“Esas palabras eléctricas”: Arlt on the Telephone

ABSTRACT:The presence of the telephone throughout the work of Roberto Arlt calls for closer examination, for although this sound reproduction technology functions differently in the newspaper writings and novels that made him famous, it always allows this sophisticated media theorist to explore the expanding role of networks in everyday life in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Unlike the publics created and catered to by radio or newspapers, the telephone exhibits a unique combination of intimacy and immediacy that depends on a widely available network of wires extending across the city. After tracing some of the history of Argentine telephony and Arlt’s intersections with it, I review a series of aguafuertes in order to reveal how he understands the specificity of the medium as well as how he occasionally attempts to render this textual space a telephonic one. Turning to his novels, I then address his depictions of the telephone network as a key one among the many that, taken together, constituted a constantly changing city. As I argue, attending to the telephone—and its contrasts to the phonograph and radio—complements other scholarly work on Arlt’s engagements with visual media like cinema and photography. Often appearing alongside each other in his works, telephony sharpens print as an instrument of media theory as the latter, whether as novel or newspaper, retains the crucial ability and responsibility to situate the former.