Strife for the popular: Claridad against avant-garde writers in Crítica (Argentina, 1926-1927)

Abstract

In the decade of the 1920s Crítica, the most popular newspaper in Buenos Aires, added to its editorial staff several writers who had links to the aesthetic avant-garde of the Martín Fierro magazine. A picture taken at the inauguration of the paper´s new headquarters in 1927 shows its director with some of them; the people´s paper had also become the house of the poets, whose modern song was now in unison with the rotary press. With a contradiction characteristic of those times of change, the very avant-garde writers who expressed their rejection of the market were trying to conquer an expanded space of circulation. In 1926, the Martín Fierro magazine owned two small publishing houses destined to take the work of the avant-garde writers to the great mass of the readership. Such strategies show an interest in participating in the process of modernization not only through aesthetic proposals but also through expansion in the market, an aim shared with other cultural producers that were located in a completeley opposite place, be it aesthetically or politically. That was the case of the left-wing magazine and publishing house Claridad, whose initiaves were, in this regard, successful beyond comparison. Nevertheless, however meagre results the aesthetic avant-garde´s attempts to enlarge its readership by means of their own institutions for circulation and publicity had, the same cannot be said as regards the relationship some of those writers started with the mass media. In particular, the success of the newspaper Crítica caused several of them to find there, at least partially, a means of sustenance and a space for the circulation of their aesthetic ideas and their literary practice. As a critical reaction to that profitable aliance, the magazine Claridad began a campaign of agression and discredit through articles that were destined to criticise the contributions of some journalists of the new sensitivity in the popular newspaper. This paper shall deal with that series of writings, published between 1926 and 1927, and the important implications they brought about.