Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931-1970

240 Pages·1986·2.81 MB·English

by  John King

CAMBRIDGE IBERIAN AND
LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
GENERAL EDITOR
P. E. RUSSELL F.B.A.
Emeritus Professor of Spanish Studies
University of Oxford
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
E. PUPO-WALKER
Director, Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies
Vanderbilt University
A. R. D. PAGDEN
Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge
Sur
This book tells the story of Sur, Argentine's foremost literary and cultural journal
of the twentieth century. Victoria Ocampo (its founder and lifelong editor) and
Jorge Luis Borges (a regular and influential contributor) feature prominently in
the story, while the contributions of other major writers (including Eduardo
Mallea, William Faulkner, Andre Breton, Virginia Woolf, Alfonso Reyes,
Octavio Paz, Waldo Frank, Aldous Huxley, and Graham Greene) are discussed.
Politically speaking, Sur represented a certain brand of liberalism, a resistance to
populism and mass culture, and an attachment to elitist values which offended
against the more dominant phases of Argentine thought, from Peronism to the
varied forms of nationalism, socialism and Marxism. Dr King examines the
journal's roots, its development, and its demise, relating it to other journals
circulating at the time, and highlighting vital issues debated in its pages.
CAMBRIDGE IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
LITERATURE AND LITERARY THEORY
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HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY
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Sur
A study of the Argentine
literary journal and its role in the
development of a culture, 1931-1970
JOHN KING
Lecturer in Cultural History, University of Warwick
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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
KingJ,o hn1,9 50-
Sur: a studoyf t heA rgentilniet erjaoruyrn aaln d
itrso lien t hed evelopmoefna tc ultu1r9e3,1 -1970.
(CambridIgbee riaanndL atiAnm ericsatnu dies)
Bibliography.
I. Argentina-Intellilfee2c..t S uura (lB uenAoisr es,
ArgentinIa.T) i tleI.I S.e ries.
F2810.K5159 86 982'.1826 -9625
ISBN9 78-0-521-26849-3 Hardback
ISBN9 78-0-521-12P1a2p1e-r7b ack
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Contents
Acknowledgements page vii
Introduction
The cultural context
Argentine letters in the nineteenth century:
'gentleman' and 'professional' writers 7
Magazines in the cultural life of Buenos Aires: I 900-30 I 3
2 Sur: the early years
Victoria Ocampo 3I
Literary travellers in Argentina 35
Sur: the first issues 43
3 The years of consolidation, I 935-40
Introduction 58
The intellectual and social context of the I930S 60
The literary context 77
4 The war years
Sur and the war: an overview 95
Foreign contributors IOI
Latin American contributors I07
Argentine writers I IO
Sur and little magazines, I940-5 I26
5 Sur in the years of Peronism, I 946-55
An overview
The opening to Europe
Latin American writers
Argentine writers
v
Vl CONTENTS
6 Sur, 1956-70: the failure of reconstruction
Argentine cultural development, 1956-70
Foreign contributors to the magazine
Latin American contributors
Argentine contributors
Conclusion 198
Notes 203
Select bibliography 225
Index 229
Acknowledgements
My greatest thanks go to Gerald Martin who acted as my supervisor
when an earlier version of this work was presented as a thesis at Oxford
University. Gordon Brotherston,John Rutherford and Peter Russell
also read the text and made many valuable observations. John
Wainwright of the Taylorian Institute in Oxford gave me a great deal
of bibliographical guidance. Cristina Weller commented on the text
and typed up several versions with great skill and accuracy. Janet
Greenberg in Berkeley was also generous with her observations and
shared her research material on Victoria Ocampo with me.
In Argentina I was helped by a number of people. The writers and
critics associated with Sur discussed their ideas with me, in particular
the late Victoria Ocampo and the late Maria Rosa Oliver,Jorge Luis
Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jose Bianco, Silvina Ocampo, Enrique
Pezzoni and Teddy Paz. Carlos Lohle and Marcela Sola assisted me in
many different ways and I was greatly encouraged by their enthusi­
asm and friendship. The editorial committee of the magazine Punto de
Vista gave me a number of valuable insights, in particular Beatriz
Sarlo and Maria Teresa Gramuglio. The staff of the Sur offices and in
the various libraries of Buenos Aires were always cooperative.
Finally my research trips to Buenos Aires were financed by the
SSRC, the DES, the Ford Foundation, the Di Tella Foundation and
the University of Warwick.
JOHN KING
Warwick, June 1g85
vu
For my mother
and in memory of
my father
Vlll
Introduction
Tout cela d'un gout exquis, evidemment.1
This book is concerned with the problem of reading and interpreting
the Argentine literary magazine Sur, which was published regularly
between 1931 and 1970, and irregularly thereafter, as an elegant
fusion of fiction, poetry, philosophy, plastic arts, history and social
commentary. That a magazine should be chosen as a research topic
reflects the reality of Argentine literary life in the twentieth century.
Such publications offered many writers their main opportunity to put
forward ideas in the form of works ofliterature and critical or general
essays. Most magazines only lasted for a few years or, in some cases, a
few issues, but Sur, thanks to the quality of its contributors and the
sound financial base of its founder, Victoria Ocampo, was to have an
important influence on several generations.2
There have been no substantial accounts written of literary
magazines in Latin America, and few studies exist of their European
and North American counterparts.3 There are signs that more
attention is being focused on this area, but the research for this study,
and in particular the methodological and theoretical issues that it
raises, have evolved, to a large extent, in a critical vacuum. The lack of
a coherent body of criticism imposes certain necessary limitations on
the work. Francis Mulhern has argued in his recent study of the
English critical magazine Scrutiny:
It will doubtless be noticed that the book lacks a systematic theoretical and
methodological preamble . . . This is largely a matter of necessity. Few
precedents exist for the study of a journal as such; it would evidently have
been inadequate to construct a schema, by derivation and specification from
the existing conceptual resources .. . and it would just as evidently have been
illegitimate to elicit one by induction from the investigation of a single case.4
What his work has demonstrated and what this book sets out to
achieve is a detailed case study which pays attention to the magazine
as history and as text. It will be argued that Sur should not just be
2 INTRODUCTION
treated as an anthology that came out every month or two, but rather
as a process - with its own internal history and conflicts - which
developed in a certain political and cultural setting. Its discourse
remained remarkably coherent throughout the period of its publica­
tion and can therefore, if my methodology is successful, be reliably
charted through the changing conditions of Argentina in the mid
twentieth century.
The main focus will therefore be literary history. It will locate the
journal within the very specific development of Argentine letters in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then seek to explain
how it elaborated and altered these tendencies throughout the forty
years of its regular publication. Sur's view on literature and life
became the most powerful force within Argentine letters during this
period and all other forms of cultural expression can be defined by
their adherence to, or disagreement with, its central premises. The
literary world cannot be divorced from the wider historical context
and particular attention will be paid to developments within
Argentine and world history to which the magazine was forced to
respond and which shaped its course, in particular the growth of
fascism and communism, the Second World War and the rise and fall
of Juan Domingo Peron.
Complex problems arise when dealing with a composite text, for
it is necessary to identify links between a number of diverse texts
without reducing a complex enterprise to a crude general classifica­
tion of content. Raymond Williams has argued in an influential essay
on the 'Bloomsbury fraction' that the critic of a literary magazine or a
cultural group must establish two factors: the internal organisation of
a particular group and its proposed and actual relations to other
groups in the same area of enquiry and to the wider society.5 Certain
magazines declare their intentions and thus offer guidelines for
subsequent analysis. Other magazines, in the apparent heterogeneity
of their material, present more complex problems. Historians ofideas
have pointed out that there is a very substantial difference between the
great reviews of the nineteenth century that attempted to speak for a
wide cross-section of educated opinion and the little magazines of the
later period that sponsored the new, 'in the vanguard of the war
against established literary, artistic or political properties'.6 In most
cases, the little magazines set out a manifesto or a programme which
determines their selection, proclaiming the foundation of new
movements and developing their doctrines explicitly and polemical­
ly.7 Poggioli makes the distinction: