Theater in the Subjunctive Mode: Arlt's Trescientos millones

Conceived in 1927 and first staged in 1932 by Leónidas Barletta's Teatro del Pueblo, Roberto Arlt's Trescientos millones (Three Hundred Million) in a prologue and three acts uses the metatheatrical metaphor to investigate human creative activity and the continuities and disjunctions between a creator's represented and lived realities. Spanish immigration for low-paying work was a common feature of Buenos Aires life in the 1920s, and, according to Arlt, the play was inspired by an impoverished Spanish immigrant maid whose real-life suicide the writer had documented as a police reporter. The play reconstructs the elaborate daydream created by the Sirvienta (servant woman) during a solitary vigil in her empty room the night before she dies. Her intricate fantasy assumes the structure of a play performed by phantom actors and draws on her readings of pulp fiction, in particular, the eighteenth-century writer Ponson du Terrail's forty volumes starring the roguish Rocambole. Through her dream-play performance, the Sirvienta seeks a life more palatable than her servitude to the Patrona (employer) and her son. In the opening scene of act 1, the Sirvienta contemplates herself in a mirror and expresses distress at what she sees. Declaring that if only she were rich her life would change, she worries that in her present state even death will not want her. Death, the first phantom character, enters on this cue. A composite of female picaresque literary types, she reassures the Sirvienta that people die only when they are ready. The Sirvienta then enacts her will to live through a dream-play melodrama reflecting its creator's readings: Rocambole brings news that she is the rightful heir to trescientos millones; the Sirvienta takes an ocean voyage and meets the noble Galán; their child is kidnapped and put to work in a Buenos Aires slum; with Rocambole's

help, the Sirvienta rescues her grown daughter, who in turn seeks her mother's blessing in a marriage to the Galancito. The "real-life" Patrona's calls for service periodically interrupt the dream-play's action, and the fantasy is brought to a halt when the son, seeking sexual favors, repeatedly knocks on the Sirvienta's door. To escape his demands, the Sirvienta shoots herself, and her dream-play's phantom actors celebrate their emancipation from her service. Only Rocambole grieves her death. Dispersing the other phantoms with a crack of his whip, he kneels before the dead Sirvienta, sadly kisses her forehead, and begs God's mercy for the suffering servant. As the Patrona's son continues to bang on the door, the curtain falls.

The melodramatic action of the Sirvienta's dream is not Trescientos millones ' central concern, and the dream itself actually constitutes a play within the play. The play without the play that frames the Sirvienta's dream and is also enacted during its "intermissions" includes the preparations for and the process of staging that event. The piece's preface shows a secret gathering of the phantom actors who are traditionally summoned by human dreamers to portray individual creations like the Sirvienta's dream-play performance. Here, these "protagonists of dreams," including Rocambole, the Cubic Man, the Byzantine Queen, the Galán, and the Devil, assemble in the "astral zone" of human dreams to discuss the rigors of their work. At the mercy of their creators' whims, they must often play roles beneath their artistic dignity. Of this group, only Rocambole and the Galán are slated for roles in the Sirvienta's dream-play. The others will be summoned by diverse human creators, and the Sirvienta's own dream will include additional phantom actors. But those in the initial gathering spell out their theatrical callings. "Actually," the Galán explains, "one plays all the parts." "Just like actors," the Byzantine Queen adds (OC 3: 243). This self-conscious exchange ceases when the actors are summoned by their respective human dreamers, but it resumes during the Sirvienta's dream-play intermissions when her mistress calls and the actors use the break to talk. In addition, throughout the dream-play, both the Sirvienta and her actors step out of their roles to comment on the performance in progress.

Critics have aptly noted this work's Pirandellian quality, its Freudian allusions to the theatrical nature of dreams, and the pathos and social critique implicit in its opposition of a "happy-ending" dream world with the impoverished "real world" of the Sirvienta's tragic life.^[5] The work's metatheatrical structure and deployment of explicitly theatrical strategies, however, foreground a concern with the process of human

invention and its interaction with actual experience. The theatrical texture of the Sirvienta's dream-play permeates the demeanor and performances of those who enact it. The actors assembled in the preface are not only the phantoms of individual dreamer-playwrights but also the products of diverse traditions in human artistic creation, many with performative or theatrical qualities. The protean Rocambole appears in the same elaborately stylized outfit with which he is represented in woodcuts and chromolithographs illustrating early Barcelona editions of Ponson du Terrail's work. The Byzantine Queen resembles a carnival queen, the Galán has the air of a strolling player, and the Devil, with his caricaturesque Mephistophelian cape, looks like a circus devil. A parody of cubism's dehumanized representations, the Cubic Man resembles the homunculi and mechanical men of assorted human inventors. Regardless of the parts they will enact in individual dream-plays, therefore, the phantom actors are themselves already representational, the progeny of human creation, including popular fiction, chromolithography, carnival and circus dramatics, cubist art, and the Frankensteinian and Promethean humanoids of romanticism's mad inventors.

But the dream-play's theatricality goes beyond the representational substance of its actors or the artistic sources of its plot. The Sirvienta is portrayed as the work's spectator, actor, and, above all, director, and her role shifts intensify the sense of a work in progress. In her role as spectator, the Sirvienta sits on her bed and watches the visions unfolding before her. She becomes an active performer in her own drama when Rocambole delivers the money that transforms her from servant girl to orphan-heiress. In the following scene, the Sirvienta enacts the transformation. As the lights dim in her tiny room, a greenish hue permeates the scene, and one end of the room grows, "its wall prolonging itself into the bridge of a transatlantic ship, with an oblique, yellow smokestack and the winches' feathers opened in a fan. Orange clarity rolls over the ship and the silvery and bright green perspective of the chimerical ocean " (OC 3: 255). In a scene that blurs the play's boundaries between the mimetic space the audience sees and the diegetic space the characters imagine, representing a crossing from life to art, the Sirvienta moves from her bed to the ship and becomes somebody else. "The maid, timid and sad, " the stage directions indicatc, "has been transformed into a voluptuous and elastic creature who smiles with delectation at the scene that surrounds her " (OC 3: 255).^[6]

But the Sirvienta's role as author-director is the most critical for the dream-play's theatrical structure. Acknowledging the authorship of hu-

man dream builders, the phantom actors critique the play in progress. Although they denigrate her artistic sensibility, they grudgingly acknowledge the Sirvienta's status as the work's creator: they are the actors, she the author. The Sirvienta's involvement is instrumental, however, not only for the dream-play's conception but also for its performance. Her physical presence and mental attention trigger the play's action, and her absence, in body or spirit, brings it to a halt. As the author, she gives birth to its characters and shapes its plot, and as the director, she oversees the creation of its sets from the extension of her bare room and instructs the actors in executing their roles, for example, in her first meeting with the Galán. As the dream-play's central love scene, this encounter alternates between attempts to perform a lovers' assignation and arguments as to how it ought to be played. James Troiano has noted that this Pirandellian procedure gives the scene the quality of a dramatic rehearsal, intensifying the experience of a work in progress (38). As the Galán declaims his lines, the Sirvienta affirms her directorship, calling for more expressiveness. She explains to the Galán how she would play his role, as each draws on prior artistic experience for interpreting the scene. He volunteers the procedure of a German novel, but, explaining that she has read only the forty volumes of Rocambole, the Sirvienta demonstrates the interpretations she desires. This directorial exchange continues in the final scene with her daughter Cenicienta (Cinderella), an episode marked by an impoverishment of the Sirvienta's imagination. In contrast to the elaborate fairy-tale settings for the dream-play's prior scenes, this set's golden porticos and red curtains give it a conventional theatrical ambience, and, in contrast to the multicolored, ethereal lighting of prior scenes, this one is bathed in a "sad clarity." "You don't like to dream," the daughter, who yearns to fly, tells her mother (OC 3: 283). But even as she faces a diminution of creative energy, the Sirvienta maintains control of her play, for example, when the daughter steps out of her role to ask how it should be performed.

David William Foster argues that Trescientos millones dramatizes the striking differences between the Sirvienta's represented world of escapist dreams, which evolves from the pulp fiction she reads, and the real world of her poverty, an interpretation in which neither her dreaming nor the money of the play's title can solve the protagonist's dilemmas. It is up to the spectator, Foster continues, to think of viable solutions to the problems of people like the Sirvienta (16–17). But although the work's social commentary is indeed profound, the interaction of the

play without the play and the play within the play as well as the sometimes ironic distance between them focus attention on the process, not the content or validity, of the dream and point as much to the continuities as to the disjunctions between represented reality and lived reality. Trescientos millones is not so much about the possible concrete solutions to the Sirvienta's difficult life as it is an enactment of the will to change manifested in the problematic representational inventiveness with which she lives it. This focus simultaneously exposes and obscures divisions between art and life as well as between high art and popular culture.

To begin with, the trescientos millones of the play's title calls for more than a literal reading. No actual money ever changes hands (it is only a dream), and the issue of how real money might actually improve the Sirvienta's life is never posed by the work. In their preplay exchange, in fact, the phantom actors note the arbitrary, nature of the amount, as one says it will be thirty million and another asks why it could not simply be thirty thousand. In the context of the dream-play's theatrical structure, the trescientos millones functions as a kind of preperformance deus ex machina that sets off the Sirvienta's fantasy. Signing for the money, as I have noted, converts the servant girl into the orphanheiress protagonist of her dream-play. But when the Sirvienta first appears onstage, even before that exchange with Rocambole, the money incarnates the will to transformation that sets the performance in motion. Thus, reclining on her bed in the dark, she observes, "If I were rich, this wouldn't be happening to me." Sitting up, she insists, "I say that if I were rich, this wouldn't be happening to me." Then moving toward the mirror, she turns on the light and observes, "I'm thin and ugly, . . . even death wouldn't want me" (OC 3: 249).

This scene forecasts the theatrical function of the trescientos millones . It is while standing before the mirror, the most literal representation of herself, that the Sirvienta expresses her wish for a different life. Like the actor in a play, she seeks a self-portrayal different from the one reflected before her. More important, the key statements in this scene are expressed in the subjunctive mode. "If I were rich, this wouldn't be happening to me," grammatically encompassing both the condition contrary to fact that she desires and the potential of its fulfillment, is a fundamentally theatrical construction that provokes the creation of a virtual scenario. Dramatic activity, as Turner pointed out, operates in the subjunctive mode, or in what Herbert Blau calls, invoking Turner, the "as if " condition of performance (The Eye of Prey 164; emphasis in

original). Thus theater simultaneously denotes the separation (of fact from fiction) in the conditions contrary to fact it enacts and the possibility of actualization (of uniting fact and fiction) implied in its subjunctive mode. In Trescientos millones, the money is a theatrical mechanism pointing both to the fiction of the Sirvienta's desire and to the possibility of its transformation into fact. Her pcrformance is the potential "site of passage, " to use Artaud's term (109; emphasis in original), between the reality of her lived experience and the fiction of her dream-play, the site of "marking and merging" of horizons posed by Austin Quigley (22 ff.), or that "interstitial moment crossing art and life" of which Blau speaks (Blooded Thought 78).

As the work's title suggests a possible site of passage between the two worlds, so does the piece's interplay between them obscure the boundaries of that site. The dream-play's scenarios present the most visible example. The ocean liner deck, a mountain scene, a carbon shop, and an opulent room are all extensions of the Sirvienta's tiny quarters, visible diegetic theatrical spaces emerging from the mimetic, and her movement between the edge of her bed and the imagined scene reminds the spectator of Trescientos millones that the dream-play is at once separate from her real life and a part of it. Although certain theatrical devices (the Patrona's bell, the pauses when the phantom actors freeze, the ethereal play of lights over the dream scene) indicate transitions from a theatrical mode to a "reality" mode, the Sirvienta's selfawareness and that of her actors underscore the continuity between the two spheres. Always aware that the dream-play is make-believe, its participants are simultaneously their "real" selves and their performed selves. In an intermission scene, for example, while the phantom actors exchange disparaging remarks and knowing glances about the Sirvienta's artistic tastes, they abruptly return to their dream-play roles, and it becomes "impossible to discern if they are comrades or enemies " (OC 3: 263). Thus they are at once (and indistinguishably) the adversarial actors who disdain their director and the comrades enacted in her fantasy. The Sirvienta makes similar willful choices, as when the Galán enters for their love scene and she "resolves to follow the game of the amorous comedy " (OC 3: 259). But like the phantom actors, she plays it with awareness, "always with her little ironic mode " (OC 3: 259). This ironic distance points to the Sirvienta's simultaneous existence in both worlds, a dual identity made palpable by the "laborer's duster" she wears throughout the performance, even as she is transformed in demeanor and expression.

In the same vein, the dream-play actors' Pirandellian independence, while ostensibly denoting art's autonomy from life, in fact emphasizes the mutual contamination of the two realms. Drawn from the discourses of theater, circus performance, cubist art, and pulp fiction, the actors' physical demeanors, gestures, costumes, and language embody multilayered references to accumulated repertoires of human invention. The site of the play's opening secret meeting is described as an "astral zone where human beings' imaginations fabricate with force lines the phantoms that pursue them or that they re-create in their dreams " (OC 3:241). This astral zone constitutes a repository of human representations, a storehouse of surplus intertextuality that humanity has collectively produced and from which individual dreamers unconsciously draw in their creations. Just as the Sirvienta's tiny room unfolds into the set of her dream-play, accentuating the contiguity of the two worlds, so is the astral zone of accumulated artistic artifacts created by human beings in the process of living. More important, the work's "real" protagonist and her immediate surroundings are cut from the same intertextual cloth as the "smoke characters," or her phantom actors. The Sirvienta's room is described by an ostensibly objective authorial voice as imbued with "the desolate polychromatic perspective of a serial novel by Luis de Val " (OC 3: 249). Although designated a "real character," when she first appears, the Sirvienta is in the act of representing herself, a process that draws from her readings of pulp fiction: "A hard and insolent expression that is suddenly tempered in a voluptuous childishness of a cheap fantasy. It is reminiscent of Rina, the Angel of the Alps, or any other harlot destined to endear the burlap hearts of the female readers of Carolina Invernizio or Pérez Escrich " (OC 3: 249).

Like a Don Quixote or a Madame Bovary, the Sirvienta seeks to reinvent herself in keeping with what she reads, forging a lived identity out of a fictitious mold. But as a hyperbolically fictitious character (his exploits fill forty volumes), Rocambole inverts this process: "Whenever I play the character of some drama, I like to suffer and dream as if I were a man of flesh and blood instead of a phantom" (OC 3: 247; my emphasis). Thus the phantom actor approaches the theatrical event as if he were real, and the "real" character, the Sirvienta, approaches it as if her life were make-believe. What unites Rocambole and the Sirvienta in the subjunctive theatrical space on the interstices of art and life is the desire for transformation, an inventive impulse to create a different self—and a different life—from the ones they must represent at the beck and call of others. The Sirvienta's struggle to free herself from the roles

assigned by her masters is repeated and reflected in the phantom actors' autonomous gestures, seeking to loosen the representational bonds securing them to human dreamers. The process of representation made palpable by the theatrical event is thus portrayed, like theater, as an ambivalent force. Although it promotes a liberating impulse for transformation, it also makes manifest the power plays at stake in the representations that, as if from the prompter's box, we impose on one another. Significantly, neither the Sirvienta nor Rocambole achieves the desired representational autonomy. Rocambole is always Rocambole, no matter how many volumes of his exploits are produced, "always the same character through different names" (OC 3: 245). Similarly, notwithstanding her elaborate production, the Sirvienta fails abysmally to transform her life.

Foster suggests, as I have noted, that the Sirvienta's failure to change is attributable to the paucity of her lowbrow literary sources, a reading that would ascribe to Arlt himself the phantom actors' disdain for the Sirvienta's tastes in art (16–17). But I would argue for the need to consider the work's ironic distance from all of its characters, the origins in popular culture of the phantom actors themselves, and the blurring of divisions between high art and popular culture that characterizes much of Arlt's fictional world. While it is certainly true that the Sirvienta's creative sources lie in the realm traditionally labeled low art, the actors' profound social snobbery embeds their aesthetic critiques within an ironic frame. Complaining that the Sirvienta as orphan-heiress has the audacity to address them as "tú," they decry, in terms recalling Walter Benjamin's account of art's loss of aura, the harm they have suffered from art's reproduction through film and disparage the lower classes' creative pretensions: "The next thing you know, the lowliest dishwasher will think he has the right to an imagination" (OC 3: 265).^[7]

But in Arlt's artistic world, the lowliest dishwasher does indeed presume to dream, and creative self-representation is a feature of human existence not limited to a particular class. This is true, for example, of Silvio Astier, the protagonist of Arlt's first novel, El juguete rabioso (1926), which I have examined in the chapter on artists. Silvio's models for the transformation he seeks (Rocambole, Baudelaire, Edison, and Napoleon) are drawn from a range of aesthetic and cultural contexts. In Arlt's subsequent and more radically experimental novels, Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931 ), characters from lower echelons of Buenos Aires society seek to transform themselves and their world by acting out elaborate fantasy games.^[8] In the same spirit, regard-

less of their aesthetic class origins, all of Trescientos millones ' phantom actors are described as "puerile and ingenuous" products of human imagination.

What Trescientos millones suggests is that the impoverishment of imagination paralleling the Sirvienta's loss of the will to live derives not from her scant artistic background but from the nature of human invention itself and its relationship to lived experience. In its prefatory scene, Arlt's piece calls on its implicit spectator to see what the work's characters, "real" or phantom, cannot: the exposed, connecting tissue between Trescientos millones ' actual reality and its dream-play reality. The Sirvienta does not perceive the phantom actors' astral zone when they are not performing in her play, and they cannot see her when she retreats "offstage" to serve her real-life Patrona. But in its opening secret meeting, the play suggests these things ought to be seen, not only by individual dreamers who construct them but by all people: "If peopie had more sensitive vision, they would see us ... like they see the birds and the clouds" (OC 3: 247).

The play's implied spectator, possessing a "more sensitive vision," does indeed see the astral zone phantoms as clearly as the birds and the clouds, an analogy drawing attention to the duplicitous reciprocity of the real and the fictitious. This perspective undermines turn-of-thecentury aestheticist notions of art's autonomy from life and, in the Sirvienta's specific story, exposes a dynamic interaction between a work in progress and a life in progress. In the play's dramatic world, life and art are intertwined by the process of human invention. The phantom actors rely for their existence on the activity of human dreamers, but the dreamers' creative powers, in turn, are inextricably tied to their will to live, as the depletion of one parallels a loss of the other. But in addition, here both art and life are representational, intertextually prone to repeat what has been said and done before. Thus human dreamer-playwrights like the Sirvienta forge their work from lived experience, but that living in turn is shaped by art, not only by the specific pulp fiction constituting the Sirvienta's artistic training but also by the cadre of phantoms inhabiting the astral zone repository of prior representations. But even as human creative activity, like theater, is weighted down by a persistence of the mimetic, it is also motivated by a desire for liberation. In employing the metatheatrical metaphor to enact the dream-play's performance, Arlt's work exposes theater's mechanisms to display a tension in human invention between the previously said and the urge toward the new. As Blau has aptly noted, there is something in the nature of

performance (in this case, a dramatic dream-play re presentation) that requires "doing it as it has always been done ... even when it appears to be done as if for the first time" (The Eye of Prey 164). Weighted down by what has always been done, the limits on her life and her art, the Sirvienta fails to transform her world. But even in the face of her failure, Trescientos millones privileges the "as if" implicit in its title, encompassing, in the vanguardist spirit, the human impulse in even the "lowliest dishwasher" to transform reality through invention, to alter life through art.