Roberto Artl, the nation, and Its distressing journey

Abstract

 In the first decades of the 20th Century, Argentina endured an economic and social break down in regard to the strategic plan of 1880. The historical events severed the infinite opulence model, and showed the dissolution of the national self in military revolts, electoral fraud, corruption, caciquism, and deep gaps between districts and social classes. By 1930, Roberto Artl’s writing is a questioning about the limits of the modernizing project, and of the most meaningful stages of the historical progress’ request. The characters of his fictional work allow the writer to portray not only the anguished and fallen self, but also the subject detached from the sociability proposed by the romantic generation that, in 1880, seemed to determine a stable identity, according to apparently safe rules. The writer’s insight is that 1930 the historical moment that demands a different condition for what is real. The effect of reading Artl’s works resides in the indefinite manipulation of the literary language by proposing characters that are anchored in perceiving a world that excludes them, and a narrative vicissitude that reveals an off-centered History as the binding story. Consequently, the outcome is to impress and marshal the social body through the imaginary production as a literary version of History.