalized in this scene where readability comes into play.

Sarmiento seeks to create a clear distance between himself and the barbarism from which he becomes an exile by resorting to culture. We must not forget that his motto is a quotation: a sentence from Diderot which Sarmiento misquotes and attributes to Fortoul, thus opening up a line of equivocal references, false quotations, and apocryphal erudition which is a sign of Argentine culture at least up to the time of Borges. Within this anecdote we find condensed a situation that Argentine literature will repeat with certain variations throughout its history: the head-on collision between the man of letters and the world of the barbarians.

El matadero represents the horrible counterpart to the same situation. In Echeverría's story the cultivated man is inserted into the world of the other, in the working-class neighborhood of the slaughterhouses and the borders of the riverbank. Rather than beginning with exile and flight, this fiction begins with the hero's entry into enemy territory; the violence that Sarmiento escapes appears as the nucleus of the tale. The hero is trapped by the barbarians and dies harassed and tortured.

Facundo could be viewed as beginning where El matadero left off, and this continuity of violence, torture, and exile found at the start has been maintained throughout Argentine history, taking shape in various signs. However, if for Sarmiento the violence has been left behind and the power of the written word affirmed in the form of another language used to mark the difference (“What does that mean?” the barbarians asked themselves), in Echeverría the violence is up front, and the story's language remains trapped, like the body, by the confrontation. The text reproduces the conflict on a lexical plane creating a disjunction between the cultivated, presumptuous language (almost unreadable for us today, a language of translation we might say) of the learned unitarian and the oral, popular language of the marginal riverbank federals. And it is paradoxical that the lasting value of El matadero lies in the vitality of this popular tongue which has betrayed Echeverría's presumptions and explicit ideology. The author sought to duplicate within its style a value judgment presupposed by the collision between a refined man and uncultivated barbarians. The story's texture has inverted this opposition, and the most vital aspect of El matadero is the oral register where popular language appears for the first time in Argentine literature (apart from the gauchesca). On the very first pages of Facundo and El matadero, we discover a confrontation of translation—the foreign tongue, the literary tongue (lacking footnotes, a more-or-less savage erudition), bilingualism—with the signs of violence and voice: the popular phrasing, the primitive tones of the national tongue. Moreover, the tension of the dual register is marked in works as different as those produced by Roberto Arlt, Borges, Leopoldo Marechal, Julio Cortázar, Cambaceres, and Arturo Cancela, and it is when the fracture is welded that the greatest texts of Argentine literature are produced.

Thus we find two versions of the origin of Argentine fiction: one, the triumphant and parodic; the other, the hallucinative and paranoid recreation of an oft-told confrontation. Furthermore, it could be said that paranoia and parody are the two great modes of representation of the popular classes in Argentine literature.

Between those initial texts, however, there exists a key difference that I am particularly interested in delineating, for it is this difference which synthesizes the topic of the present essay. While the beginning of Facundo is set forth as a true story and has an autobiographical form, El matadero is a fiction—and because it is a fiction, it can enter into the world of the barbarians and give them a place and make them speak. In Argentina fiction is developed in an attempt to represent the world of the other, whether he be called barbarian, gaucho, Indian, or immigrant. This is because, during the entire nineteenth century, in order to speak of oneself, to tell about one's group or one's class, autobiography is used. Learned men account for themselves in the form of true tales; they account for others with fiction.

Literature does not exclude the barbarian, it fictionalizes him, which is to say that it constructs him precisely as the author subjectively imagines him. The enemy is an object that has the privilege of being represented. One must enter the enemy's world, imagine his interior dimensions, his true secrets, his ways of being. The other must be made known in order for him to become civilized. The strategy of fiction implies the ability to represent the hidden interests of the enemy.

The barbarian is a synecdoche for that which is real: in his physical traits one can read, as with a map, the dimensions and characteristics of the reality that determines him. Phrenology is cartography. The other is not just a subject or object, but rather the expression of an alternative world. Barbarism is a metaphor for the spatial conception of a culture: they are on the other side of the border; in order to get to know them, it is necessary to enter (like the unitarian) into their world, to move within one's mind to that enigmatic territory which begins beyond the confines of civilization.

The invention of this split reality is the nucleus of Facundo. The opposition between civilization and barbarism³ describes this dual, conflictual universe politically; at the same time, though, it constructs it. The complexity of the book derives from the attempt to keep the two realms united. One could comment that Sarmiento invents a form so as not to fracture this connection. The pure difference is what the text unites: it is not simply a question of theme; the writing reproduces the split reality (and constructs the unity). The form of civilization and the form of barbarism are represented in different ways. The system of quotations, cultural references, translations, epigraphs, and marks of foreign reading that support civilization's word stand in opposition to the oral roots, the testimonies and tales, the traces of lived experience that duplicate and give voice to the barbarian world. (“I have heard it during an Indian celebration …” “An illiterate man has provided me with many of the deeds to which I have been referring.” “I myself have heard the terrible details.” “Later I obtained the circumstantial narration from a witness to the deed.”) There are two forms of truth, two systems of proof that reproduce the structure of the book and duplicate the topic. The tension between the written word and reality, between culture and experience, between reading and hearing, generates a basic difference. Civilization and barbarism are cited in distinct ways, and the man who writes Facundo has access to both versions and is able to translate them. This double movement is represented in the very first page of the book: the writer stands on the border, between two tongues, between European quotation and the marks on his body, and this is the place of enunciation.

Facundo establishes an imaginary relationship between two juxtaposed and antagonistic worlds. The book's problems with literary form are concentrated within the title's and. (No one possesses a more personal sense of the conjunction than Sarmiento. His writing unites heterogeneity. Polysyndeton is the mark of his style.) Politics tends to make this and be read as or. Fiction establishes itself within this conjunction. The book is written on the border: to situate oneself at the limit is to be able to represent one world from the vantage point of another, to be able to narrate the passage and the crossing.

For this reason, Sarmiento is interested in the way James Fenimore Cooper was able to fictionalize the intersection between two realms. “The only North American romance writer who has been able to acquire European celebrity is Cooper, because he has taken the theater for his descriptions to the border between the barbarian and the civilized ways of life.”

In reality, Sarmiento attributes to Cooper the virtues that belong to the genre. In Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács defined the novel as the form imposed upon an alienated world.⁴ Beyond normalized existence and trivial experience the horizon of another enigmatic reality appears (simultaneously demonic and poetic) which seems to be past logic and reason. The novel form can be constituted (as Don Quijote illustrates) when it is possible to conceive of a more intense existence in another world, juxtaposed against everyday life. The nostalgia for an experience that would transcend immediacies is transformed into an imaginary construction of an alternative reality with its own truth and its own laws: the novel narrates the relationship between the two worlds, and the hero is the one who goes from one side to the other.

The opposition between civilization and savagery is the ideological name for the novelistic scission. The dual reality that constitutes the genre's form appears inverted and politicized in Sarmiento. This is why Raúl Orgaz is right when he insists that Sarmiento constructed the opposition between civilization and barbarism with Cooper's novels in mind.⁵ The struggle between two opposite forces that define this reality forms a constant in historical thought during this period, and it appears in Sarmiento from the very beginning. However, Facundo is written as it is (and it is a unique book) because Sarmiento discovers within the genre a method to represent the experience of a divided world. As Lukács has pointed out, the genre transforms the single discursive dimension of the metaphysical order and shows that the dual reality can also be grasped as figure and anecdote. What Sarmiento reads into the genre is this figurative and not only discursive representation of meaning: to produce the experience of signification; to foreclose interpretation in an image before it becomes an idea. The novelistic experience of this divided reality is the kernel of the literary form in Facundo.

We do not read Facundo as a novel (which it is not) but rather as a political use of the genre. (Facundo is a proto-novel, a novel machine, a museum of the future novel. In this sense it establishes a tradition.) The argument with the genre stands implicit in the book. Facundo is written prior to the consolidation of the novel in Argentina and prior to the constitution of a state. The book is situated in relation to these two future forms. It both discusses the conditions that the government should possess (chap. 15) and the possibilities of a New World novel in the future (chap. 2). On the one hand, Facundo is the kernel of the state (in the sense used by Claude Lévi-Strauss in discussing totemism as the kernel of the state); on the other, it is the kernel of the Argentine novel. Possessing something of the prophetic and the utopic, it produces a mirage effect: within the vacuum of the desert, whatever one hopes to see shines as if real. The book is constructed between the novel and the state: anticipating and announcing them both, it stands between these two antagonistic forms. Facundo is neither José Mármol's Amalia nor Juan Bautista Alberdi's Bases: it is composed of the same but transformed material, like a crossbreed or a double form.

The key to this form (the invention of a genre) resides in the fact that the novelistic representation does not gain autonomy by itself but is, instead, controlled by the political word. This is where the effectiveness of the text and of its strategic function is defined: the fictional dimension acts as an instrument of truth. Therefore, the book presents a dispute regarding its own norms of interpretation that move throughout the story. Facundo proposes a type of truth different from what it practices. The discussion concerning the distortions, errors, exaggerations, and novelization of reality delineated by Sarmiento's contemporaries is directly bound to this issue. From the detailed revisions made by Valentín Alsina up to the opinions of Alberdi, Gutiérrez, and Echeverría,⁶ all criticism tends to agree that the book fails to obey the norms of truth that it posits. At the same time, everyone recognizes that this incongruity is the basis of its literary effectiveness. (Only when the book becomes canonized through its ideological triumph does this debate find its resolution.)

Facundo is constructed within the tension between the discursive and the figurative character of meaning: according to where the emphasis is placed, one reads one thing or another. On one level, the book is neither true nor false; it simply proposes an experience of reality, and this is founded on belief. At the same time, however, truth itself is posited as the most faithful reconstruction of the struggle between civilization and barbarism ever to have been achieved. The problem of norms of interpretation resides within the structure: at times, Sarmiento perceives the freedom of reading which stands as implicit in the book. “[About the] Facundo to which you refer with such interest, an Argentine friend of mine said that the many errors it contains are the cause of its popularity,” he writes in a letter to Miguel Luis Amuchastegui (December 26, 1853), adding: “Among us there exists a divorce between the reader and the book.” The reader takes his turn as author to be able to correct a faulty narration or an effect attributed to a cause different from the real one. The fascination of the text and its possible uses and transformations are related to its errors, that is, its veering away from the truth and its figurative and fictional construction of signification.

The first page of Facundo centers on this issue. First there is a warning about the inexactitudes and errors concerning the relationship between truth and falsehood; then Sarmiento narrates an anecdote. We encounter an immediate link between the discussion of tergiversation concerning reality and the story that opens the text. The initial anecdote defines the conditions of the true enunciation: the first page constructs the frame, perhaps, between subject and truth. Lived experience inaugurates the text; he who calls himself “I” affirms his right to the word, and the autobiographical form is the guarantee of truth. In Facundo, Sarmiento presents the terms that define his entry into writing “for the first time” in an inverted fashion: now it is the indignation of his heart which serves to hide the fantastic fiction of his imagination. (This inversion is the discovery of a form and the invention of a genre.)

Fiction is subordinated to the political use of language, but fiction constructs the stage where the political word can enter. The initial scene of Facundo is there in order to write the quotation. It does not matter whether it is true or false (it is written as if true); it is told so that the sense may remain fixed in an image, so that the signification may be the result of an experience.

However, the place where the discursive truth is concentrated is also sculpted by the tergiversation, the distortions, the fictional use. Sarmiento finds a phrase from Diderot in an article from the Revue encyclopédique (“On ne tue pas les idées”), he reproduces it in an article in 1842,⁷ uses it at the beginning of Facundo, misquotes it, and translates it in his fashion (“Men are beheaded, ideas are not”); he transforms, displaces, and appropriates it. After this metamorphosis, the French quotation ends up as a sentence from Sarmiento: Barbarians, ideas cannot be killed.

In this microscopic example, the procedure that Sarmiento is going to expand and reproduce throughout the entire book (and in his literary writing) is synthesized. This writing process is characterized by a manipulation of truth, bound at once to error, to translation, to plagiarism, to falsification, to urgency, to appropriation, to fictional liberty, to political necessity. Yet, the foundation of the form that we see here in miniature resides also in the figurative use of truth: Sarmiento synthesizes an abstract network of meaning in an experience represented by an indelible image. In this way, he constructs an imaginary scenario for writing the truth. What I mean by this is that Sarmiento is able to create a dramatic scene that condenses the abstract lines of an interpretation. It does not matter whether this construction is true or false, since fiction is at the same time true and false, since fiction seeks to produce an experience of truth.

2

Sarmiento is the founder of Argentine literature because he finds a solution that attends both to the freedom of writing and the necessities of political efficacy. The backwardness and lack of autonomy of nineteenth-century Argentine literature hinder the institutionalized constitution of genres, making their boundaries uncertain. Sarmiento exploits the possibilities of this formal immaturity like no one else. Constructed of all his readings and all his books, Facundo is a book unlike any other. Its basic traits are those of juxtaposition and the mixture of fragmented genres: we find simultaneously the essay, journalism, private correspondence, historical chronicles, and autobiography. (Indeed, the practical effectiveness of the book depends on this use of genres.) Sarmiento uses genres as distinct modes to enunciate truth: each genre has its system of evidence, its legitimacy, its method of making credible. The genres are stances of enunciation that guarantee the criteria of truth. In this sense, there exists a direct relationship between the fragmentary use of genre and the effect of truth (key to political efficacy).⁸

The need to mask and conceal the fictional use of language is what explains the movement of writing among the different genres. Yet, the fictional construction is the knot (the internal form) that unifies and maintains this constellation intact. The use of fiction is what keeps any particular genre from predominating and makes possible the expansion and proliferation of Sarmiento's writing. The basic formal situation that unifies the multiple registers in Facundo is fictional.

Sarmiento constructs the nucleus of this internal form for the first time in “La pirámide” (El Zonda, no. 6, August 25, 1839). This writing process marks the beginning of his literary works; by this I mean that it is found at the chronological origin of his literature, and it repeats itself every time he writes. The underlying scene is simple: the fictionalized other is convoked as a spectre (at once monster and enigma, the synthesis of the enemy culture); the agent of truth broaches a dialogue and a personal struggle with him. The writing is the stage for this confrontation.

In “La pirámide” we find the Spanish cultural tradition personified in the ghost of a dead father. “The desembodied shadow” defends the negative tradition: Spanish heritage is that monstrous figure which insults “the damned patriot, the parricidal son.”

The invention of a genre consists in constructing an imaginary form directly and personally related to both history and politics. The writing reproduces the movement of this dialogue with an interlocutor who is both the object and receiver of the discourse. The complex pronominal mechanism typical of Sarmiento's writing is the expansion of this basic situation: the writing represents an oral scene of polemics and insults possessing forms of interrogation, sermon, political oratory, slander, self-defense, and a denial of charges. The interrogations, interjections, negations, suppositions, and implicit questions all work on the imaginary construction of the enemy (and his allies) as a basis for the situation of enunciation. The other man is the you of the discourse, but he is also the object. When you is converted into he, and he forms his group and alliances (them), we are transported into the area of intrigue and paranoia.

Undergoing a metamorphosis, the spectre changes places, and its content becomes modified. In Mi defensa it is the nation that “sinks below my feet, it evaporates, it turns into a horrible spectre.” In Facundo, “the terrible shadow” is the ghost of a dead man who contains all the enigmas of barbarism. In Campaña en el Ejército Grande the place of the monster and the enigma is occupied by General Urquiza (and his dog!). Campaña is truly one of Sarmiento's greatest books because this dramatic form of direct confrontation with the other enigmatic figure—who in all his monologues does not hear and whose deep reasoning one must imagine—functions as a mold for representing a concrete historical situation. (Urquiza attends to this figuration with certain ironic indifference, but he undoubtedly grasps the excesses of Sarmiento's overacting and paranoid burden. “I owe to Urquiza the coining of ‘crazy’ as a label,” Sarmiento writes to Mary Mann in 1868.) In Campaña the figurative character of meaning dominates the purely discursive signification once again.

The secret drive behind this personal and imaginary struggle with the figure of the quintessential other is, of course, Juan Manuel de Rosas. The image of the spectre and its metamorphosis is Sarmiento's way of representing his impossible dialogue with Rosas. Sarmiento is a great writer because this dialogue with Rosas, in his texts, is always displaced and fictionalized as well as indirect and mediated. The writer of Facundo never writes a book about Rosas, yet he does nothing but write about him: Sarmiento's great literary (and political) decision lay in choosing Quiroga as the subject of a book (about Rosas). This displacement allows the writer total liberty because he constructs a disputed figure between Sarmiento and Rosas. Just as Rosas politicizes language and uses it to construct a rigid symbolism for the federalists, which condenses the lines of interpretation, on the other side of the battlelines we find Sarmiento, constructing a scenario to use Quiroga's ghost for his own creation of a symbolism designed to condense within a series of images and mottoes the other sense of history. “A noisy controversy has erupted between Rosas, hero of the desert, and Sarmiento, member of the University of Chile. It is a battle of titans by the look of things,” writes Sarmiento (as always using indirect discourse as a subtle mark of fictionalization). Sarmiento's writing constructs the illusion of a struggle between equals (an equality that Urquiza refuses to recognize).

In Sarmiento, literature lasts as long as the illusion of this dialogue lasts, a dialogue that is nothing more than the fictional representation of a political confrontation. Or perhaps it is better to say that literature has its place as long as Sarmiento can re-create Argentine history as a personal struggle. What one should actually say is that Argentine history is a struggle whose privileged stage is Sarmiento's writing. There must exist a counterpositioned “other” to fight against so that the confrontation can lighten the megalomania and autonomy of the agent, thus justifying all the excesses and tergiversation and uses of language: this is why the political struggle against the enemy tradition overlaps with Sarmiento the writer.

For the confrontation and dialogue to be possible, it is necessary not only to find the “other” present in writing in the form of an ideal adversary, but also to construct the author as the personification of civilization and truth. He who marches in Campaña en el Ejército Grande is a perfect example of this work of the figuration: Sarmiento presents himself in the forms of emblem and allegory. This complex construction of a subject able to engage in a personal dialogue with Argentine history runs throughout Sarmiento's works. “Everything in the world can be personified,” he writes in Recuerdos de provincia. (“Rosas is the personification of barbarism.”) The personification of himself as an example of civilization is the other great moment in Sarmiento's writing (together with the construction of the spectre).

The writer must become a dual personage, speak of himself in the third person, introduce himself. Sarmiento utilizes the classical means of changed identities to allegorize himself: he narrates a story with an enigmatic (and admirable) protagonist and finally discovers, “that was I!” At times he dramatizes himself: Sarmiento is present at a scene where everyone is speaking of him, but no one knows him; or, even better, where everyone is praising him, but no one realizes that the young man standing to one side of the room is the selfsame Sarmiento.

In Sarmiento, the unexpected figuration of his identity is a form of literary construction. Just as important is the figuration of the enemy tradition embodied in the “other” as spectre. Here we perceive the traits of his novelistic writing: as in serial fiction, we find dead traditions and scenographic twists, the play of false identities, of changed names, of appearances that represent the basic modes of representation of the story's truth. In Sarmiento, however, the hero is the one who writes: like those great protagonists of the genre, he is the only one who can pass from one world to another, the only one who really knows the laws that allow passage into this enigmatic reality.

The story of the exile and the quotation are placed at the beginning of Facundo so that the hero can make his appearance. In this border scene his place is defined: during the entire book we will see him move and march, enter and exit the story, pursue the figure of the monster that is lost in the desert, struggle to decipher the meaning of the enigma. Megalomaniacal, paranoid, omnipotent, this agent will speak both as prophet and geographer, as hunter and traveler, as historian and poet; he will tell everything about himself and speak for everyone (as if he were everyone); he will say that he knows all the secrets and all the stories, that he has read all the books and studied all the languages: in reality, the only thing the hero does is write. He does nothing else; he writes as no one else, all the time. Facundo is at once the story of the spectre that contains the native land's enigma and the history of the author as well.

It is worth noting that the man who writes the quotation at the opening of Facundo has been writing for some time and is working to make himself a name as a writer. His beginnings are marked by anonymity and invented names: at first Sarmiento calls himself “incognito” (the unknown), and he writes to Alberdi under the pseudonym of García Román in order to send him some poems. We are now in 1838: “Although I have not had the honor of meeting you, the brilliance of your literary name … encourages the shyness of a young man who wishes to hide his own name in order to subject the enclosed composition to your indulgent and illustrious criticism.” This is how the history of his relationship with literature begins, and the end is found in Las ciento y una. Now in 1852, Sarmiento has made a name for himself and deliberates with Alberdi as an equal. And the epic road he takes from being a nobody to becoming a writer is one of the great bildungsromans of Argentine literature. “I was a writer,” he says in Recuerdos de provincia. “How many mistaken vocations did I attempt before finding the one that had a chemical affinity, I might say, with my essence?”⁹

Prior to everything else, Alberdi and Sarmiento debate the autonomy and function of learned men. This is the area where Alberdi makes his objections. Moreover, the central point is his criticism of Sarmiento's use of language: he accuses Sarmiento of making fiction (“He invents an apparent Rosas”) and of placing politics at the personal service of his writing. In one sense, Alberdi is right: Sarmiento conceals his personal exploitation of the Argentine tongue beneath the form of a political use of language.

This writing brings him into power. Sarmiento reminds one of the serial writers of the nineteenth century who, as Walter Benjamin said, had made a political career out of their ability to illuminate the collective imaginary. But Sarmiento goes further than the rest: the best Argentine writer of the nineteenth century becomes President of the Republic. And then something extraordinary occurs: Manuel Gálvez tells the story of Sarmiento writing a speech for his inauguration that is rejected by his ministers. Sarmiento's inaugural speech is written by Nicolás Avellaneda.

We might say that it is here, in an emblematic figure, that all the tensions between politics and literature running throughout Sarmiento's literature are resolved. From this point on, Sarmiento will have to adapt himself to the necessities of practical politics. Furthermore, he will first have to adapt his use of language.

We can envision this speech as the great text of Sarmiento the writer: the last text, his farewell to language. At times I think that we Argentine writers also write in an attempt to save and reconstruct that lost text.

Notes

1. Sarmiento's literary writing is interiorized. It could be said that it is confined to private circulation. Correspondence is the place where the history of Sarmiento's literature from 1852 on should be reconstructed. The letter as a personal form of relating with a known and absent interlocutor is a central form in his writing, and Sarmiento's masterly use of this form can be observed in Campaña en el Ejército Grande and in Viajes.

2. “Concerning your books, I have had no word,” Andrés Bello writes to Friar Servando Teresa de Mier in a letter dated November 15, 1821. “Only the Devil could have given you the idea to send 750 copies of your work (whichever) to Buenos Aires, which of all the countries of the Americas is without a doubt the most ignorant and where the least is read” (Andrés Bello, Epistolario [Caracas: La Casa de Bello, 1984], 1:116). This cultural poverty and debility are, contrary to what one might think, related to the so-called condition of Europeanism in Argentine literature.

3. In order to reconstruct the historical line and the implicit interpretative threads in this opposition, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1972). His analysis of the process of ruralization in the power bases, of the relationships among the masses, discipline and the army, and of the relationship between Rosas and the May Revolution represents an extraordinary development of the central content of Facundo. In this sense, Revolución y guerra is the best book written on Facundo: one of the few cases in which the commentary (though displaced) about a classic reaches the heights of that classic.

4. This hypothesis, formulated by Lukács in 1920, is implicit and has been brought into discussions and enlarged in nearly all the subsequent theories on genre. See Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1978); Claude Lévi-Strauss, on myth and novel, in Mythologiques. III: L'Origine des manières de table (Paris: Plon, 1978); and René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961). For a synthesis of the relationship among the philosophical traditions, the double realities, and the beginnings of the novel, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), chap. 1.

5. See Raúl Orgaz, “Sarmiento y el naturalismo histórico,” in Sociología argentina (Córdoba: Assandri, 1950).

6. See “Notas de Valentín Alsina al libro Civilización y barbarie,” in Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo, ed. Alberto Palcos (La Plata: Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 1938), pp. 364-426; and Juan Bautista Alberdi, “Facundo y su biógrafo,” in Escritos póstumos (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Europea, 1897), 5:273-383. Juan María Gutiérrez writes to Alberdi in a letter of August 6, 1845: “What I said regarding Facundo in El Mercurio I do not regret; I wrote before having read the book; I am convinced that it will have a negative effect on the Argentine republic, and that every sensible man will see it as caricature: this book is like the portrayals made of our society by those travelers who report strange things: the slaughterhouse, the mulata fondling the little girl, the cigar in the mouth of an older woman, etc., etc. Argentina is not a pool of blood.” At a later date (July 1850), also in a letter to Alberdi, Echeverría refers to the errors and exaggerations committed by Sarmiento in his war against Rosas (“Sarmiento wanders about like crazy”).

7. See Paul Verdevoye, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, éducateur et publiciste (Paris: Institut des Hautes Etudes de l'Amérique Latine, 1963).

8. The two problems are actually only one. The issue could be synthesized in the expression “There is no book like this one.” On the one hand, the natural question—What kind of book is this?—is implicitly answered (“poem, pamphlet, history”). On the other hand, it is presupposed that no similar work exists (“It is worth more than a battalion of cuirassiers sent by a valiant leader”). The key, of course, is the relationship between these two issues: in the intersection we find the play between the problematics of dual autonomy and the place of Sarmiento as writer. As late as 1876 (Obras completas, vol. 22), in a speech about the railroads, Sarmiento states that in the midst of the silence and the Rosist terror, “one could hear from beyond the Andes a voice, and from Chile there arose something like a light, a flier, a romance, a book, call it whatever you like, which appeared in the Chilean press.” The book's generic uncertainty is the direct result of its efficacy. However, the lack of autonomy and the urgencies of practicality represent the circumstances of that generic uncertainty and of Facundo's ambiguous uses of truth and fiction.

9. The problematic regarding merit, fame, success, and recognition run throughout the entire history of Sarmiento's relationship with writing. “I neither practice nor accept the axiom of Rosas of sacrificing fortune, life, and reputation for the nation. The first two I have won because of keeping the last intact, according to my understanding of things,” he writes in Campaña en el Ejército Grande. This concept of holding personal fame before the nation as well as before the requirements of practical politics is at the center of consciousness in Sarmiento the writer.