{Photograph} by TBIT, through Wikimedia Commons. Licensed beneath CC0 1.0.
Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “realized to make use of a gun at eleven, bought his first motorbike at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, began learning drugs at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero as soon as wrote. Fogwill was born exterior Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived till 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a younger man, however it wasn’t till 1980, on the age of thirty-nine, after he’d misplaced the fortune he made in promoting, that his story “Muchacha Punk” received a prestigious writing contest and his literary profession took off. In 1982, he wrote his most well-known novel, Los pichiciegos. Set throughout the Falklands Battle and printed whereas the battle was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of battle, a sort of Slaughterhouse-5 for Argentina, was a direct sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the navy dictatorship. A author of quick tales, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish greater than twenty books throughout a thirty-year profession.
Drawing on his background in promoting, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, simply so, like Prince or Madonna—right into a model. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing each the navy dictatorship and what he known as the “horror present” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “nearly alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable physique of labor, an thought, an inimitable means of being, and above all, an ethics.” Referred to as a beneficiant buddy and mentor, he guided youthful writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira.
Like his persona, Fogwill’s writing is provocative and irreverent. He absorbed the completely different strands of the Argentine custom and produced a literature that defies classification: a literature of concepts and the physique, the political and the private, the extraordinary and the ineffable. Nimbly traversing type and style, he employs myriad kinds whereas sustaining a singular and inimitable sensibility.
Nowhere is that this reward extra obvious than in his quick tales, which vary from metafictional parody to drug-fueled delirium, from realism to political satire to forays into style, from hedonistic escapades to deeply private explorations of music and artwork. Regardless of their density of thought and narrative complexity, his tales are by no means a slog. At instances his prose is euphoric and propulsive; at others, delicate and restrained. Fogwill is within the manipulations of social, political, and financial constructs; within the fraught relationship between phrases and issues, between that means and expertise; within the physique, the sensorium, and need; in altered states, desires, and reminiscence. Humorous and unsettling, acerbic and contemplative, his tales discover the randomness of life and the methods wherein that means rises out of incoherence, revealing itself in flashes, in fragments, in ephemeral moments.
“Muchacha Punk,” the story that launched Fogwill’s literary profession, is ostensibly the picaresque story of the one-night stand an Argentine traveler has with a British “punk lady.” “What’s attention-grabbing about this story,” the protagonist states on the outset, “is ‘I slept with’ the punk lady.” And on the floor, that’s primarily the plot: an opportunity encounter on a chilly winter evening in London, a mutual attraction, an amorous journey. However what unfolds on the web page is much extra intricate, evolving right into a story that deconstructs itself as it’s being written, a narrative about class and the politics of language, about cultural collision and historic contingency the place, towards the backdrop of a brewing battle between Argentina and the UK, an evening within the life of 1 man brings the zeitgeist of a decade into focus.
In “Assist a él,” his parodic homage and anagrammatic inversion of Borges’s canonical “El Aleph,” Fogwill reframes the encounter with the fantastical, all-seeing orb of Borges as a psychotropic and erotic episode. Whereas each tales are, finally, about loss, in regards to the demise of a beloved, “Assist a él” manages to carry the cerebral Borgesian expertise into the realm of the corporeal and libidinal. The place Borges’s “instrument” permits his protagonist to achieve entry to the infinite and to thereby hear once more the “irretrievable voice” of his misplaced love, the “syrup” that Fogwill’s protagonist imbibes actuates an intensely lubricious reunion the place hallucination, oneiric fantasy, and reminiscence meld collectively. Like Borges, Fogwill layers in metafictional references; like Borges, Fogwill pokes enjoyable on the determine of the author and the literary endeavor, however by making transcendence much less a matter of information, by taking it out of the library and the labyrinth and grounding it in bodily pleasure, he brings the Borgesian—and by extension, the Argentine—custom into dialog with a extra up to date cosmology.
Tales like “Japonés” and “Passengers on the Evening Practice” showcase Fogwill’s chameleonic virtuosity, how he might adapt and eschew style conventions to create taut, suspenseful narratives whereas sustaining his poet’s consideration to language, his wry humor, and his ludic sensibility. In “Japonés,” Fogwill’s hypnotic prose and detailed information of crusing create an immediacy that put the reader aboard the boat the place the narrative takes place, establishing a flip that comes out of nowhere and transforms a story of journey and camaraderie into one thing like a ghost story. “Passengers on the Evening Practice,” which seems within the new Summer season problem of the Overview, is a ghost story of a unique order, a grasp class in pacing and perspective, the place the vicissitudes of trauma and reminiscence are refracted to disquieting impact by means of a sequence of inexplicable occasions in a small city.
“Day’s Residues,” in the meantime, places us contained in the frayed nerves and disoriented sensory expertise of a person on the tail finish of a days-long cocaine binge. Because the story unfolds, the borders between actuality, dream, and hallucination turn out to be more and more porous. Eventualities and characters recur, overlap, and are reconfigured. The general impact is that the story itself—in its rhythm, its construction, in the way in which it agitates one’s nerve endings—mimics the motion of a dream. However the unstable narrative footing additionally events moments of poetic lucidity. For Fogwill, desires are “a darkish dissolution” whereby “consciousness breaks down slowly, sloughing off its ineffective artifice”; a bodiless state whereby the palimpsests of waking life accumulate with out that means and the veil of language drops, revealing issues “of their full being.” Dreaming is each the construction and substance of the story, making for an expertise of studying that’s concurrently dread-inducing and stimulating, disconcerting and epiphanic and completely unforgettable.
A prodigy and a polymath, a singer and a sailor, a lover of artwork, music, tobacco, quick automobiles, and public outbursts, Fogwill was an excellent and subversive author, a larger-than-life determine, Argentina’s quintessential poète maudit. His affect is pervasive and enduring in Spain and Latin America. Though these of us within the Anglophone world is perhaps a bit of late to the celebration, right here’s hoping his singular physique of labor finds a foothold right here. His writing calls for our consideration.
Will Vanderhyden is an award-winning translator of Spanish literature.
