Federico Gauffin’s En tierras de Magú Pelá (1932): A Modernist Bildungsroman, an Intertextual Dialogue with Güiraldes and Arlt, and a Reaction to the Nationalist Project

Abstract

En tierras de Magu Pela (1932), the first novel of an obscure Argentine writer, Federico Gauffin, is a semi-autobiographical account of his experiences on an expedition he had joined nearly three decades earlier to explore the Pilcomayo River in the Chaco region of northeast Argentina. The novel has received little critical attention, yet it is an invaluable piece of regionalist writing, and it also reveals something of the role of writers vis-a-vis the state and the 1930s Nationalist Project. Most significant, I will argue, are the ways in which the novel works within the narrative structure of the bildungsroman while testing the limits of the genre. The result is not merely another noteworthy Spanish American contribution to the bildungsroman but an intertextual dialogue with contemporary works that have become seminal pieces of Argentine literary history, most notably Ricardo Guiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra and Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso. One commonality between these three very different novels is that their apparent failures are paradoxically the keys to their success when viewed from a modernist bildungsroman point of view.