Affect as Class Passion: Roberto Arlt’s Petty Bourgeoisie

This article links the form of Roberto Arlt’s novels Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas to a process of class consolidation, specifically the emergence of the petty bourgeoisie in Argentina. It argues that Arlt was a pioneer in describing the behavior of the middle sectors, and that sociological scholarship built on Arlt’s observations. Arlt’s novels depict an inchoate petty bourgeoisie that must differentiate itself from proletarian and lumpen sectors: for the novels’ characters, morality offers an avenue to achieve this distinction. Arlt’s novels explore this avenue, which entails an activation of the body, and thus expresses itself via two kinds of affect: experiential and literary. I focus on how affect intersects the structure of character motivation and extended descriptions. I argue that attending to affect in Arlt can illuminate longstanding debates about his place in literary history and provides an opportunity to assess how affect theory can enrich ideological analysis.