Losing the World, Falling into the Flesh: Roberto Arlt Phenomenologist

Abstract

This article aims to offer a sample of the phenomenological acuity of the prose of Roberto Arlt, the most influential Argentine novelist of the twentieth century, through the study of a section of his most famous novel: The Seven Madmen (1929). In it, the narrator-chronicler describes the psychotic crisis suffered by the protagonist after being abandoned by his wife, a description whose terms coincide in a surprising way with those of Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life. Arlt, however, adds avant-la-lettre a new dimension to the phenomenological strand inaugurated by Henry, namely: the description of the schizoid split as the loss of the world and the fall into the flesh. But beyond fixing an eidetic determination of this disorder, Arlt’s originality as a phenomenologist lies in the narrative device that allows him to grasp the texture of the protagonist’s experiences. In this sense, the stereoscopic representation of the novel and the metaphoric language used by it to depict the invisible life of the flesh can be considered as the specific contribution of fiction to both existential phenomenology and phenomenological psychiatry.