Mapping The Tasteland Argentina Brurera

Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas 12
Matas Bruera
12
This book draws together the results of extensive research into the complex
relationships that some modern European and Argentinean writers have
enjoyed with food and wine. The European writers considered include Roland Mapping the Tasteland
Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Honor de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Italo Svevo,
Marcel Schwob, James Joyce and Robert Louis Stevenson; their Argentinean
Matas Bruera Mapping the Tasteland

counterparts include Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Roberto J.
Payr and Ezequiel Martnez Estrada. Through an exploration of both fiction
and non-fiction, the author shows how these thinkers ideas about food and
wine influenced modernity and how they continue to influence contemporary
issues such as globalized menus and food poverty.
Matas Bruera is a sociologist, researcher and teacher of the history of ideas

at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Quilmes in Argentina.
He has published extensively in journals and magazines on the sociology of
culture and food culture. He is the author of Meditaciones sobre el gusto: vino,
alimentacin y cultura (2005), La argentina fermentada: vino alimentacin
y cultura (2006) and Comer (2010). He is also a founding member of the
Explorations in Food and Wine in
journal Pensamiento de los confines. Argentinean and European Culture
ISBN 978-3-03911-345-3 Translated by David Gorman
www.peterlang.com Peter Lang

Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas 12
Matas Bruera
12
This book draws together the results of extensive research into the complex
relationships that some modern European and Argentinean writers have
enjoyed with food and wine. The European writers considered include Roland Mapping the Tasteland
Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Honor de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Italo Svevo,
Marcel Schwob, James Joyce and Robert Louis Stevenson; their Argentinean
Matas Bruera Mapping the Tasteland

counterparts include Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Roberto J.
Payr and Ezequiel Martnez Estrada. Through an exploration of both fiction
and non-fiction, the author shows how these thinkers ideas about food and
wine influenced modernity and how they continue to influence contemporary
issues such as globalized menus and food poverty.
Matas Bruera is a sociologist, researcher and teacher of the history of ideas

at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Quilmes in Argentina.
He has published extensively in journals and magazines on the sociology of
culture and food culture. He is the author of Meditaciones sobre el gusto: vino,
alimentacin y cultura (2005), La argentina fermentada: vino alimentacin
y cultura (2006) and Comer (2010). He is also a founding member of the
journal Pensamiento de los confines. Argentinean and European Culture
Translated by David Gorman
www.peterlang.com Peter Lang

Mapping the Tasteland
Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas
Volume 12
Edited by
Claudio Canaparo
PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
Matas Bruera
Mapping the Tasteland

Argentinean and European Culture
PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet
at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bruera, Matas.
Mapping the tasteland : explorations in food and wine in Argentinean and European
culture / Matas Bruera.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-03911-345-3 (alk. paper)
1. Argentine literature--History and criticism. 2. Food in literature. 3. Wine in
literature. 4. Food in popular culture--Argentina. 5. Food in popular culture--
Europe. I. Title.
PQ7622.F66B78 2013
860.9982--dc23
2013024563
Cover illustration: Analoga IV (1972) Victor Grippo.
ISSN 1661-4720
ISBN 978-3-03911-345-3 (print)
ISBN 978-3-0353-0554-8 (eBook)
Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2014

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All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the
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Printed in Germany
Contents
Prologue vii
Acknowledgements xi
Translators Note xiii
Part 1 Taste, Modernity, Centre and Periphery 1
Gourmet Physiology, or the Bourgeois Sorcery of Shapes 3
Food for the Body, Fasting for the Soul 27
Barthes: From the Semiology of Wine to the Empire of the Senses 43
Part 2 Taste, Modernity and Centre I

Bordeaux: The Human Condition as Purple Venality 47
Montaigne: The Botrytis and Chteau dYquem 49
Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Diet-et(h)ics and the Truthful

Wine of Bordeaux 55
Part 3 Taste, Modernity and Centre II

Modernity and its Artificial Paradises 63
Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin:

From the Order of the Table and its Stimulants to the
Disorder of the Drunken Barricades 65
vi
Hemingway, or the Alcoholic Outpourings of Valpolicella 81
Monogamous Joyce and his Fendant de Sion Wine 87
Svevo, the Unconscious and the Generous Wine of Istria 97
Schwob, Stevenson and the Imaginary History of the Wines of

Samos and Bourgogne 105
Part 4 Taste, Modernity and Periphery

Argentina: A Corpus of Wine and Food 115
Sarmiento, the Fermentation of the Country and the

Preservation of Wine 117
Aldao: Servile Monk and Drinker 133
Mansilla, or Vernacular Sybaritism 141
Payr the Rogue: From the Counterfeiter of Carln Wine to

the Beaujolais of Villefranche 165
The Shadow of Martnez Estrada and his Alimentary Radiography 173
Marie Langer, or the Child as a Peronist Snack 207
Index 223
Prologue
At the most obvious level the human being shares with all living beings the
need to feed itself. However, food is plagued with phantasms and passions,
which go beyond its physiological and irreplaceably preservative character
because it refers to the perception and exegesis of the world. Food nourishes
us, it encourages us to interpret life and grant it meaning. It is a symbolic
register in which a wider social reality is transcribed and condensed.
To eat is to assimilate or grasp the world. It is to become imbued with it
through sensitive resonances which in everyday life throw us physically into
a rich cluster of significant possibilities, although stereotyped by habit and
self-reflective apathy about these possibilities. Every text, like every food,
is a horizon of allusiveness, a cognitive reflex which delimits the profile of
the reflection and which does not consume, as knowledge, the thickness
of the material which it symbolizes.
In this sense, food, diet, and regime are indispensable categories for
thinking about human behaviours and identities. And if we speak of identi-
ties and imaginaries, it is difficult to think ofArgentina. It was believed to be
Trapalanda or the Empire of Plenty (Martnez Estrada), an illusionary
country plagued with gold and spices which attracted the frustrated pillag-
ing conquistador; or it dreamed of being Eurindia (Ricardo Rojas), that
new ethnic mystery, in which Argentina is the most fecund organ which
assimilates the European and overcomes the American. Once a second
hand European writer said: Argentina is a European country; there the
presence of Europe can be felt just as intensely as in Europe itself, and at
the same time it is external to Europe (Witold Gombrowicz). For the
Argentineans the mere mention of the very name Europe has a particular
resonance. The imaginary of Europe brings together a common denomi-
nator of aspirations: civilization and ecumenicalism.
Colonizer, discoverer and narrator of the world, galvanizer and usu-
frutctuary of the history which she herself forged, Europe has managed to
impose its idea of reason, which defines everything which came before
viii Prologue
or which is outside of her as myth. The trifling familiarity of Americans

with our culture is one more proof of the colonizing perspective of the
history which she has imposed on us.
Our perpetually unfinished ethnic genealogy, the product of an always
barren search, does no more than move with an unusual insistence the
question about who we are, what defines us, our unfinished explanation of
identity. America is a presence in ourselves in so far as we are Americans,
but more still in so far as we are not. Our immigratory profile, which far
exceeds the mere appearances of the European style and the occlusion of
mixing and of original peoples, confronts us with an unprecedented situa-
tion: the absence of history. Just as colonization forms part of the bygone
times of America, immigration as an historical rupture with a European
past, does not cease to be a phantasm which wanders passionately and
in a disquieting manner until the present as a direct consequence of our
difficulty of being.
Our progeny has not made things easy for us. We are the legatees
of characters which are at the very least confused, even destroyed. The
inheritances were never easy to decode, and he who receives an inherit-
ance always decodes it secretly. We never know its content and in this way
the inheritance imposes a task, that of deciphering the legacy. From the
promissory ideal of the new world, our place was a capricious extension of
land, populated by images. The immigrants came in search of foodstuffs
and the land always provided them in excess, up until today, although this
time newly colonized by biotechnology.
In an epoch in which things Latin American acquire a certain visibility
in their possible cultural recognition, perhaps it is time to settle accounts
in the wake of making our identity visible with Europe. The link between
Argentina and the old continent is just as promising as conclusive. Just as it
always turned its back on its continental future, it aspired to identify itself
with Europe in its limits and possibilities. Argentina is nothing without
Europe, and the gaze of the thinkers of the old continent has left a fruitful
witness to its cultural ascendancy. Argentina is nothing without Europe in
its colonialism, inheritance and immigration.
One is their writing. Argentina and Europe are the writing of others:
of Montaigne, Balzac, Marx, Benjamin, Joyce, Svevo, Stevenson, Schwob,
Prologue ix
although also of Sarmiento, Mansilla, Payr, Borges and Evita. European

grammar delineated us from our constitution as a country on the basis of
its Enlightenment, Romantic, Positivist or Revolutionary ideology.
And the link with wine and food is revealed in this construct, for writ-
ing is like cooking. It is a result which offers a thought, framed by language
or ingredients, which in combination go beyond the individual order of
the ideas or the dishes. Food characterizes the form in which existence is
managed, permitting us to fix a series of rules of conduct and is assimilable
not only to coexistence, but also to the social struggle. Everything eaten
is an object of power (Elias Canetti).
To eat is to reassess on a daily basis that every vital imprint or mark
of life is imaginary. El pez por la boca muere1 and man defines himself by
his jaws and discovers himself through swallowing. Every diet enunciates
an ethics, an aesthetics and a metaphysics of devouring.
Foods do not only nourish our mortal body, but also our age-old
imagination. Foods do not only fulfil a biological function but also have
meaning. And they dramatize the imaginary dimension, that is, an uncon-
scious but always present fabric of indigestible evocations and connotations
This results in a holistic poetics at the service of the gluttony of thought.
Although thought has never paid sufficient attention to food, every
thinker has nourished some part of his work from a former alimentary ide-
ology. However, the food has been devoured by nature and seasoned with
the simple mark of vitalism. Food is, above all, culture when it is produced
or created, when it is prepared or transformed and when it is consumed
or chosen. The kitchen sense Roland Barthes would say is a cluster
of complex and subtle signs which do not possess the beautiful simplicity
of the letters of an alphabet, and to decipher it implies a constant struggle
with the innocence of its objects. That is the search which we undertake
with these essays which would map gustatory horizons and which bring
together two continents, remote in their spatial dimension and civilizing
perspectives, although close in the history of their ideas and their foods.
1 Translators note: A colloquial phrase, best translated as Least said, soonest mended
(literally: The fish dies by the mouth).
Acknowledgments
Every book is a narcotic that feeds the ego. It falsely stimulates the distinc-
tion of a person whose name appears in print in conjunction with a biog-
raphy bound to the more obvious records or curriculum vitae. Mapping
the Tasteland is the fruit of the generosity and the encouragement of a
cluster of friends, colleagues and family members, without whom it really
would not have been possible. I want to thank in particular: my partner
Mara Bagnat for making me understand what I have been and what I can
be; Claudio Canaparo for his dedication and his fraternal support; David
Gorman for his patience and passion in the transmission of ideas; Marcelo
G. Burello for his intelligence and generosity; Rodolfo Hamawi for his
sincere affection and support; Nicols Casullo (in memoriam), Ricardo
Forster and Alejandro Kaufman for their constant presence and friendship;
and last, but not least, Myrna and Jorge.
Translators Note
It is of course impossible to translate a writers exact words from one lan-

guage to another without some loss of meaning or of style. As a language,
Castellano favours long sentences with multiple sub-clauses nested one
within the other; English by contrast prefers brief, direct and linear con-
structions. In preparing the translation have tried to stay as close to the
Castellano as possible so as to retain something of the flavour of Matas
Brueras style of writing and way of thinking, while at the same time trying
to produce a coherent text in idiomatic English.
Although Mapping the Tasteland is a philosophical / sociological
analysis, it is written in a quite elaborate style, using words and phrases
that are particular to the porteo dialect of Buenos Aires, mixing registers
and deploying a profusion of metaphors and idioms and other figures of
speech. As a result, a number of words and phrases from the original text
defy translation; where this has been the case, I have left them italicized
in Castellano in the text and have provided an explanatory note at the
foot of the page.
About 30 per cent of the text consists of quotations from other authors
in a variety of languages, ranging from English, through the romance lan-
guages and Latin to German and Danish. Where it has been possible to
obtain a reliable version in the original language, it has been used, but in
some cases it has been necessary to translate from the version in Castellano.
Thus virtually all the quotations from English-speaking writers have been
taken from the original English version. There were, however, a few excep-
tions where it was impossible to obtain the English version, and transla-
tion was therefore necessary, and this has been signalled in a note. In the
case of writers of languages other than English the same effort was also
made to find a reliable version in English but this was not always possible.
Even when an English translation was found, it might not be reliable. In
all cases in which a quotation has had to be translated, the translation was
xiv Translators Note
done by me. The translations were then checked against the originals in
Castellano, French and Italian.
I would like to thank the author for his constant support and help. I
would also like to thank Adriana Montao Critelli for her help in improv-
ing the translation and Victoria Patience for her translation of the first
chapter, which I later revised. Any errors and inaccuracies that remain are
of course my own responsibility.
David Gorman
La Matanza, Provincia de Buenos Aires
June 2011
Part 1
Taste, Modernity, Centre and Periphery

Gourmet Physiology, or the Bourgeois Sorcery
of Shapes
The tide brings daughters, the butcher shop creates boys.

Honor de Balzac, Trait des Excitants Modernes
Alphabet Soup
Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth
sweetness.
Judges 14: 14
Words and food are the origins of every culture. Words are the beginning
of culture, but so is food, because eating calms a body that expresses its fear
of dying through losing the energy that makes it a living, speaking being.
In this way, food brings everything together: nature and culture, physis
and techn, the raw and the cooked. This is the old dichotomy between
feeding the body and feeding the mind. Out of a natural necessity, mankind
has created a cultural possibility that surpasses all materialistic euphemisms:
the preparation of food.
All things said and done, there is no wisdom that has not passed
through the mouth and been tasted. Memory is appetite, words are food,
grammar is a recipe, knowledge is nutrition, menus are rhetoric, facts are
flavour, and writing is cooking. No appetite can ever be satisfied, but appe-
tite can only exist when there is a lack. Knowing and eating, words and
food, are both children of the same parent: hunger. Anger was born in
4 Gourmet Physiology, or the Bourgeois Sorcery of Shapes
the first person who felt hunger,1 says Ariadne, as recreated by Cortzar
in Los Reyes. Eating your fill is one thing, overdoing it is quite another.
Words and food are charged with meaning. They are an ethos that
can be interpreted in many different ways, like picking out an idea out of
alphabet soup.
The Law of the Stomach
In any case, whether dietetic knowledge was considered an original art

or seen as a later derivation, it is clear that diet itself regimen was a
fundamental category through which human behaviour could be concep-
tualized. It characterized the way in which one managed ones existence,
and it enabled a set of rules to be affixed to conduct; it was a mode of
problematization of behaviour that was indexed to a nature which had
to be preserved and to which it was right to conform. Regimen was a
whole art of living.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2:
The Use of Pleasure
Naming something means stipulating a sense and inscribing it into a cer-

tain worldview. Gastr or gastros (stomach) is the etymological root of
all the compounds that appear on the culinary scene. Gastrology is the
word the Greeks usually gave to cookery books until the poet Archestratos
suggested the word gastronomy in his treatise on pleasure, in which he
privileged the end product the food itself over the text concerning it. A
variety of other concepts have subsequently held centre stage: in the writ-
ings of Rabelais or Montaigne, gastrolatry, or the science of the mouth;
or, according to the Utopian Fourier, gastrosophy, which brings together
1 Cortzar, Julio, Los Reyes, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994, p.19.

three fields of knowledge agronomy, medicine and cookery and tries

to fight injustice by producing enough riches and abundance for everyone.
It is said that the gluttony of Roman feasts was so excessive that it
ended up imposing the concept of gastronomy or the law of the stom-
ach. It is suggestive that gastronomy turns out to be a discipline connected
to nomos, or legislation. A portion, a share of the whole; etymologically
confusing for some, but actually nothing more than an enlightening out-
burst. At present, the problem is not hunger that is, the fair distribu-
tion of food nor was it in the past. Instead the problem is excess, and
the possible culinary combination that both stimulates the senses and
increases capital.
Once the word gastronomy had been coined, all its supporters from
Berchoux, via Grimod de la Reynire to the creator of the physiology of
taste, Brillat-Savarin became caught up in the universe of the law.
Sins, excesses, and vices have always been the point of reference for all
legislation. Why was the law never worried about hunger? Why, in view
of such a great cultural tradition, has hunger always proved so natural?
There is no such thing as blind justice, just as there is no innocent dietetics.
Rousseau, conscious of the origins of inequality, of peoples eagerness for
excess, and being a lover of natural humanity, confessed as few have done
and wept before a shop window full of expensive food.
Gastronomy is rooted in artifice. Like the great glutton of a legislator
that Leviathan represents, the veil of taste a philosophy of as if is
drawn between the misery of need and the elegance of the conspiracy
behind it: it is necessary to make an individual virtue of a need shared
by all. There is no art without restrictions, no pleasure without order.
Legislate stomachs and you bring order to human life.
The Physiology of Taste or of Nothing
Taste is taste.
Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
The hedonistic discourse on food and wine in hunger-stricken post-1990s

Argentina is both suggestive and shameless. The appreciation of new and
original delicacies has been accompanied by an unrecognizable surge of con-
versation about them. A lack of moderation has always dominated Argentinas
consumerist cultural scene: while hunger takes shape as a picturesque image
ofthe landscape, palates refine their tastes and make the distinguishing of
flavours an added value for social and cultural connections. This distinction
in sensibility has led to the material distance between the different parts
of the social body deepening as never before. The intolerant rage of the
quantitative has been confirmed by the fine temperance ofthe qualitative.
To rework an old local saying: Tell me what you eat and drink and
Ill tell you who you are. Although in terms of the physiology of taste, it
is impossible to pin this essential characteristic down because it stipulates
from the start that the number of savours is infinite, for every soluble body
has a special savour which is not quite like any other.2
Just as the mission of modernity is to bring order to the world, name
it, and adapt it to our understanding, Brillat-Savarin grades and calibrates
the phenomena of taste, describing: direct sensation, the first impression
arising out of the immediate action of the organs of the mouth, while
the substance to be tasted is still resting on the front part of the tongue;
complete sensation, composed of the first impression and the impression
which follows when the food leaves its initial position and passes to the
back of the mouth, assailing the whole organ with its taste and perfume;
and considered sensation, the judgment passed on to the brain on the
2 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, The Physiology of Taste, London: Penguin, 1994,

p.40.
impressions transmitted to it by the organ.3 Taste is articulated according

to a canonical narrative scheme which refers to the establishment of a lack,
of a subject which seeks until it finds, and which eventually passes judge-
ment on what it has found. What about those who do not find? Hunger
cannot take part in this ritual, this ceremony. When the lack of food is a
constant, everything seems delicious and nothing can be truly appreciated.
Taste is a luxury which responds to an understanding produced within
the temporal sphere. As such, taste can be developed through telling a
story about it. There are few better examples of this than Proust recaptur-
ing times and tastes:
No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a
shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary
changes that were taking place.
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no
suggestion of its origin.
And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters
innocuous, its brevity illusory this new sensation having had on me the effect which
love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it
was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it
have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with
the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not,
indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? I
drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which
gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself.4
Barthes has been a close observer of the link between gastronomy and
language, especially when he points out the power ofthe latter to summon
up the delicacies it is referring to at the very moment when they are absent,
for eating and talking are operations that take place on the same part of the
body: the tongue. The linguistic, sweet-toothed pleasure of the gastronome,
who unfurls his speech with relish and summons fetishist desires through
the use of strange words, is a stereotype of this kind of absence.
3 Ibid., p.42.
4 Proust, Marcel, Swanns Way, New York: Random House, 2004, pp.6061.
Few ideas are as bourgeois as that of taste, which takes absolute free-
dom of choice as a given, and declares null and void the primary concept
of need by establishing that hunger is both the taste of the poor and the
sentence they must serve.
We are speaking now of the physiology of hunger, which does not
distinguish between Proustian madeleines and stale bread, and which
is expressed through one distinctive attribute: the fact that the subject
suffering the feeling metamorphoses into the feeling itself. In the Purgatory
of his Divine Comedy, Dante describes it as follows: Each in his eyes was
dark and cavernous,/ Pallid in face, and so emaciate / That from the bones
the skin did shape itself .5 Language, with its transfer of meaning, personi-
fies hunger as a hungry person who, by suffering, is devoured and consumed
by hunger itself. Just as hunger is made flesh or the lack thereof in
mankind, taste is not just an attribute of something in the way that some-
thing you could see or hear would be. The distinction between subject and
object is paradoxically as much a characteristic of taste (Proust) as of hunger
(Dante). In the two contrasting cases, the subject is shattered by the object.
5 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The
beginning of this divine comedy inspired the start of the astonishing existentialist
fiction that is Ferdydurke, which masterfully sketches out one of the most powerful
critiques of taste in relation to hunger: Nothing that is really tasty can be really
awful (as the word tasty indicates), and only that which has bad taste is truly ined-
ible. With envy, I was reminiscing about those beautiful, romantic, classical crimes,
the rapes and gouging of eyes in poetry and prose herring with jam, that I know
are awful, unlike those wonderful and beautiful crimes in Shakespeare. So dont talk
to me, dont, about those rhymed agonies we swallow as easily as oysters, dont talk
about the candy of disgrace, about the chocolate cream of horror, the little cakes
of wretchedness, about the lollipops of suffering and the sweetmeats of despair. So
why does this busybody of a woman, who uses her finger to tear at the most bloody
social ills, death by starvation of a workers family of six, why, I ask, does she not
dare, with the same finger, to pick her ear in public? Because this would have been
much more dreadful. Death from starvation, or the death of a million in a war this
can be eaten, even relished yet there still exist in this world combinations that are
not edible, that make us vomit, that are bad, discordant, repulsive, and repellent,
oh, even satanic, and these the human organism rejects. See Gombrowicz, Witold,
Ferdydurke, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, pp.147148.
Being and nothing. Taste implies a philosophy of nothing, a theology, if

you will; or, in short, an ethics. The sensualism of Serres and his five senses
or the hedonism of Onfray and his gourmet reason are difficult to grasp
in places which suffer famines. The pleasure of taste escapes all attempts
at reduction and thus escapes all science. It is revealed as an ironic kind
of physiology which conceals a void that shelters antithetic, tautological
values: I like it or I dont like it. This is a power of appreciation, which
in todays Argentina is nothing more than a denial of hunger.
Society at Table
He who teaches philosophy today gives the other food not to please him,
but rather to modify his taste.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aus dem Nachlass
In every capitalist metropolis the increase in productivity and wealth

brought with it two pithy symbols of social reproductivity: on the one
hand, the table, the icon of a powerful minority which brings together
healthy eating and good manners, hygiene and courtesy, and taste and
fullness; on the other hand, the bed, the materially and spiritually limited
space of a needy majority able only to reproduce their miserable existence
and the strength they have lost during the working day.
The table is the sorcery of shapes, the mise-en-scne of a ceremony which
tries to reproduce, in the domestic or public sphere, something that sup-
posedly exists throughout the social spectrum. The ritual of expense and
magnificence, courtesy and equality, grace and taste, the kingdom of civility
and recognition. A micro society which brings together intersubjectivities
in the act of sharing values and stimuli, a selective group practice which
narrows and comes together in conversation. A tight sort of sociability
watches over the pleasures of the table, helped along by supposed pair-
ings of foods and wines, an idea which reproduces a certain model and is
evidence of the desire for harmonious coexistence. By eating and drinking

with others, sharing pleasures and desires, each person is reconciled with
themselves and with others, and therefore endorses within a reduced but
exponential circle the political scene.
In history, behaviour at table has not been an isolated, referent-free
fact, but is rather part of the diverse behaviour transmitted by society in
the form of certain vital general and structural configurations. Civilizing
norms basically order and the probability of progress for the entire social
body are in themselves only beneficial to the owning classes, or the middle
classes that aspire to them, because the dispossessed, faced with starvation,
cannot refine their taste, participate in conversation, and much less behave
in a civilized fashion. These are behaviours that impose composure and
formalisms, and which organize the consumption of food through deli-
cate, indirect, and imperceptible regulations that contrast with the brutal
imposition of privation. They constitute, as Pierre Bourdieu points out:
[] a way of negating the meaning and primary function of consumption, which are
essentially common, by making the meal a social ceremony, an affirmation of ethical
tone and aesthetic refinement. The manner of presenting and consuming the food,
the organization of the meal and the setting of the places, strictly differentiated
according to the sequence of dishes and arranged to please the eye, the presentation
of the dishes, considered as much in terms of shape and colour (like works of art)
as of their consumable substance, the etiquette governing posture and gesture, ways
of serving oneself and others, of using different utensils, the seating plan, strictly but
discreetly hierarchical, the censorship of all bodily manifestations of the act or pleas-
ure of eating (such as noise or haste), the very refinement of the things consumed,
with quality more important than quantity this whole commitment to stylization
tends to shift the emphasis from substance and function to form and manner, and so
to deny the crudely material reality of the act of eating and of the things consumed,
or, which amounts to the same thing, the basely material vulgarity of those who
indulge in the immediate satisfactions of food and drink.6
Producing forms is a way of disciplining consumption and negating the

truth of the social world and its relationships. Changes in behaviour at
6 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994, p.196.
the table reveal a wider transformation in the behaviour of society. When

that society sits down at the table, its culinary extravagance and refinement
subjugate the hungry political body which was not invited.
The Gourmet Myth
We are not even the children of circumstances, but rather of their

appearances.
Miguel Brasc, De criaturas triviales y antiguas guerras
Argentina can testify to abundance basically linked to native food myths

and, at present, to the concentration of wealth, and abject poverty. A lack
of moderation dominates the historical horizon of the River Plate area,
from the cannibalism of the Guaran, who devoured Juan Daz de Sols in
1516 thus providing imaginary sustenance for the doctrine of barbarism
to the hunger of the present, in which a large part of the population has
no choice but to feed itself off the waste of its fellow human beings, who
use the world of gourmet food as a justification of their difference. In turn,
the Pampas have gone from being an area where natural food abounded
to being a panoramically homogenous land taken up by a monoculture
such as the soya bean grown for fodder, the biotechnological agricultural
system or model that determines our working stereotype as a country.
Concentration of wealth and abject poverty, productive uniformity and
taste or consumer diversity.
Evoking the regime of production of food and taste allows us to
think about peoples conduct, to characterize their existences, links, and
social wishes. We are impassive, complacent witnesses to the internal pro-
liferation of a gourmet dialect which reveals our social and psychic life.
Within the catastrophic Argentine food scene, this is a privileged form of
expression amongst the vastly differing material circumstances of society.
The main course options of a menu all of which were along the same
lines recently included: Carpaccio of sirloin with sheeps milk cheese, a
bouquet of spinach and crunchy parmesan; marinated salmon with mixed
greens, alfalfa sprouts, a rice timbale, crunchy greens, sundried tomatoes,
and passion fruit vinegar; scallops coated in black and white sesame seeds
with greens, rice leaves, kombu,7 and a chilli and coconut coulis; bicolour
tortelloni filled with marinated salmon, sheeps milk cheese, and thyme in
a saffron, wine, and prawn sauce; etc. Not to mention the sophistication
of the starters, desserts, and the wine menu.
Food is inseparable from the imagination, although in Argentina there
is something very striking about the sublimation of gastronomic sensibility
in the composition of dishes, which is also applied to menus and sustained
by critics, starting with the kind of rhetorical, atavistic terminology illus-
trated above. It is as if the circumstantial, transitory nature of the object
were magnified by the sumptuousness of the praise.
In Argentina except in the Andean northwest there are no traces
of autochthonous food. Unlike the wide and exotic Latin American
culinary panorama,
the expeditions of small units of troops against the small indigenous bands of the
Ro de la Plata were sufficient to almost completely destroy their customs and
their culture, affirming in a second undertaking the riches of an Argentinean culi-
nary system clearly inspired by the alimentary customs of the European countries.
This is particularly evident if we consider, on the one hand, the barbecue, which
although using a simple grill which we can suppose to be indigenous is specially
composed of beef unknown in the Pre-Colombian epoch, and on the other hand,
the empanada, a filled pastry made from wheat flour, an alimentary product also
foreign in these parts.8
In direct opposition to the non-existence of a native cuisine, an exacer

bated false syncretism has arisen which manifests itself in ornamental
language and forms, and in the way dishes are presented. The new chefs,
7 Translators note: Kombu is an edible kelp, widely eaten in East Asia.

8 Fournier, Dominique, La cocina de Amrica y el intercambio colombino, in
Montanari, Massimo (ed.), El mundo de la cocina, Buenos Aires Paids, 2003, p.124.
like naturalists, focus on precious trivialities and have turned cooking

into pure ornamentation, as if the verisimilitude of their gourmet doc-
trine depended specifically on thinking through every detail. As a reflex
reaction to the statistics occasionally published on the amount of people
whose basic needs went unsatisfied, neighbourhood assemblies and soup
kitchens flourished and turned out to be circumstantial to the same
extent that the hunger was structural. An authentic decantation of the
culture of shamelessness that proliferated in 1990s Argentina, the gourmet
world was here to stay.
In his Notes de voyage dans lAmrique du Sud, the French politician
Georges Clemenceau noted, after describing the cuisine ofBuenos Aires as
having no particular identity: Against the immutable background of man
and his societies, is not the clearest pleasure of our changes to be found in
the variety of the appearances and the forms of expression?.9 This question
was as pertinent then in 1910 as it is now.
It is not a one-off gesture, or an aristocratic whim that attempts to
respond to standardizing forms of taste or appreciation by distinguishing
itself, because the gourmet myth stops being gourmet when it shows
signs of industrialization. Indeed, there is a television channel the only
one of its kind in all Latin America which broadcasts food-related pro-
grams twenty-four hours a day, and there are a host of publications and
lifestyle or wine clubs that sustain the gourmet ideal. (Today even fast
food chains turn to fashionable chefs to put together their meal deals).
What is novel about this imaginary construct which turns knowing
how to eat and drink, and culinary criticism individuals with personal
opinions into something substantial? It is simply that in this way it
cultivates values by staging and transmitting what is great and extraordi-
nary about a society whilst deprecating the most typical and traditional
aspects of that very society.
Observing the culinary Argentina of today reveals how far some peo-
ples sensibilities enjoy, at times, a kind of timelessness which is superior to
9 Clemenceau, Georges, Notas de viaje por la Amrica del Sur, Buenos Aires:
Hyspamrica, 1986, p.117.
the so-called material conditions of a society. The 1990s got rid of decency.
This exacerbated obsession with gourmandise stimulus is in keeping with
a certain level of human relationships and a certain emotional configura-
tion. The gourmet world is a programme, an aesthetic, and an ethic in the
face of a lack of protection, hunger and the distribution of food. It is also
a cultural guilt supplement, because just as it gives preference to the indi-
vidual over the social, it privileges seeming over being, appearance over
reality. By privileging form over everything else, it masks its interest in
function, through which it does what it does whilst appearing not to do
so. Critics, or experts, make excessive use of apodictic judgments which
aim, on the one hand, at gaining personal recognition and, on the other,
at dividing social classes: having preferences when you choose things is a
practical affirmation of a basic distinction, and is the basis for everything
one possesses, and for defining what is yours and what is others. Just as true
class differences are naturalized, as an ideological strategy the gourmet
myth is very efficient because, as it resignifies the consumption of foods,
it cancels out the way they were produced and acquired, and preaches them
as a genuine cultural fact.
How did we become what we are? Nietzsches answer was aware of
spiritual indigestion and turned out to be a programme in itself: I am
interested in a question on which the salvation of humanity depends more
than on any curio of the theologians: the question of nutrition.10 Now, all
desire for food tends towards an ideal. Like all idealizations, the gourmet
myth is a form of rejection.
10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, Oxford: Oxford
Worlds Classics, 2007, p.19.
Skinny Cows
Being fat. Over half of all Argentineans are overweight. What is to be

done? How to avoid a life of misery? A practical guide to beating obesity.
Cover of Viva magazine, a supplement in the newspaper Clarn
(Sunday 15 August 2004)
The establishment of the gourmet world in todays hunger-ridden

Argentina is not part of a civilizing process that takes culinary memory as
something of real value and preserves customs and traditions, because cul-
tural identity has always been an unresolved issue in this part of the world.
Instead, it is a process that encourages a sophisticated consumerism on the
part of an ever smaller but ever more vocal group of individuals, a process
that starts with the emergence of values that distinguish social groups in
the face of growing hunger. In this sense, it is completely representative of
a reactionary, concealing attitude in the face of the production of abject
poverty. However, the urgent nature of each catastrophe blinds politically
progressive ways of thinking by limiting the notion of justice to the distri-
bution system a non-negotiable value which is clearly expressed when
neighbourhood assemblies and soup kitchens form and by not relating
the problem to the way food is produced, which is equally catastrophic,
and harder to intervene in civically. The myth that Argentina is somehow
the granary of the world still defines the countrys image of itself, both
on the national level and the international, so much so that Argentines
believe that they still inhabit a pastoral paradise full of plump cows and
generous harvests.
The Grupo de Reflexin Rural (Rural Reflection Group) has researched
this issue thoroughly and has reached conclusions that warn that the tragedy
is only going to intensify. The data and positioning of Argentina in the
international arena are conclusive: at present, Argentina is second only to
the United States as a user of genetically modified seeds. In terms of geneti-
cally modified soya alone, around 19 million hectares (56 per cent of the
cultivated surface) were sown between 2001 and 2010, leading to the use
of 190 million litres of glyphosphate-based herbicide sold and controlled

oligopolically by the transnational corporation Monsanto.
Argentinas rural model is one of increasing dependence, based as it is
on the export of consumables with low added value, the concentration of
land in the hands of a few, rural depopulation, and the plundering of soil
fertility, biodiversity, and seeds. This model borrows against the countrys
future by becoming supply-dependent, lacking in food sovereignty, and
weak in its role in international trade.
The soya economy is the model, because it turns soya into a product
that is independent of natural and cultural conditions, and builds a society
in that image.
Soya is becoming more and more omnipresent in todays Argentina. Our habits and
norms are changing as the domination of soya over Argentina is consolidated. Highly
complex socio-cultural processes are substantially simplified by the soya model. The
cultural dimension tends to disappear into purely technological arguments as if
social processes could be understood from a lineal, technological point of view. The
technical process imposes culturally and socially devastating dynamics. Like sugar
during slavery, soya brings with it a specific social production system. The technical
conditions for the soya process give rise to an agriculture that is devoid of culture
and society, with neither wage earners nor farmers. The land is seen as a wholly
inert surface, and not as soil with its own cycles. The soils cycle is substituted by
technological packages requiring ever-greater input in an extractive process that is
similar to mining: a single man with a tractor can work 50ha in a day. Indeed, soya
farming is only justifiable on enormous scales. Soya deserts are the consequence of
soils that have ceased to be the live organism we call earth.11
While some enjoy the varied, extravagant bounty the gourmet world
has to offer, the soya complex standardizes health and food practices: the
most recent data suggests that 70 per cent of industrialized food contains
genetically modified soya in the form of flours, lecithin, proteins and vegeta-
ble oils. So intense is the intervention of corporations in our lives that they
shape the way we live culturally through advertising and food, in the same
way that they demolish the cultural dimension of food by subordinating
11 Grupo de Reflexin Rural, Estado en construccin / Estado de gracia [State under

Construction/State of Grace], Buenos Aires: Tierra Verde, 2003, p.82.
the problem of hunger to technology and science. As happens with taste,

the autonomy of the hungry is totally expropriated by so-called Solidarity
Soya, in that recipients of aid end up suffering and atoning for the
cultural imposition of a type of food.
Faced with ideas from progressive sectors which sublimate their politi-
cal cravings into the concept of multitudes, reactionary schools ofthought
reply thriftily with high production levels, their lucrative, technological
answer to their own distributive desires regarding the problem of hunger.
The era of skinny cows and soya for fodder as a form of pre-emptive social
control.
Devouring with your Eyes
It doesnt matter what you see, what matters it what it is.

Jingle for an advertisement for Schneider beer
At the current stage of capitalism, production is not based on satisfying

consumer needs; on the contrary, consumption exists to serve the interests
of production. The media further this task by announcing that economic
reality makes production an end in itself, giving no accounts of the costs
of its inescapable growth. What matters are the figures, and in this sense
the medium is the message.
All discourse thus entails an imaginary, which builds a mythical social
framework that is quite categorical when faced with the proliferation of
poverty. As is the case with sport, where the whole country supposedly
shares in the triumph of a national team, production is sustained by a totally
fallacious distributive economy. Each cover of the rural supplement of
Clarn newspaper is an insatiable source of hermeneutic repetition: huge
print letters announce pompously, like a kind of national cause detached
from any critical consciousness, the increasingly astronomical success of
genetically modified soya as if it were referring to the height of an athletes
jumps. This is supported and accompanied by innocent advertisements

for transnational companies that exalt the preventative virtues of certain
seeds and weed killers, starring, for example, models dressed up as nurses.
For their part, growers give interviews and parade themselves through
different television programmes paying homage to the comparative cir-
cumstantial advantages enjoyed in neighbouring countries. The primal
myth of Argentina as the granary of the world is alive and well and being
cheered on by the media, although in a different way. In the past the myth
predicted a sort of promised land for all and sundry, while in the present
it reinforces the current social imbalance and the concentration of wealth,
in which a few people earn huge amounts, a great many people eat little
or nothing at all, and almost everyone reads and nods their approval on
the basis of the information the media provides of a benefit as fickle as
it is fleeting. Argentina has always been unpredictable and exceedingly
euphoric when it comes to circumstantial and temporary successes. The
installation and expansion of soya production in Argentina is, to quote a
local saying, bread for today and hunger for tomorrow.
Social crises or catastrophes resignify concepts and soothe any values
that could come into conflict with them, such that, in the face of a vast
reserve army of labour, work emerges as an end in itself which stimu-
lates production, removed from any moral responsibility, similar to the
historical lack of responsibility of soldiers in wars. But at the same time,
advertising and the media reinforce a fundamental aspect of this stage of
capitalism: the industry of the production of consumers, which tends not
only to transform people into characters within the story of production,
but also writes the instinct of consumerism into human nature, separat-
ing it from its surroundings.
At every moment, the press and advertising offers us sensual or moral
gratification. However, reality is not only what you see, but also what is
shown, and not passively, but imperiously. As such, it is impossible to
ignore the idealistic fetishism this propounds, in which the meaning of
things is not presented as an outcome but as a way of obtaining experiences,
because objects are transmuted into ideas or messages. The gourmet world
is a timely example. Processed food as a gourmet product is the clearest
expression that everything real is symptomatic rather than rational, and
that meaning belongs to the glamorized products that are shown to us

not as something we have made, but instead as explicitly natural resources.
The backdrop of the Argentine financial landscape is the social disaster
of the last few years, which has deprived half the population of the most
basic consumables, obliging them to rummage through consumers rubbish.
Given this, advertising is an appropriate sphere in which to read many of
the aspirations and sensibilities of Argentine society, as it is there that the
circulation of discourse is embodied. Lately, preachers of consumer culture
have turned to two explicit ideal models. The first of these is rhetorical,
which facilitates a certain image of what is real and stylizes it, thus making
it more persuasive. The second is poetic, and by producing an imaginary
reality tends towards effectively creating the issue itself. A prototype of
the rhetorical model is an advertisement for a top-of-the-range Citron
quite a coincidence, given that Barthes had already analyzed one in his
Mythologies shot in the middle of a dirty, devastated city, Buenos Aires,
and which announces that the city looks marvellous. Examples of the
poetic model are advertisements for food, which tend to towards integra-
tion, to a communion of consumption or to socializing, if endogenous,
forms whose discourse exudes the possibility of sharing with someone else.
The family sitting down to table or a couple confirming their relationship
with a good bottle of wine is the prime example. Outside lies hunger.
Advertising builds worlds crawling with positive attributes and values,
and has no reason to and in fact does not point to the system which the
use of these products endorses. There are no advertisements which imagine
a car stuck in a traffic jam or someone getting indigestion from something
they ate. An advertisement can exacerbate what is individual, can found a
moral, condense our passions and obsessions, materialize life and idealize
matter: the Citron advertisement, with its scenery of a destroyed, apoca-
lyptic city, one of people rummaging through rubbish but not of people
protesting against this; or the Peugeot advert that suggests that destiny is
inevitable; or any advert for food, the protagonists of which tend to wor-
ship sociability and getting together in order to replace the atavistic fear of
hunger and swollen bellies with the aesthetic model of slimness and the cult
of the body. The statistics on the increase of car sales whilst street protests
proliferate are telling, as is the overabundance of gastronomy schools and
the growing numbers of young people wishing to train as chefs in the face of
the landscape ofhunger. Just as cars go through rigorous testing programmes
aimed at attributing qualities to them, chefs do not only cook and handle
food, but also stylize it with their gourmet presentations, which appeal to
the senses and to the idea of being able to devour something with your
eyes. Traffic and food are stereotyped in take-away offers.
Just as there is no news about the facts, with the mass media tend-
ing instead to produce the facts that they report on themselves, there is
no advertising or imaginary formulation that does not tend, poetically or
rhetorically, towards underlining the idea of consumption through techni-
cal and semantic control. The borderline between fantasy and reality is so
blurred that everything becomes a mixture of sublime, undefined references.
The jingle of a beer advert is explicit about this: It doesnt matter what you
see, what matters is what it is, with which it reflects on the appearance of
things and appeals to the ontological and not the mythical, to essence and
not appearance, as if it were a call to materialism, and against food ideal-
ism. It is a discourse that hovers over itself, as if meaning was being forged
and, at the same time, it was trying to find out about this meaning. Just as
what matters in news reporting is getting the scoop, adverts often turn out
to be self-referential and, in the case of this particular beer advert, try to
give themselves precedence over the analysis of meaning and thus accom-
modate an objectification of taste, regardless of intersubjectivities. As such,
adverts can be said to re-appropriate the old, ironic techniques of pop-art,
which vindicated the artificial nature of advertising. It alarmed the elite
of the time, declaring that a bottle of Coca-Cola and a lurid hamburger
had as much right to be portrayed on canvas as a bottle of wine and a dead
duck, an idea which has since been assimilated and is no longer shocking.
When the production of objects becomes ever more assimilated to the
projection of images, the promotion of attitudes, and the stimulation of
desires, the accumulation of experiences tends to replace the accumulation
of goods, especially in a poor country like Argentina, where many people
no longer devour things even with their eyes, while others are encouraged
to eat only with their gaze.
Exquisite Corpses
[] a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious,

nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or
boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or
a ragout.
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children
of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or
Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
Eating and drinking are the result of a highly significant experience for
community life, being both the context for and the introduction to con-
versation and social coexistence. For this reason, in any plea for an ideal
or more perfect world, provisions are on the menu:
The Promised Land is defined by its borders, and afterwards by its abundant, although
basic, offer of foodstuffs, a land flowing with milk and honey. The Lords Prayer
deals with eternal truths and includes a practical petition: each day our daily bread.
The pagan ancient Greeks, imagining the world ofthe immortals on Mount Olympus,
provided it with what was necessary for their sustenance: ambrosia and nectar, the
food and drink of the gods.12
The promised land is one thing, the land that is actually farmed is quite
another: from the time of these benign, idyllic landscapes to the spread
of industrialized food production, the market has gradually structured
the volume of production and food supplies to serve the new norms of
wealth concentration, severing ancient customs and destroying cultural
orientations.
The city produces rubbish the daily bread of some but not food.
Throughout history, the concentration of individuals in places far from
12 Lewis, Bernard, Donde comen con los dedos, in Revista de Occidente 266267
( JulyAugust 2003), p.27.
food sources has led to new ways of eating.13 For this reason, many scholars
have drawn connections between logistics in times of war and transforma-
tions in methods of manufacture and supply in nineteenth-century Europe.
One example of this are galletas marineras14 which got their name when
production chains starting using state-run bakeries to make staples for navy
fleets. Food manufacturers were later inspired to make a similar commer-
cial product. Another example is canning, which arose from the need for
transportable, non-perishable supplies for campaign tents. Another is the
invention of margarine, the result of a growing demand for new sources
of fats for maintaining firearms.
13 The same can be said of the composition of major urban centres, industrialization,
and the effect of wars on food supplies. The sensation of those who have been on the
front line of a war does not seem so very different from the lot of someone forced
to rummage through rubbish to survive. To make this clear, let us consider one of
Ozus writings. In September 1937 he joined the second regiment of the Takebashi
imperial guard and left the same month for China, where he became part of the
second chemical weapon battalion, under the direct command of the Japanese army
deployed in central China. He was demobilized in July 1939, and on 3 April wrote
in his diary: The longer you live, the more you find yourself compelled to modify
your judgements. Respecting the clean or the dirty, for example, to refuse to eat
because it is dirty, or to become exquisite, implies that the only thing to do is wait
to find something clean to eat. Nevertheless this was never the case when I was in
Nanchung, where this implied condemning oneself to having an empty stomach.
The truth is that when hunger plagues you in collaboration with fatigue, you end
up drinking from paddy fields full of tadpoles, in eating potatoes peelings collected
in the road, shells of manju [Translators note: a popular traditional Japanese sweet]
rummaged from the dust or leftovers of abandoned dinners. I, who had once been
so obsessive that from time to time I took Daimoru (a medicine which aids the
digestion), had ended up abandoning any requirement of cleanliness; which taken
to extremes, runs the risk of having its effects in the future on my obsession with
perfection as far as my art is concerned. Any similarity between this and the reality
in Argentina of people doomed to sifting through the scraps of our rubbish is not
mere coincidence: the national catastrophe was a war whose victims wander our
pavements every day. See Ozu, Yasujiro, Antologa de los diarios, Valencia: Filmoteca
de la Generalitat Valenciana, Donostia Cultura, Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe,
2000, p.97.
14 Translators note: Literally, sailors biscuits, a popular kind of savoury cracker.
War and industrialization fed off each other until, from the early
nineteenth century until the First World War, the growth of cities replaced
the army as the driving force for change. Due to the impossibility of pro-
ducing food in the cities, as well as the growth and concentration of mar-
kets, food ended up being industrialized. This meant mechanizing supply
methods, reorganizing distribution, producing non-perishable foodstuffs,
and adapting mealtimes to fixed working hours. From the multiplication
of the loaves and fishes to soil management and scientific livestock, from
the Last Supper despite a traitor having taken part to lonely meals at
workstations or in front of the television, from hearths to microwaves, food
has gradually lost its socializing qualities. Uniformity and speed; that is,
the industrialization of food.
Generally speaking, it is evident that it is not possible to abstract food
from political economy, and that the food and the drinks, being produced
goods, turn out to be grounds of an expropriation of labour. I was surprised
to find out that the standard bottles of wine enjoyed by bourgeois consumers
like myself have roughly the same volume 750ml as the lung capacity
of the glassblowers who once made them. As regards nutrition, the data
on todays world is not particularly heartening. In 2004, the front page
of a Spanish newspaper announced that for the first time in history the
number of obese people in the world equalled that of the malnourished:
of the earths 6,000 million inhabitants, some 1,200 million were eating
more than they needed, while an equal amount were going hungry. The
malnourished and the overfed, two sides of the same coin. Nothing could
be further from a brave new world and the critical, satirical, cinemato-
graphic fantasy embodied by Marco Ferreris La grande abbuffata (The
Grande Bouffe) or the Mr Creosote scene in Monty Pythons The Meaning
of Life, given that food-related suffering due to either lack or excess
involve, in todays world, the same social subject or victim.
Food choice embodies social class. Nutrition culture converted
into nature is expressed by dimensions, volumes, and forms and makes
the body, as Bourdieu liked to say the most incontestable objectifica-
tion of class taste. The body is both a bearer and producer of signs. It coins
opposite world visions which express themselves according to their place
on the social scale: the working classes have voluptuous body shapes, and
can only think of food as necessary to survival, while the middle and upper
classes privilege the form and look of their food, choosing that which is
easiest to digest and lowest in calories.
Nutritional desire is in keeping with an aesthetic ideal. Everyones
mouth waters, but not at the same thing. Food, like language, is a defini-
tive cultural proof, both between and within societies: whilst it identifies,
it inevitably establishes differences. That is to say, on an ideal level, food
is identified with get-togethers and coexistence, but in reality it feeds the
differences between classes. In the words of George Steiner:
To convive (the verb is rare after the mid-seventeenth century) is indeed to live
with and among others in the most articulate, charged form which is that of the
shared meal.15
When it comes to flavours, our vocabulary is as eloquent as it is biased:

in Argentine Spanish someone common or contemptible is described as
un grasa,16 a pleasant person is un dulce (a sweetie), someone good is un
pan de dios,17 a boring person is described as un amargo,18 and the object
of your desire is un bombn.19
What dialectic could explain the adoption of epicurism and hunger,
the refinement of gastronomic senses or sensibility and other peoples
recurring contact with our waste, the tendency to standardize food produc-
tion but diversify concentrated consumption, the exaggerated concern for
slenderness in the face of under nourishment, the ever-increasing numbers
of sommelier and culinary arts schools in the face of vulnerable, unfed
masses, and the visual saturation of television chefs in the face of hunger?
15 Steiner, George, No Passion Spent: Essays 19781995, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996, p.390.
16 Translators note: This is untranslatable in English. The nearest equivalent would
be chav, although it lacks the sense of fatness or greasyness contained in the
Castellano grasa.
17 Translators note: Literally, bread from heaven but the closest equivalent is salt of
the earth.
18 Translators note: Literally, bitter.
19 Translators note: Literally, a chocolate.
As Gombrowicz wrote, Argentina is a mixture that has yet to become a

cake, or more simply, it is something that has not fully gelled because it has
never managed to seat all those trying to live together at the same table.
The defence of taste and gourmet distinctions (which are already
tending towards industrialization celebrity chefs cook up menus at fast-
food chains, now theres dialectics for you!), by making a symbol out of
choice, turning taste into a necessity, stigmatizing the body and natural-
izing, through deprivation, the social and economic causes of it all. This is
a trend throughout the globalized world; in Argentina, like most things,
it is symptomatic. Just as frugality is only possible for someone who is not
hungry, luxury is incomprehensible without hunger.
Food nourishes and invokes the reproductive instinct, although:
After the invention of cooking the next great revolution was the discovery that
food has other virtues and vices: it can encode meanings. It can do the eater good
of kinds which transcend sustenance and evils which are worse than poison. It not
only maintains life but also enhances it and sometimes degrades it. It can change
the eater for the better or for worse. It has spiritual and metaphysical, moral and
transmutative effects.20
Few have understood this as well as cannibals have: exquisite corpses.

Extravagance and culinary refinement always entail a hidden menace such
as that in Swifts proposal21 and here is one last coincidence: the surname
of the Irish writer that put forward the provocative solution for the starv-
ing is shared by Argentinas market leader in beef exports and local canned
goods. Today that proposal has become literal: (individual) pleasure in
taste is the denial of (others) hunger.
20 Fernndez-Armesto, Felipe, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, New York,

The Free Press, 2002, p.20.
21 See Swift, Jonathan, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People
in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them
Beneficial to the Public in Major Works, Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2003,
492499.
Food for the Body, Fasting for the Soul
I am warming the body so as to begin, rubbing my hands together in order

to take courage. Now I have remembered that there was a time when, in
order to arouse my spirit, I prayed: the movement is spiritual. Praying was
a way of reaching myself in silence and hidden from everyone. When I
parlayed I obtained my souls repose; and that repose is everything that
I could never have. More than that, nothing. But the void has the value
of the plenum and resembles it. A way of obtaining something is by not
searching for it, a way of having is not asking, and only believing that the
silence which is wrought in me is my response to myself, to my mystery.
Clarice Lispector, La hora de la estrella
(Cannibal) In 2001 a former German soldier confessed to having killed and

eaten a compatriot, a computing expert employed by Siemens, and to having
done so with his victims consent. The internet had officiated as the disem-
bodied matre dhtel and the victims willingness to be eaten was proven
in the trial: before offering himself as a delicacy at the feast and sharing his
genitals, which they could not finish eating him because of the toughness
of the meat the evening was recorded in video he had sold his goods
and wiped the hard disc of his computer. This agape (unconditional love)
possesses all the ingredients sexual, ritualistic, and incomprehensible
for forming part of the most dazzling menu in the police records of these
times. Even more so when the neighbours of the cannibal referred to him
as a normal and friendly person, given to sharing a pleasant word or a beer,
and to displaying the friendliest customs and the most correct forms. The
virtual word made itself flesh, the idealistic ritual, matter.
Given the fait accompli, the victimizer lamented only not having been
able to get to know and converse more with his victim, who insisted on
being eaten without delay and whose supposed willingness distinguished
this from previous stories of a similar nature. The judgement was benevolent
28 Food for the Body, Fasting for the Soul
in treating it as a case of homicide by request, and the review of this case

by the higher court is consistent then with established case law. It is an
authentic example of the creation of laws monopolized by judges, as a result
of which, cannibalism is not classed as a crime in the German penal code.
Anthropologists distinguish in broad outline between the Amerindian
and European traditions of cannibalism: while in the former the meat is
important as holder of the soul, through which strong ties are established
with that which will be swallowed, for the second the consumption of
the other is possible only on condition of relinquishing all subjectivity.
Humans possess appetites for the most varied circumstances, from knowl-
edge replete with words to a succulent dish composed of the best meats.
All the pleasures of the palate are subordinate to the laws of orality; the
pleasure of gulping down and of talking. The mouth is the indisputable
seat of ambiguity and guilt, of the spirit and animality, of the raw and the
cooked, of nature and of sociability, of the word and the flesh.
Now, what about the hunger which a cannibal feels? This question
is very difficult to answer with certainty for in all anthropological inves-
tigations real and symbolic elements are intertwined in such a way that is
extremely difficult to evaluate. However, it is extremely common to try to
frame the practice of cannibalism as one of the resulting demarcations of
the spheres of the human and the non-human, whether the latter is divine
or bestial. Cannibalism is always symbolic, even when it is real.
So, as well as incarnating the inhuman or absolute otherness, all
cannibalistic experiences possess their rules. Amongst the recorded cases is
that of the Rugbiers, the representatives of the Uruguyan high bourgeoisie,
who survived two months in the Andes in 1972 and decided spontaneously
to impose certain conventions similar to those of the primitives in their
cannibalistic incursion: they didnt eat family members the power of the
blood and shunned eating the flesh of women. In this sense it appears to
be an exclusive rule, covering every experience of cannibalism, not to feed
oneself from those people with whom sexual relations would be incestuous.
As Feuerbach said, we are what we eat. However, we are a long way
from shedding light on the moral effects of nutrition. Nietzsche, always
voracious in his conceptions, pointed out that the alimentary regime is not
something chosen, but that we find the one most suitable to our organism.
Distinction is the sign of choice. Is there anything more distinctive than

eating another human being? Contemporary society possesses a hunger for
what? From Swift onwards, the use of cannibalism in its figurative form, as
a Socratic appeal which distinguishes the not clearly non-human, has been
losing its propagandistic gastric force. In the concrete case of the German
cannibal and his consenting victim, as in most of the current debates, only
the voice of certain North American conservatives has been listened to.
These conservatives use this case, with extreme irony, as one more example
of the advance of civil liberties, although speculating politically in the face
of other demands (abortion, euthanasia etc.), which could be established
in the future.
Perhaps to choose our food is to produce our own essence, although
nowadays all discrimination refers to a false freedom of choice, or rather,
a will to accept. Dietetics today is more than ever the empire of imposi-
tion disguised as necessity, as opposed to free will. It is to be what one is,
beyond some voluntary cannibalistic incursions.
(Fasting) In 2005 a former Argentinean soldier decided to go on hunger

strike because he could not bear the idea of being sentenced to 9,138 years
in prison as the attorney had requested, or to 6,626, demanded by popular
and private prosecution.
A great number ofthe inhabitants ofthis world suffer hunger, although
by no means through choice. To choose not to eat is to procure for oneself
a reduction of energy, of the bodily powers, to invite the body to resort to
itself as the ultimate breath of salvation. It is to dramatize a physical dis-
ability, approach death, to weigh up the possibility of the impossible by
contrast with the principle of certainty in the staging of the law and the
judgment. It is to try, although timidly, to show oneself weakened, beaten,
disconsolate, and to feel fear like that time a paradigmatic memory of
the flights of death the sailor who, after throwing out to the bottom of
the Ro de la Plata bodies made unconscious by an injection of pentothal,
almost fell behind them.
The imaginary of the prison recurs constantly in one idea: rotting
in prison. It speaks of the decomposition of the body, of the corrupting
function of the burial. It is the condition most like death, but with absolute
and instantaneous consciousness. There is no humanistic vision of confine-

ment; confinement is only another way of managing death.
Scilingo was a prisoner before his confession. He was also a prisoner
of the actual unconfessable fear, just as human as his homicidal actions
mentioned above. Through his sentencing it has perhaps been possible to
understand that salvation, like the ethical and by contrast with due obedi-
ence, is always individual. A life never conforms to the duty which the most
just individual could do. He was already a prisoner of his memories, which
condemned him, for he knew deep down that a truly free man is incapable
of offending the liberty of another man. And this is constantly ignored
by all the actors participating in the drama, just as substantial justice is
different from legal formalism. It is never equal to what it was, nor is it the
same every time it is repeated, not even to the cold letter of the law, which
needs warm bodies which can expiate their sins and serve as an example of
that which should not have happened, but which, however, did happen.
(The vivisected body) Norbert Elias has specified the decline of zoophagic
logic from the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the progressive
disappearance of the custom of cutting meat at the table. This supposed
evolution towards sarcophagic logic was related to the increasing division
and specialization of labour, converting the family into a simple unit of
consumption, but above all to the same process of increasing civilization
which pushed men to reject that which they sought in themselves as their
animal nature.
From that day to the present, animality has been ever less present in
our foods. The tendency to reify foodstuffs makes them more embellished,
decorated, reduced and unrecognizable.
Simultaneously, science, and in particular medicine, tend more and
more towards the de-menuization of the bodily organs as well as to the
infinitesimal analysis of their chemical and biogenetic components. (The
associate of this process of de-menuization is the transplant.)
The evolutionary plot is impious. The techno-economic logic and the
delicate division animal / human give way to a sarcophagic deanimalization
of meat and a vital dehumanization of our humanity.
(Hyperanthopomorphism and reification) Our links to the human are now

as paradoxical as those which we establish with animals. Both end up at the
same time ever more objectified and subjectified, for the frontier between
them has dissolved. This is expressed, on the one hand, in industrialized
stockbreeding, which reifies animals, and on the other, in industrial civi-
lization, which humanizes them, at the same time as science re-animalizes
man. In short, this conflictive and diffuse relation of hyperanthopomor-
phism and reification produces a lightweight but constant critique of the
consumption of meat and a certain kind of ambivalent naturist tendency.
However, the countryside no longer is what it was. It long ago lost
its bucolic and mythical imagery which presented it as natural and a part
of nature itself, as a kind of paradise lost: a thing of nature or physical
poetry which operates on our spirit and our soul and ultimately on our
body. The land has been converted into a giant testing laboratory for the
biotechnology companies which manage the driving energy of the social
field. The traditional systems of local knowledge dynamic, bipolar and
metaphorical become marginalized and are replaced by a scientific system
nomological, technical and quantitative. There is talk of ideal types
which propagate the creation of new genotypes which contain the greatest
number of desired qualities, in experimental systems which have as their
horizon a synthetic and abstract nature constricted by science, and which
despise or elude local agricultural practices.
The mechanisms of control over the human acquire a sophisticated
socio-technical dimension: I will tell you what you will eat and I will know
who you will be. And this is expressed perversely here in terms ofthe model
designated Solidarity Soya. By means of the system which delivers a given
number of tons of this pulse with the aim of feeding part of the starving
population, the concept of solidarity is redefined. It thus achieves a cul-
tural and alimentary imposition parallel to bio-technological dependency
and the denationalization of agricultural production. Capitalism is always
savage, although not necessarily natural.
Forage for the poor, but the little cows remain at arms length. The
increasing development of the sophisticated world of the gourmets sensibil-
ity, is based on a hedonism which is not amateur, but rather sensibly light
or diet-et(h)ical. In todays world the noble causes and private collections
have disappeared without fanfares. The ethical is slight, painless, tempo-

rary, punctual and appeals in the discursive as the flipside of the produc-
tive to reaffirm the idea of equality. Our societies, and in particular the
unequal Latin American societies, are unequal in their ethos, because they
are unequal in their facts.
(Gastro-anomie) There reigns a spirit of the modern table companion in

which the fundamental thing is to know what to eat and how much. All
foodstuffs, even the most economic, give information about their contents
in a periodic table of nutrition. The imaginary of the epoch, in conjunc-
tion with democratic ideology, depends on knowing how to choose. In
the same way as with the alimentary contents, politicians present a report
on their goods before they begin their administration as a guarantee of
transparency. Advertising appeals to the symptom of equilibrium as the
form or synonym of health. We eat, in essence, our social representations
of health. Just as food according to Simmel ties the exclusive egoisim
of eating to a frequency of being-together, a habit of being-united,1 the
unavoidable presence of calorific expenditure veils, nowadays, the constant
surplus value and the social reproduction of the working hand.
(Fast food) Among the most special characteristics of industrialized food

is the impossibility of finding out where it came from. Biotechnology and
genetics have replaced metaphysics and politics. The penal sanction replaces
dismemberment, and the prison the hangman. The ethereal enterprise
replaces the factory-body, merit replaces the salary. Permanent education
replaces the exam (teaching to the test), the products replace production.
The hamburger dehumanizes the beast.
(The fault of the tomato) The current marketing of the natural turns out
not to be the counterpart of technological development, but the subtle
transportation of artificial products. The distinction between nature and
society possesses its cultural whims since the highest representatives of the
Nazi regime were faithful exponents of the cult of the natural. Hitler was
1 See Georg Simmel, El individuo y la libertad.

a vegetarian and fought against smoking and alcohol, Hess and Himmler
cultivated a taste for homeopathy, the SS promoted the consumption of
mineral water and fruit juices amongst its members.
Nowadays the obsessive maniacs of health food and social hygiene
have already been typified ideally as ortorexicos.
Warhol and all his pop irony not only represented in anticipation,
as few others did, the end of the classic still life in painting and in the
world, by replacing vegetables, ducks and bottles of wine with coloured
and fluorescent hamburgers, Coca-Cola and tins of Campbells soup, but
also gave us an unequivocal and refined message. Is there anything more
cultural and contrary to nature than the tins of natural tomato which
colour our everyday sauces and populate the shelves of the supermarkets?
(Fast food) One of the most trumpeted virtues of so-called junk food is its
speed. Everything is judged in the fabulous present of the instantaneous and
aseptic act. There is neither a taste nor a sensibility which is unquestionable
in the present continuous. Except for the orgasm, hope is the only genuinely
human occupation. The delay in the work which has to be completed is a
refined form of remorse. The symbols are ever more complex: while bars
and restaurants compete naively with local fast food outlets, in the former,
the management reserve the right of admission, while the latter remain
tolerant, except for the aspect of movement and assembly. In doing so they
have taken over in their pious message of happiness, the minor art of dis-
couragement, the indiscriminate admission, independent of the vocation
of the consumer, and the use of the toilets as if it were a club. The happy
meal, contains all the happinesses, minus the hope.
(Victims) It is the time of the victims: a luxurious epoch in which every dead
body is the spokesperson of a culprit, whatever the cause, and in which it
is intended to enunciate an original accumulation of guilts and sins. All
are subject to suspicion, and because of their investiture, are already con-
demned in advance. The responsibility is unilateral, attributative, explicit,
and turns the living into spokespersons for the dead on the worst terms: we
hear over and over again the representatives of the victims adding the name
innocent. Well, isnt every victim innocent? As Snchez Ferlosio put it:
Not to compassion, but rather to the lack of compassion, responds the automatic
need to add innocent to the word victim, and to the same ideas responds the
tacit convention of accrediting as a merit of the victim the affront by which he has
been reduced to such a condition. In either case the expiatory mentality imposes
the deviant conception of compassion as credit. In the first case, in fact, innocence
only makes the victim creditor of compassion or, in other words, he has no debt
to expiate. In the second, the same conception is endorsed, for on validating so
spontaneously the harm suffered as a merit, the victims situation is recognized as
a positive balance, or the victim is recognized as creditor. Thus whoever vindicates
justice against compassion against this kind of compassion is not contrasting two
opposites, but rather restating in explicit terms the same underlying assumptions of
the idea of compassion as credit. Between compassion and justice, there will not be,
then, opposition, but rather, concomitance.2
Now this avenging and expiatory credit compassion is accompanied by

a mise en scne. It is an epoch of visibilities, of turning up and showing
oneself everywhere, of making oneself known without scruples and at
whatever cost. Private life has invaded public life. Faced with the advance
of technology, does there remain any chance for the spiritual life outside
of the inner life? There is no sorrowful silence; only the public stage seems
capable of redeeming pain.
In a society that tends to commercialize everything, and where the
means of mass communication carry out their function of homogenization,
Walsh lives again in the murder of Cabezas and the disappeared return to
life as the victims of Croman.3 Third World post-industrial capitalism
accomplishes their mission: it changes the victims and waits patiently to
claim the next ones.
(Nausea) The assimilation of foodstuffs or ideas reveals a mystical link

with things, for what is absorbed becomes the active part of consciousness.
Existentialism in general and Sartre in particular believed that philosophy
2 Snchez Ferlosio, Vendrn ms aos malos y nos harn ms ciegos, Barcelona: Ediciones
Destino, 1993.
3 Jos Luis Cabezas was an Argentinean photo-journalist who was assassinated in
1987; Repblica Cromaon was a disco in Buenos Aires which burned down in
2004, causing 194 deaths and 1,432 injuries.
swallowed reality, with which it avoided confrontation with its density and
assimilated it cognitively in a trivial and uniform manner. The protagonist
ofNausea contrasted the world of existence bland, viscous and sweet or in
other words unpleasant with the idea of consciousness clear, precise and
pure, or, to put it differently, pleasant. As things could not be dissolved in
consciousness, and the self was something external to it, this difference shed
light on the existential drama between the state ofbeing different from being
and the condition of not wanting to annul oneself in the being external to con-
sciousness: everything is full, existence everywhere, dense, heavy and sweet.
Foods offered by the fast food chains have the nauseating quality
bland and sweet (it is said that the secret of the success of this type of
food is that everything, even the salads, contains sugar) of the existence
experienced by Roquetin. Now, the obligatory question from the diligent
employees of these chains, when they propose making our portion bigger,
is: arent you going to invite our being to discover the essence of things,
taking refuge in something unreal and not returning to our consciousness?
(Consciousness) In agrarian societies, which are hierarchical and dogmatic,

the guarantees and the legitimation of inequality prevail. The inegalitar-
ian ambition of contemporary societies inherits the earth like a kind of
residual legatee and without transcendental reasons. Equality demands
fewer reasons than inequality and, as the reasons are scarce, this turns us
into unequals by omission or by default.
Sartre observed optimistically that in his epoch the working class was
disposed to embrace materialism because its experience of work had made
it feel the constraints that circumstances imposed, just as the middle class
tended to idealism because its working situation consisted principally in
the manipulation of words, ideas and people. The failure of materialism was
caused by the evolution of the world or work, for the direct management of
physical reality has diminished considerably and the representation, both
mediated and immediate, of events has converted social life as Goffman
pointed out into a game of idealistic representations. These are open to
an improvization limited by a double imperative, that of the assigned role
and that of the rite, which help us avoid violent confrontation resulting
from recognition.
(Euthanasia) Terry Schiavo has been deprived of food and water. She has
been abandoned to her free will in order to die due to the impossibility
of feeding herself. Almost as a paradox of fate, she ended up condemned
to die of hunger for having been the object of an irresponsible diet, which
didnt contemplate in its menu the lack of potassium. However we deal
with the theme, it presents its melodramatic side, for her incapacitated
image, repeated to the point of surfeit by the media, more than the fierce
political discussions, fades away like her life, when the law, the unwavering
defender of a certain type of order, privileged the rationality of the deci-
sions in terms of the costs to the health system.
(From first-hand experience) There are few powers as tyrannical as that of

personal experience, for it is inflamed with a unique and irreducible privi-
lege. To have lived something first-hand seems to be the most irrefutable
condition with respect to an event, regardless of the solutions proposed
to resolve it. Speeches like these ought to sharpen the attention, for they
come to us with an unshakeable degree of empathy, which transforms them
into a polemic whose word, become flesh, ardently proclaims a repressive
ideological condition and an impoverished ethic of the self.
(Cookery and knowledge) Eating makes us other or what we are, for any
incorporation of food creates an identity, both biochemical and imagi-
nary. The rib of Old Adam from which we are made does not distinguish
us from the divine breath which animates us. Food for the body and the
spirit, as an indissoluble psychophysical unity, is the old dualism in which
the body is at first the container and, in modern times, an obstacle to the
activities of the soul. Man feeds himself from flesh, converses with God,
has bodily secretions, experiences humiliation, touches the heavens with his
hands, fills himself with glory, sees his cells degenerate, and knows that he
will have lived and died without really understanding the meaning of this
end. Matter and idea. We are also what we know, although knowledge is
founded on the ability to generalize or give form to reality and to recom-
pose it in its unity. Now, to break down the totality into the manifold in
order to arrive at the unity, isnt this like cooking?
(Lipophobia) If there is a general tendency in the global plane, it is contempt

for obesity or weight. Many critical studies believe that this phenomenon,
stereotyped as the war against fat, has been driven by North American
insurance companies through the diffusion of life insurance policies, and
question statistically the risk of death associated with this type of bad.
Everything in capitalism supposes an exhaustive domain of statistics, in
which a higher number of deaths in contrast to war, which beyond the
values in play, always makes the economy go round signifies lower revenue.
(Argentine lipophobia) In our country the cult of slimness has acquired

a boost from industry. The grasas had already been condemned because
Evita adored them; they were the deposits of energy which compensated
for the losses and stored the surplus when there was an excessive intake of
nutrients. Grasitas, adipose tissue, the great Argentinean political energy
understood as the great reservoir (the protector of the social body) and
exponent of zoological alluvium.4 The body regulates the social universe
in a longitude of hope. Perhaps in our country lipophobia is the highest
representation of gorilismo?5
(The Last Supper or the closing scene)6 Various fundamental features of

the fabulous internationalism of these times become exhibited in adver-
tising campaigns. No less lascivious is the advance of right-wing puritan-
ism stimulated by the inventiveness of the culture industry. Imagology
allows us today to present Leonardos Last Supper as if it dealt with a group
of women dressed up in clothes made by one of the most well-known
French brands. From a Milan convent to the public stage of a first world
metropolis, on the basis of which certain associations have expressed their
repudiation of the denigration of Christian values. Faced with this, the
clothing companys defence has pleaded that the same has not happened
4 Translators note: The term used by critics of Peronsism to describe Peronism.

5 Translators note: Gorilismo: The name given by the Peronists to the right-wing
anti-Peronists.
6 Translators note: The Castellano is an untranslatable play on words, La ltima es-cena,
which combines in one word the idea of escena (scene) with that of cena (supper).
to the bestseller The Da Vinci Code, which distorted the official version
to depict a church that conceals that Christ was a man who married Mary
Magdalene. The offended puritans and believers responded that the pub-
licity featured lascivious and suggestive women and presented erotic
and blasphemous behaviours against something which constituted the
essence for the Christians.
The world has become a struggle depersonalized by the power of the
image. The word has suffered the same devaluation as the values, and the
visual media in the absence of literary legitimation are the most impor-
tant immediate (if not prospective) space of public meaning. Advertising
achieves its aim of being on the stage and on everyones lips, making it an
ecumenical banquet. Not for nothing did the open companionship of the
table, by contrast with the Roman feast, acquire a unique meaning with
Christianity. Just as anyone can sit at the table of a Christian, all are privi-
leged witnesses of advertising. Modern societies are based on the myth of
the transition to equality and the table is a good advertising precedent.
However the kingdom of God remains in the heart of Jesus, in the same
way in which the blessed bread the promise of objective love makes
its way peacefully to the stomachs of every believer. There is no true com-
munion, but only individual salvation.
On the other hand, fashion, the object of discussion, has its cycles.
North American ethnologists proved some time ago that the rhythm of
change of fashion is not only profoundly regular the amplitude increases
for half a century and the complete oscillation lasts a century but tends to
change its forms according to a rational order. This shows that it is another
of the ordered phenomenon of the epoch. Thus the true innovation of so-
called avant-garde clothing dose not depend on the creation but on the
message Benetton, in this sense, turns out to be the best antecedent as
well as on the imaginary heaven stimulated by advertising campaigns. In
fact the models of Marith & Franois Girbaud do not show off the cloth-
ing in their last supper, but rather an idea. They state a concept, provoke
a debate, encourage the reactions of the conservatives and include their
products in the news sections in the newspapers. To be blasphemous has
its returns, and I am sure that enough will be obtained in this world and
not necessarily in the other.
(I know what you want to be) In the absence of truly human satisfactions
produced by the privilege of the privatized and depoliticized, man has
returned to narcissistic pleasures, whether individual or collective, such
as sport or food. The table and the playing field transmit the emotional
economy, correlative to a pacification of the social world which displaces
to the inner world of the individual the regulation of tensions, and the
censoring of the affections and of aggressive impulses. The advertising
agents have understood this before anyone else and they resort to certain
fascist slogans which propagate self-satisfaction or masturbation: Just
do it! or Eat me slowly! Both invitations express a longing for a kind
of ritual courtesy which appeals to personal pleasures and which exempts
us from responsibility or at least holds it in doubt by privileging vanity
without any moral objectivity.
The mass media and their commercial breaks exacerbate narcissism
just as much as the egalitarian passions with the aim of distinction and trap
the converts as much as the lost ones. And thus they transmit one of the
fundamental presuppositions of the modern future which since romanti-
cism has blinded humanity: prioritizing the person over their ideas.
(Reified flesh) Among all the bodily secretions there is one which does
not constitute the object of a taboo and which rarely arouses disgust: the
tears. It is also the only one exclusively human, the one which does not
remind us what we have in common with the animals. We are very simi-
lar to the mammals; our frontier with them is diffuse in that like us they
copulate, procreate, have excretions, have blood, and die. It is as common to
mythologize them or anthropomorphize them, as to zoomorphize ourselves
in accordance with our appearance, our virtues or our defects. An obese
woman is a cow, someone who is distinguished by his sexual capacities
is a bull, a slow person is a tortoise, an easy woman is assimilated to
the insatiability of the chickens, someone without character is a lamb
and with character is a lion.
Eating meat is a part of this continuity which we tend to establish, and
paradoxically, this act makes it possible to establish a certain discontinuity
and distinction between humanity and animality. Whoever fails to carry
out actions worthy of a human being is classified as an animal. On the
other hand, there is also a tendency to conceal the characteristics which

arent present in the animals: to think of flesh as being inanimate and still
not to eat part of a body, that is to say, to deify the flesh.
(The papal body) Without room for doubt the death of John Paul II will
be recorded as one of the events of the twenty-first century. No one on
earth or in the heavens seems capable of celebrating a funeral mass as daz-
zlingly and appealingly the one celebrated after the death of this pope. It
is credible because it is incredible, in the same way as we grasp that the son
of God has died. And it deals with nothing less than the Church, that is to
say an institution charged with watching over souls and which possesses
the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of the benefits of salvation.
The great religions said the clear-thinking Catholic G.K. Chesterton
are distinguished from superstitions by their robust materialism.
The flesh is one thing and the body is another, quite different. The
fragility of the body with all the biblical charge which this idea supposes
can do little against its own weakness and its own death. However, its
density offers resources: the body becomes a fetish in which the man who
is embodied is practically omitted. The body is purely negative evidence,
since it is very difficult to penetrate it and it constitutes itself socially. Dont
speak of the papal body.
An exposed body, emptied of its entrails and its heart, embalmed,
as rigid as its doctrine, eternalized by the vertigo of the cameras and the
shouts of the faithful demanding its canonization.
The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain

place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing
and the product.7
A travelling body which rests suddenly and ad eternum, exposed in this

ecclesiastical parsimony which supervises the spectacle and accommodates
its spectators according to the hierarchies of power.
7 Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983, p.31.
Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it
is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a
true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the move-
ment that is produced on the recording surface. Capital is indeed the body without
organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only
the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money
the form whereby money produces money.8
We make mention of an institution which hides the most sacred mystery

of such an anti-natural and historically constituted division between the
soul and the body. The Church, a social enterprise, lives from economic
considerations in exchange for spiritual service. It exchanges income-work-
matter for word-spirit-promises.
The homily and vigil of the pope, which in principle are supposed to be
subject to ancestral customs, reveal a particular conjuncture of impersonal
power in these times. That is to say that its bourgeois clientele, the sellers
of symbolic services, has already been practicing for some time ascribing to
the bodily order what is supposed to belong to the spiritual in its powers
of showing the body as a way of referring to the soul.
The Church promotes the embalming of the papal body and in
this way preserves its flesh, despite this being one of the three enemies,
according to the Christian catechism, which inclines men to sensuality
and lasciviousness.
Nietzsche said that the stomach, the instigator and plaintiff of pains,
is what impedes man from feeling himself to be God. Food has its own
journey, and circulates between cavities, transformed from nourishment
into excrement. We are gastropods, bestowing privilege to the internal but
not necessarily to the intimate. We are beings with entrails and without
vital space. Bad digestion makes us human.
The heart is the most noble organ for it carries with itself the image of
a secret, dark and mysterious space, which sometimes is opened. John Paul
IIs was claimed by the Poles. Where did his stomach end up?
8 Ibid., p.33.
Barthes: From the Semiology of Wine to the
Empireof the Senses
The excess of criticism with respect to wine and gastronomy turns con-
temporary commentators into fashion mandarins, and consumers into
the bulimics of the words and their tendencies. The world of secondary
discourse, which some people call taste, hasnt taken note of the vertigo
of the senses; it only possesses that of the pocket. It takes the place of
profound thought about the uses and customs of the culinary culture and
wine-production of the peoples. It is here that modesty should at least
be an ally, since a great majority have forbidden the business gourmet and
his sybaritic rites not only reflection on him, but above all the means
of support.
Regardless of the true evolution of modern thought and of the contem-
porary devaluation of the use, abuse and ethics of language, gastronomic
journalists repeat aesthetic axioms without realizing that they are dealing
with products of a linguistic nature which pertain to economic modes and
transactions. The fetishism of communication has taken the place of the
fetishism of merchandise.
The world of wine, with its elegant language and scenography, is an
emblematic case of the obsession with sense and the consequent idealiza-
tion of the object in question. This is made worse when the linguistic signs
are referred to as social.
No transaction of meaning in the field of discourse sweet wine,
for example is ever neutral. Thus experience is objectified, assigning it an
unequivocal and general value, leaving to one side the multiple possibili-
ties of the senses.1 Wine as raw material is returned to us manufactured by
1 When I speak of perception, I speak primarily of the wine of Bordeaux that I sense.
I have written Les cinq sens in order to protest against this reduction of sensation to
language which makes philosophy a cadaver. When I drink a good Bordeaux wine I
44 Barthes: From the Semiology of Wine to the Empire of the Senses
the critic. In the same way as the link between capital and work functions,
the signifier tends to create a structured market and naturalizes itself as
something signified.
Objectivizing the senses and subjectivizing things tends to produce a
loss of meaningful tension: everything is mechanized and acquires a rigor
mortis. Now, this indifferentiation can be understood as a synthesis of the
rupture between sense and reference. It is because of this that Hegelian
idealism rescues the ideology of virtue when the law abandons its univer-
sality, the individual his particularity and both their opposition. It aspires
to advertising, which in its controlled messages creates ideals reuniting
the ambiguous and conceptual character of the sense, with the aim of
promoting its referent.
What does the distinction or magic of a wine really mean? It aspires
to crystallize a sense or conceptualize a referent. The advertising sign, like
a youthful dream, reduces the multiplicity of the sense of an object and
returns it to us idealized as a slogan with unequivocal value. In advertising
it is not a question of highlighting the virtues of a product, but, pending a
material pretext, of establishing ideals, aspirations and feelings.
There exists today a new world of expression, linked profoundly with
the field of consumption. This is an extension and mutation of the market,
in which wine serves as a prototypical example, and it unleashes its crea-
tive impulses and turns luxury or the production of material elegance (a
category not recognized by classical aesthetics) into an unclassifiable aes-
thetic. Perhaps it forms a part of post auratic art or of art as a commod-
ity, whose refinement in such a social ceremony not only demands that
it be saleable, but assumes it. From a certain critical point of view, luxury
might be vulgarity,2 but one thing is beyond doubt:
do not drink words. From 1900 or 1930 the world has disappeared from philosophy.
Serres, Michel, Sobre el contrato natural. Entrevista a Michel Serres, in Archipilago:
Cuadernos de crtica de la cultura 15 (1993), p.42. For the development of these ideas,
see: Serres, Michel, Les cinq sens, Paris: Grasset, 1985.
2 Although it could be said that for classical aesthetics, material elegance is neither
a category of the beautiful nor the exoticism of the ugly proposed by the new
aesthetic perspective of rock. An Argentinean group, symbolic of this music, whose
Barthes: From the Semiology of Wine to the Empire of the Senses 45
the field ofthe arts is incalculable and the number ofthose who cultivate it is uncount-
able. The commercial artist, the product designer, the producer of magazines who
is called the art director, the hair stylist, the manufacturer of Haute Couture, the
decorator who arranges the shop windows of Cartier, Herms or Gucci all of them
take advantage of the lucrative confusion of the boundaries between the liberal
and the applied arts which permits the stars of the vanguard to sketch the label of
Mouton Rothschild.3
According to Roland Barthes, myth is a language or in other words

it is not an object but rather a system of communication or a message:
Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this
message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no substantial ones. Everything,
then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in sug-
gestions. Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral
state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not,
which forbids talking about things.4
Thus Barthes partly justified his study of the semiology of everyday life
the catch, the striptease, the Citron DS or wine which made everything
verbal or visual a text capable of being significant.
Barthes postulated that the French nation felt that wine was something
specifically French. It was like a totem drink which supported a varied
mythology which was not bothered by contradictions. Its condition is to
transmute, convert, alchemicalize, create ex nihilo. However,
name refers to the little round pieces of curds, the dried residues of milk left over
after cheese has been made, shout in one of their songs: luxury is vulgarity, s/he said
and conquered me. They place these unpublished aesthetic circumstances before a
totally new classificatory instance. Any art is in the last instance demoralizing, since
it does not propose to seduce or fascinate with opulence, but to shake with the moral
institution of its art. This is so much the case and the current situation is so confused
that this rock bands verse had already been stated by a character imbued with the
Bacchic atmosphere of a classic national story: What profusion, what lust. In all
this lust palpitates an intimate. breath of vulgarity. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo, Clave
para un amor, Historia prodigiosa (1991), pp.5152.
3 Gruenter, Rainer, Sobre la miseria de lo bello, Barcelona: Gedisa, 1992, p.155.
4 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, New York: The Noonday Press, 1972, p.107.
46 Barthes: From the Semiology of Wine to the Empire of the Senses
wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also
for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily
life, from the snack (plonk and camembert) to the feast, from the conversation at
the local caf to the speech at a formal dinner.5
In this way the mythology of wine contributes to the understanding the

ambiguities of daily life, for
it is true that wine is a good and fine substance, but it is no less true that its produc-
tion is deeply involved in French capitalism [] There are thus very engaging myths
which are however not innocent.6
Thus wine could be vanilla-ed, orange-blossomed, round, balanced,

corporeal, purplish, peppery, caramelized; it could provide us with dis-
tinction, magic, lineage, wisdom, culture; it could be the consequence of
coupage, land, assamblage, or of the chaussepied or charmat methods. But
for Barthes the essential characteristic of our current alienation is that wine
cannot be an entirely happy substance, unless it is forgotten that it is the
result of expropriation. Because they are isolated from the circumstances
which gave them birth, the broad daily concurrence of modern myths,
including that of wine, disclose an ideological abuse which they hide.
Modern mythology tries to make things unequivocal instruments of
communication. In this way, Barthes aim, more symptomatic than analytic,
of bestowing the rules of language on the set of symptoms of bourgeois
or commercial myths was imprisoned by the same mythology which he
wanted to denounce. The semiological studies of social reality are a reflex
of an empire of the senses.
In short, to acquire any product whatsoever, grants us access to an
ideal because consumption and advertising are the genuine idealist activi-
ties of the present.
This is something which the materialist critics havent been able to
grasp in its entirety.
5 Ibid., p.60.
6 Ibid., p.61.
Part 2
Taste, Modernity and Centre I

Bordeaux: The Human Condition as Purple Venality
The mythology of wine can in fact help us to understand the usual ambiguity
of our daily life. For it is true that wine is a good and fine substance, but it is no
less true that its production is deeply involved in French capitalism, whether it
is that of the private distillers or that of the big settlers in Algeria who impose
on the Muslims, on the very land of which they have been dispossessed, a crop
of which they have no need, while they lack even bread. There are thus very
engaging myths which are however not innocent. And the characteristic of
our current alienation is precisely that wine cannot be an unalloyedly bliss-
ful substance, except if we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an
expropriation.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Montaigne: The Botrytis and Chteau dYquem
Biographies are always suspicious, because lives always exceed the defini-
tions with which, in a handful of words, they try to capture them. However,
there is something which irrevocably characterizes the figure of Michel
de Montaigne (15331592): no author has ever read the classics so obses-
sively and no other author has been quoted so often by the moderns. It is
no accident that Sainte-Beuve, the only perennial critic in literature, has
suggested that he was the wisest of all the French.
In general, when we talk of Montaigne it is impossible to avoid sketch-
ing his life, for he is an absolutely fundamental author in the history of
French literature. He is important because he created a new space for writ-
ing which transcends the idea of writing as a purely intellectual activity and
converts it into an existential activity of the self. The essay and the autobi-
ography acquire a typical and independent character from the beginning
of the sixteenth century, as a response on the part of so-called renaissance
humanism to the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages in which the
teachings of Aristotle are combined with the religious doctrines. Man no
longer projects himself towards a divinity nor searches for his essence in
God, but is rather centred on himself and bestows on himself the basis of
his existence and reason. This is no minor change, but combined with the
liberation from the teleological yoke, it inaugurates the modern concep-
tion of the man whose existence is unique and independent. This cult of
the ego is an unquestionable future consequence of the naturalistic medi-
eval philosophy, conjoined with certain aspects of protestant ideology
and the creation of a literary space with philosophical aspirations. Since
Montaigne, we have called this literary form the essay. In it the person who
writes becomes the most important part of the discourse.
If it is a question of subjectivizing, we must not diminish the impor-
tance to the French authors biography of his complete name: Michel
Eyquem de Montaigne. Do the names make the people who bear them or
50 Montaigne: The Botrytis and Chteau dYquem
the persons make the names that they bear? In this case it is difficult to
decide.1 It originates from the family Eyquem or Yquem, whose lands pro-
duce one of the most mythologized wines in the world, Chteau dYquem.
Tell me who you are and I will tell you what you drink; tell me what you
drink and I will tell you who you are. The wine, life and thought of Bordeaux
become mingled. They all possess in advance the quality of durability, le
dur dsir de durer.2
It is difficult to speak of a system in the work of Montaigne, because
his thought isnt based on the strength of his convictions what do I
know? but rather on the author as their centre. We will, however, try
to see how the itinerant and experimental character of his discourse has
been formed.
At first, and influenced by his friend, tienne de la Boeti, from whom
he learns austerity and severity, he seems to adopt the doctrine of the stoics:
The world is nothing but variety and dissemblance; the vices are all alike,
1 Martnez Estrada offers a suggestive explanation of the family sage: As regards his
mother, he was her spitting image, her continuation. Maybe there was in him much
more of her than of his father and possibly this taste for solitude, this solitude of
the spirit (the seventh solitude of Nietzsche), this lack of confidence, this obsession
with analysing, with not letting himself be tricked by rhinestones, came to him from
those Lpez de Toledo and the need to go to Portugal, where he modified himself
in Louppes: of an obligatory conversion in France, in which the child lost all value
commitment and fear. In the end, the child overcame his existence in his Essays as
in his name he overcame his paternal surname: Eyquem. He erased that name from
the root: he preferred the toponymic of his castle to his patronymic which the lucky
merchants used: the stone to the blood. See Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Estudio
preliminar, in Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, Ensayos, Mexico: W.M. Jackson, 1963,
vol. XIII, pp.xviiixix.
2 From the white Yquem de Montaigne to the red ofBordeaux that Antoine Roquentin
observed his neighbours drinking in the novel which contrasts the world ofthe clear
conscience with the unhappy existence. The husband eats a fine rib of underdone
beef. He looks at it closely and smells it from time to time. The wife picks at her
plate. A heavy blonde woman of forty with red, downy cheeks. She has fine, hard
breasts under her satin blouse. Like a man she polishes off a bottle of Bordeaux at
every meal. Sartre, Nausea, p.47.
in that they are all vices, and the question is understood in this way by the
Stoics.3
Then he begins to distance himself from the austere Stoical doctrine
and, engrossed in the reading of Plutarch, his writing acquires an ever
greater independence when he concludes that man cannot accede to the
truth, because science and wisdom are exclusive to God. In this way he pre-
figures the anti-rational argument of Pascal, although he extracts positive
conclusions from this scepticism. Thus, the only possible science is personal
and his writings enter into a more intimate vision. Montaigne wants to
discover in man in other words, in himself his originality, diversity, and
infinite nature. He does not believe in the moral, intellectual or spiritual
perfectibility of the entire human condition. On the basis of this change
of vision he concludes that not all the vices are the same.
In this sense intoxication seems to him coarse and brutal for in it eve-
rything is bodily and worldly. Although all excesses alter the understand-
ing, intoxication defeats it and dulls the body. Here his erudite support
is Lucretius: When man is overcome by the strength of wine, his limbs
lose their agility; he walks uncertainly, his steps are insecure, he becomes
tongue twisted, his soul seems suffocated and his eyes lost. The drunken
man belches impurely and stutters insults.4 On the basis of this quote,
which brings together a whole load of truths, it is hard to dispute that a
drunk man generally stammers insults without distinguishing their degree
of truth or falsehood. But what we can indeed concern ourselves with is
the reference to the impure belching. Is there perhaps anyone living in this
world who can let them out independently of their condition of alcohol
poisoning with singular purity?
3 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, De la embriaguez, in Ensayos, Buenos Aires: Aguilar,

1962, Vol. I, p.334 (De lyvrongnerie in Les Essais, Paris: Jean Gillequin, 1914, Vol.
II, p.154).
4 [] hominem cuum vini vis penetravit / Consequitur gravitas membrorum,
praepediuntur / Crura vacillanti, tardescit lingua, madet mens, / Nant oculi; clamor,
singultus, jurgia, gliscunt. See Lucrce, uvres Compltes, Pars: Garnier Frres,
1865, p.136.
Beyond this digression, although he is worried by any condition in

which man is incapable of governing himself, Montaigne admits that exces-
sive drinking as Horace notes in one of his odes5 is the revealer of
profound secrets. In this it is like the must which, when boiled in a barrel,
brings to the surface everything which was at the bottom. Montaigne is
aware, from the huge collection of references he makes, that, apart from
the disorders which wine can cause, intoxication wasnt condemned in
ancient times. Even the stoics, with their pure discipline, recommend the
practice of intoxication with the aim of intensifying virtue. The references
are unlimited; his conclusions succinct and ambiguous:
My taste and constitution are greater enemies to this vice than my discourse; for
besides that I easily submit my belief to the authority of ancient opinions, it seems
to me indeed a cowardly and stupid vice, but less malicious and hurtful than the
others, almost all of which shock public society more directly.6
The quality of the wine is another question. Thus, because the lives of
men cannot be adjusted to the corset of the biographies, neither can the
characteristics of a wine be reduced to any symbolism, however generous
this may be. Perhaps it is possible to make a basic and pertinent distinc-
tion between good and bad brews, and to be prepared for those dissimilar
states. Intoxication doesnt make any subtle distinctions:
[] for delicacy and the careful selection of wines is therein to be avoided. If you
found your sensual pleasure on drinking the most delicate, you condemn yourself
to the pain of drinking the worst.7
Montaigne bases himself on a generous body of references and makes

profound categorizations of countries and their beverages. Thus he distin-
guishes, for example, the Germans, who swallow wine rather than savour
5 Of prudent men, who guard / their cares in the breast, / find your happy liquid /
which they enjoy in recounting, / and the most secret design / is made clear by your
light. See Horace, A su nfora, in Odas, Buenos Aires: Austral, 1947, pp.146147.
6 Montaigne, De lyvrongnerie, p.157.
7 Ibid.
it, from the French, who adapt it to the care of the health by restricting
the favours of the god Bacchus, etc. Beyond this his conclusions are obvi-
ous in context of his personality. Nothing holds Montaigne back. He is as
free inside his work as he is in the library in which he finds refuge, and it
is in this sense that he invites us to give more time to drinking in order to
reserve for ourselves the pleasure which we can find in the course of our
lives. The conclusion is clear: get drunk whenever you can. The transcrip-
tion is really mundane: not to reject any chance to get drunk and to keep
constantly alive in the imagination the desire to do so. To a large extent the
origin determines human thought in the same way as it does the quality
of the wines. Montaignes thought has become mythical because to a large
extent everything in his Essays prefigures modern idealism. Leaving on one
side the usual references in terms of his influence, it has been pointed out
that in his writings is expressed the rigorous structure of Joyces Ulysses,
for the ruminations and the life flow in them as the protagonist feels them
and not as they are ordered by the storyteller. And the wine which emerges
from the earth and which he saw being born has also become mythical.
This is not to anticipate anything, but to be a unique being and reclaim
the sickness of the vine as one of the forms of health for man. When we
are born we begin to die, we are already dying, the French author urges us.
The myth of Chteau dYquem is founded on the idea of a harvest done
by hand, grain by grain. The grapes must be affected by the botrytis cinerea
fungus, a disease called the Noble Rot, which develops on the grapes in
autumn, and not until every one of them is affected to the chosen point
are they harvested. Wait too long and the grey corruption could ruin the
whole crop. Moreover, each grape rots in the air and for this reason the
harvesting has to be done day by day, passing time and time again over
thesame vine, picking only those berries which have been attacked and
carrying them rapidly to be pressed immediately, which even in the case
of excessive humidity has to be done by crioextraction. All this care gives
as a result an increased concentration of sugars, as well as unique aromas.
The history of the name of this wine is related to Thomas Jefferson, who,
during his time working as the United States ambassador to France, before
becoming president, bought the harvest of 1784. In those days it was unusual
to bottle wines. Jefferson made a selection of those which he liked most
and asked that they be put in bottles printed with his initials, as well as
with the year and the name of the owner, Yquem. The brother of the Tsar
of Russia did the same a little later and it is said that Napoleon himself
bought part of the harvest of 1802.
We have, perhaps, digressed excessively by way of vaguely impression-
istic quotes. In the end, the method which Montaigne provides us with
pursues the same ends as those fruits which the earth gives us of which he
is a native. To appeal to the particular in order to elucidate the universality
of the being which wants to understand us and to live well; what better idea
than to take his Essays, open them by chance at whichever of his revelatory
pages, while enjoying foie gras from Strasburg and trying to release the six
perfumes of the pat in the unbeatable company of Chteau dYquem,
gilded, profound, the offspring of a strong root.
Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Diet-et(h)ics1 and the
Truthful Wine of Bordeaux
What kind of truth does wine hold? Judging by the insistent axiomatic
ordering of the sensations that the contemporary oenologists and critics
carry out, tasting a wine could resemble a propaedeutic which tends ide-
ally to the state of absolute knowledge and not to self-referential existential
experience. However, there is nothing more tautological than taste, beyond
the unquestionable power of appreciation which tends to homogenize it
with subordinated referential claims by attempting to awaken in the neo-
phytes ideas and sentiments which they themselves had not lived,
In vino veritas, stated Pliny the Elder,2 only to clarify that the idea came
from the masses (vulgoque veritas iam attributa vino est). Kierkegaard took
up the idea again in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the form of
a suggestive and provocative dialogue which enables him to suggest, as
in many of his anguished reflections, that vitalism must not lose itself in
thought. Contrary to Hegel, moreover, he exalts the principle of subjec-
tivity. We participate in the representation of a modern banquet, whose
contrasted referential horizon the platonic erotic symposium requires
that the discourses take place accompanied by wine, abundant food and, in
the background, the dance from Mozarts Don Giovanni. Every sumptuous
encounter refers to a menu, a philosophical diet-et(h)ics which exhibits
itself symbolically in its philosophical leftovers. An intense image comes
from the gospels: the pups also eat the crumbs which fall from their mas-
ters tables (Matthew 15:27), or is recycled by a study of subjectivity and
1 Translators note: The word in Castellano is diet-etica which is a play on dietetica and
etica or in English, dietetics and ethics. The sense in English combines the sense of
dietetics and dietary ethics.
2 Plinio el Viejo, Historia natural, Madrid: Gredos, 1998, Vol. XIV, p.141.
56 Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Diet-et(h)ics
the historical-social with respect to the relationship between creator and

pubic in the field of art:
It is enough to affirm that with the triumph of the capitalist bourgeoisie after the
nineteenth century, a new situation appears. At the same time that the cultural
indifferentiation of the society is formally declared, a complete separation or divi-
sion is established between a cultivated public at whom is directed the wise art
and a people which, in the cities, is reduced to feeding itself from crumbs which
have fallen from the cultural table of the bourgeoisie [].3
Kierkegaard had already affirmed that although the essence of the

individual is temporary, his existence is conditioned by a vehement desire
for eternity. Because of this he thinks that the aesthetic attitude to life,
which locates our soul in the unmediated erotic (an idea highly typical of
the romantic conscience), ought to be superseded by the ethical conscious-
ness, the eternal breath in the midst of solitude.
Now, all regimes of thought ought to be sober and well balanced.
Aristotle had already recommended walking, thinking and exercising tem-
perance. The discourse was assimilated by the peripatetic to a mass which
ought to tend towards the just mean.4 And Kierkegaard also found in food
a plausible field for expressing thought: neither get drunk nor sin with
the sweet tooth, abstain ethically in order to enjoy the eternal breeze and
divine enjoyment so as to invigorate the heart. The tradition is different
in subject matter, and the Dane knows this, for while the Greeks propose
to dominate the appetites through moderation in order to gain health,
Christianity invites us to the feast. Moderation in food alludes to discretion
in thought, for the times have produced an indigestion of knowledge
which has separated man from the significance of his existence and from
his own inner life.
When a mans mouth is so full of food that it prevents him from eating in any manner
whatsoever so that in the end he will die of hunger, how shall we make him eat? by
3 Castoriadis, Cornelius, Transformacin social y creacin cultural, Revista Letra

Internacional 8788 (Winter 1979), p.15.
4 Aristotle, El arte de la retrica, Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1979, p.418.
Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Diet-et(h)ics 57
filling his mouth still more or removing some of the food? In the same way, when
a man knows much, when his wisdom does not have any importance for him, or
is as if it had no importance for him, which is the most reasonable? to procure
still more knowledge for him, although he begs in a loud voice, or take from him
something else instead?5
Memory, reminiscence are constant topics for those who have reflected
on the joy of feeding oneself. According to Brillat-Savarin, on the individual
level, taste, linked with the passing of time, is transformed into a story
which speaks to us of fragrances and aromas constituted as memories. A
countrys cuisine, according to the countess of Pardo Bazn, constitutes
an ethnographic repertoire of extraordinary interest.
Kierkegaardian diet-et(h)ics are also inscribed in the accumulation
of memories. Neither excess nor frugality; neither eternal memory nor
bread and water, but an alimentary organization which prescribes a vital
minimum of forgetting in order to resist life. At this point the truth can
be found that wine is offered in any symposium, because given that the
discourses depend on the theme, they ought to be made and pronounced with wine,
in the same way that whatever truth proclaimed in them could not be different
from what resides in wine, for wine is the defence of the truth, just as truth is the
justification of wine.6
St Augustine had already made a distinction according to which being

without appetite manages to remind us of having desired:
[] how is it, that when I remember my past sorrow, the mind hath joy, the memory
hath sorrow; the mind upon the joyfulness which is in it, is joyful, yet the memory
upon the sadness which is in it, is not sad? Does the memory perchance not belong to
the mind? Who will say so? The memory then is, as it were, the belly of the mind, and
joy and sadness, like sweet and bitter food; which, when committed to the memory,
are, as it were, passed into the belly, where they may be stowed, but cannot taste.7
5 Kierkegaard, Sren, Forord (1844), quoted by Rigotti, Francesca, in Filosofa en la

cocina, Barcelona: Herder, 2001, pp.8283.
6 Kierkegaard, Sren, In vino veritas, Madrid: Guadarrama, 1976, p.32.
7 Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine: Revised from a Former Translation by
the Rev. E.B. Pudsey, Oxford, 1853, pp.193194.
Like food, wine is for Kierkegaard an element which enables him to

distinguish the faculty of memory from the indifferent reminiscence and
thus to study profoundly the degree of maturity achieved by a personality.
The former is the synonym of ideality which entails the responsibility of
maintaining the eternal in the life of man; the latter is incapable of evok-
ing, mimicking, it is hectic and dispersed.
Reminiscence does not only have to be faithful, but also happy. It is like the good
wine, which on being bottled has to conserve the aroma of what it really was. And
in the same way that the grape cannot be pressed at just any time of the year, because
the climatological conditions of particular periods have a decisive influence on the
quality of the wines, thus neither does that which has really been lived tolerate being
remembered at just any time or in any circumstance.8
St Augustine thought that the events that are confided to the memory
are like food, which on being digested loses its memory or flavour to the
point of evoking sensations opposite to the original ones. Kierkegaard, by
contrast, evokes by means of wine, which makes things more substantial
and tasty because it disappears in water, how the feelings of reminiscence,
when distilled, are concentrated, and certainly become more intense:
And in the same way that the fortified wine gains in quality on being decanted, because
the particles of water that it contains evaporate, thus also reminiscence gains much
by eliminating the particles of water of the memory, without which it is converted
into something chimerical, not very much less, as does the fortified wine.9
The age of a wine could come to resemble the stages of the lives of men:
[] age, as is well known, has lost its memory, which is in general the first faculty that
is lost. However, age always preserves a certain wealth of poetry and, according to
all its popular representations, possesses some gifts of prophesy and a special divine
inspiration. [] Infancy, by contrast, has a stupendous memory and an astonishing
ability to retain but neither is capable of evocation, of true reminiscence.10
8 Kierkegaard, In vino veritas, pp.78.

9 Ibid., p.24.
10 Ibid., p.8.
The reminiscence thus becomes intoxicating and the silence could be

reminiscence in extremis, even more so than the glass which we raise to
our lips in a compulsive manner:
Does there exist anything that makes you as drunk as silence? I believe not, because
for all the speed with which the drinker brings the cup to this mouth, his drunken-
ness will not increase as rapidly as silence will, which increases by the second. And
whatever the intoxicating liquor contained in the glass that he raises to his lips, it
will not be more than a miserable drop compared with the infinite ocean of silence
which is my drink. What is all the fervour of wine but a miserable fable in relation
to this knowledge of silence which is in an ever stronger state of agitation? And, on
the other hand, what is more fleeting than this drunken stupor of silence? One sole
word and everything is over! And what feeling can be more disagreeable than the
one which is experienced when one is torn brusquely out of ones delicious silence?
It is much worse than what the drunkard experiences on rising on the following
day, because in the silence speech and the taste for the sounds of the human voice
have somehow been lost, and a murmur is felt like that of the stammerer obliged to
speak or a trembling like that of a surprised woman, who in that instant finds herself
completely unable to deceive with the usual resources of the language.11
Silence is the ineluctable protagonist of the three-day pilgrimage which

Abraham carried out with his son Isaac to Mount Moriah.12 Words harass
Alexander, the protagonist of Sacrificio, the final film of Andrei Tarkovsky,
who pursues silence in order to be able to act. Why is language rich enough
to express the desires and, by contrast, so poor and limited when it tries to
describe realities? the Dane asks himself.13
There are five participants in the Kierkegaardian banquet John
The Seducer (ruin), Vctor Eremita (sympathetic irony), Constantino
Constantius (rational hardening), The Young Man (intellectual melan-
choly) and The Dealer in Fashions (demonical desperation). This is an
adequate number which is no greater than that of the muses nor less than
that of the graces. However, the sixth guest, William Afham, a silent par-
ticipant for the rest of the protagonists but not for the reader, and unlike
11 Ibid., pp.2122.
12 See Kierkegaard, Sren, Temor y temblor, Buenos Aires: Losada, 1990.
13 Kierkegaard, In vino veritas, p.37.
the final Platonic thinker, is the pure being [] almost less than nothing
or existence itself . He is the one who, his memory almost nil, reminisces
stealthily from a corner, from his completely private, blessed and delicious
lagar,14 a space filled with silence, peace and beauty. The sensuous aes-
thetic the truth which is in the wine turns out to be something past,
a reminiscence, which cannot be reduced to nothing. This exceptional,
invisible spectator, whose essence is pure abolished becoming, who closes
the dialogue by joking about Hegel, is like a character from some novel
by Gombrowicz El matrimonio, Ferdydurke, etc. Gombrowicz admitted
in his confessions that the God created by the rationalists seemed to him
to be highly abstract, and he felt himself, being an existentialist, to be the
nephew of the Dane:
Ferdydurke is an existentialist: he is so because the man created by men and the

men who form themselves mutually constitute precisely the existence and not the
essence. Ferdydurke is existence in nothingness, that it to say, no more than existence.
Thus in this book almost all the great themes of existentialism resound mightily:
becoming, self creation, liberty, angst, the absurd, the nothing [] With the differ-
ence that here to the typical spheres of human life according existentialism the
banal life and the authentic life in Heidegger, the aesthetic life, the ethical and he
religious in Kierkegaard, or the spheres of Jaspers is added one more sphere, the
sphere of immaturity.15
The banquet scene will be destroyed with the intention of not leaving
the slightest trace. Thus, with the breaking of the cups, whose content
thewine of Bordeaux and aroma intoxicated the senses and inflamed the
blood of the participants, the signal was given for the demolition team to
act as swiftly as a memory which we pray for the dead.
In his texts Kierkegaard proposes to avoid predicting and to try to
act, and not to take great delight in ideas but rather realize himself. He
deals with a painful evolution, the simile of a birth in which container
and contents are as incompatible as a great wine in the wrong bottle until
14 Translators note: Lagar is a difficult word to translate. The closest word in English
is winery a little used word that denotes a place where wine is made.
15 Gombrowicz, Witold, Diario 1, 19531956, Madrid: Alianza, 1988, p.310.
the moment (Matthew 9:17): when new wine is poured into old wine-
skins, they burst what will happen when God implants himself within
the weakness of man, if this does not make man new and a new vessel?16
Any comment on his writings will be poor for, as Steiner says,17 in this
mixture of immediacy and indirect discourse, urgently confessional and
ironic, there is a distance so vivid as to make his personal drama a powerful
illumination, celebrating inner retreat and absolute silence.
16 Kierkegaard, Sren, Migajas filosficas o un poco de filosofa, Madrid: Trotta, 2004,

p.48.
17 Steiner, George, Pasin intacta, Madrid: Siruela, 1997, pp.277293.
Part 3
Taste, Modernity and Centre II

Modernity and its Artificial Paradises
To eat alone is to experience suffering an unusual loneliness. To share food

and drink on the other hand touches the very depths of the human condition.
To embrace the religious ritual, the constructions and demarcations of genre,
the domination of the erotic, the complications or confrontations of politics,
the contrasts of discourse serious or frivolous the rites of marriage and of
the mournful funeral. In its many complexities, to eat food in turn at a table,
with friends or enemies, disciples or critics, close friends or strangers, with
the innocence or the conveniences learned form cordiality, recomposes the
microcosms of the very same society.
George Steiner, Las dos cenas
Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin:
From the Order of the Table and its Stimulants to the
Disorder of the Drunken Barricades
The Order of the Table and its Stimulants
In his Paris Spleen, Baudelaire proposed to men the life of relentless intoxi-
cation, in order not to feel the horrible passing of time which wears out
the back and makes us bow down towards the earth.1
Wine unites opposites: it is memory and forgetting at the same time.
It flows with its name through the history of the world from the bronze
age of Homer like a river which glistens and which gladdens the heart of
men. It exalts happiness and mitigates fear.
The modes of thought of antiquity teach us history. Myths, since
the origin of time, have underpinned the whole of life. Behind each man
who has found a place in history are either deeds or words. The deeds are
transformed into pressures on and modifications of present reality, and
almost always show themselves when the energy which produced them
has been lost. The words, above all if they are written and serve as the food
and substance of the memory, are transformed into proposals and experi-
ments for the future.
Bacchus, the god of wine, was the son of Jupiter and Semele. Despite
being the one who introduced men to the cultivation of the grape and its
transformation into wine, he did not represent only the intoxicating power
of wine, but also its social and charitable influence. Because of this he is
seen as the promoter of civilization, a creator of laws and a lover of peace.
1 Baudelaire, Charles, Embriagaos, in El Spleen de Pars, Mexico: Fontamara, 1989,

p.105.
66 Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin
He symbolizes the joy of life, the life-giving force of nature and the fertil-
ity of the soil. Myths date from time immemorial and speak of gods and
heroes situated in a prestigious epoch. It is a distant world but one which
is also surprisingly close to our own fantasies. All peoples, at some point in
their evolution, have created for themselves legends or marvellous stories
which they have believed in for a while. In those days, the superior beings
were brilliant and a little frivolous, lovers of the game of war, mixed up in
human affairs, passionate, and given to speech, wonderful in their noble
self-assurance.
As the centuries passed, what we call history became the consoli-
dation of the language of everything which, however real, disappeared,
consumed by the insatiable jaws of time. Thus the divine mythical figures
lost their religious significance and achieved a formal intoxicating beauty.
Myth became art.
Myth opposes itself to logos in the same way as fantasy opposes itself to
reason, or as the word which narrates opposes the word which demonstrates.
Logos and mythos are the two halves of language, two equally fundamental
functions of the life of the spirit. The logos, being a form of reasoning, tries
to convince, while the mythos has no other end than itself, to be believed
in or not believed in. All too often we are offered rationalistic answers
which neither solve our problems nor contribute to the understanding of
phenomena. Dissatisfied with the mere knowledge of things, beings and
stories, men propose to freely create a perfect image which corresponds to
their own desire for harmony. They thus enjoy their sense impressions
colours, flavours, smells, textures and sounds and order them according to
their will. This is the real basis of that human endeavour which we call art.
In its transition from physiology to art during the nineteenth cen-
tury, wine took on different meanings, accentuating certain tendencies
which even today abound on this earth and are as distinct as the differ-
ence between a geologist and a gardener. The body has its problems and
its answers; alcohol produces its effects and its artificial paradises. Eating
is a predatory exercise. As an act it is both animal and dirty, and thus all
the intentions of refinement, from the most rudimentary use of fire for
cooking to the use of utensils to carry to the mouth what we have cooked
by means of industrial methods and elements, pursue as their goal the
Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin 67
disguising of the alimentary instincts which we possess as living beings as

such. To sublimate this act and convert it into something social, cultured,
clean and spiritual, which allows us to transcend our animal nature, has
been possible only by means of an aesthetic imaginary and through regu-
lated forms of behaviour. Enlightenment Reason reprimands and orders an
accumulation of mythical and obscure behaviours with the aim of acceding
to a truth by means of an experimental method supported by observation.
The phenomena are the given; the principles are the object of enquiry.
Belligerent currents war against superstition and a secular will flowers
which rests on facts. This is later assimilated to the disenchantment of the
world. The French Enlightenment had acquired its first renovating formula-
tion of human understanding with noetic sensationalism, finding later the
highest expression of encyclopaedism in naturalism and its degeneration
into materialism. This was formulated by Condillac in a treatise which
stipulated that all our knowledge and spiritual operations proceed from
our sensations. Later, with the ideologist and hygienist George Cabanis,
sensationalism moved towards a physiological materialism which affirmed
that psychological facts were directly related to the body.
Faced with this horizon of thought, Brillat-Savarin wrote his Fisiologa
del gusto, the supreme code of the experts in gastronomy, which collects
numerous repeated experiments in order to discover principles deducible
from the methods of science. The modern body is presented as the experi-
mental field, the laboratory of the sensations. Something as indomitable as
taste begins to be confined to a certain field in which there abound expres-
sions such as analysis, principles, thesis, rigour, functions, number,
mechanical, membrane, experience to refer to expressions which
are intended to forge a doctrine as an eternal basis for science. It shows
a special disposition which opens the pores of the gustative sensibility in
keeping with those of intellectual potency and sentimental inclination.
I have left on one side a great number of strange and singular things, which a sound
critique must reject, and I awakened the attention in making clear and popular certain
knowledges which savants seemed to have reserved to themselves.2
2 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, Fisiologa del gusto, Barcelona: Zeus, 1970, p.26.
Beyond his divulgatory and militant intention, and in correlation with

the intentions proper to Enlightenment philosophy which have turned back
towards the world, his science of taste is not easy to assimilate although his
aim satisfies the most sweet-toothed and sought-after spirits and bodies
and pursuers of rights and duties.
In the first ten years of the nineteenth century, while the juridical codifications are
being elaborated, one can be present at the birth of the word gastronomy in its
contemporary sense, at that of the gastronomic criticism, the genealogy of gastro-
sophic reflexion, the practices of the modern table.3
Brillat-Savarin is in tune with his epoch because he orders and legis-

lates. He does so in his multiple roles. According to his own assessment
he is an anatomist, physiologist, chemist, astronomer, naturalist, historian,
musician and above all mdico aficionado, who in spite of his sententious
humour, turns out to be a prescriber of hygiene and dietetics. However his
rational knowledge of food arouses dissimilar aftertastes. The canonical
and nourishing work for gastronomic literature or the history of ideas,
the irony of science, the gustative pleasure, as well as the instances, is based
only on the binary distinction of pleasant / unpleasant, in the same way
as in Molire the dream is produced by a soporific virtue. For the history
of philosophy, by contrast, gastronomy is a pastime of the appetite. (For
Kant, for example, science exists in so far as it is known by a priori princi-
ples; for this reason gastronomy is confined to the relative, arbitrary and
subjective dominion of the senses.4) Although Brillat-Savarin is accused
3 Onfray, Michel, La razn gourmet, Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1999, p.64.
4 Although Kant was concerned with taste in his Critique of Judgement, he never
completed a critique of culinary reason, perhaps because he considered taste and
smell to be inferior senses, subjected and conducive to perceptive distortions with
regard to the superior and objective senses of touch, sight and hearing. However, he
never missed the chance to deal with the body and thus in his last writings, devel-
oped a system of hygiene to dominate our nature so that it could not dominate
us which prescribes dietetics as the art of preventing illnesses as opposed to the
therapy or art of curing them. Thus he advises that in our old age we must as he
will in his repeat every day what has been done one day, avoiding a number of
of being a fantasist or falsely wise, it is thought-provoking to observe how

he cites true science in order to season his indigestible writings. In fact
he and Claude Bernal, the son of a wine merchant from Bordeaux, are the
only French physiologists who are mentioned in Anglo-Saxon publications.
The body, both social and individual, is presented as a reflection of
the soul, from the gifts of civilization related to the culinary culture of the
peoples to ordered vitalism, without exception until the final days of the
subjects. The story comes to us of the dignified sister of Brillat-Savarin,
Pierrette, who at ninety-nine years old, was eating in her bed as she was
accustomed to do. Feeling that her life was expiring she shouted her order:
Quick, quick, bring me the dessert because I am going to die!
Now, within the order which proposes, and except for the recogni-
tions of editorial success which are attested in their epoch, it is necessary to
notice that the physiologist was as concerned as Balzac was with the abuse
of certain substances, amongst them wine, and the consequent overexcite-
ment produced in individuals of all social strata. (Balzacs Tratado de los
excitantes modernos of 1838 accompanied the work of Brillat-Savarin as an
appendix in various editions.) As is pointed out insistently by hedonists and
admirers, the poet of transcendental gastronomy committed the worst of
the sins: that of omitting from the major part of his work special attention
to wine. When wine is referred to we are alerted to the intoxicating danger
it represents: Gourmandise is the enemy of excess: any man who becomes
drunk or suffers from indigestion courts the risk of losing control.5 Every
Louis, for example, during his reign, suffers drunken minions: During the
certain fluids soups and water in return for a stronger food and more exciting
drink (wine for example) as much in order to activate the peristaltic movement of
the intestines (which amongst the entrails seem to have more vita propria, because
when, still hot, they are torn from the animal and, cut into pieces, they crawl like
worms, whose work cannot only be seen but heard), and in order to carry to the
bloodstream elements which, like a stimulating substance, are useful in order to
maintain the activity of the arterial system so the blood keeps flowing. See Kant,
Immanuel, Conflicto de la Facultad de Filosofa con la Facultad de Medicina, in
El conflicto de las Facultades, Buenos Aires: Losada, 1963, pp.121145.
5 Brillat-Savarin, Fisiologa del gusto, p.143.
reign of Louis XIV, men of letters were all given to drink. [] They are
now gourmands a great amelioration.6 Or there is the story about the
Louis XVIs Swiss Guard who, not being able to control his generous vice
for wine nor abstain from drinking for even one day, ending up dying of
thirst. The saturated body sheds light on his reasons and appetites. This is
without mentioning fermented concoctions of low quality: Proverbially it
is said that to get rid of a glass of Surene, three things are needed, a drinker
and two acolytes to hold him up and prevent him losing courage.7 Wine
is always worthwhile if it is good and especially if it acquires a secondary
role, improving a meal by washing it down, for example a partridge with
a glass of Laffitte or Clos-Vougeot.
Thus on several occasions, Brillat-Savarin unites phrenology and char-
acterology with the alcoholic history of his table companions. On one
occasion, eating in New York, he notes that he: had some anxiety, but
being at the same time younger, bigger and more vigorous than my hosts,
my constitution, unused to Bacchic excesses, would easily triumph over the
two Englishmen, worn out by the excess of spirituous liquors.8
Such is his practical and reflexive concern with the excesses induced
by strong drink, that his lyrical hyperbole finds its resplendent zenith in
the conjunction of both individual and planetary genesis and evolution:
[] this thirst for a kind of liquid which nature has shrouded in veils, this extraor-
dinary appetite which acts on all races of men, under all climates and temperatures,
is worthy of attracting the attention of the philosophical observer. I have often been
inclined to place the longing for spirituous liquors, which is unknown in animals,
side by side with the anxiety for the future, equally alien to them, and to look on
the one and the other as distinctive attributes of the last sublunary revolution.9
Balzac also sheds light on his concerns about stimulants and, with a
merciless sincerity proposes the control of the excesses with the aim of pro-
curing health. (By excess he means enjoyment which exceeds natural laws
6 Ibid., p.161.
7 Ibid., p.135.
8 Ibid., p.323.
9 Ibid., p.140.
and with reference to five concrete substances: alcohol, sugar, tea, coffee
and tobacco.) In several passages he shows himself to be the critic of the
author of the transcendental gastronomic meditations. He criticizes him
in particular for demanding from science the enlargement of the senses,
where the genesis of everything that sponsors the union of the sexes and
invites the relationship of the good and the bad, the real desire with a
possible pleasure. He charges him with having ignored the union which
exists between the products of man and the possibility of transforming
his vital conditions.
Balzac also believes that the destiny of a people depends on its food-
stuffs, just as much as on its regime, and not just on its political economy.
However, his work is inspiratory of the revolutionary duet of his epoch,
Marx and Engels, who believed that artists were not obliged to give the
reader the historic future solution of the social conflicts they describe. They
saw in Balzac, a conservative and sympathizer with the ancin regime, a
creator of prophetic types which could offer instruments for the under-
standing, analysis and criticism of capitalist society. They appreciated that
in his Human Comedy
Balzac has seen himself forced to contradict his own class affinities and his political
prejudices, has seen the inevitability of the end of his beloved aristocrats and he has
described them as not deserving of a better fate.10
While Balzac, in the epoch of Louis Phillipe, sensed what would occur
under Napoleon III and predicted in his novels the end of an epoch in the
face of a new mode of accumulation of wealth, he drank twenty cups of
coffee every day (that had been made in a magenta cafeteria of decorated
white Limoges porcelain) and fled his creditors. In the same way, while
Marx and Engels exalted exploiting phantasms and called on the prole-
tariat to unite in order to overthrow capital, they sampled and divulged
10 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, Sobre arte y literatura, Madrid: Ciencia Nueva,
1966, p.196.
the virtues of the wines of those convulsive times: Bordeaux, champagne,

port, Madeira, sherry and German wines from the Rhine and the Mosel.11
Perhaps it is not necessary to read in literature great omens of the
world to come, but rather the uncertain desire ofthe world longed for. Like
coffee sediment, it often tells us only what we want to hear. Even in a text
which claims to be as serious and committed to its epoch as the Tratado
de los excitantes modernos, Balzac wants to condemn amongst other sub-
stances coffee. He condemns it for encouraging problems and not neces-
sarily awakening the spirit, for inhibiting the membranes of the stomach,
producing a type of nervous vivacity similar to anger, occasioning thirst,
sweat, dryness of the skin, and turning the saliva thick. (This is something
which Brillat-Savarin does not develop fully and from which the writer
of the Human Comedy turns out to be a specialist or experienced drinker,
not to say a caffeine addict or evangelist of vigilance.) But, in order to be
just, Balzac also admits that it helps whatever paper is covered with ink.
Thus his writings run satirical, condemning over excitation at the same
time as practicing it.
The question of experience continues to be essential, beyond the a
priori formulation:
11 Amongst other such references we could cite certain pages from the album ofJenny,
the eldest daughter of Karl Marx, which contain a game of questions and answers,
very popular in England half way through the 1860s, called Confessions, which she
enjoyed with her sisters Laura and Eleanor. Amongst his replies Marx manifested
his opposition to servility, submission and prudery. Engels confessed that his idea of
happiness is the Chteau Margot of 1848, whose date made reference to the revolu-
tionary events of that same year, his favourite cold plate, salad, and his favourite hot
dish, Irish stew (meat with potatoes and onions); while Marx chose Balzac among
his predilections for prose and, for food, fish. Nothing human is alien to these two
revolutionaries and this is shown in Jennys album, which in 1960, Charles Longuet,
great-grandson to Karl Marx, donated to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached
to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and which
contain the confessions of all the members of the family and of many leaders of
the international workers movement. See facsimiles in: Ivanov, N., et al., Federico
Engels, vida y actividad, Moscow: Progress, 1987, pp.220221.
Everyone is master of himself, according to modern law; but if the capitalists and
proletarians who read these pages think that they harm only themselves smoking like
a chimney or drinking like Alexander, they fool themselves miserably; they adulterate
the race, bastardize the generation, and hence ruin the countries.12
Balzac is a stereotype of himself. The whole of life, like this work, is

a subtle satire or a deceitful cover-up which, when uncovered, becomes
a proclamation against the very customs that it practices. We are always
trying to do something and to stop doing something else. The discourse
of health is as sick as the proclamation by someone who has returned to
health that they have lost something. Now, in addition to the excess coffee
which he drinks, he reveals the wine which he does not drink to be the
oldest of the stimulants and the one which kills most people in the world.
The pleasure of drunkenness, or intoxication, veils real life. It helps us
forget sorrows, makes the taste buds insensible, conspires against taste,
and produces a temporary poisoning. In the same way as Balzac classifies
the substances, so he characterizes men inasmuch as they work, think or
do nothing. He aspires, cynically and humouristically, to the elegant and
unhurried life, which should not be confused with dandyism, for the latter
is a heresy of the elegant life, an affectation of style.
On becoming a Dandy, the man converts himself into a vanity cabinet, into an
exceedingly ingenious mannequin which can put himself on horseback or lie down
on a canap, which skilfully bites or sucks the tip of a cane [], but never comes to
convert himself into a thinking being.13
The elegant life consecrates intelligence and science. Balzac speaks to us of

a type of man who has disappeared and a new one who appears at the high
point of the century and must have an axiom to guide him: All excess that
wounds the mucous membranes shortens life.14
12 Balzac, Honor de, Tratado de los excitantes modernos, Barcelona: Zeus, 1970, p.379.
(Trait des Excitants Modernes, Paris: Editions de LHerne, 2009, p.16.)
13 Balzac, Honor de, Tratado de la vida elegante, in El dandismo, Barcelona:
Anagrama, 1974, p.64.
14 Balzac, Tratado de los excitantes modernos, p.397.
The Disorder of the Drunken Barricades
Illness, pleasure, the senses, the excesses and leisure are Baudelairean terms.
The decadence of positivism, the rise of beauty and the foundation of
modernity. Man ends up resembling what he would like to be,15 says
Baudelaire, and establishes his historical and rational theory of beauty
in opposition to the idea of unique and absolute beauty. Thus in his writ-
ings he prefers to speak of beauty as an effect (as it is formulated in Poes
The Philosophy of Composition) and not of art as a cause or medium to
attain. What in Poe was argument, in Baudelaire will be poetic method:
the man of the multitude, like the detective who observes without being
seen, announces modern art on the basis of the disappearance of the notion
of the author and the discrediting of the critical biography. It is here that
Baudelaire retrieves everyday life from the chroniclers (amongst whom
Balzac and his Comedy are counted), and this could easily be complemented
with the works of Gavarni and Daumier, representatives of the tempera-
ment of the artistic painter of customs.16 Reality will be apprehended
with new poetic-philosophical eyes on the basis of a world beyond the
decipherable community which he rounds up: an exhaustive exploration
of being and its circumstances supernaturalism. Without ideas which
justify a priori the expression of the world, poetry supports itself by itself
alone and in it is cultivated a certain extremism ofthe senses in which the
imagination the reinvention of the world predominates over memory.
Time, for its part, is linked to pleasure:
Desire of pleasure binds us to the present. Care for our health suspends us on the
future. He who attaches himself to pleasure, that is, to the present, is to me as one
who, rolling down an incline, and trying to cling to the shrubs, uproots them and
bears them away in his fall. Before all to be a great man and a saint for ones self.17
15 Baudelaire, El pintor de la vida moderna, p.80.

16 Ibid., p.83.
17 Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare, in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed.
T.R. Smith, New York: Boni & Liverlight, 1919, p.235.
Although he never stops having his photo-portrait taken, Baudelaire

opposes himself to the realistic painting or the photography of his epoch,
because they conspire against the imaginative faculty of constructing or
transforming the world which we inhabit and whose voice is bestowed by
the poet. (It is worth noticing the coincidence here with the Marxist theo-
retical line.) In this way he speaks to us of a convalescing artist, an image
symbolized by a return to childhood:
Lets go back, by means of a retrospective effort of the imagination, towards our most
tender, our earliest impressions, and recognize that we had a singular relationship
with these vividly coloured impressions, which we received later as consequences
of a physical illness, as long as this illness has left our spiritual faculties pure and
untouched. The child sees everything as new, for he is always inebriated.18
The painter of modern life looks for the passing, fleeting beauty of pre-
sent life, perhaps strange, violent or excessive, although always poetic, and
knows how to concentrate in his work the bitter or intoxicating taste of
the wine of life.
Baudelaire took offence with Brillat-Savarin and with Balzac for having
libelled wine and for not having rehabilitated it as a promoter of ecstasy.
For the physiologist, wine was the moderating and solicitous companion of
socializing and of pleasurable community meals which invited a healthy and
rational discourse. For the writer, alcohol in general and wine in particular
rose up in his demonized ink, altering the nature of the blood, obstruct-
ing the generative faculties and turning men, at length, into watery beings.
Nothing is further away from the damned poet who valued this image of
ragged Paris differently. His is a Paris full of monstrous stunted figures,
hollow, feeble, blanched, blue-stained, twisted by brandy19 and he gave a
voice to these nocturnal creatures which fled reality, like the drunks, the
seekers after paradises, and all the dreamers of the ideal for whom reality is
unbearable. Baudelaire mixes the soul of wine with the rag pickers hounded
by miserable sorrows, with the murderers imprisoned by remorse, the lonely
18 Baudelaire, El pintor de la vida moderna, pp.8687.

19 Balzac, Tratado de los excitantes modernos, p.382.
orphans of love and the lovers who flee fleeing from themselves in their own
sensuality in order to cultivate the flowers of evil.20 For the maker of these
sickly flowers, wine is happiness and melancholy, forgetting and memory.
It is a vehicle which takes us out of our own selves and it is what enables us
to abandon ourselves to being rootless; that is to say, in such ecstasy it is a
drug which provides a protocol which is not social, but rather solitary for
an individual and typical search. Because of this, a number of critics anchor
their analysis in the physiology of the poet inherited faults, tormenting
health problems, etc. in order to explain how his experiential disorders
transformed themselves into spiritual torments. Perhaps it is wrong to
ignore his stormy life, although I believe it is more interesting to affirm an
alternative perspective. For Brillat-Savarin wine is an antidote (for wine,
like food, does not possess in its work any particularity except to gently
amplify the body, without changing it because all diversion is forbidden
for the gastronomic guest and making it shine). For Balzac wine is one
of the most dangerous substances because it promotes intoxication and is
the negation of social movement, for which reason the moralists and the
state must combat it. But in Baudelaire wine appears humanized and, in
that way, violent and bodily:
[] wine is similar to man: it is not possible to know the extent to which it can be
held in esteem or scorned, loved or loathed, nor of how many sublime acts or mon-
strous crimes it is capable. As a result we are not more cruel to it that to ourselves
and we treat it as an equal.21
As Proust puts it well:
[] a good anti-alcoholic hygiene cannot approve of the praise of wine: Give back
to your son the force and the vigour / and it will be for this fragile athlete of life / the
oil which gives firmness to the members of the fighter. The poet could reply that it
is the wine and not him that speaks. But anyway, what a divine poem! What an
20 See Baudelaire, Charles, El vino, in Las flores del mal, Buenos Aires: Losada, 1989,
pp.163170.
21 Baudelaire, Charles, Parasos artificiales, Buenos Aires: Losada, 1992, p.13.
admirable style (tomb and caves)! What human cordiality! What a sketched depic-
tion of a vineyard!22
Thus Brillat-Savarin proposes that the new ornament of the metropolis,

the temple of gastronomy, raise little by little its immense arcades towards
the heavens and that sweet-toothed and frugal men, on the basis of their
pleasure and necessity, go ahead and look in that direction. Balzac, for his
part, holds it important to look at the suburbs and fight the plagues of con-
temporary society, with the aim of calming the over excitement general in
all strata of society and the deterioration of the health of the people. Both
make useful proclamations which direct habits and naturalize the search
for health in conjunction with pleasure. Baudelaire, by contrast, proposes
intoxication in order to remain on our feet and dancing in opposition to the
insuperable passing of time. We live as we were born: alone. Thus if one day
we wake up in the solitude of our room inadequately intoxicated, we could
ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of what-
ever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind,
wave, star, bird or clock will answer you: It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken
if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine,
with poetry or with virtue, as you will.23
In short, Baudelaire celebrated wine in a profoundly lyrical sense,

interpreting his captive song through the vermillion seals and his glass
prison. And thus like a dense constellation that reunited wine fraternally
with the loner as much as with the lovers, with the murderers or with the
rag pickers, Benjamin saw in the damned poet the great majority of the
theoretical motives which his materialist perspective provided. According
to Adorno, it was because of this that he wrote about the Paris of the Second
Empire, collecting themes rather than developing them. Benjamin was aware
that Baudelaire didnt possess the humanitarian idealism of Victor Hugo
nor the idealism of Musset (whose epoch did not please him in the way it
pleased Gautier), that he could not take refuge in devotion like Verlaine
22 Proust, Marcel, Flaubert y Baudelaire, Buenos Aires: Arca-Galerna, 1978, pp.6061.

23 Baudelaire, Charles, Be Drunken, in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, pp.5758.
nor betray adulthood like Rimbaud, was neither able to be hero nor martyr
nor saviour, and played with the role of the modern, alert to the fact that
the obvious power in this new epoch was not held by the bourgeoisie that
Balzac had conceived of in his comedy. Benjamin illuminates this moment
by using diverse sources and the multifaceted gaze, which included the
Napoleonic taxes on wine, the rag pickers, the aperitif, and the use of the
boulevard in the service of the daily chronicle, the bazaars and the soul of
the commodity, amongst others.
Everything seems to be concentrated in the opening of the text dealing
with the weariness of the Baudelairian citizen: Eh! What! You here, my
dear? You, in a place of ill! You, the drinker of quintessences! you, the eater
of ambrosia! Indeed, this is something surprising!24 Benjamin sees in this
little prose poem how Baudelaire anticipates that the honourable artist,
the drinker of elixirs, will have lost his halo in the mud of the tarmac,
how he will have degraded art and turned it into a spiritual commodity.
In Benjaminian terms, he senses the loss of the halo in the experience of
shock, this illumination of daily life which disturbs the senses, in order then
to recompose the diverse pieces in the image of an allegory.
We participate in a story signalled on the one hand by political con-
spiracies, anarchist and revolutionary alcohol which is fermented in the
taverns, and on the other by the way in which the poet, through his song,
registers the appearance of the urban life of the masses with all its social dis-
equilibriums and injustices. (Since the romantics song had been conceived
of as a road to knowledge, something which had been well thematized by
Schelling.) Baudelaire is for Benjamin, beyond his deliberative incapacity
and his craggy, steep, sheer contradictions, what Marx characterizes as the
bohemian and professional conspirator as political type. His irritation,
neither proletarian nor plebeian, makes him capable of participating in
rebellions which put down governments shouting in its rebellious paths,
Death to General Aupick! (his stepfather). The phantasmagorical char-
acter of modernity is closely united with the objective loss of experience,
giving way to mere subjective experience.
24 Baudelaire, Charles, The Loss of a Halo, in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, p.99.
The image of Baudelaire is thus established by itself: the enigmatic article of the
allegory in some, and the merchandise of the mysteries of the conspirator in others.
Marx speaks contemptuously and it was not a case of expecting anything different
of the taverns in which in which the lower conspirator feels at home. Baudelaire
was familiar with the vapour which settled there. In this vapour developed that great
poem which he entitled The Wine of the Chiffoniers. We could date his composition
by the middle of the century. Things which echo in these verses were then discussed
publicly. For example, the wine tax. The Constituent Assembly of the Republic had
agreed on its abolition, as had been agreed in 1830. In The Class Struggles in France
Marx shows how in the marginalization of such taxes the demands of the urban
proletariat meet those of the peasants. The taxes which raised the price of ordinary
wine to the level of that of the most refined, reduced its consumption, because
the gates of all the cities of more than 4,000 inhabitants had raised the octroi25 and
every city had been transformed into a foreign country with protective duties against
French wine. Marx says that in the taxes on wine the peasant tastes the government
bouquet. But they also harmed the city inhabitants and forced them, in order to find
cheap wine, to go out to the shops in the outskirts. There they dealt in wine free of
taxes which was known as vin de la barrire.26
Beyond the fact that Baudelaire echoes the words of an observer who
suggests that the wine of the barricades saved the government many blows,
he believes that wine opens to the dispossessed the dreams of future venge-
ance and future dominion (hence Baudelaires poem about the wine of
the rag pickers and the lumpenproletarians). These were celebrated by
Benjamin as allegorical characters, redeemers of the detritus of history,
which, although they were far from the bohemia of the men of letters and
of the professional conspirators, jointly and unified by the aroma of the
barrels / powder keg, were part of the expression of a social protest against
a future which they knew to be precarious, to say the least. For the author
of the Illuminations, bohemia represented the main ferment of all kinds of
implausible reformist phantasmagorias in the face of a proletariat, which
as a class lacked even a self-conscious organization, provided a posteriori by
25 Translators note: A duty levied in some countries on various goods entering a town
or city.
26 Benjamin, Walter, Poesa y capitalismo: Iluminaciones II, Madrid: Taurus, 1988,
pp.3031.
the unions and the party. However, the collective heroism was expressed
in political struggle, in which a great number of utopian movements and
utopians with apocalyptic fantasies fought for the leadership of the revo-
lutionary crusade so as to realize the epic explosion of the barricades in
the days of the Paris Commune. (These included for example, Proudhon,
Saint-Simon and Fourier, and groups of Enlightened conspirators, in the
style of Blanqui.)
Baudelaire incarnates, for Benjamin, the visionary poet and critic of
the new modernity, the visionary before his time, and incarnates also the
rhythm of the sensibility which expressed its compulsive revulsion for the
spectacle of bourgeois society, whose spiritual values had been deformed
and had lost their innocence.
Art sheds light on our perceptive constitution by disclosing to us a
world realized and formulating for us, time and time again, how it could
be. Flowers adorn and wines wait to be drunk at each one of the stations of
Calvary which life imagines. They are the flowers of evil and the intoxicating
wine over which Baudelaire let his imagination run. In the same way, and
outside of his writings, Benjamin paid secret homage to the damned poet
when, in a bar in Trastevere, decorated with plastic flowers which served
as the only option Falerno wine and salt cod, he told us:
A young man asked me nothing more than the measure; he seemed to understand
that wine was taken. I began to feel alone and took out the black magic wand, which
already many times worked around me the profusion of letters with that name in
the centre which mixed now with the perfume which sent to my solitude with that
of the Falernian.27 And I lost myself in it the profusion, the name, the perfume,
the wine28
27 Translators note: A white wine produced since Roman times from grapes grown on
the slopes of Mount Falernius in Italy.
28 Benjamin, Walter, Cuadros de un pensamiento, Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 1992,
p.89.
Hemingway, or the Alcoholic Outpourings of
Valpolicella
Just as we have doubts respecting the literary virtues of Ernest Hemingway,

the stories that surround the course of his life seem to us voluptuous. The
current imaginary associates his figure more with a glass of Roederer Brut
champagne from the 1942 harvest,1 a glass of very dry Martini and doppio,2
with a Negroni composed of two sweet vermouths and soda water,3 with
a Carpano punto e mezzo,4 with him always having in his hand a bottle of
Campari or of Gordons gin and his inseparable young Valpolicella, than
with a subtle affair of a quill.
If some postmodern writers think they have inaugurated a cynical
literature with respect to the marketing of certain well-known firms of
good repute, they are wrong for it is difficult to overcome Hemingways
own brand. His literature, the final repository of melodrama, is a confused
and chaotic catalogue of the cosmopolitan bon vivant. Rolex watches (the
Perpetual Oyster, if it stops you, youre dead), Burbury pilots (waterproof
coats ideal for strolling through Venice or Canterbury), crystal glasses
from Murano (not advisable for those who practise nomadism), Cadillacs
or Buick Roadmasters (large, if possible, and with Dynaflow traction),5
the magazines Time, Life, Newsweek, Vogue or Harpers Bazaar (realized
inventories of the last word in fashion).6 For hotels he favoured those such
as the Muehlebach in Kansas City (whose beds pride themselves on being
the biggest in the world), the Gritti Palace in Venice (an old palace whose
1 Hemingway, Ernest, Across the River and into the Trees, New York: Scribner, 1998.
2 Ibid., p.59.
3 Ibid., p.45.
4 Ibid., p.61.
5 Ibid., p.246.
6 Ibid., 247.
82 Hemingway, or the Alcoholic Outpourings of Valpolicella
rooms all look onto the Grand Canal and in whose bar Hemingway sampled
three bottles of Valpolicella a day), the Ritz in Paris (the most celebrated
of the worlds hotels, where everything is a party, especially the bar, which
bears the name of Hemingway for he declared it liberated the day the Allies
reached Paris), the Ambos Mundos (Room 511) in Havana (an irresistible
Mecca for the writers devotees, which recalls the luxuries and excesses of the
Batista epoch), and, of course, the famed bars such as Harrys in the Avenue
d lOpra (his singular presence has made us forget conspicuous visitors
such as Gershwin), the Roubidoux in St Joseph, Missouri (the symbol of
sparkling Martinis), and that type of museum for drinkers which El Floridita
and La Bodeguita del Medio in Havana represent (world repositories of
the Daiquiri or Papas Special and the Mojito respectively, on the basis of
that phrase that rings out constantly in the head of some readers and on
the palates of conspicuous drinkers: The drink could not be better, nor
even similar, in any part of the world).
Without having, up to the present, cleared up doubts about his literary
aptitude, there is no doubt of his aptitude for public relations. Hemingway
is a festival which follows us. Everything he has trod on has become some-
thing noteworthy, perhaps not because a North American addicted to drink
appears exotic, but more for his condition of sybarite. He himself sheds
light on this when he states that the Americans believe that the mortadela
is a kind of sausage.7 Just as there exists a Michelin guide, at some point
it will be necessary to make an epicurean guide which could be named
Hemingway by analogy with the rules of good living.
Now the critique that could be established today of our author lacks
originality, for in life he has suffered, and not with little animosity. His
compatriot and friend Faulkner asserted that Hemingway, like a number
of representatives of romanticism, was as boastful as some ofhis characters.
Indeed, in Hemingway the character dominates so disproportionately over
the author that it is impossible for us to discern to what extent it was his
literature or his personality that was the target of this criticism. Catalogued
with the epithet, the modern Byron, and as well as having made of his
7 Ibid., p.181.
personality a romance, at the margins, as they say, of the romantic con-

ception which predominated in his work, he recreated with his tone and
from his personal life the ideal image of the prototype of the hero, clearly
rooted in the twentieth century.
Thinking that failures define the lives of men more than their possi-
bilities and ephemeral successes, we shall recover his novel Across the River
and Into the Trees. For as well as the amorous happenings, the perpetual
military hierarchies and the uncountable aperitifs which cross the text,
the protagonists indefatigable companion is undoubtedly a wine: the
Valpolcella.
This book, which was labelled lamentable by the British newspaper
the Sunday Times, as a synthesis of the worst of his previous novels by the
Saturday Review of Literature and as a parody of the author himself by
the San Francisco Chronicle, is the story of a frustrated idyll with an infernal
Venice as the backdrop. The main character, Colonel Cantwell, a veteran in
his fifties, conscious that death is approaching and wanting to give expres-
sion to all his desires before he dies, pursues a passionate adventure with
a beautiful nineteen-year-old countess named Renata. A large number of
critical analyses try to contradict, in the manner of a dynamic soap opera,
the warning, present in a number of his novels, that the characters are
imaginary. However, the author contributed to this identification, making
his characters or alter egos surpass his passion for young aristocrats, for
hunting ducks and admiring Renaissance painters, choosing and enjoying,
in addition, the same wine. Thus Hemingway stereotypes Valpolicella: It
is friendly and cordial, like the house of a brother for which one has good
feelings, a sentence which the producers of the Veneto region repeat as if
it were a biblical verse, in the manner of an unshakeable command.
Now, some of the words of Hemingway or of Cantwell recover the
sensual universe and the naturalistic suggestion of the author and his char-
acters. Beyond the importance that these words turn out to have with
respect to the Latin, there is no doubt that the taste ofItaly and the Veneto
begins with its grapes. There are one hundred different types, several dis-
tinctive of this region. Although some exegeses insist, for the protagonist
of this story admits various connections with wines, that Hemingways
preferred wine was the Chteau Margaux of Bordeaux, the Valpolicella
84 Hemingway, or the Alcoholic Outpourings of Valpolicella
brings together attributes which, from the origin of its name, the valley
of many bars, has accommodated itself more to the imaginary which our
author possesses in excess.
As many of the regions producers maintain, technology could improve
the quality of the wines but could never compete with the comparative
advantage which they have: tradition. The deep roots of many European
wines ceases to be a euphemism when one realizes that an estate in the
region is managed by Count Sergo Alighieri, a descendent of Dante. Few
could have imagined that this surname could extend to a drink in which
the divine word took on a connotation distinct from that of the famous
comedy. It is known that the poet lived seven years in Verona and that he
was just as aware of the fertility of his lands as of his words.
While drinking their uncountable bottles of Valpolicella in Across the
River and Into the Trees, the colonel and his young lover read Dante. Of
the writer they say that he is an abominable and pretentious character,
although an excellent poet. Of the wine they consider that the new vintage
is better, that this wine gets awful dreggy at the end8 and that it is not
a grand vin and bottling it and putting years on it only adds sediment.9 It
is that Cantwell privileged the memory which he possessed when he tried
the Valpolicella served in a carafe, during the war, at thirty centesimi the
liter.10 His impression would change if he had had the possibility of trying
the emblematic Valpolicella bottled by Casa Masi who, quite by chance,
own, among others, an eighty-hectare estate of the Alighieri family.
In short, Hemingway and his protagonist coincide in advising that
any wine, and in particular those made in Verona, is good for curing us of
the illnesses which we suffer, and especially for sadness and indecision.11
At the same time, and continuing with the identifications, the writer
would coincide with the colonel in feeling himself to be a genuinely dis-
liked guest, worthy of a disheartening trade. We could come to doubt, for
8 Ibid., p.141.
9 Ibid., p.112.
10 Ibid., p.105.
11 Ibid., p.149.
Hemingways character was and continues to be stereotyped under the

slogan of the great simulator. However, his final act was unique and irrev-
ocable. His farewell by means of suicide turned out to be as trustworthy
and as replete with connotations as any of his stories. The last of his ritual
objects was his favourite weapon, a British twelve-calibre double-barrelled
Boss shotgun with silver inlays. Not everything was a party and with the
running of the waters of spring he mocked his pledge of a farewell to arms,
and deciding whether to have or have not, he remembered the green hills
of Africa, the snows of Kilimanjaro, and as he pulled a face because of the
satisfactions which the old man and the sea and his glasses of Valipocella
produced in him, the bell tolled for him. Although, as Cantwell recalls,
citing DAnnunzio, if death is not enough, then what the hell more do
they want from us?12
12 Ibid., p.55.
Monogamous Joyce and his Fendant de Sion Wine
T.S. Eliot wrote a prologue to the unfinished biography of James Joyce,

written by Joyces brother Stanislaus, stressing that all interference in the
life of a public person was due to three different kinds of reasons which
were difficult to discern: utility, incoherence and impertinence. Avoiding
any kind of characterology, which is always disobedient, we could ask our-
selves what it means to read Joyce. In Joyce, work and life are metonymical
concepts which sink their roots in the uncultivated land of writing such
that subsequent studies of the author and his environment appear to be
suggested by our own curiosity, a curiosity which, on the other hand, the
author seemed to request from us.1 In short, the whole of life is parodic
and deserves interpretation, especially when language is complicit and
words alone are certain good.2
Borges said that it was a mistake for Joyce to bury himself in the novel
when the only thing that interested him was words. It was that Joyce had
a sweet-tooth for (was a gourmand of ) words, and the pantagruelic tex-
tuality had distanced him from those ideas of the classic novel in order to
cook itself in the free association of ideas, offering a menu so large that it
sounds like mere lyrical distortion. His supper is the last supper and thus
he has the desire to serve everything and produce excess:
His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink gripped his
trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slush of greens. See the animals feed. Men,
men, men. Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling
1 Eliot, T.S., Prefacio, in Joyce, Stanislaus, Mi hermano James Joyce, Buenos Aires:
Compaa General Fabril Editora, 1961, p.10.
2 A line by W.B. Yeats from The Song of the Happy Shepherd, used by Joyce, according
to his brother in the previously cited biography, pp.205206, and whichis mentioned
in the essay El da del populacho, in Joyce, James, Escritos crticos, Madrid: Alianza,
1975, pp.8489.
88 Monogamous Joyce and his Fendant de Sion Wine
for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulg-
ing, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced young man polished his tumbler
knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with an infants
saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A
man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchew-
chew it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad boosers eyes. Bitten
off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry
man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Dont! O! A bone! That last pagan
king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the
Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted
him to Christianity. Couldnt swallow it all however.3
Thus Bloom expresses himself on the basis of objective reflections

or chewed thoughts (God only knows whose reflections or thoughts),
characteristic of a sordid, spasmodic and repugnant world, which comes to
meet him so he ends up drinking a wine made in the lagares of Bourgogne
which lingers on his thirsty palate and which makes him remember when
Molly surrendered to him for the first time. Valverde, the novels transla-
tor, says that the succession of ideas in Blooms mind makes it impossi-
ble to suggest the changes of a kaleidoscope, and that his figures rapidly
metamorphosize in the readers. It is a kaleidoscope, or perhaps a linguistic
labyrinth, in which Dedalus is both the mythical creator of the trap which
pens us in and of the wings that could liberate us from the confinement of
words to which we were subjugated by Minos. There is a suggestive exces-
sive viticultural verbosity: vino as a word from a common source, very
possibly Philistine or Cretan, for in Greek, Hebrew, Arab and Persian it is
taken from Minoan or from Minos.
Because on the day when he had made his first holy communion in the chapel he
had shut his eyes and opened his mouth and put out his tongue a little: and when
the rector had stooped down to give him the holy communion he had smelt a faint
winy smell off the rectors breath after the wine of the mass. The word was beautiful:
3 Joyce, James, Ulysses, Alexandria, VA: Orchises Press, 1998, p.161.

wine. It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew
in Greece outside houses like white temples.4
The sense of smell provokes a certain delight in the sound of words; that
of taste dramatizes them from memory.
From the unholy wine of the adolescent artist who rises up as a sen-
sual being imbued with everything which can turn itself into poetry the
colour which evokes or the taste which announces to the glass of water
from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament.5 From
Dedalus to Telemachus (the son of Ulysses), Joyce shows a consistent aes-
thetic concern with language, granting the words and their chamber musi-
cality an inescapable prominence. In this way the great Joycean epiphany,
a continuation of the Homeric, is completed in which, beginning with a
surrender to the ecstasy of contemplation and expression, the things, the
people, and the banal events alone support, in certain significant moments,
their truth in the gaze of the artist. This is why, being a precocious crea-
tor and full of infinite necessities, Stephen says: I will pass it time after
time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the
catalogue of Dublins street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know
at once what it is: epiphany,6 or that at the start of Ulysses the very same
Stephen tries to complete that obsession by trying to collect the biggest
possible number of epiphanies with the aim of sending them to all the
libraries in the world.
At the same time there exists another kind of experiment which Joyce,
with a certain linguistic arbitrariness, called, epiclesis. This is a somewhat
major development, although in equal tone of contemplative objectivity.
Although it deals with short stories or snapshots like those offered in
Dubliners (signed by his literary alter ego, Stephen Dedalus) it is interesting
to stress this freedom to name which he uses makes reference, in its original
4 Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Barnes & Noble,
2004, p.41.
5 Joyce, Ulysses, p.10.
6 Joyce, James, Stephen Hero, ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, New York:
New Directions Press, 1959.
sense, to the invocation of the Holy Spirit which transformed the bread
and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Our writer told his brother
and guardian, Stanislaus, that in the resemblance between the mystery
of the mass and his literary experiments he was aiming in my poems to
give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by
converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent
artistic life of its own.7 The mass, as a great drama, literature as a eucharist,
the communion as a ritual survival of cannibalism:
Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? Corpus: body. Corpse. Good idea the
Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They dont seem to chew it: only
swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it.8
Body and blood, the body of work and the words which flow from faith
to apostasy.
Joyce already knows that art is worth the trouble and that by dis-
tancing himself from religion he chooses wine as intoxicator and not as
the blood substitute of Apollo, Christ, nor for whiskey like the cub artist
Dylan Thomas.
The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs smartly. Wine.
Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank what they are used to
Guinnesss porter or some temperance beverage Wheatleys Dublin hop bitters or
Cantrell and Cochranes ginger ale (aromatic). Doesnt give them any of it: shew wine:
only the other. Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise theyd have one
old boozer worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink.9
The twentieth century has definitively secularized life and has sub-
stituted as Stanislaus puts it literature for religion as the thing which
would unveil the emotional and intellectual problems of men. Equally
Joyce, being a rebel, always maintained a Thomist passion for the system,
7 Joyce, Mi hermano James Joyce, p.129. See, on the same theme and later dealt with
in Ulysses, the ingenious passage from the same biography in which Stanislaus sets
out his vision of the Holy Communion as an act of cannibalism (p.106).
8 Joyce, Ulysses, p.77.
9 Ibid., p.78.
and while repudiating their origin, translated the most representative Irish
poets, W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge. He liked to think in terms of opposed
forces and recurrent cycles, and believed that whatever disappeared through
opposition would return transformed and rediscover its contrary. And
language was the medium of integration and the synthetic expression of
the evanescent and the everlasting. Joyce was the representative of a certain
metaphysical semantics,10 which, more important than the Babylonian
noise and lower than the most basic awareness, dissected feeling and reflec-
tion, giving place to whatever gives prevalence to the auditory pleasure of
hearing and reproducing the words by pure sonority, from the gnomn of
Euclides and the simony of Christianity to the paralysis of Dubliners,11
towards the extreme ludic sonority of Finnegans Wake.
Wine! What a wonderful word, and what an important substance in
the life of Joyce! Wine, as the pacifier of his existential tragedy, but also as
the promoter of his metaphorical resources: Farrington the copyist drinks
dark beer but on more than one occasion, when he feels upset, his face turns
red and takes on the colour of red wine or lean meat.12 There is in Joyce,
as in Barthes (although the latter assumed he was dealing with a basically
French mythology),13 a particular synaesthetic association between red wine
10 Jung says of Ulysses: The whole thing is an infernal nihilism, a magnificent monstros-
ity from hell, obviously brilliant if the book is considered from the technical point
of view of a work of art. Jung, C.G., Quin es Ulises?, trans. XXX, Buenos Aires:
Santiago Rueda, 1992, p.9.
11 See Joyce, James, Las hermanas, in Dublineses, trans. Guillermo Cabrera Infante,
Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1991, p.7. Jung supervised the treatment of Joyces daughter
in Zurich and attributed her mental illnesses in great part to her frustrated love for
her fathers best student: Samuel Beckett.
12 See Joyce, James, Duplicados, in Dublineses, pp.82, 84 and 91.
13 Steak is a part of the same sanguine mythology as wine. [] Like wine, steak is in
France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized. See Barthes, Roland,
Steak and Chips, in Mythologies: New York: The Noonday Press, 1972, pp. 6263.
I like wine, I like blood, says the eccentric character of a French novel who enjoys
the clotted blood that floats around the killing and who, at the same time, like a
good glutton sinks his teeth in the salty muscosity, iodized and fresh of the shellfish
accompanied by a dry white wine or a glass of Poully-Fuiss. See Tournier, Michel,
and bloody meat, which made him look down on and opt monogamously
for the electricity of the white:
He returns, then, to Trieste, where he resumes his classes and his drunken binges: as
a good Dublin wine is his refuge, apart from being an element of fine dining, whose
pleasures he shared with Nora [Barnacle], a woman with an Homeric appetite. But,
as with Nora, also with drink, Joyce is monogamous, choosing a particular type of
white whine red wine seems to him bistec-licuefacto, while the white is electric-
ity. Later, when he has to move to Zurich, he will chose another local white wine,
the Fendant de Sion, with a vague resemblance to a metallic ore in German Erz,
which he extended into Erzherzogin, archduchess, in order to engage in wordplay,
in Italian, very much in line with Ulysses: Si e pipi, ma pipi di archiduchessa. Alcohol
and the recurrent dental infections begin to damage Joyces eyes; in 1907, moreover,
they give way to a violent attack of rheumatic fever [].14
Although it cost him the gradual loss ofhis sight, he never stopped drinking,
and he always chose white wines whose names seemed to him sonorously
and practically suggestive of certain mystical associations, such as Saint-
Patrick-Clos, Saint-Patrice, or the wine named after the pope, Chateauneuf
du Pape.
The Ogre, 1972, p. 66. In short, as is shown by a communication from the University
of Bourgogne, meat gives us the first place to our nature as butchers, as predators.
It constitutes an intrusion of the natural into the cultural. Meat (viande), violacion
(viol), violence (violence) are similar words, semantically close to each other. That
animal element contains, at one and the same time, life and death. On eating meat
we digest agonies according the celebrated phrase of Marguerite Yourcenar. It is no
accident that a food thus provokes passion and repulsion, appetite and disgust. See
Lardellier, Pascal, La carne enmascarda de los fast-foods, in Revista de Occidente,
Madrid, April 2004, n 275, pp. 120121.
14 Valverde, Jos Mara, Joyce, Barcelona, Barcanova, 1982, pp.3334. This anecdote is
also related by his great biographer Richard Ellmann: Joyce sampled the Fendant
de Sion, a wine made from the Chasselas grape, while drinking one night with his
friend Ottocaro Weiss, who had returned from the war in 1919, and in a dialogue the
latter indicated that it reminded him of urine. To this Joyce responded, laughing:
S! Ma di unarciducchessa. From that moment it was known as the Archduchesss
and in that way it was celebrated in Finnegans Wake. See Ellmann, Richard, James
Joyce, New York, Oxford University Press, 1965, p.455.
Even though he never become the great connoisseur of wines which

he imagined himself to be, he always favoured it as a drink and faced with
the demands of his mother with regard to his love for alcohol in general,
on various occasions he desisted from drinking some aperitif in order to
dedicate his whole passion to wine. On more than one occasion he repeated
that he would like to have seven tongues in order to be able to taste several
wines at once.
Every city seemed to him particularly enchanting for its places to eat
and drink. Of his country and of his own city, Dublin, he liked the pubs,
especially those that surrounded Christ Church, because they reminded
him of medieval taverns where they importuned him with the sacred and
the obscene. In Rome, he loved the renowned Caffe Grego, the haunt of
Amiel, Thackery, Byron and Ibsen, amongst others, where the menu was
in English and it was possible to read the British dailies. In Paris, which
during the 1920s was a veritable party, he adored Les Trianons, a restaurant
whose owner and staff were his devotees, where they always read him the
menu and where every night he reserved a table so as to be able to sample
a different dish or a white wine. Moreover, in the French capital, he took
part in meetings organized by Peggy Guggenheim, the rich New York
heiress and patron of the arts, and, when he was not with Ezra Pound or
William Faulkner, often finished the night drinking with Hemingway, who
accompanied him many times to his house where both listened stoically
to the reprimands of Nora. Of the cosmopolitan Trieste he loved its pubs
thronged with people, open until the small hours of the morning, like
those of Dublin, and from which emanated the fragrance of another of
his favourite wines, Opollo. Amongst these pubs stand out: Lsteria, in
the city of Parenzo, above the via del Ponte, the Bonavia restaurant, which
was one of the first eating places in the city to have electric light and where
they served Italian wine and German food; the Trattoria Viola, where he
went regularly day and night; and the fine and expensive Ristorante Berger.
From time to time he went to three other restaurants: Ai Tre Pompieri,
Ai Due Dalmati and Ai Due Leoni. The last one, advertised from time to
time in the socialist daily Il Lavoratore, was a very fine place, with a pleas-
ant summer garden and distinguished by a an exceptional selection of
wines and beers. But his favourite bar was that of Francini Bruni, to whom
all the confirmed drinkers of the city went and generally returned home
singing La vergine degli Angeli (The Virgin of the Angels) from Verdis
opera La forza del destino, or some popular song in the Trieste dialect. In
Zurich, he favoured the restaurant and hotel Pfauen, where he met with
his friends to drink Fendant de Sion or in its absence other whites such as
Vallois or Neuchtel. He also frequented the Caf Odon, of which Lenin
was an assiduous client, and the renowned Caberet Voltaire, the meeting
place of the Dadaists.
Now the bars that he visited are as well known as the constant drunken
binges that took place in some of them. There are a number of anecdotes,
told by Francini Bruni or by Joyces brother Stanislaus, in which it is said
that they had to carry Joyce drunk to his home. Luckily for them and for
Nora, Joyce was never at any point in his life an aggressive or outrageous
drinker, but he did drink to the point of collapsing in public. Because he
was of very light build, he was carried home by friends who put him to bed.
The following day, when he got up, he would be grumpy, with red eyes and
moreover in a bad mood. Occasionally he drank until the early morning
and then he found it impossible to give his classes, as one of his students
remembers. One day, while he was teaching, he fell to the ground with-
out saying a word. The respectable middle class family, in a state of shock,
phoned a doctor. He diagnosed alcohol poisoning, possibly aggravated
moreover by malnutrition.
Although he didnt eat as well as he drank, he was an excellent host.
Those who have been invited to his parties point out how hospitable and
diverting they were, as well as how much he was concerned to offer a
highly elaborate meal served by the better of the two catering services
and a diligent waiting staff. Although with his mode of feeding himself
he showed that he didnt give too much importance to food, his friends
remembered him for his dedication, and he said with certain airs of the
gourmet reminiscent of Brillat-Savarin that God had made the foods
and the devil salt and the sauces.15
15 This is similar to what Tennyson said when he said: There is a saying that if God
made the country, and man the town, the devil made the little country town. There
Nothing kept him from wine, just as nothing kept him from litera-
ture. He did not even deprive himself of drinking other beverages, such
as his favourite whiskey, Jameson. This, he said, differed from all other
Irish whiskeys, which used filtered water from the Liffey, while his favour-
ite preserved the sediment, which gave it its special quality. Nor did he
deprive himself of a strange potion called Bilzbrause, although it could be
said that his monogamy for white wine was almost absolute. Not even the
ten occasions on which he had to go to the operating theatre to submit
himself to the delicate interventions of the surgeons on his eyes held back
his passionate fervour for wine. Alcohol was leaving him blind but in no
way did he ever abandon it. He believed that it was an indispensable ele-
ment at the table and he felt that it helped him escape from the economic
calamities which he had to bear as a result of the continued censorship of
his writings. He enjoyed it and he suffered it, like life and literature, at the
cost of damaging his vision although not his hearing; in respect to this,
one of his characters sang a pretty song:
Pull out his eyes,

Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.16
is nothing equal to the smallness of a small town. (See Tennyson, Hallam, Alfred,
Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p.96.)
See Joyce, James, Escritos crticos, Madrid: Alianza, 1975, p.163. In this reference the
phrase which Joyce spoke to Frank Budgen fits very well: Have you noticed that
when I am seized with an idea I can do with it what I like?
16 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p.4.
Svevo, the Unconscious and the Generous Wine
of Istria
Once Italy was Enotria or the land of wine and with this phrase the Greeks
established a fertile prognosis. The magnanimity of Dantes Paradise in his
Divine Comedy is comparable with the modern grandeur of Italian literature
as much as with Italian wine. Thus flow devotees drunkenly with alcoholic
and generously poetic songs of praise.
Instead of dying in Venice, one could set out from there for the Orient,
crossing the plains of Fruli, with their low ash-grey skies in whose wintry
landscape it is possible to make out the fields riddled with pruned wines
ready to support the crops like the belly of Maria, who in a poem of Rilkes,
Plegarias de las doncellas a Mara, is a force which dared to throw vine
leaves and plant the seeds and make the rays of the sun shine in order to
return them as wine.1 There follows a chalky high plain, Il Carso, where
the dawn rises from the quarries of Monfalcone which recede towards and
disappear in the Adriatic. The journey is completed by crossing a winding
road which passes through Duino and through the rock crowned by the
castle of the Thurn und Taxis, an emblem of literary inspiration, for it was
there at the start of 1912 that the same Rilke began his elegies. He began his
song like Orpheus his lyre, adducing its existence as longing, because If
drinking tea is bitter, turn to wine.2 Having passed Miramare the traveller
1 Suns burned, seeds sank;/and you became that wine. See Rilke, R.M., Gebete der
Mdchen zur Maria, in Werke I (Gedichte 18951910), ed. M. Engel and U. Flleborn,
Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: WBG (under licence by Insel), 1996, pp.95102.
2 Rilke, R.M., Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Ed Alexander, dedicated to the memory of
Jamie Alexander (available at paradox777.com), p.30. After Baudelaire, Rilke was
the last great correspondent in the landscape of European literature and poetry. In
a long letter written to the princess of Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe on 25 June 1925,
Rilke describes in a strange voice the appearance of Valais as a song moderated by the
seasonal flow and the time of the grape harvest. Amongst the varied and rich images
98 Svevo, the Unconscious and the Generous Wine of Istria
will feel the sweet welcome of the countryside which returns us to Trieste.
This is the ancient Roman Tergeste, a city associated for centuries with
the Venetian Republic, absorbed later by the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and which after many ups and downs became part of Italy again, until a
good part of its area of influence ended up converted into Yugoslavia and
later the Croatian coast. At that point in the journey it is good to stop
in the Istrian peninsula and meditate on the conspicuous link between
wine and literature, inspired by the myriad reflection in a sea of red lights
driven by the light breeze and a sky of dazzling brightness. (The Istrian
peninsula penetrates deep into the sea, forming an enormous arch like a
solid penumbra according to Zeno Cosini, the alter ego of Italo Svevo.)
Trieste is the city of the great historical bars, the San Marco, the
Torinese, the Tommaseo, the Degli Specchi, and the Cattaruzza, amongst
others;3 it is also the refuge of the great writers. These include Umberto
Saba,4 who once put himself to singing words as full of understanding as
wine and writing happy cantigas on the white tables of the Caf Tergeste,
surrounded by drunks who duplicated his delirium. I mention also James
Joyce,5 who lived there from 1904 to 1915 and from 1919 to 1920, where he
he points out the reason why the contemplation of his visit to Duino prevents his
acceptance of it: I told her of the peculiar charm which these places exercised over
me, when I saw them for the first time the previous year during the period of the
wine harvest. In another letter to a friend, a year later, he says: I understand more
and more that it is the sun of wine which alone has pleasure and interest in the lands
of the vine shoots. What surrounds him makes him write the short and exquisite
configurations of his late poetry, amongst which can be found his Breve ao del vino,
in which the stocks of wine are bodies made of grapes. See this interesting analysis
of his poetics of wine: Gruenter, Rainer, El Breve ao del vino, un ciclo estacional
en Valais de Rainer Maria Rilke, in Sobre la miseria de lo bello, Barcelona: Gedisa,
1992, pp.121134.
3 See Venaille, Franck, Trieste dcil parece existir como antes, in Los misterios de
Trieste, Mexico: FCE, 1985, pp.226237.
4 See Hersant, Yves, Umberto Saba muere en Gorizia, in Los misterios de Trieste, op.
cit., pp.107117.
5 See Rabat, Jean-Michel, La segunda patria del exilio: James Joyce en Trieste, in
Los misterios de Trieste, op. cit., pp.175213.
finished Dubliners, wrote some of the most important chapters of Ulysses

and poured out white wine in excess. And there is also Claudio Magris, who
in El Danubio6 stopped to describe the customary celebration of the wine
of Pecs. In his essay La felicidad he argued that existence itself is at times
a strong and generous wine which is drunk deeply, but that the claim to
seal it in bottles labelled with a sell-by date is a great deception. And when
they granted him a prize, he decided to celebrate by abandoning himself to
wine with aristocratic grandeur and without bourgeois caution. But Trieste
maintains an indissoluble identification with the figure of Ettore Schmitz,
known in the world of literature as Italo Svevo, a pseudonym which reveals
his Italian-German ancestry, and which in some way represents the vari-
ety of collectivities which mould the multi-ethnic and polyglot triestinos.
Svevo was a writer of novels, essays, stories and plays. Looked at from
the present his work can be seen to be an important milestone in the modern
renewal of Italian literature before the exponents of realism and decadence
(Verga, DAnnunzio, Pascoli and Croce). What interests us, however, is the
way the work of Svevo helps us to examine in depth the links between the
rationalization of experience, the unconscious, wine and the possibility of
truth. The Freudian theory of psychoanalysis amplified the ego (the self )
and constituted one of the narcissistic wounds of modernity. In the same
way Svevos characters introduce us, through their stories, to the world of
biographical illusions and contradictions and lay bare their failure to adapt
as a testimony to the solitude and insanity which modern society produces
in the individual. The protagonists of his writings embody a stereotype:
the antihero, young or old, who experiences the external world, from the
point of view of his interior discourse, as something alien. With that in
mind and in view of our interests we will attempt to recover his references
to wine and its effects on the unconscious.
Svevo was the first person to translate Freud into Italian and his studies
were a turning point in the development of his literature. We must remem-
ber that Freud had concerned himself in different works written between
1905 and 1911 with the theme of alcoholism, the addictions and wine. At
6 See Magris, Claudio, El Danubio, Barcelona: Anagrama, 1997, pp.258260.

that point he had related the psychopathology of mania and humour to

alcoholism and drunkenness, establishing the basis for a more profound
understanding of the addictions. In his work The Joke and its Relation to
the Unconscious7 he granted alcohol a disinhibiting function which pacified
the critical faculties and which connected the subject with the pleasure of
nonsense. Later, in his Contribuciones a la psicologa del amor (1912)8
he contrasts the relation of the lover with the sexual object and that of the
drinker of wine with the drink. While the lover pursues an interminable
series of substitute objects none of which provide complete satisfaction,
the drinker is more or less tied to his favourite drink and repeated gratifica-
tion does not affect the recurrence of his powerful desire. The great lovers
of alcohol describe their relation to wine as the most perfect harmony, a
model of a happy marriage. He also occupied himself later on, in his work
Acerca del mecanismo paranoico,9 with the role played by alcohol in the
deliriums of jealousy, suggesting that the drink overcomes the inhibitions
and annuls the work of sublimation. These bibliographical citations could
be accompanied by a customary note: the father of psychoanalysis exercised
a part of his libido by sampling in different Vienese restaurants Pollo a la
Fraulein accompanied by the traditional and exquisite red Durnsteiner wine.
Returning to Svevo, in his best-known work, The Confessions of Zeno,
which Montale describes as a great psychological comedy, psychoanalysis
turns out to be the support for a cathartic biographical story in which the
written word could encourage the objective of abandoning nicotine. (It
is close to the interior monologue of the characters of Joyce, the English
teacher, friend and the man who encouraged Svevo to write.10) The topic
of the relation of health to illness, whether imaginary, existential, or con-
crete, is always present and exceeds the prescriptions of any doctor. But
7 Freud, Sigmund, El chiste y su relacin con lo inconsciente, in Obras completas,

Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 19781985, Vol. VIII, pp.118124.
8 Freud, Sigmund, Sobre la ms generalizada degradacin de la vida amorosa
(Contribuciones a la psicologa del amor, II), in Obras completas, Vol. XI, pp.181183.
9 Freud, Sigmund, Acerca del mecanismo paranoico, in Obras completas, Vol. XII,
pp.5576.
10 See Svevo, Italo, James Joyce, Barcelona: Argonauta, 1990.
although tobacco is the inseparable companion of the story, wine also has
a prominent role. The chapter The Wife and the Lover records a journey
to Rome with a coachman with whom Zeno shares a passion for wine. Zeno
advises him to stop drinking the wine of Castelli, because it made his feet
swell up and the doctors had prohibited him from taking it, and to move
to Trieste in order to drink the very different wine of that region, which
is capable of assuring him of the success of its drastic cure.11 In the same
passage we participate in a reflection which points directly to the effect
of wine on discourse, its consequences for the ability to reason and on the
upsurge of diverse reactions, on recovering the other I we have in ourselves.
Thus Zeno Cosini takes part in a family dinner on the eve of the wedding
of the sister of his wife, who he loved in the past and has not altogether
forgotten. On this occasion he takes the opportunity to overindulge in
wine in order to relieve momentarily his feeling of unease, enabling him
to bring to light another personality, another self capable of manifesting
suppressed desires and feelings: Because of the effect of the wine, that
offensive word which was accompanied by a general guffaw, inspired in me
a genuinely irrational desire of revenge. In front of all the members of the
family, the wine assumed the identity of an instrument capable of produc-
ing an authentic metamorphosis, almost a potion of black magic. Then,
would you like to kill me? [] You have bad wine! He hadnt made a single
effort to try the wine which I had offered him. It is as if it was the wine (a
recurrent metaphor for the blood, in this case the blood of the protago-
nist) offered by Zeno which contained all the arrogance which until that
moment he had been showing off before his entire family. Shedding light
on his perfect knowledge of wine as an instrument which has effects in the
psychic dimension, Zeno uses it to combat his most evident incapacities
and although his thoughts and reasonings do not change, he uses alcohol
to gain courage and to liberate what was always hidden:
I felt truly degraded and beaten. I would almost have been capable of throwing
myself at the feet of my father-in-law to beg forgiveness. But that too seemed to me
something suggested by the wine and I banished the thought. [] Not every drunk
11 Svevo, Italo, La conciencia de Zeno, Barcelona: Lumen, 2001, p.160.

falls prey immediately to whatever the wine suggests. When I have drunk too much,
I analyse my impulses in the same way as when I am serene and probably with the
same result.12
But the effect of wine, despite being transitory, is not a medicine,

for the pain which afflicts Zeno, his inability to live, cannot be cured by
burying his real personality, mixing up his life with another: Perhaps I
did not always have the desire to confess myself, even when the effect of
the wine made me more magnanimous? Furthermore, that the fantasies
of the wine are authentic anecdotes does not mean that wine tempts us
to tell the truth: I found myself up to the neck in the lie, such that I even
added some false detail that had no purpose. And afterwards they say that
wine reveals the truth. In the end, looked at this way,
wine is a great danger, above all because it doesnt bring out the truth. Quite the
opposite of the truth: it reveals in particular the past and forgotten history of the
individual and not his current will; it brings to light, capriciously, all the absurd ideas
which he has cherished in more or less recent epochs; it does not take into account
the amendments and reads everything which is still perceptible in our heart. And it
is known that in this there is no way to erase it so radically, as is done with a mistaken
word in a bill of exchange. Our whole history is always legible in it and the wine
shouts it, forgetting that which life has afterwards added.13
Alcohol adds to our lives the desire to live with the greatest intensity, but
it does not bring us truth.
This thought informs different aspects of Svevos work. These include,
on the one hand, final judgements, such as that made by Aghios, the long-
lived character of the story Corto viaje sentimental,14 with his stomach
burned by the wine he has drunk: of no longer having confidence in any
kind of sincerity (a statement which characterizes to a large extent the
feelings of scepticism and discomfort which the work of Svevo cultivates,
in which man is hateful to man and life is a continuing mistake). They also
12 Ibid., pp.220221.
13 Ibid., pp.227228.
14 Svevo, Italo, Corto viaje sentimental, Madrid: Alianza, 1970.
include, on the other hand, the self-deception ofthe family head who looks
for justifications for his Bacchic excesses in the dry and sincere wines of
Istria, in the story El vino generoso:
I ate and drank not from thirst nor from hunger, but rather from hunger for liberty.
[] I loved that wine as one loves reminiscences and did not distrust it nor was I
surprised when, in spite of giving me glory and oblivion, it increased the anger in my
soul. [] And I drank much and spoke little, concentrating on scrutinizing my interior
to see if in the end it was filled with benevolence and altruism. That interior burned
slightly. But it was a heat which after would be diffused in a pleasing warmth, in the
feeling of youth which wine produces, lamentably, only for a short space of time.15
All of Svevos characters maintain that wine does not usually change
their vision of the present but rather confuses that of the future. Before
a toast they are capable of stating that it is necessary to live happily for a
couple of years in order to be able to bear more easily those which follow
thanks to the recognition of having already enjoyed, or that of happiness
there remains the lament, which covers the true pain of life. Man pursues
noble reasons in order to be able to explain and explain to himself those
acts which he carries out without really knowing why.
Perhaps this existential doubt might have been revealed in the sequel
to The Confessions of Zeno which was cut short because Svevo died while
preparing it. Like a sign of destiny, he lost his life as a result of the perni-
cious effects of neither wine nor tobacco, of which his characters speak at
length, but rather in a car crash in 1928: an unfailing sign ofthat modernity
which he did not understand, which relegated him and condemned him
in his life to the glassware business. They say, in a dream that his favourite
imaginary readers share, that Zeno Cosini still did not analyse himself
although he continued writing his diary and still has abandoned neither
tobacco not the generously alcoholic wine of Istria.
15 Svevo, Italo, El vino generoso, Buenos Aires: AZ editora, 1994, pp.1536.

Schwob, Stevenson and the Imaginary History of the
Wines of Samos and Bourgogne
Borges once pointed out that the critics had never noticed the source of
his book Historia universal de la infamia (1935) in Marcel Schwobs Vidas
imaginarias (1896). This book, whose unusual method caught the attention
of the Argentinean writer, professed like most of his stories the alchemi-
cal combination of real protagonists and fabulous facts which more often
than not were themselves fantastical.
In reality all literature is fantastic. Up to the present day we doubt to
which genre the world belongs, whether to the fantastic or to the real. It
is possible that it belongs more to the fantastic, because realism is only a
passing and perhaps a somewhat unhappy episode in literature. Language
itself is fantastic, that is to say, the audacity of supposing that we can fix
the world with words is pure fantasy.
Marcel Schwob was born and lived in France during the prolific nine-
teenth century, and, in addition to his renowned translations of Lucian
de Samosata, Stevenson and Meredith, he left us his art of circumstantial
invention through several little-read stories. Mimos brings together some
of them, which were sent to the author by the delicate infernal shadow of
a character, the poet Herondas, an inhabitant of the island of Cos under
the rule of the good Ptolemy. One of these stories,1 dedicated to the
theme which occupies us, tells how the tyrant Polycrates begged that they
brought him three sealed bottles which contained different delicious wines
from distinct vines. On receiving this order one of his thoughtful slaves
gathered together three different recipients: one of black stone, another
of yellow gold and a third of clear glass. But the absent-minded cup-bearer
filled all three jars with the same wine of Samos and took them to his
1 Schwob, M., Mimos, trans. A. Lenalie, Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1901,
pp.4243.
106 Schwob, Stevenson and the Imaginary History of the Wines
master. Polycrates contemplated the three recipients and took the one
of black stone, frowned, raised his eyebrows and broke the plaster seal in
order to smell its contents. His immediate comment was: This flagon
[] is of common material and the odour of he wine within it pleases me
but indifferently. Then he raised the bottle of yellow gold, admiring it a
good while, until he decided to remove the seal and whispered: This wine
[] is certainly inferior to its beautiful receptacle enriched with vermil-
ion grapes and effulgent vines. Finally he took the third and final jar of
clear and translucent glass and raised it and pointed it towards the light
of the sun. The blood red wine, heavy and vital, sparkled. He immediately
uncorked it, emptied its entire contents into a glass and drank it without
stopping to breathe. His words, like sigh, were: This [] is the best wine
I have tasted. In the act, he placed his glass on the table and on doing so
knocked over the bottle, which fell and smashed to pieces.
Until now, we have transcribed the story and its implicit moral. That
appearances deceive and that marketing celebrates with its best wines is
well known; we can also make reference to the current preponderance of
the container over the contents in the sphere of wine and the world of the
gourmet. The sight always demands more, because saturated with sweet
images it demands new flavours, in which the labels of the wines and the
presentation of dishes cover the ignorance of the overfed consumers. The
authentic wine trail is that of consumption, whose faithful advanced com-
panion is novelty. The confused vocabulary of the critics and the commu-
nicators, added to the stereotyped discourses of the sommeliers, smudges
grandiloquent adjectives over innocent appetites next to distracted wine
waiters who overestimate the oak-saturated drink at astronomic prices.
What is a wines elegance? Neither more nor less than the fullest consum-
mation of idealism That is to say, the wine acquires the value of a sign and
the sign the body of the wine. The virtues of what we drink, like everything
we consume, are stylized in an ever more abstract way, without reference
to any specific utility, however symbolic it turns out to be. Thus it is not
the case that the wine is fine or delicate but that it disappears as a product
wrapped in and providing elegance.
Schwob, Stevenson and the Imaginary History of the Wines 107
Nietzsche had already stated this in the nihilistic nineteenth century,

when he pointed out that the vacuous was not found in the fate but in the
origin of the word:
The truths are then illusions which have forgotten what they are, worn out metaphors
which have lost their sensible force, coins which have lost their image and which now
come into consideration only as metal, not as coins as such.2
All words derive their concept or sign not because they are suppliers of
the original and unique life, but rather because they are useful to us in
accumulating more or less analogous experiences.
From this line of thought it is also possible to recreate the story and
its tales. It is the attic of the memory. In this high and uninhabitable part
of the house, closer to the earth than to the sky, useless objects or objects
not being used are usually kept which are not thrown away because of their
sentimental value or for who knows whatever other odd reasons.
History bewitches us like an omnipresent spectre. Regarding the loft,
it is not a passageway but rather a chest to which we resort and which we
open when we need to make absence and loss a presence which we wholly
embrace and understand. Now we are aware that all historical perspective
is a lens which deforms, because to grant an autonomous meaning or abso-
lute value to a past event is to be a victim of the most profound illusion,
to make the vigil a dream.
What happened recently or several centuries ago is irretrievably lost.
The nature of what has already been is indecipherable and elusive. However,
we hold onto the past like sailor to his raft in the full knowledge that the
querulous sea has neither passion nor memory and is both impenetrable
and heartless. We do not want to lose the times that have passed because
we believe in our existence in the form of an echo which propagates itself
in the present as a fading resonance.
Despite having professed a kind of antihistoricism in his youth,
Nietzsche never managed to exorcize the spell of history. Beyond sensing
2 Nietzsche, Friederich, Introduccin terica sobre la verdad y la mentira en el sentido

extra moral, in El libro del filsofo, Madrid: Taurus, 1974, p.91.
differentiated external and internal spaces, he took the decision to recount

his life to himself . Ecce Homo is an enigmatic and tragic picture of his
intellectual trajectory, because two months after completing it he was to
lose his mental faculties. In it he wrote: the four Untimely Thoughts are
entirely warlike. They show that I was no John the dreamer, that I like to
unsheathe the sword perhaps also that I have dangerously loose wrist.3
The young philosopher makes us hear his convictions. We cannot become
lost in a knowledge which we do not translate into action:
From time to time I am invaded by a childish repugnance for printed paper, which at
such times seems to me to be only dirty paper. I imagine very clearly a future epoch
in which little is read and less written, but much thought and more done. Everything
seems to await already the arrival of the man of action who tears secular customs
out of himself and of the others and gives a new and better example to imitate. It is
done by night and I have to think of my part.4
Where are we going? Who knows? We have to change the course of the
world. The question is how to do it, for the world lacks a future.
Later on, Nietzsche specifies his intentions by writing De la utilidad
y de los inconvenientes de los estudios histricos para la vida:
[] the second Untimely Thought (1874) identifies what is dangerous, corrosive and
poisonous to life, in our way of doing science: The sick life of this machinery and
this dehumanized mechanism, the sickness of the impersonality of the worker, of
the false economy of the division of labour. It loses purpose, that is, culture: the
medium, the modern cultivation of science, barbarizes. In this treatise the historical
sense of which this century is proud, was recognized for the first time as an illness,
as a typical sign of decadence.5
Nietzsche sculpts himself with his own pen, which seems to remove him
from time but does not; it is rather what the whole man represents an
appearance ofthe unfathomable. His considerations paint him as an activist,
a seeker after polemics and an incautious denouncer of the complacencies of
3 Nietzsche, Friederich, Ecce homo, Madrid: Alianza, 1991, p.73.

4 Nietzsche, Friederich, Epistolario indito, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1929, p.133.
5 Nietzsche, Ecce homo, pp.7374.
the culture of his epoch. All history, sometimes that of others, sometimes
our own, yearns for a certain proselytism and elevates its protagonists on
exemplary and admonishing pedestals.
Now, if for ourselves the present turns out to be an accumulation of
confusions and pastiches, the reconstruction of the past on the part of
history is no less generous, except in its sculptural profusion, with respect
to the life of individual.
Returning to the theme of the materialization of the sense and the
idealization of the referent, history could stereotype lives to the point of
not bringing into play the objectivity of its descriptions. The past of men
in this world is like a banquet whose menu or rhetoric is fixed before-
hand. But just as the table unites, taste divides. Every life is as particular
as the taste which it has in particular. If not, how do we explain the things
about which history keeps quiet? We know that it is based on the facts,
the roles, the discourses, but not on the palates or on the alcoholic intake
of the participants. In this sense we can ask ourselves how Schwob would
have done in his eternal gallery of revisited historical personages. What if
Anacreon had not been so in love with the vine as to have sung to wine?
What if he had died, choked by a semilla grape at eighty-two years old?
Would Alexander have been drunk when he killed Cleitos? How could it
be that having been born in a fishing city, Erasmus would look down on fish
or would not be a furious drinker, having condemned like so many others
the idea that the truth is in wine? What was this intoxicating power of the
nepenthe plant which the elegant and divine Empedocles had, a power
which immobilized his attackers as if they have drunk sweet venom mixed
with sparkling wine from a crater? These peculiarities are the delights of
the history which she has not tasted, although literature has done, because
they turn out objectively inappropriate and indigestible. They are, or could
form part of, the imaginary lives which Schwob reconstructs, whose his-
torical characters take wine as a singular and irrenouncable symbol of their
private lives in such as way as to conspire against the biographies which
register basically their public lives and the important events in general.
Thus the magician Septima, a slave under the African sun, made his way
towards his sisters tomb by a peaceful road where the lovers drank date
wine leaning on the polished walls of the tombs; the poet Lucretius was
poisoned by a beautiful barbarian woman with arms laden with translucent

emeralds who handed out crateras filled with sparkling wine; the novelist
Petronius lived nourished by elegant things appropriate to a lover of luxury,
enjoying statuettes which imitated the figure of Praxiteles, sculpted from
foie gras and accompanied by amphoras of wine sealed with plaster and
diligently covered with gold, and died at the hands of a drunken butcher
who buried his hatchet in his neck above the headstone of an abandoned
tomb; the Maghribian Sufrah, the geomancer, drank African wine with his
princess lover when tricked by Aladdin; the heretic Frate Dolcino followed
and admired someone who thought he was John the Baptist, whose word
was as harsh as the wine of the mountains; the gentle soldier Alain who
served King Charles survived the nomadic attacks curled up in a pipe of
wine whose bottom had been knocked out at the entrance to a winepress
and drank his jars of wine in the Cheval Blanc tavern in Lisieux; between
his plunderings the pirate Kid was accustomed to pass through Madiera
to provision himself with wine.6
Everything, wine just as much as life, turns out to depend on how you
look at it. Everything is formulated according to the quantity of unmixed
mature wine which we have drunk or the spirit with which we are imbued
when we speak, according to whether or not we have eaten. To expel Pinot
wine or the black grape through the mouth is like exorcizing death, and
why not history, of which Blanca, la sangrienta, in spite of her short life,
knows plenty?7 And there is nothing sadder than the drowsy end of a meal:
Death is a terrible thing, the idea of which assaults me above all after having eaten.
The doctors who I have consulted do not know what advice to give me. I think I
have bad digestion. And there are days when my stomach bellows like a bull. It is
necessary to beware of these inconveniences. I will not tell you, my friends, if you
feel uncomfortable. The tumour could rise to the head and then one would be lost.
6 Schwob, Marcel, Vidas imaginarias, Buenos Aires: Hyspamrica, 1985, pp.40, 46,
5761, 63, 71, 102, 132. (Vies Imaginaires, Paris: Flamarion, 2004.)
7 Schwob, Marcel, Blanca, la sangrienta, in El rey de la mscara de oro, Buenos Aires:
Fausto, 1979, pp.97103. (Le Pays bleu in Le Roi au masque dor: dition commente
par Maurice Mourier, Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999, p.69.)
The emperor Claudio acted in this way, and nobody laughed. It is better to appear
vulgar than to put ones life in danger.8
And what if we enquire of the gods like the cynics did?
Because the gods decided it was necessary to eat in order to live, thought Crates,
they ought to have turned the face of man towards the earth, where the roots grow;
no one could feed themselves from the air or from the stars.9
Modernity has secularized the world and we are far from living in a paradise.
Death and metaphysics nourish themselves as intensively as the personal
roots and social imprints.
To recreate history is to make our tragic and profound humanity worse,
full, as Aristotle would say, of piety and terror. (Aristotle was the aesthetic
guide to Schwob, just as Virgil had been to Dante.) And it is to do so in
full knowledge that our heart is bipartisan and that the soul wanders about
from one extreme to the other of egoism and charity both in the individual
and in the masses. Making a genealogy of terror and the ways of produc-
ing it, Schwob tries to make piety (delicate commiseration and supreme
disinterest) rise in man, with the end of giving way to a new society where
there would be no poor people and everyone could eat. Literature, like
life, is a conjecture.
Under these classical principles, and trying to contribute to psychol-
ogy and philosophy, sciences of human things which have not yet reached
the level of the heavens, he brings together a series of stories in Corazn
doble, dedicated to Stevenson, who he read, translated and applied with
delight. He was particularly interested in those stories which refer to the
split personalities who hide their soul beneath the body as if the latter were
merely a garment, walking the streets of a foggy London or on that voyage
of initiation to a desert island where treasure is hidden. Schwob went to
look for his tomb in Polynesia, from which came his book Viaje a Samoa,
for he needed to continue his dialogue with Stevenson, although he only
8 Schwob, Marcel, Las estriges, in Corazn doble, Barcelona: Montesinos, 1981, p.26.
(Orginal in Cur Double / Le Livre de Monelle, Paris: Flammarion, 2008, p.28.)
9 Schwob, Vidas imaginarias, pp.3435.
did so after the latters death; in life they had only exchanged letters, but
had never met. After the voyage, Schwob said little of Stevenson, although
he once attempted to define him, pointing out that if life is grey and lightly
intoxicating, Stevenson was like a resplendent glass of sparkling wine. This
is something which the Scotsman would have liked very much, sparkling
wine being one of his favourite drinks. In Stevenson alcohol seems to be
a vital question which inundates his literature where it expounds, not
humour, but the dark side of the human condition, and the fertile idea
of the double in daily life. Double hearts and double personalities arouse
reflections on wine. The transformation of food which returns us to death,
and the taking of a potion which turns one person into another or sheds
light on his hidden side, like the wine which lets out, perhaps the truth,
or some part of what we are. Nabokov gave his attention to this question
when analysing The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; he dismissed
its status as a detective story and pointed out:
There is a delightful winey taste about this book; in fact, a good deal of old mellow
wine is drunk is the story: one recalls the wine that Utterson so comfortably sips.
This sparkling and comforting draft is very different from the icy pangs caused by
the chameleon liquor, the magic reagent which Jekyll prepares in his dusty labora-
tory. All this is expounded in an appetizing manner.10
10 Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, Volume 1, San Diego, CA: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p.180. Some of the references that could endorse Nabokovs
analysis can be found in the following Spanish edition: Stevenson, R.L., Dr Jekyll y
Mr Hyde, Madrid: Alianza, 1991. Mr Utterson is austere with himself and because of
this drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages (p.7); Dr Lanyon
recieves Utterson, the oldest friend of Jekyll, in his dining room, alone and savour-
ing a glass of wine (p.21); the doctor gave one of his pleasant dinners to some five
or six old cronies, all intelligent, reputable men and all judges of good wine (p.33);
Mr Utterson sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr Guest, his head clerk,
upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a
bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of
his house. The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps
glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen
clouds, the procession of the towns life was still rolling in through the great arteries
with a sound as of a mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle
Utterson, Dr Jekylls lawyer, enjoys wine as much as he savours his words.

He feeds himself from them, enjoying them as if the alchemical power
of their flavours and tones formulated the story which Stevenson wants
to make believable by making a dramatic fantasy march before sensitive
and sensible men in a familiar setting with a certain love for old Port. The
reality is combined with a nightmare world in a vagueness proper to the
inebriated or dreamers who allude to recreational concoctions of stories or
lives as real as imagined stories. Curiously, the destiny of books, on several
occasions, is united with that of their authors:
And there is something in Stevensons death in 1894 on Samoa, imitating in a curious

way the wine theme and the transformation theme of his fantasy. He went down to
the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favourite burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, and
suddenly cried out to his wife: whats the matter with me, what is this strangeness,
has my face changed? and fell on the floor. A blood vessel had burst in his brain
and it was all over in a couple of hours.11
The biographers recount that the bottle and the glass are pulverized, just
after his having sampled their exquisite contents. Perhaps they deal with
another moral, like the story of Polycrates which Schwob relates in Mimos,
or a whole edifying sentence, like that of Monelle (1894), the portrait of
Louise, the young lover of the Frenchman, who died of tuberculosis in 1893,
a year before Stevenson: That every cup of clay that is passed to you crum-
bles in your hands. That every cup from which you have drunk breaks.12
the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the
colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on
hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs ofLondon (p.50);
the final night Poole confesses his opinion to Mr Utterson before the fireplace and
a glass of wine which he never tastes (p.65); in his explanation of what happened
to Jeckyll he compares Hydes moral insensitivity and his foolish disposition to do
bad with the characteristics of an inebriate: I do not suppose that, when a drunkard
reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by
the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility (p.114).
11 Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, Volume 1, p.204.
12 Schwob, Marcel, El libro de Monelle, Buenos Aires: Argonauta, 1974, p.31. This pas-
sage reminds me of an inverse sense expressed in the verses 95 and 96 ofthe Rubaiyyat
Schwob did not die of a heart attack, but of a strange fever which
transfigured his sneer and left behind a bed full of books in a house sur-
rounded by the noise of the last playful children of the or gangs of rogues,
typical of the stories of Franois Villon, who he always admired for his use
of medieval slang.
Why continue recounting, or weaving conjectures between life, his-
tory, and literature in a world saturated with words? For western culture
writing would be, from the start, located in the virtual space of self-repre-
sentation. Writing, meaning not the thing but the word, advances towards
the discovery of a possible and impossible infinity. To insist on the story,
to avoid its disfunctioning, is a way of keeping alive the relation between
death, unlimited persecution and the representation of language by itself.
of Omar Khayym, in the version translated directly from the Persian by Omar Ali-
Shah and Robert Graves, when mentioning wine glasses formed from the clay which
comes from the decomposition of a dead body, as in the case of the lover, whose clay
is transformed into a wine jar. As Bachelard said, who might well have explained the
reference of Monelle: clay is for many souls a theme of fantasies without end. Man
asks himself endlessly from what slime, from what clay he is made. Because in order
to create clay is always necessary, an ambiguous material where earth and water are
united. Not in vain the grammarians discuss whether clay is masculine or feminine.
Our sweetness and solidity are contraries and require androginous interests. Clay
would just have to have enough earth and enough water. Perhaps we are only made
of tears and clay. See Bachelard, Gaston, An Essay on the Imagination of Water, Dallas:
Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1999, p.111.
Part 4
Taste, Modernity and Periphery

Argentina: A Corpus of Wine and Food
The night before last, behind a hovel, by candlelight in the open air, Patricio
Rodrguez, the French minister, the commander of the Decide, Conesa and
others crouching passed the gauchos blade in order to cut his slice of the roast
from the spit which was held by an old Indian woman. Not to have a photo-
graph! exclaimed the Frenchman. This was the god of the Pampas.
Domingo F. Sarmiento, Papeles del presidente
Sarmiento,1 the Fermentation of the Country and the
Preservation of Wine
It can be arduous dealing with someone who has been as stereotyped as

Sarmiento has. The bronze, the paintings of the school and the allegori-
cal songs, in conjunction with the vacuous and laconic commentaries on
his immense and little read work,2 have impressed on him the figure of a
poor and extremely civilized sneer, which dissipates his genius by turning
him into a national hero transformed into a statue. Institutionalization is
as opposed to living thought as the insulating material of marble to that
of the blood. Sarmiento is as vast as his inspired and defiant knowledge,
as our unknown identity:3 He has preceded us to the abysm, looking for
his origins and he has come face to face with his patria4 and remains an
enigma. A virile national hero in a nation of eunuchs, Sarmiento is unbear-
able because he exceeds his country.5
All collections of anecdotes harvest Sarmientos love for inverting
popular sayings. At various points in time he has subscribed to the idea
1 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (15 February 181111 September 1888) was an activist,
intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh president of Argentina.
2 Augusto Beln Sarmiento says that if his whole work were published it would reach
to 100 volumes.
3 Argentine is an anagram of ignorant (Argentino es anagrama de ignorante), in
Beln Sarmiento, Augusto, Sarmiento anecdtico, Buenos Aires: Arnoldo Moen, 1905.
4 While patria is generally translated as fatherland, this word has, to the English ear,
acquired unfortunate overtones of Nazism as the translation of the German vater-
land, and these overtones contaminate our understanding of the word patria, which
includes the senses of homeland, nation, and motherland, as well as fatherland.
So as not to prejudice understanding of this word, the translator has decided to leave
it in castellano in the text.
5 Romano, Ernesto, Sarmiento y la Divina Comedia Argentina, Pensamiento de los
Confines 11 (September 2002), p.123.
118 Sarmiento, the Fermentation of the Country and the Preservation of Wine
that the habit makes the monk, and perhaps this appreciation acquires the
appearance of a premonition with respect to its own surname,6 on which
he bestows an important meaning, as an invocation of an unbreakable
link with the Argentinean viticultural process. The vine shoot is the piston
rod of the wine long, thin, flexible and naked from which the leaves,
the tendrils and the clusters grow. It is worth recording that, although it
has been pruned in his inscription, he inherits from his parental root the
surname Quiroga Sarmiento, a synthesis of the drama of the country in
which its natural and civilizing stock are joined. The phrase inspired by
Alberdi completes the sentence when it says that Sarmiento is the Plutarch
of the bandits.
Sarmiento is Facundo because before sketching the story, he lived
it within himself with tremendous intensity; the book is not the fruit of
his intellect, but rather of all the potencies of his mind, of all his being.
Facundo contains more things than Sarmiento consciously put into its
pages. We cannot leave ourselves captivated by his adjectivization. He does
not scorn Quiroga and he considers Rosas a not inconsiderable rival. His
prose is so full of such suggestive virtues that, perhaps because of his aes-
thetic admiration for the subjects of the biographies, he comes to establish
a surprising parallel with Rosas. Indeed in his old age, he visited the tomb
of Quiroga, in order to affirm that the other side of the sepulchre was not
covered with repulsive characters, but rather with the sculptural forms of
Ajax and Achilles.7
Sarmiento condenses and contains everything: the positivist character-
istic and the archaic mentality. In the manner of Goethe, the rational and
the Faustian are part of his origin and his life. Doctor Faust, as he called
himself,8 is that plausible beginning of relativization, in which objective
reality is amalgamated with the imagination.
6 The name Sarmiento means vineshoot in Castellano.

7 See Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Obras Completas, Buenos Aires: Luz del Da,
1948, Vol. XLVI, Pginas literarias, p.85.
8 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XXXV, Cuestiones americanas, p.134.
Sarmiento, the Fermentation of the Country and the Preservation of Wine 119
Every beginning can be recreated; hence his genealogy and lineage

can be conjoined with the origins of viticulture. On the one hand, there
is a speech which, in recognition of the centenary of the United States
independence, he gives in the house of the minister General Osborne. After
speaking of the blessed Hispano-American offerings, he repeats the story
of the success of the cultivation of the vine in five North American states.
This is for him a form of competition with the French wine-producing
industry, something which it is possible to imitate in large parts of Chile,
Mendoza and Buenos Aires. He points out:
The vine was, however, indigenous to those primitive forests, and was growing there
in America before being discovered by the Scandinavians, for their runes speak of a
Vinland (a land of vines) where the men of the North touch the West: but it lacked
the southern spirit of Spain, France and Italy, which were always wine-producing and
introduced into America as far as California the classical vine sung of by Anacreon
and Horace.9
9 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XXII, Discursos populares, p.20. Sarmiento

echoes in this discourse the semi-historical traditions of the Nordic peoples which
relate the adventures of Eric the Red, a violent and absolutely free Viking whose
maritime deeds, rather than his murders in Iceland, made him transcendent in the
history of navigation. It is said that his Viking ship plied in an intuitive manner the
route to the west and reached unknown lands which he baptized Greenland. Shortly
afterwards, his son, Leif, guided by the birds which dropped from time to time and
by the great navigator of the Arctic, Bjarni Herjulfson, arrived at a province which
they named Vinland on account of the abundance of the wild vines which covered
its hills. The skilled legend which depicts the lives of these navigators will be dealt
with by diverse historians who will conclude that in the eleventh century numerous
embarkations for the new world of forests and vineyards left from Greenland and
that Vinland could turn out to be Labrador, Terranova or New England where wild
vines still abound. These ideas, although not their exact location, are confirmed by
an inscription in runic characters found to the east of the lakes which says: Eight
Goths and twenty two Norwegians, we explored the interior of the lands situated to
the east of Vinland. We raised our camp two days journey from this rock. We stayed
there one night and then returned here. Ten of our men have been killed. The other
ten are waiting for us on the coast where we anchored the ship, fourteen days march
from here. Virgin Mary let us find them alive. See Zaragoza, Clara Luz, Vinlandia
in Historia y mitologa del vino, Buenos Aires: Mundi, 1964, pp.147149. To confirm
On the other hand, in Conflicto y armona de las razas en Amrica, he

compares the extensive slopes of the Andean Cordillera and its agricul-
tural provinces to the cities of Europe, surrounded by vast fields with farm
houses, poplar groves and orchards, enclosed and constantly and carefully
cultivated. Sarmiento says:
A Portuguese group made prisoner during the frontier wars had been sent to that
isolated region by the border governments of possessions much disputed by both
crowns; and this group, which would be from Oporto or the wine-producing coun-
tries, introduced and cultivated the wine, which requires incessant work and intel-
ligence for the pruning season, the grape harvest, and the distillation of the wines
obtained.10
The vine and wine are symbols which ratify their nominal link in the attacks
which he receives beyond the Cordillera, in an article which is entitled A
mal sarmiento, buena podadera.11 As Ricardo Rojas (one of the few who
that wine was known in the new world with its various wild species, vitis aestiva-
lis, vitis cordifolia, vitis riparia, vitis candicans y vitis rotundifolia o vulpina which
are distinguished from the itis vinfera or linneo baptized by Linneus before
the arrival of Columbus in America. See also Imbelloni, Jos, La Esfinge Indiana:
Antiguos y nuevos aspectos del problema de los orgenes americanos, Buenos Aires: El
Ateneo, 1926, pp.9293.
10 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XXXVIII, Conflicto y armona de las razas en
Amrica, p.128.
11 As the subtitle tells us, it deals with a refutation, commentary, reply, or whatever you
want to call this riddle which in respect to the voyages published with neither rhyme
nor reason by one Sarmiento, one J.M. Villergas has written in odd moments, which
was reprinted in Buenos Aires, replicating the mistakes of appreciation expressed in
certain pages of the voyages of Sarmiento published in Chile, perhaps not so much
with antipathy as with a spirit of slavish devotion (of the French intelligence) with
the aim of not circulating with impunity species which could lower the good image
of the Spanish amongst our brothers in America. As well as the mistakes, which
according to this writer Sarmiento commits in his visit to Spain which occupies him
in counteracting argumentatively in the course of three chapters, he dedicates to him
from the start a poem written in Paris in 1853 which in one part sings: [] That
Spain, for example, is a vine / From which that Sarmiento has sprouted. / Because
of this, a conduct arouses in me / Great passions which, from you in decline / The
understand his physical and metaphysical enterprise) says, they help to

define him as a Dionysiac figure, a son of Zonda, because he is made in
the image of the land of his birth, and nourished by her.12
Sarmiento possesses the imagination and the sensibility of an artist,
but he never uses the word with purely literary ends for he understands it
as a didactic and pragmatic means of managing social reality. He wants to
reform customs or to found institutions and the Argentina which he forges
is his imaginary creation; but his writings do not correspond to the genre of
imagination. Because of this all his letters and all his work are anticipatory,
and in them whatever respects the vine and the production of its juice holds
a prominent position. This is meditated upon throughout his work and its
public function. Dionysian by sensibility and Apollonian by intelligence.
Personally, and doing honour to his name, wine is for him an enjoy-
ment which encourages his feelings and his imagination, as well as helping
him to think about the problematic of a industrialized country which he
pursues. The grape, like his meditations, brings everything together: the
regional influence (with the vine as the initiatory, original and Adamic
emblem of his childhood in San Juan) and the universal (when he feels
humiliated by his contemporaries in his land like Noah naked).
human tongue will never / Be able to calculate what you deserve. / And in effect,
sir, there comes a dart / Which pierces my breast / But is rather the same devil /
Which set the child against his mother. / Yes sir, I say this to you frankly, / Such a
practice tears the heart / For more than one attempts to demonstrate / That in the
world there is nothing more bizarre / That a Vineshoot gets bigheaded climbs the
vine. (Translators note: The final line, Que un Sarmiento subindose a la parra
contains an untranslatable play on words: Sarmiento, as we have already seen, as
well as being a surname, also means vineshoot; the phrase subirse a la parra means
literally to climb the vine and figuratively to become bigheaded.) See Villergas,
J.M., Samienticidio o a mal Sarmiento buena podadera, Buenos Aires: Imprenta de
la Revista, 1854.
12 See Rojas, Ricardo, El profeta de la pampa: Vida de Sarmiento, Buenos Aires: Losada,
1948, p. xii.
As well as having recreated for students the testamentary teachings

of Jesus,13 there is in Sarmiento a profound pantheism, for he thinks that
it is man who has the potential of completing and perfecting the divine
creation. By choice a founder of things he is always planning to measure,
map, carry out a census, alphabeticize, codify, legislate, plant and conserve.
The vine and its juice form a recurrent part of his symbolic meditations
and pragmatics.
The first grape varieties are originally grown in the Antilles after
Columbuss second voyage to America (1493) but because of the climate
of the Caribbean they are not very productive. And although the vineyards
achieve a certain degree of expansion in Latin America with the spread of
Christianity (which could not dispense with wine for the celebration of the
mass), in Argentina the first vines coming from High Peru date from 1543
and settle down well in the city of Salta and a little later in Cafayate. Years
later they manage to develop in Santiago del Estero (1557), Mendoza (1561)
and San Juan (1562), thanks to the intervention of the Jesuits. With plants
brought from Chile, which spread through the whole territory from 1598
(Crdoba, Misiones, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires), the first serious project
in the sphere of viticulture takes place in Cuyo in the middle of the nine-
teenth century. While Sarmiento is governor of this region he contracts
the Frenchman Miguel Aim Pouget, a native of Tours resident in Chile
and a specialist in agro-industry and fruit cultivation, who introduces the
implementation of new vine-growing techniques (grafting, branching,
reproduction, and the system of fallows), united to a series of new systems
for the production and preservation of wines. To this auspicious pairing we
owe, in turn, the creation of the Quinta Normal de Agricultura, inspired
by its Chilean counterpart, which has as its principal aim the development
of agricultural techniques and of experiments which can later be used in
the private sector. Thus they create the first model farm and bodega in the
13 See Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Vida de nuestro Seor Jesucristo, Buenos Aires:
Difusin, 1946. Inspired by the work of the German canon P. Schmidt, whom he read
in French, Sarmiento composed an orthodox history of Jesus, earning the approba-
tion of the ecclesiastical authorities who used it as a textbook in the state schools.
country, and introduce numerous species of trees (both fruit bearing and
forest), new Italian bees accompanied by new bee-keeping systems and, as
if this were not sufficient, they carry out the first reproduction of French
vines, amongst others the renowned Malbec, synonymous with wine in
Argentina.
In San Juan, Mendoza, Rioja and Catamarca, infinite varieties of dessert grapes, grapes
for dry wines, and grapes for making raisins have been cultivated, to a greater or lesser
extent, for a century. Some interest awoke in Chile forty years ago in improving the
cultivation and the varieties of grapes and in refining the musts, which has been done
satisfactorily, introducing from France the stocks of Bordeaux and other table wines.
And to Mendoza, Monsieur Pouget, an expert wine producer, brought a collection of
one hundred vine varieties, later going personally to France to exhibit his Bordeaux
wine of Mendoza which obtained a bronze medal, and to bring new stocks, etc.14
Now, man does not live from prizes alone. Sacramentos horizon is
prospective and greatly exceeds the conjuncture and circumstances.
Shall we protect the cultivation of the wine? We will protect it. How? By charg-
ing taxes on the consumption of liquors. Fantastic! In the capital it is converted in
stocks, and while the aguardiente is prepared, vines are planted whose fruit has to be
harvested eight or ten years after planting. How many drinkers are there in Chile?
Is it possible to augment, protect and duplicate the drunks along with the vines?
Later a day might come when the vines will give more aguardiente than there will
be drunkards to consume it, and behold! it would be necessary to go uprooting
vines and withdrawing capital from this industry in order to invest them in other
more lucrative ones. The protective right will be useless because the disproportion
between production and consumption, supply and demand, will have made the price
collapse all of a sudden. Then they say they will export the excess. Enough! Was it
necessary to double the value of a product in order to teach the convenience of
exporting it? If there was a market to which it could be exported at the price which
rights made exorbitant, wouldnt the producers have done it, without anyone med-
dling with their affairs?15
14 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XLII, Costumbres-progresos, p.109.

15 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. X, Legislacin y Progresos, p.320.
For Sarmiento, the problem with Argentina is its great size, an ailment
which can be traced back to the isolation in which the province lived in its
infancy, a symptom which shapes human progress in its capacity to sub-
jugate distance and space. On the mythical plane, to convert chaos into
cosmos, to dominate the void, is to begin a very concrete epic which resolves
the struggle between order and disorder. It is to subdue the pampas and
turn it into a city through real media such as the telegraph or the railway;
to exorcize dissolution in the same way as a good transfer stops wine turn-
ing sour and becoming vinegar; to turn the national tragedy into a divine
comedy constructed from routes of circulation, the path of Lacio, in which
he is Dante and Vlez Sarfield is Virgil, which takes the Argentinean pur-
gatorial closer to Europe:
There is no superfluous expenditure on a railway which the passengers dont have to

pay for with interest and the freight which passes through while it exists. [] The vines
of Mendoza and San Juan produce today twenty thousand cuarterolas16 of wine, and
when the railway arrives at the gates of bodegas the production could be doubled.
Rocha, the dealer from Buenos Aires, has in his warehouse in Calle Cangallo tunnels
to store the cargo of five ships and the modern construction of buildings prepares
underground bodegas for the wine with the end of keeping it from the atmospheric
variations which cause it to ferment. The wine of Cuyo will arrive in Rio de Janeiro
y Baha, in place of the European beverages, if they manage to ensure that the wine
of Bordeaux laid in the railway wagon in San Juan arrives at Buenos Aires without
having been stood on end, and the liquid that it contains rolled, tossed or stirred,
in loadings, unloadings, embarkations, disembarkations, and loading again. That
which will remain is excellent vinegar. Behold the organic function of the railway
between the Andes and Buenos Aires: to take wines and minerals of little value and
lower charge, in order to sell them off in Europe. Minerals, like wine, cannot be
moved twice without converting wine into vintage or minerals into valueless stones.
European wine, aged and decanted, gains with being transported if it is genuine: if
it is a peasants chemical composition, it gains with stirring and shaking, in order to
not settle the staining particles that give the wine a purple tint.17
16 Translators note: A cuarterola is a pre-metric measure, used in Argentina before the

introduction of the metric system in 1884.
17 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XXVI, El camino del Lacio, pp.162163.
What impressions are projected, in the eyes of the inhabitants of this coun-
try, of the infinite horizon and the emptiness of the pampas?18 Sarmiento
has a pantheistic spirit and faced with this threatening poetics of human
solitude, can complete and perfect creation. Because of this he rescues
from among the emigrants the poet from the province of Mendoza, Juan
Gualberto Godoy, who
has made beautiful compositions of American scenes and customs. He consecrated

his last canticles to the faraway patria and raised the spirits of those who fought. In
the chronicle curses against Rosas and his satellites are recounted which were not
lost in the wind because they were the ballast of the airborne newspaper19 and fell
on the table of the confederates like the words of the banquet of Nabuco. Godoy
was an especially progressive spirit. In 1811 his initiative was decisive in the creation
of the wine industry in Mendoza. In exile he dedicated himself to teaching. His
verses form a thick volume.20
In Sarmiento everything is cultivable. He makes a kind of compari-

son between agriculture and livestock farming; the former is static, fixed,
demarcated and requires a workforce, while livestock grows alone and free.
But he puts the emphasis on the farming of livestock, and improving the
native races with exalted examples from other countries. In the same way
as the conscience of a people could be transfigured, so could livestock be
perfected or the grape turned into a wine which possessed a value added
through careful cultivation and the respective crianza.
18 Now I ask: what impressions must be left in the inhabitant of the Republic of
Argentina by the simple act of cleaving the eyes to the horizon and seeing not
seeing anything. Because the more one fixes the eyes on that uncertain, diaphanous,
undefined horizon the more it moves away, the more it fascinates, the more it con-
fuses and the more one joins in contemplation and doubt! Dont you know? What
is there beyond what is seen? Solitude, wilderness, danger, death. Hence the poetry:
man dies in those scenes, he feels assaulted by fantastic fears and uncertainties from
dreams that worry him while awake. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Facundo, Buenos
Aires: Jackson, 1947, p.45.
19 Translators note: Sarmiento is here referring to Huricn, a newspaper written in verse
by Juan Gualberto Godoy.
20 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XIV, Los emigrados, pp.375376.
Among so many obstacles which are opposed to its development, San Juan has an
anchor of salvation, which is the cultivation of the vine, whose products are measured
not so much for the original goodness of the grape as for the degree of intelligence
which is found in producing it. The wine which disturbs the reason is the product
of reason itself. The experiences of successive generations which have taught them
to make wine are age-old; Suetonius spoke of the wines of France, just as Julius
Caesar mentions, in his Commentaries, the beer which was then the essence of the
Germans. We do not ourselves have this experience and it is contemporary science
which we have to ask for advice on making our wines, because in order to export
them profitably we have to act like grown men in the markets using the science and
the experience of every nation of the world. A bushel of wheat exported from San
Juan to the Litoral will not withstand the freight charges even by rail; but a bottle
of Chateau-Lafitte, or of the widow Cliquot, can reach the Poles, cross the seas and
scale the mountains until it comes across a civilized man who drinks it. The Cossacks
went to France to drink all the champagne that they encountered, when France paid
a high price and accumulated with interest the taste which devoted itself to fifteen
years of obeying and glorifying its tyrannies. You have seen seor Doncel, the state in
which the Quinta Normal is to be found, which should have been for twenty years
the great agricultural school of San Juan, the plant nursery of the industrial cultures,
of the vine, of the forest trees, of the forest, of what is lacking.21
It is necessary to educate the soil as much as those who work on it,

because he aspires to the development of farms which would act as train-
ing centres for people who would make cultivation their office. But it is
also necessary to conserve, to survive In the same way as he thinks of
the preservation of the corpse through the process of mummification, he
gives a special impetus to conserving everything produced meat, wine,
etc. (Mummification is a circumstance which worries him, for he supposes
that on the basis of the discovery of some product people will want to
accommodate the dead in their houses, with the resulting possible collapse
of the cities, for the dead are condensed time, just as coal is light and heat
deposited for later use.22) The sarmientan drinking trough is in this case
the inescapable reference of the first brilliant oenologist, Louis Pasteur,
21 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XXII, Discursos populares, p.260.

22 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, La vida de Dominguito, Buenos Aires: Ediciones
culturales Argentinas, 1962, Vol. VI, p.106.
and his Etudios on wine, its diseases, and the causes which provoke them,
New procedures for conservation and aging (1866). This work is the
exponent of his germ theory: Kill the germs says the Frenchman and
his American disciple senses this when, without having read the book, he
prescribes the obligation of boiling water before drinking it in order to
combat the yellow fever epidemic. Pasteur is responding to Napoelaon IIIs
request to investigate why so much wine deteriorates before the arrival of
the consumers, something which was detrimental to French commerce. He
proposes to improve the quality of the preservation of wine by heating it
to a temperature of sixty-eight degrees for ten minutes and then cooling
it rapidly, or that is to say, pasteurizing it. In this way unwanted yeasts
are killed which might otherwise be introduced into the manufacturing
process; by means of the seals of the containers the wine would not turn
sour. Pasteur has refuted once and for all the theory of spontaneous gen-
eration (the belief that living organisms could develop out of inanimate
matter) and makes us understand that if wine comes into excessive contact
with air it allows the development of vinegar bacteria (acetobacter). At the
same time he discovers that the quantities of oxygen which make the wines
mature are very small, that their action is not brusque but rather gradual,
and that in a bottle of wine enough oxygen is dissolved to trigger a process
of ageing years in duration. Sarmiento turns to the best of the sources:
Monsieur Pasteur, the celebrated French pharmacist, had already hit the nail on the
head and had taught the preservation of the vines from the illnesses to which they
are exposed, such as the acidity to which they are exposed by a number of ailments.
Behold questions of interest to all, and whose solution insures millions of lost for-
tunes. In order to avoid the degradation of wine, M Pasteur advises cooking the
must at as high a temperature as is necessary to kill or sterilize the plant seeds whose
germination will cause the wine to rot. To avoid meat rotting it is enough to cook
them and preserve them from contact with the air. Preserves [] We recommend
the reading to the District and Municipal counsellors, the heads of families [].23
We cannot permit ourselves the luxury of making history fall silent as

did Hebe, the celestial cupbearer who, on falling down spilled the nectar
23 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XLVII, Educar al soberano, p.73.

destined for the gods.24 And thus with the glasses, engraved in the style of
Borghese which represent a festival presided over by Bacchus, accompanied
by Sileno and the Bacchantes (who as funeral urns precede the tomb of
Dominguito with the aim of making the tombstone that covers the hubbub
of the earth less heavy), Sarmiento orchestrates in his head and foments
legislatively, in parallel with the viticultural industry,25 the development
of the glass industry in Cuyo:
Castellano is, as is known, very poor in word play. [] San Martn has left in his cor-
respondence one of those quid-pro-quos of a great practical variety. What is it to
blow and make bottles? we ask traditionally, when we think that it is the simplest
thing in the world, for the glazier only has to give a puff to the molten glass and a
bottle is made. [] How good it would be to have cheap bottles to embottle, purify,
improve and export wines. Excellent: but neither the province nor private industry,
have anything to do with the public good, with its own advancement. The nation
ought to make bottles.26
This is a recommendation which considers how many of the exports,

beyond some wines of remarkable quality, have failed because of their style
and their container. And Cuyo ought to turn winemaking into an industry
in the same way as Tucumn did with sugar:
The wines begin to supply a strong article of export, those of the Marenco Cereseto
y C.a brand being preferred, which supplied ten thousand bordalesas27 of what goes
this year. In the exportation, however, the attention of the Commission has been
drawn to examine four of five qualities of particular origin, although many of the
samples sent by the Club Industrial have turned to vinegar, which that useful society
should bear in mind, in order to remedy the defect in the bottle or in the making.
In Tucumn the machines, the capital and the intelligence, have created the sugar
industry in five years. Mendoza is on track to improve its wines. San Juan, more out
of the way, needs to put more intelligence and it has it. Put it in practice.28
24 Sarmiento, La vida de Dominguito, p.89.

25 See Ley fomentando la industria vincola in Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. L,
Resumen Cronolgico, p.48.
26 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XLI, Progresos generales, pp.1316.
27 Translators note: A bordelesa is a wine barrel holding 225 litres.
28 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XLI, Progresos generales, pp.361362.
He had experienced these advances in the viticultural industry in the

course of his journeys, and in his logbooks of expenditure, in addition to
the excellent French wines of Bordeaux and Chambertin, and Italian ones
such as the Napolitan Lacrima Christi, he records the purchase of glasses
in the exquisite factories of Venice. And these industrial advances are often
joined with beneficial conjunctural situations such as the one propagated
by the Phyloxera, which gives these lands a unique comparative advantage:
Above all it is necessary to inform the villages interested in the cultivation of the
vine that after ten years of hastening the study and observation of the learned, such
as French practices, we have arrived at two conclusions with regard to the disease of
the vine called phyloxera: First, that it is a destructive insect introduced from with-
out and secondly that every attempt to extinguish it in France has been ineffective
up until now. The insect went to the United States with certain stocks of wine and
it has reproduced itself everywhere and not only in the part where the new stocks
were introduced. [] Our conclusion is as follows: given that Phyloxera has still
not been introduced into this part of America, Congress, the Legislature, customs
prohibitions, the guards and the police ought to prosecute as the most abominable
infection, just like syphilis, the introduction of any vine plant, from any part of
Europe or America, from one part to another part of America.29
Faced with the spread of Phyloxera as a plague throughout Europe,

Sarmiento orchestrates a strategy for the development of the winemaking
industry in Argentina. This consists in trying (with the support of Pasteur)
to prevent the producers introducing new plants and making them perfect
the production of the wines on the basis of a verified grape. And given
that he knows the position of our country, one of the biggest consumers
of the wines of the old continent, and that of Buenos Aires, the second
largest external market for French wines and their derivatives, he wants
them to invest in the road of importation from the Andes to the coasts,
and perhaps also exportation, to where the bon-march is reached so that
our production might compensate for the lack of European wine.30 At the

30 Ibid., p.112.
same time he celebrates the disclosure made by M. Marquette in the book

Le vigne et les vins dans la Rpublique Argentine (1886), whose proposition
is to make known to these families who have been dispossessed of their vines in France,
the excellent conditions in San Juan and Mendoza for continuing the cultivation,
moving them there, with the advantage that the industry exists on a large scale and
only needs the intelligent work of the French vine grower, with his ages-old methods,
in order to produce the best French wines at the foot of the Andes.31
Like his genius, Sacramentos intuition lacks limits. Although he can

separate the enjoyment of wine from the alcoholism which has lain in wait
for several of the figures who he respects (his father, Aldao, his teacher,
Oro, Paz, San Martn, etc.), at the end of the nineteenth century, imbued
with the Dionysian passion, he already knows how to sell the wines of
these lands with the aim of creating another industry which will reposition
Argentina in the world. Almost as a jest of fate against the way in which the
wine industry could have been developed, the country was disintegrating
by contrast with the possible development and preservation of our wines.
It is suggestive to listen to the contemporary sommeliers and critics
using in many cases the same arguments used by Sarmiento so long ago:
The wines of San Juan y Mendoza, which are already beginning to predomi-
nate in our consumption, are slightly headier than the Chilean, and could
this year in France impart courage, which there they lack, and here have
too much, because offered too often.32 The concepts and the distinctive
attributions which some present-day oenologist constantly makes about
out wines or the singularly named of the new world capricious and
possessed of terroir had already been pointed out by the prophet of
the Pampas capricious and possessed of nerve two centuries before.
In this country, as Sarmiento put it, everything, even words, has a
return voyage. In his text on Muiz, he rescues the indigenous (from the
invention of the bolas made by our historic ancestors to the cultivation
31 Ibid., pp.292293.
32 Ibid., p.60.
and consumption of rheas, ostriches, mules, and osos lavanderos),33 making

public the fauna of the Pampas to the gastronimic world of the twenti-
eth century. At the same time, premonitory again, as if anticipating a
long and consistent guffaw, he laughs at his times, as we ourselves could
become indignant today faced by the fake gourmet world, making a criti-
cism of the incipient Porteo menagerie, when he speaks of the cultured
people of Buenos Aires because to be cultured is not a matter of saying
one is cultured do not eat armadillo for refinement, for M. Charpentier
has not recognized them as cultured, he, who serves frogs to the French,
and we will not sell a pig in a poke to his parishioners.34 (The criticism is
similar to Nietzsches consideration, untimely in time and appreciation,
with respect to the cultera or culture of the Philistines.35) Although
not everything ends here, for he practices that criticism when he makes
fun of the French culinary doctrine in the referred to aristocracy which
looks down on the criollo,36 and in his residence in El Tigre offers a meal,
in which the president participates, and explains it is only for those who
give carpincho por liebre:37 The meat is excellent, and in a Venetian fes-
tival held in Carapacahy all the High-Life taste in general of an enormous
roasted carpincho, the women who did not know that it was carpincho,
licking their lips, and licking the moustaches of the men who did know:38
Perhaps as a sweet they would have served ambrosia, that pudding he had
baptized and which his granddaughter offered him assiduously as a telluric
33 Translators note: A kind of bear native to Latin America.

34 See Nietzsche, Friederich, Consideraciones intempestivas I, Madrid: Alianza, 1988,
pp.2627.
35 Sarmiento, Obras Completas, Vol. XLIII, Francisco J. Muiz, p.99.
36 Translators note: Criollo refers to the mixing of European and indigenous people
that took place in Latin America.
37 Transaltors note: Literally carpincho instead of hare. Like the hare, the carpincho
is a species of rodent, but whereas the hare is native to Europe, that carpincho is a
Latin American species. The point here is that the Argentinean aristocracy looked
down on everything local and prized everything European. Hence Sarmiento fooled
his guests by pretending that the meat was of Euroean and not local origin.
38 Ibid., p.98.
and divine present.39 On concluding the journal surely he will have drunk
a toast, as he always does, in honour of the fine drinkers: tout seigneur
tout honneur!40
39 General Sarmiento, who in spite of his intellectual preoccupations, was a superb

gourmet, adored this dish, which his granddaughter, an artist even in culinary mat-
ters, prepared several times for him, and which he baptized with the poetic name
that it carries. In case you are tempted to transcribe the recipe that Juana Manuela
Gorriti collected: Mix a litre of good milk with a pound of sugar and put it on the
fire: add two egg yolks and six well beaten whites separately, and the grated rind of
two lemons. Stir this mixture in a lively fire, until there appears on the surface a green
syrup. Pour it, then, in a pudding basin previously spread with butter and put it in the
oven at a moderate heat and cook rapidly. The moment that the pastry begins to stick
to the sides of the pudding basin, sprinkle a glass of the best wine of the standard of
a port. The curaao is the wine most recommended for this pudding. Thus they will
be able to offer their guests a taste of a confectionary with a history and, while they
are devouring it, to think they have managed to grasp it by the mouth. See Gorriti,
Juana Manuela, Cocina Eclctica, Buenos Aires: Librera Sarmiento, 1977, pp.326327.
Aldao: Servile Monk and Drinker
The history of Argentina has its pedestals on which are mounted heroes,
traitors and martyrs, although some of its protagonists are difficult to
characterize and remain in the shadows of the unnameable. Our attention
is drawn by the scanty bibliography, or perhaps the silence that surrounds
the figure, as brutal as suggestive, of the dipsomaniac priest Flix Aldao.1
The religious hosts have proclaimed their Apocalypse in the plundered
indigenous America and have supplemented the evangelizing word with
the blade, the blood of Christ with the alcoholic emanations of wine, and
the kingdom of heaven with the government of the land thieves. The cross
and the sword have gone on a pilgrimage together, turning the military
career into a priesthood and the vows of faith (in the Jesuit missions, for
example) into a militia of a political nature. Martnez Estrada, who consid-
ers that our psychological modus operandi bears the stamp of the police,
gives this priest as an example of this association:
Goethes Mephistopheles associates, without needing to look for histories, war,

commerce and piracy. But in South American lands, perhaps without this being an
innovation, the militia associated itself with another institution, which it protected
while taking prestige and strength from it: the Church. During the civil wars, our
great saga, the priest and the caudillo2 worked together and at times were one and
the same, wearing the generals uniform over the cassock. This is the case of, amongst
others, the friar Aldao, a barbaric caricature of Richelieu.3
1 Jos Flix Esquivel y Aldao (17851845): Dominican friar and soldier who became
general and caudillo of Mendoza.
2 Translators note: The word caudillo can be translated as political boss or tyrant
but it has no exact equivalent in English as it refers to a distinct social reality, i.e., a
rural landowning class that combines aspects of feudal social relations and culture
with certain aspects of bourgeois culture and social relations.
3 Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Muerte y transfiguracin de Martn Fierro, Mexico: FCE,
1948, Vol. I, Las Figuras, pp.221222.
134 Aldao: Servile Monk and Drinker
However, the figure of Aldao exceeds every imaginable stereotype,

breaks the moulds, and blackens the white scapular with the foul-smelling
and ruby red blood of the fratricides. It is one thing to endorse slaughter
and conquest with the divine word, and another, similar but different, to
be the stern executioner. The idea of a sacrilegious priest fires the imagi-
nation, particularly when his life dilutes commandments with licentious
customs associated with women, gambling and drinking.
The Sarmentinian Heraldo de Facundo anticipates with his actions
the prolific banners, Religion or Death, inscribed in black on two femurs
which make the slogan an ambivalent alternative. Aldaos caudillesque4
family lineage approaches on the one hand popular sympathy and on the
other, requires that he be portrayed as a tyrant. He (or his minions) governs
the land of wine at the foot of the Andes, with certain turbulent inter-
ruptions between 1840 and 1845. Mendoza is also going to bow its head,
chosen for a battle before the altar of that degraded Bacchus, who comes in
the spirit of an orgy, spreading in the streets the torrents of his lust, stirred
with the blood spilt in the paroxysm of intoxication.5 The Argentinean
bacchanalias complete the triadic damned altar of the fourth period of
national tradition: the monk (the knife), the tiger of the plains (the lance)
and the restorer (the feather). The rhetoric of Joaqun V. Gonzlez finds
Aldao as a kind of inebriated and convulsive antichrist, a faithful represen-
tation of the hereditary vices of Argentinean sociability in that historical
period, a figure which is contrasted with Omar Khayym who professes
the Sufist philosophy, exalts love and intoxication as a mystic ecstasy, and
whose work, the Rubiyat, Gonzlez translates into Castellano.6
Plato, who considers that wine communicates health to the body and
restraint to the soul, mentions certain restrictions, on its use which are
based on the experience of the Carthaginians. These include abstention
on the part of the magistrates and judges when they are carrying out their
4 Translators note: Caudillesque: pertaining to the caudillo class.

5 Gonzlez, Joaqun V., La tradicin nacional, Volume II, Buenos Aires: La Facultad,
1912, p.239.
6 See Khayym, Omar, Rubiyat, trans. Joaqun V. Gonzlez, Buenos Aires: Hachette,
1983.
public functions, and drinking as little as possible or never when taking

part in any warlike expedition, because of its capacity of dominating our
spirit and leading us to do what is against our interests. War and alcohol
have been incompatible since antiquity, as were reason and madness from
the start of modernity.
The best-known anecdote about Aldao is also the one most disputed
by historians. It situates him in a merciless battle in which, after two days of
intense fighting, a truce is agreed, as a result of which his brother Francisco
goes to the enemy camp negotiate. The negotiator points out:
Gentlemen, he said with dignity and confidence, there is nothing left, it is Felix
who has already eaten!, giving these words, which he repeated several times, a par-
ticular emphasis. To an aide-de-camp he gave the order to advise Flix that he was
there and that the slightest threat on his part was a violation of the treaty. [] D. Jos
Aldao also enters the field, for they surprised him at the gate, from where he returned,
exclaiming, This is Flix! He is already drunk! He was indeed drunk, as was his
custom during the afternoons; three or four days previously, it had been necessary
to put him on a stretcher in order to save him from the enemy guerrillas who were
approaching him. Confusion was introduced into the camp and the approach of the
Auxiliaries of D. Flix and the Azules of San Juan completed the defeat. A moment
later the friar penetrated the camp taken with such little cost; on top of a cannon
there was a corpse wrapped in a blanket; a vague premonition, a confused memory
of the message which his brother had sent him makes him uncover the face. Who
is this?, he asks those who surround him. The vapours of alcohol blinded his sight
such that he did not recognize his own brother who had been so brutally sacrificed.
His aides-de-camp try move him away from this sad spectacle before he recognizes
the corpse. Who is this?, he repeats in a decisive tone. Then he knows that it is
Francisco. Hearing the name of his brother he straightens himself out; the fog clears
from his eyes, he shakes his head as if waking up from a dream, and seizes the nearest
lance. Woe to the vanquished! The butchery begins [].7
7 Sarmiento, Domingo F., El General Fray Flix Aldao, Gobernador de Mendoza, in

Los Caudillos, Buenos Aires: Jackson, 1945, pp.3031. This episode, which Sarmiento
portrays, depicts him as a young man with his father Clemente, under the command
of Nicols Villanueva, is known as the Battle of Pilar and is remembered as the
most dreadful massacre in Argentinean history. Historians have disputed the accu-
racy of this Sarmentinian description of the fratricide, although not the facility with
which the person got drunk and committed illogical actions: it is certain that the
Butchery and wine participate in the same bloody mythology and

in the course of our history have been assimilated to the excesses of the
caudillos, the latter having been present as forms of reaction and domina-
tion over the political and social scene from the first days of the countrys
independence. In western culture, however, wine has been personified as
the revealer of profound dreams, for when the must boils in the vat it brings
to the surface everything that was in the dark depths. From the process
of fermentation it is possible to obtain either the finest of wines or mere
vinegar. And because of the preponderance of tyrannical fear, from the
religious superstitions of the Sociedad Colonial to the Mashorca, part
of our history, like American history in general, has been read on the basis
of a vision of wine which oscillates between the sword of Dionysus above
military action was rapid and the group defending the city was overcome without
major difficulties. Aldao inspected the enemy lines and inside a blanket he found
his brothers corpse. His rage was so terrible that he began to kill with his bare hands
the prisoners who he found in the passage. It has been debated whether Francisco
was shot as a reprisal for the attack or whether the very arms under the command
of his brother killed him. There have also been polemics about the drunkenness of
the friar-general. Some historians have attributed this kind of polemic to the legend
devised by Sarmiento. One of the chroniclers of the epoch, the Unitario Jos Luis
Calle [Translators note: During the nineteenth century the unitarios believed in cen-
tral control from Buenos Aires and opposed the federales, who believed in regional
autonomy], does not expressly mention this circumstance, which has seemed to some
an argument against Sarmientos version. The truth is that, irrespective of the details
of the circumstances and of the origin of the gunpowder and which drove the fatal
bullet, the action ordered by Jos Flix Aldao was his brothers death sentence, as he
was in the enemy camp negotiating an agreement. The absurdity of the action sug-
gests that drunkenness might be the truth. See Correas, Jaime, Aldao (17851845),
in Historia de caudillos argentinos, Buenos Aires, Alfaguara, 1999, pp.171172. What
is interesting in Sarmientos story is that he tells us that he often got drunk during the
afternoon and evening. It is important to appreciate this detail in order to remember
the Platonic recommendation which advised not using the day for drinking, for
one ought to fill ones time with ones occupations, nor the night, for this ought to
be used for the engendering of sons. Aldao had children wholesale and by various
women and in addition dedicated himself to drinking in the afternoons. What is of
interest in Sacramentos story, is that he tells us that he usually got drunk during the
afternoons, which did not do him the least harm.
the head of Damocles or the disproportion of acetic acid in he composi-

tion of a wine.8
Now, in its intoxicating condition wine has stimulated poetic crea-
tion, has put philosophic discourse on the right track and has pacified
certain existential tragedies. The fountain of metaphoric resources, it has
promoted interior monologue or has been assimilated to a strong and
generous existence, then sadly embattled for the bourgeois life. In this
sense, it has got on well with dandyism but not with war and its rational-
ity. In fact, when Aldao fell prisoner to the forces of Paz after Oncativo, a
number of chroniclers pointed out that he was drunk and with his belt
loose. It is thus that the origins of the history of the nation and of America
are swarming with stories, many of them passionately denied, in which
certain alcoholic beverages have produced the debacle and not just of the
federales (as Ramos Meja believes without much foundation9), but also
8 The Mendocino, Agustn lvarez, a follower ofthe educational ideas ofSarmiento and
preacher of lay pedagogy (both were recognized as teachers by Martnez Estrada),
closes one of his books relating the first half of the Argentinean nineteenth century
to a vinegary wine: When the proportion of acetic acid in the wine is quite consid-
erable, it is called vinegar, and if, using the same criteria, we had given past epochs a
name corresponding to the principal component of their spirit and of their human
conduct, we would have to say that the satanic epoch commenced and terminated in
America in 1810: the superstitious reign of the devil intensified amongst us between
1820 and 1852, and prolonged itself in an ever less accentuated form until the present.
See lvarez, Agustn, La transformacin de las razas en Amrica, Buenos Aires: Casa
Vaccaro, 1918, p.223.
9 It is said, and I dont know with what foundation, that Quiroga was accustomed
to inflame his mobs with strong potions; that the dictator Francia made frequent
use of eau-de-vie; that Artigas usually got drunk, and that the lethal action of amyl-
ose has awakened more than once en D. Juan Manuel the bloody impulses of his
moral madness. See Ramos Meja, Jos M., Las neurosis de los hombres clebres
en la historia argentina, in Obras Completas V, Buenos Aires: Editorial Cientfica y
Literaria Argentina Atanasio Martnez, 1927, p.84. Canal-Feijo responds to him
in an article in Revista Sur dedicated to Martnez Estrada: In the second half of
the century the cultured intellect dared to denounce the neurosis of the famous
men of Argentinean history. Few celebrities were saved from the catalogue (except
for those omissions dictated principally by the scruples of Portean courtesy). []
of the patriotic liberators. Sarmiento demands caution on the part of the

hygienist in the use of his texts (taken exaggeratedly literally in the case of
Aldao, and echoing the erroneous gossip with respect to Quirogas alcohol-
ism, who the native of San Juan says was a gambler but not a drinker). We,
for our part, must be just as cautious with respect to the rumours about
the state of inebriation in which San Martn and OHiggins were found
on the day of the defeat at Cancha-rayada.10 The customary hygienism of
Ramos Meja makes him believe that the figure of Aldao deserves to be
portrayed as an extraordinary and prolific sampler of the local neurosis
with respect to the eternal and chronic abuse of alcohol (alcohol idolatry)
which leads the personality to hide itself in a apoplectic dream in which,
as a savage allegory, it is dragged in a frenzy of insatiable blood. From the
prototypes to the multitudinous fauna there is only a single step, for the
abuse of alcohol is a considerable social plague. Morbidity is always lying in
wait for health, in the same way as many political and social upheavals of
an alienated character (for example, the tumults of Comuna or Mazorca),
find their cause in excessive libations.11
Its work has not yet arrived at the stage of clarifying whether the civil struggles and
the chaos unleashed by the wars of Independence shed light on the neurosis of the
celebrated men of national history, or whether this neurosis, an accident of personal
pathology explained by the constitutional predispositions of the individual, is that
which ought to shed light on the anarchy, the tyranny and the political crimes. In
fact, the madman Sarmiento (as he was accustomed to call himself ) advised the
young psychiatrist, Ramos Meja, who had used his texts as a testimonial reference
of facts and persons, to take better care in the use of references which fell at the foot
of the page. See Canal-Feijo, Bernardo, Los enfermos de patria, Revista Sur 295
( JulyAugust 1965), p.21.
10 Vicente Fidel Lpez, on the basis of the testimony of Colonel Las Heras, one of the
main protagonists in the battle of Cancha-rayada, concerns himself with refuting
the rumour that the deserter general Brayer, after the defeat, spread sotto vocce that
San Martn and O Higgins, and the principal leaders, were found celebrating the
birth of the first, and were inebriated when the attack occurred. See Lpez, Vicente
Fidel, Desbande de Cancha-rayada y victoria de Maip, in Historia de la Repblica
Argentina, Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1913, pp.170171.
11 Although with Aldaos general secretary, Pedro Nolasco Ortiz, he promulgated during
his government several strategic decrees with the aim of accumulating power, he is
The apostate monk drinks without distinction: the cheap spirits of

the cooking stoves, eau-de-Cologne, vinegar and even ink have been drunk
with intimate relish, that mad beast of an alcoholic thirst without end. Not
discriminating, he seems like an Indian described by the pen of Mansilla,
who drinks automatically and stimulates the pen of the phrenologist:
And he drank so much without pleasure, that in his copious final libations he lost
himself in an unbearable mixture of good and bad liquors; the wine ofMendoza, gin
and the most revolting drinks; molasses, cider and even methylated spirits itself, which
constitutes, as is known, the final and supreme recourse of the hardened drinker.12
His picture is completed by his physical infirmity, a cancer, the alter ego
of moral frailty, which deforms his face to the point of confirming his
monstrosity, not only on account of his appearance, but also because of
his tumours foul-smelling emanations. What began as a lentil developed
little by little, and after a bad surgical intervention by a Spanish doctor,
into putrefying flesh.
Prostration calms him and shows him in an attitude which puts into
dispute his clinical diagnosis. He is no longer the alcoholic who could end
up in the cannibalism which positivism hints at, but rather becomes more
and more frugal in his diet and his treatment. The tumour grows and his
habits calm him because he follows a simple diet. This includes, as Miguel
Rivera (the doctor sent by Rosas, his brother-in-law, who stayed with him
till he died) notes in his diary: chicken eggs and wings, slices of tender and
succulent roast meats, soup with rice, api (milk pudding with rice), orejones
(dried fruits), almond ice-cream, milk, orange juice and a little glass, not
of just any wine, but one imported from Bordeaux, which revives him.13
remembered for having declared slyly, in May 1842, that all the Unitarists were vio-
lent madmen and insane. Alienation was defined according to the lens with which
it was observed: that unprecedented legal component in the countrys institutional
history was countered later by science, Ramos Meja style.
12 Ramos Meja, Las neurosis de los hombres clebres en la historia argentina, in Obras
Completas V, op. cit.
13 Much do I fear that the waters and the foodstuffs have an influence on the progress
of evil, because there is a very clear analogy between the illnesses of the white tissues,
The martyrdom of Aldao lasts little more than a year and is minutely
detailed by his doctor, who shows him always opposed to public power,
although pacified, fearful, and hypochondriac in his domestic vicissitudes.
This latter is with good reason: dominated by his last wife, Dolores Gmez,
who is a fury, who handles him with a despotism and a tyranny, [] being
the most shocking contrast which can ever been seen, talking and watch-
ing him like a hyena watches a meek lamb, which it has only to devour.14
Humanized, but hardly resorting to the divine faith (he had already done
so when a prisoner in Crdoba, and walked handcuffed with a host in his
hands), entrusting his reconciliation with God to the Dominican Order,
confessing himself and dressing himself below his clothes with the scapula.
As various testimonies say, the monk in him never completely died and he
was given the extreme uncion and his soul has twice been recommended.
Aldao is a ghostly and abysmal figure, who has not only been forgotten
by historiography, but also by the popular imaginary of Mendoza. He is
almost a conjecture, the other, the same, perhaps from a poem by Borges,15
except for the Sarmientian epic which he considered deserving of the best
pen and of public recognition.
which are usually suffered in this country, and those ofthis tumour and others of cellu-
lar tissues of quite a similar character. This fear is well-founded, hygienically speaking.
See Rivera, Miguel, Pasin y muerte del Fraile Aldao, Buenos Aires: Americana, 1958,
p.71. The very same doctor recounted in his diary that he permitted him to drink a
glass of good wine on the 28 August and three oclock in the afternoon in memory
of the day of St Augustine and of his dear Political Mother, Sra. Doa Agustina
Lpez de Rosas, the respectable and virtuous mother of the Illustrious Restorer of
our laws. I explained to Sor. General and his friends that at that hour I must drink,
with the agreement of my beloved wife, the Sra. Doa Mercedes Rosas de Rivera,
who was in Buenos Aires, a glass of wine to the heath of our good Mother [] The
General told me then that some day, when he could, he would also be pleased to take
a glass of wine with me with such a pleasing objective [] (p.55).
14 Rivera, Pasin y muerte del Fraile Aldao, p.69.
15 In the epigraph to the Poema conjectural (El otro, el mismo, 1964), Borges writes:
Doctor Francisco Laprida, murdered on 22 December 1828 by Aldaos guerrillas,
thinks before dying []. See Borges, Jorge Luis, Obras Completas, Buenos Aires:
Emec, 1974, p.867.
Mansilla, or Vernacular Sybaritism
Marx pointed out that embarrassment was a revolutionary feeling. Mansilla

was, above all, a shameless person.1 His dandys poise, which distanced him
from the Baudelerian stereotype, symbolized by his clothing and his man-
nerism of wearing the kepis, authorized criticisms and jokes with respect
to his alcoholic disposition.2
His work, a great stylists confessional, does not have the power of
the great American egotistas Sarmiento, Montalvo or Mart for by
contrast with those who subsume subjectivism to the service of social pro-
jects, he does not have the slightest intention of toning down the naked-
ness of his national and patrician tradition which assimilates the country
to a club. That microsociety, which turns particular interests into social
1 Lucio Victorio Mansilla (Buenos Aires, 23 December 1831Pars, 8 October 1913)

was a general in the Argentinean army as well as being a journalist, writer, politician
and diplomat.
2 Just imagine! I was crossing the street calle de la Florida, opposite the Confitera
del guila, and I would not be surprised to see Mansilla coming absolutely rat-arsed!
[Translators note: The Castellano reads: con un peludo brbaro, an informal phrase for
very drunk.] How embarrassing. Everyone was looking at him and he, as if nothing
was wrong, as if it were the most natural things in the world. [] This should not
be permitted It is necessary to proceed. And who ran to the entrance gates of the
Congress in order to observe Mansilla and be amazed by the man, who, forgetting
all reserve, had got drunk [Translators note: The Castellano reads: habia montado
un peludo]. His biographer says that Mansilla, who presided over the Cmara de
Diputados de la Nacin, took part one day in 1819 with a loose-fitting bright plush
white hat, commonly known as peludos which in romance-criollo is a synonym for
drunk. See Urien, Carlos M., Impresiones y recuerdos: un contemporneo. El General
Lucio Victorio Mansilla, Buenos Aires: Maucci Hnos. Editores, 1914, pp.4748.
On the use of the kepi or kepis in particular and their reasons, see Mansilla, Lucio
V., El dedo de Rozas, in Entre-nos, Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1963, pp.508509.
142 Mansilla, or Vernacular Sybaritism
interests, delineates frontiers, defines memberships, and integrates nomen-

clatures and labels.
Ricardo Rojas brands him a sketchy coward and, bothered by him,
accuses him of not having attempted the classic genre of the nineteenth
century, the novel, the basic sphere of recognition of the bourgeoisie as a
class.3 The real question is different. It is one of the impossibility of defin-
3 According to Ricardo Rojas, in the history of Argentinean literature Mansilla forms

part, next to Santiago de Estrada, Miguel Can, Eduardo Wilde, Fray Mocho and
others, of the generation of prose writers, blessed with literary sensitivity and diverse
culture, but deprived of this spirit of continuity which in his thought and his work
create the organic unity of the true book. He unites them under the qualification of
writers of fragmentary prose, for as well as their love of verse and the imagination
and their sharp observation, they wrote stories or brief anecdotal tales permitting a
glimpse of the novelist that each one of them could be in better conditions of intel-
lectual vocation and cultural environment. Of Mansilla in particular he speaks his
mind easily when he insists that He was no poet: he knew neither how to imagine
nor record. He was no dramatist: he knew neither how to make a speech nor how to
speak. All of Mansillas books are anecdotal confidences, that is to say, spoken mem-
oirs. At the same time he believes that most of his writings are of greater value for
the human content of the argument than for the art of the autobiographical tale
and that in spite of these novelistic faculties, he did not write a single novel; in spite
of these writerly skills, he did not compose a single masterly page. The most personal
features of his style are the rambling spontaneity of the subject, the sometimes dis-
courteous familiarity of his language, the unaesthetic disorder of the composition.
All of Mansillas work belongs to the minor genre of the chronicle: it has for us an
historical, and maybe human, interest, on account of the imprudent frankness of the
writer; he seasons his discourse with the hearty spices of philosophy and with the hot
spices of irony. He ends up concluding that for Mansilla, art was an integral part
of his life, and he could only save it by considering that he practised life as an art.
He created a living poem: his own biography: he created a novelistic character: his
own personality. See Rojas, Ricardo, Los prosistas fragmentarios. Captulo XVI.
Los Modernos II, in La literatura Argentina Volume XV de Obras de Ricardo Rojas,
Buenos Aires: La facultad, 1925, pp.689702. In his compilation of visions of the
Pampas Williams lzaga assumes that stereotyped vision although that does not
detract from its merits: It is a pity that Mansilla has not cultivated form, as has been
said countless times. But is it not perhaps in the lack of prudence, the disorder, the
neglect of his style highly personal moreover that the freshness and originality of
ing what he practices, for all autobiography erroneously supposes itself

the mimetic product of a referent. It deals with a spectacular reflection,
reflected intensively in the famous five-times-magnified photograph that
Mansilla took of himself at a table in the rooms of the Club del Progreso,
in which the narrator and personage of the autobiography mutually deter-
mine each other in an allegory identical to the structure of every attempt
to understand or read. This is the illusion of referentiality, neurosis of
autonomy, dominated by pomposity, whose trope (as De Man put it),
consists in giving voice and face to the absent or the dead.
As soon as we understand that the rhetorical function of personification consists in

giving voice or face through medium of language, we also understand that what we
are deprived of is not life, but rather the form and the sense of a world which for us
is only accessible through the way that strips us of understanding. Death is a name
that gives us linguistic embarrassment and the restoration of mortal life by means
of autobiography (the personification of the name and the voice) dispossesses and
disfigures as much as it restores. Autobiography hides a disfiguration of the mind
through the very unveiling.4
The writers of the generation of 1880 could be understood through

the national significance that their self-referential evaluations acquired.
The obsession with referentiality and with the addressee of their writings
whether this is on the basis of the not-to-be-missed dedications, the
choice of the espitolatory model or the contribution to national memory
made by the individual forms the self recognition, present and future
of the ruling class. Thus we take part in the passage of a captivating and
banned romanticism to that of the associates of an oligarchic and melo-
dramatic liberalism.
Mansillas work is, in De Mans terms, an essay on epitaphs, some-
thing difficult to sum up in a few lines. Beyond certain abstracts (My life
his work resides? See Williams lzaga, Enrique, La pampa en la novela argentina,
Buenos Aires: Estrada, 1955, p.194.
4 De Man, Paul, La autobiografa como desfiguracin, in La autobiografa y sus
problemas tericos, Barcelona: Suplementos Anthropos, Estudios e investigacin
documental, 1991, p.118.
has been a poor melodrama with an air of a great show in which I have
played alternatively the role of the hero, the lover and the noble father:
but never the servant),5 it makes of the autobiographical a document
which acquires sense on the basis of our readings and is converted into the
hetero-biographical.6
Bearing in mind the paradoxes of autobiography, we urge the reading
of our author on the basis of the subjectivism of taste, its criticisms and
its digressions:
Tastes simplify themselves with time, and a curious social phenomenon has been
fulfilling itself since the beginning of the world. The macrocosm, or the collective
man, lives by inventing pleasures, delicacies, necessities, and the microcosm, that is
to say, the individual man, by striving to emancipate himself from the tyrannies of
the mode of civilization.7
In the manner of Rousseau, conscious of inequality, although not

of its origin, his whole work (from the ambivalent axis of civilization-
barbarism or country-city which often makes alimentation redundant),
is a constant process of clarification with the aim of reconciling man to
5 Mansilla, Lucio V., Mis memorias escritas en diez minutos, Correo del domingo,
Buenos Aires, 19 June 1864, cited in the prologue of Ghiano, Juan Carlos, Mis
Memorias (Infancia-adolescencia), Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1955, p.30. Although
Mansilla seems to contradict himself in various passages in his work, like a good
soldier he never seems to fail to be clear (as well as constantly enunciating the equal-
ity of men) that some give orders and others serve and obey: To sum up: hence a
gentleman who only differentiates himself from me in that he is the servant and I
the master. Ibid., p.78.
6 I will try very hard [] to philosophize as little as possible over my references. Or
what it is worth: I will leave the commentaries to be made by the perspicuous reader,
in Mansilla, Mis Memorias, p.66. Concerning behaviour and our will, Mansilla points
out in a passage: When we vacillate, when we dont know if we want or do not want,
when there is deliberation without choice, is there will or not? Here a difficulty is
presented: the person, the I, which is cause and effect, at the same time. See Mansilla,
Lucio V., Por qu?, in Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, Buenos Aires: Hachette,
1963, p.74.
7 Mansilla, Lucio V., Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe,
1993, Vol. I, p.30.
nature. Although God gives life and health, we ourselves can contribute (as
do certain races and nations) to Creation. And it suggests an experienced
and cosmopolitan palate:
[] after having travelled through Europe and America, having lived as a Guarani8
in Paraguay; having eaten mazamorra9 in the Ro de la Plata, charquicn in Chile,
oysters in New York, macarroni in Naples, truffles in Perigord, chip10 in Asuncin
[] The more straightforward, simple, innocent, the better: no hot spices, no truffles.
The stew is the only thing that does not do damage, that does not cause indigestion,
which does not irritate.11
For Mansilla, the customs are a seed which must be well seasoned.
They are the potent emissary of the laws and the foodstuffs, in the form
and manner of their ingestion, are the determinants. In principal, he com-
bines food and conversation, which assimilate themselves to a Symposium
of the pampas which rejects the accordion players and black singers, as
the Greeks did the flute players and acrobats. As a causeur he values the
free dialogue which brings men together around food, be it in the Club
del Progreso (with its equals), around a bonfire (with its soldiers) or in an
Indian encampment (with its Indians). It is in order to expel ignorance
from our proud civilization that it is necessary to make comparisons in
which we respect the customs and use of culinary utensils:
8 Translators note: The name of a people who live between the rivers Amazon and
Plate and of their language. The Guarani language is an official language in Paraguay.
It is also spoken in parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. The Jesuit missionaries in
Paraguay wrote Guarani dictionaries and grammars, hymns and catechisms. Guarani
acquired a symbolic status in Paraguay during the Chaco War with Bolivia, 19321935.
Today many Paraguayans with hardly any indigenous blood speak Guarani better
than Spanish.
9 Translators note: A milky pudding made with maize.
10 Translators note: A tart made with cornflour (or mandioca) and cheese.
11 Mansilla, Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Vol. I, pp.3031.
[] the spectacle of the Indian which the toldo12 presents is more consoling than that
of the Gaucho which the ranch presents and this notwithstanding the fact that
the Gaucho is a civilized man. Or are they barbarians? [] In the gauchos ranch,
generally there is no door. They sit on the floor, on hard pieces of wood or on dried
cows heads. They rarely make stew, for they do not have a pot. When they make it,
they drink the soup from the stewpot, passing it from one person to another. They
have no jugs; they make do with an oxs horn. Sometimes they do not even have
this. They never lack a cauldron, however, for they have to heat water in order to
drink mate. They never have a lid. Its a job to put on the lid and take it off. Enough
of laziness: cast it aside!
The roast is grilled on an iron barbecue, or a spit, and it is eaten with the same
knife with which the next one is killed, burning the fingers. How sad and heartbreak-
ing all this is! It breaks my heart to have to say it.13
In the Indian encampments, by contrast, food is served rapidly and
[] they put before each person a great wooden plate with a plentiful stew of corn
cobs and pumpkins, with cutlery spoons, forks and knives and water.
The captives were the servants. [] I hadnt eaten more than a small steak since
the previous day; the stew was very appetising and well seasoned. I set myself to
eating with as much enthusiasm as the previous night in the Club del Progreso.
And because I hadnt forgotten the rags, as they forgot the serviettes there, I did so
like a gentleman.
The stew having been finished, they brought the roast meat, and afterwards water-
melons. [] We conversed as if we were in a salon, each with whomever he pleased.14
12 Translators note: The tent used by the indigeous peoples of Argentina.

13 Mansilla, Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Vol. II, pp.332333. In another epi-
sode of the journey Mansilla believes that, by contrast with the gauchos, the Indians
in particular, because of their use of certain culinary instruments, could learn and
thus civilize themselves: I already knew from experience how delicate is the palate
of the Indians, for many times they sat down at my table in Ro Cuarto, and I took
the opportunity at the same time to admire the skill with which they wielded the
gastronomic utensils, the spoon and the fork; how well they managed the tip of the
tablecloth so as to wipe the mouth, the perfect equilibrium with which they raised
the glass brimming over with wine to the lips. Positively, it is not so difficult to civi-
lize these barbarians. Ibid., Vol. I, p.185.
14 Ibid., Vol. II, pp.334335. This image seems to contradict the imaginary of whoever
can make himself from whatever was the desert. While Martn Fierro and Cruz shed
light on how difficult it is for all men to procure subsistence, although it is difficult to
Mansilla, the good diplomat believes in dialogue: diplomacy is

alike everywhere, the same in London as in Vienna, in Buenos Aires as in
Leubuc. Without doubt, and apart from his ambiguous role as politi-
cian, soldier or evangelist, he foresees the Roquista massacre. His world is
composed of visible forms (phrenology), organic functions (physiology)
and hierarchies, the exception being made in the case of the campfire, a
simile of the sociability of the table in the land of the pampas, where every
one says, respectfully, what they want to say:
The campfire is the poor soldiers delight, after the fatigue. Around its glow the
military hierarchies disappear. Superiors and junior officers converse fraternally
and laugh comfortably. And even the assistants who cook the stew and the roast
meat. And those who brew the mate, sometimes stick their nose into the general
conversation, supporting or contradicting their bosses and officers, making some
witticism or talking nonsense.15
perish from hunger, for every creature that walks ends up on the barbecue, Martnez
Estrada puts forward the dietetics of the frontier, marking the differentiated per-
spective which Mansilla described on his journey: The food which constituted the
exclusive dietary regime of the Indian was the meat of the colt or the mare. In his
1833 campaign, Rosas troops, the guerrillas, and the majority of the inhabitants of
the country did not taste any other food. Fruit, vegetables, and pulses were practi-
cally unknown. Martn Fierro attributes to the satiety of meat, which they probably
neither seasoned not roasted, the smallpox epidemic. It will be, we ourselves said /
Caused by so much colt meat / As these brutes eat [Vol. II, pp.850852]. But Mansilla
was surprised by the banquets that Epumer and Mariano Rosas offered him. See
Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Muerte y transfiguracin de Martn Fierro, Mexico: FCE,
1948, Vol. II, Las perspectivas, p.343.
15 Mansilla, Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Vol. I, pp.5859. I have said to him:
the campfire is our armys democratic tribune. The Argentinean campfire is not like
the campfire of other nations. It is a special campfire (p.122). A well made campfire
turns out impossible to resist. It would have been easier for a woman to pass before
a mirror without giving herself the ineffable Platonic satisfaction of looking at
herself (p.99). Another passage from his writings collects the free conversation at
his fathers table, while avoiding excessive familiarity: And not only did they serve
themselves very good things, at the aforesaid table, but they were also very happy;
because my father ate surrounded by his officers, those being at ease before him, for
the easy freedom of conversation which he permitted them, compatible with the
His own kitchen, a kind of refectory that drove his wife to despair,16
supplies stories and undefined digressions, so that he can continue recount-
ing. The word is a foodstuff whose purpose is to calm hunger through eating
and meeting: Me, write for the public!, I said to myself, Me, a journalist!
Me! [] The next day we had a second talk with him and I made up my
mind, urged by necessity what I am saying? by hunger.17 Now the
dialogue is with his own class, whose restrictions include also number, and
by defining it, he defines himself.18 He not only references the recipients
of his writings, but also shows how they should be read slowly like food:
social decorum and the mutual respect which men owe each other, whatever their
respective places in the hierarchy. Over familiarity is the cause of contempt, See
Por qu?, in Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, p.77.
16 Mansilla, Lucio V., Raimundo, ibid., p.198.
17 Mansilla, Lucio V., De cmo el hambre me hizo escritor, ibid., p.108. From the
individual anecdote to the ideals of civilizing progress: to improve the social con-
dition of everyone, to abolish hunger, misery, prostitution as far as is humanly pos-
sible, taking as its horizon of reference the bodily aesthetics on the basis of a social
dietetics, although with the emphasis on women: Fatness is the enemy of beauty
and you must know that spending much time in bed makes you fat, especially if you
have a sweet tooth. Hence sugar and sleep and drink and carbohydrates are a series of
sworn enemies of slimness, naturally incompatible with the obsessive development
of embonpoint. Mansilla, Lucio V., Filosofando, ibid., p.623. Hence, perhaps, he
calls his philosophy peripattica (peripatetic); see Mansilla, Lucio V., Humus,
ibid., p.396.
18 As Vias says: The readers search, the direction of his literature are manifest: to his
class belong the protagonists and the audience ofhis work. And as he neatly takes care
to demarcate his public, through this topographic description he defines himself.
See Vias, David, Literatura argentina y realidad poltica: apogeo de la oligarqua,
Buenos Aires: Siglo Veinte, 1975, p.12. I take advantage of this note [number thirteen
in the original text] to make a food-linked digression about this number. When the
table companions meet in a house, restaurant or hotel and those invited amount
to thirteen, because one has not arrived and they have granted fifteen minutes of
grace to those who are imprecise, it is necessary to have at hand a substitute, called
the quatorzime, who he should be young, not more than thirty-five years old, of
sympathetic bearing, refined manners, dress well, speak several languages and be well
informed of all the latest ideas of the epoch and of the day. All this is owed to certain
biblical or superstitious beliefs: things that come in thirteens always turn out bad.
Every reader is impatient: some read the newspapers hurriedly, almost in passing;
others swallow books without chewing them, like certain members of the audience,
close to the orchestra, like twins, the legs of the dancers. They are like that after indi-
gestion! [] And, then: you look everywhere for sensation; but you want it quickly,
instantaneously, steamed, by electricity, la minute, although they serve you, as in
the inns, reheated dishes.19
Always relativistic and ambiguous in his discourse, he says that the

degree of evolution determines the manner of eating, and that as they eat,
so men behave. One could have a sweet tooth for words and for quotes.
One could do what mice do, that is to say, gnaw what they cannot eat so
as to keep their teeth occupied (Spencer) or be a subtle cook like a poet
who feeds the body and the spirit:
Believe me, then, when I say that in the kitchen I am not a simple chef, some cordon
bleu, but a veritable artist. What am I saying! A poet. I improvise, invent and I turn
out some dishes scrumptious.
The kitchen is a temple
whose furnaces are the altar.
If you ever saw me calling the shots with the frying pan you would be convinced
beyond doubt of what I have been saying
But, unfortunately, the thing is that I have chosen the wrong vocation. Thirty
years ago, instead of conspiring with Semp, I committed idiocy of enrolling in the
army. [] I could cite as eyewitness what I just affirmed to my old boss and friend,
General don Emilio Mitre, who is also a cook. But there is no cook like me. He
Amongst thirteen there are always misfortunes. When thirteen eat together, sooner
or later on of them is hanged, dies suddenly, disappears without anyone knowing
why, is robbed, shipwrecked, wounded in a duel. In the end, the most common is
that among thirteen there is always a traitor; or philosophic under the influence
of bad thoughts, one only digests with difficulty! It is because of this that a lackey
is sent for to make a fourteenth. In all barrios there is one; that way, like the doctor,
he is not long in arriving. See Mansilla, Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Vol. I,
pp.126127.
19 Mansilla, Lucio V., El famoso fusilamiento del caballo, in Entre-Nos: causeries del
jueves, pp.139140.
belongs, in this subject, to a mixed school, and I do not accept, not even in philoso-
phy, the eclectic doctrines of Victor Cousin.20
Amongst soldiers there is mutual understanding, and also amongst

causeures who take their digressions for battlefields (hence Sainte-Beuve)
in which they intervene with the gift of words.21 The word feeds knowledge
as much as food and deepens the testimony. On several occasions Mansilla
signals that he believes in the testimony of the senses and that he possesses
20 Mansilla, Lucio V., Catherine Necrassoff , ibid., pp.180181. The alimentary meta-
phors have nourished the western imagination ad nauseam. To read is to eat and to
write is to cook. The chef-poet Mansilla is an alchemist whose cookery transforms
raw words into exquisitely cooked delicacies. At the same time, the reader can ingest
words (art) or opt to digest (journalism). As Benjamin once pointed out concern-
ing the art of reading novels: Not all books are read in the same way. Novels, for
example, are to be devoured. To read them entails the pleasure of ingestion. This is
not to speak of an identification. The reader does not put himself in the place of
the hero but rather incorporates what is happening to the other. The visual example
of this would be the tasty accompaniment in which they bring a succulent dish to
the table. There exists, it is certain, a crude experiencial regime just as there exists
a crude regime of the stomach namely: first hand experiences. But the art of the
novel, like the culinary arts, begins just beyond the raw products. And how many
nutritious substances dont agree when raw! How many stories there are which it
is advisable to read only, but not live at first hand. They are tales which entice more
than one who would flee if he had to go through with them in reality. To sum up, if
there exists a use of the novel the tenth it would carry the emblem of the cook.
It is she who elevates the world from the raw state in order to create on its basis the
edible, in order to give it taste. During dinner it is possible to read the paper, But
never a novel. This is because we are dealing with activities which dispute the terri-
tory. See Benjamin, Walter, Leer novelas, in Cuadros de un pensamiento, Buenos
Aires: Imago Mundi, 1992, pp.150151.
21 From the understanding of everyday life as the confrontation of cultures (through
politics or war) Mansilla makes one of the leitmotivs of his work. His causeries of
the Thursdays, related to those of the French critic Sainte-Beuve (who, as his editors
say in their prefaces, did not talk about the rest, but above all of himself ), acquire
the character of a premonitory symbol: I have carried out my literary life [] with
tactics, in a word, as one fights a war, and I have divided it into campaigns. I speak
here only of my criticism See Sainte-Beuve, Juicios y estudios literarios (De causeries
du lundi), Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1899, p. vi.
a highly developed sense of aesthetic beauty. Now, in the particular case of

food, be it home-made (bourgeois) or noble and of great complexity, what
is important is the spiritual guest, as Brillat-Savarin puts it and Mansilla
repeats (in French): animals feed themselves; man eats; only the spiritual
man knows how to eat. And not every one sits at that table, only an elite,
his entre-nos,22 the recorded addressees and the senders:
Florentina Ituarte de Costa, the grande dame; Misia Juanita her sister, married to
Seor don Castro Senz Valiente (the mother ofJuan, my beloved Juan Vivot); Juanita
who married Castro was older and less friendly to the chickens and the doves. What
I can be sure of, which I still repeat, is that there have been no better tables than
those amongst which I include as abundant, patriarchical, that of the Lavallol, Calle
Cangallo, opposite what afterwards became the Banco Man. And that of Seor don
Miguel Riglos with its crystal, its porcelain, its cutlery, its placemats, all English in
the best, indeed the finest, taste.23
Mansilla, who has a good memory, tries to enlighten us and refute some
questionable opinions of his time which supposed that food had evolved
with the evolution of customs and that at the start of the twentieth century
people ate better than in their infancy. Although past times were hard and
this made the ancient delicacies moderate, they had the advantage of eating
the real thing. He contrasts this with what happens today when the wave
of immigration and diversification has created a situation in which the
names are one thing, the thing itself another. He is neither referring to
nor criticizing the cheap restaurants or the traditional ones, nor those in
which choice chefs cook and even less any Parisian establishment; in these
you can find well prepared foods of all nations (from ravioli or meat with
skin to souffl or plum pudding). Rather he is against the rhetoric of the
cookery books used by foreigners French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese
coachmen, quartermasters or ranch hands who are contracted to prepare
22 Translators note: A reference to the title of one of Mansilas books.

23 Mansilla, Mis Memorias, pp.209210.
food based on these recipes and who do not know how to beat the oil and
the egg in order to make a mediocre mayonnaise.24
In his Causeries Mansilla makes his own the French physiological
postulate tell me what you eat and Ill tell you who you are. It is a chance
to focus on the good criollo food of his paternal table, which is quite dis-
tant from European haute cuisine. (In the face of the latter Brillat-Savarin
affirms another of his aphorisms: the discovery of a new dish contributes
more to the happiness of the human species than the discovery of star.)
Thus Mansilla points out:
Or are these not good things? fat meat, well roasted, carbonada, locro,25 beans
(and what do you say to me of the lentil, which is the most nutritious vegetable
substance?), chickpeas, dulce de leche, invented in America by the Jesuits, fried puff
pastry tarts with meat or sugar, and meat with skin, of Arab origin? (The latter was
24 In his travel memoirs, written six years after the memoirs of Mansillas infancy,
Clemenceau writes about the cooking of Buenos Aires: It is not easy to speak of
the cuisine of Buenos Aires rather more international than local with the excep-
tion of the houses which can permit themselves the luxury of a French head chef. A
marked influence of Italy, with its pastas and cheeses. Little variety in the fish. The
deplorable custom of rebellious flesh, for the simple reason of making use of it too
recently dead. Indifferent pulses. Too many tropical fruits and too much of a tropi-
cal effect in the fruits of Europe. European lobster and fish, imported by means of
refrigerators not to be recommended. Magnificent water. National dishes: puchero,
boiled ox, excellent when the animal has not been sacrificed that morning (which is
unusual); roasts, whole roast lamb, a tasty reminder of my Greek excursions, where
I encountered it going under the name of lamb in the palikara style. I could add a
long list whose main interest would be unusual names given to well-known dishes.
See Clemenceau, Notas de viaje por la Amrica del Sur, p.117. In addition, Mansilla
is accustomed to link customs with a kind of human typology in the style of Balzac.
He asks himself if (in addition to less libertinage, being less dissipated and of going
to bed and getting up early) it was the frugal customs of his grandparents who nei-
ther swallowed nor drank, like ourselves, so many adulterated substances, which []
ultimately lead them to manufacture some sons of great proportions, or whether
it was them who carried out the fight for Independence and the civil war. See Mis
Memorias, p.83.
25 Translators note: Carbonada and locro are two types of meat stew from the north of
Argentina.
something Alexandre Dumas learned to prepare in Argelia, and he felt greater pride
in this skill than in having been and being the principal French novelist, something
said without reducing smallest way the renown of Balzac himself.) And on the other
hand in order to combine the theme of taste with that of smell the two inferior
senses according to Kantian Metaphysics for combining civilization with cleanli-
ness, he will announce: tell me what soap you consume and I will tell you whether
or not you are a decent person.26
A travelling companion of Brillat-Savarin, it is quite accidentally

with respect to Baudelaire that Mansilla is most distanced in the sphere
of French alimentation. The empathy which unites Paris (the travellers
sweet) with Buenos Aires (the American Paris), and in its turn with the
desert (as a preliminary form) and dandyism, does not reconcile the two
protagonists, who are dissimilar not only in their appearance but especially
in their culinary tastes:
26 See Por qu?, p.76, and En el camino, in Causeries, p.307. As well as the implicit
vision of taste in Mansilla, there is also in various passages in his writing an implicit
portrait of the smells of the epoch: the odours of Buenos Aires, which in the past,
with the south wind, were those of the abattoirs; with the east wind, those of the
beach, with or without a hangover, with or without putrefying fish and with greater
or lesser pollutions from the Rio Barracas flowing into the Rio de la Plata; and with
the wind from the west and the north those of the stone ovens which burned bones
and embers of all kinds, they are now sui generis in their combination; every nose
feels according to its nature [] the smells are somewhat like those of Genoa, puri-
fied (Mis Memorias, pp.180181). In another passage from his childhood memoirs
he recollects the impression of a certain French scientist, Monsieur Lerminier, who
having visited the Ro de la Plata, comments to his sister Eduarda that he remembers
these places because of their smell of human sweat and dirt. Thus Mansilla says:
there are unforgettable odours. This sensation is more persistent than that of taste.
It has become for some noses a fetish (Mis Memorias, pp.9697). And to our author
they are an invariably unavoidable fetish for in his vast work there abound references
to the noses of our times: that of the tinsmith Miserete enormous, Jewish, swollen,
bright red like a strawberry; that of Pedro de Angelis advisor to Rozas sponge-
like (Mis memorias, p.196); of a large nose, adorned with tumefactions, in which a
microscope would have discovered infinitely small worlds (Entre-nos, p.425); that
of Juan Patio, turned-up (Entre-nos, p.145); or that of Rozas, big, and polite,
tending more to the Greek than to the Roman (Entre-nos, p.93), etc.
I cannot say of myself what Anatole France says of Baudelaire: that he affected in
his person a kind of satanic dandyism; that he took pleasure and pride in seeming
hateful; that this is lamentable and that his legend, made by his admirers and his
friends, abounds in traces of bad taste.
Have you eaten the brains of a newly born? he said one day to a respectable
functionary. You should eat them. They are very much like green nuts, and they are
a delicious thing.
Another time, in the common room of a restaurant frequented by people from
the provinces, he began, in a loud voice, a story of this kind:
After having murdered my poor brother with my own hands
I have striven for the contrary: I have neither dressed la diable, nor spoken
once to him like a cannibal.27
Mansilla is neither a poet nor damned. He is rather an unusual and

kind Christian, but basically in his exterior appearance and dress. He wants
to be accepted but understands that it is a problem of social evolution and
of customs which make him criticize the intolerant aristocracy of tin and
oppose the rotten and Roccocco Criollo environment. In fact, the cloth-
ing is accompanied by certain table attitudes which the high life would
describe as coarse and which could tell us something about his thought,
for example, how to eat with the knife and raise it to ones mouth. This
utensil in particular denotes the level of evolution and is iconic (not only in
respect to the table,28 but in particular of the way of killing animals which
27 Mansilla, Lucio V., Un hombre comido por las moscas, in Entre-Nos: causeries del
jueves, p.392.
28 Although they refine livestock breeds, some say they ought to improve the manners
of the criollos. On the subject of the proper and improper behaviour which one ought
to abide by in order to eat at the table of a renowned family of Buenos Aires (quite
distinct from that of a farm kitchen), Vctor Galvez (the alias of Vicente Quesada)
emphasizes primarily the use of the knife. Thus he writes in the late nineteenth cen-
tury: Save me God from giving advice! But it is good not to forget the necessity of
observing what is customary in every social condition, and not to believe that they
eat at the table of a distinguished family in the same way as they eat in the kitchen of
a ranch. To me this seems fundamental. Since culture, the refinement of manners, is
not taught as it is in schools in France, at least there are teachers for he who observes
what others do. Observe others and learn, and above all by Saint Crispin! dont
put your knife in your mouth. Never! Never! I speak of an eminently stockbreeding
will be sampled) of the doubtful transition from barbarism towards more

civilized manners. Participating in a slaughter of cows, Mansilla assumed
that the Indians would carry it out like the Christians do, that is to say
repeatedly sticking the knife in the breast and slitting his throat in the midst of
bloodcurdling roars that made the earth shudder.
They did something else.
An Indian shot him in the forehead, leaving him senseless.
They slit his throat immediately.
Why did you shoot him, brother? I asked Mariano.
So he wont bellow, he replied. Cant you see that it hurts me to kill him that way?
Having slit the animals throat, they abandoned him to the Chinese women. They
skinned him, cut him into pieces and deboned him, collecting even the blood.29
In the head of the young Mansilla, who reads Rousseau secretly and
neglects his pride of place in breaking the necks of the animals, the
slaughterhouse and the job bear witness to the identity of an epoch and
country, and the good criollos will agree that if the animal breeds are carefully refined
(in order to look for the qualities which the natives of the land do not have, their
beauty of form, their strength or refinement), why should they not refine man, the
most noble of all the animals? Isnt the argument precise? Tell me if Im wrong. It is
crude but it is graphic. See Galvez, Vctor, Memorias de un viejo: escenas de costum-
bres de la Repblica Argentina Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser Editor, 1889, Vol. III,
pp.403404. It is precisely Vicente Quesada who, next to other young men (Bernardo
de Irigoyen, Benjamn Victorica, Emilio de Alvear and other Porteos who served
the Confederacin, among whom Mansilla can be found), moved to Entre Ros years
later; Ricardo Rojas explains how on the basis of the agreement with Saint Nicolas,
which was a transaction with the Rosista governors, and the segregation of Buenos
Aires, which was an aversion of the Portean Unitarists against the ex-Mazorquiero
Urquiza, they offered an opportunity of rehabilitation to many youths of federal
origin. See Rojas, Los prosistas fragmentarios. Captulo XVI. Los Modernos II,
p.691.
29 Mansilla, Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Vol. II, p.326. Part of this passage is
cited by Luis Franco, without mentioning the source, in a chapter which he dedi-
cates to the Indians in El otro Rosas: Still more: the animals are killed with a bullet
through the forehead, avoiding the agony caused by slitting the throat. So it doesnt
bellow. Cant you see that its a pity? See Franco, Luis, Los indios, in El otro Rosas,
Buenos Aires: Editorial Reconstruir, 1956, p.65.
its contradictions. These go beyond the romantic and unilateral literature

of Echeverra:30
[] they are not seen without gleaming knives, mutilated limbs, hands soaked with
blood, up to the ears in blood; it is not heard, so to speak, as a dominant note, but
rather the pitiful whine of the animals, begging for mercy in the pen, and I myself,
there in that place, amused myself innocently in breaking their necks, imitating the
savage dexterity of those butchers so American that in my childs imagination they
on took the proportions of something extraordinary, more virile than the rest of
the simple mortals. There was amongst us an enormous Basque, a bigshot, who was
also a skilful skinner, and who, when my weak hand was unable to do so, helped it
to insert the lethal dagger in the neck. And how many times he did so, for the blow
was badly inflicted and the poor animal resisted death, I did not hear him shout
repeatedly Take it savage! Surely in those Unitarian salting houses they said Take
it terrorist! How awful!31
The slaughter, the flaying, and the butchering are Americanisms used
by our author and already incorporated into the dictionary ofthe Academy
(but not in his time). They constitute the symbol or intimations of the
civil war and of the death which must be overcome as well as the actors
involved (for Rosas and Urquiza appear like an egg to another egg). In
addition, in conjunction with industrialization (the salting house) they
are synonymous with movement, animation, life and work, and permit
us to evade the Restorer of the Laws as much as the Federation, or to
speak of politics and its actors, essentially the great lazyboneses of this
30 Translators note: Jos Esteban Antonio Echeverra (1805 1851) was a poet, writer
of fiction and political activist, who played an important role in the development
of Argentine literature.
31 Mansilla, Lucio V., Por qu?, in Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, p.70. In this,
amongst the authors digressions, what is interesting is the reference he makes, in
contrast to the slaughter of the cows, to his fathers arguments in favour of fishing
as a sport: the man who fishes, meditates, concentrates, converses with himself, and
like the family of the fishes, he is numerous and varied, has much to learn, observing
their customs, their ingenuity, in order to eat the bait and not take the bait and
of fish as a nutritious food, easily digestible and hygienic, the bringer of good health
and good humour.
country. As can be seen, it deals with a mode of thought which still has
validity in the national life.
As a certain strand of sociology believes with regard to the civilizing
process, the relationships which men have with meat-based foodstuffs are,
in a way, very important in the consideration of the dynamic of human
relations and psychic structures.32 Mansilla, as if in passing, recounts
the significance of an odd and festive event which is typical of a certain
zoophagic logic of determinate well-off social groups of the nineteenth
century, a practice which ceases to be habitual with culinary modernism.
That is to say, he refers to cutting to pieces in a classy way an important
animal, at the table and in front of the table companions:
The formula was like this: Hey man, how lovely! Tomorrow is the day ofthe turkey!
This one was waiting its sad end, with other volatile ones which they fattened with
nuts in Daddy Tristns corral, and was roasted, not in the house for as it was a
real gentleman of a turkey the oven was not big enough but in the bakery of the
foreigner Adel. My father was the carver. He put all his vanity into it. He did it with
the rare skill of a surgeon anatomist. It formed a part of good education. Whenever
he showed off with some roast bird, my mother always said to me, Pay attention.33
The grownups, the parents and guests of rank, occupy the principal
table and they send the leftovers to the youngsters, who sit at another
table and are exempt from the custom:
That day, us boys didnt have a place at the table, there was only space for my mother
who stood up for the desserts. What were we given! On the contrary, being a day of
merrymaking, our freedom was greater. There was no question of eating carefully.
There was no question of not sucking the fingers. There was no question of not put-
ting ones knife in ones mouth. And there was no question of using serviettes or
aprons. To the extent that anything would be left over (there usually had two ducks,
one for each wing) they were going to send it to us.34
32 Elias, Norbert, El proceso de la civilizacin: investigaciones sociogenticas y psicogen-

ticas, Buenos Aires: FCE, 1993, p.160.
33 Mansilla, Mis Memorias, p.212.
34 Ibid., p.212.
Mansillas gluttony a gluttony of food as much as of words mani-

fests itself as the counterpart to the hygienistic attitude of his parents:
They were served pastries my father said: Agustinita give only a little to this
child The pastry is heavy. Imagine what we ourselves would think of a similar
recipe The pastries are heavy? Its not as if they were made of lead! My father, who
was really skilled in carving, cut up a little sucking pig my Mother said: Dont
give this child pig for it is really indigestible. We brothers looked at each other, as if
saying to ourselves: But these people then we will lose our minds in the house of
Mrs Ladybird. Sweets were served: Just a little, said my father, for these chil-
dren, for it attacks the stomach and is bad for the teeth. And the coffee arrived
and my mother looked at us and said to us: Children dont need coffee go and
play. And wine? Wine for children, at my parents table! No way! Wine was
only for formal persons.35
This excessive caution with respect to food and drink is, according to our
author, what led him to commit his first robbery in his uncles house. Just as
hunger made him a writer, he committed his first theft from a larder. And
as he points out several times, human nature is insatiable. Or excessive
hygiene, we ourselves could add, produces gluttonous behaviour.
Beyond his meticulously hygienic education, Mansilla turns out to have
a cosmopolitan and developed palate. The list of what he has eaten is as
extensive as his writings. It includes tortitas de Morn (a light chocolate-
coloured sweet), quesos de Goya and chorizo fried in the Italian style of
San Po, panqueques de melaza en lo de don Toms (pancakes with molas-
ses in the style of Don Toms), dulce con los dedos, manteca, natas, caf
con leche gorda con Eduardita en lo de mam Mariquita, the charqui of the
soldier Calixto Oyarzbal in la Caada de los dormilones (The Valley of
the Sleepers), la mazamorra sacudida y galopada por el lechero36 better
than any crema la vanille. It also includes fiambres (cold cuts), sausages,
cheese and hams in the grocery store of the official Rejas, a centre of con-
versation for nice people, as later would be la Rtisserie Charpentier,
35 Mansilla, Lucio V., Mi primer robo, in Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, p.595.
36 Translators note: Literally porridge shaken and galloped by the milkman, but this
does not really tell us very much.
the Confitera del guila or that of Gath y Chaves. It includes water

from the well with honeycomb in the Caf de los catalanes, raviolis made
in the grocery store of the Italian Boassi (in Cangallo y Reconquista),
fried tarts and pastries made with non-flaky pastry on rainy days in his
parents house, fried trout in Uspallata (as excellent as those of the Swiss),
fresh esterlete from Volga in the Parisian house of Catherine Necrassoff,
entrecte in the house of the innocent Bordenave, puchero (stew) and
asado (roast meat) with Mariano Rosas, pucherete with Garmendia,
mulas y peludos with his soldiers in the Laguna de Calcumuleu, etc. In
short, his Memorias could be described as culinary.
To the hygienest vocation of his parents37 his contemporaries added
an ambivalent characterization of Mansilla, branding him, according to the
37 According to our author, hygienism includes the general cleanliness of the body
(hands, nails and teeth checked by his mother) and a strict menu of permissions and
prohibitions, with stipulated hours for breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner, detailed
in his Memorias, pp.204208. Beyond showing a certain adolescent resistance to this
vocation of his progenitors and not practising it to excess or for long, on more than
one occasion he will recognize the importance of hygiene as the principal part of
Political Economy, because nothing is more expensive than illness, except death. See
Gato por liebre, in Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, pp.278279. Equally, rebellion
seems to be, in part, a familiar symptom. It is worth giving as an example an anecdote
from the childhood of his uncle who on being chastised by his mother abandoned
the family home and his clothing after writing: He left everything which is not
mine, Juan Manuel de Rosas, changing the z for the s, which Mansilla interprets
as his first act of rebellion against all other authority than his own will. Mansilla,
in his writings, is less rebellious than his uncle called Rozas (because it comes from
rozar). See Rozas: ensayo histrico-psicolgico, Buenos Aires: La enciclopedia de la
intelectualidad argentina, 1933, p.42. This anecdote is also mentioned by Martnez
Estrada in order to put it on an equal footing with the neglect of Hernndez: He
also left all that belonged to him, on leaving his father and enlisting in the troops
of the civil wars and on taking the side of the Federal cause, which was that of the
gauchos (although not for the gauchos). It is striking that Martnez Estrada says
that the letter of the rebel Rosas was written leaving what was his (and not what was
not his, as Mansilla puts it), as well as the zeta of his surname and his patronymic
Ortiz. See Martnez Estrada, Muerte y Transfiguracin de Martn Fierro, Vol. I, Las
Figuras, p.40.
situation, as acriollado or as a gringo on the basis of his food consumption.

Mansilla resisted all these tendencies. In a celebrated passage he tells how he
mechanically devoured seven plates of the famous rice pudding this
was also his appetite prepared in the criollo style in his uncles house,
while his uncle read his Mensaje and awaited his fall and permanent exile.
Beyond his vituperations against Urquiza the madman, Rosas contented
himself with the fact that his nephew had not become a gringo and this was
confirmed in Southampton when far from his homeland, he continues to
think of the plates of rice pudding. Mansilla knows that Rosass favourite
food is sweetbreads, roasted or in soup, and that in his house there were
always Cordoban candies, red, as was to be expected (Even in this! What
a rage!), which his aunt Encarnacin gave to Manuelita.38
With wine and other alcoholic drinks, Mansilla is very careful and
basically fears drunkenness which in general he judges to be among the
barbaric customs of the Indians. It is clear that in this sense the hygien-
ist inheritance has borne fruit, because several of his interlocutors advise
no wine in order to preserve health. There are two forgeries which do
much damage: women and wine, because chassez le naturel, il revient au
galop: love is another form of intoxication: both make us lose the head
getting sloshed with aguardiente is worth as much as a womans caress
run from them: they will make you shavelings, from the point of view of
my personal observation.39 Alcohol and women are vices which make us
stagger, which make us fall and lose control of ourselves.
For Mansilla, happiness can be found at the extremes wealth or pov-
erty, darkness or glory but it certainly cannot be found in subjection. He
calls himself a wandering Jew, and he understands that anything which
held us back could not permit us to wander. Travelling in order to spend
money, acquire a chic aspect and air, eat and drink well. Faced with bore-
dom, he thinks that alcohol (in whatever version) does not relieve tedium,
although he is aware that at times drink can help console sorrows of the
38 See Mansilla, Mis Memorias, pp.207, 213.

39 See Mansilla, Lucio V., Los siete platos de arroz con leche and Juan Patio, in
Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, pp.101, 150.
soul and the bitternesses of thought. In fact he confesses that he has

written the causerie Cazuela while drunk, although he ends by offering
a candid apology for the forms and advantages of drinking coffee, a drink
which turns out to be a spiritual stimulant and which he was not allowed to
drink in excess as a youngster. His apology is different from that of Voltaire,
and gives way in turn to the astringent exordiums produced by this infusion,
which can be fought with the purgative produced by oranges in the same
way that there is nothing better for sardines than wine (although Mansilla
cannot smell alcohol and this distances him from the febrile intoxications
of Poe). But he admits that, with his secretary, he accompanies coffee
with whiskey, bought in the English Bazaar of Calle Florida because it
is better for rheumatism.
In his family there was no particular passion for wine and in fact at
his parents table wine was not often seen. His mother found it disgusting
and never drank it, and although his father was very strong, so strong that
he never became inebriated, he drank very little. Concerning the type of
wine which was drunk daily, he tells us that it was bought, sending the
big bottle, on the corner of San Po if it was carln and in the hunchbacks
storehouse if it was priorato; which is not to say that there were no wines
embottled in the house. Some were buried, it is very true, in the last patio
which in fact had an unpaved area40 and would be uncorked for some
national or religious occasion. But in general terms, even if the Indians are
on the borders of marriage, alcohol, that enemy, is never refused. There
is an ideal Pampas (the one of the cardoon and the ombu41), of which the
40 Mansilla, Mis Memorias, p.212. Mansilla recounts in this same passage that only
once did his father took on Mr Bawl, the secretary of the English Legion, in a
beer-drinking competition, and beat him. In another part of his memoirs he com-
pares the significance beer has for the Germans with the significance of mate for the
Argentineans. He says that it is a great resource, although there are many reasons
why it has been banished from the salons. The fundamental one is hygiene and this
will make it continue to fall into disuse. He contrasts this with the cigarette, which
will return through imitation of European chic. Mate, with yerba or coffee, will be
an indispensable companion during his journey to the Araucano desert. See Mis
Memorias, pp.178179.
41 Translators note: A tree chracteristic of the Pampas.
poets and the historians, who are not acquainted with its physiognomy,
have sung, and another, real one, (that of the Indian Gaucho), with nether
subjection nor law, in which its inhabitants all live achumados (drunk) and
in search of a shot of aguardiente. With these they eat, and they negotiate
the recovery of captives, with yerba, tobacco, the horse or alcohol: Mariano
Rosas, with other caciques42 and many captains were devoted to Bacchus;
father Burela had arrived the day before from Mendoza with a great ship-
ment of drinks.43 Or they are eliminated.
Mansilla shows himself to be in an attitude of constant confession.
The Araucanian has secrets, although he always demands the same from
the Christian:
At the last moment he comes clean about his terrible problem, not all at once, but
little by little. []And while they are conceding or giving, he will be demanding,
and will have demanded what they were looking for, which was aguardiente. Then
comes the coup de grace, he orders at last what most interests him and if they dont
refuse he will answer: not giving him more, but giving aguardiente.44
While the liquor did not run out, the saturnalia lasted, everyone who
would drink a toast (yapa) would stagger drunkenly and fall like stones,
vomiting as if attacked by cholera. This produces in Mansilla a feeling of
42 Translators note: Chiefs.

43 Mansilla, Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Vol. I, p.148. The traveller describes
another sinister and orgiastic scene in which the chusma was achumada near
the tent of the Spanish-speaking Indian, Villareal, near the end of the book, which
produces humiliation and terror: Men and women, young and old, all were mixed
and stirred each with the other; unkempt pig-like hair, dirty torn shirts, loose greasy
pilquenes [Translators note: a traditional Indian garment], some half dressed, others
naked, the women without modesty, the men without shame, some throwing up
white slime, others vomiting; dirty painted faces, the eyes of those who still have
not lost consciousness lively with lewdness, languid the look of those who nausea
was prostrating; reeking, growling, screaming, cursing, laughing, crying, lying down
one on top of another, squashed, looking like a group of disgusting reptiles (Vol. II,
p.593).
44 Mansilla, Una excursin a los indios ranqueles, Vol. I, pp.204.
disgust foul-smellling rabble, with the smell of asafoetida and not

of fear.
The indifference of his companions and of history produce terror in
him, hence the verbal diarrhoea in conversation and his digressive prose. It
is as if he had to take account of everything, but of himself in particular, as
the central protagonist of his work. Lineages which lost are remembered
and will survive. To remember is to live again the justification of his
Memorias for oneself and for the others, a select and suitable public.
However, the uses of memory are concomitant with the uses of forgetting:
There is nothing sweeter than the forgotten sweet. Oh! at times it seems
to me that the hight of happiness would consist in not having memory. In
particular because one of his characters believes that memory is independ-
ent of consciousness and he wants to make us believe that not a single
psychic element enters into its production and that as they are made bio-
logically blinded by a mechanistic vision memories are implanted in
our organism, are conserved and are reproduced. But the problem is not
only what is remembered, but also how, and in this sense, it is forgotten.
His confessions and our curiosity activate the mechanism of credulity
which functions like the best dish, badly prepared, which we taste together:
[] the number of impressions which [the public] needs to swallow ought to be

divided, to a great extent, by the number of lies which have to be digested. And how
difficult it is to digest them! A truffled pt de foie gras, whether rancid or well made,
is digested in greater or lesser time, with greater or lesser difficulty, with or without
medical help. One could administer to oneself a good dose of magnesium in fluid
or calcined form. And in no time at all the stomach is ready to start again [].45
Mansilla believes that we suffer from knowing, just as we used to from

ignorance, and makes his own the Arabic proverb which says silence is
golden, and the word, silver, knowing that both have their apologists. For
such a conversationalist, whatever is eaten, even if it is in bad condition,
should be accompanied by drink which ferments correctly. The word fer-
ments in it and produces its elegant conversation (to write as we speak),
45 Mansilla, Por qu?, in Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, p.47.

sometimes of exacerbated rhetoric. He appeals to confidences in a loud

voice, without mental restrictions or reticences, for ideas are generators
just as the grape can become a generator of a good wine, although always
dependent on the taste of the recipient, be it his secretary or imaginary
or ideal reader: Friend, this is going to cause me much work. I think: last
night I fermented it, and I dont know if, what seems to me to be wine,
will be converted into vinegar.46
46 Mansilla, Lucio V., Si dicto o escribo?, in Entre-Nos: causeries del jueves, p.318.
Payr the Rogue: From the Counterfeiter of
Carln Wine to the Beaujolais of Villefranche
The happy sun of Rabelaiss Burgundy, the Dionysian dance, the blond
wheat of the Pampas, the burlesque imitation of the tragedy or one-act
farce, the socialist utopia, the folklore of the northern territories of Inti,1
the profane and modern prose works of Rubn Daro, the criollo mischief
of the go-getters, the exaggeratedly white frock-coat or the dark and vulgar
slang all of this fits Payr.2 This is so much the case that David Vias
described him and understood him as a symbol of the passage from rebel-
lion to abdication or from the Pago Chico to La Nacin.3
As he was accustomed to saying to himself, Payr lived in order to
see with his blue eyes in constant flux (Fernndez Moreno), the eternal
image which was X-rayed on his death, but he also lived in a frugal manner,
which made him, from his memory of poor and thin times, reveal an indi-
vidual sensibility in the world of the gourmet. From the subtly expressive
appreciation of a sauce to the appropriate proportion of a condiment or
the stimulus of a spice, from a correctly made coffee to a well-made chopp,
he understood as few did the relevance of gastronomy to human relations.
In fact, the patriarchal culinary customs of the different regions of the
country provided him with a certain poetic understanding, as well as of an
explanation, for the outsiders (who assimilate the country to a beef-steak or
the Europhile food which is served in hotels), of a particular class distinc-
tion: that between those whose menus include soupe loignon, mock tortue
and pures and those who only count on the underprivileged bread and
mazamorra (a milky pudding made with corn), and who on the farms and
1 Translators note: The Inca sun god.

2 Roberto Jorge Payr (Mercedes, Province of Buenos Aires 19 April 1867Lomas de
Zamora, 5 April 1928) was an Argentinean writer and journalist.
3 Vias, David, Apogeo de la oligarqua, Buenos Aires: Siglo Veinte, 1975, p.133.
166 Payr the Rogue: From the Counterfeiter of Carln Wine
in the industries of the north are obliged to practice the quietum vivere4
and vegetarianism.5
There is as much disparity in their lives as in their tastes and nomadic
understandings of drinkable elixirs, from the aloja (fermented carob or corn,
and water) of the land of Inti to the Lambic6 of the city of Manneken-pis.
He loved Belgium as much as Baudelaire hated it. He knew the hidden
corners of Argentina which for Baudelaire did not exist. He united them
to the artificial paradise of French wine, which for Payr ought to be served
at room temperature.
Like the damned poet in the sphere of the city dweller, Payrs char-
acters resort to the mysterious juice of the vine (how great are the spec-
tacles of wine illuminated by the inner sun!) in order to evoke memories,
drown sorrows and bewitch the feelings. In a story from Scripta (1887),
which exudes passion and drunkenness, the carpenter, Don Juan Dir looks
at the street though the ruby coloured liquid while muttering: What a
beautiful red! I wouldnt know what to compare it with. How good it is
to see everything through wine.
4 Translators note: Quiet life.

5 Mazamorra Oh foreigners, my friends, who have sold my country! mazamorra is
something cooked in water and salt (and bleach to whiten the grains of maiz which
have previously been crushed in the mortar), and which constitutes the principal
food of the needy classes of the provinces of the North; for not all the Republic of
Argentina is carnivorous, as it believes itself to be or affects to believe itself to be,
and the observation shows that its vegetarian part is not the most resolute and pro-
gressive, although it could be patriarchally the best. For as I was saying, from midday
and throughout the afternoon, the rural families unite around the stewpot which
boils in the campfire, making flakes of white dance on the surface and a thick foam
whose bubbles burst with the unexpected jump of the grains which fatten while they
rise and fall, brusque and capricious, trace spirals, group together, split up and boil
in that turmoil with maddened violence. With great appetite and a little curiousity,
the cooking of the mazamorra turns out a microcosmic spectacle: they fast, look at
the stewpot and they will see []. See Payr, Roberto J., Pasemos a la cocina, in
En las tierras de Inti, Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1960, pp.9091.
6 The local beer of Brussels.
Payr the Rogue: From the Counterfeiter of Carln Wine 167
Years later, surrounded by virgin books in the Divertidas aventuras

del nieto de Juan Moreira (1910), Rozsahegy, that representative of the
court aristocracy declares: It is clear. To wine, the wine. But what wine
are we talking about? The grandson Gmez Herrera, who goes from being
a miserable farm worker to a powerful lord, used to drink the dense Greek
wine in the taverns or the chacoli (a light and sour wine which is made
in the Basque Country, in Cantabria and in Chile), but later squanders his
wealth on forty-year-old Oporto wine poured from a cut-glass decanter
in which the best wines sparkle like precious stones. Now, in addition to
the converts amongst his characters, there are the pure ones who amongst
themselves ooze distinctions of birth. His characters accompany this ambi-
guity, so little do they seem like Laucha,7 the confirmed counterfeiter of
drinks and wines, and Monsieur Grandcru, the elegant bodega owner of
old Burgundy, in Villefranche, the cradle of Beaujolais.
Argentina is not much like France, although our wines have increased
in prestige and personality. We go on without knowing too much about
ourselves and hence we are able to coincide with the gaze ofOrtega y Gasset
(in his moment of revilement), later emulated in the words of Murena
when pointing out that the awareness of what we are not and the desire
to be lead us to be so falsely.8 We are not what we want to be, but what we
7 Translators note: A laucha is a small rat and the character of El Laucha, the main
protagonist of Roberto J. Payrs El casamieinto de Laucha (1906), has much in
common with the nature of the rat.
8 Murena, H.A., El pecado original de Amrica, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1965,
p.55. The Argentinean authors motto, which supports a good part of the ideas of his
book, had already been expressed by Ortega y Gasset in his visions of the promises
of the pampas. For the Spanish philosopher, we Argentineans believe ourselves to
be something which in reality we are not, but which we want to be. And we believe
it so intensely that we end up convinced that we are and that we make others believe
it too. Ortega says of this ersatz, this lack of authenticity, amongst other things:
Perhaps the essence of Argentinean life is this to be a hope; the criollo does
not participate in his real life, for this has rather taken place out of his control,
established in the other, in the promised life; the higher the level of life to which
we aspire, the greater will be the distance between the project what we want to
be and the real situation what we are. See Ortega y Gasset, Jos, Intimidades,
believe we have to be. We are like the scoundrel Chamijo, the protagonist
of El falso inca (1905), who could come to be Pedro Bohoroquez Girn,
a child of noble blood, or Hualpa Inca, inheritor of the indigenous rebel-
lion of Tpac Amaru.9 Or like Don Manuel Dir, the protagonist of El
vino, who yearned to be rich in order to leave his past behind as a poor
and obscure artisan and thus be able to marry Marta Caro, one of the
most beautiful and rich young women of the Porteo scene, who rejects
him and condemns him to the narcotic vapours of wine. In this story, as
in some of Mansillas digressions, the drunks and the unsuitable women
are understood as condemned and produce classical and hygienic morals:
And I say today to my sons (sons too of a noble woman of the same class)
that the biggest poisons of the heart are wine and ill matched love, when
the man does not have enough strength of will in order to squeeze his heart
in his hands and put out the fire that is consuming it. We have left far
behind the Baudelairean idea that wine resembles man and that we cannot
be crueller to it than to ourselves. There emerges, rather, a prophylactic and
educative spontaneity typical of the epoch (and also in fashion in Europe),
which survives for several decades, in which alcohol and its excesses (the
opium of the people) are condemned even in socialist publications which
propagate the promulgation of a national dry law. It is not the same with
tobacco, which turns out to be the most faithful companion of women.10
in Obras Completas, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957, Vol. II, El Espectador

(19161934), pp.635666. Murena does not recognize this source of inspiration in
El pecado original de Amrica, although he does in his article in Revista Sur: Thus
we arrive at the simulated exit from self-absorption: we swell up, we want to simulate
a being that we do not possess, we aspire to erase from our appearance the wince of
fear which we pretend not to suffer. It is a substitute, which Ortega perceived vividly.
See Murena, H.A., Notas sobre la crisis argentina, in Revista Sur 248 (September
October 1957), p.10.
9 Translators note: Tpac Amaru was the last indigenous leader of the Inca state in
Peru. He died in 1572.
10 It is interesting to point out how, in the book Scripta (possibly the first volume of sto-
ries published in this country) two stories collect morals in an asymmetrical manner
(condemnatory and exculpatory) with respect to alcohol and tobacco in relation to
amorous links. See Payr, Roberto J., El vino and La pipa, in Scripta, Buenos Aires:
Not without reason, Payr is considered by Agustn lvarez and so

many others to be an excellent writer of documentaries on criollo customs;
indeed they place some of his works, in particular El casamiento de Laucha
(1906), next to Martn Fierro by Hernndez. We Argentineans fit quite
well into the mould of Laucha, that representative of the picaresque who
is obliged to gain a living in whatever way he can and at whatever cost.
Within living memory, Laucha was transfigured into several traders in
Argentinean wines when two decades ago they sent fake wine to several
Eastern countries. There exist witnesses according to whom Payr did not
only physically meet this person, who belonged to the underclass, but drank
Jacobo Peuser, 1887, pp.4170 and pp.7993. Thus the so-called Sociedad Luz
(Society of Light) of the socialists ( Juan B. Justo, ngel M. Gimnez, Klimann
y Pieiro), a cultural institution which propagates teaching with light projections,
orchestrates campaigns (pamphlets, anthologies, legal projects) in defence of the
health and future of the working class and the people in general so as to save the
Argentinean Nation from the ravages of alcoholism. In his Antologa antialcohlica,
Gimnez (a follower of this strange positivist socialism and Darwinian rationalism
and devotee of a kind of Sarmentinian pedagogy for the lower classes, who turned
himself into an educator of the sovereign), founded his project of the vernacular
dry law, saying that the socialists, attacked by the mercenaries of the Church and
all the reactionary forces, present this project for repressing alcoholism, in defence
of the moral and physical health of the people and for the future of our patria. This
sanitary education undertaken by Gimnez and his followers, includes, in addition to
this anti-alcoholic predilection, sexual education and public instruction, for which
he appeals to extracts from universal literature, scientific and political, which in those
days could be acquired cheaply. See Gimnez, ngel M., Antologa Antialcohlica,
Buenos Aires:, Imprenta La vanguardia, 1933, Series I, Vol. IV, no. 4. On the other
hand, with respect to tobacco and the conjugal life, in Payrs above-cited story La
pipa the character chooses to continue at the cost of losing his partner and achieves
his object: of not quitting his habit and of living with her. Three years after the
publication of Scripta, the Scot J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) writes My Lady
Nicotine (1890). This is one of the most suggestive essays about tobacco, in which
he associates the habit of smoking with solitude, and makes a healthy legato with
respect to marriage and against nicotine, not to mention that in his final pages he
recognizes that he has never stopped dreaming with his pipe and that, when his wife
is sleeping, he speculates about what his neighbour would do with her. See Barrie,
J.M., Lady Nicotina, Madrid: Trama Editorial, 2003.
with him on more than one occasion a glass of wine in the local store called
La Polvareda. (There they fraternize through the circulation of the glass,
said Sarmiento in his Facundo.)
But Payr did not only depict men of lower social rank and pay such
as Laucha, who, panting with thirst, are used to drinking two quarts of
carln wine;11 he also portrayed the eminent bodega owners of the old
11 Cunninghame Graham describes in 1870 the pulperas de campaa, in which the

gauchos pass their time getting drunk with carln wine, playing cards and listening
to the gaucho minstrels. (The pulpera was, until the start of the twentieth century, an
extremely common commericial establishment in many regions of Latin America in
which it was possible to acquire everything that was then indispensible to daily life:
food, drink, candles, medicines and fabrics, amongst other things. It was also a social
centre for the lower and middle classes in which they met to take a beer, play at cards
or organize dances or music with guitars with the locals.) After the battle of Pavn,
which initiates the national structure of the triumphant paternalist oligarchy, the
gaucho voice and its derivatives (barbarian), are reserved for the armies of Chacho
Pealosa and his peers, who, for all that they are an oligarchy, ought to be extirpated
because the Argentinean betrayal impedes the Europeanization of the Pampas. An
English traveller had already described the gauchos in 1820: very strange people,
who have long braided hair like the Chinese and carried a strange instrument, sitting
around the campfire. They reminded him of the witches of Macbeth. Clearly the
problem is not so much wine as that it appears associated with other bad habits, for
there is a variety of average quality, although the one most consumed since the start
of the century is Carln, different from other alcoholic drinks which are a luxury:
Here there are wines of all classes, from the humble Port to the imperial Tokay, but
of medium quality. Port and Madeira are sold at a peso a bottle. Champagne costs
$150. There is a great surfeit of French and Spanish wines. But the most common is
the Catalan wine, or as they say, Carln, bought for two or three reals a bottle and
which is very far from being disagreeable. The national production is poor: the wine
of Mendoza is sweet and tastes like our homemade wines. Beer is a luxury. Bottled
beer doesnt have the flavour which the beer from London barrels has. Brandy, gin,
and rum are abundant. The latter comes from Brazil, Havana and the Isle de France.
Old Jamaican rum is difficult to find. Caa, a kind of white brandy coming from
Havana, Brazil and Spain, which they call aguardiente espaol, is much drunk and
tones up the spirit. See Cinco aos en Buenos Aires por un ingls, 18201825, Buenos
Aires: Solar/Hachette, 1962, pp.103105.
world, such as the character in Violines y toneles (1908),12 who believe in

the similarity between adjusting staves and harmonious tables. We are
no longer in the infinite and inhospitable space of the Pampas, but in
the beautiful Villefranche, the city founded in the eleventh century and
framed by marble walls that keep medieval secrets and the secrets of the
French Revolution. The capital of the mantilla, the curtain, and muslin
(which now is hardly manufactured). Amongst the curiosities it contains,
one should be remembered: the inventor of work clothes. It is a land with
a subsoil of granite, rich in manganese, which becomes the ideal stock for
Beaujolais, always incarnated in dark ruby, of a character structured with
aromas of iris, withered rose, species and mature fruits. This is something
which Laucha could not have known how to appreciate, although he could
make an exaggerated copy of its colour and bulk.
The fanaticism for this wine is such that the zone is famous for the
associations which celebrate their devotion to Beaujolais with the elec-
tion of new member-followers in the Bacchic councils. Many and diverse
names honour the noble fruit of the earth in its most grandiloquent expres-
sion, wine: Amigos del Beaujolais, Vendimiadores de las Piedras Doradas,
Amigos de Brouilly, Racimo en Flor, Molino de Viento, etc., and the only
feminine association, Las Damoiselles de Chiroubles. There is one that car-
ries a name which recalls Payrs style: Los Garganta Seca. But even if Payr
can manage to enjoy the wines of Europe, he feels that the Old Continent
is not for him and he writes from Barcelona a letter to Gerchunoff in which
he testifies: Of course I will not work for Europe: I am not interested
in it except in so far as it refers to that formidable seedbed of the future.
Our America, with all that it lacks, is more tempting than these conven-
tional and academicized lands in which the foreigner has to limit himself
to being contemplative if he does not want to be ridiculous or accept the
mockery of those who perhaps are worth less.13 This is because not only
12 Payr, Roberto J., Violines y toneles, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de Amrica Latina,
1968, pp.59.
13 Gonzlez Lanuza, Eduardo, Carta a Alberto Gerchunoff (Barcelona, 9/2/1909),
in Genio y Figura de Roberto J. Payr, Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1965, p.76.
does he know how to observe, he wants to perform and pursue a civiliz-

ing zeal in the manner of Sarmiento and of Alberti. Like them he sees the
countrys tragedy in the desert and beyond this in the consistent and unjust
monopolization of the land.
His multifaceted personality has made history recover it as a mutation.
Like all good reserve wines, it always turns out to be a surprising mystery
until we do try it.
The Shadow of Martnez Estrada and his
AlimentaryRadiography
All radiography is in-depth photography, a revelation of what is hidden. It is

the most concrete image, the most trustworthy myth and the most eloquent
metaphor. All radiography makes known our dark or hidden side, our most
visceral biography, information about our hidden body. Radiography is,
then, an apocalypse, a revelation or proof of the hidden reality.1
The Pampas, the environment in which we ourselves develop, is the
symbol of a telluric fatalism. It is not a landscape to be described, but rather
to be analysed spiritually, for it is the ultimate truth which, because of its
depth, its ability to move us, and its metaphysical persuasion, dominates
us with its vast loneliness and its uncertain horizons.
The civilization which we establish is possessed by barbarism, in the
same way that beneath the etiquette of the cosmopolitan unity is hidden
the chirip,2 or the rustler disguises himself as the lawyer. And Martnez
Estrada3 senses this already, years before abandoning poetry, when on
comparing the ideal expression of the book and the concrete expression of
the human face, he points out that an infinity of centuries since the time
when history began to be written, having encircled ourselves with anguished
shadows, we doubt where to go because from the four cardinal points we
hear voices of travellers who have left to conquer truth.4
1 Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Prlogo intil in Antologa, Mexico: FCE, 1978, p.13.
2 Translators note: The chirip, also called medio poncho, was an article of clothing, a
kind of poncho worn around the legs by the Gauchos. The word chirip is of Quechua
origin.
3 Ezequiel Martnez Estrada (14 September 18954 November 1964) was an Argentine
writer, poet, essayist and literary critic.
4 Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Energas annimas (Nosotros no. 106, 1918), in La
Revista Nosotros, Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1969, p.440.
174 The Shadow of Martnez Estrada and his Alimentary Radiography
Nothing More than Shadows
The reverse of the Platonic allegory, the shadows are the indissoluble pro-
tagonists of the Argentinean future. They are spectres which inscribe symp-
toms, anathemas which reproduce themselves silently and voraciously,
crouching and shady evocations of our substantial and disruptive history.
In the West too, according to Stoichita,5 the relationship with the
shadow demarcates two myths about the origin of representation, one
concerning the birth of painting and the visual arts, the other being the
allegory of the cave. With regard to the first, Pliny the Elder points out in
his Natural History that a lovesick girl from Corinth traced the outlines
of the shadow of her lover on the wall with the light of a candle in order
to keep alive his memory. It is with the second myth that in the Republic
Plato opens the theory of knowledge, shedding some light on that primitive
man, the prisoner in a cave, who can only see the (false) shadows which are
projected on a wall and not the real sun or the Idea in its dominion. In this
way too our conception of history and representation, as well as having
always been guided by the search for a clear aetiology, finds its foundations
in the shadow as a symbol of an itinerant genealogy which reaches to our
times and which spans different fields of thought.
The dogma of the forms does not meet with a quiet endorsement in
these parts. Politics and literature flow together in the literary essay or in
a literary work in essay form, in which truth is mixed with imagination
and they establish between them particular associations. Fiction speaks to
us of politics as it does of war and in a paranoiac and conspiratorial way it
stylizes a way of seeing the world.
From Sarmiento to the present day, Argentinean literature and the
Argentinean essay have tried to exorcize the harassing shadow of that
transcendent trilogy constituted by Facundo (the barbarian of the inte-
rior), Rosas (the most faithful copy of Facundo) and Pern (the other
Rosas). In this sense, the shadow is the national parabola which has guided
5 See Stoichita, Victor I., Breve historia de la sombra, Madrid: Siruela, 1999.
essayistic-literary thought since its origins and in some way brands the his-
tory of Argentinean representation.
In reality, the previous complaint is complicated when the axis of
analysis does not focus on the usual problem ofcivilization and barbarism,
but on the conjunction of the national reality with the personal constitu-
tive characteristics of those who think and write. From this point of view
the aetiology of identity is always inexplicable, for the identification of the
analysts with the object of study usually makes impossible the objectivity
necessary for their task. This ambiguity with relation to the analysis, where
the subject is mixed with the object which it is intended to understand,
creates an indissoluble alloy between fiction and biography, between epic
and history, between that which can be exemplified and that which can be
taught, between the weight of the real and the substrate of a life.
The shadow, the way of life of the dead, turns out to be an allegorical
resort of objective knowledge which has pursued the Argentinean intel-
lectual from the beginning of those times, and which, independently of its
degree of clarity, has turned the distancing into an unfortunate knowledge
which can find no rest. For the shadow of what is intended to be redeemed
is nothing less than that of itself, of the patria, of the father.
Composition, Theme: The Cow
A spectre haunts Argentina, a spectre which, in the Peronist epoch, made

Martnez Estrada, sick ofthe patria or of neurodermatitis, throw the inkwell
against his shadow on the wall,6 like Luther in Wittemberg. That shadow
is true in its nominal and mythical representation, and does not appear
to have been exorcized even now. (An advertising spot prays: more cows,
6 Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Prlogo a la primera edicin, in Qu es esto? Catilinaria,

Buenos Aires: Lautaro, 1956, p.17.
more country.) At that point it was formulated in the following manner,

the lumpemproletariat having made itself visible and conscious:
It was also the Mazorca, for it left the slaughterhouses like the other left the salting
houses. They were the same hosts of Rosas, now enrolled in the band of Pern, who
was the successor of that tyrant. A kind of legal representative, they exercised without
the poncho the Gauchos trade in the city; in the very heart of the city without the
poncho but with the Gauchos knife, they exercised the trade of the people that cut
the tendons of the animals, the throatslitters and the salters of the tasajo7 of yester-
year. The country continued to be a great breedingplace and slaughterhouse of cows
as it had been from Echeverra to Hudson. And those sinister people of the plains,
who Sarmiento described in Facundo, had not perished. They were living at that very
moment, applied to the same task but now indoors, in enterprises much older than
those of Rosas, Anchorena, Terrero and Urquiza. On 17 October they sallied forth
to demand an explanation of their captivity, to demand their place in the sun, and
appeared with their butchers knives in their belts, menacing with a San Bartolom
of the Barrio Norte.8 We felt shivers on seeing them march in a true and silent horde
with placards which menaced with the taking of a terrible revenge.9
Composition, theme: the cow which, affirmative and illusory, divides

history into two in its solemn movement.10
Pasipha is the goddess who represents old Unitarists and Federalists,
as well as representing the workers party, a party which lacked an industrial
proletariat although it had a rural one which had Pern as its priest. This
mythological allusion is no accident for it deals with the goddess of the
farmers although she is unfailingly remembered disguised as a wooden
cow. The myth tells us that Poseidon avenged himself on the spouse of
7 Translators note: A dried salted meat that can be transported for consumption later.
8 Martnez Estradas reference to San Bartolom makes metaphorical reference to those
beings who, like the Biblical Apostle, remained indifferent to the love of worldly
things, lived devoted to heavenly love and all their life remained supported by divine
grace and help, not supporting themselves by their own efforts, but rather by the
love of God, like the followers of Pern who took the public sphere and shocked
the posh inhabitants of Barrio Norte.
9 Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Prlogo a la primera edicin, p.32.
10 Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, La vaca, in Obra potica, Buenos Aires: Hyspamrica,
1985, p.149.
Pasipha, Minos of Crete, sparking off in her love for the gleaming white
bull which they should have sacrificed in her honour. Daedalus, an exile
from Athens and the maker of some wooden toy robots that could speak
and move,11 helped her to realize her zoophilic love by constructing a cow
from hollow wood, which he covered with cow hide, adding to its hooves
hidden wheels that helped make it move. He accompanied her to where she
met Poseidons bull, which gave life, and as the fruit of this union there was
born the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man.
Facundo, Rosas and Pern are executors of a way of being national,
which based its existence on retrograde elements, on past evils and relapses,
so-called social residues or historical invariants, which have turned out to
be a constant in our brief history. This shadow roasted our culture and
turned the people into a pack of mules which adored its passing idols,
all of them consecrated to watch over bovine acquiescence, whose repre-
sentation is a wooden cow which gives birth to a monster:
Pern carried to the great stages of the theatres and universities, to the benches
of the Justiciary and the Bar, the executors and the rightful claimants of Facundo,
Aldao, Here and the other mob of predecessors, and to the parishioners of the
Federal Catholic cult of the bodyguards of Rosas and his wife. He spoke to this
people with his oracular voice, as if coming from the depths of the tombs, for the
god that he served Rosas and the idol he imitated Yrigoyen had been silent.
He assumed the plural roles, like a criollo Frgoli, of the tribune of the people, of
the philosopher of the Lumpengesellschaft, of the priest of Pasipha (who could have
been the goddess of fertility of the rodeos of Rosas and of Urquiza), of the general
11 In his compulsive comparison, Martnez Estrada states that while Rosas promoted
an arms and toys industry in Santos Lugares [] It was the light industry with
which he made the children and adolescents fiercer, equipping them with fusils,
canons, helmets, bayonets which later they would reduce to the blunderbuss and the
slaughtermans knife of the Mazorca in the genealogical link, taking advantage of the
popular ignorance which admired irreverently the machine as a toy, Pern awoke
in the ill-fated child who is our adult, and more if he is poor, the serious fascination
for the toy. Thus he could, implant a heavy war industry and build aeroplanes and
machine guns so we could entertain ourselves. See Martnez Estrada,Qu es esto?
Catilinaria, pp.85 and 89.
of the militias of the Colorados del Monte,12 black shirts, brown and blue of his
descamisados13 who used shirts of silk.14
Focused with the Spenglerian lens of morphological equivalence,

Peronism means stirring up nationalist sentiments, where the caudillo
changes his apparel and the masses continue their hard work. History
manifests itself in recidivist archetypes, in which only ornamental changes
and never structural ones take place. For Martnez Estrada the Peronist
multitudes were popular tribes of butchers imbued with the romanticism
of Echeverra, just as the caudillos of the past had been for Sarmiento
imbued with Volneys invocation.15 The shadow that lies in wait for us is
12 Translators note: The cavalry of Rosas.

13 Translators note: Literally without shirt or shirtless. The term was originally
used as an insult by the elite to describe Perns followers but was later reclaimed as
a term of pride, with Juan and Eva Pern affectionately referring to their followers
as descamisados.
14 Martnez Estrada, Qu es esto? Catilinaria, p.227.
15 Although all questions which refer to origins are shaded, there is no doubt that
Facundo and its shadow have constituted themselves as the Book of Genesis of our
nationality. It is worth transcribing its first lines: Terrible shadow of Facundo, I
am going to invoke you in order that, shaking the bloodstained dust which covers
your ashes, you rise up to explain to us the secret life and the internal convulsions
which tear the entrails of a noble people! You possess the secret: reveal it to us!.
These words remind us of the Invocation of the count of Volney in Las ruinas
de Palmira, which Sarmiento had read fruitfully: Hail, solitary ruins, sacrosanct
sepulchres, silent walls! I invoke you! Yes! while your aspect rejected with secret
terror the looks of the vulgar, my heart found, on contemplating yours, the delight
of profound sentiments and of elevated ideas! How many useful lessons, how many
pathetic or energetic reflections you offer the spirit which consults you! When the
whole enslaved earth fell silent before the tyrants, you still proclaimed the truths
that they detest; and confusing the relics of the kings with those of the lowest slave,
you attested to the sacred dogma of EQUALITY! It is in a gloomy precinct that I,
solitary lover of LIBERTY, have seen your genius appear, not as it is represented by
the foolish masses armed with torches and daggers, but rather with the august aspect
of justice, taking in its hands the sacred balance at the gates of eternity in which are
weighed the actions of the mortals! See Volney, El Conde de, Las Ruinas de Palmira,
La Ley Natural y La Historia de Samuel, Pars: Garnier Hermanos, p.13. In fact a
our own, which, although concentrated in these negative protean proto-

types, projects our beliefs, our needs, our preoccupations and our habits
as a manifestation of the Argentinean vine as much as colonization and
the peculiarities of the land had done. But in Sarmiento not everything is
shadow, beyond the constitutive:
The future? What? Can you not see this river which draws the tributaries of fifty
navigable canals, which covers thousands of leagues from the mountains of Peru,
Bolivia and Brazil; these pampas which could feed two hundred million bulls; these
immense forests, these climates which fertilize all the products of the earth? Say to
Europe: here there is a free people and in a century we will be innumerable like the
sands of the sea; our shared plains could invite all the inhabitants of the earth for
a banquet; space and food there would be for all. Do you ask for lights? Men? Oh!
We are not the last among the Americans! Oh God who hides from us the secrets
of the future! Do not hide them from us: here the Hispano-American destinies are
being prepared; something better than North America or a thousand times worse
than Russia will turn out formidable among such debris.16
In Martnez Estrada, by contrast, his pessimism (which is made clear in

his attempt to rectify the Sarmientan vision, present in the final paragraph
of his Radiografa) gives way to a negative philosophy of history. Basing its
analysis on a series of pernicious myths which conspire against our liberty
(tellurism, anti-techologisim, the sanctification of the heroes, the eternal
return, etc.), criticism turns out to be an abstraction which does not deal
with the civilizing structure of neo-colonial capitalism, but rather with the
appearances. That is to say, it focuses on ethnography or certain invariable
characteristics. Hence, for Rosas, the historical invariants of Facundo,
which detect only formal differences and neither structural nor functional
ones, continue in the middle of the nineteenth century to be the spectral
passage from this book is cited by Sarmiento in Facundo when not only invoking
the shadows bur also the loneliness of the Pampas which bring to his mind a passage
from Condes Asiatic Ruinas. See Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Facundo, Buenos
Aires: Jackson, 1947, p.26. Note the stylistic similarities between Sarmiento and
Thomas Carlyle, who Sarmiento had read in English.
16 Sarmiento, Domingo F., El General Fray Flix Aldao, Gobernador de Mendoza, in
Los Caudillos, Buenos Aires: Jackson, 1945, pp.1819.
dominator of a psychological invariant, fear. This fear is founded, as in all

cow-breeding cultures, on the violent action of the slaughter man.
While the prairie and the breeding of livestock, the branding and the slaughter of the
ranch in fields, corrals or slaughter houses are a typical trade, characteristic of the
labour; while the cow, the horse and the sheep are not living beings but rather the ele-
ments of an accountancy, the raw material of a slaughter, the worker will preserve the
emotional, passionate or deeply psychological keynotes. A primitive Weltanschauung
from eight thousand years ago. But precisely what varies least is incorporated to the
automaticism of the manual and vital function, and the sensibility that it inevitably
creates. A technique is always a mental habit.17
We are speaking here of mental entelechies which result from the

influence of the environment. Nature, rather than the subjects or history,
states an unfailing truth, for geography makes its barbaric and telluric
spirits manifest themselves, sprits in which, for example, the caudillo has
disappeared only in appearance because he has mutated into the function-
ary or magistrate. This is because the conquest and colonization were done
not only by men but by livestock (both cattle and horses) to whose care,
droving and farm work the function of words is reduced:
The cow and the horse are markers of an historical and social invariant of the first
order and as a whole have fixed to the country one of the frontiers of its sphere of
destiny. They are equal in this respect to coal and iron. This is a generator of a form
and style of civilization. Also between the cities and the fields, between the country
and the port, are the cows.18
17 Martnez Estrada, E., Los invariantes histricos del Facundo, Buenos Aires: Conferencias
pronunciadas en la librera Viau en August de 1947, pp.67.
18 Ibid, p.18. Ten years after the conferences held in the Viau bookshop, the bovine
impetus already exhausted in face of the crisis unresolved by the failure to form a
community spirit, a beloved disciple of Estrada demands, at least: For how long has
Argentina been in crisis? Since her beginning? But she had in the previous century
an animal impulse, so to speak, which took the country forward in spite of herself.
And she also had at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this, the
illusion of having given expression to a community. The crisis beat then very close to
the surface. But they were lapses in growth. Now, for the last few decades, for the last
three decades, we have been in the crisis of the crisis. What happened to the animal
It is the triumph of Pasipha over Ceres, of the crimson slaughter which

leaves for a while its bloody trace in the ear over delirious golden corn-
fields, of the multiform barbarism over the harvest, the threshing and the
ploughing of the spirit in that Argentina which Martnez Estrada once
contemplated critically in its abundance, in his lyrical epoch and in his
primitivist book on Hudson.19
Civilization and Barbarism, Bread and Meat
This linking of the meat industry with the primitive and of the cereals with
the civilized is a constant which impregnates the entire natural and moral
imaginary of the national alimentary sociability. Tell me if you breed or
cultivate and I will tell you who you are. All the food that we consider edible,
for all that it presents itself to us in its natural state, is always cultured.
impetus, from which without doubt came the famous bovine optimism? In some
way it became fatigued, ended, although it still exhales a few convincing moos. And
the one thing capable of sustaining it was never formed: the spirit of community.
The proof: the country is sunk in paralysis. Murena, H.A. Notas sobre la crisis
Argentina, in Revista Sur 248 (SeptemberOctober 1957), p.1.
19 See Argentina (1927), in Obra potica, Buenos Aires: Hyspamrica, 1985, pp.127179,
and El mundo maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique Hudson, Mexico: FCE, 1951. This
more hopeful vision of the national reality, which he did not often express in his
writings, returns briefly in his Salmo de vida y esperanza (1958): The luminous gods
will return from banishment because the day has arrived/the day of ploughing up
the earth, of pulling up the chaff in order to sow the wheat []/Henceforth every-
thing will be done as is due for he who gains his bread with dignity;/everything will
be done for the midday sower and reaper, and not for the prevaricator nor for the
nocturnal mountaineer;/for the land is not exhausted nor is the labourer tired;/she
will never again be exhausted nor he despoiled;/and never more will imposters and
degenerates throw lots in order to gain the shroud of the patria []. See Martnea
Estrada, Ezequiel, Leer y escribir, Mexico: Joaqun Mortiz, 1969, pp.151153.
In its original symbology, livestock moves freely and is subject to

nothing except its own free will. It reproduces as it likes and is subject
to a sanguine temperament. As the historians point out, it is certain that
the transition from hunting wild cattle to breeding and domesticating
them entailed that the passage from dairy farm to ranch, which although
it represented an organizational form of our main resource, was rapidly
assimilated to the slaughterhouse.
The Indian is described in his barbaric desert, fed basically from the
meat that he can hunt, and in fact when they think of colonizing Patagonia,
during the first incursions of 1778, they build hundreds of ploughs in order
to work on the land. The cultivation of the land is identifiable with that of
the spirit and the evolution of customs and culture. And bread, the pro-
totype of the cultivable, possesses a highly potent symbolic interweaving,
which is unlike that of livestock. Bread unites everything, the simple and
the complex, from the sweet stale crust of charity to the unleavened tran-
substantiated bread of the Christian communion. It is a symbol contingent
on work, on the serious and the progressive. It requires effort for it is gained
in the sweat of his brow. A birth is welcome because the new adolescent
comes with bread under the arm and not with a piece of meat between
the teeth. The evil ways of the fathers made them tear the bread out of
the mouths of their children. It concentrates effort, is fundamental and
should never be lacking although, paradoxically, it constitutes a supplement
and serves to accompany. Beyond alimentary choices which take account
of cultural identity, it is difficult to think of food without bread, just as
it is to think of the history of bread in isolation from the class struggle.
Bread is symbol of the harshness of life and work, it is the memory of a better state
harshly acquired in the course of the previous generations. [] Bread arouses the
most archaic respect, next to the sacred; to throw it away or step on it is a sign
of sacrilege; the spectacle of bread in rubbish bins arouses the indignation; bread
becomes one with the workers condition: there is less bread in the rubbish bin than
poverty. It is a memorial.20
20 De Certeau, Michel, La invencin de lo cotidiano. 2. Habitar, cocinar, Mexico:

Universidad Iberoamericana, 1996, pp.8889.
Bread is the great generic food. In the colonial epoch it is difficult to

obtain it outside Buenos Aires and its consumption is basically urban. The
absence of good machinery to harvest grains and so produce flour consti-
tutes an insuperable obstacle. From 1820 the situation is changed by the
opening up of wheat importation, from Chile and the United States,21 two
civilizing models of the Sarmientan ideology although it continues to
be expensive. In his writings Sarmiento emphasizes the value of any form
of cultivation, and he even assimilates it to culture as an advance on the
natural. Thus the hardworking North American peace pleases him in its
contrast with the bloody politics of Europe: When Europe says hunger,
the Republic replies Eat your fill with my bread. When the conservative
kings, who with their bread eat the fools, say there is war, the Yankee replies
and sows his wheat.22 Cultivation is like education. Argentina should sow
its wheat for everyone and break out of the cycle of cannibalism in order to
definitively accede to democracy like the civilized peoples who have been
able to extend contentment to the largest number of individuals.
It was from ideas like these that the socialism of the new century takes
its reference point. And it is one of its adherents, Ernesto de la Crcova,
who paints the iconic painting of the national visual arts, Sin pan y sin
trabajo,23 confirming that perhaps it is possible to live without meat, but
not with hunger (which is to say without bread). Work, no longer rural, but
21 An English commercial traveller, perhaps Thomas George Love, who illustrates the
customs of Buenos Aires in his diary from 1820 to 1825, dedicates a paragraph to
bread: Bread is expensive: two small loaves of bread (hardly much bigger than our
own French rolls) are sold for half a real. According to the quality of the flour, they
reduce the size. Bread made with North American flour is better. For the moment
they depend on foreign importation and the North Americans have extracted large
sums of money. The wheat of the country, for some starange reason lack of care or
deficient harvests does not manage to satisfy the demand. They usually mill the
wheat in the bakeries, because according to a recent law they have to locate them
outside the city. In the work of milling the grains they use mules. See Un ingls:
cinco aos en Buenos Aires, 18201825, Buenos Aires: Solar/Hachette, 1962, p.104.
22 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Obras Completas, Buenos Aires: Luz del Da, 1948,
Vol. XLVI, Pginas literarias, p.17.
23 Translators note: With neither bread nor work.
rather expressed by smoking chimneys, is now assimilated to bread, and its

lack to an dishonest civilizing project. Reference to this work is justified by
what it means in its time, not only as an exegetic icon, but also on account
of its reception outside the country. It is intended to transform Buenos
Aires into one of the great artistic capitals of the world in an exhibition
put on in the United States:
Among the unforgettable spectacles which I have been given to consider across the
world, none has impressed me so profoundly as that of the Republic of Argentina
in Saint Louis, occupying for the first time in her history a prominent place among
the most cultured nations of the Earth. And to consider that this triumph is owed
not to the unheard-of richness of her prairies, nor to the splendour of her wheat,
but rather to the selection of the art exhibition! I feel in my soul the pleasure of the
worker who contemplates the land of his elders, covered at last in golden cornfields.24
To sum up, Martnez Estrada wanted the same: the triumph of the spirit
in a country materially represented by her agricultural and cattle-breeding
wealth. It is known that the Indian and the gaucho, the Montoneras and
the majority of the inhabitants of the country based their dietary regime
on meat: Every creature that walks is going to end on the barbecue: crops
are practically unknown by contrast with meat. Mansillas description of
certain feasts in the Indian camps, in which vegetable foods are present in
order to satisfy the hiker, does not exempt us from the formlessness of our
telluric forces. Little by little these forces take the finished formof the con-
stellation with the Rosista Manual de Estanciero where a sign ofthe zodiac
is distinguished as a prototype: Taurus. This Milky Way of the livestock
remains fixed to the ground of the Pampas like the planets in the firmament
and the civilizing intentions are then invaded by ghosts which are thought
to have been annihilated, as a symbol of the irredeemable. Nature has cre-
ated its archetypes, which repeat themselves eternally, metamorphosizing
in order to give the impression of change, although they do not evolve.
Rustling has governed our models of civilization:
24 Schiaffino, Eduardo, La evolucin del gusto artstico en Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires:
Francisco A. Colombo, 1982, cited in Malosetti Costa, Laura, Los primeros modernos:
arte y sociedad en Buenos Aires a fines del siglo XIX, Buenos Aires: FCE, 2003, p.313.
The lands and the livestock, the strays and the wild animals actually belonged to
the Indian. The campaigns carried out against him were not enterprises of civiliza-
tion, but rather great speculations done in order to found and consolidate a system
of agriculture and livestock breeding which enriched a large group of families, thus
creating what has been called the feudal aristocrat, the lord of the earth. There does
not exist a word to designate that cattle-rustling of the land; but it existed for many
years as a normal regime for regulating the distribution of wealth and balancing the
budgets. The State stole the land and redistributed it, just as the cattle rustlers stole
and redistributed the livestock.25
The frontiers, which cloud our ambitions, are indicated by forts,

although livestock breeding is a vibrating wire which makes the fron-
tiers move. It is what moves and offers itself, as opposed to the immobile
and the useless. According to the radiographer, the bountiful nature of
this land fertilizes our bad morals, and we are defined by that attitude of
taking what she gives us without ourselves making any effort. Thus our
ancestors behaved; and the gaucho, the other outcast, whose life follows
the vicissitudes of a second phase of the Indian camp a change of aspect
but not of substance is like Martn Fierro. He is the personification
of the unchanging environment, who eats meat with his hands near the
campfire, throws the bones over his shoulder and feeds himself with nei-
ther vegetables nor bread; for to cultivate, or to put it differently, to bend
down, is for him a humiliating activity. We have accustomed ourselves to
food without worries and a long time ago the gaucho, and subsequently the
hobo, reproduced a sceptical philosophy. Governments are also producers
of the environment and this conditions the emergence of dictators, who in
reality are the restorers of the laws of nature. In short, the war between the
city and the country, between the white man and the Indian, between the
arable land and the uncultivated land, between the citizen and the peasant,
is what gives character to our subsequent formation.26
Finally, this constitutive question has no solution for, as with the
Minotaur, we are trapped in a labyrinth of errors where civilization and
25 Martnez Estrada, E., Muerte y Transfiguracin de Martn Fierro, Mexico: FCE, 1948,
Vol. I, Las Figuras, p.115.
26 Ibid., Vol. II, Las Perspectivas, p.276.
barbarism are the same, given that the city is the country reincarnated.
Nor will the locomotive save us, as Hernndez believed, understanding
it as a resource to promote progress, like the industrious population and
the profitable products which the earth gives to those who cultivate
and fertilize it, which would solve the problem of the Indian and the
frontiers for to implement it would be to put the lid on the real prob-
lem, which was the Indian who was there in order to lasso it.27 Neither
would technology be a solution for our invariants. The railway would
only enable the locomotive to move itself, like Pasipha with her wheels.
The cow and her hide would continue in the rodeo and would produce
their monsters. The livestock on foot, which constitutes the base of our
great fortunes, was the Achilles heel of the civil wars, the skeleton of the
nation and the stumbling block of the governments. It lived beneath and
within its hide.28 And it continues to live today, for the current state of
the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes (which Ernesto de la Crcova, the
gentelman-farmer, founded in 1923) serves as an example which dis-
embodies our spirit. This establishment forms part of an enclave with
the highest property and speculative values of the city of Buenos Aires,
Puerto Madero, a symbol of the first world aspirations of the decade of
the 1990s. It appears to be a level which resists urban modernization, and
in its gardens of Sevillian pretentions and tiles, of dry fountains which
try to accumulate an aristocracy of the spirit, survives a small parilla
which, with its fumes of roast meat, sings the praises of inert sculptures
which witness the unhappy taste of its table companions, inhabitants of
a country which demands bread and work like never before.
27 Ibid., Vol. I, Las Figuras, p.124.

28 Martnez Estrada, E., Radiografa de la pampa, Buenos Aires: Babel, 1933, p.122.
Bread and Circuses
Man does not live by bread alone. And Martnez Estrada knows it but
considers that man needs air more than bread, light more than meat;
for he is a luminous animal, an aerial being and not a terrestrial one, and
the air is the nous, the breath, the spirit.29 In the same year as Martnez
Estradas Qu es esto? (1956) appears, Jos Luis Romero, reflecting on
the reality of the national spirit, publishes his essays, gathered under
the title of Argentina: imgenes y perspectivas. Here he recognizes, by
contrast with others who can only manage mere approximations, that
he has made a fruitful effort in order to go deeper in this investigation.
According to Romero, he deals with collisions of mentalities: alluvial,
Criollo and universalist and hopes that this last one, a minority like
the second, but with the possibility of ascendancy over the first, will
impose its spirit which is open to different western spiritual currents
and their mediate ideas.
For Romero, as for the radiographer, the problem is to analyse the posi-
tion of the masses. They are on the one hand divided into urban and rural
sectors, and on the other grouped according to their origin (natives, immi-
grants, mestizos, etc.). Romero points out that those of European origin
predominate in the agricultural tasks, whereas among the livestock farm-
ers the Criollo maintains his ancient prestige and has not been replaced.
29 Martnez Estrada, E., Las 40, Buenos Aires: Torres Agero, 1983, p.33. A year before
he had already expressed this idea in an improvised discourse given at a dinner in
Baha Blanca: I thought: if we have always lived closing the eyes to the tasks of a
superior, really spiritual life, would not the punishment be just? To grow and get
fat they have told us even in French and in English are the two ends proper to man;
and this is neither true nor the case with animals. Sarmiento has warned us that we
were turning ourselves into the shepherds of Europe, into cattle breeders; and later
we see it now with evidence, we have turned ourselves into minders of pigs. We have
made a pigsty out of a meadow and also ourselves, the shepherds grow and fatten
with the cows and the pigs. We devote ourselves to the soul one hour every Sunday,
forgetting what we owe the soul every hour of every day of the week. See Martnez
Estrada, E., Cuadrante del pampero, Buenos Aires: Deucalin, 1956, pp.8384.
Thus the perpetuation of the agrarian-livestock breeding structure with

the primacy of the livestock breeding maintained the extremely limited
horizons of the masses who increased in number and were distributed in
different ways in a country whole vitality exceeded those margins.30 Hence
the appearance of a profound resentment against the ruling groups, that is
to say, a marked political scepticism which accompanies an awareness of
social justice, shown in the military revolution of 1943. Confronted with
this situation, Martnez Estrada, who, identified with the universalist men-
tality, shows himself to be party to the improvement of social conditions,
but at the same time, in Las 40 (1957), reinforces a certain cultural idealism
above the control of and submission to material goods. The inhabitants of
the country have mellowed; instead of colt and armadillo we eat goose
and chicken. Food, like farming, serves to enable him to express the criti-
cal state of the culture:
It is very easy to promote agriculture and injustice. On the other hand it is extremely
difficult and requires competence to maintain in good condition the culture
which, in the end, also forms part of our national wealth. Amongst ourselves,
it is either confused with cultivation and livestock breeding, or abandoned to
personal sacrifice and effort, without reward and almost without satisfaction for
those who have chosen the high plateau over the field of alfalfa; in the parable
of Rod, the field of stones. It is to concede such priority to material goods, to
celebrate officially the exhibition of mutton and officially to bring to an end free
cultural institutions.31
30 See Romero, Jos Luis, Indicaciones sobre la situacin de las masas en Argentina,
in Argentina: imgenes y perspectivas, Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1956, p.31. The author
also points out in an earlier chapter the distinction between three different kinds
of mentality: the aluvial mentality (masses of multiple origins, of hybrid charac-
ter, foreigners and criollos, voluminous and urban, bearer of an radical amorality
sustained by a philosophy of success which pursues the social ascent, luxury and
leisure, and exalts at the some time the ordinary and the undifferentiated, and which
when we mature, we will forget), Criolla (the country which has been and is no
longer) and universalist (the western spirit).
31 Martnez Estrada, Las 40, p.18.
We live in a grassland in which our view focuses only on the treasury

and the sky (taxes and heaven). We are, appealing to Thoreau, the prop-
erty of the herds and (recurring to Marxism), the clear example of rela-
tions of production independent of our will, where the mode of material
life conditions of the process of social, political and intellectual life. And
there are paradigms which dominate the life of the nation and condition
it: the market, the barracks and the temple, and produce a disdain for the
spiritual life and the national education of the young.
The Peronist experience, however, left its imprint on the deep culture
of the country as much as on the epidermis of the radiographer:
I do not want the fields to be abandoned and the livestock and the vagrants left to
wander through them as in bygone days; I would rather that the earth was divided
into plots and worked with love and skill, although I do not approve of the Peronist
tribunals taking from the farmer his piece of land in order to give it to the usurping
cattle rustler. I know that uncultivated land is barbaric and Justicialism is fiscal cattle
rusting; but I do not believe that I now have to defend the barbarism ofthe wasteland
against the civilization of plunder. Because this is what we are doing. The trade in
silk is superior to that in pigs and hooves, as that Englishman said who prowled the
pampas, but if there was only roast with leather and hooves to feed myself, I would
consider myself poor; and if I had to overfeed myself and not do anything else than
get fat, I would consider myself very unfortunate. I cannot serve these interests, I
cannot be in league with this butchers shop [] Hence we have dozens of thousands
of Durham, Shorthorn or Corriedale studs and cannot cover two thirds of the vacant
chairs although they are offered with prizes.32
These are false idolatries in a country of muleteers which warn that without
bread man cannot live. Bread and circuses, peronism and fattening. Evoh
Peronism. The leader emulates the caudillo, and the Peronist masses, the
gestures of the slaughterhouse rabble. Empathy exists between the lying
reality and the false characters of literature, except in the purple lands of
Hudson, which do not perish, but are rather transfigured, which make
bread which does not nourish:
32 Ibid., p.32.
Although they deal in a well written literature, it will always be a literature without
roots, affected, from which the dramatic yeast of the reality of life has precisely
been extracted, replacing it with anecdotal and scenic ingredients. But the yeast is
in the bread and not in the crust. Also our history is a pretence of bread which does
not nourish us.33
33 Martnez Estrada, Muerte y Transfiguracin de Martn Fierro, Vol. II, Las Perspectivas,
pp.373374. Neither will the impossible harvest of wheat be able to save us (La cose-
cha, 1956) this radiographic literature of the convalescent transfers Kafkaesque
impotence to the Pampas. Some critics have pointed out that this story clearly exposes
in its dialectical play the confrontation between the gringo anti-Peronista proprietor-
farmer and the dispossessed worker nomads, the idle owners only of labour power and
at most only a horse with which to move. They point out also that Martnez Estrada
takes the side of the first group, in other words, the agrarian status quo, when he pro-
nounces against the social existence of the agricultural worker, the detritus and dregs
endorsed by the Peronist state: it was the fight to death between the authorities, the
habitual delinquents and the unemployed, the saboteurs and the sheep rustlers on
one hand and on the other the respectable people, the farmers. This was something
he would confirm in one of his letters: There are farmers who had to dump the
wheat in the middle of the field and I believe in part that I will have to do the same,
for it is necessary to harvest it before it rots. From all this some pretty observations
for the story La consecha, which I had written the previous year, but it enriches me
with fabulous episodes. This is to touch with ones hands the true reality! (Letter
to Orfila Reynal, 26 December 1946.) The profound feeling that remains, as well
as his noticeable gorilismo, is that for Martnez Estrada the country will never find
the peace necessary to escape from a kind of determinism resulting from structural
failures and vices which come from the colonized Trapalanda: The foreigner was
becoming attached to the land, reconstructing the abandoned civilization with the
fragments and residues which remained; the mestizo rose up against him and reso-
lutely took the side of the livestock against the side of the land. Our history is, in
the eyes of the radiographer, substantially tragic and not even a new harvest could
save the country of the cows, which have replaced the corral with public office and
will make Buenos Aires, a city without a soul, the enemy within. See La cosecha,
in Tres cuentos sin amor, Buenos Aires: Goyanarte, 1956, pp.958 and Radiografa
de la pampa, Buenos Aires: Babel, 1933, p.38.
Buenos Aires and her Taste
The existence of Buenos Aires in not an opportunity but rather an impedi-

ment. It is not a sign of health but rather a focus of infection, a giant head
which even if decapitated would continue, like that anticipated in the fourth
part ofhis Radiografa and confirmed with Goliat, to eat its own bovine body.
There in Buenos Aires there is, although the good patriots do not want it, a govern-
ment of occupation. The government is composed of individuals generally separated
from the country who imagine it is formed like an enormous cow with bountiful
udders and numerous and voluptuous breasts.34
Buenos Aires is an insuperable contradiction. It is the metropolis, just

as Spain was before, with its own colony the interior which it has to
maintain in a condition of stupefaction so as to avoid barbaric outbursts.
This top-heavy character turns it into the main enemy of the country for
it devours, squanders and corrupts. Furthermore the lack of unity makes
her a conglomerate in which certain structures superimpose themselves
artificially and the isolated individuals which create it subsist in their new
habitations without unity: The surface is the same city, which lacks a third
dimension: which in this order of things, like the vertical root in the pulses,
creates the profound roots of the man in the city. A city is not such if the
citizens do not exist as a unity. Urbis y Civitas.35
In her civic constitution she is fallacious for she has advanced eras-
ing her steps. She has tried, by means of tall buildings, to watch over that
which invariably survives without being perceived: the Pampas, the waste-
land, the village and the colony. In this huge city without a soul, her civic
body the only vital organ, which makes it impossible to sense her history,
Martnez Estrada carries out a profound microscopy of the senses. Like an
investigator who follows hidden tracks he invites us to rediscover her in
her perceptual problems, for she perverts our senses and our intelligence:
34 Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, La cabeza del gigante, in Leer y escribir, op. cit., p.138.
35 Martnez Estrada, Radiografa de la pampa, p.181.
The city atrophies the senses: it shortens and clouds the vision, hardens
the feet [the sense of touch], stultifies the hearing. The sense of smell is
atrophied imperceptibly as the sense of the elements and of the terrestrial
emanations.36 Taste, for its part, associated as it is in his writings with
alimentation is a sense that in the inhabitant of the city is implied by the
social situation. The menu passed from being a piece of rhetoric to being
the culinary epitome of the kind of life that is led. Tell me what you eat
and I will tell you who you are. In general terms we eat well, without love
of luxury and without personality, because the taste of the Porteo has also
become mechanical and cosmopolitan, and have undoubtedly changed
by the cultural fusion because the menu of our grandfathers (formed of
twenty five distinct dishes, preserving a national taste for the predominance
of the meats, spices and other prepared ingredients), is made up of recipes
native to the country or adapted centuries ago. Today in a three course
lunch we unite three countries from three different parts of the world,
and do not lack the promiscuity of the official banquets where the menu
is an agape of international brotherhood.37
As can be seen Martnez Estrada anticipated half way through the last
century a critique of the fusion of culinary cultures which sheds light on
the confusion of identity. Like its gastronomic offer, in reality Buenos
Aires has nothing to do with what we say and live. The table is the
place of acceptation and welcoming although it has its rules and strange
anomalies: Except for the vegetarians and dyspectics, no one has racial
prejudices when it comes to food. The table is usually a programme of
the extreme left. Everything is eaten, without discernment, but not just
anywhere nor at just any time. The surroundings, whether they are grand
hotels, bourgeois restaurants or cheap diners, make time part of the ritual
of eating; this is something which could deceive us as observers, for the
duration of ingestion is in inverse proportion to the time of indigestion.
In addition to this, they turn the most urbane into a party and the least
into a primitive act of survival. Porteo menus deceive just like their city
36 Martnez Estrada, E., La cabeza de Goliat, Buenos Aires: Emec, 1947, p.108.
37 Ibid., p.112.
with respect to the country in which one finds oneself. They are a public
staging of polyglot and international stomachs Spanish, Italian or French
cuisine which hide in the privacy of the home the telluric foodstuffs
locro (a meat and vegetable stew), humitas (tamales / ground maiz),
empanadas, puchero (stew) and asado (roast meat). Behind the scenes
the city is replete with family restaurants or poor peoples restaurants
(giving the adjective the meaning which proletarian has with respect to
prole). These serve cheap menus and have the appearance of charitable
shelters, combining alimentary and spacial economy, because in them
group together employees who prefer them to eating in the street and
favour the list of prices over the list of dishes. Tell me where you eat and
I will tell you what class you belong to.
However, this physiology oftaste governed by class location has excep-
tions. An aristocracy (biological and not political) which despised the
mule train and tolerated the tenacious incredulity ofthe common people,
a very different aristocracy, like Lugones, Quiroga or the writer himself:
[] poor of money, proletarian as he considered himself, but in no way plebian

as our aristocrats usually are, he despised the upstart and the pedant of fortune
or of letters. Physically and intellectually he possessed the grave elegance of the
martinet and the democratic dandyism of the cockerel. He had the tastes of the
affluent gentleman, and because he had no wealth but his talent, and did not yearn
for any other, he resigned himself, like his old friend Horacio Quiroga, to enjoy-
ing little with nobility and sobriety. He did not smoke, and rarely drank alcohol.
He was a typical man of his times, sensual and abstemious. He preferred strong
dry spirits, appropriate to a man, such as whiskey, brandy, and port. He felt at
home in the bar, for the people, free and unregimented of course, did not bother
him, not even when they looked at him with the curiosity and the respect of a
man of whom much was spoken and little was read. It was not the human species
so much as human unanimity that he detested. [] On Saturday afternoons he
went to La Nacin in order to correct proofs and afterwards drank an aperatif in
the Helvtico, a bar on the corner of San Martn and Corrientes, like the casual
labourer who drank a glass after work. He was always quick to pay the bill: not in
order to protect those who were still poorer than him, but rather as if amongst
Quiroga, Espinoza and I he was the eldest, who had the most social and tribal
obligations. One afternoon he treated us to caviar, which none of us three friends
had tried, and which we judged to be an imperial delicacy abolished in the whole
world after the fall of the Romanoffs.38
Martnez Estrada feels he is part of a team which is trying to remove the

veils of the apparent reality. And he always warns of the need to create a
narrative world which could explain itself by itself and make its characters
acquire vitality and serve as a guide, as those of Dostoyevsky did.
The United States and its Drug Stores
All truth that is instantaneous and which is accepted with acquiescence is

a covert lie. Martinez Estrada is not able to persuade, for it is not possible
to pretend. He has personally suffered the reality of the country which
pursues him and will not allow him to rest.
The image which he has left us ofhimself is that of a committed though
contradictory writer, and a certain incoherence makes itself present in his
change of attitude which takes place between his laudatory writings on
the North American reality (of exaggeratedly Sarmientan heritage) and
his furious condemnation of that country and its state in La Havana in
the Service of the Revolution. Some will say that his alignment in 1941 with
the democratic allies in opposition to the Nazi-fascist axis in El verdadero
cuento del To Sam (1962) is a question of adaptation to the urgent events
of history.
A guest ofthe State Department, along with fifty other Latin American
intellectuals, Martnez Estrada keeps an indulgent, not to say ingenuous,
journal of the evolution of Roosevelts New Deal. On returning to Buenos
Aires after having travelled four days by plane in stages of ten hours, he
declares to Noticias Grficas that he is astonished by the tolerance of the
38 Martnez Estrada, E., Leopoldo Lugones, retrato sin retocar, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,
1968, pp.3435.
Union, which as a stimulus to cooperation and solidarity, has overcome

the obstacles which nature poses and has managed to find the road to
unlimited progress:
The United States is the ideal country for the free man. Liberty is interwoven into
the life of this people, and is something about which they do not think, just as the
healthy man does not think of his organs. How can I put it? I, an Argentinean, have
wanted this liberty for my country. Not that liberty of which one writes or speaks
but that which is breathed and which no one abuses because it is not possible to
abuse the air which enters the lungs. It is a marvellously disciplined people, but it
is discipline which is the essence of its liberty. In public and private life men and
women do whatever they want, but never want anything other than what they ought
to. They limit their own liberty with responsibility, better than they would as the
result of any external action.39
From the lacerating and heretical writings of his radiography of the

Pampas to the triviality of the annotations and the weakening of the cri-
tique of the country in the north, which he senses as if it were his own,
but this time with an intuition exempt from reflection and charged with
vague impressions. This is so much the case that many of his observations
perhaps those of the organic intellectual of circumstances are founded
on marking a distinction between the Pampas and the United States on
the basis of his compiling dietetic anecdotes with great delight.
The contrast between North America and Latin America is clearly evi-
dent in every step which he takes and in every conjecture which he makes.
The impressions that he collects do no more than confirm the ambivalence
of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in contraposition to those of
the French and the English. While one group were going in search of El
Dorado, others, more sensible, pursued proximity, good climate, fertile
soil and the strategic distribution of primary materials.
39 Interview with Ezequiel Martnez Estrada, La libertad es la esencia de la admi-

rable disciplina que se advierte en Estados Unidos, in El auto argentino: revista
tcnico-literaria y de ilustracin gremial y deportiva editada por el Centro Proteccin
Chauffeurs XXXI.369 (September 1942), p.10.
One was the plan of conquering the Santo Sepulcro, the other a project for a spice
shop on a large scale. One went to lose itself in the uncultivated low lying lands, to
founder on the rocks and to dry up on the high plateaux; the other to plant tobacco,
cotton, wheat and corn in the promised land.40
And this link with nature makes that civilization in some ways what he
is looking for in different ways; from the dedicated architectural solidity,
the flexible movements of passers-by and the moderate affluence of the
attitudes, to their suggestive alimentary customs. From the scenographic
excess ofthe Latin world to Saxon harmony, the foods are the living example
of a good living citizen and of social temperament. In Miami he observes:
In the businesses there is a catering service. It is not food like the food we understand,
but rather a commodity that they eat, and it is natural that it is served in the same
places in which books, fabrics and a thousand other articles are sold. Everyone talks
in a rather low voice and nobody walks hurriedly. There is a notable synchronism
is everything, a harmony in the things, the beings, the lights, the movements, as if
the ensemble of urban life were directed by an orchestra conductor. The timbre of
the voices and their friendly moderato are extremely agreeable. It can already be
seen that this is not Latino and that there exist moral and domestic modes distinct
from ours.41
They eat as they walk, says Martnez Estrada. Nobody runs, they live in
a tranquil climate and with a movement that is both uniform and respectful,
something which applies as much to the vehicles as to the persons. Everyone
carries out their everyday tasks naturally in an atmosphere in which the
streets are annexes of the home. We will recall that a city like Miami was
in this epoch significantly different from the image which anyone could
have had of the United States on the basis of the hectic urban life described
in the films. The first impression the radiographer had of North America,
Miami was in that period a mixture of small southern city, winter recrea-
tion centre and incipient retirement home.
40 Martnez Estrada, E., Diagrama de los Estados Unidos, in Panorama de los Estados
Unidos, Buenos Aires: Torres Agero, 1985, p.236.
41 Martnez Estrada, E., Diario de viaje a los EE. UU., in Panorama de los Estados
Unidos, Buenos Aires: Torres Agero, 1985, pp.2930.
There they walk about, shopping is done and a mixture of varied offers
is sold in excess, although naturally ordered and on display. Everything is
at the disposal of anyone who wants to acquire it. Nothing is lacking and
the association of the most diverse things (drug-store) is similar to the most
thriving association of ideas:
A store where there is everything (Five and Ten) gives the impression of English life
according to the novels of Dickens and everything is preserved here as on a visiting
day. Perhaps this is the most English store, just as the drug-store, which has been
grafted on, is the most North American. Our great English stores are, in comparison
to these, what our meals are with respect to theirs. Those are immense and have little
variety; these are highly varied, eye-catching, happy and for what is necessary at the
moment. A good memory is not necessary when they go shopping. Not only is food
prepared at the moment, but rather it is sold when needed.42
By contrast with the Latin spirit, it is a spirit which is uniform in

diversity which is expressed as much in the meals as in as in the slender
bodies, the possessors, one would say, of a unity of style, neither obese
nor skinny. And this is attributed to the glands of the women, still not
charged with the saturated fats associated with fast food. He says that for
him hygiene, a North American quality per se, not a Hispanic one dirt
or impurity of blood (taken from Conflicto y armona de razas). This
constitutes a sad typology inherited without critical mediation which
corresponds to the mode of dress and behaviour.
The whole description is made while he reads a pocket edition of
Franklins Autobiography. This is a kind of spiritual testamentary manual
of Sarmientan imaginary, from which he extracts a phrase which helps him
on his journey: Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others (Come
para t mismo, pero vstete para los dems).
For Sarmiento, who insists on calling himself Franklincito, his own
journey, like that of the radiographer, results in a spontaneous sketch of per-
sonal impressions. However, due to the importance which he attaches to the
themes he sketches in order to set examples for the improvement of the life
of our country, he resolves, by contrast with Martnez Estrada, to develop
42 Ibid., p.37.
them in later writings: De la educacin popular (1849), Argirpolis (1850),

etc. By contrast, Martnez Estrada feels guided by Benjamin Franklin, who
he cites at every opportunity and admires for the same reason as Sarmiento:
his vision of the statesman which, although he is a puritan, permits him
to personify in the layperson-capitalist. Although the native of San Juan
is never named in the radiographers journals, he is absolutely present in
a significant combination of ideas and concepts. North America makes
a reappearance is his later reflections, this time in relation to Sarmiento:
Sarmiento y los Estados Unidos (Cuadernos Americanos, 1952), Sarmiento
(1956), Meditaciones sarmientinas (1968), or highly caricatured as the
mandarins of the Banana Empire, in his final maritime stage.
Martnez Estrada reads Franklin and the United States through
Sarmiento. His on the ground verification is guided at an earlier stage by
the pages of that immanent presence which is Franklincito. He does
not see the same things, because he is looking almost a century later and
the country and the circumstances are different. But despite the differ-
ences of epoch and in some of the authors he refers to (Cooper and
Tocqueville by Sarmiento and Carlyle, Munford, Poe, Whitman, Thoreau
and Keyserling by Martnez Estrada), assorted Sarmientan ideas prefigure
the Estradian analysis. In the radiographers symbolism, because of its anti-
imperialist and independent condition, North America is assimilated to
that potent Sarmientan prototype, Robinson Crusoe. He contrasts this
with England, which like King Lear cedes its territories and reserves for
itself royal authority and dignity. Furthermore, Martnez Estrada would
seem have written his Diario and his Diagrama de los Estados Unidos bear-
ing very much in mind the discourse pronounced by Sarmiento in 1857
in Chivilcoy with the aim of bringing to an end the Iglesia Nueva. The
reflections of the native of San Juan on this are worth remembering for
their genetic vision, the first attempt at large scale colonization which
was made and the painting of the scene to trace cities for immigrants and
he compares that agricultural city of tomorrow with the more developed
North American regions.
It is necessary to be transported to the United States or to Chivilcoy, in order to see

city educational institutions, with streets of thirty varas in width,43 with inhabitants
of every language and physiognomy, with five hundred brick houses built in one year,
over a floor which still preserved traces of the wild. [] Machines for ploughing,
machines for drying, machines for milling and machines for transportation What
do we lack in order to rival the United States in prosperity and grandeur?
Certain cities are in the vanguard of the progress of civilization and

in them as much as in some of ours the panorama peopled with cows
has been transformed by rings of estates cultivated with care. They have
produced, moreover, a huge variety and abundance of foodstuffs, which
leads Sarmiento, in his Chivilcoy discourse, to cite Brillat-Savarns cel-
ebrated slogan:
Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are, the author of the Physiology of
Taste has said to the nations, with as much grace as depth; and in fact, the culture of
the peoples is measured by the quantity, quality and variety of the substances which
they have adopted to feed themselves. The Greenlanders drink whale oil as their only
food, the Irish devour potatoes, the peasant of our country bolted down, not long
ago, entire hindquarters of cows without any condiment other than salt. Chivilcoy
flaunts, in one year, in the middle of the Pampas, every variety of grain, vegetable
plant and domestic animal which makes the table agreeable and life easy, having
generalized the use of bread to every social class with the abundance and perfec-
tion in its making which the wealthy proprietors of the countryside never knew. If
anyone thinks these details ridiculous, it is enough that he knows that there are still
peasants who look with repugnance on the salads which they call contemptuously
eating grass. I have followed with pleasure the making of bread in Chivilcoy, and
want to enumerate the diverse processes through which the grain which supplies
them passes, so that I am not accused of exaggerating by placing this people very
high in the scale of civilization.44
Sarmientos celebration of the civilizing tradition of wheat and bread

in opposition to the cow and its meat is taken up later by Martnez Estrada.
Brillat-Savarns emblem, repeated three times in the Obras Completas and
43 Translators note: A vara is unit of length approximately equivalent to one yard.

44 See Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Chivilcoy Agrcola, in Obras Completas, Buenos
Aires: Luz del Da, 1948, Vol. XXII, Discursos populares, pp.5771.
in the discourse on Chivilcoy is also reproduced by Martnez Estrada in

his Diario, though curiously only once in his entire works. I suppose he
was influenced here by his reading of Sarmientos writings. Food and all
its variables agriculture, production, machinery, variability, frugality,
etc., which Franklin and Sarmiento see as synonymous with civiliza-
tion, are taken to extremes by Martnez Estrada, who conceives of them
as a signifying example of the taste which creates the grade of differential
development of the different cultures.
As his stay progresses, Martnez Estrada adapts more and more to
the culture of the north on the plane of experience. If in Florida he does
not pamper himself with the American breakfast and only eats half way
through the morning, orange-juice, corn-flakes and coffee, in Washington
he becomes accustomed to eating like everyone, ham and eggs on getting
up, a meal at midday and another at night with pudding. And he believes
that, on the basis of the food or the taste, in particular of the coffee, the
North Americans establish a table of quality as the index of the culture
which makes the customs the exquisiteness and the naturalness in what
is correct. In the capital of the northern country everything is styled with
a perfect conjunction between nature and culture; trees and squirrels,
fountains made out of lakes and monuments out of mountains. And he
feels the same about the customs too, for hardly anyone drinks alcohol and
there are very few drunks to be seen in the streets; in the restaurants they
eat with neither wine nor beer; no one drinks alcohol. But they read a lot
(books, magazines), for entire hours. While he eats he reflects on what
Gustavo Durn, a Spanish soldier who emigrated at the end of the Civil
War, says to him: I consider it indecent to savour food and much more to
talk of it. To taste is to live without consciousness the corporal happiness
which attends all living beings. This is what he feels at times during his visit
with regard to his life and, opening his heart, he assimilates to his fresh
and crude thought: It is not a question of feeding oneself but rather of
savouring. The crudeness of eating could only be pardoned by enjoyment,
and still more for the commentary on the enjoyment. Only that it has been
decided to eat secretly and thus transform this natural function, as we did
with others, in taboos, in mysterious secrets.45
Apart from the assessment which could be made of his Diario de
viaje, Martnez Estrada feigns satisfaction for he feels that he has seen
everything which he could without having assimilated it to himself and
without having lost the sense of taste. Thus supporting himself with the
author of Fisiologa del gusto and adding to the analysis of food the bonds
of love, he points out: that if Brillat-Savarn and the author of the Kama
Sutra were called as expert advisors on Judgement Day these specialists
would surely be needed no North American would be condemned for
these two terrible Latin sins: gluttony and lust.46 Faced with this and his
whole diagnostic and analysis Martnez Estrada feels like a masturbator
or a sinner of the palate; the Saxon origins of these cultures makes him
overestimate their respectability, in contradistinction to Latin culture,
which, like Dostoevsky or the black churches which shout out the mass,
endorses public confession. North American greatness is made clear in
the character, the most noble grace, and is expressed publicly in the cafe:
The people of the family, united together in the cafe, give it a homely
atmosphere. No one is in a bad mood, no one is of bad character nor has a
hostile look. That is a Latin thing. Love is replaced by friendship, and this
is camaraderie and understanding.47
By contrast, in those parts the cafes, with respect to their Spanish
inheritance, do not represent any kind of love, but rather the sordidness
of bohemia, pride and ignorance:
The cafe came later to give a place of residence to the literary circle outside the home,
and the Pea replaced to some extent the family. We are left with this Spanish or
Madrileo custom of the cafe, which is generated by the pleasure of avoiding the
obligation of doing something serious, and of dodging the responsibility of having
personal ideas, rather than the opposite being the case. The ideological doctrines and
45 Martnez Estrada, Diario de viaje a los EE. UU., p.73.

46 Ibid., p.75.
47 Ibid., p.89.
the positions which are maintained in the caf are imputable rather to the place than
to the patrons and when they are excessive the owner of the business goes to jail.48
The United States is the living expression of democracy, the experi-

ence of wellbeing and equality, by contrast with what happens amongst
ourselves, where equality is the purest enunciation and representation of
equality in poverty. We are dealing with vital forms (things) or curren-
cies (containers) in which a wild or backward state takes the form of the
thing; and another highly civilized state, one of acceptance that does not
demand proofs, duration, observation, touching, but only eating and using
without thinking about it. North America and the cultura of packaging
or the senses: an organization of things, of forms, a system of containers
and conditioning of things, with boxes and cellophane, which deprives
them of direct contact by the senses, although they preserve them from
decomposition.49
However, he does not approve of everything in the cities ofthe Union.
Being a human factory and almost everything being well constructed and
preserved, there exists the exception which confirms the rule in every civi-
lizing process. There we have Chicago, the periphery of North America,
a city full of poor people and modest housing in which everything is fat
and heavy, even the sky and the air. The industry of the abattoir, of the
foundry: the instruments creating the atmosphere; the atmosphere creat-
ing the organs; the organs creating the functions. The people of untidy and
vulgar aspect; they dress worse or less tidily. Why? They splash and stain it.
The workers set the tone and taste.50 During this visit, recalling the patria,
he eats puchero in the Argentine consuls house. The people of Chicago
are like those of Buenos Aires, although the city has its peculiarities: Al
Capone, Morrison Hotel, prostitution, scenographic wakes, and also the
slaughterhouses which Martnez Estrada wants to visit but which they will
not permit him to do, saying that they are just like the ones in Argentina.
48 Martnez Estrada, La cabeza de Goliat, pp.252253.

49 Martnez Estrada, Diario de viaje a los EE. UU., p.40.
50 Ibid., p.106.
But we insist on the idea that in addition to a certain fascination and

complacency about North America, there is always a hint of nonconform-
ism, which arises because of his standing as the invited visitor to whom
they do not pay attention and of whose thoughts they are not aware. He
says several times that no one is interested in him and that he circulates in
the train of PanAmericanism like a packaged commodity free of risks.
Always one to flatter organization and full of false modesty, he is irritated
more than anything else by the lack of recognition and the indifference:
My journey is not official except for the invitation and the diet. Better. Only its being
well organized before, explains why it is possible to devote more time to the intel-
lectual tourists. But it is also a bureaucratic question. I warn C.R.J.: Dont worry,
do not think that I have come to conquer American cities, I have come to see. The
business card which she brings indicates that I want to give lectures, and this is what
I like least. I havent come for that but rather to see. But she has the obligation of
courtesy. She will attempt to arrange everything nicely. It bothers me to be one South
American more; another client who has to be attended with deference. I have seen
some through the offices of the State Department and I can understand very well
what they think of us and the secret contempt which I read in the depths of their
eyes. The fact is that I am not in the least interested in talking and seeking public-
ity. I believe that they would listen to me as they would to a boring and obligatory
number of a program. Would they understand what I can bring them as a new, dis-
tinct thing? I judge not. Between these people and me there is a greater abysm than
that between this country and mine.51
Martnez Estrada: observes: Every ceremony here is a kind of menu

with dishes from the visitors country of origin. And he feels anguish for
not being able to exhibit the admiration for those poor great men of
American society Poe, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln to those who he
supposes powerless to survive these inexpressive rules of social coexistence
and ofbanking. This bureaucratic organization of culture and intellectual
interchange is saddening. It is like preserved meats and fruits. Everything
is to hand and well served: but it lacks the flavour of beef and the feel of
silver.52 He also thinks that the North Americans know how to compen-
51 Ibid., pp.4445.
52 Ibid., p.45.
sate for their lack of a flair for speculation with their singular disposition
for useful knowledge and their gift for mechanics. And he thinks that this
invites them to avoid all forms of thought which contemplate slowness
and savouring: The seasoning which thought acquires meditating on it, is
missed as much as how to savour the foods. For Martnez Estrada culture
ought to join together the imaginative and the useful, the speculative and
the pragmatic. And this would turn out to be an aptitude of the reality of
the soul (limited by neither time nor space), a human creative power, pai-
deuma, which makes some men (as in his country), experience solitude in
the bosom of society or the incomprehension in the northern country of
the tremendous life ofthe spirit (Poe), the genital strength of democracy,
the nation and the people (Whitman) or the infinite neglect (Thoreau).
David Vias, wise as ever in his criticism, tells us that the radiographer
warns us that
the cultural contradictions of the North American masses have reduced to a mini-
mum of expression the great dimensions of literature and history; that the cultural
commentators have become more important than the original work and consider
themselves to be the message itself. Or that in the museums converted into temples
reposes this canonical flattening in the face of which the most heterodox minorities
of that country are reduced to the role of impotent witnesses.53
And perhaps he does not see this because as well as enunciating the
unlimited progress of the country of the north, he asks and takes pity on
those creators of spiritual values without whom the soul and nature, would
form the border territories of this happy world complete on the map in
the same way as he yearns for in Hudson this pantheism, this idealization
of the primordial chaos, this panegyric to rural life and liberty, this religion
of the noble savage uncontaminated by civilization:
I still need to find a human being, a man, a woman, as natural as the chicken in
the hencoop and those human beings in tins. This is the most important thing, I
know; but the most monstrous. The empire of the mummy, bottled, freely dispensed
53 Vias, David, De Sarmiento a Dios: viajeros argentinos a USA, Buenos Aires:

Sudamericana, 1998, p.291.
(and dangerous to neither the maker nor the consumer). O!, a good poisoning by
unsterilized food! To die like a hero because of having eaten a living rat! A good
tuberculosis caused by milk fresh from the cow! Today more compassion than a few
days ago for Poe, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Jack London. Poor sons of Franklin,
Washington, Jefferson! Without this, which still abounds in South America like the
forest fruits and the fresh and living animals, the grandeur ofthe country is fictitious
and fortuitous. A city of beautiful houses is no more than a warehouse of preserved
foods, beautiful to look at with its bright and colourful hermetically sealed contain-
ers. But in justice, is there no possibility of a civilization, of a culture of this type of
meat-processing plant?54
No, we ourselves could reply, for in accordance with his vision, we are
a mere appendage of nature, without initiative nor will nor even liberty.
Nature determines social life in the same way that the cow has prejudiced
development in the case of Argentinean society: my country was full
(it ate much and well), it surrendered itself to a kind of orgy of sitting
around the table chatting, which we call Peronism, and was punished.55
In full knowledge of this, only ourselves remain, the inhabitants of this
side of the world, to talk with the dead, to look down on the body, the
larder of the lower instincts, to indemnify the soul, a property which
grants us the possibility of being divine, that is to say, knowing full well
that it is impossible to give up eating, to do as he does: As something
indispensable and in disgust, and until this moment I did not think that
I had digested what I have eaten, just as some friends who do not love
me say that I do not digest what I read.56 His preference and this is
what few understand of his alimentary radiography would have been
the search for a romantic lost paradise, a dream in the limits of time
without discernible links to reality the (auto)biography of Hudson57
54 Martnez Estrada, Diario de viaje a los EE. UU., pp.5657.

55 Martnez Estrada, Cuadrante del pampero, p.163.
56 Ibid., p.172.
57 Part of this Eden is described thus: They were the plains, open to the sky on the other
side of the horizon, in which natural spectacle he rejoiced, for as well as its terrestrial
beauty, flocks of birds, dragonflies and butterflies increased with the evidence of a
miracle. In this sense the Argentinean Republic or the Banda Oriental were for him
no more than a fragment of the land of South America, with neither industries nor
or perhaps Tln.58 Lacking this, and although eating the indispensable with
relish, he would have opted to not eat luminous, flying or non-terrestrial
beings, like Simone Weil,59 who made her conduct a counterexample to
the worldly grossness of digesting food.
commerce, neither institutions nor museums, neither laws nor libraries: a region of
the planet with neither flag nor slavery. However, at that time the country was reor-
ganizing itself. See Martnez Estrada, El mundo maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique
Hudson, p.142.
58 See Borges, Jorge Luis, Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in Ficciones, Buenos Aires:
Emec, 1956. Uqbar is part of a project channelled by a sect of writers, sociologists,
scientists, and historians who decide to create a fiction with hints of reality, about
an unknown country. With time the project captivates two generations of writers
who end up creating a whole planet, Tln, under the direction of a kind of demiur-
gic order, Orbis Tertius. Men are capable of conceiving of a world, says Borges in
this story. A Postdata de 1947 indicates that the intervention of Tln into reality
has been more than an intellectual exercise, a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth
destined to be deciphered by men, amongst whom appear the names of Martnez
Estrada, Leibniz, Berkeley and Alfonso Reyes.
59 With respect to the mission of the writer, Martnez Estrada responds to a report
which they made in 1956: I think that that mission is, inevitably, social, religious,
artistic and intellectual; but I could not say that it was also political. My ideas in this
respect have changed after reading Simone Weil. See Cuadrante del pampero, p.169.
Marie Langer, or the Child as a Peronist Snack
History is plagued with cannibalisms, whose symbolic dimensions are more

nutritious than the human meat. Some critics believe that the resource of
cannibalism serves to organize colonialism and even the discipline of anthro-
pology and all the discourses about that other which had to be overcome.
Modern societies brood on certain eternal collective fantasies. They
reproduce myths whose origin is unclear, which arise from unconscious
anonymity. Their ideological implications exercise a degree of power over
those who relate them and listen to them, at the same time as bringing to
light the most hidden aspects of the socio-cultural condition and produc-
ing a concrete effect on reality.
The edible fantasy has no limits. But the excessive appetite, cannibal-
ism, is inexplicable for it involves phenomena which exceed the morpho-
logical projection which we could ascribe to it; this is true as much of the
cultural as of the historical categories of the biological species. However,
the cannibalistic act is inscribed in the experience of language, which
understands the most diverse spectrum of enunciations, whether affec-
tive, copulative or coital, of domination or of competition: smother you
with kisses,1 eat you whole, eat your liver, head or heart, eat you alive,
etc. We experience cannibalism in daily life, although pacified by cultural
resources which provide us with ethical and aesthetic justifications.
To eat is not to eat in general (we are leaving on one side here the vital
and organic necessity); for such an act defines us in our socialized humanity.
This is so perhaps because cooking has strict rules (recipes), which can be
respected or transgressed. But they can be transgressed only on the basis
of knowing them, in the same way as when one writes one can turn to rhe-
torical artifice because one is conscious of employing it and knows how to
1 Translators note: The words in Castellano are comerte a besos, literally eat you with
kisses, but smother you with kisses is the nearest equivalent in English.
208 Marie Langer, or the Child as a Peronist Snack
use it. Literature has provided us with an exalted ideology of cannibalism

which has generally played with the rules imposed by modernity on the
hungry body politic of life in common. This ideology passes from Swifts
critique of productivist utilitarianism to Oswald de Andrades cannibalistic
manifesto against the oppressive reality. It has also seasoned our imagina-
tion and our progeny by including (although hidden in these parts) a local
representative of French literature. This is Cacambo, the heroic servant
of Tucumn Epicurean, cosmopolitan and Encyclopedist who saves
Candide, when mistaken for a Jesuit, from being roasted by the herdsmen
and helps him in Europe to do the one thing worthwhile, that is to say,
cultivate his orchard.2 Nowadays we can no longer think candidly that
everything is for the best and that the bad contributes to the common
good, especially when we can be invited to an aristocratic vegetarian fes-
tival where it is supposed that
2 See Voltaire, Cndido y otros cuentos, Madrid: Alianza, 1992. Incidentally, the char-
acter of Cacambo is rescued from oblivion in a story by Arturo Cancela, in which
he is presented as our ideal representation of European art, because he breaks
with the usual reputation (cosmopolitan villain) of the Argentinean and is a
model of fidelity, of good sense, of audacity and moral balance. Moreover, with
respect to his forgotten posterity, it is stated that Cacambo the mulatto has had in
Tucumn his share of historical reparation, paid an Argentinean paradox by a
foreign enterprise: the French company, Fives Lille, which built the railway to San
Cristbal. Wanting to honour the memory of the Voltearian hero and son of this
province, the company gave the name of Cacambo to a station near to the capital
situated in the line to Guzmn. No one knew the meaning of such a strange word,
and the people, in order to save themselves the work of an annoying investigation,
assumed it was of Quechuan origins. But after several years, the government of the
Nation annexed the line to San Cristbal, incorporating it into the network of the
Ferrocarril Central Norte. And as neither the administrator nor the employees of
the railway knew the origin of the word Cacambo or Cacambo, as it is generally
known in the end they made the strange word disappear from the nomenclature
of the stations, replacing it with Wenceslao Posee, which it still bears. See Cancela,
Arturo, Cacambo, in El burro de Maruf: la filosofa del hombre que camina y que
tropieza y otros ensayos, Buenos Aires: Ediciones M. Gleizer, 1925, pp.101110.
there does not exist even the shadow of a thought about this cursed flesh here a
shudder of horror of rejection of this eternal flesh and that blood to which you
are so addicted
and they serve us, like the character from Gombrowicz, the flesh of a child
dressed as an immaculate cauliflower. Perhas everything is owed to this
indigestible parody: animality prepares the exquisite [].3
The Argentinean political scene, however, has its exclusive mythical
duet (equally loved and hated) of the eternal return. This duet consists of
Pern and Evita, in whose government stories crop up which project on
these figures unconscious cannibalistic desires. And it possesses its popular
imaginary marked by the idea of zoological alluvium. This is the case after
a diverse range of essays beginning from the start of the nineteenth cen-
tury had analysed how the supposed pathological nation settles down on
the geographical substrate sick territory, barren land, etc. without
absolving the subject of history. Peronism has produced the reaction of
an ethnographic substratum based on the pelos duros, cabecitas negras or
gusanos de tierra4 and has found beautiful and indignant lineages amongst
the inhabitants of this soil. This has stimulated a large number of fictions
which serve as a political weapon for idealization or systematic rejection,
the result of having projected onto them the archaic images belonging to
our fantasies. One of the most suggestive cannibalistic rumours of this
epoch is the one of the roasted child that Marie Langer5 analysed:
The most complete version of the long story, which was recounted in June 1949
throughout Buenos Aires, was as follows: a young couple take on a servant, the wife
being close to the end of her pregnancy. The baby is born. A few weeks later, husband
and wife go out to the cinema one night, leaving the baby in the care of the servant,
3 See Gombrowicz, Witold, El festn de la condesa Kotlubaj, in Bakaka, Barcelona:

Tusquets, 1986, pp.155180.
4 Translators note: Stiff hairs, little black heads and earthworms respectively in
Castellano.
5 Translators note: Marie Langer (Vienna, 1910Buenos Aires, 1987) was a left-
wing political activist and psychologist, founder in 1942 and then president of
the Asociacin Psicoanaltica Argentina and, later, president of the Federacin
Psicoanaltica Argentina.
who up to this moment has merited trust. On returning they find the whole house
lit up. The servant receives them with much ceremony, according to one version,
and tells them that she has prepared them a great surprise. She invites them to enter
the dining room in order to serve them a special dinner. They enter and encounter
a horrifying spectacle. In the middle of the table, placed with great care, they see
their child in a large dish, roasted and surrounded by potatoes. The unhappy mother
loses her reason immediately. She loses the power of speech and no one has heard
her pronounce a single word since that day. The father, who according to several
versions, is a soldier, takes out his revolver and kills the servant. Afterwards he runs
away and there has been no news of him.6
In analysing this rumour, Langer makes clear the speed with which it
spread among a diverse range of people capable of exercising critical reason,
shedding light on how, through this type of story, a repressed interior
situation and childhood anguishes still persistent in the vast majority of
people could become blurred. She refers to the idealized motherhood of
western culture and its counterpart which we all carry within: a murder-
ous mother who kills and eats her child, as the Kleinian school had already
contended. This modern myth and its analysis serve to reveal, as in the cases
of ancient mythology, collective anguishes and conflicts. In fact tradition
contributes other such versions in which the children serve as food for their
parents: Tantalus and Ceres in Greek mythology, Snow White or Hansel
and Gretel in childrens stories, or the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands
in a tradition unlike that of the classical or modern west. Cannibalism, as
Carlos Juregui says, arouses its lush polysemy, its semantic nomadism and
its metaphoric tendency. As a preliminary act, the word cannibal is one
of the first neologisms which the European expansion produces:
The body constitutes a repository of metaphors: in its economy with the world, its
limits, fragility and destruction, the body serves to dramatize and in some way write
the social text. Cannibalism is a radically unstable moment of the corporeal and, as
Freud thought, one of those primal images, desired and feared, on the basis of which
subjectivity and culture are imagined.7
6 Langer, Marie, El nio asado y otros mitos sobre Eva Pern, in Fantasas eternas a
la luz del psicoanlisis, Buenos Aires: Horm, 1966, p.80.
7 Juregui, Carlos A., Canibalia. Notas para una cartografa nocturna, Revista Humbolt
47.142, Comer y ser comido (2005), pp.1012.
We cannot avoid pointing out, however, as Germn Garca reminds

us with reference to the psychoanalytic cultural debates in Argentina, that
the Kleinian doctrine had its followers amongst whom could be found
Langer. It was, he points out, a doctrine whose value was the
conceptual insignia of an appropriate name when it comes to fight for the attention
of virtual consultants. A change of name permitted an emphasis which promoted a
difference. For example, to adopt Melanie Klein opened the possibility of including
constellations about the mother, rhetorical constellations which were impossible on
the basis of the patriarchalism of Sigmund Freud. And this very thing, to be able to
say patriarchal of Sigmund Freud, was already a selection of current interlocutors
and future clients.8
In the account, taken from the psychopathology of everyday life

expressed in the Peronist epoch, the servant, on the basis of an uncon-
scious identification, plays the role of the mother because of the tasks she
carries out with relation to the child: feeding, caring for and cleaning it. The
above mentioned similarity is counteracted by the position of dependency
8 Garca, Germn, El psicoanlisis y los debates culturales: ejemplos argentinos, Buenos

Aires: Paids, 2005, p.15. In a chapter of his book La entrada del psicoanlisis en la
Argentina, Garca had already dedicated a few lines to Langer on the theme which
occupies us in which he made a similar critique: The active and versatile Marie Langer
passes through different modifications of psychoanalytic discourse but always main-
tains the continuum of a kind of culturalism which by denoting the social acquires
diverse political connotations: in 1951 the myth of the roasted child is related to
Tantalus and other myths of childrens literature; in 1958 the same rumour is related
to Eva Pern and the analysis of the phenomenon hardly disguises her ideological
position. In 1951 Marie Langer affirms: It is strange that Freud, the revolutionary
and extremely critical observer of all the others aspects, has yielded without protest
to the phalocentric concepts of his time [] He could not liberate herself from
the cultural burden which the patriarchal past of our civilization imposed on him.
An accidental factor of his focus would be, then, the long phalocentric patriarchal
tradition. Marie Langer assumes that Freud did not liberate himself from what he
discovered. She assumes, moreover, that he valued the biological in detriment to the
social and environmental. See Garca, Germn, La asociacin, la disociacin, in
La entrada del psicoanlisis en la Argentina: obstculos y perspectivas, Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Altazor, 1978, p.218.
and social inferiority, which help the employer (the good mother) to carry
out a kind of vengeful fantasy as part of her infantile frustrations. The
repressed hatred for her own mother is discharged on the servant (the
criminal mother) who she fears and who she believes to be capable of the
worst things: theft of property, seduction of the husband or the children.
Conscious stereotypes are gathered together here which guarantee the truth
of rumours and profound unconscious causes subject to the law of an eye
for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. According to this law, the person who
believes in the cannibalistic desires of the mother and identifies herself
with the victim, fears suffering, from the bad mother, what she herself, in
her first infancy, wanted to do to her. This is a compensation which dis-
torts the mothers primary desire to eat herself (or her breast, where the
criminal the apparent victim is the adolescent). It is to incorporate her
into the amorous voracity of the adolescent and to chew her (out of hatred
and fear) as a projection of her hunger and aggression.
The father also plays a role in the rumour, because it is no accident
that it deals with a soldier (authoritarian, king or president) or with a
doctor (before whom there exists neither a sexual secret not its prohibi-
tion) who is the object of the daughters love. The latter, like Cinderella,
feels neglected and wants to eliminate the mother in order to occupy her
place. The servant thus represents, for Langer, on the oral plane the bad
mother, on whom the child projects her own cannibalistic desires, and on
the Oedipal plane incarnates the resentful child in love with her father.
As Marie Bonaparte will say of the modern myths, it is an anguish
typical of the epoch which lays itself bare on the basis of a general psycho-
logical situation and finds credulity in the most varied of environments of
the social spectrum, according to diverse identifications with the spreaders
of rumour. This is the self-censorship of the analyst, Marie Langer, who
fails to link at the same time social anguish with political reality because
she finds herself under the dictatorship of Pern. During the period of
the Peronist government a conjunction of different myths circulate whose
central character is a woman and which provoke euphoric debates in the
Asociacin Psicoanaltica:
They told me that the distressing situation which mediated the creation of the myth
was obvious. It was the political situation through which the country was passing, or
to speak concretely with respect to the myth, it was the dictatorship of Eva Pern,
the all powerful and despotic mother who dominated everyone. Eva Pern was the
servant, the apparently good and humble woman of low social condition, but simul-
taneously evil, dangerous and feared. And the myth had arisen, precisely because it
was too dangerous to make a critique of her. The myth affirmed always on this
plane amongst other things, that the child was Argentina and that she was a resent-
ful person who wanted to avenge herself. The parents, the nice people according
to the myth, represented the class she hated, etc. And as the repression was so great,
the people turned to fantasy to express their critique, their warnings and their fears.
In this epoch and in this argument we cant get much further in analysing the myth.9
Mysticism has its flat notes: from the well-known secret based on a
rumour with an infinite echo in Barrio Norte to the deafening canticles of
the descamisados in the Plaza. Langer mostly refers to Evita by her name
without using the diminutive form, and by her married name. She makes
it clear that she aims to give neither a personal nor a political analysis of
Evita, but rather use her as a screen on which to display the contradictory
affective images which emanate from her according to who projects them.
Her figure concentrated as few others did in the plane of consciousness,
the most disparate ambivalences: adoration for the masses her addicts
and the woman with the whip for the opposition.10 Although on the
unconscious plane,
it cannot surprise us that for her enemies she represented the wicked servant, the
murdering mother and the mortal mistress. But how could she have had this mean-
ing for those who adored her? I believe precisely for this reason. The idealization of
9 Langer, Marie, El nio asado y otros mitos sobre Eva Pern, in Fantasas eternas a
la luz del psicoanlisis, op. cit., p.95.
10 The expression the woman with the whip, which Langer says she has taken from a
book by Mary Main, forms a part of a passage from La razn de mi vida, in which
she in turn forges the expression come what may: Many times I have wished that
my insults were slaps or whips in order to give them many blows full in the face to
make them see even it were for no more than a moment what I see every day in my
welfare courts. See Pern, Eva, La razn de mi vida, Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1952,
p.178.
Eva Pern was the reason why also her followers, although unconsciously, put her on
the same level as the horrific, because it is this which leads us to idealization. Thus a
vicious circle was established. The more terrifying they felt her to be, the more they
were forced again to idealize her, in order to maintain her image.11
Opposing visions are dealt with which are clear on the plane of con-
sciousness and capable of making Evita a saint or the devil. (According
to Langer, however, both sides had a contradictory internal world which
showed that they repressed one of their images and projected the other.)
However, these two conflicting forces change their perspective over time.
First Eva was underestimated as an intruder and, later, accused by her
enemies of being a kind of insatiable mouth that sucks and appropriates.
By contrast, at first she was adored by her grasitas, who saw in her the shy
but luxuriously dressed Cinderella, although she was capable of realizing
their fantasies, and latterly was converted into a figure of power, a kind
of Robin Hood, with a imexhaustable breast capable of recreating the
Milky Way of the Justicialista (a vernacular Hera12), and the first worker
of the country. In philosophical terms we could say with Feuerbach that
the single man is a poverty-stricken being and that we represent the neces-
sity in others: Just as mothers milk, your first food, was prepared in your
11 Langer, El nio asado y otros mitos sobre Eva Pern, p.96.

12 Langer emphasizes that both her followers and the opposition compare her to an
offered breast or an insatiable and violent sucking infant. Milk, the totem beverage,
and breastfeeding have always possessed a symbolic and almost divine character in
our culture. This takes us back to the myth of Hera, the wife of Zeus and queen of
the gods on Olympus, who feeds Hercules, because she does not know that this is
one of her husbands many sons and believes that he has been abandoned. Hercules,
breastfeeding with all the power of a god, sucks her breasts with such force that he
spills drops of milk and hurts Hera. On removing him, a jet cuts through the skies and
forms stars, which explains the creation of what the Romans called the Milky Way.
We could complete this mythical tradition with the lucid definition that Ambrose
Bierce gave of the mammals when satirizing domestic employment: family of
vertebrates whose females, in natural state, breastfeed their litter, but when they
turn civilized and intelligent, give them to a wetnurse or use the babys bottle. See
Bierce, Ambrose, Diccionario del diablo, Buenos Aires: Libertador, 2004, p.93.
mothers body, in the same way, you suck, so to say, your personality from
the breast of humanity.13
The official story was completed with the publication of the book
La razn de mi vida, in which Eva appropriated the role of ideal mother,
and from which Langer extracts for her essay the following conclusions:
She is the mother who adores the father. In her book she promises the people that
she will never distress them with disputes with Pern, the leader, in the way that
the majority of fathers distress their sons with their differences of opinion. She gives
it to be understood that she neither has children, nor does she need them, so that
every one can feel themself to be one of her sons and her to be the mother of every-
one. [] She assures them, then, that she will never put herself between them and
the father and that although she loves him passionately she will never make them
relive the suffering of the jealously experienced when they were children faced with
parents united sexually. She cannot provoke their jealousy for if she draws closer to
the leader, she does so because he loves them and with the sole end of speaking to
him of them.14
For Martnez Estrada, stigmatized as the consummate anti-Peronist, as well

as having recognized Pern as a superior governor over all the rest,15 the
13 According to Feuerbach, our consciousness, what we are, has been formed in us from
others. On dying we begin to be, on the basis of their memory, a constituent part
of their consciousness. Thus in addition to that metaphorical milk, both sleep and
alcohol could be illustrations of the absence of consciousness: Regarding the fact
that consciousness is involved with individuals, in the same way as a natural element
involved with bodies, you must let yourself illustrate, amongst other things, states
such as the dream, the loss of consciousness and drunkenness, those states in which
man is seen deprived of the enjoyment of consciousness. See Feuerbach, Ludwig,
Pensamientos sobre muerte e inmortalidad, Madrid: Alianza, 1993, pp.196197.
15 It is ignored left and right, and this is extremely grave, that Pern initiated in the
country a government of the technical type in place of a government of the empirical
type of his predecessors. The surveyor replaced the scout, and it is shocking to hear
his negators say that he has done the same as them but with bad faith. The bad faith
is in this affirmation. Pern exceeds all his rivals both in bad tactics and in good ones
too; he is a Machiavellian governor if you like, but he is not incapable, exuberant
and not like his detractors. You have to know who he has been in order to sentence
orphanhood of the people would explain the candour with which she
submitted to them and was disposed to serve them, making them her
protectors. The people had not exercised the psychic functions of love
in any of her notes of the erotic range (Platonic love) but rather those of
the libido.
What our people needed was love: to project their love towards the heights, to feel
that a warm breast rebounded towards them, to make a cult of love, to love love. I
have reproached the lack of true love as one of her gravest defects, although I didnt
dare to blame her because the origins of her stock were very sad, born of the cross
of the settler and the Indian. Love inspired embarrassment rather, and on the plane
of the sentiments which are expressed as a national scale, I had despised much more
than loved their caudillos and instructors. It was thus until 1943.16
That redemptive Evangelical type of love for the outcasts gives the radi-
ographer his immemorable example of the worship of the God mother,
who wins people round by exercising power through her grace and charisma.
It is an effective alliance: All worship is, in the end, feminine; adoration
is a daughterly attitude and, concretely, in my judgement, the attitude of
the daughter to the father.17 Eva and her catechism, the reason of her hagi-
ographic life, are the demiurges of the Peronist adventure. Beyond that the
Perons constituted an exclusive diptych, the cult of the self-sacrificing wife,
which would make the hair of any feminist ideology stand on end, closes
the circle of the personalization of power, whose body is a bridge which
could be as much an identification as an opponent:
He lacked the imagination and courage for an enterprise of such magnitude. As well
as a strong dose of great audacity, considerable thoughtlessness or cynicism was also
needed. All that Pern lacked, or which he possessed only to a rudimentary degree,
necessary to bring about the conquest of the country from above, she consummated
him and the majority of his accusers ignore who he was. Gentlemen accusers: he
has been a superior governor to you and if you reply that he is more infamous you
have to prove it to me. Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel, Qu es esto? Catilinaria, Buenos
Aires: Lautaro, 1956, p.274.
16 Ibid., p.261.
17 Ibid., p.257.
or she made him consummate. In this sense he was also an irresponsible go-getter.
In reality he was the woman and she the man.18
And this ambiguity of the roles, which seems less and less strange, is
not so strange and recalls the words of the military protagonist of Walshs
story. Distressed by the decomposition of the body of that woman related
in her death to the national secret of the caudillo: Shes standing up!,
shouted the colonel, I will bury her standing, like Facundo, because she
was a man!.19
Perhaps because it is apologetic, propagandist or apocryphal, La
razn de mi vida was never read seriously but it helps, however, to rein-
force with its words the ideas of the myth which Langer collects. While
Rascovsky and his followers said that Eva was obviously the servant of the
rumour, she defines herself by saying: The whole secret lies in the fact that
I have decided to serve my people, my patria and Pern [] Is there not in
this perhaps the key, the explanation of my own life?20 Thus the child was
Argentina and she was someone with a chip on her shoulder who wanted
to avenge herself. Eva says:
18 Ibid., pp.244245.
19 Walsh, Rodolfo, Esa mujer, in Obra literaria completa, Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1985,
p.170.
20 Pern, La razn de mi vida, pp.150151. Evita did not write La razn de mi vida. Its
author was the Spanish journalist Manuel Penella de Silva [] According to Penella
they spent many hours together, while he followed her in her various daily activi-
ties and then they discussed what he wrote. They had differences, for she wanted
to appear perfect, idealized, a myth a bourgeois myth on the other hand. But the
one who opposed himself to the book for the ideas expressed about the woman was
Pern, and once it was finished, it was sent to Mend ya Mndez San Martn for
correction. According to father Bentez, Penellas version aggrandized Evita, but
also had many Spanishisms, something implausible and even ridiculous. The work
that was put on sale in October 1951 bore little relation to the one which Penella
wrote. Whoever the people were who corrected the final version, Evita accepted it
as her own and at least we ourselves can make it hers. Moreover, the book contains
paragraphs, phrases and expressions which also appear in her speeches. See Navarro,
Marysa, Evita, Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2005, p.334.
We always repeat a phrase of Perns which says: In the new Argentina the only
privileged ones are the children and My social resentment does not come from
some hatred. Rather it comes from love: from my love for my people whose pain has
opened forever the gates of my heart and, closing the circle, to love is to serve.21
To serve is to combat hunger and achieve social justice:
Few rich people and many poor people. The wheat of our land, for example, served to
satisfy the hunger of many privileged people too in foreign lands; and the labour-
ers who sowed and harvested this wheat here did not have bread for their children.
The same thing happened with all the other goods: meat, fruit, milk. Our riches
were an old lie for the children of this land.22
Furthermore, to serve a dinner, in the Residencia or in the Hogar de la

Empleada, is by contrast with the nice people, to convert all food into a
peronist club with strict oratory rules: The sole condition is that no one
can say a word that does not refer to the common leader!; this is because
for a peronista there is nothing better than another peronista.23 And to
make his presence at every table whether with nothing more than cider
and pastries rather than champagne inescapable and in accordance with
the rules of Peronist taste: Somehow we want to be at the table of the
Argentineans. We have chosen this way because it seems to us to be the
most cordial and the most dignified.24 It is thus that in Evitas homes
everything has to be informal, in particular their dining rooms, whose
tables must have happy and friendly tablecloths and cannot lack flowers
which are never lacking in any home where there is a mother or a wife
who is more or less affectionate with her own. The wall must also be like
that: familiar and happy: pleasant and evocative paintings, bright pictures
the crockery is dignified.25
21 Pern, La razn de mi vida, p.174, p.213 and p.150.

22 Ibid., p.159.
23 Ibid., pp.193, 199.
24 Ibid., p.216.
25 Ibid., p.230.
It is because the home begins where the Nation ends that the wife,
being the mother of the family and born to sustain it, should be there.
Her purpose is to shed light on moral values, for she respects life because
she has created it.
In her sacrifice, Evita redeems the people and transforms herself
into a revived Joan of Arc, who offers her life burning with love for her
descamisados.26 Her life is as voracious as the illness that lead to her death,
about which there also circulates mythical vampiric rumours (she needed
fresh young blood and had ordered that they got it from children) which
bring us back to archaic fantasies:
Now she had a skinny face, ill from anemia, according to some, from cancer, accord-
ing to others. The people felt themselves guilty, believing that they had drained her
with their voracity. [] They had eaten her red corpuscles, they were her cancer.
They felt themselves to be vampires and Dracula. She had awoken in them the old
guilt towards the mother which they acquired as little children when in their fan-
tasies they drained her and destroyed her voraciously. [] The others, those of the
opposition, felt the same guilt. But while the peronistas admitted (we have made
her work too much for us thats why she is like this!) or negated it, negating the
possibility of her very death (there began to arise the Immortal Evita in the soul of
her people), the others, those of the opposite side, projected their guilt of infantile
voracity on her. She was the vampire who had drained them, who had sucked and
bled the Argentinean people and who now wanted to save herself by sucking the
blood of innocent children.27
As Lamborghini said, Argentina is valued for its great power of represen-

tation, and Peronism was the historical emergence of representation and
literature: There a woman is no more than a woman, here in contrast she is
a worker who walks to the factory,28 and a child, as well as being a grilled
snack, is a proletarian damaged by wealthy companions.29
26 Ibid., p.47.
28 See Lamborghini, Osvaldo, Prlogo de Csar Aira, in Novelas y cuentos, Barcelona:
Ediciones del Sebal, 1988.
29 In line with the myth of the roasted child, I recall a more recent fantasy which also
had as its axis the alimentary question: at the start of the 1990s a rumour spread
Evita is a figure that can bear neither averages nor indifferences but,
by contrast, every kind of mythology. In this sense she is unique. She is
capable of carrying the most atrocious and barefaced rumours, to which,
moreover, Argentinean society is very much inclined. Nor did her inert
and rigid body curb her magical power. Faced with this, as a paradox of
destiny, the Sindicato de Obreros de la Alimentacin proposed her can-
onization, and revived in the dispute various glazings of sense which did
not fall silent, for it was supposed that whoever obtained her body would
make themselves master of this power. She, who in life had felt herself to
be the shadow and the creative hands of her leader, although always
governed by the hands of Providence, continued living after death. In
fact, as Langer points out, in a comment which not by accident was added
in the post 1955 edition, which showed, as Garcia said, the weakness of
the analysts in the face of militant political discourse:30 Pern, after the
throughout Buenos Aires, which asserted that in their Portean restaurants the
Chinese substituted rats for the chicken on their menus and that they had freez-
ers stuffed full of rodents. The rumour was repeated by everyone, fervently and
credulously. The foodstuffs, in themselves, also possess their own myth and their
acceptance in different cultures is never instantaneous. It is enough to recall the
cultural resistances that the potato raised at the start of our history, because the fact
of growing underground and not in the light of the sun like other noble fruits gave
rise to rumours about the mysteries they represented. Due to famines, their ease
of cultivation and care prevailed over the resistance and they ended up forming a
substantial element of local alimentation. But over time it also confirmed its own
characteristic as the benchmark mythical food of Latin America and Argentina, a
food which had been laid bare by the conquest, and which connected man to his
freedom of conscience and his own spiritual energy coming from the mother earth.
For this reason, the potato was a great protagonist of certain works by the conceptual
artist Vctor Grippo, in which the tubers, generally connected by cables, produced
energy and expanded the consciousness.
30 There are three versions written by Langer about this myth. The first is an article
which carries the title Existen El mito del nio asado published in 1950 in the
Revista de psicoanlisis 3.VII, and a year later included almost without change in
her book Maternidad y sexo. A third somewhat amplified version, El nio asado y
otros mitos sobre Eva Pern, whose first edition is dated 1957 (Buenos Aires: Nova,
pp.7395) and the second 1966 (Buenos Aires: Horm, pp.79103), with minimal
death of Evita, lost his force, his mystical influence over the masses, he
fell with the ease with which idols with feet of clay fall, and once dead, to
make things worse, lost his hands without ever recovering them again.31
additional references, is the one cited by Germn Garca and the one used in this
essay and cited above. In addition to clarifying, almost as a platitude, that analytic
and political practices are not played in the same space at the same time, Germn
Garca, responding to Gregorio Baremblitt, points out that analytic theory has
no right to psychoanalyse practical politics as Langer does, in the best style of
Freudian negation, on the basis of her ideological incursions like those added after
the fall of Peron. It is, as Garca insists, a question of a desire that is articulated in
the ideology of a social group which recognizes itself in her the APA (Asociacin
Psicoanaltica Argentina) and of the return of displaced politics: The whole group
recognizes the connection between Evita and the good/bad mother of the myth
of the roasted child, but for the same reason the whole group fails to recognize the
determinants of this certainty. This critique is contemplated with the engaging of
consciousness, which the Cordobazo produces in Langer and her established con-
temporaries: In Cuestionamos the psychoanalytic problematic evoking the social
control of the individual is not recognized. (It is as if it were inconsistent with such
language, and for the same reason transindividual, it is confounded with the vague
notion of the inner world used by M Klein.) But this same lack of recognition is
already a recognition which appears sketched out in some of the texts. There is a
voluntaristic displacement towards the political, which will not serve securely to
convince a melancholic of the happy virtues of a better society. The wish for an
engagement of consciousness (political and social) seems to repress an evidence:
psychoanalysis exists because Freudian theory wants to give notice of that other
system whose laws are distinct to those of conscious reason. See Garca, Germn
Leopoldo, Respuesta a Gregorio Baremblitt, Los libros 4.27 ( July 1972), pp.1519;
Garca, Germn Leopoldo, Cuestionamos, las aventuras del bien social, Los libros
3.25 (March 1972), pp.1213. See also Garca, El psicoanlisis y los debates culturales,
p.184. [Translators note: The Cordobazo, which took place in August 1968, was an
important protest movement uniting workers and students in the city of Crdoba,
one of the most important industrial cities of Argentina, and led to the fall of the
government of Ongana and four years later to the return of democracy.]
31 Translators note: Pern died in 1974 and thirteen years later, in 1987, someone entered
his tomb secretly by night and cut off his hands. It is still not known who carried
out this attack nor have his hands ever been recovered.
Index
agriculture 16, 125, 185, 188, 200 biotechnology viii, 31, 32

alcohol 33, 51, 66, 70, 75, 76, 78, 8185, Bioy Casares, Adolfo 45n
92, 93, 95, 97, 99103, 109, 112, blood 28, 39, 50n, 60, 69n, 75, 9091,
130, 133, 135, 137139, 141, 160 101, 113, 117, 133, 134, 138, 145n,
162, 168170, 193, 200, 215 155, 156, 168, 197, 209, 219
alcoholism 76, 99100, 130, 138, 141, 169 body, the v, ix, 3, 67, 10, 19, 23, 25, 27,
Aldao, Jos Flix Esquivel y 129, 133140, 2933, 3637, 39, 4041, 51, 52,
177 66, 6770, 76, 90, 111, 114n, 134,
alimentation vi, ix, 12, 28, 31, 32, 57, 67, 148n, 149, 159n, 173, 177, 191, 205,
144, 153, 192, 220, 173, 181, 182, 210, 215 217, 220
193, 196, 205, 219n, 220n bodies 29, 30, 68, 98n, 197, 215n
lvarez, Agustn 137n, 169 Borges, Jorge Luis ix, 87, 105, 140, 206n
America viiviii, 119, 120, 122, 125, 129, Bourdieu, Pierre 10, 23
131n, 136137, 141, 145, 152, 156, Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme 5, 6, 57,
171, 179 65, 6772, 7576, 94, 151153,
Argentina vii, viii, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 199, 201
18, 20, 22n, 25, 117n, 121, 122, 123,
124, 125n, 129, 130, 133, 137n, 139n, Canetti, Elias ix
145n, 146n, 148n, 152n, 166, 167, cannibalism 11, 28, 29, 90, 139, 183, 207,
168n, 175, 180n, 181, 183, 184, 187, 208, 210
188n, 202, 209n, 211, 213, 217, 218, Castoriadis, Cornelius 56
219, 220n, 221n civilization vii, ix, 10, 15, 3031, 65, 69,
Aristotle 49, 56, 111 117118, 126, 144145, 146, 148n,
Augustine, St 57 153, 155, 157, 172, 173, 175, 179,
180, 181, 1835, 189, 190n, 196,
Balzac, Honor de viii, 3, 6978, 152n, 199200, 202, 204205, 211n,
153 214n
barbarism 11, 144, 155, 173, 175, 181, 189 and barbarism 144, 175, 181, 185186
see also civilization Clemenceau, Georges 13, 20, 152n
Barthes, Roland ix, 7, 19, 4346, 47, 91 colonization viii, 179, 180, 198
Baudelaire, Charles 65, 7480, 97n, 153, cookery ix, 3, 4, 5, 13, 25, 36, 66, 127, 150n,
154, 166, 168 151, 152n, 166, 207
Beckett, Samuel 91n cooking see cookery
Benjamin, Walter viii, 65, 7780, 150 corpse see body, the
224 Index
Cortzar, Julio 4 90, 93, 94, 111, 131, 146, 148, 149,
cows 15, 17, 31, 146, 155, 156n, 175177, 150n, 151, 152, 154, 156n, 157, 160,
180, 186, 190n, 191, 199, 205 162, 183, 188, 191, 192, 193, 196,
cultivation 13, 15, 45, 65, 76, 87, 108, 119, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206,
120, 122123, 125126, 129130, 207, 210, 212
142n, 181183, 185186, 188189, Echeverra, Jos Esteban Antonio 156,
196, 199, 208, 220n 176, 178
culture viii, ix, 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, education 32, 126, 137n, 157158, 168,
23, 31, 32, 33, 37, 43, 46, 56, 67, 69, 169n, 183, 189, 199
92n, 108, 109, 114, 126, 130, 133n, Elias, Norbert 30, 157
136, 137n, 142n, 150n, 154n, 177, Eliot, T.S. 87
180, 184, 188189, 192, 199201, Ellmann, Richard 92n
203205, 207, 210, 211, 214n, 220n Engels, Friedrich 71, 72n
enjoyment see pleasure
Dante Alighieri 8, 84, 97, 111, 124 Europe vii, viii, 12, 22, 28, 84, 97n, 120,
De Certeau, Michel 182 124, 129, 131n, 145, 152, 161n, 168,
De Man, Paul 143 171, 179, 183, 187, 208, 210
diet vii, ix, 4, 28, 36, 139, 203, 147n, 150n, Evita see Pern, Eva
184, 203
dietetics v, 4, 5, 29, 31, 55, 57, 68, 147n, Fernndez-Armesto, Felipe 25
148n, 195 food vii, viii, ix, 37, 925, 29, 30, 3236,
diet-et(h)ics see dietetics 39, 41, 5558, 63, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72,
drink 10, 21, 23, 43n, 45, 59, 63, 69n, 70, 76, 88, 93, 94, 112, 139n, 145148,
82, 84, 90, 91, 92, 100, 101, 106, 150152, 156n, 157, 158, 160, 165,
112, 139, 148n, 158, 160, 161, 162, 166n, 170n, 179, 181185, 188,
163, 167, 170n 192, 193, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201,
drinking 6, 7, 10, 13, 21, 22, 4344n, 50, 204206, 210, 214, 218, 220n
52, 53, 59, 73, 78, 82, 84, 88, 91, 92, Fourier, Charles 4
93, 94, 95, 97, 100101, 109, 123, Fournier, Dominique 12
125, 127, 132, 134136, 139140, Franklin, Benjamin 197, 198, 200, 205
146, 161, 162, 166, 167, 170, Freud, Sigmund 99, 100n, 210, 211, 221
199200
drunkenness 51, 53, 56, 59, 65, 6970, 73, Garca, Germn 211, 220n, 221n
74, 75, 77, 80, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, gluttony ix, 5, 158, 201
99101, 109, 110, 113, 123, 135137, Gombrowicz, Witold vii, 8n, 25, 60,
139, 140, 160162, 166, 168, 170, 209
200, 215 Gonzlez, Joaqun V. 134
gourmet v, 3, 9, 11, 1316, 18, 20, 25, 31, 43,
eating vii, ix, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 18, 20, 94, 106, 130, 131n, 165
21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36, 39, Gruenter, Rainer 45, 98
40, 50n, 55, 56, 63, 66, 69, 70, 88, Grupo de Reflexin Rural 1516
Index 225
Hemingway, Ernest vi, 8185, 93 Montaigne, Michel de viii, 4, 4954

Hernndez, Jos 159n, 169, 186 Montanari, Massimo 12n
Hispano-America see Latin America Murena, H.A. 167, 168n, 181n
Horace 52, 119
Hudson, Guillermo Enrique 176, 181, Nabokov, Vladimir 112, 113n
189, 204, 205, 206n Nietzsche, Friedrich 14, 28, 41, 50n, 107,
108, 131
imaginary vii, 17, 29, 32, 36, 67, 81, 84, North America 29, 3738, 82, 119, 179,
140, 146n, 181, 197, 209 183, 194198, 200204
Ivanov, N. 72
Onfray, Michel 9, 68n
Joyce, James vi, viii, 53, 8795, 98, 100 Ortega y Gasset, Jos 167
Jung, C.G. 91n Ozu, Yasujiro 22
Kant, Immanuel 68, 69, 153 Payr, Roberto J. 165172

Khayym, Omar 114n, 134 Pern, Eva ix, 37, 178n, 209, 210n, 211n,
Kierkegaard, Sren v, 5561 213221
kitchen ix, 13, 15, 89, 113, 148, 149, 154 Pern, Juan Domingo 174, 176, 177,
Klein, Melanie 211, 221 178n, 209, 212, 215, 216, 217, 218,
220, 221n
Lamborghini, Osvaldo 219 Peronism vi, 37n, 175, 178, 189, 190n,
Langer, Marie 207221 205, 207, 209, 211, 212, 215, 216,
Latin America viii, 12, 13, 32, 118, 122, 218, 219
131n, 133, 170n, 179, 194, 195, 196, pleasure 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 25, 28, 39, 52, 53,
197, 201, 203, 205, 220n 56, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 90, 91,
Lewis, Bernard 21 98n, 100, 121, 130, 139, 150, 154,
Lucretius 51, 109 184, 199, 200, 201, 215
Pliny the Elder 55, 174
Mansilla, Lucio Victorio ix, 139, 141 Plutarch 51, 118
164, 168, 184 Poe, Edgar Allan 74, 161, 198, 203, 204,
Martnez Estrada, Ezequiel vii, 50n, 133, 205
137, 147n, 159n, 173206, 215, Proust, Marcel 7, 8, 76, 77
216n
Marx, Karl viii, 65, 7172, 75, 7879, Rabelais, Franois 4, 165
141, 189 Ramos Meja, Jos M. 137, 138, 139n
meat 2728, 3031, 39, 72n, 91, 92, 126, regime see diet
127, 131, 139, 146, 147, 151, 152, 157, Rojas, Ricardo vii, 120, 121n, 142, 155n
159, 176n, 181, 182186, 187, 192, Romero, Jos Luis 187, 188n
193, 199, 203, 205, 207, 218 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 5, 144, 155
modernity 6, 74, 78, 80, 99, 103, 111, 135,
208 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 49, 150
226 Index
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino v, ix, 115, Thoreau, Henry David 189, 198, 203,
117132, 135, 136n, 137n, 138, 141, 204, 205
170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 179, 183, Tournier, Michel 91n
187n, 197, 198, 199, 200
Sartre, Jean-Paul 34, 35, 50n United States of America 15, 53, 82, 119,
Schwob, Marcel viii, 105114 129, 183, 184, 194199, 202
senses v, 5, 7, 9, 20, 24, 43, 44, 46, 60, 68,
71, 74, 78, 150, 153, 191, 192, 202 Valverde, Jos Mara 88, 92n
sensibility 6, 12, 24, 31, 33, 67, 80, 121, vegetarianism 33, 166, 192, 208
165, 180 Victorica, Benjamn 155n
Serres, Michel 9, 44n Vias, David 148n, 165, 204
South America see Latin America vines 53, 77, 97, 98n, 105106, 109, 113n,
soya 11, 1518, 31 117, 119127, 129130, 166, 179
Steiner, George 24, 61, 63 Virgil 111, 123
Stevenson, Robert Louis viii, 105, 111113 viticulture 119, 122
Stoichita, Victor I. 174 Volney, comte de (Constantin-Franois
Svevo, Italo viii, 97103 Chassebuf de La Giraudais)
Swift, Jonathan 21, 25, 29, 208 178
table 911, 19, 25, 30, 32, 38, 39, 55, 63, 65, Walsh, Rodolfo 34, 217
68, 70, 95, 98, 106, 109, 125, 143, Weil, Simone 206
146n, 147, 148n, 150n, 151, 152, Whitman, Walt 198, 203, 204, 205
154, 157, 158, 161, 171, 186, 192, 199, wine v, vi, ix, 6, 9, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23, 33,
200, 205, 210, 218 4346, 47, 4954, 55, 5761, 65,
taste v, vi, xi, 511, 13, 17, 20, 23, 25, 33, 43, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 7580, 83, 84,
52, 55, 57, 59, 67, 68, 73, 75, 79, 83, 8795, 97103, 105, 106, 109, 110,
89, 109, 112, 113n, 126, 131, 144, 112114, 117132, 133, 134, 136, 137,
147n, 150n, 151, 153, 154, 163, 164, 139, 140, 146, 158, 160, 161, 164,
166, 170n, 186, 191, 192, 193, 199, 166172, 200
200202, 218
Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas
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Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas 12

Matas Bruera Mapping the Tasteland

Matas Bruera is a sociologist, researcher and teacher of the history of ideas

ISBN 978-3-03911-345-3 Translated by David Gorman

www.peterlang.com Peter Lang

Matas Bruera Mapping the Tasteland

Matas Bruera is a sociologist, researcher and teacher of the history of ideas

Translated by David Gorman

www.peterlang.com Peter Lang

Mapping the Tasteland

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Cover illustration: Analoga IV (1972) Victor Grippo.

Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2014

All rights reserved.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Translators Note xiii

Part 1 Taste, Modernity, Centre and Periphery 1

Gourmet Physiology, or the Bourgeois Sorcery of Shapes 3

Food for the Body, Fasting for the Soul 27

Barthes: From the Semiology of Wine to the Empire of the Senses 43

Part 2 Taste, Modernity and Centre I

Montaigne: The Botrytis and Chteau dYquem 49

Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Diet-et(h)ics and the Truthful

Part 3 Taste, Modernity and Centre II

Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin:

Hemingway, or the Alcoholic Outpourings of Valpolicella 81

Monogamous Joyce and his Fendant de Sion Wine 87

Svevo, the Unconscious and the Generous Wine of Istria 97

Schwob, Stevenson and the Imaginary History of the Wines of

Part 4 Taste, Modernity and Periphery

Sarmiento, the Fermentation of the Country and the

Aldao: Servile Monk and Drinker 133

Mansilla, or Vernacular Sybaritism 141

Payr the Rogue: From the Counterfeiter of Carln Wine to

The Shadow of Martnez Estrada and his Alimentary Radiography 173

Marie Langer, or the Child as a Peronist Snack 207

or which is outside of her as myth. The trifling familiarity of Americans

although also of Sarmiento, Mansilla, Payr, Borges and Evita. European

It is of course impossible to translate a writers exact words from one lan-

Taste, Modernity, Centre and Periphery

The tide brings daughters, the butcher shop creates boys.

The Law of the Stomach

In any case, whether dietetic knowledge was considered an original art

Naming something means stipulating a sense and inscribing it into a cer-

1 Cortzar, Julio, Los Reyes, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994, p.19.

three fields of knowledge agronomy, medicine and cookery and tries

The Physiology of Taste or of Nothing

The hedonistic discourse on food and wine in hunger-stricken post-1990s

2 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, The Physiology of Taste, London: Penguin, 1994,

impressions transmitted to it by the organ.3 Taste is articulated according

Being and nothing. Taste implies a philosophy of nothing, a theology, if

In every capitalist metropolis the increase in productivity and wealth

evidence of the desire for harmonious coexistence. By eating and drinking

Producing forms is a way of disciplining consumption and negating the

6 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London:

the table reveal a wider transformation in the behaviour of society. When

The Gourmet Myth

We are not even the children of circumstances, but rather of their

Argentina can testify to abundance basically linked to native food myths

In direct opposition to the non-existence of a native cuisine, an exacer

7 Translators note: Kombu is an edible kelp, widely eaten in East Asia.

like naturalists, focus on precious trivialities and have turned cooking

Being fat. Over half of all Argentineans are overweight. What is to be