Reading books in Buenos Aires

This thesis began with my discovery of Argentine literature during a two-and-a-half-year sojourn in that country from 2006–2008. My creative work arose from my wish to reflect upon and account for the experience of learning Spanish in Buenos Aires, and reading about the city’s history and culture in the work of its writers, as well as the work of foreign writers who travelled there during the 20th century. There are two parts to this thesis – an exegesis and a creative work of narrative non-fiction, both of which seek to introduce a selection of Argentine writers to Anglophone readers. In the creative work, my audience is what Virginia Woolf, via Alexander Pope, called ‘the common reader’. The work is a bibliomemoir, where the terrain covered is both literary and geographical, as well as personal. Reading has always provided an extra dimension to travel, allowing the outsider additional points of access to the foreign culture she seeks to know. Books can inform the reader of a city’s history, culture and stories, its place in the world, while also offering the city as an imagined space that she can inhabit and share as she wanders its streets. My creative work focuses on what Argentina’s 20th-century writers had to say about argentinidad, or Argentine national identity. I mostly read those works that were, at the time of my sojourn, available in English translation – as such my selection is somewhat arbitrary and haphazard (this dubious criterion also serves my potential Anglophone reader, who will be unable to access untranslated work). I was also guided by my own interest, particularly in women writers, some of whom are only now being rediscovered for what might be called the Argentine canon. Reading lists that are guided by the writer’s idiosyncratic tastes, as well as the random limitations of circumstance, are characteristic of the bibliomemoir form. Victoria Ocampo is one such writer, and while I dedicate a chapter of my creative work to her biography, the exegesis focuses on her literary output, which, until recent years, has been somewhat neglected by scholars. Ocampo, who is virtually unheard of in Australia, wrote across the genres of autobiography, memoir, travel writing and literary criticism (genres also frequently crossed by bibliomemoirs), and I have studied her work as a way of examining questions that are of deep interest to me: the relationship between reading and identity, writing and identity, and the ways in which both reading and writing work to generate national identities. Ocampo’s writings challenge overwhelmingly masculine notions of argentinidad, and her ideas about nationhood have something to offer to any national community seeking to understand itself beyond traditional tropes of military glory and settler-colonial frontier heroism. The resonance with Australia’s situation is clear, and is made explicit by Ocampo’s elaboration of a South-South connection between her country and mine via her highly idiosyncratic analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo. I hope my discussion of these untranslated essays represents a useful addition to the scholarship in this field