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Adolfo Prieto: Profile of a Parricidal Literary Critic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
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Twenty years ago the first publications began to appear in Argentina of a loosely confederated group of writers, leftist in political persuasion, who took strident exception in culture to both the old oligarchic tradition and to the parvenu peronista establishment. During the years of the peronista government, the writers and intellectuals who supported Perón had been successful in imposing their own persuasions on the universities and publishing media at the expense of the old guard, represented by the literary supplements, Sur, the Academia Argentina de Letras, and the Jockey Club. The young leftists born around 1920 had been snubbed by the old-time writers and persecuted by the peronista regime. Their emergence as a loosely unified assertion of leftist political and cultural values, supported by a similar affirmation in postwar Europe, is a major literary phenomenon in mid-century Argentia.
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- Copyright © 1978 by the University of Texas Press
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The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.
References
Notes
1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, El juicio de los parricidas, la nueva generación argentina y sus maestros (Buenos Aries: Editorial Deucalion, 1956). See also Ángela B. Dellepiane, “La novela argentina desde 1950 a 1965,” Revista iberoamericana 34 (1968):237–82; and Martin S. Stabb, “Argentine Letters and the Peronato: An Overview,” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs 13 (1971): 434–55.
2. Noé Jitrik, Seis novelistas argentinos de la nueva promoción (Mendoza: Biblioteca Pública Gral. San Martín, 1959).
3. Concering these journals and their impact on Argentine intellectual life, see María Luisa Bastos, “‘Contorno’, ‘Ciudad’, ‘Gaceta literaria’, tres enfoques de una realidad.” Hispamérica, nos. 4/5 (1973): 49–64.
4. Juan José Arrom, Esquema generacional de las letras hispanoamericanas, ensayo de un método (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1963), pp. 216–17.
5. Enrique Anderson Imbert, La crítica literaria contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Gure, 1957), for example, mentions Sartre only in passing. Although the following passage is accurate in indicating the position taken by the parricidas in their correspondences with Sartre, it is the only attention Anderson Imbert gives him in what is still the principal overview of literary criticism in Latin America: “Para Jean-Paul Sartre (¿Qué es la literatura?) la crítica consiste en comprender cómo cada escritor elige su manera de ser: oscilando ante abyecciones y heroísmos, tomando posición ante su tiempo, dirigiéndose a sus contemporáneos, asumiendo su responsabilidad de militante en el Reino de los Fines, el excritor trasciende las condiciones que lo rodean y afirma su libertad en una literatura comprometida que, en el fondo, es la realización del proyecto singular y absoluto de su propia vida” (pp. 61–62).
6. Quoted from Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 24–25.
7. Translated as ¿Qué es la literatura?, trad. de Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1950).
8. Frederic Jameson, “Three Methods in Sartre's Literary Criticism,” in John K. Simon, ed., Modern French Criticism, from Proust and Valéry to Structuralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 193–227. The pagination of the quotes is indicated at the end of each one.
9. There are three major studies on Sartre's literary criticism: René Girard, “Existentialism and Criticism,” Yale French Studies, no. 16 (Winter 1955–56): 45–52; Eugene F. Kaelin, An Existential Aesthetic: the Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962); Benjamin Suhl, Jean-Pual Sartre: the Philosopher as Literary Critic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
10. Adolfo Prieto, Borges y la nueva generación (Buenos Aires: Letras Universitarias, 1954). Prieto's book is discussed in an overview on Borges criticism: María Luisa Bastos, Borges ante la crítica argentina 1923–1960 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Hispamérica, 1974), pp. 263–83.
11. An excellent survey of Prieto's development as a critic is Rodolfo A. Borello, “Adolfo Prieto: literatura y sociedad en la Argentina,” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos, no. 214 (1967): 133–46. Two recent scholars mention Prieto's work in panoramas of critical commentary devoted to Borges: Martin S. Stabb, Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Twayne, 1970), pp. 139–40 (in his chap. 5, “Borges and the Critics”); and Nicolás Rosa, “Borges y la crítica,” Los libros, no. 26 (1972): 19–21. See also the comments by Allen Phillips, who refers to Prieto's “ligereza crítica, su arbitrariedad y el grave error de juzgar a Borges según una filosofía del arte francamente ajena a la obra que estudia” (“Notas sobre Borges y la crítica reciente,” Revista iberoamericana 22 [1957]: 41–59; quote is on p. 55). But, then, of course there are critics who would not agree with Phillips's assertion that Prieto's critical philosophy is methodologically alien to Borges's work. Is there only one critical method appropriate for analyzing any one literary work, or are all critical theories equally valid, the only restrictions being their own intrinsic limitations and the reader's demand that they be applied with a convincing rigor?
12. The only major criticism of Prieto's book that I have been able to discover is the exchange between Roy Bartholomew and Prieto in Ciudad, nos. 2–3 (1955): 93–106. Although Bartholomew is basically sympathetic to Prieto's critical commitments, the defects he points out prefigure subsequent reservations: “podrá ejercer Prieto la crítica con honradez, no lo dudo, pero le está vedado juzgar a Borges primero porque no lo entiende y segundo porque lo mueve o lo distancia ‘una motivación psicológica’, un desagrado personal y físico” (p. 100).
13. Jorge Luis Borges, p. 140. Prieto's analysis is also disabled by his implicit rejection of the principles of the union between form and content (despite his presumed readings in Marxist esthetics, Prieto appears to see only content).
14. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Leviatán, 1956.
15. La literatura autobiográfica argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1966). Originally, Rosario, Arg.: Universidad Nacional del Litoral, 1964. Basic reviews are: Borello, “Adolfo Prieto” (see note 11); Alfredo A. Roggiano, Hispanic American Historical Review 4 (1964): 662; Jaime Rest, Revista de la Universidad de Buenos Aires 8, no. 2 (1963): 332–36.
16. Proyección del rosismo en la literatura argentina (Rosario, Arg.: Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Seminario del Instituto de Letras, 1959), with an excellent introduction of scope and methods by Prieto; and Encuesta: la crítica literaria en la Argentina (Rosario, Arg.: Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Letras, 1959), a series of responses by critics to six questions (it is regrettable that Prieto did not include himself).
17. Juan Manuel Chavarría, Densidad espiritual de Sarmiento (Buenos Aires: López, 1962).
18. Rosario, Arg.: Editorial Biblioteca, 1968.
19. Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1969.
20. It is no accident that Arlt's literary stock has risen steadily during the last three decades when Argentine culture has become increasingly polarized in tune with almost unresolvable political tensions. Marechal's “rehabilitation” has come about in very recent years (he died in 1970, still virtually ignored by the establishment writers he had angered by his peronista sympathies), and, as is to be expected, paralleled the “rehabilitation” in the early seventies of peronismo and its “discovery” by elements of the radical left.
21. Roberto Arlt, Un viaje terrible (Buenos Aires: Editorial Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1968).
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