Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America

Buenos Aires and the Literary Construction of Urban Space

46 T he Buenos Aires locations presented in the novels El sueño (The Dream; 1998) and La villa (Shantytown; 2001) by César Aira—streets, buildings , businesses, and public spaces—are identifiable both by native porteños and by literary tourists finding their way with street maps in hand. However, the geography of Aira’s barrios and city streets cannot be understood solely in light of conventional maps. The familiar places of his fiction are constructed according to a complex geography that embodies the status of Buenos Aires as a social space and derives from a dynamic between his characters’ knowledge of the physical city and the practices of their daily lives. Since Aira’s project is literary, the city he builds is imaginary, but the process his characters engage in to create it provides a context for exploring how such cities are perceived and understood by those who frequent them in reality. The idea of “constructing” urban space involves the creation of the built spaces of urban environments, on the one hand, and, on the other, the attribution of social meaning to city spaces and their contents. Like signifier and signified in semiotic systems, the built spaces and their meanings are inseparable, although the relationship is not simple. As Ángel Rama notes with respect to the first Spanish settlements in the Americas, an intention or meaning precedes the material foundation of cities: “Before becoming a material reality of houses, streets, and plazas, which could be constructed only gradually over decades or centuries, Latin American cities sprang forth in signs and plans, already complete , in the documents that laid their statutory foundations and in the charts and plans that established their ideal designs” (Rama 1996, 8–9). The imagined T buenosairesandtheliteraryConstructionofurbanspace riChard young young and holmes text-5.indd 46 11/1/10 10:08 AM buenos aiRes and the liteRaRY constRuction of uRban space — 47 city, then, is not the exclusive preserve of literary or artistic creation, but is first expressed in the texts that project the eventual shape of the real place and, therefore, to some extent, underlie all subsequent textualizations regardless of their form. Literature and the arts, notwithstanding their importance as means for constructing and circulating urban imaginaries, are among many forms of textualization. The imagined city is as broad and complex as its counterpart in reality. Consisting of the collective and individualized idea of the city carried in the mind and memory, it is drawn from a knowledge of the past and present of the city, personal experiences, and the meanings derived from these sources. Speaking of the construction of an image of Rome, Rob Shields writes, “This means fully locating it in the different emotional geographies of people as different as tourists and city dwellers, building up an image of the place through the events and activities it attracts and repels, mapping its function in language and its role as a pole in the gestalt field of Western historical culture” (Shields 1991, 6). The same may be said of other places, even if they lack the centrality of a city such as Rome. In the potential scope and immense diversity of the image that this process suggests, however, regardless of the size of the city in question, the sheer scale of things seems overwhelming. What strategies, then, do urban subjects deploy to negotiate a phenomenon as huge and varied as a modern metropolis? Burton Pike could well have been anticipating that question when he remarked , in The Image of the City in Modern Literature (1981), “The city is . . . incomprehensive for its inhabitants; as a whole it is inaccessible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified” (Pike 1996, 245). With respect to Buenos Aires, the collective reduction of the city to a comprehensible image is already evident in the expression of its history through a series of labels, each of which encapsulates a specific period of time: the colonial backwater elevated to viceregal capital in 1776; the gran aldea, or big village, of the 1800s transformed between 1880 and 1930, during Argentina’s early industrialization, into “the Paris of the South” and the city of immigrants; the modern metropolis of 1930 to 1983 dominated by military governments, Peronism, and further industrialization ; and, finally, the post-dictatorship city from 1983 to the present under globalization and neoliberal economics. As James Scobie (1964) has long since recognized in the case of Buenos Aires and Argentina, the city and the nation are highly integrated...