Tango and the myth of Paris

The song “Araca París” (1930), by Carlos Lenzi, is the perfect example of the idealized image of Paris prominent during the golden age of tango: “I bailed from Puente Alsina to Montmartre, / as everybody was nagging me, to fool me: / ‘You got the criollo looks to be the gigolo / of those old French bags who are into dancing. / What are you doing in Buenos Aires? Quit being a sap! / Flee those milongas at the Tabarís, / after three tango cortes you’ll be a millionaire … / Argentine and morocho! King of Paris!’”Footnote ¹ Music and eroticism coalesce into this portrayal of the Argentine morocho capable of seducing both women and the city through tango steps and becoming the King of Paris. Just one year later, “Anclao en París” (1931), by Enrique Cadícamo, presents us with the other side of this dream: “All washed up from living from jamboree to bender, / I’m anchored, Buenos Aires, in Paris on the strand. / Fallen into troubles, on the run from lenders, / here I’m thinking of you from in this distant land…. You have no idea how I want to see you! / I am out here stranded, no money and no faith.”Footnote ² The object of desire is no longer Paris but Buenos Aires. The Argentine tanguero voices a nostalgic lament for the city he left in pursuit of a misleading dream that did not result in fame and success, but rather in misery and hopelessness.

Eduardo Archetti (Reference Archetti1999, 4) has associated these allusions to Paris with the symbolic status that the French capital has traditionally held in Argentine culture as a fabric of fantasies and illusions: “Above all Paris promised entertainment and enjoyment, with its cafes and restaurants, its theatres, vaudevilles and cabarets, its department stores and colorful local fairs and markets.” Tango emerged in the late nineteenth century as a by-product of massive immigration and rapid urban modernization. It was initially a marginalized genre played in brothels and the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Its dance evoked seduction and eroticism while its lyrics expressed the dramas of modern society through the eyes of the popular classes. Into the twentieth century, tango was legitimized and embraced as a symbol of national identity only after it achieved success in the Parisian Belle Époque. Not just performers but also the rich elites who frequented brothels in Buenos Aires took tango to Montmartre cabarets and the salons of the French bourgeoisie. In this sense, Marta Savigliano (Reference Savigliano1995, 110) has argued that the European acclaim of tango entailed its exoticization as an object of consumption within a global economy of passion: “Tango was an exotic genre suited to the complex modern imperial bourgeois ordering of the world. All contradictory alignments were played out through tango in terms of the erotic.” Following this line of reasoning, tango became a marker of national culture only as far as it fitted into the center-periphery logic of cultural recognition. The Argentine upper classes re-imported tango as an exoticized cultural product whose Eurocentric connotations subsequently reshaped the performances of local musicians and dancers. The fact that the first sound films in Argentina repeatedly featured tango performances proves, as Paul Schroeder Rodríguez (Reference Schroeder Rodríguez2008, 53) has noted, “the central role that music (and its privileged medium, radio) would play in the development of Latin American cinema during the studio period.” Moreover, after a period of decline in the mid-century, when Argentine audiences favored other genres such as rock and folk, Paris was also at the core of tango’s revival. The worldwide success of the musical Tango Argentino (1983) and the experimental innovations of Astor Piazzolla reached their climax in Paris, within the context of the forced exile that followed the 1976 military coup.

The itinerary of tango could be seen as mirroring the dynamics of what Pascale Casanova has defined as the World Republic of Letters. For Casanova (Reference Casanova2007, 87), Paris has traditionally been the “Greenwich meridian of literature” because “it was able to manufacture a universal literature while consecrating works produced in outlying territories—impressing the stamp of littérarité upon texts that came from far-flung lands.” The mythical views of Paris seen in “Araca París” and “Anclao en París” are not exclusive to tango but date to the foundational ideologues of the Argentine nation. As Marcy Schwartz (Reference Schwartz1999, 1) has noted: “Latin American urban culture has designated Paris as an idealized, hegemonic cultural center that serves as a model for European modernity…. The city summons such diverse images as bohemian lifestyles, social prestige, sensuous Parisian streets, and revolutionary politics.” Tango lyricists who chose Paris as the setting for their stories continued a tradition that includes nineteenth-century men of letters, such as Domingo Sarmiento and Esteban Echeverría, as well as Latin American modernistas, like Rubén Darío and Enrique Gómez Carrillo, who yearned for an aestheticized experience of life and literature. The fact that several of the most renowned authors of the so-called Boom, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Severo Sarduy, and Julio Cortázar, lived and worked in Paris during the 1960s and 1970s would only reaffirm its iconic influence on Latin American literature.

Jorge Asís’s El pretexto de París (Reference Asís1985) and Paula Wajsman’s Informe de París (Reference Wajsman1990) combined traditional themes of tango and the iconic status of Paris to interrogate a period of political violence and exile. These novels depicted Paris in the 1980s as the backdrop for some of the most heated debates that marked the Argentine public sphere in the aftermath of the brutal 1976–1983 dictatorship, such as human rights violations and the redefinition of the figure of the intellectual. Asís and Wajsman drew on the simultaneously local and global narrative framework outlined in tango stories, which Graciela Montaldo (Reference Montaldo2016, 14) has described as a “portable territory of fiction,” or in other words, “a localized territory that literary and film fiction can nonetheless transform into a stage that circulates in the global market.” Through the lens of tango, El pretexto de París and Informe de París transposed topical discussions relevant to Argentine culture into the French context, ultimately reimagining a national identity that was in crisis following the impact of authoritarianism and state terror. Far from being an unprecedented phenomenon, as Florencia Garramuño (Reference Garramuño2021, 79) has pointed out, canonical authors of the Argentine avant-garde, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Oliverio Girondo, had already thematized tango in their works of the early twentieth century: “The process was ambiguous and ambivalent: on the one hand, it shows how Latin American artists and intellectuals tried to emulate their European counterparts by internalizing their gaze; on the other, it also exemplifies their often desperate attempts to recuperate elements of popular culture to build a ‘national tradition’ with them.”Footnote ³ Given its symbolic status as a mutually autochthonous and cosmopolitan marker of Argentineness, Asís and Wajsman could build on tango to call into question the idealized image of Paris as a locus of cultural sophistication as much as the conditions under which Argentine literature continued to be produced in exile.

As is examined throughout this article, Asís and Wajsman delineated both their fictional characters and self-representations as authors by rewriting the gender archetypes that populated traditional tango songs. In this way, El pretexto de París and Informe de París used cultural forms that are unique to the Río de la Plata to challenge the paradigm of the Latin American author that was favored in the European cultural scene during the 1980s, and which was commonly associated with a commitment to political activism and the literary style of the Boom. However, their fictional renderings of tango and Paris ultimately produced opposing perspectives on the impact of gender on the spheres of politics and literature. On the one hand, Asís drew on the stereotype of the compadrito, and, to some extent, of the Latin lover, to turn its sexist connotations and seductive prowess into an allegory of his own artful success in the literary field. For her part, Wajsman rewrote the figure of the milonguita as that of an autonomous woman who used her exoticized attractiveness as a means of subverting gendered and neocolonial forms of cultural recognition.

Jorge Asís: The king of Paris

The career of Asís as a public figure is a peculiar case in Argentine cultural history. He was a relatively prestigious writer affiliated with the Communist Party in the 1970s, a best-selling author and renowned journalist during the 1976–1983 dictatorship, secretary of culture and ambassador to Paris and Lisbon throughout the neoliberal 1990s, and a recurring figure in the media as a witty pundit on Argentine politics. Despite publishing more than thirty books between 1971 and 2022, and even running for Vice President in 2007, Asís’s controversial persona and vitriolic views prevented him from being recognized as a prestigious author and receiving serious academic consideration. For example, in 2001, the cultural magazine El Ojo Mocho (1991–2008) dedicated a pioneering dossier to exploring his literature, introducing him in these terms: “Jorge Asís is a controversial character. An ‘absolute maudit’ … whose self-construction as a media and political figure has persistently overshadowed his literature” (“Condes, pícaros e intelectuales” 2001, 9). The archetypal character that populates his fiction is the reventado, a man of plebeian extraction who earns a living thanks to his deviousness and wit, and whose narrative perspective facilitates a depiction of Argentine society as an economic and political fabric based on simulation and deceit.

Set during the 1976–1983 dictatorship, El pretexto de París portrays a group of Argentines who hold prominent roles in the public sphere and are visiting their counterparts who went into exile in Paris. The main character is the celebrated journalist Bartolomé Rivarola, a figure that Asís (Reference Asís1985, 12) used as an alter ego throughout his career. Upon arriving in France as a newspaper correspondent, Rivarola presents us with an ironic depiction of Paris that oscillates between admiration and skepticism: “[H]e suddenly felt satisfied with himself, curiously happy to be finally in Paris, … fulfilling the vague craving for a mythical trip that, as a colonized intellectual, he had felt since learning how to read, and which was further inspired by his poor understanding but vibrant readings of Rayuela.” On the one hand, Rivarola is proud of himself for achieving the dream of travelling to Paris as a well-known Argentine author; on the other, his cynical tone dismisses the myth of the City of Light as a naïve and ideologically colonized view. He thus continues his description of Paris as if it were Buenos Aires. For Rivarola, its most famous boulevards and cafés are equivalent to the Calle Corrientes and other iconic locations of the bohemian subculture of the 1960s and 1970s: “Rivarola in Paris, who could have guessed it? The mad Rivarola standing at the corner of the world, that of the Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel boulevards, all the better, during a drizzly afternoon, looking at the Café de Cluny, which indeed existed, as if it were the Politeama at the corner of Corrientes and Paraná” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 13). By reducing the most paradigmatic neighborhoods and cafés of Paris to a scale model of Buenos Aires, Rivarola turns Paris into a familiar scenario from which he can benefit through the weapons of pretense and artfulness.

His cynical angle also raises questions about the material and ideological conditions of the Argentine intellectuals who went into exile in Europe. Rivarola pays a visit to an old friend, called “Vaquero Jones,” a writer and union leader whom he defines as the “penultimate Trotskyist on earth” and who fled Argentina after a period in jail. Rivarola notes that “Vaquero lived in conditions of extreme frugality, … completely isolated from the world, or from the intellectual adventurism of the sophisticated gauchiste exile, which was appropriate to the sadness of a political refugee, but for real, without bluffing” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 24). His misfortune as an exiled writer struggling to earn a living gives Rivarola the excuse to rant against the so-called “sophisticated gauchiste exile.” Comparing Vaquero to other unnamed authors whom one could associate with figures such as Julio Cortázar or Eduardo Galeano, Rivarola argues that their unequal degrees of renown were not dependent on literary merit but on the fact that his friend stayed true to himself and did not compromise his old revolutionary beliefs. In his eyes, the label of the reventado does not apply to Vaquero, who publishes articles in obscure periodicals and lives on the margins of French society, but to those who would benefit from the political dilemmas of their countries to gain a European audience. He portrays them as “the empty but demagogic gauche, which monopolized the pain of others and appropriated the memory of the martyrs, taking advantage of the guilt-ridden solidarity of so many civilized organizations, of their little trips and conferences, of their prizes and awards” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 25). The stereotyped figure of Vaquero thus enables Rivarola to ridicule the prestige enjoyed by other writers who put their literature at the service of human rights activism, and to criticize their networks of publications and events as a self-interested stratagem.

In this way, Asís used fiction to intervene in a broader debate about exile and intellectual work. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Argentine and other Latin American intellectuals reconstructed their networks through solidarity committees and periodicals. Organizations such as the CAIS (Centro Argentino de Información y Solidaridad) promoted events and publications, such as the book Argentine: Une culture interdite (1981). Even the iconic French journal Les Temps Modernes dedicated a special issue to discussing Argentina in 1981. These initiatives aimed to denounce human rights violations and gathered renowned exiled personalities, including David Viñas, Osvaldo Bayer, Osvaldo Soriano, and Fernando Solanas. However, the attempts to continue careers and reconstruct a cultural field in exile soon aroused controversies with those who had stayed in Argentina. The climax of these disputes occurred in 1981, when Luis Gregorich published an article in Clarín, labelling the conflict as “A Divided Literature.” On the one hand, as Gregorich (Reference Gregorich1987, 56) pointed out, “it is argued that Argentine literature produced in the country is dead, and that only exiled writers are keeping the flame of a creative tradition alive”; on the other, he also noted that “those who stayed in the country are not so pessimistic about themselves. Their view is that political and non-political exiles are not that many, nor very representative.”

This article sparked heated debates, such as the exchange of open letters between Cortázar and Liliana Heker in the magazine El Ornitorrinco. Cortázar (Reference Cortázar1981, 4) defended the position of the intellectual who contributed to Latin American political struggles from Europe: “This, Liliana, does not grant those abroad any pre-eminence compared to those still in the country; it just means that those, who one day may decide to say what they really think, will have to join us outside the homeland.” In response, Heker (Reference Heker1981, 6) disdained the notion of political commitment that Cortázar adhered to as an imposture: “If you allow me to define your attitude, I’d say that in general you behave like an adherent. You give your support to movements; you declare your agreement and solidarity…. I’m not aware of many Argentines who have found themselves in such a comfortable position to fight for ‘their people’.” Besides the debatable fairness of such accusations, these virulent exchanges reveal how the intellectual and political legitimacy of renowned figures in Europe could be viewed with suspicion by those who sought to preserve Argentine culture from within Argentina. At the same time, those living abroad could regard the public visibility of their counterparts in the country as examples of self-censorship and even conviviality with the dictatorship.

As a writer who stayed in Argentina and became a best-selling author during the dictatorship, Asís had personal and intellectual reasons for intervening in these debates, which account for the Manichean and vitriolic views seen in El pretexto de París. He was indeed the target of numerous polemics that questioned the success of his articles in Clarín and his novel Flores robadas en los jardines de Quilmes (1980). Asís was not only the most celebrated chronicler of a national newspaper suspected of complicity with the dictatorship, but he also became a best-selling author with a novel that cast a cynical eye on the beliefs that had drawn numerous intellectuals towards political action. An exiled intellectual as renowned as Osvaldo Soriano denounced that Asís’s fame was symptomatic of “the emergence of a lumpen literature, so ambiguous that I’d even dare to call it neo-fascist” (Pereda Reference Pereda1982).

The polemical impact of Asís was representative of the disputes among intellectuals that marked the final years of the dictatorship. José Luis De Diego (Reference De Diego2007, 200) has noted that these discussions looked ahead to the reconstruction of a democratic public sphere and debated pressing issues such as “which prerogatives would the exiled demand upon their return?; what privileges would be reclaimed by those who, despite everything, stayed in the country?; … how would job positions be allocated in academia, newspapers, and publishing houses?” Situated in 1980 but published in 1985, two years after the end of the regime, El pretexto de París gave a fictionalized and retrospective response to these questions. Rivarola arrives in Paris carrying a copy of a novel that the real-life Asís (Reference Asís1985, 20) had just published, and which, as we can guess from the words of his alter ego, is none other than Flores robadas: “He had a copy of his latest novel, the one that would abruptly change his life and that was published shortly before he left the country, a fact that made his uneasiness worse, as it was the first book he published after 1976 and he feared that the dark forces of state terror could react badly and target his family.” Through the misleading voice of Rivarola, Asís presents himself as a potential victim of state terror and speculates about the fortune of a novel that his readers already know was the Argentine best-seller of the 1980s. He sends a complicit wink to his audience and situates both author and reader ironically above the controversies that undermined his status as an author.

Moreover, Rivarola takes revenge against a left-wing intelligentsia that had questioned the literary value of the real-life Asís. As he tells himself, as if talking to his friend Vaquero, with a verbose use of sexual metaphors that allegorize his conquest of public recognition:

Rivarola presents the triumph of the outsider as a triumph in the equivalent spheres of sex and literature. Drawing on vulgar slang and idioms typical of the Río de la Plata, Asís establishes a connection with the reader that transcends established institutions and canonical styles of the Argentine tradition. Such an anti-intellectualist stance also casts a cynical light on the center-periphery dynamics that determine which authors are recognized in both Europe and Latin America. Upon arriving in Paris, Rivarola explores the possibility of being translated into French. He has a meeting with a French editor who claims to know every Latin American author exiled in Europe. As soon as the editor admits not knowing him, though, Rivarola starts mocking the worn-down clothes that make the Frenchman look “badly clad, as in the tango.” He continues with a sarcastic use of grammar that ridicules the Francophile and neocolonialist stamp of a character playing the part of an arbiter of the World Republic of Letters: “The bookworm was penniless, but he felt importánt, he bore his mishiadurá with the haughtiness of knowing that he had numerous écrivains from Latin Americá knocking on his gaté, wanting his attention, and let’s stop messing around with the languagé” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 71).

Asís combined humor and the vocabulary of tango to respond to the exoticization of Latin American literature in the international market. As Casanova (Reference Casanova2007, 234) has noted regarding the enthusiastic European reception of themes commonly associated with the Boom: “‘Magical realism’ … was both a stroke of genius and a strike against international critical authority. The emergence of an aesthetically coherent body of writing in Latin America in the late 1960s forced critics in the center to confront the fact of a genuine literary unity on a continental scale that until then they had failed to notice.” In the 1980s, an influential intellectual such as Ángel Rama (Reference Rama, González and Timothy2023, 202) had already criticized this Eurocentric standardization of a complex continental tradition according to market demands. In his words, readers were “exposed to the peculiar prodigality of the consumer mass market in which determined topics and treatments acquire the appearance of registered brands, defeating competition from other products, which following the laws of the market were trying to look like the successful ones rather than show originality.” Rivarola’s mistrust regarding the figure of the Latin American author in Europe finds its stylistic counterpart in a comparison between El pretexto de París and a paradigmatic example of the Boom, such as Rayuela. Cortázar (Reference Cortázar1986, 425) included countless references to high culture and the avant-garde to depict Paris as the setting of a perennial invitation to revolutionize the interdependent spheres of art and life. As expressed in one of its emblematic passages about love: “Horacio the moralist, fearful of passions born without some deep-water reason, disconcerted and surly in the city where love is called by all the names of all the streets, all the buildings, all the fiats, all the rooms, all the beds, all the dreams, all the things forgotten or remembered.” On the contrary, Asís paired costumbrismo and dirty realism to offer an alternative angle on the cultural connections between France and Argentina, one that casts a cynical light on a post-dictatorial context in which possibilities of aesthetic and political revolution seemed not only closed but even unthinkable.

It is thus not coincidental that Rivarola draws on the themes and vocabulary of tango to mock the mishiadurá Footnote ⁴ of the literary editor. El pretexto de París is explicitly aware of the risks of situating its plot in Paris and how easily its characters could be associated with the stereotype of the morocho argentino that became a trademark of the global success of tango. As Asís said in a 1980 interview: “I often find myself associated with tango, simply because I speak the language of Buenos Aires, but I have nothing to do with the tango philosophy, with all that defeat and paleness” (in Burgos Reference Burgos2001, 24). Asís attempted to differentiate his use of lunfardo and other tango motifs from usual understandings of the genre as an artistic expression of nostalgia and melancholy. Asís could not risk being read through a defeatist lens if he aimed to consolidate his self-representation as an outsider who succeeded in climbing the social and cultural ladder. Hours before finishing his European trip, reflecting on his disappointing encounters with editors and intellectuals, Rivarola dismisses the nostalgia for Buenos Aires and reinterprets the moral lesson of the most famous tango song ever. In “Volver” (1934), Carlos Gardel gave voice to the fear of “the encounter of the past I now return to, and the life I have been living.”Footnote ⁵ On the contrary, Rivarola tells himself: “It isn’t advisable to walk along Corrientes, Rivarola, you must be really prepared if you want to face the specters, the turbulent past that refuses to stay on the shelves of memory” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 122).

Asís drew on the rhetorical and thematic repertoire of tango to produce his own version of what Julio Premat and María Teresa Gramuglio have defined as “fictions of the author” and “figures of the writer.” Looking at a corpus that goes from José Hernández and Leopoldo Lugones to Ricardo Piglia and Juan José Saer, Premat (Reference Premat2008, 11) has noted that the recurrent depiction of writers in Argentine fiction relates to the broader need of authors to create a space for their works and public personas within the national tradition: “To make texts legible, for texts to exist, it is necessary to supplement them with a second fictional component, which to some extent surrounds and completes them.” In the same vein, Gramuglio (Reference Gramuglio2023, 185) has argued that representing oneself as an author entails negotiating collective and contextually dependent meanings around the practice of literature: “The figures of the writer inexorably refer, on the one hand, to the construction of a contingent subjectivity, and on the other, to the state of the literary field to which the writer belongs, to the conflicts in that field, to the ways of gaining access to it, and to the ever-changing conditions of literary practice.”

Given their foundational role in the modern culture of the Río de la Plata, thematizing the connections between tango and Paris enabled Asís to reimagine the figure of the Argentine author in the aftermath of the self-proclaimed Process of National Reorganization. In fact, attempts to rethink the markers of Argentine culture were common among intellectuals and responded to the influence of authoritarianism on the public sphere. As David Rock (Reference Rock1993, 244) put it, especially after the Malvinas War, the instrumentalization of patriotism in the hands of the dictatorship had vitiated the sense of a national identity: “In the 1970s, the Nationalists supplied the ideological weaponry for the military’s violent confrontation with ‘subversion’ and in the 1980s with the militant authoritarian assumptions on which the carapintadas sought to resist the restored democracy.” On the other hand, the impact of state terror undermined the revolutionary ideas that had driven artists and intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s. Claudia Gilman (Reference Gilman2003, 166) described this radicalized paradigm as “anti-intellectualism,” as it favored political action over cultural work: “It is a discourse, not necessarily ‘sincere,’ that arises within the intellectual field to abjure its own principles, confronting its members with other sets of values, personified by the man of action and the man of the people.” It was this seemingly inexorable abandonment of radical beliefs that an author as influential as Rodolfo Fogwill polemically defined as a major aspect of the “Cultural Legacy of the Process.” Fogwill saw the notion of the Process itself as a misleading semantic imposition, as it suggested that the regressive structural transformations that Argentina underwent had been restricted to the period between 1976 and 1983. On the contrary, he contended that the neoliberal reshaping of the nation had begun at least in the early 1970s and continued well into democratic times. In addition to the financial and free-market reforms that would condition the Argentine economy for decades, Fogwill (Reference Fogwill2010, 74) argued that the spread of commemorations and homages to the intellectuals who were victims of state terror constituted a perverse form of “horror TV theatre” that taught new generations of Argentine writers not to transgress the limits of “permitted” dissent: “State terror, it seems, not only serves to stimulate the publishing industry with spectacular themes; it also serves to found a culture condemned to ruminate on the themes of the immeasurability of horror, the untimeliness of justice, and the unthinkability of certain extreme situations.”

Therefore, by the mid-1980s, Argentine intellectuals were participating in the reconstruction of a democratic public sphere while redefining themselves as intellectuals. El pretexto de París was part of Asís’s efforts to reposition himself in a renewed cultural field that seemed unfavorable to his career. His status as a best-selling writer during the dictatorship, added to his ideological shift from leftist ideas to an individualistic understanding of liberalism, was not compatible with the figure of the politically engaged democratic intellectual. He thus reappropriated the national tradition of tango to redesign his public image as an iconoclastic yet still distinctively Argentine author. However, rather than using traditional tango themes to evoke feelings of nostalgia and defeat, Asís envisioned his alter ego, Rivarola, as a success-driven reinterpretation of the compadrito archetype. As Julie Taylor (Reference Taylor1976, 276) has noted: “The compadrito was the man of the tango. And the tango was his dance, its choreographic style based on his affectations, developed in the brothels he ran on the edges of Buenos Aires.” The compadrito was a significant figure in the process of urban growth and social modernization that Buenos Aires experienced during the early 1900s. Mike González and Marianella Yanes (Reference González and Yanes2013, 33) have regarded him as a variation of the former rural outlaw who moved to the metropolis and had to find a way to reaffirm his power and authority among the marginalized of modern society: “Many were pimps and confidence tricksters. And as their prestige grew, so they abandoned the short ponchos and glistening black boots in favor of the tight-fitting suits, high heels, spats and long, brilliantined hair depicted on so many posters and paintings (and in so many tangos) of the day.”

Rivarola adapts the pose of the compadrito to the Parisian context when he attends a soirée that gathers artists and intellectuals from all over Latin America. His description of the gathering replicates the ironic tone he had applied to the European cultural scene before: “On a sort of school stage, there were four or five fools playing the charango, the quena, the bombo, and the guitar. They played protest songs that inevitably alluded to hope, with lyrics that presaged a triumphant return to the homeland and were met with the shouts of a unanimously stirred crowd” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 31). Rivarola is less interested in the artistic qualities of the performance than in enjoying his time in Paris. On the one hand, his derogatory comments perpetuate a centuries-long Argentine cultural conflict between Buenos Aires and the provinces, which dates to the civilización and barbarie dichotomy, and in his words takes the shape of tango and folklore; on the other, a political message in which he does not believe provides him with the resources to deploy the confidence tricks and seduction tactics of the compadrito. He thus attempts to escape his boredom when he sees a Uruguayan woman, a former activist, and decides to seduce her. Rivarola portrays her as an object of desire that enables him to devise scenarios of masculine fulfilment. His sexist speech paraphrases well-known slogans of revolutionary politics and sexual liberation, but only to turn their meanings upside down. As he tells her when trying to lure her into bed: “[T]he only thing that dictators will never be able to kill inside us is our strong vocation to love, because as long as we show them that we can still love, communicate, and understand each other, there will be little the Videlas, the Álvarezes, and the Pinochets can do. So, fucking our brains out will be a sublime act of rebellion” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 35).

This depiction of seduction and eroticism evokes the stereotype of the Latin lover that Rudolph Valentino personified and popularized in the 1920s. It was precisely the combination of tango and Paris in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) that turned Valentino from a little-known actor into an international superstar. The part of Julio Desnoyers, an Argentine bachelor who inherits a fortune and moves to France to lead a bohemian lifestyle, allowed Valentino to mesmerize the audience with his tango dancing skills in subsequent scenes set in Buenos Aires and Paris. As Giorgio Bertellini (Reference Bertellini, Baldassar and Donna2011, 48) noted, tango fed into the fusion of erotism and exotism that Valentino embodied like no other actor before: “In the increasingly racialized industry of desire fostered by Hollywood, the lover Valentino could convey the sense of both an emotional and romantic connection with audiences while transmuting his Italianness into a universal (white) characteristic of humanity larger than the sum of the roles he played as an Arab sheik, a Spanish torero, and an Argentine tango pirate.”

El pretexto de París looked back at the long tradition of cultural exchange between Argentina and Paris to advance an anti-intellectualist view of literature and politics that capitalized on the global fame and erotic connotations of tango. After spending the night with the Uruguayan woman, Rivarola reflects on his behavior and describes himself as a “marginal porteño intellectual” who is not ashamed of confessing his egotistic aims in the most vulgar possible terms: “The books he had read and written did not teach him a miserable little lesson, and the fucking bastard, besides a foolish romanticism and a phony admiration for Europe, was only driven by the desire to stick it in; stick it in, always” (Asís Reference Asís1985, 43). In his opportunistic and streetwise eyes, and contrary to the intellectuals who sought to resume their careers in exile, literature and the mythical status of Paris are just resources for role-playing and social climbing. Within the fictional world, Rivarola performed and adapted the figure of the compadrito to benefit from his artful stratagems and reaffirm his masculine prowess. At a broader level, the anti-intellectualist bias of his alter ego also allowed Asís to equate the seduction of women with the achievement of success in the cultural field. As its title indicates, the novel served as a pretext for Asís to settle a score with other writers and intellectuals who had criticized the value of his novels and his public status as an author during the 1980s.

Paula Wajsman: Negotiating gender through tango

Despite belonging to renowned intellectual circles in Buenos Aires in the 1960s, such as the journals Literal and LENGUAjes, Wajsman remains relatively unknown to the Argentine public. Little is publicly known about her biography beyond the fact that she went into exile in Paris in the mid-1970s and lived in Mexico and the United States before returning to Argentina in the late 1980s. She was a writer and psychoanalyst usually associated with the names of her former partner, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and her friend, Manuel Puig, whom she advised on psychoanalytic theories during the writing process of The Buenos Aires Affair (1973). Wajsman started writing Informe de París in Paris but published it upon her return to Argentina in 1990. The fact that the novel went unnoticed in literary and academic circles exemplifies her reluctance to accommodate her authorial project to the expectations of the Argentine cultural field. However, there have been recent initiatives to rediscover her work, such as the publication in 2012 of her posthumous novel Punto atrás, as part of the “Narradoras Argentinas” collection by the university press EDUVIM. The director of this collection, María Teresa Andruetto, has explained that its purpose is to give a new life to the works of forgotten female authors who “had to break through many glass ceilings” and who had been “torn out of the national literary circulation” (Friera Reference Friera2012). The recuperation of Wajsman was part of a broader initiative, in the aftermath of the Ni Una Menos movement, aimed at redesigning the national tradition through a feminist lens.

Informe de París portrays a brief period in the life of an Argentine woman who arrives in Paris after a vaguely mentioned stint of political activism in Buenos Aires. The main character and first-person narrator, unnamed but referred to as Princesa, opens the novel with a succinct reference to her escape from state terror. However, her reflections quickly adopt a disillusioned turn that calls into question her own ideological background as much as her legitimacy to narrate episodes of political violence: “Sometimes I think that leaving is worth nothing. But here I am, telling you the tale. There are cretins who say: ‘A soldier who did a runner can be useful later’; but I don’t believe that, nor does anybody else. A soldier of what? Until when?” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 6). The use of slang to refer to politics casts a skeptical light on the circumstances of political exile. Her reluctance to “tell you the tale” suggests that exiled intellectuals might be representing themselves as socially conscious public figures while pursuing individualistic aims.

Upon arriving in Paris, Princesa met former acquaintances from her intellectual circles in Buenos Aires but failed to connect with them: “I got bored to tears with a group of petty serious Argentine students who went to every seminar taught by French intellectuals to become their copycats. Unbearable guys, every one of them, those who think according to fixed timetables and never dream about what they think” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 51). Princesa disregards the allure of French cultural trends in the aftermath of May 1968 and ridicules her peers for still seeking a role model in Paris. Such an ironic view of exile and activism reveals its harshest side when Princesa criticizes the experiences and ideas of Argentine revolutionary groups. She does not give concrete names but refers to a generic “Orga” that might allude to Montoneros, the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, or any of the movements that undertook armed struggle at the time. Princesa and the few Argentines with whom she fraternizes in Paris associate their current misfortunes with the feeling of having been deceived. She regards their former political leaders as tricksters who are enjoying a more privileged and comfortable life in exile than their lower ranks: “After dusting off their French, they opened consultation rooms or got public positions. They gave no mind to people like [us] … and they wrote papers for conferences about activism and exile, as if they were the owners of the topic” (1990, 66).

Princesa feels alienated from the social spheres where a Latin American intellectual could reconstruct an ideological network in Europe, and her narrative addresses issues that were widely discussed in the Argentine public sphere at the time. As Hugo Vezzetti (Reference Vezzetti2013, 42) has noted: “During the years of the dictatorship, especially in exile, in the heat of resistance, solidarity campaigns, and the new experiences lived in the host countries, many started to reconsider their revolutionary beliefs and to change them for human rights activism.” Informe de París gives voice to the reflections of a character unwilling to reframe her revolutionary beliefs and embrace the cause of human rights. Her harsh comments not only convey an image of Paris that contradicts the stereotypes of high culture inherited from the nineteenth century; she also contests more positive and widespread opinions about Europe, as expressed by Cortázar in the polemic with Heker, which saw political exile as an opportunity to disseminate Latin American culture and promote solidarity during the 1970s and 1980s.

While Informe de París replicates the cynical angle of El pretexto de París, Princesa does not aspire to social prestige as much as Rivarola and chooses to live on the margins of French society. She becomes the leader of a group of other Argentine men struggling to earn a living through odd jobs and minor drug dealing. They all frequent activist circles like hers in Buenos Aires and decide to stay away from them upon arriving in Paris. As she says about her friends: “Over there, they were too young to be tangueros. Here, they realized they knew every song by heart…. In Paris, representing tango characters seemed a normal and possible way of being a man, of being Argentine” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 69). Countless references to tango songs permeate her depiction of their habits as a group, sustaining their sense of community and belonging. As she recaps one of the afternoons when a French acquaintance visited them: “Lying between pillows, they kept listening to the same albums, rolling joint after joint and chatting. Claude, too; as the talk was always about the same stuff, he had learned the complete jargon by heart and kept up with the lunfa” (89). Mirroring their conversations, Princesa’s narrative constantly combines the argot of 1970s left-wing culture with words and expressions from what she calls the lunfa. Lunfardo emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the suburbs of Buenos Aires as a fusion of immigrant dialects and slang and was later disseminated through tango lyrics. Tango holds together this group of Argentines otherwise lost in Paris through a shared and idiosyncratic use of language; it offers them a performative repertoire of poses and manners suitable for recreating a national identity that authoritarianism and exile had put into crisis.

Traditional tango narratives are set on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and told through a masculine voice that laments betrayal and lost love. Tango envisions a moral universe that is conservative and male-oriented, translating local issues of migration and marginality into universal allegories of heartbreak and despair. As González and Yanes have explained, the genre depicts social tensions as embedded in gender and sexual relationships: “The singer on this sad night is a man abandoned looking back to a time of happiness now lost. His weakness and confusion are the consequences of the actions of a woman who has left him, a milonguera who has probably been tempted … by rich men who have money but few illusions, and who are willing to pay for her company (the bacán)” (González and Yanes Reference González and Yanes2013, 91). Asís advanced a success-driven interpretation of the compadrito as the once-colonized man who can now reconquer the metropolis through passion and seduction. On the contrary, Wajsman (Reference Wajsman1990, 72) reread the socially transgressive potential of tango from a female perspective. After describing her friends as Argentine morochos, Princesa refers to herself in similar terms: “Just as the guys, in Baires I used to be a rocker, but here all I could think about was tango because it described something that had to do with us and which had already happened before.”

Her performative stance as an outlaw who makes progress in Europe thanks to her artfulness adopts the style of the milonguita that populated tango lyrics of the golden age. As Archetti (Reference Archetti1999, xviii) noted, modern urban life in the early 1900s gave Argentine women the chance to engage in forms of sociality beyond the moral boundaries of the heteronormative family: “The lyrics of the tango … [reveal] the tension existing between a conventional morality that defines woman as passive and chaste—the mother and the disciplined spouse—and a romantic drive in which man is fascinated by the seductive power of the femme fatale.” The classic tango story is told from the viewpoint of men who suffer at the hands of treacherous women unwilling to accept a life of dignified poverty and self-abnegation. Iconic songs such as “Margot” (1921), by Celedonio Flores, evoke the dreamlike scenery of Paris to condemn a woman who abandoned a former lover: “You always go out with friends / to have nice liquors / at the luxury private booths of Petit or Julien, / and your mother, poor old lady! / Cleaning all week long / to be able to cook something, / in extreme poverty, / in the old tenement lit with kerosene.”Footnote ⁶ Classic tango songs gave moralizing depictions of victimized heroines that ultimately chastised women for flouting gender conventions.

However, the adventures of the milonguita can be reread as a female struggle to survive and achieve a certain degree of independence. Reinterpreting this figure amounts to understanding the depiction of women in tango not as passive objects, but as agents capable of subverting and negotiating social norms. In this vein, Princesa draws on the image of the autonomous and rebellious milonguita to expand on her controversial views about political activism and exile: “There was nothing to celebrate, all right. In Argentina, things were only getting worse, and there was little we could do from Paris…. Was it better to die of sadness than of excessive speed? Was it better to become a second-rate academic than to go dancing? And since, for the moment, Buenos Aires was unreachable, why wouldn’t we celebrate our memories with champagne and cocaine?” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 72). The repertoire of feminine stratagems emerging from tango offers Princesa unconventional gender performances to consolidate her independence in Paris. Her decision to live on her own terms and impose her will on the group of exiled Argentines contradicts the admonitory fate that awaited the milonguita in traditional tango stories. As Mercedes Liska (Reference Liska2017, 38–39) has noted, the moralistic and patronizing reprimand of female self-determination in the lyrics had a counterpart in the corporeal techniques that subordinated movement in the dance. Women performed docile choreographic movements and followed the lead of their male partners: “The remedy proposed in the tango was to renounce such longings in the name of protecting the feminine body: The male should always lead, decide which figure to execute, and never ‘let go’ of the woman until the dance has ended.” The reappropriation of tango as a symbol of national identity in the 1920s and 1930s was concurrent with its standardization as a ritualized dance aligned with civic mores and rigid gender roles.

Besides earning money and enjoying Paris, Princesa takes the lead when seducing and partnering with men in turn. Alluding to tango, she refers to her French and Argentine lovers with a light-hearted attitude that communicates a sense of female self-determination: “Meanwhile, I had a good time; they bathed me, carried me in their arms, looked me in the eyes, walked me around, and pampered me. But only an Argentine, Adrián, was able to fuck me wild, the way I wanted. And sometimes—only sometimes—Jean…. What can a tango dancer do without a partner?” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 65). Such a reversal of gender roles can be seen in one of the few tango songs from the Golden Age written by a woman, “Se va la vida” (1929), by María Luisa Carnelli, which expresses the viewpoint of the milonguita in the first person: “Life is a-passing … / There’s no returning … / Here’s some advice, now listen: / If there’s some bigshot who wants to pay your way, / pounce on that proposition. / The days are speeding, / the years are flying … / Happy days are so fleeting … / Pay no mind, then, to virtues or blues! / Go out and live your youth!”Footnote ⁷ Likewise, when her Argentine friends remind her of the benefits of marrying a Frenchman, Princesa reaffirms her will to be autonomous and free-spirited: “If going to the movies with a guy twice is enough for him to imagine we’re engaged, can you picture the outcome if I get married? These Frenchies have more faith in paperwork than in steaks: he’ll think that we’ll grow old together, penny-pinching to secure properties and around a copious offspring” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 201).

Princesa further exploits her image as an Argentine milonguita in Paris when a magazine called Paris Decontracté recruits her as a model. The magazine aims to disseminate exotic fashion trends and hires foreign women who could represent the distinctive looks of their countries. The allure of her exoticized figure gives her a chance to keep her position as the financial provider of the group of Argentines. After one of their acquaintances is jailed, Princesa stresses their need to replace drug dealing with another source of income: “I didn’t even want to imagine that this could happen to one of us: we had to quit peddling urgently. I didn’t want to save my own ass, how fun, but I had to start with myself so I could offer something else to the guys” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 63). Figuratively, Princesa resignifies the “non-knowledge” that is the trademark of the female tango dancer who allegedly must only follow the movements of her male counterpart. Such a naturalized asymmetry between the roles of the leader and the follower renders invisible a complex set of skills that a woman must develop to decode and anticipate the initiatives of her partner. Rather than just letting themselves be led, the women and their skills constitute an embodied knowledge that is at the core of tango, and which also allows the female dancer to improvise solo moves in between and independently of the movement as a couple. As María Julia Carozzi (Reference Carozzi2015, 194) has pointed out, the adorno is “a truly kinetic tactic, as it insinuates itself into the space of the other and demands being always on the lookout for opportunities, which must be ‘seized on the fly’ and turned into actions at the right moment.”

Princesa puts this strategic know-how to use when modelling. For instance, she describes her poses and movements with a male colleague during a photoshoot as a tango dance: “We hit it off well. The game was innocent at times, cunning and spicy at others, like a milonga. And then we slowed down grooving to the saxophone beat” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 202). On the other hand, Princesa argues that the fact that Paris Decontracté wanted to hire her alongside a Vietnamese model connotes a not-so-hidden ideological message. She regards the interest of French trendsetters in their looks as equivalent to the interest of European intellectuals in foreign political issues. This comparison underlines her skeptical opinion about the European conferences and publications, such as the aforementioned Les Temps Modernes, that denounced state terror and human rights violations in Latin America: “[We are] disposable models, glamorous victims, following the latest fashion trend. The right-wing defends whom? A Vietnamese refugee. The left-wing pities whom? An Argentine refugee…. Exotic objects for exhausted people who get excited with violence” (1990, 193). Through improvisation and artfulness, she turns the seemingly docile role of women in tango into an active performance that both challenges and profits from gender and ethnic preconceptions. While Princesa refrained from participating in circles of exiled Latin American intellectuals, whom she regarded as impostors who benefited from the suffering of others, her performance of the archetype of the milonguita exploits the diffuse boundaries between fashion and politics to make a living.

Towards the end of the novel, Princesa refuses to continue with the modelling job due to its rigid contractual obligations. She expresses her refusal to give up her free-spirited lifestyle through lunfardo and more references to tango. She feels “anchored in Paris” while sitting on a park bench and looking at the homeless people around her: “Everything is so far away … I don’t even have a country. I’m already a clocharde. ‘A linyera, I am …’ I want to sing, and I can only sob. Later, not even that” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 195). Her thoughts are invaded by a classic tango song, “La canción del linyera” (1945), by Ivo Pelay, but her reluctance to sing it mirrors her reluctance to end as one of the powerless people it depicts. Moreover, the reference to becoming a clocharde alludes to the emblematic chapter that closes the first part of Rayuela, and with it the stay of its main character in Paris—that is, the scene when Horacio Oliveira has sex with a homeless woman right before getting arrested and deported to Argentina: “Emmanuele was little by little leaning more heavily on her drunken friend and with a tongue stained with tannin was humbly licking his deal, … following the line of some obscure feeling of pity, so that the newcomer would feel happy on his first night as a clochard and maybe he would fall a little in love with her” (Cortázar Reference Cortázar1986, 212). Cortázar gives a detailed account of how Oliveira feels repulsion for the smell and looks of the clocharde but uses her as a sex object to feel desired and fulfilled as a man. On the contrary, Princesa puts herself in the shoes of a clocharde only to reaffirm her sense of autonomy and determination as a woman. In her words, the artfulness of the outlaw and the tactics of the milonguita will enable her to overcome this dead end in her life: “I might seem a clocharde, too, but I have cigs, and I have grass. I have a home, I have friends, those who fight aren’t dead” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 195).

Conclusion: Authorship and gender

Although Asís invoked themes and idioms from traditional tango songs, the nostalgic aura usually associated with the genre does not fit a writer who modelled his self-image as that of an opportunistic parvenu who succeeded in seducing the centers of cultural power. As Asís himself told El Ojo Mocho regarding his appointment as an ambassador in France: “It’s a contradiction that also had to do with my work at UNESCO. I represented a culture that could not stand me. I was a writer whose oeuvre was unfindable” (“Condes, pícaros e intelectuales” 2001, 34). Such a cynical tone permeates El pretexto de París as Rivarola persistently ridicules the circumstances of political exile but also uses them to his advantage. The novel portrays the intellectual field as a game in which every trick is valid when it comes to earning prestige and rising to positions of influence. Political and artistic beliefs are nothing but role-playing in the hands of a compadrito for whom there is no difference between winning audiences and seducing women. However, despite presenting a skeptical view of the World Republic of Letters, Asís was not so interested in challenging as in manipulating it. He actually consolidated the center-periphery logic of cultural prestige when posing as an artful figure able to dispense with the recognition of the Argentine and European intelligentsias and still succeed in Paris through less reputable means.

For its part, the ending of Informe de París portrays Princesa, alone after quitting her job and leaving her friends behind, eating at a food truck while pondering her life choices. At this point, she addresses the reader for the first time in the novel: “Do you want to know my biography?” Her response is as disconcerting as it is ironic: “I spent an eternity eating a chicken thigh, standing in front of an Arab of whom I only saw the belly and who didn’t even look at me. There were flies, many flies, and their buzz reverberated in a hole of silence” (Wajsman Reference Wajsman1990, 223). Her disregard for the alleged veracity of the biography genre shows that there is no authenticity or essential truth to be found in her first-person narrative. Princesa exaggerates her versatile and self-serving performances as a milonguita to separate her identity as a Latin American woman from the notions of exoticism that would allegedly suit her in the European cultural field.

Ultimately, El pretexto de París and Informe de París used fiction to intervene in the debates that marked the Argentine public sphere in the aftermath of the 1976–1983 dictatorship. These novels portrayed a foundational myth of Argentineness, such as Paris, as the stage of a vitriolic and even resentful polemic about the figure of the intellectual in a context of exile. Given the detrimental impact of authoritarianism on the idea of a national identity, as well as on the formerly influential paradigm of revolutionary culture, Asís and Wajsman sought inspiration in a domain beyond the strict limits of literature. Both reread the tango tradition as a performative repertoire of motifs and themes to reshape the image of the author and participate in the renewal of the cultural field. However, their reinterpretations of gender archetypes such as the compadrito and the milonguita resulted in contrasting representations of the Argentine writer in Paris. Borrowing from the Hollywood version of the Latin lover, Asís re-signified the character of the compadrito, turning its opportunism and artfulness into a sexual and sexist allegory of his conquest of cultural recognition. On the contrary, Wajsman drew on a female stereotype that never had the global circulation of its masculine counterpart and thus lent itself to a less conventional reappropriation. Princesa performed the part of a milonguita to reaffirm her independence and will to survive after experiencing political persecution and disillusionment.