Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (2 page)

All of this line is absurd, of course, since the book was purchased without reading the preface, and the reader is hoping for some escape from, or novel perspective on, daily life, else he or she would not have bothered to look at fiction in the first place. But the critical approach is foisted upon readers so persistently and authoritatively with virtually every book that it may succeed in persuading some of them that indeed this is what they want. Certainly the chief guilt in this idiocy belongs to those who write the preface, but those who pick up a book and read the cover blurbs and preface first are themselves not without blame. Readers should make it a rule to read the blurbs, preface and explanatory notes last, after the main work, so that they can enjoy knowing that their pleasure was not spoiled and their perceptions were not preconditioned, and so that they can revile the idiot who tried to spoil things for them by demonstrating that he had read the book first and therefore was one up on them.

Now that this book has been converted to an electronic text, you find yourself in a bit of a fix. You can’t flip ahead to see when this anti-preface ends, and there are no page numbers to guide you. You could go back to the table of contents and click on the beginning of
Scarecrow
, jumping right over my remarks, or read on a bit and hope that I won’t be too long. Keep in mind that since the Spanish text has been dropped, the text of the book is now half as long, and I do have something to say.

2. Within Your Reach

Having said the above, I recognize my task as one of introducing the startling, stunning and definitely mind-altering work of Oliverio Girondo by not telling you what it is about, not only if you have followed convention and started reading this preface first, but even more so if you have not. I am writing the preface because it is definitely expected of me, the publisher, and the book, digital or print, would appear deficient without it, since Girondo is a writer almost totally unknown among readers of English. The print publication, aside from one or two poems in anthologies, was his “debut” in the language, and this Kindle edition is his coming-out party in e-land.

Also I am writing the preface because there are a few things I can safely mention in advance without destroying the purpose of his work. For example, the title.
Scarecrow
—well, yes. In Spanish,
Espantapájaros
—literally, “it scares birds.” Where is the scarecrow? You may look high and low to find him. Or maybe he’s right there in front of your face. Who is he? You’ll figure it out. Who are the birds? Same thing. Now then, have I given anything away? Maybe, because I referred to the scarecrow as a “he.” Yet maybe I’m mistaken, and it is nothing more than an it.

All right, so far, so good. Now what about the second title, or subtitle, which Girondo appended (in parentheses) to the work?
Al alcance de todos
—”within the reach of everyone.” How’s that—a scarecrow within everyone’s grasp? Does that mean that everyone can reach out and buy “Scarecrow”—the book—because it is found in every bookstore? No, the first edition of 1932 was printed up in 5000 copies and not sold in the bookstores at all. Instead, Girondo rented a landau coach from a mortuary and hired liveried footmen and coachmen to attend the vehicle. In place of the floral wreathes he stacked copies of the book, printed with his own money, and in one seat propped up a lifesize scarecrow he had made out of
papier-mâché
, with top hat, button eyes and painted white gloves. Then Girondo got in and, drawn by six horses, paraded through the streets of Buenos Aires announcing publication of
Espanatapájaros
through a megaphone, handing out copies and directing the public to a shop on la Calle Florida. There, on the sidewalk, a bevy a pretty girls selected by the author hawked the book, its cover bearing a likeness of the same well-heeled scarecrow. By such means the edition sold out in fifteen days. The dummy scarecrow retired to the vestibule of Girondo’s estate on Calle Suipacha, where it greeted unsuspecting visitors forever after.

So the subtitle might refer to that occasion, for the book was unquestionably available to all within earshot of Girondo’s bullhorn. The price was $2.50, which though more than the usual 25 centavos for paperback still fell within the range of everyone’s pocketbook, which makes two meanings for “al alcance de todos.” However, in 1966, a year before Girondo’s death,
Espanatapájaros
was republished in a collection of his works and still bore the curious subtitle. Now it was not a separate publication, and it was purveyed in the bookstores. So the subtitle must not refer to the first edition or to the price. It must mean another sort of accessibility, namely, the mental—the author thought his work accessible to every mind, high and low. It was, in his conception, an Everyman scarecrow: “You Can Get It.” When one considers the content, which no one will ever quite understand, such a meaning can only be taken as a joke. So maybe Girondo means something else again, such as “everyone can attain the status of a scarecrow.” Perhaps the idea is that the scarecrow stands up on a hill, at a height above everyone, and people must climb to attain—
alcanzar
—a closer acquaintance. Perhaps they can strive to be a scarecrow themselves.

In this case, the scarecrow’s literary manifestation must be written in a state of heightened inspiration, awareness, understanding—another meaning of
alcance
. O.K., I’ll tell you: it is. You won’t see anything else in the world like it. Telling you won’t spoil your approach to it, because the crazy thing is so spectacularly original that even though alerted by my advance notice you are still going to be more surprised by
Scarecrow
than by anything else you have ever read in your life, even if you are ninety-five and have spent every free moment fiendishly consuming all of the most fantastic symbolist, futurist, cubist, surrealist, expressionist, anarchist, dadaist, existentialist, creationist, ultraist, vanguardist, magical realist, modernist, postmodernist and every other -ist compositions that you could lay your hands on, plus the farthest-out non-ist compositions as well, including Lucian’s
True Story
, Rabelais’
Adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel
and Dostoyevsky’s
Bobok
. There is no way that you can prepare for the experience of coming face to face with Girondo’s scarecrow.

We might consider other possible meanings of the subtitle, but the translator, Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, has already considered them all. The one he likes best, because it captures the variant meanings mentioned above as well as the everyday tone, is the one printed here. Simply: “Accessible To All.” But it is not always possible to retain all the nuances and multiple readings of Girondo in one English translation. A choice must be made for every sentence, and that choice may be one of many. For example, Alter-Gilbert wrote me in the midst of his labors:

There is a preponderance of sexual innuendo in
Scarecrow
, and Girondo has a wicked penchant (Joycean in method) for cramming a phrase with multiple meanings, so that a line such as
Solidario del naufragio de las señoras ballenatos, de los tiburones vestidos de frac, que les devoran el vientre y la cartera
has a double set of associations: (1) “I am in solidarity with the shipwreck of whale-calf señoras and with the sharks in tuxedos who devour their bowels and their flippers” or (2) “I am in solidarity with the broken romances of married whale-shaped women and with the lotharios in their coats and tails who consume them, both their wombs and their purses.” There is the plight of whales in nature and of betrayed women in society united by a creative use of Argentine slang. There is further the strong suggestion that the abandoned women are pregnant, a suggestion reinforced by a line in the next paragraph referring to rats and abortions circulating through the subsoil. This is one example among many that could be cited.

So maybe the scarecrow can be all things to all people, creating such a plethora of readings as to reach out and grab anyone, or to appeal to the mind that reads it in its own way, which might mean any way. Maybe Girondo produced a deconstructionist text before the evil thought of tearing apart great works entered the envious minds of pretentious critics, and at the same time created their worst nightmare, for they can hardly deconstruct a text that in the process of self-creation deconstructs itself. They need to find the supposed standard meaning of a work before they can attack it, ascribe false readings to it and then claim that it fails in its mission, but here “al alcance de todos” there is no standard meaning, unless it be one that scares birds. For this reason, I believe that
Scarecrow
may become a guardian angel for the distraught soul about to bite the cyanide capsule of literary criticism and an effective antidote for those who already writhe in the throes of deconstruction.

In any event, you can judge for yourself, but only if you read the print edition, where the original text is presented on the left-hand pages facing the English, which appears on the right, so that you can make your own possible alternate readings as you follow Alter-Gilbert’s inspired rendition. Here you must take my word for it that Alter-Gilbert has kept his translation close to the original text, but occasionally was moved by its spirit to outpourings of unrestrained eloquence, such as do not spring from the tedium of mechanically following word for word.

3. The Straw Man Objects

But wait a minute, someone who has already read the work might object. There are standard themes here: life, love, suffering, death, identification with the universe. What’s so original? Yes, I would agree, there are standard themes, but from what angle? Is
Scarecrow
symbolic, satiric, ironic, lyrical, rhapsodic, paradoxical, absurd—or all of these things put together? Does it have an overarching theme, or even a logical sequence? Must you read it straight through from chapter 1 to 24, or can you proceed in any order you like? And are the chapters really chapters; do they necessarily belong to the same work? To what genre does the thing belong, can you tell me that? Can you spell out its message, or if you tried would you not so grossly mischaracterize the work as to prove yourself a philistine? To all of these questions the wise guy whom I have invented must throw up his hands. And so, I imagine, must real readers whom I have not invented, even though the work is meant to be within their reach.

Girondo once drew up a manifesto for a magazine he helped found, called
Martín Fierro
after the freedom-loving gaucho of the pampas. It lays out a sort of program, but one of such broad expanses as to remind us that “everything is new under the sun if seen with up-to-date eyes and expressed with a contemporary accent.” The manifesto is included at the end of this volume, so that you may hold it up to
Scarecrow
and see whether Girondo’s masterpiece observes his own rules. For that matter, whether anyone followed his rules, or whether there were any rules to follow. Dozens, scores and possibly hundreds of Latin American writers have felt the influence of Girondo, which greatly invigorated the Argentine avant-garde through the magazine, but it was one that reinforced their individual abilities and left no identifiable trace.

Not too long ago, moviegoers around the world felt Girondo’s charm when his anomalous works, quite unaccountably, inspired a full-length feature film,
The Dark Side of the Heart
(1994). Argentine director Eliseo Subiela tooks themes from
Scarecrow
and
Lunarlude
, added some inventions of his own and fused them together with an original plot. The film’s hero is Oliverio, a misunderstood poet and reluctant advertising man, who wanders in a long coat through Buenos Aires seeking the woman of his dreams and testing attractive nominees with his tricky tropes. The woman who appreciates them most turns out to be a prostitute named Ana, who possibly is Death, but she insists that their relationship remain platonic. Overcome with passion, he offers her his bleeding heart in his hand, and together they dance the tango.

The chief scene I recall takes place in the apartment of his friend, an artist who has fashioned his doorway in the shape of a gigantic painted vagina, through which Oliverio enters. I can tell you these things because they are not found in this book, but I strongly recommend the movie nonetheless, especially for that grand entrance. After its showing in Argentina sales of poetry went up and young men began a craze of pursuing young women with verse. Although a big hit at international film festivals, it did not noticeably increase Girondo’s reputation abroad, probably because he was not yet translated.

4. What Was Wrong With Him?

There is one question I would like to address before I turn you over to the author—or let him loose on you. Why did Girondo, having written
Espantapájaros
in 1932 and a slimmer yet also amazing piece of prose,
Interlunio
[“Lunarlude”], five years later—why did he write nothing more in fiction? Why did this talent, equal in these two works to practically any fantast you can name, a talent who might have won world renown on the order of the indisputable greats and topped any list of outstanding Latin American authors, rather than sought inclusion in its addenda or footnotes; why did he produce only enough miscellanea to fill one average-sized, large-print volume of
Obras completas
? No novel, no collections of stories, no literary essays, no book reviews that anyone recalls, no memoirs or biographies, no plays after the age of 25, only one translation—of Rimbaud’s
Une saison en enfer
—and that a collaboration with a friend, Enrique Molina.

What was he up to? Was he such a pampered aristocrat, such a slick-haired fop and listless dilettante, that he couldn’t bring himself to raise his languid hand and write more than a hundred pages of fiction during the forty-five years of a professional literary career? Or did he consider himself a Rimbaud and value his poetry more—those anti-poetic effusions, actually not very numerous, some of which are included in this volume to shock, disgust and delight you. Or his art notes and occasional essays on social themes, destined like all such matter to yellow and become the province of antiquarians and pedants? (They have, however, been given fresh white pages in the 1999
Obra completa
, published in Spain.) Or his drawings and paintings, which were accomplished, but rarely exhibited? One of his aphorisms, which are noteworthy but not profound, and which are included in this collection in lieu of any remaining prose of interest, perhaps gives us a clue: “No critic can compare with our desk drawer.” Was Girondo such a perfectionist, like the composer Paul Dukas, that he withheld most of his work and left posterity but one—or one and a half—
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
? Or could there have been another reason why his output was so small? Let’s take a brief look at his life and work.