SOURCE: Foster, David William. “Rural Culture Revisited.” In The Argentine Generation of 1880: Ideology and Cultural Texts, pp. 151-77. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Foster distinguishes between the stereotypes of rural life and the attempted romanticization they inspired versus the realities of that lifestyle by individually examining several prominent works from the period.]

The basis of Argentine wealth during the period of immense prosperity from 1880 to the Great Depression is to be found in the rural, agricultural sector. The conquest of the desert, the construction of a vast railway system, and a concerted immigration effort are all elements of the program related to this economic base. Yet prosperity meant the possibility of living in splendor in Buenos Aires, and, as for Andrés in Cambaceres's Sin rumbo, the metropolis rather than the farm or ranch came to represent status and well-being. The consequence in Argentine culture is the strong interest from this period forward in urban themes and the displacement by the city of issues related to the countryside, where the immigrants were originally intended to settle, all of which is symptomatic of the inevitability of the urban dominance.

Yet what happened in Buenos Aires affected rural society, if only to overlook, underestimate, and denigrate it. Political priorities set in Buenos Aires affected the countryside, quite often in a fashion judged to be detrimental. The need to enhance and expand the agricultural exploitation that had become the basis of national prosperity only served to restructure—sometimes violently—rural society, as, for example, in the subjugation of the nomadic gaucho to the role of steady ranch hand. Foreign immigration into rural areas stimulated by the social philosophy and political considerations of Buenos Aires ideologues led to inevitable cultural conflicts between the old Creole stock and the two largest groups of newcomers, Italians and Jews (the latter certainly quite alien to traditional Hispanic mores).

From one point of view, writers and intellectuals based in Buenos Aires recognized the value of the countryside by interpreting it in a process of mythification that culminates in Ricardo Güiraldes's famous gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra (1926). Two of the most interesting examples are by immigrants, both Spaniards. The play Gauchos y gringos (bosquejo de costumbres argentinas en un acto y en verso) (1884) by Justo S. López de Gomara (1858-1923) closes with the optimistic verses based on the joyous amalgamation of conflicting cultural patterns:

y del más alto al más bajo
el criollo y el inmigrante
formarán pueblo gigante
de progreso y de trabajo.(1)

(And from the highest to the lowest, the Creole and the immigrant will form a gigantic society of progress and work.)

The essay Los inmigrantes prósperos (first published in Spain in 1933, but written around 1902) is a series of vignettes by Francisco Grandmontagne (1866-1936) in which he delivers a paean to the prosperity of immigrant colonies, especially those of Spaniards, in the New World generally and Argentina in particular. Although more properly a member of Spain's Generation of 1898, Grandmontagne nevertheless represents an important “external” verification of the ideology of dynamic, assimilationist immigration in Argentina, one that in the case of the Spaniards will be undermined by the image of the impoverished urban gallego in early twentieth-century Argentine culture. But, as the texts examined in this chapter demonstrate, already within the scope of the writing of the Generation of 1880 there is the need to examine critically both accepted concepts of rural culture and the new mythopoesis it stimulated.

Gutiérrez's Juan Moreira figure, along with its subsequent dramatization by the popular Podestá theatrical group, represents undoubtedly, after José Hernández's Martín Fierro (1872 and 1879), the most enduring image of the Argentine countryside at this time. However, in addition to the gauchos and their culture, there is another historical reality, and that is the conflicts, so crucial in this time for the economic expansion of the country, relating to the domestication of the vast hinterland. This conflict involved the pitting of modernizing European society of Buenos Aires against traditional rural sectors. But it also brought into armed battle the survivors of the once dominant indigenous cultures and the whole array of European settlers and their descendants, anxious to stabilize their agricultural and ranching exploitation of the pampas. Although Garmendia's text can hardly be said to enjoy the stature of the canonical documents this study has concentrated on, it is an exemplar of an extensive bibliography of writing about the army and its role in the domestication of the countryside that is rarely examined by literary scholars.

THE OUTLAW AS EPIC HERO: EDUARDO GUTIéRREZ'S JUAN MOREIRA

… mire que ése es un hombre de mucha historia. …(2)

(Look, for this is a man of much history.)

The most immediate issue presented by a work like Eduardo Gutiérrez's Juan Moreira is that of ideological encrustation. It is not just that we are dealing with one of the seminal works of Argentine literature, one of the works that, during the period of the various projects of sociocultural definition that converge under the heading of the Generation of 1880, served to define a particular stance toward a cluster of significant ideological topics. Even more fundamental is the fact that Juan Moreira is part of a network of cultural texts that enjoy a unique resonance because they are concerned with one of the primary cultural myths of Argentina.³

While it is generally recognized that Gutiérrez's serialized novel is the origin of the Moreira myth in the sense that it was the first work to deal with the specific narrative associated with the eponymic figure of the story, it is important to recognize that Gutiérrez's narrative in reality participates in a wider network of related narrative and ideological strands.⁴ There may be a particularly unique or specific narrative trajectory associated with the story of Juan Moreira. But one of the bases of its immediate repercussion among Gutiérrez's readers was that material dealing with gauchos had already circulated to some considerable extent among various segments of the Argentine reading public.

Gutiérrez began to publish Juan Moreira in 1879, when Hernández was completing the second part, the Vuelta, of Martín Fierro. Originally published in 1872, Hernández's poem was an instant success and quickly became a cultural monument. Like Cervantes's reprise of Don Quixote, the Vuelta was necessary to protect the author's “product” from the diverse and often outrageous extensions built upon it both by enterprising imitators and the popular tradition. But aside from the folksy notion of a literary figure that resonates in the mind of readers such that they seem to assume an autonomous “real life” existence—the tradition of real life Quixotes and Uncle Remuses and Tom Sawyers who emerge as a testimonial to how readers enact the urge to correlate literature and other cultural artifacts to the everyday life—the enormous spread of the Martín Fierro type and its derivatives like Juan Moreira attests to the degree to which the texts that feature them strike a specific cultural note in great need, at a particular moment, of being sounded. The proliferation of gaucho or gauchesque material through the early nineteenth century, as part of a special Romantic adaptation of folk or popular material to the cause of the Independence movement (for example, the poems of Hidalgo and Lussich), is also part of the general field of cultural reference that Hernández's and Gutiérrez's narratives evoke.

However, to speak of the existence of a generalized field of reference, the “gaucho motifs,” is not enough to indicate the extent of the response Gutiérrez's novel achieves at a particular moment in Argentine cultural history. The portrayal of the gaucho had emerged earlier in the century as part of a Latin American literary response to the Romantic interest in the culture of the people: the gaucho as embodying the lifestyle of an Arcadian idyll that may serve as an example for national identity, which is why Hernández's poem must first characterize this idyll and then chronicle its destruction in order to portray the plight and the destiny of Martín Fierro and his sons in the society of the Argentine Republic. But the gaucho as a figure of the destruction of the idyll has become for Gutiérrez the main point of departure.

Juan Moreira, therefore, is the synthesis of the gaucho rebelde: not the gaucho malo in Sarmiento's definition. The latter is an individual represented as cursed with a stigma of antisocial behavior that places him outside the range of idyllic features that Sarmiento is also at pains to detail; Facundo is the epigone of this sort of antigaucho.⁵ Rather, Moreira creates the gaucho who has been forced into an antisocial role both as the consequence of the treatment to which he has been subjected and as the only path open to him to survive in a world he is unable to control.

Part of the general underpinnings of this conception of the gaucho's plight, by the time of Gutiérrez's writing and its derivatives, is the Naturalist's conception of the conditioning forces of a society that define, inevitably and inexorably, a certain manner of being. There is much to be said, within the context of the rigidifying forces of the dominant social culture of the Generation of 1880, about literature and art around themes of criminal behavior, social misfits, immoral and abnormal conduct and the like; this is even more true in the case of works published in the 1890s. Surely this material reflects as much a normative concern for bringing all manner of lifestyles into conformity with a dominant mode, that of “polite society,” as it does with various forms of “scientific” preoccupation with the residue of human behavior left behind by the forces of law and order, order and progress, in their dynamic drive to constitute one kind of social norm. In this sense, Juan Moreira as a figure of rebellion is not just a manifestation of the gaucho type, but of a larger social figure, one that will have considerable importance for the writing of the Generation of 1880. Of particular importance is how Juan Moreira plays upon the readership's interest in the gaucho figure as a social rebel, a criminal misfit whose conduct is the consequence of a conjunction of social forces that for complex reasons contradict the dominant pattern of law and order.

It would be easy to say that this interest is simply a morbid one: the more well-defined the social norm, the greater the interest inherent in the example of deviance from it. Hence, there is considerable mileage in the literature of the period to be derived from the figure of the prostitute.⁶ But an assessment of interest based on a concept like morbidity is perhaps too affective to be of much analytical use. What must remain undeniable is that, as part of the project of sociocultural definition with or without reference to the general principles called Naturalism, Gutiérrez appealed most successfully to his readers' interest in human situations on the margin of dominant social norms, which explains why he also wrote many other works on nongaucho criminal figures.⁷

The gaucho is on the margins of Gutiérrez's readers in a dimension added to that of a social misfit like the prostitute. For where the latter is part of the urban scene that is continuous with the personal identity of Gutiérrez's readers, the gaucho is part of a rural setting that becomes a very powerful point of reference for a society whose controlling self-image is increasingly defined in urban terms. The gaucho is the Other in a double sense: the Other as the individual outside the law, and the Other as outside the controlling urban sector. If the criminal element provides one major defining feature of the writing of the Generation of 1880, so too will the dialectical relationship between urban and rural forces of Argentine identity whereby the latter will be seen both as a lost Arcadia and as the repository of a deleterious Hispanic past that must be swept away. One of the dominant images of the gaucho had, in effect, become the quintessence of the telluric primitive that must be assimilated to the dominant culture or, if not, destroyed. This imperative also includes the Indian and an entire range of social types that will, later, include the immigrant originally brought in to enrich the native stock.

These are the aspects of Gutiérrez's novel that constitute facets of its ideological encrustation, from the point of view of readers in 1879 as well as for readers one hundred years later. While Juan Moreira may not be as artistically “primitive” a novel as criticism is wont to assert, there can be no avoiding the fact that it is this sort of encrustation that makes it such a centerpiece in a characterization of the cultural writing of the Generation of 1880.

Although the appeal to historical fact may be one of the hoariest devices of narrative fiction, it is of special importance in the case of a novel like Juan Moreira. During a cultural period that witnessed the attempt to ground explanation—“narrative” in the largest sense—in an appeal to scientific fact, methodology, and reasoning, the appeal to real events by Gutiérrez may be taken as a rhetorical guarantee of the legitimacy of his story. Certainly, the novel is called upon to justify its continued existence in the face of the rise of a formal historiography dedicated to charting the ways in which it is different from narrative fiction. Both the emphasis on what can generally be called the fantastic and the utilization of historical motifs by fictional writers during the Romantic period provided an ample basis of contrast for positivistic historiographers to trace where such poetry left off and scientific knowledge began.

The formal discipline of late-nineteenth-century historiography might not have been possible—or even necessary—if it had not been for the Romantic aesthetic, which provided a rather neat though extreme point of reference for the difference that the academic historians sought to promote and prize. The concern for seeking the mysterious or hidden bases of human motivation and conduct that led to what were later considered the outrageous plots of Romantic fiction meant a concern for what lay beyond the verifiable, the reasonable, or the natural. Often the quest for the unknown and the supernatural led to an interest in historical materials, to the so-called Romantic Revival that is an integral part of the writing of that period. Such a revival of historical materials—presented to the reader by a narrator who claims to have had privileged access to them, the ploy of the documents found forgotten in a custom-house—contributed to the dwelling on the supernatural or on what lay beyond the ken of everyday life.

The historical writing that emerges in the late nineteenth century is determined to base its appeal on the sort of explicit documentary evidence and logical reasoning that were argued to be the antithesis of the plot structure and narrative strategies of the historical novel. And, precisely, much of the new historical writing dealt with the themes and materials of the novel it sought to preempt: chronicles of antiquity, biographies of great men (that is, the Romantic hero revised), the ebb and flow of historical events as determinants in the formation of a national character, and the concern for the texture and details of daily life that will lead to the rise of the anthropological and sociological disciplines as adjuncts of scientific historiography.

Such intellectual thrusts must necessarily displace, if only because they have the attractive patina of the new, the conventions of an earlier historical fiction. Certainly in all of the European nations undergoing national redefinitions during the latter part of the nineteenth century, there is a primacy accorded to the interpretations offered by the academic historians, and it is all too easy to see today how they served the ideology of these processes rather than being merely the detached objective observers they claimed to be. This process was even more true in Latin America, where the period beginning roughly in 1880 is crucial in the implantation of a Liberal society that will, in the view of its proponents, solve once and for all the independent non-Hispanic destiny of the several republics.

It is within the context of these priorities that Gutiérrez's appeal to the availability of facts to support his story of Juan Moreira's career assumes a special importance as one basis for a reading of the text. At two points close to midway in his narrative, Gutiérrez asserts the privilege of fact. The first quotation is used to allay presumed skepticism on the part of the reader as regards the veracity of the events and feats attributed to Moreira:

No hacemos novela, narramos los hechos que pueden atestiguar el señor Correa Morales, el señor Marañón, el señor Casanova, juez de paz de entonces, y otras muchas personas que conocen todos estos hechos. Hacemos esta salvedad, porque hay tales sucesos en la vida de Juan Moreira, que dejan atrás a cualquier novela o narración fantástica, escrita con el solo objeto de entretener el espíritu del lector.

(83)

(We are not writing a novel, we are narrating the fact to which Mr. Correa Morales, Mr. Marañón, Mr. Casanova can attest to, the latter the justice of the peace at that time, as well as many other persons familiar with these facts. We make this caveat because there are so many events in Juan Moreira's life that they leave far behind any novel or fantastic narrative written with the sole object of entertaining the spirit of the reader.)

It must be noted that an affirmation of this sort occurs in tandem with a variety of qualifiers that occur throughout the novel to the effect that “parece imposible que” (it seems impossible that), “parece increíble que” (it seems incredible that), and so on. Such qualifiers are used to head assertions that support Gutiérrez's presentation of Moreira as both a paradigm of the noble gaucho and as a superior exemplum of the virtuous individual, both as a model of Christian charity and as a fearless avenger of wrongs done to him and his family, immediate and extended.

Since, in the course of the novel, Moreira repeatedly triumphs against the fatal destiny that has befallen him and the hostile forces that persecute him, the appeal to historical fact serves to frame the uniformity of these triumphs and the ease with which Moreira appears able to overcome the odds ranged against him by circumstance and society. Were he not to prevail at the conclusion of each of the episodes that provide the major narrative nuclei of the novel, Gutiérrez would be left without a story to tell and a particular point to be made about what Moreira must represent for the reader. In view of how the pattern of events by which Moreira wins with such ease the armed contests that challenge his survival—the terms taken from Propp's morphology of the folk tale is deliberate here—Gutiérrez is constrained to condition his narrative with the reminder that it is not to be read in terms of the conventions of the simply novelesco, by which it is reasonable to assume Gutiérrez means the outrageously fictional considered to be the lowest common denominator of Romantic epics:

Esa misma noche vino al rancho un paisano, amigo de Santiago, con una novedad bastante grave para otro que no hubiera sido Juan Moreira; y que vino a sentar su reputación de valiente en Cañuelas, con un hecho que no nos atreveríamos a narrar, si el señor Nicolás González, juez de paz en aquella época, no pudiera atestiguar este hecho novelesco, digno de los espíritus fuertes que figuraron en la Edad Media.

(112)

(That same night a country man came to the cabin, a friend of Santiago's, with some news that would be serious for anyone other than Juan Moreira, who staked his reputation as a brave man on Cañuelas with a deed that we would not dare to narrate if Mr. Nicolás González, the justice of the peace at that time, were not able to testify to this novel-like deed, worthy of the strong spirits that peopled the Middle Ages.)

Obviously, no one expects readers to avail themselves of the sources the narrator specifies. What is at issue is not the existence of such sources but the illusion of fact that reference to them provides to the narrative.

This illusion of the appeal to fact extends to the narrator's overall stance toward his story and the mediating role he assigns himself between it and the reader. In addition to assertions of factual or documentary sources, the narrator repeatedly affirms that his information is based on personal contacts with the places of the story and with surviving witnesses of the events chronicled:

Hemos hablado una sola vez con Moreira, el año 74, y el timbre de su voz ha quedado grabado en nuestra memoria.

(18)

Hemos hecho un viaje ex profeso a recoger datos en los partidos que este gaucho habitó primero y aterrorizó después. …

(19)

Hemos hablado con los empleados de policía que han combatido con Moreira, inválidos todos, y que figurarán a su tiempo en esta narración, y hemos conversado largamente con el capitán de las partidas de plaza de Lobos y Navarro, inválidos también, y todos ellos nos han relatado la honda impresión que producía la mirada de Moreira en el combate.

(36)

(We have spoken only once with Moreira, in the year 1874, and the pitch of his voice is engraved in our memory.

We have made a trip for the sole purpose of gathering data in the townships that this gaucho first inhabited and then later terrorized. …

We have spoken with the police personnel who fought against Moreira, all of them incapacitated, who will figure in due course in this narrative, and we have spoken at length with the captain of the force in Lobos and Navarro. They were all incapacitated, and they have all spoken of the deep impression produced by the look on Moreira's face during battle.)

These references are from the early portions of the novel, and their strategic location may be taken as part of a need felt by the narrator to confirm the legitimacy of what he is relating.

It is customary to speak of the narrator of the late nineteenth-century novel as “omniscient” and as wont to control the narrative in a deus ex machina fashion toward making sure that events conform to a preconceived plan or design. Gutiérrez presents no substantial or innovative deviation from this pattern, and it is clear that his narrative of the criminal career of Juan Moreira is meant to support an unambiguous thesis. This thesis comes at the very end of the story, and it confirms the extent to which the novel appeals to a reformist sentiment that is a central concern in the period for the transition from the Hispanic feudal past to a more enlightened Liberal society. It also confirms the need to underscore the extent to which the structure of daily national life continued to deviate from such an ideal:

¡He aquí los graves defectos de que adolece nuestra célebre Justicia de Paz!

De un hombre nacido para el bien y para ser útil a sus semejantes, hacen una especie de fiera que, para salvar la cabeza del sable de las partidas, tiene que echarse al camino y defenderse con la daga y el trabuco.

(226)

(Here you have the grave defects that our celebrated Justice of the Peace system suffers from!

They take a man born to be good and useful to his neighbors, and they turn him into a kind of a beast that, in order to save his head from the sabers of the police, must take to the highway and defend himself with dagger and gun.)

A good case could be made for how Gutiérrez's interest lies in recording the vestiges of the feudal Hispanic past rather than in underscoring defects of the emerging Liberal structures. In either case, he stands as the mediator between the reader to whom rhetorical appeals of understanding must be made and the story of an individual who, by any definition of antisocial behavior, ends up engaging in unbridled lawlessness as the result of injustices of which he has been victim.⁸

Juan Moreira exhibits an unambiguous and uncomplicated story line: Juan Moreira is a fine specimen of a gaucho, a model citizen and worker, and an exemplary friend to his neighbors. Because of his popularity and his success with a woman whom he marries and by whom he has a son, he attracts the enmity of the local police authority, the teniente alcalde. As every Argentine knows, Moreira, after various episodes of mistreatment at the hands of the teniente alcalde, who exercises virtually absolute authority over the gauchos of his jurisdiction, kills the gringo store owner Sardetti in a quarrel over money that Moreira has loaned him and that Sardetti refuses to repay. Sardetti, who is a caricature in the novel of the hated immigrants that native Argentines felt were usurping their economy, is egged on by the teniente alcalde in refusing to honor his debt to Moreira. Moreira subsequently must kill the teniente alcalde in order to escape justice for the death of Sardetti. Moreira's words, “—Ahora, que se cumpla mi sino” (“Now, let my destiny be fulfilled”; 34), initiate the main trajectory of the story, Moreira's flight from justice until his final treacherous capture and assassination.

This trajectory is appropriately episodic, as Gutiérrez strings together a series of approximately a dozen narrative nuclei that demonstrate repeatedly Moreira's attempt to hang onto a shred of decency, self-respect, and virtuous feelings against the odds of the accumulating case against him as a common criminal to be hunted down and killed like a wild animal. The principal thrust of these episodes involves situations in which Moreira finds himself obliged to defend his honor against what seem to be legions of evil men, “bad” gauchos, who are ironically the epitome of the unthinking violence and random brutality attributed to Moreira. Each time Moreira must defend himself against these aggressors, his persecutors are provided with one more justification for hunting him down. For purposes of the narrative's coherence and cohesion, Moreira sees these circumstances as confirmation of the fatal destiny that he must fulfill, and his weary observations to this effect punctuate the narrative:

—¡Maldita sea mi suerte!—continuó, dirigiéndose a la puerte y llevando aún la daga en la mano—. ¡Que no puedo pisar un sitio sin tener que matar a un hombre!

(105)

—¡Está de Dios que no puedo luchar con mi sino!

(145)

(“Damn my luck,” he went on, addressing the door and still carrying the dagger in his hands. “I can't go anywhere without having to kill a man!”

“It is God's will that I not struggle against my destiny!”)

These are only two examples of the epiphonemic phrases by which the narrator has Moreira characterize the fateful circumstances in which he finds himself entrapped, circumstances that constitute a trap of both happenstance and social design from which he cannot escape.

For purposes of the heightened characterization of his narrative, Gutiérrez organizes his material in such a way that the fundamental circumstance, provided by the unjust persecution Moreira experiences in protecting his good name, against the teniente alcalde's interest in his wife, and his property, against Sardetti's fraud, is reinforced by, to use once again an allusion to the morphology of the folk tale, the dragons placed in his path that he must slay in order to remain free. For Gutiérrez's narrative, the irony is that these dragons are both embodiments of the evil that the noble gaucho's value system is ranged against and images of law and authority. Either his victims are ignoble officials or their death simply adds to the weight of evidence against Moreira by which official authorities are empowered to persecute him. When either these “dragons” or the authorities they represent turn out, in fact, to be figures of noble virtue consonant with Moreira's ideals, he is allowed to spare them and they become champions of his cause, much in the sense of the figure of Cruz in Martín Fierro. Significantly, although these individuals may go forth to proclaim how Moreira is an innocent victim of injustice, that they are unable to assuage the forces pursuing him adds to the case the narrator makes against a specific system of authority.

The trajectory of Moreira's flight from justice reaches a high point in the chapter “El nido de desventuras” (Nest of misfortunes). It is here he learns what has happened to his wife and son, “sumido en una meditación extraña, hundido en el abismo de sus penas” (deep in a strange meditation, sunk in the abyss of his suffering; 126). If up to this point Moreira's concern has been to return to his wife and son and to protect them from being persecuted in his absence, he now knows that there can be no turning back. Although neither his words as a character nor the narrator's as the controlling point of view in the narrative allude to a code of morality or to the effect that, once having been possessed by another man, Vicenta can never be taken back by or return to Moreira, it is obvious that this sort of standard is taken for granted by the characters (Moreira and his compadre Giménez, who is the bearer of the terrible story), narrator, and implied reader. That the modern reader may find this circumstance unreal is beside the point, since accepting it is clearly required as a fundamental point in order for Gutiérrez's novel to proceed.

It is because Moreira realizes that he cannot now turn back that his purpose in life shifts from returning to rescue and protect his family to avenging the wrong that has been done to him. He does return, but it is to kill the teniente alcalde in the bed that he now shares with Moreira's wife, Vicenta. Significantly, this is Moreira's first failure, and a subsequent attempt to kill the teniente alcalde also fails. Moreira's third and conclusive failure occurs when he is finally killed, the victim of the treachery of another gaucho who points him out—references to the Judas figure are explicitly used—to the military squadron pursuing Moreira. Moreira's need to kill the teniente alcalde and then to die himself becomes a ruling passion, and in the hands of another author a decade or so later, the story might have become a study in the psychopathology of the criminal mind. However, Gutiérrez remains faithful to his intention to portray the misfortunes of a good gaucho forced to pursue a life of violence. Toward this end, it is important that the narrative be circumscribed in terms of the iterative nuclei that underscore the futility of any attempt by Moreira to defend himself, to vindicate himself, or to prevail against the system of oppression and persecution that closes in around him.

In terms of the failure of the noble gaucho forced to go bad, the narrator supplements the juxtaposition of Moreira's inherent nobility the circumstances of violence thrust upon him with a major example of literary intertextuality. One might argue that the image of the wandering gaucho, meeting with one adventure after another on the open road, is in some sense an allusion to the Quijote model or even the figure of the wandering Jew. However, Gutiérrez has special emphasis for the model of the Cid, the Medieval Spanish warrior who rebels against an unjust liege lord, only to regain his confidence and to vindicate his nobility through the agency of his own superior virtue as an eloquent embodiment of the feudal ideal.

Juan Moreira's intertextuality with the Cid narrative is based on an echo of one of the poem's key opening lines: “Dios, qué buen vassallo, si oviesse buen señore!” (God, what a good vassal, if only he had a good lord!; l. 20). Compare the following aside by both the narrator and other characters in Gutiérrez's narrative: “Ya lo hemos dicho, [Moreira] hubiera hecho una figura gloriosa” (We've already said that Moreira would have made a glorious figure; 15). This echo is rounded out by one of the supplementary chapters added by Gutiérrez to Juan Moreira when it was published in book form, “La daga de Moreira”: “La daga de Moreira is digna de figurar en un museo al lado de la espada del Cid” (Moreira's dagger is worthy to figure in a museum alongside the Cid's sword; 228). This sort of intertextuality adds a specifically literary dimension to the characterization of Moreira's inherent nobility and virtue as the ideal gaucho—a sort of Argentine “natural man”—corrupted and perverted into a life of violence at the hands of a corrupt and perverted official authority.

Of course, it is the primacy of this opposition that provides the plot impetus for Gutiérrez's narrative: the image of the lost Eden, of the trammeled Adam whose fall is the result of an external agency, and of the struggle against an implacable fate, not an impersonal and unknown fate, but one that is the specific correlative of a degraded social circumstance. This opposition provides the fundamental ideological configuration of Gutiérrez's novel and the point of reference both for the terms chosen to characterize Moreira and his misadventures and for the interpretation of their general sense of meaning. It is on the basis of this controlling ideology that we understand the irony of some of the chapter titles: “La pendiente del crimen” (The slope of crime)—Moreira's “crimes” are defined by the greater crime of his unjust persecution; or “La fuerza del sino” (The force of destiny)—Moreira's destiny is dictated by a corrupt social system and not by the secret forces of the universe as evoked by this title taken from the Duque de Rivas's famous romantic drama and Verdi's opera based on it.

The role that the narrator assumes as a mediating consciousness for Moreira's situation as the propitiatory victim of a corrupt social system is directly related to the generic ambiguity of Gutiérrez's work. Clearly, no pretense is made to be writing either history or biography: the simple absence of any of the normal apparatus of those emerging disciplines would allow the reader to accept the fact that Juan Moreira is basically a literary work, if only by default. The author goes to great length to confirm the historical or documentary accuracy of the general outlines of the story being presented. Yet there is an essential ambiguity arising from this appeal to fact on the one hand and the novelistic licenses that the author takes as a matter of course in characterizing Moreira's personal attitudes toward the fate that has befallen him.

If the narrator mediates between the story and the reader to the extent that a particular social thesis is being promoted and the rhetoric of the story points toward the highlighting of that thesis, Gutiérrez's narrator does not “crowd out” Moreira's own consciousness. That is, where one usually associates with the novel of Naturalism a narrator who must assume the entire burden of speaking for the characters, since, in their degraded circumstances, they are unable to speak or think for themselves, Gutiérrez, as part of his image of Moreira as an Adam unjustly denied the Edenic existence his noble spirit entitles him to, is careful to authenticate this image of the gaucho by having him speak in his own voice.

Moreira is able to verbalize his value system and the priority it accords to both defending one's person and respecting others. He is also able to reflect on his destiny, his sense of frustration and rage, his drive for revenge, and, ultimately, his death wish—all in order to escape a dead-end existence. These features of Gutiérrez's image of Moreira are particularly evident at the turning point in the narrative, the moment when Moreira's friend Julián informs him of the evil that has befallen his family. Although there is no way to verify the narrator's record of Moreira's words and reactions within a historiographic norm of documentary authentication, the foregrounding of Moreira as an individual reacting to his personal tragedy is crucial to the ideological position whereby the gaucho as epitomized by Moreira is an Adam brought down by a nefarious social system.

AUDIENCE COMPETENCE AND THE THEATRICAL VERSION OF JUAN MOREIRA

A reading of the dramatic version of Juan Moreira, written by Gutiérrez himself and first performed in 1886 in two acts by the troupe of the Uruguayan actor José J. Podestá, gives the impression of a work that is distinctly naive and unaccomplished artistically. The scenes—five in the first act and six plus a Mutación in the second—seem to skip from one episode to another in the description of the unjust persecution and eventual death of the “good gaucho” Juan Moreira. There is no apparent psychological development, at least as we associate it with Realist-Naturalist drama, and little in the way of a clear development of dramatic events from proposition to complication and denouement. In sum, the play seems to have only the barest of dramatic tension and to possess only an archaeological interest. A charitable if patronizing attitude would conclude that it was more attractive as the theatricalization of the Podestá troupe than as the literary text we read.

There is a unanimous recognition of Juan Moreira as the inaugural work of a national Argentine theater.⁹ But legitimate questions can be raised concerning its artistic importance, particularly when read today or compared with European drama of the 1880s. While it is possible to attribute the fragmentary or episodic nature of Juan Moreira to the dramatic immaturity of the author and the primitiveness of the pre-Sánchez Argentine stage, it is possible to understand—if not justify aesthetically—this feature in terms of the reception of a work by its contemplated audience.

All literary works embody an implicit identification of their immediate audience and of the literary competence of that audience. In the case of Juan Moreira one can state that, in general terms, its audience could be counted on to have had a relatively limited experience with traditional, spoken theater, although it may have been extensively familiar with the contemporary pantomimes of the Podestá company and, indeed, Juan Moreira was first presented as a pantomime. Thus, it is possible to identify certain tendencies and overtheatricalizations designed to ensure and reinforce audience comprehension of the conventions of the dramatic enactment. On the other hand, the audience can be assumed to have had extensive familiarity with the Juan Moreira legend to the extent that that story jibed with the personal experiences of the audience or of friends and relatives who may have suffered similarly arbitrary treatment at the hands of the agents of law and order that is the main point of Gutiérrez's novel.

Roland Barthes has noted, in his extensive commentaries on reader competence and how works of literature are structured in terms of that competence, that, among other codes, all works depend on a reader knowledge of a specific referential or cultural code. This code, whose components are hierarchical and go from the universal to the cabalistic, from the internalized referential knowledge of all mankind to that of limited in-groups, means that it is not always necessary for authors to “fill in all the gaps.” They can depend on the assumed competence of readers with this code or a subset of it to complete the story or grasp its implications. Allusions in classical literature or topical references in contemporary writings, songs, and jokes are all basic examples of the “shorthand” of the referential code. Barthes speaks of complex examples in nineteenth-century fiction, and it is true that when a realistic or a symbolist-psychological literature deals with the unknown or the unusual or deals with the familiar from unexpected perspectives the referential code becomes less reliable and can even constitute an ironic antiphony between popular wisdom and the true sense of the text.

In the case of Juan Moreira—as in most costumbrista fiction, or in early allegorical narratives based on established Christian stories, or in the romance histórico and fronterizo—there is little question of unexpected interpretation. The work may be seen simply as the dramatization of the familiar. The episodic nature of the play, rather than a lamentable defect of structural coherence when the work is analyzed in intrinsic isolation, becomes a completely justifiable structural openness when we see Juan Moreira in terms of the audience competence it implicitly anticipated. In short, there is no need either to give the complete details of the Moreira story either as specific legend or as a sociological type or to provide a texture of logical action and transition. Both are part of the audience competence and may, as a consequence, be comfortably dispensed with. It is only for modern readers that a problem of confusing fragmentation may occur, and thus it behooves us to “recover” from the structure of the work the historically conditioned competence we are expected to have. This may not necessarily increase the artistic value of Juan Moreira, but it does enable us to understand the principles underlying its structural configuration.

We may see the structural principle by which the discourse of a text is a function of the presumed reader-audience competence in several aspects of the drama Juan Moreira. For example, much of the language of the text is stereotyped, and we may say that such a language reinforces or supports the presumption that the popular audience will want to encounter in the play everyday speech with which it is familiar. A familiar linguistic pattern, therefore, seems to substantiate the premise that the audience competence implied by Juan Moreira will demand, as an adjunct of a story with which it is familiar, a language that likewise does not deviate from a colloquial norm. Conversely, both the highly concentrated expression of Romantic drama, with its emphasis on a language (and, of course, on a theme) that is pregnant with symbolic nuances, and the pseudodocumentary expression of Realist and Naturalist drama that attempts, in its turning away from Romantic symbolism, to convey faithfully the sociolinguistic texture of daily speech, are inappropriate to Juan Moreira as pre-Realist but post-Romantic theater. That is to say, the language of the play is neither symbolic in a Romantic fashion nor documentary in the often exaggeratedly verist sense of Realist-Naturalist theater. Rather, the language reflects a conception of speech that is a mixture of colloquial, daily expression and an expression that, still on a colloquial level, passes for the poetic or the symbolic. In this sense the language suggests a documentary verism without actually attaining it: it is a literary language that is “paracolloquial.” It should be noted that many of the best plays of the major Latin American playwright of the period, the Uruguayan Florencio Sánchez (1875-1910), whatever Realist-Naturalist pretensions he may have had, are likewise characterized by this same register of linguistic expression—La gringa or Barranca abajo, for example.

Three features of linguistic expression in Juan Moreira may be adduced in support of the foregoing contention concerning a paracolloquialism demanded by a presumed audience competence: (1) language forms that capture an audience's linguistic self-image—the Argentine voseo, phonologic phenomena like pensao or verdá, lexical items like juepucha or tata, figures of speech like ¿Qué vientos lo traen por aquí, amigo? or Largue todo el rollo, amigo Julián; (2) metaphors of the sort to be found in foregrounded popular speech where an effort is made to be “poetic” and to go beyond the cliché-ridden formulas of most colloquial expressions—“Sí, han creído que soy vaca que se ordeña sin manear” (Yes, they think I'm a cow who can be milked without having to be hobbled),¹⁰ “tanto se baraja el naipe que al fin se gasta” (you shuffle the cards so much they wear out; 413), “… Yo no soy mancarrón patrio pa que me hagan parar a mano, ni soy candil pa que así no más me priendan” (I'm no local nag you can stop with one hand, nor a lantern you can light so easily; 422); (3) “reasoning” that reflects the attempt of the humble individual to give some sort of coherent account of his circumstance and his experiences, a reasoning that is, moreover, a repository of recognizable folk wisdom (accurate or otherwise), popular values, and the cunning of the individual obliged constantly to protect his meager interests from the rapacious. Reasoning of this kind forms the very basis of the work and on it rests the definition of Moreira's plight and his subsequent destiny. Although issues of semantic content and narrative development are involved, the structures of this reasoning involve a particular verbal texture. In the opening scene of the play, special attention is paid to questions (erotesis) and to the entailments in the last speech of Moreira:

ALCALDE:
—Señor Sardetti. Usted ha sido llamado porque dice Moreira que usted le debe diez mil pesos.
SARDETTI:
—Señor, eso es falso, yo no le debo ni un solo peso.
ALCALDE:
—¿Y a qué viene entonces tanta mentira? ¿Por qué vienes a cobrar un dinero que no es tuyo?
MOREIRA:
—Señor, yo cobro mi plata que he prestao y la cobro porque la necesito, este hombre quiere robarme si dice que no me debe, y yo entonces, señor Alcalde, vengo a pedir justicia.
ALCALDE:
—La justicia que yo te he de dar es una barra de grillos, ladrón, que vienes a contar bolazos.
MOREIRA:
—¿Quiere decir que no me debes nada?
SARDETTI:
—Nada.
MOREIRA:
—Y usted, ¿no quiere hacer que me pague?
ALCALDE:
—Es claro, puesto que nada te debe, y que tú has venido a jugar sucio.
MOREIRA:
—Está bueno, amigo. Usted me ha negao la deuda para cuyo pago le di tantas esperas, pero yo me la he de cobrar dándole una puñalada por cada mil pesos. Y usted, don Francisco, que me ha echao al medio de puro vicio, guárdese de mí porque ha de ser mi perdición en esta vida, y de su justicia tengo bastante.

(408-9)

MAYOR:
—Mr. Sardetti. You have been called because Moreira says you owe him 10,000 pesos.
SARDETTI:
—Sir, that's a lie, I don't owe him a single peso.
MAYOR:
—Why all this lying, then? Why do you sue for money that isn't yours?
MOREIRA:
—Sir, I'm here to collect money that I've loaned because I need it. This man intends to rob me if he says that he doesn't owe me, and I, Mr. Mayor, have come to demand justice.
MAYOR:
—The justice you'll get from me is a leg iron, thief, coming here telling lies.
MOREIRA:
—You mean you owe me nothing?
SARDETTI:
—Nothing.
MOREIRA:
—And you won't make him pay me?
MAYOR:
—That's right, because he doesn't owe you anything, and you've come here to play him dirty.
MOREIRA:
—That's fine, friend. You have denied what's owed me after I gave you so much time to pay. But I'll collect by stabbing you once for each thousand pesos. And you, Don Francisco, who's cast me aside out of pure nastiness, be on guard against me because it'll be my ruin yet. I've had enough of your justice.

In the fifth scene, Moreira and the Alcalde, now identified as Don Francisco, have another exchange; once again questions of “reasoning” are at issue:

DON Francisco:
—Pues sí, amigo, en cuanto Moreira caiga en mis manos no va a contar el cuento.
UN Vecino:
—Pero, señor, el amigo Moreira era un buen criollo y lo que él ha hecho, lo hubiera hecho usted mismo, Don Francisco, y cuando un hombre como él se halla en la mala, es preciso darle algún alivio, que demasiado tiene con andar huido del pago.
DON Francisco:
—No, lo he de perseguir hasta encontrarlo y cuando lo encuentre lo he de matar como a un perro, pero antes de matarlo lo he de hacer sufrir alzándome con su mujer que me ha robado, porque yo me iba a casar con ella, y ya que no ha querido ser mi mujer, será mi gaucha. (Moreira da un puntapié a la puerta, y cuando entra, todos se paran.)
MOREIRA:
—Quien va a matar de esta hecha, y a matar como matan los hombres, soy yo don Francisco que lo vengo a pelear, pa tener el gusto de levantarlo en la punta de mi daga, como quien mata a un perro. (Don Francisco saca el revólver y le tira un tiro.) Así matan ustedes, de lejos y sin riesgo …

(416)

DON Francisco:
—Well, yes, friend, as soon as Moreira falls into my hands, that'll be the end of him.
A NEIGHBOR:
—But, sir, my friend Moreira was a good neighbor, and what he has done you would've also, Don Francisco. And when a man like him finds himself down and out, it is necessary to give him some relief, since it's bad enough to be on the run.
DON Francisco:
—No, I'll go after him until I find him, and when I find him I'll kill him like a dog, but before I kill him, I'll make him suffer by running off with his wife who he stole from me, because I was going to marry her, and since she didn't want to be my wife, she'll be my woman. [Moreira kicks the door, and when he enters, everybody stands up.]
MOREIRA:
—I'm the one who's going to do any killing around here, Don Francisco, for I'm here to fight, to have the pleasure of lifting you up with the tip of my dagger, just like you kill a dog. [Don Francisco takes out his revolver and fires at him.] That's the way your kind kills, from a distance and without taking any risks.

A final example is Moreira's self-explanation when his motives are questioned by a political boss whose life he has just saved. This time, Moreira's account of his reasons establishes a counterpoint between the nobility of his act and the degradation of his lot in life:

MARAñON:
—Yo agradezco lo que usted ha hecho amigo Moreira y si alguna vez puedo serle útil en alguna cosa, acuda a mí, porque desde este momento soy su amigo.
MOREIRA:
—No me agradezca nada, señor. Lo que yo he hecho, lo hubiera hecho cualquiera. Yo lo quiero a usted porque necesito querer a alguno y usted se me figura que es algo mío, que es mi hijo o que es mi hermano. Yo soy un hombre maldito, que he nacido para penar y pa andar huyendo de los hombres, que han sido mi perdición, y he querido a usted porque siento que al quererlo puedo respirar con más franqueza, y esto es tan dulce para mí, que si usted me mandase entregar a la partida, ahora mismo iba y me presentaba.
MARAñON:
—¿Y por qué anda usted, así, errante, retando a la justicia con sus actos que son malos? ¿Por qué no trabaja usted como antes y deja esa mala vida?
MOREIRA (muy triste):
—Con las penas que yo tengo en el corazón habría que llorar un año. Yo era feliz al lao de mi mujer y de mi hijo, y jamás hice a un hombre ninguna maldad. Pero yo habré nacido con algún sino fatal porque la suerte se me dio güelta y de repente me vi perseguido al extremo de pelear pa defender mi cabeza; usted ya sabe todo cuanto ha pasao, patrón.

(418)

MARAñON:
—I'm grateful for what you've done, friend Moreira, and if there's ever anything I can do for you, just let me know, for I'm your friend from now on.
MOREIRA:
—Don't thank me for a thing, sir. What I've done, anyone would've done. I love you because I need to love someone, and you seem to me to like myself, as though you were my son or my brother. I am a damned man who has been born to suffer and to flee from men, who have been my downfall, and I have felt love for you because I feel that by loving you I can breath easier, and that is so sweet to me that, even if you were to order me to turn myself in to the police, I would go and do it.
MARAñON:
—And why are you always on the run, sir, defying justice with your deeds which are evil? Why don't you work as before and abandon this evil life?
MOREIRA [very sad]:
—There's enough suffering in my heart to cry a year. I was happy at the side of my wife and son, and I never did any man wrong. But I must have been born under a fatal sign because my luck turned and I suddenly saw myself persecuted to the extent of fighting to defend my head. You know everything that happened, boss.)

In addition to these linguistic features, all of which, it is maintained, reinforce the audience's sense of familiarity with what is going on and thus permit the episodic nature that marks the text, we have in the first act a mingling of prose and poetry, the latter in the form of a payada that gives further credence to the assertion that the language of the play is not simply documentarily colloquial in its reliance on an identification with the audience's linguistic self-image. The text of the payada, although undoubtedly faithful to the tenor and rhetoric of such popular diversions, is only tangentially colloquial. Rather, it seems to “give the tone” of the setting for the work and, in the closing strophes, to articulate the vox populi embodied in the characters of the play and, homologously, in the audience of the latter (see Juan Moreira, 411).

In these ways, and despite the fact that Juan Moreira is “weak” on plot development and “logical” representation, it is possible to see how a texture of familiarity is established for the audience in which two fundamental aspects of its competence in the face of cultural-literary artifacts are brought into play: first, the identification of a well-known legend associated either generally or specifically with the figure of Juan Moreira; second, the “acceptance” of the familiarity of the representation offered to it because of the particular linguistic registers of the work that may be called paracolloquial in their ability to be textually foregrounded. At the same time, these apparently familiar registers may be reassuring to the audience, an audience whose competence could not accept a thorough-going linguistic defamiliarization. In summary, to call Juan Moreira “primitive” or “unaccomplished” because of its episodic nature is not altogether justified. While it may not be an outstanding example of dramatic art, its fragmentariness may be seen less as the result of artistic naiveté on the part of Gutiérrez-Podestá and more as a question of a type of literary structure permitted by the sort of audience competence it implicitly envisioned.

HUMAN FEELINGS AND MILITARY DISCIPLINE IN JOSé IGNACIO GARMENDIA'S CUENTOS DE TROPA

Estas digresiones me dominan de tal modo, que me escapo inconsciente á cada momento de mi título, es imposible corregirme; porque escribo con mi corazon y él ejerce despóticamente la influencia de los recuerdos, domina la cabeza y embarulla la lista con ese desaliño que ya en mi modo de escribir es natural y perdonable, porque demasiado se hace en salvar del olvido (sin pretension literaria alguna) tipos de otros tiempos de los cuales hoy ni remotamente se tiene idea.¹¹

(These digressions control me to such an extent that I escape at any moment from my title, and it is impossible to correct me. For I write with my heart, and it exercises the despotic influence of memory, ruling my head and messing up the list with that disorder that is already natural and excusable in my way of writing, because there is too much to do in rescuing from oblivion [without any literary pretenses] types from other times about which today one hasn't the remotest idea.)

The prominence of military activity during the nineteenth century in Latin America is a widely acknowledged fact. The struggle for independence from Spain, the rivalry between competing power factions, the ambitions of individual strongmen and their followers, the conflicts between central and federal models of government, and various campaigns of pacification and domination involved the military in many of the founding activities of the Latin American republics, an involvement that has often been used to explain the willingness of the military to assume direct governing responsibility in the twentieth century.

In Argentina, the overthrow of Rosas and the subsequent period of national reorganization involved considerable military activity, especially the subjugation of provincial caudillos and the imposition of a centralized government based in Buenos Aires, which, in order to consolidate federal power, was separated as a federal district from the province of Buenos Aires. The consolidation of a strong central government based in Buenos Aires was achieved in 1880, and this date also marks the achievement of a national order of peace and tranquility in which the army is increasingly less active in armed campaigns. Before 1880, the Argentine army, subsequent to the expeditions against provincial caudillos who held out against central control, was involved in the Expedición al Desierto to contain nomadic Indians and to defeat those who fought against the economic organization of the Pampa (1879) and the Guerra de la Triple Alianza (1865-1869) against Paraguay. The mobilization of a large army for the latter war, which pitted Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against scrappy Paraguay, made possible the concentrated effort of the Expedición, an operation so vital to the expansion of a landed oligarchy and political control over the central countryside.¹²

All of this resulted in a dramatic transition from the volunteer, citizen militia of the war for independence to the professional army that, by the turn of the century, Argentina had installed along strict Prussian lines. The multiple aspects of this evolution served as the basis for a body of writing in late nineteenth-century Argentina concerning army life and military operations. In conformance with the memorialist strand of the writing of the period, a number of texts are the personal accounts of individuals who participated in military campaigns and who witnessed the evolution of the army. José Ignacio Garmendia (1812-1925), writing under the pseudonym Fortún de Vera, provides one interpretation of the role of the army in his Cuentos de tropa (entre indios y milicos) (Troop stories [among Indians and soldiers], 1891; it should be noted that the text of Cuentos de tropa is marked by very erratic orthography and an almost chaotic use of the accent mark, lending it the surely unintentional appearance of unedited entries in a campaign diary).

A loosely structured series of commentaries about what a professional army ought to be like, based on historical examples and European models, and a collection of anecdotes that illustrate his beliefs, Cuentos de tropa provides both a nostalgic version of life among the troops and a declaration of principles for the modernization of what had historically been a raggle-taggle organization. Concomitantly, Garmendia recalls what the army had been in his youth (he would have been in his early thirties when he served as a major in the war with Paraguay) while also speaking programmatically as regards the role and character of a professional army.

Garmendia's evocation of the army of his youth is unabashedly nostalgic, and his comments are underlain by an ubi sunt lament for what has become an institution of the past. Curiously enough, his comments also speak of the passing of the indigenous population with which the first settlers of the Pampa cohabitated precariously and whose safety the army was supposed to defend, often not to any appreciable degree. “En la pampa” is a series of vignettes that Garmendia published pseudonymously in the newspaper El Tribuno; neither the pseudonym nor the inclusive dates of these fragments is given, although the section is dated January 1876. The author speaks of a way of life that has now disappeared:

Mi afan tendrá su recompensa, no todo el querido panorama desaparece entre el espeso vapor de la bruma de la distancia, algo salvaremos de ese naufragio de la memoria, aquella dura vida de soldado medio indio, austera, miserable, corajosa, astuta y empedernida en los trabajos y en los peligros, amagada sin cesar por el sobresalto, á caballo, siempre á caballo, veloz, rápida sobre la marcha, sin tiempo para nada, ya sea combatiendo por la vida, ya sea esquivando receloso la persecucion, ó la sorpresa artera, teniendo por techo el firmamento con sus eternos guías, y por suelo la ondulosa llanura con sus hermosos lagos, que parecen mirajes de plata que marcan la etapa con el rastro imperceptible, ha de reflejar sus tintes, que aunque pálidos, dejarán siempre un bosquejo de esa pintoresca época que ya pasó.

(330)

¿Qué queda?

(333)

My interest will have its recompense, and not all of the beloved panorama will disappear in the dense vapor of fog of distance. We will salvage something from that shipwreck of memory, that harsh life of the half-Indian soldier, austere, miserable, brave, astute, and devoted to the tasks and the dangers, constantly threatened by surprise, on horseback, always on horseback, swift, rapid at march, with no time for anything, whether fighting for their lives or apprehensively dodging being pursued or the clever attack, having as the roof over their heads the firmament with its eternal guides and the uneven ground as a floor, with its beautiful lakes that look like silvery mirages that mark the way with an imperceptible trace, reflecting their colors which, although pale, will always be a sketch of that picturesque bygone time.

Is there anything left?

This bit of nostalgia for a way of life, of both the frontier army and the Indian populations destroyed or subjugated by the Expedición, comes quite late in Cuentos de tropa, and Garmendia's opening discussion on the nature of modern army life is unquestionably that of an older man intent on echoing the principles of organized discipline integral to institutionalized life in Argentina near the end of the century. The first segment of Cuentos de tropa is entitled “Cómo se cumple una orden,” and in it Garmendia states his own military philosophy: greater discipline, less theory about war in the safety of the city, and more experience in the execution of military operations in the actual field of battle.

Undoubtedly, a subtext of Cuentos de tropa is the transition from a personalist army built on the venerable principles of a caudillo surrounded by loyal followers and a modern army in which demonstrated accomplishment must be the criterion of authority and for promotion. The references to other ways of achieving rank and the disclaimers of any personal attack are traces of this subtext:

Soy partidario decidido de la juventud, porque ella en los ejércitos tiene el rol mas brillante y hermoso, el entusiasmo patriótico del combate; pero creo, que el mayor mal que se le hace, es demostrarle que la escala de los ascensos en la carrera militar argentina, no tiene dificultad ninguna; ni importa un sacrificio el adquirirla, y que es tan fácil como subir cualquier escala cómoda, cuyos peldaños se remontan con mucho descanso, y que lo mismo tiene para el favoritismo los distinguidos servicios de cuarenta años, como los insignificantes que puedan representar la tercera parte.

Estas son verdades amargas pero oportunas, para enseñar que se exponen aquí sin la intención de herir a nadie, sino hacer notar un grave error cuyo remedio se tiene á la mano, siempre que nos demos cuenta de lo que es y será un buen ejército, y no se haga juego de niño de la primera institución del país, que está encargada nada menos que de la salvaguardia de la patria.

(11-12)

I am a decided partisan of youth, because youth has the most brilliant and beautiful role in armies, that of the patriotic enthusiasm of combat. But I believe that the greatest evil done to youth is to show it that the scale of ranks in the Argentine military career presents no difficulty, that sacrifice in acquiring rank is not important and that it is as easy as climbing an easy flight of stairs, whose steps allow for a lot of breathers, and that favoritism and forty years of service are the same thing, as insignificant as the service of a third party.

These are bitter but opportune truths, in order to show that they are put forth here without the slightest intention of hurting anyone, but rather to underscore a grave error whose remedy is within reach, as long as we realize what a good army is and will be and leave off playing children's games with the country's primary institution, one charged with nothing less than safeguarding the fatherland.

The ringing tone with which this passage closes establishes the didactic intent of Garmendia's book, and the nostalgia of “En la pampa,” with its earlier date, can be viewed as a contrasting parenthesis in the overall panorama of what the army in Argentina has been and what it has become and must continue to become so that, as the “country's primary institution” it can “safeguard the fatherland.”

However, it becomes clear that the bulk of Garmendia's text is not a propaedeutic of the new, professional military, but, precisely as the title states, a series of stories concerning troops—that is, Garmendia's personal recollections of major events during his life as a soldier. While these stories are appended as exempla to his general comments on the need for order and discipline in the army, the personal note and an appreciation for individual differences is what makes them interesting as narratives of the period. The most interesting, and the longest, story in Cuentos de tropa is “El miliciano Rojas” (Rojas the Recruit). It is the description of a loyal soldier, of the sort evoked nostalgically in the quotation from “En la pampa,” who is unfortunately a recalcitrant drunkard who subscribes only infrequently to the exigencies of military protocol. Garmendia evokes him in fond detail, underscoring Rojas's personal attachment to him and his courage and commitment as a soldier. Yet Rojas is unable to adapt himself to wartime discipline, and his constant refrain revolves around the indignities to an “hombre libre” (free man) occasioned by the structure of authority, principally as it relates to the prohibition against his getting drunk.

Rojas is thus a counterparadigm of the professional soldier Garmendia has ostensibly undertaken to promote, and, years after their relationship during the war against Paraguay, it is clear that Rojas continues to exercise a fascination over his former superior. Rojas is presented with all of the descriptors usually reserved for the “natural” man: his impulsiveness, his emotional outbursts, the disorderliness of his person and conduct, his resistance to authority and to anything remotely resembling discipline, his inability to “appreciate” the niceties of civilization, and so on. Yet it is evident that Garmendia hardly saw him as stupid and ignorant; Rojas is repeatedly praised for his native intelligence, for his ingenious resourcefulness (particularly with respect to bootlegging drink), and for his quick wit in defending himself against the demands of authority. For Garmendia, Rojas is an assemblage of contradictions, between his inability to adjust to military discipline and his commitment as a soldier, and it is this contradictory nature that fascinates the narrator against the backdrop of his repeated defense of the Prussian professionalization of the army. Garmendia appreciates the conflict between Rojas as a free spirit and the need for authority that he, as an officer, embodies. Yet, his narrative is marked by repeated gestures of defense of Rojas's conduct: “Fuera de esto, Rojas era un buen muchacho” (except for this, Rojas was a good boy; 153).

The characterization of Rojas as a “un muchacho grande” (an overgrown child; 153) assumes fuller narrative proportions when Garmendia recounts the execution of Gómez, Rojas's close companion in arms. Gómez, like Rojas, was often drunk, but, unlike Rojas, who was a happy drunk, Gómez would become ugly and combative. During one drunk, Gómez kills another man and is executed for it. Rojas is devastated, and Garmendia's descriptions of the pathos of the man's loss confirms his attachment to the spirited soldier.

From one point of view, the account of Gómez's execution returns the narrative to the seriousness of military discipline, not just the general social need for punishment for murder, but rather the question of authority associated with the ban on drinking in order to maintain discipline. Yet the narrator eschews the opportunity to drive this point home with any explicitness, and his story ends with praise for Rojas's human qualities instead: “¡Ah! siquiera ese buen amigo podía llorar” (Ah, this good friend could even cry; 248).

“Rojas el miliciano” is the portrait of an interesting and charming individual, a man whose free spirit is the basis of his attraction for the narrator, not his qualities as a paragon of the military discipline Garmendia sets out determinedly to champion. True, Rojas is a loyal soldier and an effective combatant, but more out of his personal commitments than out of professionalism as a soldier. As a consequence, there is an underlying and very obvious conflict in Cuentos de tropa. On the one hand, it is marked throughout by the narrator's adherence to a particular development of the Argentine army in order for it to serve as the “salvaguardia de la patria.” But on the other hand, and from a far more interesting point of view, the digressions for which the narrator apologizes repeatedly are the opportunity for the characterization of the glories of a preprofessional army and of “natural” but undisciplined soldiers like Rojas:

¿Pero á dónde me he ido á parar? más no es tiempo perdido cuando se habla de las glorias nacionales; es bueno de cuando en cuando en esta época herir las imaginaciones jóvenes, negligentes que navegan alegres y contentos en el mar de la molicie, con los recuerdos sagrados de las grandes cosas que han hecho los argentinos.

(119-20)

(But where has my friend gone? Yet it is not a waste of time to speak of national glories. It is good now and then at this time to wound the imagination of the young, navigating carefree, happy and content in their sea of the soft life, with the sacred memories of the great deeds performed by the Argentines.)

Notes

1. Justo S. López de Gomara, Gauchos y gringos (bosquejo de costumbres argentinas en un acto y en verso), ll. 1210-13.

2. Eduardo Gutiérrez, Juan Moreira, 2d ed., 143. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

3. Rivera, in Eduardo Gutiérrez, and León Benarós, in “Eduardo Gutiérrez: un descuidado destino,” are examples of critics who have sought to accord to Gutiérrez the literary importance that his own contemporaries were unwilling to recognize in his folletines. The latter tended to believe that the folletines exemplified appalling writing in both the carelessness of style and structure and in the marginal, “criminal” figures Gutiérrez dealt with and appeared to extol. As Benarós notes (pp. 21-22), it was Jorge Luis Borges who contributed to Gutiérrez's reevaluation by mentioning his preference for his folletines in his famous essay “La fruición literaria” (p. 101).

4. Angela B. Dellepiane, “Los folletines gauchescos de Eduardo Gutiérrez,” discusses the features of Gutiérrez's gauchesque works as serialized composition in “Los folletines gauchescos.” Section 5 of Benarós's essay is entitled “Los mitos”; chapter 7 of Rivera's monograph deals with “‘Los proyecciones’ de la obra de Gutiérrez”; and María Bonatti, “Juan Moreira en un contexto modernista,” discusses literary descendants. Adolfo Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna, provides a brilliant analysis of the folletines by Gutiérrez and others as a model of a national popular literature and its linguistic registers.

5. Noé Jitrik, Muerte y resurrección de “Facundo”; and C. A. Jones, Sarmiento: “Facundo.”

6. Domingo F. Casadevall, El tema de la mala vida en el teatro nacional.

7. “Gutiérrez's truculent pamphlets are conceived … on the principle of anecdotes that in the final analysis reflect the insecurity of the frontier world in the face of change. The illusion of factual reality arises from the temporal-spatial development of a typically novelistic conflict: the problematical opposition of stability (the hero in concert with his world) and instability (the hero in conflict with his world), as the revelation of a stage of rupture” (Rivera, Gutiérrez, 28). Dellepiane provides, furthermore, an inventory of how the social issues of his day were dealt with by Gutiérrez in his folletines (“Los folletines gauchescos,” 491).

8. Carlos A. Egan, in “Peripheralization and Cultural Change: Argentina, 1880-1910,” discusses antisocial behavior in Argentina and its reflection in cultural materials as the consequence of an integrated series of sociocultural forces.

9. The importance of the figure of Juan Moreira in the development of a national theater in Argentina and its enthusiastic reception are discussed by Raúl H. Castagnino, Literatura dramática argentina, 81-82. See also his Sociología del teatro argentino. Concerning audience reception of Juan Moreira, see Juan Carlos Ghiano's introduction in Teatro gauchescho primitivo, 13-16. Ghiano recognizes, in his opening paragraph, the limited nature of the Gauchesque theater alongside the poetry or the novel on the same themes (p. 5). Documentary information concerning the original pantomime version and the important decision to perform a spoken version of the play is presented by Rubén A. Benítez, Una histórica función de circo, and Oscar R. Beltrán, “Eduardo Gutiérrez y su pantomima Juan Moreira.”

10. Eduardo Gutiérrez, Juan Moreira, in Los clásicos del teatro hispanoamericano. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

11. José María Garmendia, Cuentos de tropa (entre indios y milicos), 277-78. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

12. Viñas, Indios, ejército y fronteras.