| Summary: | During the 1920’s and 1930’s, a great number of writers and journalists produced texts of political criticism combining humour with a particular form of regionalism (costumbrismo). With some exceptions, most of them preferred brief forms : short stories, literary etchings (aguafuertes) or causeries. Because they were regular contributors to journals and magazines such as La Nación, El Hogar, Caras y Caretas, Arturo Cancela, Enrique Loncán and Enrique Méndez Calzada were able to reach large audiences. They were deeply sceptic, openly against Yrigoyen’s policy and, because of their intense negativity, antidemocratic. The target of their mockery is the popular and national government. They show an Argentina that can be glimpsed as a shattered society, amidst the ruins of institutions.But they do not confine themselves to present times. Their texts set up a strategy of extensive demystification of major national narratives. Laughter and stereotype undermine the myths created by Centenario authors, such as Leopoldo Lugones, Manuel Gálvez, Ricardo Rojas – just to name the more representative figures – all of which imagine collective identities for the nation, by displaying real or imagined lineages in their essays. Nationalist writers give themselves the duty of creating a past, in order to nourish with memories what they saw as a cultural and historic desert. The texts mainly adopt the form of monumental and totalizing essays, and attempt to consolidate the greatness of the nation. By constructing a collective memory, national narratives function as archives that hoard traditions and establish genealogies by providing testimony of a primeval past. Between 1923 and 1936, Enrique Loncán publishes four volumes of causeries with a very porteño title, Las charlas de mi amigo, where he revisits the genre by imprinting them with a political point of view. He chooses the forms and tones of the Nineteenth-century causerie to set them with political contents. Jocularity and mockery combine to produce a certain type of textuality that outdistances the pedagogic expression as well as the contemptuous expression. The causerie captures the present as a time of decadence. The literary forms of the national essay and of regional (costumbrista) humoristic accounts offer different ways of conceiving history : archive, memory and continuity counter with fragmentation, instantaneity and the present.
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