Dirty life, by Roberto Arlt

There is an Argentine writer, little known to the general public but revered by critics, who deserves a place in the pantheon of the Idiots. His name is Roberto Arlt: a literary and social outsider, a political rebel forever on the margins and never in line, the chronicler of a grimy, plebeian Buenos Aires—cursed and electric with the dreams and failures of its inhabitants.

He lived briefly and wrote relentlessly: novels, short stories, plays, journalistic columns. Everything about him carries the rhythm of a febrile life—contradictory, constantly in motion, always on the edge.

Roberto Arlt loved to lie, especially about himself. He toyed with his name, his birthdate, the details of his education. He portrayed himself as poorer, more proletarian, and less educated than he really was. In his autobiographical accounts, he insisted on the image of a boy expelled from every school, a penniless autodidact raised among workshops and courtyards. The truth was less brutal, but Arlt needed to fashion himself as an outcast, a literary “savage,” someone who wrote without rules or academic blessing. This distorted self-portrait is his first outsider’s gesture: not only writing outside the canon, but staging his own life as if it were a novel—ramshackle and miserable. In the end, a writer is not only what he publishes, but also the character he invents of himself.

There is a ferocity in Arlt that hurts, fascinates, and spares no one—neither the poor, nor women, nor himself. It is the ferocity of what some described as “a demonic, aggressive, violent, and sinful spirit.” In his novels, hallucination and madness are not illnesses but escape routes, popular utopias. To be mad is to break out of daily hell, to find a crack in misery: the lottery, astrology, the miraculous invention are stand-ins for miracles, illusions that become a means of survival. In his characters, despair always takes the shape of flight—away from poverty, mediocrity, humiliation. But that flight is impossible; every dream shatters, every scheme dissolves. It is in this short circuit that his literature draws its power: in the tension between the desire for omnipotence and the certainty of the fall.

Inventing is just another way of escaping, of running away. Arlt was a writer, yes, but above all an inventor. He said so himself: “I am not a writer who invents; I am an inventor who writes.”

In 1934, he patented a “system for galvanizing women’s stockings” to make them indestructible. Together with the actor Pascual Naccaratti, he founded the company ARNA: the plan was to conquer the female market and, with the profits, build a theatre of his own. The venture failed, but it remains the clearest symbol of his hunger for redemption: escaping mediocrity with a stroke of genius, a miraculous invention that would free him from debt and from the grind of daily journalism. The art of inventing spills over the boundary between life and literary fiction; his alter egos—from Silvio Astier to Remo Erdosain—are visionary, desperate inventors, obsessed with absurd and brilliant machines: a falling-star detector, a dictation typewriter, a dog-dyeing shop, pressed bricks, copper roses. Mechanical utopias, mirages of instant wealth, are always destined to collapse.

Literature is a commodity, not a heavenly calling. By the age of eight, Arlt had already sold a short story and was proud of it—unlike Borges, who treated money as something shameful, best kept out of sight. Arlt puts it front and center: in his newspaper columns, his novels, his popular theatre. He writes to survive, to pay debts, to earn a living. Ricardo Piglia puts it plainly: for Arlt, money is the greatest storyteller in the world, because it governs passions, organizes plots, and fuels mysteries. As in Balzac’s Comédie humaine, it is the great demiurge of destinies. But where Balzac’s wealth is a solid social force, embedded in class relations, in Arlt it turns into a simulacrum, crime, illusion. His characters don’t earn money—they invent it. To get it, they must lie, forge, fabricate stories; and it is in that imaginary act—in producing money as fiction—that they discover literature.

Silvio Astier counts the banknotes from his first theft as if they had a language of their own. Erdosain dreams of alchemical inventions and secret formulas that can turn emptiness into wealth. In Arlt’s novels, there is no such thing as “honest” money—wages or savings. That money is mute, gray, incapable of generating stories; only stolen, forged, invented money has an expressive voice. Only crime produces literature.

That is why writing becomes his most powerful machine: “a machine for printing pesos,” as he called it in one of his Aguafuertes. Literature replaces the magical power of the money he doesn’t have and keeps chasing. In his work, getting rich is the same as being saved. And even if wealth always fades into illusion, what remains is writing, conceived as “a punch straight to the jaw.”

Arlt did not write “well.” He claimed it himself, without apology: “I make spelling mistakes—so what? I don’t know how to write—so what? I’m still here.” His prose was a jumble of popular Spanish, lunfardo, Italianisms, errors, and broken sentences. The bourgeois critics of his time dismissed him as sloppy, unfit for the canon; today, that “wrong” language sounds like the only one capable of giving back the true voice of Buenos Aires.

Once again, Ricardo Piglia says it better than anyone else: Arlt’s style stands in open opposition to the petty-bourgeois norm of hypercorrection. It is a style made of scraps and leftovers, always boiling over. It is not salon language, but street language—dirty and alive. A literature that does not blush at its mistakes, because mistakes are the sign of life beating underneath.

That same language carries the taste of Buenos Aires streets in the 1920s and ’30s. Think of the famous “Get lost, you little punk, get lost,” Ergueta’s razor-sharp retort in The Seven Madmen: a plebeian insult, opaque to anyone who learned Spanish only from books, but electrifying to those who recognize the echo of courtyards and cheap boarding houses. It is a bastard tongue forcing its way into literature, turning slang into novelistic matter.

His access to culture was “criminal,” quite literally. In The Mad Toy, the protagonist steals books from a school library. It is a perfect metaphor for Arlt’s education: a chaotic autodidact, reader of shoddy translations, lover of feuilletons—omnivorous and urgent. Literature understood not as a career, but as a heist: a smash-and-grab, a desperate act of conquest.

Arlt was an irregular in politics as well. He flirted with socialism, communism, and anarchism, but never committed to a defined militancy; he was more at ease with social critique and attacks on institutions than with party discipline. To some, he was a “revolutionary holy man,” hardened by the misery of the liberal city; to others, a petty bourgeois obsessed with the “Gardelian leap” that would lift him out of scarcity. In truth, both drives coexisted in him, along with a slippery, evasive current that makes it hard to pin him down to any fixed ideology.

His journalistic work crossed very different terrains: from the nationalist paper Patria Libre (1921) to the Boedo magazines close to socialism and anarchism, and on to solidly middle-brow outlets like El Hogar and El Mundo, where from 1928 he published the famous Aguafuertes porteñas. With Elías Castelnuovo, a central figure of Boedo, he co-founded in 1932 the Union of Proletarian Writers, aligned with the USSR and opposed to imperialism and fascism. And yet the same Arlt served as secretary to Ricardo Güiraldes, a leading figure of Martín Fierro, the heart of the Florida group—Boedo’s declared enemy.This apparent double allegiance reveals his true nature: Arlt was never a “party man.” His ethics were those of contradiction and provocation, not discipline. The conflicting judgments he received confirm it. For the socialist Aníbal Ponce, he was an “immoralist”; for the communist Raúl Larra, he was “a tortured soul” who could nonetheless be claimed as “one of ours.” Contorno, the journal that devoted a monographic issue to him in 1954, rejected that appropriation outright: “Arlt a communist? No—nothing to do with it. An eminently rebellious spirit, he would have reacted violently against the crimes of the USSR.”

More than Marxist orthodoxies, what drew him in were anarchist utopias: the pull toward an absolute freedom of the individual, far removed from masses and collective discipline. There was no feel-good solidarity in him, no faith in progress, but rather an accumulation of negativity directed at the bourgeois order—from the Casa Rosada to the family itself.

Today, this ambiguity may be the best key to reading him. Arlt belongs neither to Boedo nor to Florida, neither to the left nor to the right. He is a writer who rejects every banner and yet carries politics within him—not as a program, but as a dirty, restless smoke that seeps through his work. His involuntary anarchism, his rebellion without a party, was the most authentic form of his marginality.

Arlt versus Borges, Borges versus Arlt. There is no sharper opposition in Argentine literature. Suppose Borges was the library—erudition, universal myth—Arlt was the street: crime, madness. Borges spoke a clear, refined Castilian, trained among the books of Oxford and Geneva; Arlt wrote in a bastard language, riddled with errors and neologisms, fed by the street and popular newspapers. Borges moved through the salons of Florida; Arlt through the boarding houses of Once. It is what Cortázar would later condense into a definitive formula: the library versus the street.

Their mutual judgments were merciless. Borges called him a half-delinquent communist, extraordinarily uneducated. Arlt replied that Borges enjoyed a fame greater than his merits. Two biographies that seem written by a schizophrenic playwright: the aesthete of labyrinths and the street brawler; the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the indestructible stockings.

And yet, it was precisely from this antagonism that Argentine modernity emerged. Borges built the mythical Buenos Aires; Arlt the plebeian one. Borges wrote for eternity, Arlt for the present. Borges embodied the cosmopolitan man of letters who dreamed of a literature “without local stains”; Arlt, the urban chronicler, plunged into the city’s dirty alleyways. Borges is formal perfection, Arlt raw power; Borges continuity with tradition, Arlt rupture. Two opposing poles, and at the same time complementary, without which twentieth-century Argentine literature would be impossible to understand.

Arlt died in 1942, only forty-two years old, never having found stability or full recognition. But time proved him right. In the 1970s, Ricardo Piglia consecrated him as “the only truly modern writer produced by twentieth-century Argentine literature.” Later, César Aira called him “the greatest Argentine novelist.”

Today, his novels—The Mad Toy, The Seven Madmen, The Flamethrowers—are seen as the great chronicle of the crisis of the 1930s, capable of weaving the Argentine context together with the major universal questions of the time: fascism, communism, new religions, and the desperate need to believe in something. Arlt was already decoding the mechanisms of capitalism back then: sex, money, power.His work continues to ferment, be reread, and rediscovered by every generation. His chronicles are reprinted, his sentences keep circulating, and his characters return to speak to us.

Roberto Arlt is a classic without legitimacy—an oxymoron that explains his strength. He lived and died on the margins, amid economic precarity and scant recognition, yet time has turned him into an unavoidable point of reference. Forgotten after his death, unearthed again in the mid-1950s, and definitively rediscovered in the 1970s, he is now regarded as the founder of Argentine metropolitan narrative: a writer who gave literary form to the modernity of the metropolis. His work oscillates between extremes—an unhappy life and belated fame, the image of the eternal loser and that of a consecrated icon alongside Borges and Cortázar. This unresolved tension keeps him perpetually alive, perpetually unsettling, perpetually necessary—impossible to domesticate.

His literature remains a machine that never stops delivering shocks: a punch to the gut that still forces us to look at the city, and at ourselves, without filters or consolation.

Idiots of the world, read and love Roberto Arlt! Dirty life by Roberto Arlt