El Matadero de Esteban Echeverría, o la inauguración de los mataderos

Abstract

The present text recovers and acknowledges the “founding text” character that El Matadero, by Esteban Echeverría, has for Argentine culture. The roots of the text have been analyzed way back in time, connecting them to the origins of the gaucho genre, as well as forward, connecting them to their culminations and projections even in diverse disciplines. Afterwards, the theme of violence will be tackled, not only as a literary recurrence and to precise the way it is interpreted. It is sustained that the violence in El Matadero was latent but present still in other works by Echeverría. Not as much for its theme but for the way it pictures, in accordance to the romantic ideology of the time, the reason and the heart, not only considering the last as an exclusive shelter for feelings but as viscera, and its equivalents such as the stomach and flank steak. This visceral part restricts access to any major formulation, because it does not enter in the parameters of the aesthetics fashionable at the time. From this point of view, I read again the complaints caused by a suffering heart, and understand crying and unhappiness in another way. There is grief because nothing, at least in the literary field, gives an exit to that unschemed and alive background which turns out to be abject since it encloses a form and a content that cannot perceive as its own. Linked to this idea of a face in the shadows, unexpectedly, El Matadero returns to be a “founding text” but of other part of Argentina: the marginal part that cannot be included in projects and that is not much talked about.