Art as Larcenous Fabrication: Arlt's El juguete rabioso

As Argentine writer Roberto Arlt's first novel, El juguete rabioso (1926; The Rabid Toy) is less radical in narrative structure and style than his later works, Los siete locos (1929; The Seven Madmen) or Los lanzallamas (1931; The Flamethrowers). But the novel is clearly a product of the vanguard years in its overtly artistic theme, its generic and linguistic heterodoxy, and its inquiry into the artistic self. The novel also synthesizes concerns shaping activities of the two principal Buenos Aires artists' groups of the time, Florida and Boedo. Its aesthetic theme recalls Florida's approach to artistic innovation, while the class and cultural conflicts of its Buenos Aires characters evoke the concrete time and place in which the novel was written as well as Boedo's call for a socially concerned art. Through an ulterior, autodiegetic narration, the novel presents in four chapters episodes from four years in the life of its protagonist, Silvio Astier, a petit bourgeois adolescent with creative ideals who seeks a viable vocation in a rapidly expanding Buenos Aires. Although the narrator identifies the story being told as his written memoirs, the temporal relationship between the story and its telling remains vague. Narrated by an older Silvio-writer, the story is focalizod primarily through Silvio the adolescent. Nevertheless, occasional temporal markers and localization shifts from the acting to the narrating Silvio establish the ironic distance typical of this narrative structure. While the narrating self remains elusively situated in time and place, the acting Silvio provides the story's primary center of consciousness. But the two come together in the protagonist's ultimate emergence as an artist defined by his talent for creative fabrication and a critical outlook on his world.

The story consists of key moments in Silvio's life between his fourteenth and seventeenth years. A youth with inventive talents, literary experience, and dreams of fame seeks a coherent sense of self and transcendence over the persistent need to make a living in a sordid urban world. Chapter 1 presents adolescent escapades of Silvio and his friends: readings of serial bandit literature, experiments with poetry and homemade explosives, and, as the "Club of the Midnight Gentlemen," a larcenous excursion to a school library. In chapter 2, family economic needs send Silvio to work as a live-in servant for an avaricious used bookstore proprietor. Though eager to be around books, Silvio is humiliated by the menial work and unsuccessfully attempts to burn down the store before abandoning the job. In chapter 3, Silvio seeks to de-

velop his inventive talents as an aviation mechanics apprentice in a military school. Dismissed because the military needs workers, not thinkers, Silvio wanders the city and attempts suicide. In chapter 4, Silvio achieves limited success as an itinerant paper salesman and begins to master city life. But, reunited with Rengo, a rogue from his thieving days, Silvio plots a robbery with his friend whom he then denounces. Conceived as a perverse deed necessary for self-affirmation, this event coincides with the youth's decision to become the "future teller" of the city's stories. Impressed by Silvio's zest for life, the would-be victim of the failed robbery offers to find him a job in the southern Neuquén, where, most critics have surmised, Silvio will retreat to write the memoirs we are reading.

Recent criticism of El juguete rabioso has focused on its representation of a literary apprenticeship and its anticipation in content and style of Latin America's new narrative; on Silvio's recourse to inventive models for self-transformation and to treason as an existentially self-affirming response to an alienating modern life; and on the novel's interaction with inherited literary forms aimed at exploring the status of character in modern fiction.^[11] Recent studies have generally addressed the social and aesthetic implications of the novel's literary and cultural thematics and the work's relationship to a variety of narrative genres, including the picaresque, the Bildungsroman, serial fiction, and the Dostoyevskian memoir, among others. Here I examine the work's attention to artistic activity, but I am particularly concerned with its construction of a specifically vanguardist artist who has a contentious relationship both to artistic tradition and to a concrete Buenos Aires world.

On the surface, the novel's Bildungsroman markers are evident: adolescent initiation into the world; friends and mentors as models for that process; conflict between protagonist values and the surrounding society; and a plot structured by the search over time for a meaningful adjustment within the conflict.^[12] In addition, Silvio's characterization as a creative figure, repetitive references to his readings, and his gradual decision to become the recorder of the city's stories further define the work as a Künstlerroman . In fact, Silvio's final decision to retreat from the city to compose stories about the problematic world he is leaving recalls Stephen Daedalus's decision in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to leave his land and forge "the uncreated conscience" of his people (253). The work's abundant literary allusions and Silvio's attempts to model his life on his readings situate the novel in the narrative tradition identified by Mikhail Bakhtin as the "auto-criticism of

discourse," that is, a testing of literary discourse (often parodically) against a given reality through a hero who, like Don Quixote or Madame Bovary, sees the world through literature and attempts to live accordingly ("Discourse in the Novel" 412–13). What is unique about this process in El juguete rabioso and typical of the context in which it was written is the specifically vanguardist models being tested, the focus on Silvio's emerging artistic persona, and the work's response to the conflictive relationship it poses between art and life.

In this novel, the protagonist's trajectory over time embodies the vanguardist problematic of the relationship between aesthetics and life, specifically, the limitations of an elitist "celestial" poetics within an insistently ordinary world. Affirming intellectual superiority to his surroundings, a stance underscored through a gallery of uncomplimentary characterizations, Silvio yearns not only to improve his social circumstances but also to be "admired" and "eulogized" (173). Like the reallife vanguard artists who formed select gatherings, Silvio and his friends organize a club, "a true society of intelligent young men" (101) with a multiform agenda. As in a vanguardist group, the club constitutes a site for experimental pyrotechnics (in this case, scientific) and members seek to employ "the most modern procedures" (103). And although it is a tiny, self-selected assemblage, the club is motivated, like the vanguardist artist, by an expansive, grand design to engage a mass public. Just as the speakers in a vanguardist manifesto seek to reach the youth of America, this group will organize other clubs throughout the country. Drawn to stealing and playing with explosives, the group embodies irreverence toward conventions and rules. And, as their principal larcenous act, the boys raid an established literary institution, a school library, to remove the imposing Diccionario enciclopédico, an act emblematic of the vanguards' assault on academic tradition. Evoking Don Quixote's selective perusal of the books of his times, the club recontextualizes this act in the book-stealing scene with jabs at Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones, a favorite target of the Buenos Aires vanguardists.^[13]

As Francine Masiello and Aden Hayes have pointed out, Silvio's attempts to build a viable self constitute a principal focus in this novel. I am concerned more specifically here with how that self in the making interacts with the artist figures constructed through vanguardist manifestos and poetic discourse. Silvio's models in constructing his artistic persona are Baudelaire, Rocambole, Edison, and Napoleon. Known to the youth through his readings, these larger-than-life creative figures

incarnate multiple features of the artist as imagined in vanguardist discourse. Baudelaire evokes the vanguards' inheritance of the aestheticist tradition of subjectivity and a select artistic stance. Rocambole, the outcast hero of Ponson du Terrail's popular serial novels, provides remnants of the romantic hero embedded in the vanguards' overblown poetic persona. He also points to the movement's challenge, in Andreas Huyssen's terms, to the "great divide" between high art and mass culture, a critique embodied in the manifestos' invocation of a mass audience as well as some artists' attention to popular art forms. Edison evokes the vanguardist portrayal of art as work with a scientific aura and artists as inventors or discovering explorers who produce or find new things. Napoleon suggests the militaristic tone of the vanguards' polemical manifestos and the vanguardist artists' expansive desire to encompass all.

Heroes in their respective specialties, these four figures are commensurate with the imposing destiny Silvio envisions for himself, and he invokes his models in ways underscoring their vanguardist connections. The theft of Baudelaire's biography coincides with the emergence of Silvio's interior, lyric voice. Rocambole provides the bedrock of his literary education (he has read all forty volumes), and the bandit's presence shapes the youth's melodramatic reveries and rebellion against social institutions. Edison inspires Silvio's chemistry achievements and modest reputation as an inventor. Napoleon incarnates the protagonist's desire for superiority over others, for example, when, as an apprentice, he adopts "the military position" and imagines his glorious future, far from the "penurious life that the majority of people naturally sustain" (173). Although Silvio ultimately assembles attitudes and skills from each, none of the four models can provide a direct path from a difficult life to a grandiose destiny. On one level, Silvio's life marks the failure of expansive vanguardist goals. The club's Rocambolesque banditry ends abruptly under the imminent threat of capture. The need to work constantly interrupts Silvio's immersion in readings as a wouldbe aesthete, and, in his "literary" bookstore job, art becomes a commodity. Finally, Silvio's hopes to combine scientific and Napoleonic aspirations in the military are dashed because he is deemed too creative for the practical tasks. In search of a poem he cannot find, Silvio vents his frustration in the lines that provide an epigraph for this chapter and that could well serve as the Latin American vanguard artist's lament, calling to mind once again the stresses between cosmic aspirations and the pulls of a contingent world: "Distant voices, pyrotechnic splendors

reach my cars, but I am here alone, held down by my land of misery as if with nine bolts" (153).

Silvio's failure to construct a viable self from heroic models is accompanied by a growing proclivity for self-analysis with a decidedly theatrical quality. In the book-stealing scene, Silvio first hears what he calls his "other voice." But a theatrical process of shifting localization accompanies this heightened subjectivity, as Silvio pictures himself in specific roles and imagines how others see him. A critical clement in Silvio's formation is realizing that these two perspectives do not coincide. Thus key moments in the protagonist's interiorization are paralleled by shifts projecting how others might see him. For example, when Silvio attempts to set fire to the bookstore, he rejoices in how manly the act must have made him appear. But at this key moment of private liberation, he literally explores his exterior self, running his fingers over his face to fashion an exterior representation: "What painter will make the portrait of the sleeping shop assistant" (159). In dealing with others, Silvio actively creates these self-portraits from his models as he would assume a theatrical role but with close attention to his audience's reactions, as in the military interview: "I gazed at the countenances of hard lines and inquisitive eyes ... of men who observed me between curious and ironic." Calling to mind one of his role models, he fashions a self appropriate to the scenario: "I thought of the heroes of my favorite readings, and the appearance of Rocambole ... with a rubber visored cap and a riffraff smile on his twisted mouth, passed before my eyes, inciting me toward confidence and the heroic attitude" (168).

The compelling sensation of being watched, at times by an unidentifiable source, characterizes Silvio's experience of city life. In one hallucinatory moment, for example, he discerns through a chaotic scene of suspended cement buckets a fragmented countenance held together by a single, enormous, winking eye. This image forecasts the sensation of a Foucaultian panoptic gaze, a paranoia, as Masiello has suggested, that sometimes pursues both characters and reader in Arlt's later novels (Lenguaje e ideología 210). But the significance of this phenomenon for Silvio's self-analysis in El juguete rabioso derives from the protagonist's humiliating intimation that the selves he imagines himself to be portraying may not coincide with what others see. For example, although he fancies himself as a poet in his literary job, Silvio concludes that others see only a pícaro . His growing adeptness at playing roles for an audience obscures any coherent selfhood residing beneath, as he wonders at the military school who he really is underneath the uniform.

Thus the increasing subjectivity that accompanies Silvio's agility with theatrical roles only intensifies feelings of fragmentation, reducing overwhelming emotion to physical sensations: for example, anger at his employers, a "red fog" within his cranium (156). This stripping down of the self becomes particularly intense in Silvio's most subjective moments, for example, as he calmly contemplates suicide and sees himself as nothing but a heartbeat and "an eye, lucid and open to the extremely serene interior" (192).

The fragile selfhood that the protagonist finally achieves is tied to his mastery of the city, to the ability of that lucid and open eye to turn outward, and to the concomitant vocational choice as a storyteller. It is crucial for this work's portrait of an artist that the decision to write coincide with growing skills in urban life, as the contentious encounter with his city unfolds in Silvio-protagonist's artistic persona and Silvionarrator's literary style. Though he never stops dreaming of distant places and his imagination is forever populated by literary presences, Silvio the character confronts his surroundings rebelliously as he wanders throughout the city. These forays to recognizable Buenos Aires locations reinforce the sense of direct engagement between an artist and his world, an engagement as crucial for the character's artistic development as heroic models or constant readings.^[14]

The urban roaming itself constitutes Silvio's personal learning style and shapes his artistic apprenticeship. Arlt himself lauded the virtues of this approach in a 1928 journalistic sketch, one of his Aguafuertes porteñas, entitled "El placer de vagabundear" (literally, the pleasure of vagabonding). The Buenos Aires wanderer, especially a would-be artist, Arlt observed, would be awed by "the extraordinary finds of the street" (OC 2: 446). We should recall that in the novel, Silvio's single successful job is as a wanderer, a traveling salesman. Imbued with the exploratory spirit of his mentors Edison and Napoleon, Silvio and his friends approach their environment through larcenous expeditions, "organized to rob fruit or discover buried treasures" (93), as when they experiment with homemade explosives and imagine that they have actually discovered a new continent and become "owners of the earth" (94). This discovering attitude, similar to Peter Bürger's characterization of the surrealists' marvel-seeking forays through Paris (Bürger 71), marks Silvio's critical eye and estranging perceptions that ascribe newness to the most ordinary things. Silvio becomes aware of this discovering attitude just as he chooses a storytelling vocation and imagines that he is a recent arrival on earth for whom everything is totally new.

The urban meanderings also constitute Silvio's education as an inventor, as artistic and life apprenticeships coincide, for he learns to conceive mechanical projects during what he dscribes as observant hours of vagrancy. He explains to the military interviewers where he has studied. "Everywhere, sir. For example: I go along the street and at a mechanics shop I see a machine I don't know. I stop, and I tell myself studying the different parts: this must work like this and like this" (170). In fact, it is the ability to construct, to put things together, that Silvio gleans from his urban surroundings. Although he yearns to become an inventor like Edison, the method he employs is fabrication, a word frequently used in the novel which, in the spirit of both Rocambole and Edison, combines the deception of larceny and the creativity of invention in a concept that, in its allusions to construction, also connotes the activity of a workaday world. In his study of El juguete rabioso, Christopher Towne Leland analyzes the relationship between the concept of inventing and Silvio's efforts at self-transformation. But my interest here is in fabrication as a kind of inventing with additional connotations. On the material level, fabricar means to construct (often by mechanical means), as a building, a bridge, or a wall. But on the figurative level—"to make or make use of something not material"—the word carries long-standing connotations of deception, as in the example provided by the Real Academia Española's example of this usage: "fabricar una mentira" (to fabricate a lie; Diccionario de la lengua española , 20th ed.).^[15] This combination of creative construction and deception or artifice is reinforced by dictionaries of contemporary Spanish usage that define fabricar, for example, as "inventar cuentos, mentiras, historias, líos" (to invent stories, lies, histories, intrigues; Moliner 1267). Silvio's real-life mentors reinforce this synthesis of imaginative construction and deception, including Irzubeta, the "Falsifier" who progresses from faking toy flags to forging checks, and Hipólito, who can "fabricate" airplanes from bamboo. Silvio's own inventive method relies similarly on fabrication, as he creates something new—a homemade culverin, for example—by piecing together miscellaneous fragments gathered around the city. His mentor-friend Rengo perfects this method, for he can fabricate a sumptuous beefsteak meal from leftover marketplace scraps, a little grease and a few meaty bones here, a bit of potato and a slash of liver there. Silvio himself masters this technique in assembling a mediocre but viable clientele, pieced together, he explains, from miscellaneous market tenders, pharmacists, booksellers, and merchants.

Silvio also succeeds in creating a viable, functioning self when he realizes the fabrication required to construct a believable character. Assuming a real-life role such as that of a salesman, he learns, works best not by imitating a single model like Rocambole but by self-consciously assembling a persona from miscellaneous gestures and words in order to become "multiple, flexible and charming" (208). Significantly, Silvio also ultimately suggests that even his more interiorized self, the "real" self under theatrical representations, possesses a similar collagelike quality, like a god made from "pieces of mountain, of woods, of sky and of memory" (205). This pieced-together self undermines the novel's organic models of personal development, including the Bildungsroman structure of integrated personal formation and the work's references to character "regeneration," a concept Silvio's friend Rengo explains in Darwinian terms. It is true that in his story Silvio is forever new, as each chapter signals an inauguration into a new profession, a new part of the city, a new way of life. And at the end, Silvio, leaving the city to write, will begin a new life yet again. But he begins again each time not through a clearly plotted development but through a process of self-fabrication, of artifice by piecing together. This process challenges organic models of personal formation or biological regeneration as well as romantic notions of individual artistic originality and, in the vanguardist mode, favors character construction that is openly nonorganic, as in Bürger's term for describing the vanguardist work of art.^[16]

As I have noted, the model of artist as fabricator emerging from Silvio's urban wanderings ascribes, in the vanguardist spirit, a legitimizing aura of work, of construction, to artistic activity. But Silvio himself abhors work with only material ends, and his daily doings are often marked by a tone of gratuitous play. The boys concoct explosives because they enjoy the pyrotechnics, and the club is a childlike, if larcenous, organization, an elaborate game of make-believe. And Silvio plays a variety of roles, sometimes merely for pleasure. Significantly, his inventions are notably impractical; they include a machine for counting stars and, in keeping with the vanguards' linguistic experiments, one for transcribing words into writing. Although his bitter work-world encounters do much to curb his playfulness, the frolicsome attitude toward life returns with the decision to write. Having matched his perverse environment with his own perversity, as an artistic persona descended to the level of the sordid world, Silvio reaffirms the ludic impulse as he explains the decision to write so that he may teach people

to be happy, "to play pirates . . . , to build marble cities . . . , to laugh . . , to shoot off fireworks" (238).

As Silvio-protagonist and Silvio-narrator begin to merge in the choice to become a writer, parallels become evident between the apprenticeship in life and the one in art, between the character's skills forged from his urban encounters and the emergent artist's style in the memoirs we are reading. The decision to become a writer appears to coincide with a relinquishing of the heroic artistic persona. Thus Silvio's uphill struggle to fashion an integrated self is paralleled by the narrator-Silvio's elusively situated voice, as if, once having decided to write, the artist as a forceful individual presence in his work consciously begins to disappear. But we recognize him through his style. The peripatetic structure of the narrator's tale, for example, reflects Silvio's hours of vagrancy through the city. Although it follows a rough temporal sequence, the story is marked by frequent narrative vagaries. Paralleling the character's fabrication of ingenious inventions from miscellaneous gathered parts, the narrator, in a synthesis of larceny and creativity, fabricates the character's story by irreverently piecing together, as critics have documented, heterogeneous traditions and sources: the picaresque, the Bildungsroman, the serial novel (each chapter could be a self-contained issue), the Dostoyevskian interiorized confession, Baudelairean lyric subjectivity, and stylistic bits and pieces akin to the work of Hispanic writers such as Pío Baroja and the nineteenth-century Argentine writers Esteban Echeverría and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. As Rita Gnutzmann has carefully documented, a comparable pieced-together assemblage constitutes the narrator's linguistic repertoire, a heterogeneous amalgam of Argentine lunfardo, colloquialisms, foreign words, invented words, and scientific terms (Introducción 50–64). In addition, incorporating the protagonist's discovering attitude, the narrator subjects the city to a critical eye, turning characters into grotesque caricatures and ordinary scenes into defamiliarized landscapes: "the enormous oblique chimneys, the unfolding of the chains in somersaults, with the shouts of the maneuvers, the solitude of the svelte masts, the attention already divided in a countenance that looked out at an eye of an ox and an iron bar suspended by a crane over my head" (191).

Silvio's decision to tell stories coincides with his awareness that he can fabricate a scene by juxtaposing styles stolen from others with his own lucidly critical vision. Adjacent passages describing city scenes, for example, evoke and ironically juxtapose two versions of nineteenth-

century Argentine romanticism, Echeverría's grotesque portrayal of gaucho life and Sarmiento's expansive descriptions of the pampas' unending horizon. Thus, on the one hand, Silvio describes a butcher's floor, evoking Echeverría's El matadero: "covered with sawdust, the smell of tallow floated in the air, black swarms of flies seethed in the chunks of yellow fat, and the impassive butcher sawed the bones" (203). And, on the other, in the passage immediately following, the narrator focuses on a Sarmiento-like endless sky, which in this case also reflects the sea: "the smooth space like a celestial porcelain in the blue frontier, with the depth of the gulf in the zenith" (203). The artist's "originality" in this case consists in piecing these inherited images together. The resulting passage, moreover, subjects to the narrator's critical eye not only the Buenos Aires landscape itself but also the ways in which others have seen it.

The irony in the juxtaposition also reveals stresses in the narrator's style, as well as in the vanguardist project, between the playful and the serious. For just as Silvio the character's inventive activity is sometimes cast in a playful mold, so does the narrator play with his sources. He also plays with the reader's expectations through the sources he evokes and the generic scraps he assembles like Rengo's beefsteak meal. Pérez Firmat has affirmed in Idle Fictions, his study of the Hispanic vanguard novel, that vanguardist prose fiction plays with its ancestors, a phenomenon that, according to Bakhtin, characterizes the entire Western novelistic tradition.^[17] But that play has a serious purpose in critiquing the worldviews implicit in the genres it steals and, in keeping with Bürger's characterization of vanguardist activity, in its irreverence toward the stylistic hierarchies posed by artistic tradition (Bürger 63). The placemerit of Baudelaire and Rocambole on equal footing underscores such irreverence in Arlt's case. It is important to note, moreover, that in El juguete rabioso, the literary critique encompasses the vanguardist project itself, played out in Silvio's four models that evoke, as I have demonstrated, elements of vanguardist discourse about art. The image of art as both gratuitous play and serious critique is already implicit in the novel's title. Significantly, the "toy" refers to the activity of play by focusing on the object constructed for this purpose and reinforces the idea of creative fabrication in the objects (rockets, explosives) that Silvio and his friends build for their own entertainment. But the qualifier "rabioso," furious or raving, gives this invention an oxymoronic quality, juxtaposing play and raving. The combination underscores the artist-in-the-making's conflictive interaction with his surroundings and

undermines the possibility of regarding the toy, the artistic fabrication, as a totally autonomous, gratuitous, or disengaged object.

Silvio Astier's project for a magnificent destiny and personal transcendence notwithstanding, the figure constructed by El juguete rabioso through the interaction of its narrating voice with its acting protagonist poses quite a different view of the vanguardist artist. The Bildungsroman ambience promises an individual's integrated formation. But the protagonist's shaky interior solidity and need to fabricate a viable self as well as the elusively situated narrating voice signal an artist defined less as a biographical personality and more as a singular form of interacting with his world. An urban rambler saturated by a heterogeneous literary heritage, he cloaks himself in an aura of scientific and exploratory action and fabricates art by assembling the scraps taken from both his literary and his lived environment. Irreverently critical toward artistic traditions, this artist contentiously focuses the inner eye of a lyric inheritance on the limits of his own aesthetic power and on the problematic surroundings through which he moves.