Beatriz Sarlo

I checked this book out from the library because I was re-reading Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos and wanted another perspective on 1920s Buenos Aires. I thought I'd read the first three chapters, which focus on the literary implications of early 20th century technological advancements. I plowed on through the final three chapters, where the focus shifts from literature to history. I'm certainly glad I did. At first I didn't understand where Sarlo was going and how the book was going to fit together as a whole. I'm glad, though, that I trusted her and stuck with it: I was rewarded with an ending that tied everything together and left me satisfied.

Inspired by the works of Arlt, she started pondering a "poor people's knowledge," a blend of scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses that stood opposed to the Buenos Aires intellectual establishment. While the upper crust of the scientific community was trying its best to keep up with Europe and North America, tinkerers and technology enthusiasts were cobbling together radios in their garages, or inventing stuff in the hopes of one day striking it big. These folks had little formal education, but were inspired by the stories of those who found the proverbial needles in the haystack that led to wealth and acceptance in the international scientific community. They were encouraged in their endeavors by a wide variety of serial publications. Sarlo focuses on two of the biggest tabloid/newspapers (they seem to fall somewhere between the two, perhaps more toward the tabloid side) of 1920s Buenos Aires, Crítica and El Mundo. These publications reached a large community of readers (tens of thousands of people) and sought to take advantage of growing interest in technology through articles that both explained modern scientific advances, and also provided practical advice to inventors and home scientists who lacked traditional academic backgrounds but who were in the garage tinkering away. Her description of the how-to and question-and-answer segments of these papers made me think of "Car Talk," which my dad used to listen to when I was a kid. Earnest, straightforward discussions aimed at helping people achieve their hobby goals. Sarlo mostly sticks to these two serials in her analysis, but she also studies other, more specialized publications like Ciencia Popular, which focused exclusively on science in modern Argentine life.

The book is divided into two parts, "Letters" and "Histories." In the first, Sarlo examines the role of technology and the dreams it inspired on the work of two prominent authors: Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt. Both men were avid inventors and technology enthusiasts. Quiroga was into bicycling in his youth, back when it was just catching on as an exciting new mode of transportation, and in his later adult years he moved up to the remote backcountry of Misiones where he drove his wife crazy (she eventually took her life) and tried his hand at cultivating various crops. His stories (which are excellent) often feature like-minded individuals. Sarlo discusses how inventors in his stories and in real life often found their hopes dashed by a complete lack of quality materials. It would seem that it's easier to build stuff when you can just go to the hardware store or Lowes or whatever other 21st century do-it-yourselfer mecca. After explaining the failures of Quiroga's characters and the thousands of other Argentines who built stuff in their free time, Sarlo moves on to discuss the role of technology in Roberto Arlt's imagined Buenos Aires, as well as the connection between his own passion for inventing (he once patented socks reinforced with rubber in the heel and toe) and his fictions. While it's not uncommon to compare Arlt to Borges in a yin-and-yang sort of way (what Borges is, Arlt is not, and vice versa), she does a good job of explaining how Borges' nostalgic look at Buenos Aires (I believe the phrase "rosy-colored" is used, although the book was due back before I could finish this review) differs from Arlt's vision of a city that was becoming. When I set Sarlo's book down and compared what I was reading in Los siete locos to the words Borges wrote that same year about his childhood Palermo in Evaristo Carriego, I certainly noticed the clear divergence of the two authors' perspectives. True, much of her discussion of Arlt's vision of the urban space relates to another of his books (El amor brujo), but the chapter was fun to read in tandem with Arlt's novel, and really keyed me in on the way he depicts the city.

Moving forward, I felt a bit lost for a few chapters as the big serial publications were discussed, then the story shifted to other histories of technology its impact on Argentine citizens. The last two chapters, though, pulled me back in. First she documents the effects of the radio, cinema and television on the popular imagination. The radio was amazing not just because people's voices could be transmitted wirelessly; it was also easy to build, and created a whole subculture of individuals who felt connected to this new technology not only as listeners but as constructors of radios. I can only imagine what it would be like to suddenly be able to build a device that would let you talk to people hundreds of miles away. Cinema, on the other hand, was not accessible in that way. It took deep pockets to be able to participate actively in moviemaking in the way that ham radio enthusiasts built their apparatuses and projected their voices into the air. The movies required the passive participation of the spectator--as radio eventually did with the rapidly growing listening public--, but in this case there was no possibility for any sort of active participation unless you had boatloads of money. Finally, television was the future, but it wasn't nearly as close as many thought it would be. It remained in the realm of the not-yet-possible throughout the 1920s, positioned as a reminder that there were still technological dreams yet to be fulfilled and perpetuating the imaginative hopes and desires of the people who had enthusiastically welcomed radio and film.

In the final chapter, Sarlo discusses an interesting ramification of these innovations: if all this was possible, why couldn't anything and everything be possible? Communication with the dead? Miracle cures? Keeping severed dog heads alive by continuing to circulate blood through them? These were the sorts of doors that the technological miracles of the early 20th century kept open. In Argentina, plenty of attention was paid to exciting new developments in all areas of scientific possibility, with practitioners of now-denounced healing techniques alternately thought of as crazy or visionary, depending on their ability to sheath their practices in sufficiently scientific babble or not. The serial publications loved devoting space to these things, denouncing frauds, applauding apparent successes, and giving readers step-by-step instructions on how to learn hypnotism and conquer their own bodies into good health. I love reading about the crazy stuff people used to pass off as science (or that people optimistically thought was science), and this chapter reminded me of how much I enjoy reading about the successes and failures of science. Moreover, the name Roberto Arlt kept popping back up. Apparently in at least one case he was rather convinced by one of these quacks. His reappearance at the end of the book reminds you how life and literature were intertwined, and they fed off each other at an exciting moment in history.… (more)