[In the following essay, Kirkpatrick relates the importance of Ricardo Güiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra to Argentine literature and the initial climate into which it was published.]

Regret, nostalgia, dreams of history and of literature—these are the topics Jorge Luis Borges evoked in his remembrance of Don Segundo Sombra, twenty-six years after its publication in 1926. Borges, so skeptical of nationalistic exaltations of “Americanism” or criollismo in literature, made an exception for Güiraldes's novel of the Argentine pampa: “Don Segundo Sombra presupposes and crowns an earlier cult, a literary mythology of the gaucho; … men of history, a hazy dream, and the vivid dream of literature, all give the work its moving resonance. Güiraldes's great gift, not accessible to other cultivators of criollo nostalgia, is to be able to value and understand that deep past.”¹

When Borges wrote these words, he did so as one who had seen the creation of a national mythology for Don Segundo Sombra. It had been celebrated as a national epic, consecrated as a classic of Argentine education, and translated into many languages. Its coming-of-age story of a young gaucho, Fabio Cáceres, represented for many the essential virtues of a disappearing civilization based on cattle raising and the virile strength of the gaucho's struggles with the elements. Yet Borges makes a different kind of tribute, for he calls it not an epic but an elegy. An epic would record and glorify the deeds of a founding hero, a leader of a people. In contrast, an elegy suggests an ending, a loss. Borges begins his essay by describing two losses, or endings: the end of World War I, and the end of an era of cattle raising as the dominant motor of Argentina's economy. For the first, Borges attributes to Güiraldes a perhaps unconscious fear that the world would enter a period of “interminable peace.” Thus, “Don Segundo Sombra seeks to compensate for that loss by recalling vigorous times of old. … Man not only wants happiness but also hardship and adversity” (9). The other, more public loss, is rooted in a more local history, a change from one way of life to another. Argentina, long before 1926, had moved away from its dependence on cattle and the gaucho; life on the wide open spaces had already become part of legend. Like many other societies whose earlier way of coexistence with the natural setting had been disrupted, the stage was set for nostalgia and idealization, a process vividly recounted in this collection by Beatriz Sarlo.

Borges's emphasis on the elegiac nature of Don Segundo Sombra removes the novel from the sphere of local history; in his typical fashion, he makes of it an abstraction: “Once the fantastic element is grasped, one sees the fallacy of the frequent comparison of Don Segundo Sombra with Martín Fierro, with Paulino Lucero, with Santos Vega or with other gauchos of literature or tradition. Don Segundo has been those gauchos or he is in some way their belated archetype, their spiritual image” (10). For Borges, Güiraldes's novel of now mythic stature gives him a place to meditate on his own central concerns, life as literature and their uneasy mirroring.

Güiraldes's name and his great novel reappear frequently in Borges's writings, especially in the early essays of El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926) and Discusión (1932) regarding literature and the formation of cultural identity. These essays include references to their days together as co-directors of the literary magazine Proa, a youthful enterprise recorded by Alberto Blasi in this collection.² But Güiraldes figures more centrally in Borges's arguments about nationalism, cultural identities, and his views on the fallacies of national literatures, especially in the essays “The Pampa and the Suburb Are Gods” (El tamaño) and in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (Discusión). In the latter, Don Segundo Sombra serves as an example of how a truly national work is produced only in connection with a universal literature:

Now I would like to speak of a justly famous work often invoked by the nationalists. I refer to Don Segundo Sombra by Güiraldes. The nationalists tell us that Don Segundo Sombra is a kind of national work; but if we compare Don Segundo Sombra with works from the gauchesque tradition, the first thing we notice are its differences. Don Segundo Sombra abounds in a type of metaphor that has nothing to do with country speech and everything to do with the contemporary coteries of Montmartre. In regard to the tale, the story, it is easy to find the influence of Kipling's Kim, whose action takes place in India and was written, in its turn, under the influence of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, epic of the Mississippi. With this observation, I don't want to reduce the value of Don Segundo Sombra; on the contrary, I want to emphasize that for us to have this book it was necessary for Güiraldes to recall the poetic technique of the French coteries of his time, and Kipling's work that he had read many years ago; that is, Kipling, and Mark Twain, and metaphors of French poets were necessary for this Argentine book that is, I repeat, no less Argentine for accepting these influences.³

In comparing the novel with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Borges notes Don Segundo Sombra's distancing from the events narrated, its self-consciousness: “To read the former is to be magically Huck Finn and to float down the river with a runaway slave; to read the latter is to have been, many years ago, a cattle herder, and to want to remember it.”⁴Don Segundo Sombra's narrator is not a young gaucho, “he is the nostalgic man of letters.” With his attention to the distancing nature of writing itself, Borges shows us how Güiraldes's “belated archetype” of the gaucho has attracted so many readers and so much critical attention. By relinquishing the novel from the claims of authenticity for an Argentine past, Borges frees it from a local destiny and from those who would canonize it for ideological purposes. His somewhat ambivalent evaluations of the novel itself may reflect his own concerns with the act of writing and the impossibility of creating or recreating anything more than the words of others. In this sense, his view of the novel's distancing from lived experience serves as a complex tribute to Güiraldes: “Don Segundo is like the eleventh book of the Odyssey, a ritual evocation of the dead, a necromancy.”⁵ As he leads us away from the temptation to read Don Segundo Sombra as a realistic account of an adolescent's coming to manhood on the pampas, he moves us toward seeing its universal nature as literature. In this regard, his opinion is close to that of Ernesto Sábato, whose brief comment opens this volume. Sábato would also push away the questions of authenticity, realistic representation, and reflected socioeconomic factors, so we might better see the novel's mythic qualities.

Borges's remarks give us an idea of what has been at stake in the reception and evaluation of Güiraldes's work. Although the novel is set within a restricted locale, the Argentine pampa, it has acquired symbolic power in the Latin American debates on cultural identity, nationalism, and their creation and reflection in literature and the arts. Don Segundo Sombra was published in 1926. Almost immediately the book became an enormous success, both critically and commercially. It appeared during the heyday of the 1920s, with the world economy in feverish expansion, an international public that crowded movie theaters, rapid technological changes in transportation and industry, and a world radically changed by the events of the First World War, the Russian revolution, and—closer to Argentina—the Mexican revolution. Specifically, countries in Latin America were reassessing their place in relation to the rise of the United States as a world economic and political power.

Don Segundo Sombra's author understood at first hand the changes that were occurring. Extraordinarily gifted in everything but years of life and early literary success, Ricardo Güiraldes was born into one of Argentina's most wealthy and powerful families, with all the privileges of such an inheritance. Educated in several languages, dividing his youth between Europe and Argentina, Güiraldes enjoyed a perspective available to very few. As a young man, he had traveled throughout Europe and most of Asia, and later with his wife, Adelina del Carril, he visited most of Latin America and the Caribbean. The photographic record reflects the handsome Güiraldes dancing the tango in Paris, riding in a rickshaw in India, sailing in Majorca, playing the guitar amid family and gauchos at his family's estate, “La Porteña,” in the province of Buenos Aires, and mingling in literary circles in Buenos Aires and Paris.⁶ Talented, athletic, genial, with a memorable gift for friendship, Güiraldes was able to reap many rewards of the kind of life made possible by the great fortunes amassed at the turn of the century.

In Argentina itself, the surges of European immigration, the prosperity gained by an export agricultural economy, and a highly literate population gave the capital, Buenos Aires, an optimistic and vital rhythm. In the twenties, unlike most cities in Latin America, Buenos Aires had a large middle class that set the political tone. Leftist workers' movements, which had frightened governments in the early years of the century, had been pacified by incorporating many of their demands within the government of “civic radicalism.” Not until the Depression of 1930, with the military takeover under Uriburu, did Argentina begin its cycle of modern military governments and more pervasive political instability.⁷

Earlier, in 1910, the country had celebrated its centennial in a capital city that wealth and immigration had converted into a stunning display of architectural beauty. At the time of the centennial, Güiraldes's father was mayor of Buenos Aires. Yet Güiraldes chose to observe the festivities from abroad, where he roamed Europe and Asia in a series of adventures with friends. Leaving the country at its height of national self-congratulation, in his travels Güiraldes developed his own form of national pride, a fierce attachment to the way of life now vanished from the provincial estates of his youth. In her biographical essay in this volume, Patricia Owen Steiner describes Güiraldes's personal experiences on the pampas. Nostalgia and idealization of his youth and homeland were to coalesce in his great novel, written in Paris and Argentina from 1920 to 1926. During his residences in Argentina, Güiraldes communicated his enthusiasm for a mythical past to some of his younger colleagues, most of whom had also been formed in a European tradition.

On the literary scene in Buenos Aires, the youthful vanguardist writers, including Borges and Oliverio Girondo, sought to shake the literary establishment out of its traditional bent. Irreverent and iconoclastic, they participated in a generalized Western vanguardist tendency. Güiraldes, somewhat older than this group, nevertheless shared many affinities with them and served as a leader in their circles, especially as co-director of the literary journal Proa (1924-1925), with Borges, Brandán Caraffa, and Pablo Rojas Paz. Just as the new literary generation in Buenos Aires was forming into coteries divided by aesthetic and political alliances, Latin America was experiencing a renewal of interest in indigenous or criollo themes,⁸ while European artists were looking to the “youthful” cultures of Africa and Latin America with an essentialist gaze, searching for authenticity in more “primitive” cultures.

The twenties and thirties in Latin America saw a resurgence of regionalist novels that explored the problematics of specific cultural and geographical areas, among them José Eustasio Rivera's La Vorágine (Venezuela, 1924), Alcides Arguedas's Raza de bronce (Bolivia, 1924), Rómulo Gallegos's Doña Bárbara (Colombia, 1929), and Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (Ecuador, 1934), and Graciliano Ramos's Barren Lives (Brazil, 1938). Miguel Angel Asturias's compilation of pre-Conquest traditional narratives, Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), forecasts his and other more recent novelists' concerns with regional and ethnic history. In postrevolutionary Mexico, the search for a national identity produced most notably the mural movement in painting, with emphasis on Mexico's pre-Conquest past, a tendency also encouraged by government support for anthropology and folklore as well as mural art. In poetry, writers like Borges, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Nicolas Guillén, César Vallejo, and Oswald de Andrade were publishing their early major works. In the arts in general, the multiple influences of surrealism, expressionism, and futurism had made themselves felt from the Antilles to Tierra del Fuego, where often they were adapted to cultural renewals inspired by nationalist or regionalist fervor. In Brazil, Mário de Andrade's pathbreaking Macunaíma (1928), showed how the currents of the avant-garde and nationalism could be brilliantly combined.

Nineteen-twenty-six was a decisive year for Argentine fiction. That year saw the publication of Don Segundo Sombra and Roberto Arlt's El juguete rabioso. Arlt's novel can be seen as the other, darker side of Güiraldes's nostalgic history.⁹ Emphatically Argentine in its setting, the novel explores a teeming and violent urban world, the space of prisons, brothels, bars, seedy hotels, accented with the slang of lunfardo, the street language of the immigrant underclass. If Güiraldes recreates a disappeared pastoral world, Arlt presents an emerging one, the increasingly urban presence in what had once been an agrarian society. The two novels have been seen as antithetical creations, or expressions of two radically different sensibilities and ideologies. In reality, their common history is much more complex. The self-taught journalist Arlt served as Güiraldes's secretary during part of the time both novels were written and shared its drafts with Güiraldes, who enthusiastically helped with editing and moral support.¹⁰

What is remarkable about Güiraldes's novel is not that it glorifies the most national of Argentine figures, the gaucho, but that this evocation would be so highly structured by the sensibilities of the vanguardists, in combination with aspects of more traditional narrative. José Carlos Mariátegui's remarks in Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality (1928), one of twentieth-century Latin America's most important statements on political and cultural identity, are enlightening in reference to the unceasing debates between “nativist” or “cosmopolitan” literature. Mariátegui finds exemplars of a very “Latin American” writing in its most cosmopolitan exponents:

This current [indigenism], on the other hand, finds stimulus in our literature's assimilation of cosmopolitan elements. I have already discussed the autonomist and nativist tendency of vanguardism in America. In recent Argentine literature, no one feels more porteño [a citizen of Buenos Aires] than Girondo or Borges, nor more gaucho than Güiraldes.¹¹

Mariátegui's statements reflect none of the anxiety of dependence or neoclonialism that might accompany the adoption of vanguardist practices, nor is realist authenticity his main critical criterion.

Later critics have been more ambivalent. On its publication, Don Segundo Sombra was immediately praised as continuing the epic tradition, in the line of the enormously popular Martín Fierro, Argentina's gaucho epic of the nineteenth century. Even Leopoldo Lugones, reigning patriarch of Argentine letters, blessed it with his approval. Many critics, however, have not been unanimously approving. David Viñas, for instance, sees not the archetype of myth but the “archetype of class.”¹² Güiraldes was seen by many as the wealthy dilettante who, despite his personal qualities, fathered an illegitimate national myth, a self-satisfied idealization formed by the landowning oligarchy. As Noé Jitrik argues in this volume, Güiraldes wrote what Argentines wanted to hear, he reassured them of continuities amid the upheavals of immigration and a changing economic structure. Jitrik nonetheless connects the novel's local interests to larger concerns. The novel “expresses a scarcely concealed sadness at the disappearance of a way of life, it speaks on behalf of an essential spiritual quality above and beyond economic contingencies.”

Eduardo Romano labels the novel the “invention of harmony”;¹³ Jorge Schwartz calls the novel a “monologic” narration, lacking the dialogism one would expect of a truly popular work;¹⁴ Christopher Towne Leland notes the almost total elision of the feminine, the misogyny created in the epoch by threats to the patriarchy of a changed status for women (the “new woman”).¹⁵ Yet Carlos Alonso points out that most critical perspectives merely reflect a critical commentary intrinsic to the novel itself.¹⁶ As he notes, within the biographical approach, to view Güiraldes as a writer who triumphs through apprenticeship and growing appreciation of his homeland, only recapitulates Fabio's own journey. For, in the novel itself, Fabio's story ends with his growing interest in literature and writing as he accepts that he must abandon his gaucho life. On the other hand, an ideological approach often explores the novel's mystification of history, for it is clear that being a landowner makes it impossible to be a part of the gaucho world. Yet this is the final message of the narrative itself. Privileged birth and the rootless gaucho life are incompatible, a conflict that precipitates the novel's dénouement.

Güiraldes's tale of the passage from the fourteen-year-old Fabio from guacho (orphan) to gaucho and then to landowner boss has frequently been labeled a bildungsroman, a tale of apprenticeship and development. Structurally, the novel is primarily episodic; most scenes relate aspects of the gaucho's daily life, filtered through Fabio's awareness and stretches of dialogue. Borges points out that in Don Segundo Sombra, space itself signifies both time and history. Lived time and the weight of the past, embodied as shadows, dreams, tales, conversations, and memories, are reflected outward onto landscapes, just as the final image of Don Segundo itself fades into the landscape.

Plot and character development are not strong features of the novel, despite the fact that it is narrated as a coming-of-age story by the young Fabio. Nor does it dwell on the particularities of history. Despite its scenes of violence, sexual intitation, and, above all, the events of daily life, the effect is not one of gripping narrative power. In her essay in this volume, Francine Masiello reveals the interplay of nature and culture in Güiraldes's subtle style and the ambivalent relationship of the protagonist to ownership and money. Fabio inhabits a sensory universe, where light, sounds, smells, colors, and the flash of movement guide us more than events themselves. Language itself enters into this sensory play. Güiraldes registers the particularities of regional and colloquial speech, without lapsing into a folksy or condescending style. In part, Güiraldes achieves this almost physical nature of language by an exacting attention to each description and by emphasizing the highly metaphorical nature of popular speech. Every person, animal, or plant is rendered not by generalities but by details. A horse is not just a “horse” but a bay, a dappled mare, a fast roan, or an edgy colt. We see clearly the items stocked in the pulpería, the changing colors of the sunset, but this view is unburdened by much explanation or background information.

Güiraldes presents his story in rapid strokes of minute details. Gaucho history, as Patricia Owen Steiner points out, builds on the legacy of a long line of observers, from scientists such as Darwin and political figures like Sarmiento, through an interweaving of historical and sociological studies and epic poems, most notably José Hernández's Martín Fierro.¹⁷ Güiraldes's novel builds on this accumulated history, shifting its outlines and details in his story of Fabio's passage into adulthood and ownership that culminates in the loss of the father he has chosen.

Aside from the continuity of Fabio's life, juxtaposition, rather than the force of circumstance or narrative development, orders the sequence of the novel. The first chapters examine Fabio's stifled existence in a small provincial town, riddled with the pettiness of local rivalries, money-grubbing, and the contaminating presence of foreign immigrants. His aunts, with whom he has been sent to live in their “prison” of a house, embody the worst aspects of provincial propriety and repression. The space of domesticity or civilization is oppressive and mean, and the boy's response is to become a trickster, living by his wits and cultivating his image as a picaresque hero. Nature, not human company, is his refuge and true home.

Don Segundo Sombra's entrance into the town is a catalyst for the boy, who schemes to run away and join him in the gaucho life. Inexplicable is the power Don Segundo holds over the boy, who within Sombra's presence is transformed almost immediately from a conniving rogue into a respectful and dutiful apprentice, eager to please his new mentor. Sombra's presence is electrifying, and his physical prowess and skill as a gaucho are legendary. Taciturn and slow to anger, Don Segundo wastes no time in conversation. Yet beside the campfire he is a loquacious storyteller. Chapters 12 and 21 are devoted to Sombra's spinning of folk tales that serve as allegorical complements to the ethical principles of the novel. These tales—Misery's story and Dolores's search for the evil monster—suspend the narrative sequence and impart an air of the fantastic to Fabio's own story. Their inclusion, as well as Fabio's inner musings, makes more convincing the rapid reversal of fortunes at the close of the story and its forecasting in a dream by Fabio.

Fabio's fragmentary dream of his inheritance and Sombra's fantastic tales are not the only allusions to forces beyond rational understanding. Nature itself, and those who learn to live within it, embody a profound wisdom. The old woman or curandera who nurses Fabio in his convalescence after an injury understands the magical healing power of nature's remedies. In another scene (chap. 16), Fabio spends a nightmarish night in the cabin of Don Sixto, who is seized by prophetic visions of the death of his son. Perhaps the most striking juncture of the supernatural and nature itself is the visit Fabio makes to the crablands near the coast, distant from the reassuring presence of the pampas (chap. 17). Fabio is revolted by the creatures who appear to raise their claws in prayer, “like Christians,” only to devour each other in their frenzy.

Nature in Don Segundo Sombra is not inherently benevolent or malevolent. As Fabio learns, the gaucho must adapt himself to the vagaries of the natural world and to human nature. And human nature, especially feminine nature, is often mysterious and hurtful. With the exceptions of a faint memory of his mother, the comforting presence of the old curandera, and a wise old woman in one of Sombra's tales, the women of the novel offer little reassurance.¹⁸ If there is a comforting feminine presence in the novel, it is the embracing mythic aspect of the pampa itself, the maternal matrix of the earth. The world of masculine values is exalted, as Sylvia Molloy notes, at the cost of the feminine.¹⁹ Even Fabio's illegitimacy and the early disappearance of his mother serve to reinforce the sufficiency of masculine values. Females rarely appear in the novel, and the portraits of Fabio's aunts are as physically horrible as the hallucinatory scenes of the crablands he will encounter later on. When the women are young and pretty, their presence inevitably leads to trouble, as in the dance scenes (chap. 11) and Fabio's flirtation with and rejection by Paula (chaps. 18, 19).²⁰

Christopher Towne Leland and Eduardo Romano seek to explain the paradox of Don Segundo Sombra's wide appeal, despite its very local character. Romano focuses on the mythic structures of the novel, while Leland explores the implications of the “family romance” in Fabio's development. As an orphan, a guacho, Fabio is freed from the constraints of an actual family and may postulate whatever heritage he chooses.²¹ The maternal element reappears most forcefully in the embrace of the pampa itself, the regenerative substratum for the brotherhood of gauchos. And Don Segundo, as padrino or godfather, offers an almost abstract, silent father figure who provides a strong model of courage and integrity. Don Segundo legitimates Fabio's inheritance because he has taught him to be a gaucho, but he must also disappear. Don Segundo returns to his wanderings, leaving Fabio rooted in a patriarchal order of ownership. As Don Segundo disappears across the horizon, Fabio feels “like someone who is bleeding to death.” Fabio's “bleeding” coincides with his initiation into the world of books and writing. His psychological crisis erupts before the inevitability of change. He must choose to accept his destiny, his heritage, at the same time it is being transformed.

Crowding—whether it be the stampede of the herd, the masses of repulsive crabs, enclosure within his aunts' house, or the avalanche of unbridled thoughts—produces extreme anxiety for Fabio, as well as most of the book's most dramatic scenes. Reflection, ordering one's finances, and planning for the future are uncomfortable activities. The jumble of past and present emerges most clearly in the dream sequences or in scenes of intense danger. Yet inexorably Fabio must move toward a reordering of his thoughts, just as he must adjust to his newfound station in life:

Sure, I had thought a lot, a lot, but always focusing on the problems of that very instant. I had thought like the man fighting with his eyes wide open to danger and with all his energy on the alert, ready to be used, right there, right then, at a moment's notice.

How different was the business of corraling images from the past. I had lived as if in one eternal morning whose own will carries it to midday. Now, at that very moment, like the evening, I was moving toward my inner self, becoming calm by contemplating what I had previously been.

Like a stream that meets a whirlpool, I was, however, churning around and sounding my own depths, filled with a heavy stillness.

(pp. 297-98)

In this passage toward the close of the novel, Fabio's thoughts recapitulate one of the story's major themes, the distancing inherent in reflection and, above all, in writing. Loss of immediacy is the price of reflection, but it is also the cost that makes possible the narratives of history and fiction. Fabio must distance himself from his unmediated relationship with the land, once resonant of his own interiority, in order to claim its ownership. Ownership and his own individual authority, both externally and internally imposed, bring also the sacrifice of the presence of Don Segundo Sombra, the father he has chosen. A natural order is replaced by legal order, and rootlessness is replaced by the stability of ownership.

Don Segundo Sombra reflects many of the anxieties and yearnings of its time and place, a world in the process of rapid change. Güiraldes reminds his readers that an epoch has passed, that one way of life has been closed off to make way for an emerging one. Josefina Ludmer shows forcefully what is at stake in Güiraldes's depoliticizing of the gauchesque tradition and what Fabio's embrace of ownership and writing signify in a national tradition.²² Yet by capturing a world in all its vivid and sensory detail, and at the same time making this world a personal one that does not depend only on historical context, Güiraldes engenders a powerful tale of fathers and sons fraught with the recurrent struggles and renewals of each generation. Don Segundo Sombra has evoked passionate commentary because its dramatized dualities—of nature and culture, male and female, freedom and law, individualism and social restraint, dream and reality, father and son—are not peculiar to its time and place. As an elegy, it pays tribute to a disappeared world of the fathers, and even more, to the losses and distancing that must occur to situate this vision within a changing horizon.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “Don Segundo Sombra,” Sur, nos. 217-18 (1952): 10, trans. Patricia Owen Steiner.

2. In Elogio de la sombra (Madrid: Alianza and Emecé, 1960), p. 325 (trans. mine), Borges published a poem written on the occasion of Güiraldes's death. It evokes Güiraldes's personal qualities rather than his literary achievements:

   No one could forget his courtesy;
   it was the unsought, first form
   of his kindness, the lasting
   measure of a soul clear as the day.
   Nor can I forget his bizarre
   serenity, the fine, strong, face,
   the lights of glory and of death,
   His hand questioning the guitar.
   As in the pure dream of a mirror
   (You are reality, and I its reflection)
   I see you conversing with us
   in Quintana. You are there, magic and dead.
   Yours now, Ricardo, is the open field
   of yesterday, the dawn of the stallions.

3. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” Discusión (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1969), pp. 157-58, trans. mine.

4. Borges, “Don Segundo Sombra,” p. 11.

5. Ibid., p. 9.

6. Ivonne Bordelois's Genio y Figura de Ricardo Güiraldes (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1966) includes photographs and tributes made to Güiraldes by his contemporaries. Her study is most inclusive and informative.

7. See David Rock, Politics in Argentina, 1890-1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); “Argentina in 1914: the Pampas, the Interior, Buenos Aires”; and “Argentina from the First World War to the Revolution of 1930,” both in Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 5:398-418, 419-52; see also Christopher Towne Leland, “The Failure of Myth: Ricardo Güiraldes and Don Segundo Sombra,” The Last Happy Men: The Generation of 1922, Fiction, and the Argentine Reality (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

8. Criollo does not translate exactly as creole. In this sense, criollo refers to the specifically local or native Latin American traits, its specific significance varying according to particular cultural or geographic location. In its original historical meaning, a criollo was a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas.

9. See especially Noé Jitrik, “1926, año decisivo para la narrativa argentina,” El escritor argentino: dependencia o libertad (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Candil, 1971), pp. 83-87; and Enrique Pezzoni, “Memoria, actuación y habla en un texto de Roberto Arlt,” El texto y sus voces (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1986), pp. 165-70.

10. Bordelois, Genio y Figura, p. 115.

11. José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality (1928; rpt. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta, 1977), p. 329.

12. David Viñas, De Sarmiento a Cortázar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Siglo Veinte, 1971), p. 242.

13. Eduardo Romano, Análisis de Don Segundo Sombra, Enciclopedia Literaria, no. 18 (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967), pp. 31-35.

14. Jorge Schwartz, “Don Segundo Sombra: una novela monológica,” Revista Iberoamericana 42 (1967): 422-46, esp. 444-46.

15. Leland, The Last Happy Men, p. 138.

16. Carlos Alonso devotes chap. 3 (pp. 79-108) of The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) to Don Segundo Sombra. He is particularly thoughtful in discussing the complexities of the novel's reception with regard to Güiraldes's class and literary identifications.

17. Josefina Ludmer, El género gauchesco: un tratado sobre la patria (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988) powerfully situates the gauchesque tradition within the shifting borders of the law, criminality, and the interpretation of history.

18. Both Leland and Romano discuss the sexual dynamics of the novel. Leland, The Last Happy Men, pp. 137-44, focuses on the dynamics of the Freudian “family romance,” while Romano, Análisis de Don Segundo Sombra, pp. 30-31, emphasizes the archetypal or mythic aspects of the nature/culture binarisms …

19. Sylvia Molloy, La Diffusion de la Littérature Hispano-Américaine en France au XXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), pp. 141-43.

20. Ibid., p. 141.

21. Leland, The Last Happy Men, p. 138.

22. Josefina Ludmer, El género gauchesco, pp. 314-15.