Buenos Aires connection between exiles. The artistic cooperation and the ideological complicity between Virgilio Piñera and Witold Gombrowicz in the years of common Argentine exile

Abstract

The aim of our essay is to put in relation several short stories of the Cuban narrator Virgilio Piñera and the novel Ferdydurke, which was translated by Witold Gombrowicz –starting from the original in Polish– during the years of his stay in Argentina. The common labor of translation in the lounges of the Rex restaurant consolidates an intellectual relation that is evident in the thematic units analyzed in this work. We will see how the problem of the Form (which Gombrowicz raises openly in his text and which Piñera will reelaborate in his way), is structured in a double slope, common to both narrators: on one hand, the Cuban writer creates a discursive modality based on a crusade that celebrates the sense of humor in opposition to the excesses of a writing replete with metaphors and adornments; on the other hand, the Polish writer elaborates a censorship towards the false exterior maturity of the human beings. In relation with the religious position, the fictional figures of Piñera are human beings alone in the universe, obliged to resist the reality in which the gods have died. What they still have is only their body so the adoration of the spirit is substituted by the adoration of the meat. In the same way, the characters of Ferdydurke live without ideal, nor gods, adapting immature myths to intimate reality of the man. Finally, regarding the humor, we will
emphasize how Piñera's stories are characterized by the choteo, and a sort of black, absurd humor, whichtakes the features of “bloody” disguised elements. We will analyze, especially, the tales “La carne” and “Il gran baro”, and we will put both stories in relation with Ferdydurke, where we can see a more surreal humor, linked with the search of the Immaturity and constructed in a grotesque shape.