Herman Melville’s short story, about a reclusive copyist who refuses to adhere to the norms of a “snug” legal firm in mid-nineteenth century Manhattan, might not appear the most theatrical of material. But its sparse, masterly dialogue, adapted by Andrés Chan, lends itself aptly to stage performance.

courtesy of 'Bartleby the Scrivener'

The theatre’s intimate setting, coupled with its stark set, places the audience firmly in the humdrum world of legal clerks. Employees, including the “piratical-looking” Nipper (Gervasio Levalle) and the obstreperous Turkey (Diego Patrisso), are presided over by the narrator – a mild, law-abiding citizen (Guillermo Caranzano). Caricatures of Dickensian proportions, their eccentric tics and fits of rage are counterpointed like clockwork.

An increased demand in copies prompts the firm to bring in a strange young man by the name of Bartleby (Germán Pierotti). “Pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn,” his world-weary, anonymous mode of existence, the narrator laments, confounds biography.

Bartleby, for his part, is apportioned a mere 37 lines, which he delivers with ever so slight, tantalising variations on the same theme. His taciturn mode of resistance is commensurate with his refusal to proffer any backstory or anecdote that might contextualise his existence and identify him as a full-rounded ‘character’.

The concision and deceptive transparency of Melville’s text is preserved in the Borgesian translation, deflecting and multiplying signification a pace with the copies penned by its deferential clerks. The dull routine is punctured only by the comic duo’s droll gaggle and by the absurdity of the narrator’s attempts to account for his taciturn employee’s eccentricities.

Initially, Bartleby punches the clock admirably, producing copies at a mechanical rate. But it soon becomes clear that he is not cut out for this style of work, refusing point blank to reexamine his own quadruplicate copies. Declining to participate in the daily round of mutual rehashed pleasantries, Bartleby’s disarming peculiarities, his bizarre exemptions from conventional ‘duties’, confound his coworkers. His laconic, disconcerting refrain, “I would prefer not to”, sends his placid boss into spasms of consternation that soon boil over into full-blown fury.

Bartleby’s air of reasonableness, his platitude and impersonality nonetheless command attention, and elicit sympathy from his superior. In line with Melville’s narration, the stage performance is interspersed with spotlit monologues from the narrator. Caranzano delivers a virtuoso performance as he tries to rationalise the passive resistance of his reticent subject according to the law of cause and effect. But the more he tries to wrestle with Bartleby’s enigma, the clearer it becomes that he eludes all conventional understanding. At the same time that his signature retort, suspended as it is without any qualifications, implicates him in Bartleby’s fate.

By the time the office workers have involuntarily cottoned on to Bartleby’s subversive lexicon of “preference”, the narrator resolves that his errant employee will have to go. But to little avail. Bartleby refuses to comply with the codes of conduct that would demand that he remove himself from the premises. His continued, unremunerative presence subverts the whole notion of tacit acceptance engrained in the Anglo-American work ethic.

Bartleby is given an ultimatum: either he must act or be duly punished. In line with his mode of passive nihilism, he relinquishes himself to the authorities. Comic beginnings herald tragic ends. But Bartleby’s damned phrase echoes on, threatening to dismantle the whole system of privatised bureaucratic functionality. In the wake of Anonymous’ recent incursion upon America’s financial heartland – the play’s subtitle ‘A Story of Wall Street’ – seems more relevant than ever.

If you were to write an ABC of Argentine literature, you’d expect to find three of the hardest-hitting household names. The Indy continues the Beyond Borges series with the author whose name would surely be the first on most people’s lips.

Nowadays best-known for his novels ‘El juguete rabioso’, ‘Los siete locos’ and ‘Los Lanzallamas’, Roberto Arlt was a novelist, short story author, journalist and playwright who, despite entering literature as something of an underdog, emerged as the first ‘modern’ novelist in Argentina and a source of inspiration to a generation of writers that followed.

An artists impression of Roberto Arlt (Courtesy of the artist Ricardo Ajler)

A Treasured Columnist

The son of immigrant parents, Arlt was born in Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century and raised in the Buenos Aires’ neighbourhood of Flores. He spoke openly about the difficulties of his upbringing and of the abusive and tyrannical nature of his father, a Prussian glassblower and postcard artist.

Having been expelled from school between the ages of eight and ten, he received minimal formal education from then on, choosing instead to spend his time on the streets of the city that inspired him, or reading the work of the Russian greats Gorky, Dolstoy and Dostoevsky.

His first short story, ‘Jehovah’, was reportedly published before he left home in 1916, but before pursuing writing as his profession. Arlt attended the a naval school of mechanics, and also served in the armed forces, undertaking various forms of employment as a mechanic, a painter, a dockworker, an apprentice to a tinsmith and a brick factory manager, before entering journalism.

Like many Argentine authors before him, he viewed journalism as a means of financially supporting his creative writing, but also as a step up to the arena he wished to enter.

Many years later, he published a column entitled ‘Yo no tengo la culpa’, whereby he spoke of the difficulties he encountered breaking into the country’s literary circles as an immigrant with an expressionless family name of no social standing.

But writing as a columnist proved to be an important aspect of Arlt’s career and an important form of expression for Arlt, who originally wrote part of his first novel, ‘El juguete rabioso’, as a column.

Published in a variety of newspapers including Critica, Don Goyo, and much later in El Mundo, Arlt’s columns, known as ‘Aguafuertes’, were the most popular of his literary offerings during his lifetime and brought him nation-wide recognition as a writer.

The ‘Aguafuertes’ written between 1928 and 1935 for the newspaper El Mundo, are favourably remembered for commenting on the peculiarities and the hypocrisy of life in Buenos Aires at the time. Retrospectively compiled and republished in a book that itself became a classic, they are often reprinted and remain treasured works of national literature.

Writing From Buenos Aires’ Underbelly

In the same year that his friend and contemporary Ricardo Güiraldes published his nostalgic novel ‘Don Segundo Sombra’, Arlt published his first novel ‘El juguete rabioso’ in 1926.

The novel, which narrates the adventures of a character called Silvio in his efforts to become someone, was originally drafted as ‘La vida puerca’ until Güiraldes prompted a rethink by suggesting that Argentine readers were perhaps not yet ready for such a crude title.

Roberto Arlt (Photo: Veronique Pestoni)

Featuring unlikely characters alienated by environments found to be rife with inequality and oppression, his fiction presented a so far unexplored perspective and found a huge audience among the youth.

Reflecting the hardships, as well as the energy and chaos of the time, the novel adopted a darkness of style that hadn’t been seen before, and expressed anguish and scenes of violence in a language that was described as at once “rough” yet the “most alive”.

His 1929 novel, ‘Los siete locos’, and its sequel ‘Los lanzallamas’, which followed in 1931, are collectively considered his masterpiece. Together with ‘El juguete rabioso’ they are occasionally considered a trilogy and whilst it’s true that they each played a part in revealing Buenos Aires’ hidden underbelly, it was ‘Los siete locos’ that earned Arlt the nickname ‘The Porteño Dostoyevsky’, after the Russian existentialist author.

The innovation of Arlt’s work lay not only in his style, but also in his decision to feature the poor, the criminal and the mad as his protagonists – predating the likes of William Burroughs and Irvine Welsh, who have since created equally shocking literature by adopting similar subjects.

Intended to be experimental and impressionistic, his novels introduced a fragmented and confused chronology, adding to the warped atmosphere and sense of chaos present in the storylines.

At once a heady mix of lower and middle-class Spanish, scientific vocabulary, vulgarities and foreign words blended with the dialects of porteños and thieves, Arlt was condemned by some for poor grammar and bad craftsmanship. At the same time, his coarse yet imaginative use of language was commended by others.

In saturating his work with a language that was as grossly urban as his themes, Arlt wrote with deliberate disregard for the rules knowingly observed by other authors. But whilst his unpolished colloquial writing came under fire from some, it was undoubtedly a refreshing move away from the middle-class literature exemplified by the Argentine writers of the same time.

Citing the changing of ideas as a reason to reject literary tradition, he made little effort to ‘linger over embroidery’, presenting a case for language being something that is constantly evolving, as though it were living.

It was this attitude that gained him the respect of a new generation of writers, who saw him as a proponent of anti-establishment anti-literary writing.

Julio Cortázar, author of the Argentine ‘anti-novel’ and the big name to have emerged from the Latin American literature boom of the 1960s regarded Arlt as a master, whilst award-winning writer Ricardo Piglia and ‘mass novelist’ César Aira have also cited him as particularly influential.

A recent stage production of Trescientos Millones (Photo: Estefanía Zinboer)

A Theatrical Legacy

With the exception of a fourth novel, ‘El amor brujo’, and two short story collections, Arlt moved his writing almost exclusively into a new medium from 1930 onwards.

Of his ten plays, only  ‘El fabricante de fantasias’ was released in a commercial theatre, with the remaining nine premiering at independent venues such as Teatro del Pueblo.

‘Trescientos millones’ in 1932, ‘Saverio el cruel’ in 1936 and ‘La isla desierta’ in 1937, make up a trio of plays generally considered the most representative of his theatrical writing.

Commended for the construction of dreamlike sequences and the imagination of nightmarish characters in plays that were fuelled by a social conscience, Arlt is considered a forerunner to the trend of social theatre and the currents of absurdism and existentialism that followed.

Marcelo Pitrola is a playwright currently living in Buenos Aires. His first theatrical experience was onstage, performing at Teatro Nacional Cervantes in Armando Discépolo’s “Babylon” and “The Organito” (directed by Hugo Urquijo Villanueva Cosse) and at the Teatro San Martín in Villanueva Cosse’s 1999 staging of “Luces de Bohemia.”

Marcelo Pitrola (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

When he turned to writing, it was to his roots in the theatre; his first full-length play was an adaptation of Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” produced in 2002 at the El Ombligo de la Luna theater. Then, in 2004 he completed his first original play: “The Peronist Princess” (excerpted here in an original English translation by Ian Barnett). In 2005, “The Peronist Princess” won first prize in the Rozenmacher Germain New Playwrighting Contest. That same year, it received special mention in the national playwrighting competition at the National Theatre Institute. As part of the Rozenmacher prize, the play was translated into English and French; it was also later translated into German. It was also nominated for the Florencio Sanchez and Trinidad Guevara award. In 2006, it premiered at the Teatro del Pueblo.

Marcelo currently works as a copyeditor for Tiempo Argentino and is on the editorial staff of the art and literature magazine, “Otra parte”. He also gives classes at the National University of the Arts (IUNA). He is in the process of completing two new works which will be produced next year. The first is “Diario de incertidumbre,” which will be produced in the Sala Machado at Parque Centenario. The other project is a collaboration with the actress Maria Merlino and director Diego Lerman. Marcelo is also working on a screenplay with the director Hernan Belon; an earlier short film he co-wrote with Ezequiel Yanco, “Feliz Navidad,” won numerous awards, and was an official competitor at film festivals worldwide.

“The Peronist Princess”—excerpted here in an official translation by Ian Barnett—takes place over the course of a single momentous evening: the ascension of Rafael Martinoti, standard-bearer of the new Argentina. The dramatic and emotional center of the play is Victoria, Martinoti’s scorned lover. Like a Greek tragedy, “The Peronist Princess” evokes grand political drama on a fiercely intimate scale. Deftly balancing tragedy and comedy, high art and smart-mouthed squalor, Marcelo Pitrola gives us a truly modern princess.

Marcelo spoke with us about his work, his creative process, and the origins of “The Peronist Princess” in a café near his home in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Your first two plays were adaptations, weren’t they?

Yes. My first play was an adaptation of Kafka´s The Penal Colony, in 2002. It was an interesting problem, adapting Kafka´s novella for the stage. I was fascinated by the idea of a protagonist struggling against an overwhelming system. The tension of the story, the horrific aspects of the prison and the punishment, had a lot of dramatic potential. My next play, “Tres Hermanas (Mas Aca)” was an adaptation of Chekov´s “Three Sisters.” Manuel Iedvabni requested the work. As a director who had worked with many plays in translation, he wanted a version of the Chekov play that wasn´t merely a translation into Spanish, but an Argentinian play. So I transported the three sisters to a northern province of Argentina and stranded them there. Instead of Moscow, they long to return to a glamorous Buenos Aires. I set the play in the 1920`s, to keep the story from becoming too anachronistic. I was even able to incorporate the climactic duel from the original. Duels were still a form of ritual confrontation at that time–not common, not usually fatal, but not unheard-of. I enjoyed the interplay of cultures, the way that the theatricality of the original played out in its new setting. The language, as well, presented an intriguing challenge.

Peronist Princess

And “The Peronist Princess?” How did you come up with the idea?

“The Peronist Princess” is my first original play, completed over the course of 2004. I began with a single image: a beautiful woman, dressed for a party, comes into a bathroom with a bloody nose. How did she get there? What happened to her? Who was she? This was Victoria, the Peronist Princess. Victoria’s last monologue arrived next. It’s different from rest of the dialogue in the play, much more direct and poetic, and it took me a while to find a place for it. Eventually, it became Victoria’s final speech. I realised that she needed to release her fury, her betrayal.

The bodyguard, Tití, emerged next. For me, he was a likeable character, similar in some ways to Victoria. Not a nice guy, exactly, but with a certain sympathy. He’s human. The third character, Martinoti, the politician, Vicky’s lover, was to me the least sympathetic and engaging. Of course, he’s not a very agreeable guy, but he was also least important, least central. He’s not onstage much.

For a play centered on a political creature, it contains remarkably few political speeches–and the political action all happens offstage.

Theater isn’t really the place for political diatribes, I don’t think. If I wanted to make political speeches, I’d…write pamphlets. I wanted to show a more universal perspective. I was looking at the subjective effects that a political system has on an individual life: the point at which an individual’s trajectory intersects with a political or cultural trajectory. I was fascinated throughout by the idea of someone resisting, trying to escape their destiny. Victoria is fighting against the role that has been assigned to her. But she’s not a very political person–she’s not a politician. She doesn’t hold office, she doesn’t do anything for any cause. She’s a politician’s lover, a marginal character. She can watch from the sidelines, mock the system a little. She can attack its failures, its problems, its willingness to betray its original ideals. And, of course, its betrayal of her. She sees herself as someone who has been betrayed. The desperation of her character comes in part out of that realisation. I wanted to evoke a character at that tragic moment: when she realises that she has no children, no husband, no one. What she wants is inclusion, recognition.

All three of your plays have involved very restrained, narrow-focus formats: a single room, a single evening, a cell, a prisoner. Do you find this setup interesting on a creative level?

Well, the works are different–but yes, fairly intimate in focus. There’s something about the stage–it’s possible to break theatrical and spatial constraints, to create grand spectacles. Look at Shakespeare. But this play was bound up in the intimacy of the story, the intimacy of the scene. This woman cannot get out of that place. The traditional theatrical setup, with its single space, is perfect for the dramatic situation of people who are unable to break out of their circumstances.

And your current projects?

I’m currently working on a very different play, “Diario de Incertidumbre.” Although, actually, the main character is also a trapped person. I guess that is sort of a personal theme. She’s a patient, stuck in the ward of a hospital, awaiting a diagnosis, unable to leave. It began with an idea of Silvia Hilario’s–this character, the protagonist. I’m hoping that Silvia can play two smaller roles, the physician and the nurse.