Emilio Lascano Tegui
On Elegance While Sleeping
VISCOUNT LASCANO TEGUI AND ON ELEGANCE WHILE SLEEPING: THE FRINGES OF A POETICS
My interest in Lascano Tegui was piqued by a now-distant exchange of pleasantries (more social than literary) appearing in publications and magazines during the modernist period in that space we call Latin American. I like to recall, among many others, the image outlined by the editors of the Cuban weekly Revista de Avance in 1928, because it establishes what would practically become the model for describing Tegui thereafter:
Viscount Lascano Tegui recently passed through Havana. He has the stocky build characteristic of the Argentine pampas, the smile of a boulevardier, and the skeptical eyes of a globetrotter. He devoured the ubiquitous stuffed crab at a local restaurant. He made the rounds on San Rafael and Galiano with his enormous Kodak camera. And he then regaled us with his magnificent hospitality, two hours full of refined humor and polished opinions on board the SS Cap Polonio […] At the end of this visit from Lascano Tegui, one of the first Argentineans to give voice to “the new sensibility,” we were left with abiding fond memories and a treasured copy of On Elegance While Sleeping. Safe travels for our good friend.1
It’s possible that this self-image was Lascano Tegui’s first artistic creation, for not only did Tegui know how to make a name for himself wherever he went, he also managed to bestow a noble title upon himself, an audacity he shared with his neighbor on the other side of the Río de la Plata, in Uruguay: Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont. The lofty, enigmatic Viscount seems to entirely overwhelm the humble Emilio we find on occasion in a few lines of the odd encyclopedia, full of erroneous bibliographic entries — as numerous as they are rare2—and almost always misquoted.
In addition to the list of verified titles Lascano Tegui published, starting in 1910—and which remained out of print even in Argentina until the nineties — there are references to other titles that are often quite difficult to verify. Furthermore, there is also a secret realm — a secret within the secret — made up of the articles published by Lascano Tegui in Patoruzú, a Buenos Aires magazine that was as widely read and popular as it was typically Porteño.
His reputation as major figure in the literary world of Buenos Aires is also corroborated in a speech that Norah Lange dedicated to the Viscount on September 10, 1936, at a reception marking the publication of his autobiographical novels Album de Familia (Family Album) and El libro celeste (The Heavenly Book).3 Even in Lange’s objective, sardonic tone, one can sense — in addition to the affection she has for her good friend — that she feels slightly uneasy about the radical nature of Lascano Tegui’s writing: she speaks of “psychosis” and “cerebral chaos,” and one could almost say that she’s a little envious of his mastery of “that delirium tremens for which we search in vain behind armoires, under the bed, and in the gaps of the crown molding.”
While with other “atypical” writers the condition of being “unknown” usually carries with it an air of tragedy (as is the case with Pablo Palacio or Jacobo Fijman, for example, who died in mental hospitals, or with Edwin Elmore, the Peruvian, who was murdered by Santos Chocano), with Viscount Tegui one is surprised by his persistent youthful vigor — youth being the banner under which the early twentieth-century avant-gardists set out in pursuit of the new, of course, but which Tegui maintained, almost as an act of defiance, many years after the initial modernist fervor died down, in the pages of a publication that must have seemed far removed from the high-cultural headwinds of the time, and the happy few to whom his first books were dedicated.4
Between 1945 and 1951, Tegui published his weekly column in Patoruzú, on themes that must surely have surprised or at least perplexed his former colleagues, but which also must have entertained his new, expanded audience, due to his engaging treatment of the trivial: vacations, fashion, the weaknesses of a man in love, the automobile, banks, hats, streetcars, as well as proper etiquette, male flirtation, and grooming one’s hands.
“On Manicures and the Sense of Touch”—issue 605, from May 1949—reasserts, albeit in very different genre and literary space, the sophisticated theme of the hand as a fetish object, or the fetishization of the hand, with which he begins On Elegance While Sleeping. In that article, the seasoned reader of Tegui will find a clear point of contact between his early novel and the later feuilletons.
On Elegance While Sleeping is presented as a personal diary, but it could also be read as a fictitious autobiography or a novel about origins, about initiation into the worlds of sex, literature, and crime. The choice of the diary as the form of the novel is justified by a certain structural aesthetic that dominates the text: that of fragmentation, instability, and changing perspectives. The convention of providing a date for each section, even though the dates are irregular, serves to mark limits, cutoffs, and pauses, and allows the narrator to jump from one subject to another without making the transition feel too abrupt.
Although this fragmentation is dictated by the conventions of the genre, it also justifies the changes in register: stories within stories, the evocation of memories, transcendental reflections, crisscrossing narrative voices, sequences that are interrupted as self-assuredly as they began; the transition from an elegiac to a sentimental tone, and from ironic to cynical; and the temporal fluctuation between a known past that is narrated — characteristic of autobiography — and the illusion of an immediate present in the diary itself.
Through this fragmentation, an apocryphal “I” is created, the apocryphal “I” of the author of the apocryphal diary, in an apocryphal time, characterized by a necessity of, or fondness for, disguise, change, and evolution. At one point a bout with typhoid fever leaves him bald; at another he is obliged to dye his red hair black to properly mourn his dead mother. His hatred of the daguerreotype — all the rage during the era the novel supposedly takes place — underscores his rejection of the fixed image. The narrator of the diary describes and constructs himself not as the static image of someone posing for a picture, characteristic of the nineteenth century, but as an image that prefigures the frantic movement of early cinema, even though literature is the model throughout; the narrator is reflected — and is brought to a logical conclusion — in the moving image of cinema.
The aesthetic of instability is also the aesthetic of arbitrariness and inversion: “The need for effects gave birth to stupendous causes,” says the author of the diary. Instability, evolution, and transvestitism inform one of the central sequences of the text, about the seductiveness of homosexuality, of “inverted” sexuality. Balanced between fascination and fear, this sequence describes the trepidation of a man who feels that he is transforming into a woman under the amorous gaze of the other and constructs a story of a love unattained:
At last I raised my eyes from their atonement and saw him looking at my hands, saw how, from his perspective, they must appear so soft and pink, how my lips were so red as to seem painted, how my clothes were of blue silk and my cuffs and collar made of lace.
The other man then leaves, and the narrator exaggeratedly reaf-firms his masculine identity in a peculiar recounting of his sexual exploits, also characteristic of the personal diary. Literary treatment of this topic ranges in tone from the veiled references of a Sarmiento to the audacious declarations of a Lascano Tegui: “How many kilometers have I traveled in pursuit of a woman’s breast!”
In other parts of the novel, the seductiveness of transvestitism and homosexuality is treated with contempt, in keeping with the reigning societal ethic, which today is quite difficult to comprehend. As such, the narrator establishes a parodic distance from homosexuality, resorting to the crudest naturalist tendencies. The
stigma of the homosexual’s condition is thus visible in his hands: “Have you ever seen anything quite so blunt yet unreliable as the thumbs of a sodomite? Next to the rest of their dapper, delicate hands, their thumbs stand out like bastards…”
For that reason the narrator proposes, “They should really only have four fingers on each hand.”
The fragmentary nature of the text is intensified by the use of certain typographical features, chiefly the copious blank spaces and, in the original edition, the illustrations of Raúl Monsegur. Fragmentation, but also ambiguity; the ambiguity typical of a genre that pretends to be private, yet is made public. The illusion of authenticity that the canon bestows upon the personal diary (especially since the end of the nineteenth century) cannot conceal the paradoxical status engendered by the tension between the private and the public. Due to this tension, every personal diary that is published ends up negating itself as such; what is highlighted in this negation is the ambiguity of all literature and a disbelief in all literature that pretends to be realist or verisimilar.
Lascano Tegui also distances himself from the genre of the personal diary when he defines it at the end of the entry dated “September 4, 18—,” one of the few occasions in which the text appears to deal with personal feelings:
This page is inexplicable in the diary of my life. I’ve written it tenderly, as though I was once in love. It seems like sacrilege to include it as part of this intimate experiment, in which we’re testing the consolatory effects of speaking badly about others to ourselves.
On the other hand, the novel’s openness to the most seemingly trivial things — like the grooming of one’s fingernails — illustrates two virtues that modern society tends to consider vices: the cult of idleness and the cult of the minimal. The very idea of a personal diary suggests that the text is composed of “idle” musings, or at least that it’s the kind of book that is only possible when one has plenty of free time, plenty of time that isn’t spent doing actual paid work; and when this impression is further confirmed by the fact that the book begins with an almost hyperrealist episode about a minimal detail like fingernails and fingernail clippings, the substitution of the ridiculous for the serious and the important seems assured.
At any rate, an unreliable autobiography that takes the form of a personal diary raises many questions. One has to do with what can be called the biographical and autobiographical impulse in Lascano Tegui. Indeed, one could read his El libro celeste (1936) as a biography of an entire country, with a focus on the Viscount’s own particular autobiography, or read El Muchacho de San Telmo (The Kid from San Telmo, 1944) as an oscillation between this autobiography and the biography of a city, or at least one of its neighborhoods.
The violence of Lascano Tegui’s gesture — the parodic appropriation of the genre of personal diary — might cause some initial perplexity and discouragement in a reader, perhaps exacerbated by the novel’s focus on the trivial as the starting point for its “story.” Furthermore, the novel is doubly removed from anything resembling a real diary, since the immediacy of what we expect from diaries — the sensation of living in the moment — is replaced by the defining trait of the genre of autobiography: recounting a life that has already been lived. “This journal I write, almost without wanting to, as dusk falls, doesn’t always paint a true picture of what’s happened to me. Rather, these are evocations of events, the memory of which passes its pen across my brow.”
Within this space, this vacillation between genres, Tegui presents a personal history that is structured in such a way as to culminate with a crime (in this, the influence of de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” weighs heavily). The entire text moves in this direction. If all writing is displacement, transference, travel, movement, Lascano Tegui — great traveler that he is — constructs an itinerary that departs from what we’ll call “the customs of the drowned” (taking a cue from Alfred Jarry) and travels toward the consummation of a gratuitous murder. The voyage begins earlier, however, with the manicure that readies those criminal hands and kicks off the trip:
My hands no longer looked like they belonged to me. I put them on my table, in front of my mirror, and changed their positions in the light. With the same sense of self-consciousness one feels when posing for a photographer, I picked up a pen and began to write.
That’s how I started this book.
At the Moulin Rouge that night I heard a woman standing nearby say in Spanish: “He cares for his hands like a man preparing for a murder.”
The depiction of the hand as fetish object runs through the entire book, from the hand that does the writing to the idea of writing as the consummation of a crime. Along the route that leads from the pencil to the dagger, the “theme of the hand” takes us down numerous detours — there is the fear of amputation in severed hands and severed genitals; hands that caress genitals, sometimes kindling fear and other times pleasure; the hands of the dead; hands with curative powers wearing black fingerless gloves or the clumsy hands that perform abortions; the hands of the drowned, upraised as if signaling for help; the hand of the onanist and the hand of the “sodomite.” Tegui’s image of death: “I’ve watched my family fall the way a leper watches his cold, swollen hands drop off in pieces.”
The Viscount surprises us with the ephemeral, fragmentary quality conferred upon his text by the outrageousness of writing about serious subjects in a light, sardonic tone. The elegant tightrope act of narrating gratuitous crime, rape, abortion, homosexuality, the world of the brothel (an orientalized one, at that), the human body corrupted by illnesses: typhoid fever, tuberculosis, syphilis, insanity, leprosy; filth, misery, the secret and the shameful: everything that is not to be spoken of. This novel surprises us by the levity of its tone, as well as by something that I would provisionally define as the intersection between a certain naturalist aesthetic and a pataphysical air.
And then it is also true that our Viscount crossed paths with the more working-class Roberto Arlt, who at this same time was publishing two prose pieces in Proa—the literary magazine run by Jorge Luis Borges, Brandan Caraffa, Ricardo Güiraldes, and Pablo Rojas Paz — which would eventually become two chapters of the famous Mad Toy (1926).
There are mysterious points of contact between Arlt and Lascano Tegui, as well as differences that may prove relevant: whereas Arlt works with some seriousness, the Viscount adopts the guise of frivolity. They can be read as two contemporary yet divergent aesthetics, products of the same period pointing to two different literary spaces. On the one hand, sex and money: a poetics of labor. On the other hand, sex and idleness: a poetics of laissez faire. A willful misreading. One wonders if the secret to Lascano Tegui’s writings might also lie in a willful misreading.
CELINA MANZONI
UNIVERSITY OF BUENOS AIRES
Translated by Rhett McNeil
~ ~ ~
I write out of pure voluptuousness, I confess. I write for myself and for friends. I don’t have a large audience or fame and don’t receive awards. I know all the literary strategies intimately and despise them. The naïveté of my contemporaries pains me, but I respect it. I’m also conceited enough to believe I never repeat myself or steal from other writers, to believe I’ll always remain a virgin, and this narcissism doesn’t come cheap. I have to suffer the indifference of those around me. But, as I said, I write out of pure voluptuousness. And so, like a courtesan, I’ll take my sweet time, and begin by kicking off my shoe.
VISCOUNT LASCANO TEGUI
ON ELEGANCE WHILE SLEEPING
The first time I entrusted my hands to a manicurist was the evening I was headed to the Moulin Rouge. The woman trimmed back my cuticles and polished my nails with an emery board. Then she filed them to points and finished up with some polish. My hands no longer looked like they belonged to me. I put them on my table, in front of my mirror, and changed their positions in the light. With the same sense of self-consciousness one feels when posing for a photographer, I picked up a pen and
began to write.
That’s how I started this book.
At the Moulin Rouge that night I heard a woman standing nearby say in Spanish: “He cares for his hands like a man preparing for a murder.”
MAY 19, 18—
I was born in Bougival. The Seine flows through our village. Fleeing from Paris. Its dark green waters drag in the grime from that happy city. As the river crossed our town, it jammed the millwheel with the bodies of drowning victims, bashful beneath its surface. One last shove and their journeys were at an end. But they couldn’t pass through the sluice gates under the mill, and so it happened, on occasion, that one of their arms would go through without them — and be seen reaching into the air, as if for help. As a child, I fished out a number of these bodies. There was a mailman in town who was famous locally for always being the one to deliver news of a death; I soon developed a similar sort of notoriety, becoming known for having discovered the most cadavers. It gave me a certain distinction among my comrades, and I prided myself on this honor. I threatened the other children that I would soon find them as well — the day they drowned. They’d tilt their heads, imagining themselves tangled in the sluices beneath the mill. My authority was beyond question: I had, in making my grim prediction, planted an inkling of tragedy into everyday life; which is precisely where logic will say it belongs, once the works of Aeschylus have been thoroughly assimilated into human consciousness, and seem as ordinary and simple as a schoolboy’s composition…
Given the pressure and demands of my strange vocation, I became more preoccupied than anyone with the reputation it brought me. When I fished, which was often, I’d cast my line near the mill. I never looked at my cork, the rough current biting into it. All I was waiting for was the sight of a hand sticking up between the sluice gates. If I took a stroll, it was by the mill, and when they cleaned the machinery, I was the first to go down to the drainage cellars to examine the sludge that collected there, picking through the endless species of objects the river had dragged in — tired of its burden, relieving itself of its cargo under bridges and in the swamps along its banks.
On Elegance While Sleeping Page 1
