Dystopian Buenos Aires

Abstract

This article explores the dystopian presence of Buenos Aires in Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos (The seven madmen) and its companion novel, Los lanzallamas (The flamethrowers). Both belong to a tradition of metropolitan narrative represented in Europe by authors such as Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin and James Joyce. Arlt’s work, however, has a distinctive character, since it connects the expectations and anxieties unleashed by modernity with a dystopian imagination which has origins in nineteenth-century Argentina with its raison d’être being profoundly linked to the formation of an Argentine national identity.