Moving Forward, Looking Back: Trains, Literature, and the Arts in the River Plate by Sarah M. Misemer (review)

This monograph is an interesting experiment in cultural studies that makes use of the train—which was crucial to the socioeconomic development of both Argentina and Uruguay—as a cultural symbol to organize the examination of a wide array of literary and filmic texts from the two River Plate countries. The vast train system was characteristically built by the British to serve British economic interests in the area, channeling the wealth of raw materials (typically cattle) to the port cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Montevideo. But the trains, in classic capitalist fashion, also served to transport European manufactured and finished goods purchased with such raw material back to their points of origin, providing for the sophistication of the port cities and railway stops along the way (i.e., the splendor of the landed gentry) deep into the hearts of the two countries.

It would be difficult to overrate the importance of the train as part of the definitive national organization (and the controversies deriving from it on the part of those excluded from its benefits) of Argentina and Uruguay beginning in the late nineteenth century. The goods brought back to the country estates and the urban palaces of the wealthy landowners, mostly from France and England, gave to these establishments their characteristic brilliance as well as a vast network of service industries. It was particularly the latter—theater, cabarets, book stores, societies, cafés, clubs, stores—that served as focal points for cultural development in Argentina and Uruguay.

Misemer provides much more than simply a registry of a sociocultural motif. Rather, she attempts with considerable success to describe in detail how trains are thematized in works of art in Argentina and Uruguay and how they serve as an organizing principle for the structure of a particular text. Concomitantly, the decline of the train is consonant with the sociopolitical decline of the two nations.

Moving Forward does not devote much space to theater because of the paucity of relevant works. However, there are three texts, two by well-known figures, that she does discuss. The first is Roberto Cossa’s El Sur y después (1987). Like most of Cossa’s work, the play focuses on the dissolution of Argentine society as a consequence of the military dictatorship and its socioeconomic contexts. The South is a fundamental motif in Argentine culture, signaling the open frontier, the escape from decadent urban society into pristine nature. The image of the train (specifically in the play, a train station), with its bidirectional movement, serves Cossa’s play as a structural device to connect past and present interpretations of Argentine history.

The second play is Cecilia Propato’s Pri: una tragedia urbana (2002). Propato also uses the train station as the locus of her play. A series of monologues focuses on the question of the loss of personal and national identity that occurred as a result of the shock of the neo-fascist military dictatorship of the 1976-83 period. The train station, with its anonymous comings and goings, including vanishings and sudden appearances (one thinks of the Lumière brothers’ use of the train in their early promotional short for filmmaking), is a metaphor of the nation.

Finally, Eduardo Rovner, known for his often brutal “absurdist” formulations of interpersonal and social violence, also uses the train station as a metaphor for the nation in El tren de soñar (2008), although in this case it is the promise of historical meaning that has disappeared along with the train that never arrives—something like Juan José Arreola’s brilliant allegory in the story “El guardagujas” (1952).

The importance of a study like Misemer’s lies, of course, in the intelligent commentary it has to make about the specific works discussed; good solid commentaries are always welcome. But what I particularly like about Moving Forward, Looking Back is the way in which she grounds...