Roberto Arlt and the Readers of Romance

Abstract

This essay examines the role of female readership in the work of the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt. I argue that the conflicted and embodied status of the reading public in Arlt’s work is crystallized in the female (or feminized) reader of romances. Through this figure, the Arltian text reveals the pervasiveness of normative sentimental discourse, and narrates how this discourse circulates, impacts, and is absorbed by the bodies of its readers. These critiques emerge quite clearly in Arlt’s novels, where the author enjoys greater freedom of expression. However, his periodical publications and theater necessarily employ a more oblique critical strategy. Focusing on his aguafuertes, the short story “Eugenio Delmonte y los 1300 novios” and the play Trescientos millones, I show how Arlt interpolates his readers as readers of romance while also enacting a rupture in the boundary between the work and the medium in which it appears, encouraging the reader’s awareness of the influence of those media in her daily life.