Catholic machine, by Daniel Link profile published in the Journal of Buenos Aires, May 22, 2011.
professor and writer continues the series on that rescues forgotten figures of national literature. In this essay, it retrieves the work of the Jesuit Leonardo Castellani (1899-1981), until recently ignored by the critics, although his work deserves pride of place next to George Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt in the literature of the twentieth century Argentina.
By Daniel Link
21/05/1911 - 11:33
Miscellaneous. He wrote detective stories, satire, criticism literary, biblical commentaries and pedagogy tests.
That morning, the father carefully reviewed his cassock. Had ordered that the plate with sizing because supposed to have to pose for the cameras, before or after dinner as the guest list had entered almost carambola ("divine", liked to say to his friends), but which decided participate because he was deeply convinced of their right to join the list of representatives acotadísima Letters Argentinas.
May 1976 had begun on a high note: Sunday 9, the president had met with top scientists (there were even algún Nobel). Días después, con ex cancilleres, y el 17 de mayo con las nuevas autoridades de la Conferencia Episcopal Argentina, que dos días antes había difundido la Carta Pastoral Anual que subrayaba el necesario espíritu de comprensión para con las dificultades de la “nueva etapa”.
Aunque el padre Leonardo Castellani no se llevaba bien ni con los miembros salientes de la Comisión, ni con los nuevos, su nombre fue sugerido por ese cónclave como uno de los más prestigiosos que la “literatura católica” podía acercar a esa mesa, servida el miércoles 19 de mayo de 1976 en la Casa de Gobierno para “conversar abierta, francamente, de los problemas que atañen culture in relation to the situation of the country ", as the secretary general of the Presidency, General Jose Villarreal, was responsible for marketing at newspapers in the days prior.
retrospect, you'd better not have, because two of the guests, for those advances, began to be harassed mercilessly to submit certain claims to the commander in chief of the Armed Forces. The executive committee of the SADE, who had won the primaries by his allies in the PC-pressured its president, Horacio Ratti (invited along with Jorge Borges, Ernesto Sabato and Leonardo Castellani) to surrender, and a series of sectoral demands, a list of names of writers missing or imprisoned since March (Haroldo Conti, Alberto Costa, Roberto Santoro, Antonio Di Benedetto, among others). Although Ratti wanted to refuse such assignment, should follow the decision of his sadistic colleagues.
Castellani, meanwhile, had been visited by "a person who, with tears in his eyes, sunk in despair, [it] had begged him to intercede for the life of writer Haroldo Conti, abducted from his home May 4. ("I did not know him but he was a renowned writer and had been a seminarian in his youth. But anyway, no I care about that, then they have been treated for any person, my moral duty to echo who asked for someone whose fate is uncertain at this time. Write your name on paper and handed it to Videla, who picked it up respectfully and said that peace would soon return to the country, "Castellani said two months after the magazine Crisis.)
Despite the informal habeas corpus The lunch was uneventful, and the tenacity of historians has given us exactly the course of service (pudding of vegetables, ravioli with tomato sauce, fruit salad), the satisfaction of the guests and the trivialities of conversational exchanges at this critical time: the problems of the hearing, the low quality of American food, the need for a council of elders for the regulation of the media, the neglect of language ... Over that lunch, which could have changed the country's history, we know everything. Some participants, however, have remained in an unjust oblivion over the years hardly begins to twist.
Arguably Ratti Horacio earth swallowed him or bureaucracy (with justice). But the romantic life of the "angry Jesuit Leonardo Castellani (Reconquista, Santa Fe: November 16, 1899 - † Buenos Aires, March 15, 1981) would have deserved a movie in any country but stunned by the dictates of the academic canon, critical laziness and the book business.
His work, vast and immeasurable (broader than that of Borges, less nihilistic than Sabato, greater plasticity than Arlt: folkloric tales, biblical commentaries, literary criticism, parables jackets, detective stories, fairy stories, pedagogy essays, satire in the magazine Jauja, he founded, and even an annotated translation of the Summa Theologica of Aquinas Doctor), dominates the twentieth century with a brilliance that only now beginning to be felt.
and heroic in a recent book (Castellani critical. Essay discourse on war and the word transfigured, Buenos Aires, Cabiria, 2010), Diego Bentivegna are enlightened by the incandescent proportions of that work, especially in regard to Jesuit as a theorist of reading (understood in all its practical implications: criticism, pedagogy, interpretation of sacred texts, etc ...).
While new Metri father's death (1942) was considered by Rodolfo Walsh as the best book of detective stories written in our country, Bentivegna goes beyond and challenges the hegemony of the critical current, which prevented him from placing myopia its production in its rightful place. Castellani, Bentivegna in perspective, it is placed equidistant from the elitism of Borges and Arlt modern machines and Bioy Casares (as Beatriz Sarlo the ever defined) and without the notion of "word transfigured" to whom he dedicated his extraordinary intellectual ability, among other things, the translation of the Apocalypse of John of Patmos and nationalist outbursts, the cultural landscape of modern Argentina is incomplete. Castellani Bentivegna read a "utopia of heteroglossia." The hypothesis is essential to assess its particular nationalism, above all, to meet all concentration camp fantasies of monolingualism and unique speech, for of which we are now so trapped.
Castellani broken language (taking parts of the cultural language of immigration cocoliche of the classics and popular jargon) stands against any attempt to think of literature as a thing of the spirit (no avant-garde urge the guide) and points in the direction of the "flesh art" of Christianity itself: a "word transfigured" is "an affirmation of the matter, the physical nature of the aesthetic act."
Catholic, Castellani can only sustain universal but their religions, as Giorgio Agamben reminds us, maybe come before relegare that the religare: no rebind is full of links universals, but to relegate all abstract reductionism: in the tension hold life forms, and these margins can be read as literature Argentina (through its obedient minions) does not want to think about himself.
