The Formation of a Post-Peronist Generation: Intellectuals and Politics in Argentina through the Lens of Contorno (1953–1959)

Introduction

A significant segment of the Argentine intelligentsia experienced the Revolution of September 1955, which overthrew General Juan Domingo Perón, as a moment of liberation.¹With some exceptions, such as Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz among others, the cultural politics of Peronism had not managed to gain many followers in the course of its ten-year experiment. During the two consecutive Perón governments (1946–1955) the often implicit, and occasionally explicit, opposition between intellectuals and Peronism only intensified.² I contend that an analysis of this opposition is indispensable for understanding the redrawing of crucial definitions within the intellectual field at that time. Due to its profound social and cultural impact, the experience of Peronism compelled Argentine intellectuals, whether or not it was their original intention, to enter the political arena, not so much because their interests shifted from culture to politics, but rather because they came to conceive the cultural world as political. This blurring of intellectual boundaries obliged many of the protagonists of the cultural world to descend from the purity of ideas to the dark reality of politics.³

This pressure for figures in the cultural world to confront and assimilate “reality,” the moral and intellectual obligation to “get their hands dirty” in the mud of the world, was a general feature of the intellectual scene of 1950s Argentina, but it was especially evident in the group of young people who coalesced around the journal Contorno. While this journal stands apart in many ways, it was nevertheless an expression of an emergent discourse that can be detected in many journals of the time. In the history of Argentine culture, the 1950s were unusual in witnessing the proliferation of significant journals. Contorno—the culmination of a path initiated in Verbum, continued in Centro, and solidified in a third journal, Las Ciento y Una⁴—would go on to become one of the most famous of this era. Many other journals were published during this period, some of them quite important; noteworthy examples include Sur, Gaceta Literaria, Capricornio, Letra y Línea, Buenos Aires Literaria, the Uruguayan Marcha, and Ciudad (which was allied with Contorno in its revisionist commitment).⁵ In the face of such an explosion of journals, why, then, does Contorno stand out, and why is it so important in an analysis of the links between intellectual and political concerns?

If we emphasize its later influence rather than its contemporary repercussions, it is clear that Contorno showcased the talents of a very important cohort; later works by Contorno contributors Viñas, Sebreli, Masotta, and Rozitchner would play a significant role in Argentina’s intellectual sphere. Although the passage of time and the scholarly attention that has been lavished on it has helped to make Contorno a nearly mythical journal, what ultimately gives it a place within the Argentine history of ideas in the twentieth century is its ability to express the context, the contorno, of what was happening in the cultural and political world, and therefore to provide a way to understand its central issues.⁶ This ability makes Contorno a privileged site for understanding the transformation of the relationship between intellectuals and politics.

Most studies of Contorno emphasize its status as a literary journal by underscoring either its literary revisionism or its cultural project, suggesting at the same time that politics did not enter the Contorno scene until late in its run. Mangone and Warley, for example, maintain that only in Contorno’s final issues did the “eruption of the political”⁷ take place; similarly, Katra identifies a “shift in focus from literary to social and political concerns, beginning with their journal’s fifth issue in 1956.”⁸ Years later, Altamirano reiterates a similar diagnosis when he affirms that “even the issue [of Contorno] dedicated to the Peronist question bore the hall mark of a literary magazine.”⁹ When Beatriz Sarlo emphasized the importance for Contorno of “los cruces, los encuentros, las tramas” (encounters, crossroads, and interweavings), she pointed out that in...