1
WORD
HTML
Autobiography as Cultural Iconography: Rafael Alberti and María Elena
Walsh
K.M. Sibbald
(McGill U)
Autobiography as a record of how people not merely live their lives but how they explain those
lives, is a curious amalgam of culture, art, imagination, rhetoric, gossip, and pure fabrication, all
in the form of self-presentation. As both cultural products and social acts autobiographies are
texts in which authors reflect, as well as respond to their particular society. Their stories from
this point of view are neither strictly personal nor unique since they consider their lives and
organize their experiences in the light of general ideas about what it is to be human and such
ideas have been significantly shaped by the particular culture and era, while even the most
private self-understanding is articulated in autobiography in the social medium of language, and
such understanding cannot escape the influence of what has been learned by participation in a
shared social world (Bjorklund 1998). Significantly, the best autobiographies are never merely a
matter of recording a life: a selection takes place of "events" and "facts" that will fit into a
comprehensible narrative. Thus, not only historical changes but the constraints and opportunities
of a variable social situation define the autobiographical self, while audience, current
conventions of selfhood, and the importance of the public story are all fundamental to what John
Babour (1992) has called this "community of discourse" and type of social interaction that seeks
to have influence. The appeal to both general readers and literary scholars is obvious, but
auto/biography as a flourishing genre in the post-modern world, both in the bookstore chains and
2
in the academic press, is mainly due to what Jonathan Eakin has rightly discerned as the distinct
shift in the second half of the twentieth century from neglect of "an artless literature of fact" to
the devouring of autobiography as "imaginative art" (Eakin, 1992 30). By the end of the
millennium the genre had lent itself less to the reinforcement of and by a particular elite in
power. Instead space had been found for what we may term ex-centric “autobiofiction” written
by maverick cultural icons, who express collective popular memory rather than individual
exemplarity illustrated in a discourse of domination, patriarchal uniformity, and cultural
hegemony. In the particular climate of repressive authoritarian government and its aftermath that
has sadly characterized too much of the Hispanic World, this kind of self-writing has proliferated
in both the process of the preservation of cultural memory and the renegotiation of the
representation of the past.
Two such examples may be found in the “palimpsests” contained in Rafael Alberti’s La arboleda
perdida (particularly the early version of 1959 that concerns me here) and María Elena Walsh’s
Novios de antaño which appeared in 1990. The pairing is not as disparate as it may first seem.
Alberti arrived in Argentina in 1940 and was quickly integrated into the Norah Lange-Oliverio
Girondo group of martinfierrista radicals championing a new avant-garde sensibility. One of his
earliest recollections of that period was the discovery that Norah Lange had recently published
her most eccentric autobiography, Cuadernos de infancia in 1937, which his wife, María Teresa
León, would review in positive and highly complimentary terms (Bedia 569). Alberti had
himself brought out a tentative first volume of his own Arboleda in (the now unobtainable)
Mexican version of 1942 and he would begin to revise and augment this in Argentina in the early
1950s. It is in this period that Alberti met Walsh, a precocious adolescent whose slim volume of
poetry Otoño imperdonable published in 1947 brought her not praise and encouragement from
the erstwhile mentor of Alberti and his generation, Juan Ramón Jiménez, but recognition from
Alberti himself in Buenos Aires. Years later, when she too, like Alberti (I, 97), could accept
Benvenuto Cellini’s invitation to all those “who have done anything of merit” to take up the
narrative of their separate lives in a “greater content of mind and health of body than at any time
in the past” (3), Walsh, in turn, published her own autobiography, Novios de antaño, in the
unquiet years after the restoration of democracy to Argentina. In its immediate success and
3
multiple editions it mirrored both Lange’s novelized memoir, for years a strangely uncanonical
text touted as "suitable" reading for Argentine schoolchildren as the conscious composition of
the supposedly idyllic years of childhood, and not the curious "collection of disparate bits and
pieces [and] dynamic reservoir of possibilities" (Molloy 129) it really is, and the Spanish version
of Books I and II of La arboleda perdida first published only after the “inmorible” Spanish
Dictator’s demise in 1975 in the happy expectancy of Alberti’s return to his native land. All three
autobiographies must be considered ex-centric (or “off-centre” in the Benjaminian sense), but in
the case of both Alberti and Walsh such a large readership seems to have been guaranteed by
their distinct status as popular figures and cultural icons of some standing. Alberti’s pre-war
activities and long exile in which he kept faith with the ideals of the Second Republic
characterized him as a committed, political figure of repute in a finally democratic Spain.
Moreover, as “El poeta de la calle” rather than austere versifier confined to an apolitical ivory
tower, it seemed that he had the creative art to bring consciousness to the nature of experience.
Walsh, too, had abandoned the minority expression of poetry for the few, choosing instead to
inhabit the “suburbs of Mount Parnassus” in her successful practice of folklore, children’s
literature, TV soaps, and one-woman-shows, while her fateful intervention in Argentine politics
in the form of the broadside, “Desventuras en el País-Jardín de Infantes,” published in Clarín as
an open letter to the military junta in 1979 made her an ever-present figure on the presidential
balcony of democracy after 1984. Such a background inevitably colours both autobiographies
and it is from this perspective of self-writing by these maverick cultural icons that we may best
explore how Alberti and Walsh interact with their readership in their separate presentations of
self, the credentials of that presentation, and the importance of being entertaining while telling
their respective stories.
Alberti begins his autobiography in traditional enough fashion, within a linear framework that
starts with his date and place of birth and continues in the family portraits or "complementary"
biographies of aunts and uncles, family servants, and the good fathers of the Society of Jesus at
the San Luis Gonzaga School. The presentation of these credentials serves, however, not only to
establish "a balance between past experience and the present self" (Pascal 57), but to characterize
that self, through the narration of his own private history, as a force in the making of his
4
country's history. Thus, it is as important that Alberti's birth be marked by an unexpected storm
as that the year, 1902, was a "[a]ño de gran agitación entre las masas campesinas de toda
Andalucía, año preparatorio de posteriores levantamientos revolucionarios" (LAP I 11). From the
first Alberti's individualism is emphasized: he is somehow "special" and his independence is
political in nature. This is reinforced by the ensuing descriptions of Alberti's immediate
ancestors, wine merchants, great middle-class proprietors of vineyards and wine cellars, and their
decline "en una interminable pesadilla de beatos, maniáticos, borrachines, ricos, pobres,
terribles" (LAP I 13). All that is left of their belle époque, replete with luxury and the anecdotes
of journeys to Russia, Sweden and Denmark, are some bottle labels, engraved in gold lettering
but turned the colour of dry leaves and eaten away by dampness and rats. Alberti's later rebellion
against the monarchy and bourgeois values is ironically prefigured in those mildewed medallions
of the Kings of Sweden and Denmark, "presididos por el perfil del zar Alejandro II, muerto por
los terroristas revolucionarios en las calles petersburguesas" (LAP I 12) (italics mine). In the
same way, his frequent diatribes against the stifling Catholicism of his youth ("ese espíritu
católico español, reaccionario, salvaje" [LAP I 20]), foreshadows his later characterization as a
"red" (read atheist as well as Communist) in the eyes of both his family and, eventually, virulent
Francoist propaganda. In his denunciation of the pernicious effect of religious education
("[h]orrible herencia de escombros y naufragios" [LAP I 29]), Alberti not only toes a sociopolitical but also a literary-philosophical line in commenting upon the "tristísima y reveladora
escala descendente del espíritu creador cristiano" that separates the Beatitudes from class
discrimination; Gregorian chant from the Jesuit-authored Royal March; Calderón's autos
sacramentales from Pemán's histrionics and Marquina's "mystical-economic opportunism"; the
Escorial from the Church of the Almudena in Madrid; true faith from hypocrisy, in short, "del
oro puro de las estrellas, a la más pura caca moribunda" (LAP I 35-36).
Book I ends with the family move to Madrid as Alberti presents himself, to his first audience in
1942, as a modern, forward-thinking, politically correct individual who has tried from an early
age to destroy the rotten social fabric of the Spain of his childhood. The self here presents
impeccable credentials for the delectation and commiseration of a politicized audience in exile.
By 1959, however, Alberti needed to situate himself not only on the side of social justice but also
5
to stake his claim in the world of art and letters. Writing from "without," in exile, he defended
his legitimate place "within" the tradition of Spanish writing and, specifically, as a member of
the Generation of 1927. Alberti reconstructs, therefore, the dominant political and artistic
movements of the 1920s and 1930s, self-conscious here of his position as a relevant literary
figure, albeit always in danger of relegation and oblivion the longer he continues to live
physically removed from the land which nurtured him, spiritually and linguistically. His
intention is, thus, that La arboleda perdida form part of the history of the diaspora of Spanish
artists and intellectuals after the Civil War, and his will to create and to remember transforms a
personal tragedy into a celebration of the artistically fruitful experience of the exciting artistic
circles of pre-War Madrid. The memoir is not only politically correct, but also artistically above
reproach, in that an observant and talented young artist and poet is therein making his social
contract with the world around him. In 1959, the performance was not intended, primarily, for a
Spanish audience but for the international community lest that particular struggle for the ideals of
art and democracy be forgotten as the pain and trauma of exile in “la España peregrina” dragged
on.
The single volume of Walsh’s “crónica sumamente adulterada de mi primera década de vida”
(NA 282), of course, spans a shorter time-frame. Nevertheless, there are notable similarities in
the authorial strategy for hooking the reader and getting the point across. Novios de antaño forms
part of the revindication of women’s autobiographical writing that is clearly in evidence in
Argentina since the publication of Norah Lange’s Cuadernos de infancia. Here the model (or
masculine) form is superseded by an alineal, fragmented narration that includes real and
“fictionalized” materials in the privileging of the typically feminine petite histoire over the
typically masculine grand récit. This, in turn, serves to deconstruct –rather than buttress- the
historicist vision of the power elite in an ironic, new revisionism clearly in collision rather than
in collusion with received history. Thus, Walsh targets, in the first instance the “female market”
of the editorial boom in autobiography whereby the figure of the author no longer coincides with
the traditional power elite pattern but rather with the readership that will authenticate the work.
To do this, Walsh zeroes in on recent political and still unresolved feminist issues in an
outwardly innocuous account of early childhood. Rather than a progressive year-by-year
6
account, she offers instead a series of ironic portraits of “the men in her life”, that is, fathers and
brothers, neighbours, the omnipresent figures of priest and doctor, idols of radio and the silver
screen, and, finally, of a succession of military leaders, all of whom are portrayed in a novelized
autobiography that reaches out to readers whose own memories take in life in Argentina in last
sixty years.
As in the case of Sarmiento who trumpeted his birthdate in “the ninth month after the 25th of
May” (217), in order to present himself as the exemplary Argentine, forming together with his
country one inseparable body, so the dates of Walsh’s much less pretentious, if much more
ironic, autobiography are important. The years 1930-1940 correspond not only to her first ten
years of life but to the so-called “década infame” which began with the military coup initiated by
General José Félix Uriburu to overthrow the legitimately elected civil government of Hipólito
Yrigoyen –a procedure that would be repeated so tragically in recent Argentine history. These
were also the years that inaugurated the hard-line, ultra-conservative habits of vicious repression,
military fraud, external debt and the distinctly clerical definition of “order” in the touted trinity
“Dios, patria y hogar,” all so forcefully imprinted on the national collective memory.
Not, of course, that any of this is discussed “historically” in Novios de antaño, although it clearly
forms the backdrop and revisionism behind a young girl’s discovery of the perplexing
differences between her family standards and those of the Monteros next door. Such differences
are, in microcosm, the typical Argentine cultural division. The two families do not share values
that are political (radical/socialist vs conservative), religious (agnostic vs catholic), or social
(reading, tea and scones vs quinielas, mate and facturas), nor even literary (world classics vs
yellow press magazines) or musical (opera vs tango). Nevertheless, thanks to the Montero macho
brothers, ill-named for the archangels Miguel and Rafael, the child María witnesses thoughtless
cruelty and hazing of an old beggar-woman (NA 18-21); and learns of “la justiciera mano marital
que llamaba a la obediencia debida” (NA 49) in countless black eyes that finally lead to the
enclaustration and death in a lunatic asylum of Miguel’s wife, Reina. She wonders at the
explanation of a “swollen liver” to account for the unwanted pregnancy of the archangels’
handicapped sister, Tula; and contemplates how close mass hysteria at the death of Carlos Gardel
7
can come to national violence. As the narrative progresses, she notes how the neighbours "se
derriten ante los señorones de galeras y entorchados que avanzan hacia el Tedeum en la Catedral,
imagen de media página en La Prensa que me espanta cada 25 de mayo, porque me parece que
avanza el enemigo para pisotearnos como cucarachas" (NA 77). The image is repeated in a series
of flashforwards starting in 1943, where those at the Tedeum were not "galerudos de levita y
quevedos, sino fantoches tétricos de desmesuradas gorras y capas talares, asistidos por una
multiplicada presencia de sotanas" (NA 208). In the slippage between the greasy photo of
Uriburu in the Monteros’ kitchen and any patriotic celebration of force (be it in 1943, 1955,
during the PROCESO, and even after), Walsh reminds her readers of the ever-present proximity
between patota and prepotencia at both domestic and national levels.
Similarly, María’s horizons widen to take in the figures of priest and medical practitioner, the
first "artistas, chansonniers en una lengua que nadie entiende, en un teatro tenebroso donde
siempre es invierno" (NA 101), and the others "señorones almidonados asustadores de madres
con cría" forming a "serie de embalsamadores bienintencionados [todos dispuestos a] paralizar
impulsos, aplacar nervios, reducir energías y dictar una primitiva reglamentación de moralina y
autoritarismo que nos resultarían muy útiles, como no, contemporáneos de la inauguración de la
tortura eléctrica en los antros policiales" (NA 144). From such domestic associations come
references to Mussolini, Franco, "El que te dije que salió al balcón" (that is, Perón), a civil war
followed by world war, and examples of anti-Semitism and growing nationalism in the head on
clash between historia oficiosa and historia oficial, all summed up by a six-year Maria with a
double irony far beyond her understanding that "la historia contemporánea era muy confusa, no
trataba de hazañas límpidas e incontestables como el cruce de la Cordillera, la Declaración de la
Independencia, la batalla de Caseros" (NA 196).
The written form of an autobiography means that there is no actual contact between
autobiographer and reader, no immediate interaction as in face-to-face conversation, and,
consequently, no repositioning possible about difficult or potentially contentious material
included in the published work. In part the autobiographer gauges the reactions of the expected
audience by making certain assumptions about whom that audience might include and allowing
8
interaction between author and "addressee" or "intended reader" [who, as Wolfgang Iser
explained, "can embody not only the concepts and conventions of the contemporary public but
also the desire of the author both to link up with these concepts and to work on them -sometimes
just portraying them, sometimes acting upon them" (32-33)]. As I have tried to show, the
"implied" or "intended" readers of both our palimpsests of memory depend for definition, first,
on the actual chronology of writing, and then on the timelines and location of that act of writing,
which, complete in different typographical styles, make the shift from one to a multiplicity of
stories in a multiplicity of times. In doing so, both Alberti and Walsh confirm Paul de Man's
felicitous identification of prosopopoeia as the dominant trope of autobiography, where the
"illusion of reference" (922) comes from endowing the absent or the dead with a present voice.
In practice, both writers often combine prosopopoeia with apostrophe, thereby ensuring a
"dialogistic triangle" in which the narrators talk to themselves, to their audience of newly
"voiced" individuals, and to their "implied reader(s)" (Loureiro 77) in a mix of past, present and
future speculation.
Of course, cultural icons have a limited life, new mores and new idols follow in never-ending
succession. Certainly, it must be said that after his return to Spain Alberti, increasingly lionized
as the “grand old man of Spanish poetry” (and very soon only surviving member of his
generation), abandoned the pretence of chronology in the subsequent volumes of his
autobiography, concentrating instead on a “disorderly” sequence of individual episodes and
anecdotes in order to rearrange history not as it happened but as it registered the importance of
the autobiographer for the new, young “lector entusiasta” (I, 319). As a result the memoir
degenerated into merely “un índice interminable, una larga guía, una agenda sin fin” (LAP II
272), of the “elegy” that was Alberti’s life, while the “intended reader” became more and more
an effaced attendant rather than participant in his ghostly dialogues. Walsh’s memories are,
certainly, more recent and the collective Argentine consciousness still has work to do on
reassembling its past. Nevertheless, with the sense of timing that has distinguished all of her
work, Walsh was careful to add a postscript to her 1990 “autobiofiction” in the form of a
(fictitious) letter to her maternal grandmother, Agnes Hoare, introducing a short (real) epistolary
containing “las nimias confidencias de las mujeres humildes, doblemente naídes" (NA 283)
9
living in Buenos Aires in the 1880s. Here the rosary of familiar concerns still repeated today
emphasizes the on-going nature of the petite histoire that is collective memory since these and
similiar comments have been all too familiar in the Buenos Aires of even the new millenium:
"Otra revolución arruinará al país, que estaba saliendo adelante. ¡Qué pronto se olvida a las
víctimas de una guerra! La gente del gobierno es tan voluble. El Correos no es de fiar. Este país
nunca estuvo peor... (NA 278-89).
In their moment the autobiographies of both Alberti and Walsh have served to fix attention on
what might otherwise be forgotten as both authors used their standing as cultural icons to record
popular memory. Certainly, both will be surpassed as popular icons but we feel strongly their
presence in the world in a creative art –autobiography or cultural iconography- that brings
consciousness to the nature of experience, "transforming the mere fact of existence into a
realized quality and possible meaning" (Olney, 1972 44).
10
Bibliography
Alberti, Rafael. La arboleda perdida. Buenos Aires: Fabril, 1959.
___. La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1975. (LAP I)
___. La arboleda perdida. Libros III y IV de memorias. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987. (LAP
II)
___. La arboleda perdida. Quinto libro (1988-1996). Madrid: Anaya & Mario Muchnik,
1996. (LAP III)
Barbour, John D. The Conscience of the Autobiographer: Ethical and Religious
Dimensions of Autobiography. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Bedia, M. “Antón Perulero. Un cuento inédito de María Teresa León.” Revista de
Literatura 64 (2002): 569-85.
Bjorklund, Diane. Interpreting the Self. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998.
de Man, Paul. "Autobiographer as De-facement." Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 91930.
Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1992.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1978.
Loureiro, Ángel. The Ethics of Autobiography. Nashville: Vanderbilt, U.P., 2000.
Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1972.
11
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Recuerdos de provincia. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1992
Walsh, María Elena. Novios de antaño. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1990.
___. Desventuras en el País-Jardín-de-Infantes. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1993.
___. Diario brujo (1995-1999). Buenos Aires: Espasa, 1999.
Text - Copyright © 2004 K.M. Sibbald