Intense, intense, intense - The Seven Madmen is Argentine author Roberto Arlt’s innovative masterpiece, a novel published in 1929 having an immense influence on "Boom" generation writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaño and César Aira. Also Julio Cortázar, who wrote of his deep literary connection with Roberto Arlt in the introductory essay included in this New York Reviews Books edition.
A childhood spent in squalor in a dilapidated boardinghouse on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, physically and emotionally abused by his father, Roberto Arlt was kicked out of school at age eight and ran away from home at sixteen. Augusto Remo Erdosian, the protagonist of The Seven Madmen, shares much of the same background as the author.
Masturbation, prostitution, child beatings, desperation, hopelessness, violence, murder, insanity – subjects addressed in stark, frank, even brutal language, The Seven Madmen brings to mind for me such modern day novels as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares. And with his plummeting dark recesses of the mind and exploring the seedier sides of human motives and actions, a number of critics have also likened Roberto Arlt to Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The storyline in a nutshell: debt collector Erdosian will go to jail if he doesn’t cough up the money he embezzled from his employers at the Sugar Company; his wife Elsa leaves him; he borrows money to save himself from jail and then devises a plan of kidnapping, theft and murder to change his life.
However, the core of Roberto Arlt’s novel isn't so much plot as it is about residents of Buenos Aires driven to madness of one variety or the other - and at the top of the list is none other than the novel's main character, Remo Erdosian.
Erdosian is study in frustration, a man attempting to work out his anxiety and rage, his “anguish zone” by, among other dreamy illusions, picturing himself as the star in a rags to riches North American film. In this way, Roberto Arlt anticipates a major theme of Manuel Puig - poor Argentinians will use Hollywood films to escape their crushing poverty (the silver screen replaces religion as the opium of the people).
Among Erdosian’s other fantasies are setting up his state-of-the-art laboratory to invent gadgets and discover new formulas that will prove him the next Thomas Edison and thus make him rich. Or, slightly more probable, the ways he will inflict injury and destroy that loathsome cur with shaven head, bird of prey nose and greenish eyes - his wife’s disgusting cousin, Barsut. Either way, Erdosian can envision himself the supreme victor, vanquishing adversaries both near and far.
Erdosian’s hypersensitivity adds fuel to the massive fire that is his agony, his torment and affliction. Does this sound too melodramatic? In his Introduction, Julio Cortázar cites Arlt’s tendency throughout his career to lapse into melodrama, sentimentality and vulgarity. But in this instance, having just been issued an ultimatum by his bosses and in the evening humiliated by his wife Elsa leaving him forever, hand-in-hand with a hefty Captain no less, such extreme heart-wrenching woe seems entirely appropriate.
Poor Erdosian! All alone in his bed that night, squeezing his eyes shut, burying his head in his pillow, he feels he's carrying all the world's suffering inside his skin. “Where on earth could there possibly be anyone whose skin was so gourged with bitterness. He felt he was no longer a man, but a wound that writhed and screamed with every throb of his veins.” And again: “Erdosian felt himself crushed by a sense of pure dread. His life could not have been flatter if he had gone through the rollers of a sheet-metal mill.”
After living through that torturous night with Erdosian, readers can appreciate the protagonist’s sensitivity and despair, both of which combine to form a film coating all his subsequent interactions.
First off, Erdosian meets repeatedly with the Astrologer. Listening to the Astrologer’s plans of forming a secret society comprised of an elite master race where the mass of humanity, those lower, base humans, will either be murdered or forced into slavery, has an eerie, nightmarish tone. Let’s not forget, published in 1929, The Seven Madmen predates the rise of the Nazis.
A Pharmacist by the name of Ergueta tells Erdosian he has figured out the patterns of world history and unfolding day-to-day events by reading the signs of the Fourth Seal and the Pale Horsemen from the Bible. Ergueta also claims, thanks to his great innocence, Jesus has revealed the secret law of static synchronicity to him alone so he can win at roulette. Later on in the tale, Hipólita, Ergueta’s wife, asks Erdosian for help since her husband lost their life savings at a casino and is now committed to an insane asylum.
Erdosian makes for an ideal listener. A man known as the Melancholy Thug reveals the bare bones truth regarding his role as a pimp for a string of Buenos Aires prostitutes and how he is doing society and those young ladies a great favor by protecting them from arrest by the police and violence from their customers. A gold prospector speaks in glowing terms of all the gold he owns only to admit the gold is still in the ground – it’s only a matter of him finding it and digging it up. Hipólita recounts how back when she was sixteen-years old, she read books and magazines, even consulted a lawyer, all in an effort to find out how she could sell herself - becoming a prostitute was a great step up, a path to freedom, from her job as a domestic housekeeper. These snippets to highlight The Seven Madmen contains doses of black humor between ample helpings of nitty-gritty realism.
The Seven Madmen gives a reader the sense what passes as civilized society is but a thin outer crust over an ocean of pain and madness. All you have to do is scratch the surface and the vast majority of people, especially hordes of poor people, are seething with resentment over their childhood (usually the victims of child abuse), inadequate education and inability to do anything but barely eek out an abysmal, disgusting hand-to-mouth existence. Life has become a life sentence where individuals are sentenced to their own private madhouse.
Argentine author Roberto Arlt, 1900-1942
“Who can say what had already died in him? All that remained of his feelings was an awareness which existed outside all that was happening to him, a soul as keenly thin as a sword-blade, which slithered like an eel through the murky waters of his life.” - Roberto Arlt, The Seven Madmen
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