negative dialectics

Piglia writes that in Arlt style and thematic content are one, that his "estilo alquímico, perverso, marginal, no es otra cosa que la transposición verbal, estilística, del tema de sus novelas". I see Arlt's transgression of literary values as one moment in a generalized transgression, one which uses the novel as a site for the transvaluation of all values. In this he is consistant, his dialectic inversion systematic, rigorous. Stylistically, bad writing becomes a sign of its quality, just as, thematically, pain becomes the site of pleasure, negation of positivity, and sin of virtue. Arlt denounces the lies of the dominant class and proposes his own, which are truer that those they replace. As Piglia shows, he subverts the 'good' writing proscribed by a reactionary elite concerned with preserving a national indiom whose 'purity' immigrants threatened to corrupt. By doing so he gives expression to Argentina's national indiom as it really is, as something composed of incoherant fragments whose expressive force comes from corrupting its own purity. Badness here is not a rhetorical deployment but the unapolagetic affirmation of language as a 'contradictory surface' whose sincerity is measured by gramatical errors, questionalble syntax and unintelligible French citations.

In world in which God is dead, culture nothing more than a disguised commodity and politics a grotesque comedy, Erdosain can only confirm his existence through crime, through the negation of virtue. Only the latter can perfect the suffering necessary for salvation and tranform him into Christ with Hipólita as Mary Magdelene at his knees. Arlt saves himself by writing badly, an act of courage that opens the doors to the black house of man's desire, liberating its repressed content and anticapting so many horrors to come. If Erdosain is an anti-hero, Arlt is a hero.