Angstlich Argentine or Buenos Aires Beat?

Mention was made in class of Roberto Arlt's affiliation with existentialism and Los sietes locos does indeed echo many existentialist themes and ideas: Remo Erdosain appears as a River Plate Raskolnikov who derives his sense of being from a criminal act ("sólo el crimen puede afirmar mi exitencia, como sólo el mal afirma la presencia del hombre sobre la tierra"); an Nietzschean ubermensch who seeks to "pergonar la audacia, la nueva vida" by "violar el sentido comun"; and a Sartrean angoissé preoccupied by the nothingness of things and the meaningless of a life "movida por el automatismo de la costumbre".

I would like to suggest another affiliation. Juan Carlos Onetti's description of Arlt as a (non) writer dismissed by Buenos Aires' stylish martini set reminds me of Truman Capote, himself a stylish martini-drinking New Yorker, who said of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, its typing". Kerouac and Arlt are not without similiarities: both were outsiders born into poverty; both were anti-establishment figures who distained the language of "los mandarinos"; both took as their subjects the marginalized and mad ("The only people for me", wrote Karouac, "are the mad ones, the ones who...burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars"); and, most interestingly, both have entered their countries respective national canons despite (and/or because of) their scorn for bourgeois taste and respectability. Breaking open literary language and liberating it from the hold of the cultured elite is what makes these "bad writers" good, a badness to which Allende, Coehlo and Esquivel could only dream of aspiring.