On Fogwill

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “learned to use a gun at eleven, got his first motorcycle at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, started studying medicine at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero once wrote. Fogwill was born outside Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived until 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a young man, but it wasn’t until 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, after he’d lost the fortune he made in advertising, that his story “Muchacha Punk” won a prestigious writing contest and his literary career took off. In 1982, he wrote his most famous novel, Los pichiciegos. Set during the Falklands War and published while the conflict was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of war, a kind of Slaughterhouse-Five for Argentina, was an immediate sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the military dictatorship. A writer of short stories, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish more than twenty books across a thirty-year career.

Drawing on his background in advertising, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, just so, like Prince or Madonna—into a brand. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing both the military dictatorship and what he called the “horror show” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “almost alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable body of work, an idea, an inimitable way of being, and above all, an ethics.” Known as a generous friend and mentor, he guided younger writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira.

Like his persona, Fogwill’s writing is provocative and irreverent. He absorbed the different strands of the Argentine tradition and produced a literature that defies classification: a literature of ideas and the body, the political and the personal, the ordinary and the ineffable. Nimbly traversing form and genre, he employs myriad styles while maintaining a singular and inimitable sensibility.

Nowhere is this gift more apparent than in his short stories, which range from metafictional parody to drug-fueled delirium, from realism to political satire to forays into genre, from hedonistic escapades to deeply personal explorations of music and art. Despite their density of thought and narrative complexity, his stories are never a slog. At times his prose is euphoric and propulsive; at others, subtle and restrained. Fogwill is interested in the manipulations of social, political, and economic constructs; in the fraught relationship between words and things, between meaning and experience; in the body, the sensorium, and desire; in altered states, dreams, and memory. Humorous and unsettling, acerbic and contemplative, his stories explore the randomness of life and the ways in which meaning rises out of incoherence, revealing itself in flashes, in fragments, in ephemeral moments.

“Muchacha Punk,” the story that launched Fogwill’s literary career, is ostensibly the picaresque tale of the one-night stand an Argentine traveler has with a British “punk girl.” “What’s interesting about this story,” the protagonist states at the outset, “is ‘I slept with’ the punk girl.” And on the surface, that is essentially the plot: a chance encounter on a cold winter night in London, a mutual attraction, an amorous adventure. But what unfolds on the page is far more intricate, evolving into a story that deconstructs itself as it is being written, a story about class and the politics of language, about cultural collision and historical contingency where, against the backdrop of a brewing conflict between Argentina and the UK, a night in the life of one man brings the zeitgeist of a decade into focus.

In “Help a él,” his parodic homage and anagrammatic inversion of Borges’s canonical “El Aleph,” Fogwill reframes the encounter with the fantastical, all-seeing orb of Borges as a psychotropic and erotic episode. While both stories are, ultimately, about loss, about the death of a beloved, “Help a él” manages to bring the cerebral Borgesian experience into the realm of the corporeal and libidinal. Where Borges’s “instrument” allows his protagonist to gain access to the infinite and to thereby hear again the “irretrievable voice” of his lost love, the “syrup” that Fogwill’s protagonist imbibes actuates an intensely lubricious reunion where hallucination, oneiric fantasy, and memory meld together. Like Borges, Fogwill layers in metafictional references; like Borges, Fogwill pokes fun at the figure of the writer and the literary endeavor, but by making transcendence less a matter of knowledge, by taking it out of the library and the labyrinth and grounding it in bodily pleasure, he brings the Borgesian—and by extension, the Argentine—tradition into conversation with a more contemporary cosmology.

Stories like “Japonés” and “Passengers on the Night Train” showcase Fogwill’s chameleonic virtuosity, how he could adapt and eschew genre conventions to create taut, suspenseful narratives while maintaining his poet’s attention to language, his wry humor, and his ludic sensibility. In “Japonés,” Fogwill’s hypnotic prose and detailed knowledge of sailing create an immediacy that put the reader aboard the boat where the narrative takes place, setting up a turn that comes out of nowhere and transforms a tale of adventure and camaraderie into something like a ghost story. “Passengers on the Night Train,” which appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, is a ghost story of a different order, a master class in pacing and perspective, where the vicissitudes of trauma and memory are refracted to disquieting effect through a series of inexplicable events in a small town.

“Day’s Residues,” meanwhile, puts us inside the frayed nerves and disoriented sensory experience of a man at the tail end of a days-long cocaine binge. As the story unfolds, the borders between reality, dream, and hallucination become increasingly porous. Scenarios and characters recur, overlap, and are reconfigured. The overall effect is that the story itself—in its rhythm, its structure, in the way it agitates one’s nerve endings—mimics the movement of a dream. But the unstable narrative footing also occasions moments of poetic lucidity. For Fogwill, dreams are “a dark dissolution” wherein “consciousness breaks down slowly, sloughing off its useless artifice”; a bodiless state wherein the palimpsests of waking life accumulate without meaning and the veil of language drops, revealing things “in their full being.” Dreaming is both the structure and substance of the story, making for an experience of reading that is simultaneously dread-inducing and stimulating, disconcerting and epiphanic and entirely unforgettable.

A prodigy and a polymath, a singer and a sailor, a lover of art, music, tobacco, fast cars, and public outbursts, Fogwill was a brilliant and subversive writer, a larger-than-life figure, Argentina’s quintessential poète maudit. His influence is pervasive and enduring in Spain and Latin America. Although those of us in the Anglophone world might be a little late to the party, here’s hoping his singular body of work finds a foothold here. His writing demands our attention.

Will Vanderhyden is an award-winning translator of Spanish literature.