The Mad Toy

"Roberto Arlt was an Argentinian novelist and journalist, a contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, but one who came from a broken home, was barely educated and began working at a young age. He was the son of poor German immigrants, and he learned to read literature through bad translations of Russian and German writers. There’s a kind of madcap genius at work in Arlt that’s only possible in a person who is an autodidact. His language is a mix of slang and literary Spanish combined with immigrant patois, and his characters and their schemes are utterly unpredictable. The Mad Toy is about a kid doing odd jobs, hustling to make his way in a cutthroat world, and being cutthroat himself. It’s largely autobiographical and has a throbbing energy, a bit like Truffaut’s film 400 Blows , which is also autobiographical – both are narratives of the artist in his hardscrabble, and petty-criminal, youth. There’s another novel by Arlt called The Seven Madmen , which is devoted more to the crazy utopian political schemes by megalomaniacs and criminals. Arlt was a bit of a crank himself. He devoted much of his short life to trying to invent pantyhose that wouldn’t fall down — stuff like that which he thought would make him filthy rich — instead of writing. Arlt also wrote long articles in newspapers about everyday life in Buenos Aires — these pieces were called aguafuertes and have been compiled into volumes, though they have not been translated into English. Many of them have the same energy, dark humor, and experimentation with language that’s there in the novels. The aguafuertes are similar to Joseph Roth’s feuilletons in What I Saw. They had a lot of influence on me when I was writing about Calcutta. All writers are autodidacts in a way. You have to learn the craft on your own ­– that even McPhee was very clear about – by doing and doing, over time for thousands of hours and many many years. I feel like that’s even more true when you’re writing about places or subjects that are over-inscribed, where a great deal has been written about them already, but very little of it feels true. To write about a place that has been written about repeatedly by outsiders who knew very little about the languages or cultures or historical particularity of the place, and who masked their ignorance with their ready disdain, I think you can’t rely on what others have written. You have to start anew, use your intuition, your common sense, and all your senses. A city like Calcutta is not just big buildings and monuments but street corners and neighbourhood clubs and pujo pandals, sounds and bodies and moments. You can listen to a street like you would listen to a symphony. You can read a whole political history of a city from its wall graffiti, or tell a story of its industrial past from the names of closed factories that only remain in bus conductors’ calls. In such situations, we all have to become autodidacts, and Arlt is a good guide on how to proceed. I feel like nobody described the world of the street better than Arlt. Those who write about cities often fall back on Walter Benjamin’s writings and his notion of the flaneur. I greatly admire Benjamin, especially as a literary critic and a theorist, but Benjamin on cities to me always reads like a distant observer, watching life happen through a thick sheet of glass. In contrast, Arlt writes from the heart of the action. I used a quote from one of Arlt’s aguafuertes as the epigraph of The Epic City : He llegado a la conclusión de que aquél que no encuentra todo el universo encerrado en las calles de su ciudad, no encontrará una calle original en ninguna de las ciudades del mundo. Y no las encontrará, porque el ciego en Buenos Aires es ciego en Madrid o Calcuta… I have come to the conclusion that he who does not encounter the whole universe in the streets of his city will not encounter an original street in any of the cities of the whole world. He won’t encounter them because those who are blind in Buenos Aires are blind in Madrid, or in Calcutta… Some people can: the Mycroft Holmeses of the world, tubby and content, who sit in Pall Mall and know the entire goings on of the world outside. I really envy them. The rest of us, like his little brother Sherlock, have to hit the streets. I think what Arlt meant was what Socrates meant when someone remarked about a friend of theirs who had just returned from a long trip and seemed no less cantankerous than when he had left. Socrates said, look who he had as his travel companion. There’s a bit of that in the character of Ila, in Ghosh’s Shadow Lines , who travels the whole world and sees only airport lounges. Arlt himself traveled in Spain and North Africa and wrote more aguafuertes based on his experience. I think Arlt’s point is if you’re blind in your own metropolis, a change of scene is not going to help. But on the other hand if you know how to look, the whole world is there at your doorstep."