The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt

First published:Los siete locos, 1929 (English translation, 1984)

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: Buenos Aires and its suburbs

Principal Characters:

• Remo Erdosain, the protagonist, a white-collar worker and would-be great inventor
• Elsa, his estranged wife
• Gregorio Barsut, Elsa’s cousin, tied to Erdosain by hatred and mutual need
• The Pharmacist Ergueta, another friend-enemy of Erdosain, a pharmacist and apocalyptic maniac
• Hipolita, a prostitute, married to Ergueta and befriended by Erdosain
• The Astrologer, a charismatic leader who recruits unstable misfits with his grandiose notions

The Novel

The Seven Madmen chronicles the disaffiliation of Remo Erdosain from normal, middle-class life and his increasing involvement with the mysterious conspiracy of The Astrologer. During a period of only a few months, Erdosain moves from being an accounting clerk with a pretty, respectable wife to being the colleague of various denizens of the underworld, occultists, and political fanatics. The novel closes with Erdosain among these dangerous companions, under the charismatic sway of The Astrologer, and working on an invention that, if successful, would be fatally toxic to the population of Buenos Aires. A footnote promises that the outcome of these unpromising circumstances will appear in a sequel, Los lanzallamas (the flamethrowers), which in fact was published in 1931.

While Erdosain is becoming more deeply enmeshed in The Astrologer’s schemes, the reader of The Seven Madmen is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish the realistic from the magical and fantastic elements in the novel. He is unclear whether The Astrologer is a Socialist revolutionary, a Fascist, or the leader of a religious revival. His followers, with the exception of the earnest protagonist, often seem not to believe in the worth of The Astrologer’s project. They hint that no serious revolution is being planned and that the conspirators are merely distracting themselves from boredom with the shared fiction of a grand undertaking. It is this mix of realistic descriptions and plot elements with bizarrely imaginative ones that has won for The Seven Madmen its fame as an important early example of Magical Realism.

The Characters

Remo Erdosain is considered one of the most memorable incarnations of alienated modern man in all Latin American literature. Within the first pages of the novel, he demonstrates his disaffection from society and its norms. Caught embezzling from his firm, Erdosain is brought to the manager’s office and required to explain his motives and purposes in taking the money. He admits that he stole for no reason and dispersed the money in a gratuitous way.

The loss of his job coincides with the flight of his wife, Elsa, who has lost patience with Erdosain’s inexplicable lack of interest in career progress and the establishment of a regular home life. These two breaks with the middle-class world set Erdosain adrift. Subsequently, he only associates with individuals whose livelihood and personal lives follow an eccentric or disturbed path.

The protagonist’s need for strange companions allows Arlt to create dialogues and monologues full of exotic, mysterious talk. Among the most notable are the prophetic harangues of The Pharmacist Ergueta. Drawing equally on his deranged reading of Scripture and his knowledge of Buenos Aires lowlife, Ergueta uses a jumbled apocalyptic jargon that horrifies but fascinates his listeners. Gregorio Barsut also has the power to compel the attention even of disgusted listeners. Obsessively afraid of going mad, Barsut retells his dreams and neurotic symptoms for hours on end. Hipolita, whom Ergueta marries while on a manic spree, continually switches her persona and manner of talking in her desperate eagerness to please. Other eccentric, fascinating talkers include The Gold Seeker, who mesmerizes Erdosain with tales of adventure; Haffner (The Melancholy Ruffian), who builds elaborate theories to justify his unsavory existence; and Bromberg (The Man Who Saw the Midwife), another unhinged mystic.

All the characters mentioned, except the well-bred Elsa, fall in with The Astrologer. This character has as his announced goal to provide modern humankind, alienated from traditional sources of spiritual orientation, with a renewed sense of purpose. To achieve this end, he is willing to resort to demagogy, deceit, and “mind games.” The Astrologer often hints that he is indifferent to the viability or outcome of his conspiracy, so long as those involved can escape the pervasive meaninglessness of modern existence.

Critical Context

Both as an early example of Magical Realism and as a literary achievement in its own right, The Seven Madmen is held in high esteem. It is the most widely discussed work by Roberto Arlt, generally deemed a great original figure in Latin American writing. Though Arlt produced three other novels, two volumes of short stories, many journalistic pieces, and several plays, none is quite as successful at fusing realism, existential preoccupations, and wild imagination as The Seven Madmen.

Arlt was a newspaper writer whose style was often rough, though he also was capable of lyric prose. The varieties of language and style in The Seven Madmen have irritated some readers and fascinated others. Yet even Arlt’s greatest admirers concede that his writing is of very uneven quality; some passages of The Seven Madmen are simply too histrionic, “purple,” or sentimental.

Any reader of the Latin American New Novel, especially those of the magical vein worked by such authors as Gabriel García Márquez (of Colombia) and Julio Cortázar (of Argentina—an avowed follower of Arlt), should turn to Arlt’s novel to understand the beginning stages in the development of this highly original form.

Indicative of Arlt’s role in the development of Latin American literature is the changing degree of recognition accorded his work. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Arlt won considerable attention as an unusual and flamboyant figure on the Buenos Aires literary scene, but his work was not always considered to be of lasting significance. For example, although The Seven Madmen won for Arlt the Municipal Prize in the category of novels published in its year in Buenos Aires, it also had many detractors who deemed the novel to be too rough in language and irregular in its construction.

After Arlt’s death many of his titles went out of print for considerable lengths of time. An interest in Arlt and his work was considered a sign of literary Bohemianism and of a taste for the perversely experimental. No doubt, Arlt’s declining reputation can be attributed in great measure to the rise of realistic fiction during the 1940’s and 1950’s. The prominence of existential themes in Argentine fiction of the 1950’s contributed to some revival of interest in Arlt, but his wildly imaginative fiction has a very limited resemblance to the sober exposition favored by 1950’s-style existential novelists.

It was in the late 1960’s that Arlt’s reputation began to rise dramatically. The upsurge of interest in Arlt, and especially in The Seven Madmen, is directly attributable to the widespread success of the Latin American New Novel of the 1960’s and 1970’s. This movement was characterized by a mingling of realistic and fantastic or magical constituents, by an inclusion of rougher language (and indeed by a thoroughgoing willingness on the part of writers to transgress the constraints of decorum), and by puzzling narrative arrangements. The traits of the New Novel were, in effect, those of Arlt’s novel; it is not surprising that many writers of the new form, such as Cortázar, expressed a debt to this neglected forebear. Readers had been schooled in the abilities needed to appreciate Arlt’s work. The New Novel taught its readership to piece together plots from fragmented bits of information, to accept unexplained elements in the narrative, and to grant the novel license to use diverse registers of language and a variety of styles. These readers were prepared to understand Arlt’s irregular novelistic practices, and the cult figure now assumed the status of a much read and much cited staple of Argentine (and Latin American) literature. Since then, the availability of Arlt’s writings has been consistently good; several of his plays have been restaged; and The Seven Madmen has been filmed, translated into various languages, lampooned, discussed, and generally given a prominent place in Argentine literary culture. Ahead of its era and slow to be accepted, this is a work whose time has come at last.

Bibliography

Gray, Paul. “The Seven Madmen.” Time 124 (August 27, 1984): 58. A review and plot synopsis of Arlt’s novel. Gray notes that Arlt disregarded the rules of grammar and the sensibilities of critics.

Hayes, Aden W. “Roberto Arlt.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An essay on the life and career of Arlt. Includes analysis of his works and a bibliography.

Lindstrom, Naomi, ed. “Focus on Roberto Arlt.” Center for Inter-American Relations Review 31 (1982): 26-41. An overview of Arlt’s life and career.

Semilla, Marían. “Roberto Arlt.” In Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Profiles Arlt and includes an extensive bibliography of works by and about the author.