Metropolitan Mourning: Loss, Affect, and Metaphysics in Buenos Aires, 1920-1940

Abstract

This dissertation examines the forms that the literary practice of mourning adopts in the work of three authors writing in Buenos Aires from the 1920s to the1940s: Jorge Luis Borges, Macedonio Fernández, and Leopoldo Marechal. It argues that these authors convey modernity in the metropolis as an experience of loss that elicits a special mode of mourning: a process in which affect is transposed into the realm of metaphysics. Scholarship on the literature of this period has analyzed the frantic enthusiasm vis-à-vis the transformation of Buenos Aires during the early 20th century from a village-like city into a modern metropolis, its spectacular demographic growth, and its economic and technological revolutions. This work explores the obverse mood: one in which the anxiety regarding the new and the destabilization of identities generate not enthusiastic celebration, but mournful melancholia. Ultimately, what Borges, Fernández, and Marechal are mourning in the modern city is the waning of affect, not as mere subjective feeling but as the ability to emotionally affect and be affected by others. “Metropolitan Mourning: Loss, Affect, and Metaphysics in Buenos Aires, 1920- 1940” charts different ways of coping with modernity in Borges’s “Sentirse en muerte,” Fernández’s "Museo de la Novela de la Eterna," and Marechal’s "Adán Buenosayres." By exploring their affective itineraries around the city and different narrative strategies, this study reveals how these authors cling to idealized pre-modern constructs – the vanishing city margins, an estancia that is a museum, and the utopia of a rural Eden – to express the sense that the constitutive element of the modern city is not to be found in its multiple gains, but in an endless series of losses. The affect of mourning is therefore transposed into mourning for the death of affect. All three authors subsume affect in a metaphysical instance that is meant to preserve it: in Borges this realm is eternity, in Macedonio a museum of allegorical characters, in Marechal baroque transcendence. Their melancholic metaphysics thus emerges from an effort to safeguard the ephemeral in the safe realm of the immaterial, a domain where affect would be sheltered from the devouring course of modern time. Ironically, however, the subject’s attempt to safeguard the transience of affect results in the demise of both subject and affect.