Manuel Mujica Lainez
Manuel Bernabé Mujica Lainez (Buenos Aires, September 11, 1910-La Cumbre, April 21, 1984) was an Argentine writer, art critic and journalist. He was known in the Buenos Aires literary environment with the nickname "Manucho."
He is recognized for his cycle of historical novels called "La Saga Porteña", made up of Los idols (1953), La casa (1954), Los Viajeros (1955) and Guests in El Paraíso (1957), for his cycle of historical-fantastic novels made up of Bomarzo (1962), El Unicorn (1965), The Labyrinth (1974) and The Beetle (1982), and famous for his first two story books, Here They Lived (1949) and Mysterious Buenos Aires (1950).
His novel The Labyrinth (1974) is considered one of the last novels belonging to magical realism on the continent. Throughout his life he received numerous distinctions and awards, among which The distinction of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (1964) stands out, the distinction of Commander of the Order of Merit (1967) offered by the Italian government and the Legion of Honor of the Government of France (1982). In 1964, he received the John F. Kennedy Prize for his novel Bomarzo, shared with Julio Cortázar for his novel Hopscotch.
Biography
Family origin and early years
Manuel Mujica Lainez "Manucho" was born in Buenos Aires on September 11, 1910, into a family of aristocratic origins and related to the patrician and founding families of Argentina. He was the son of Manuel Mujica Farías (1870-1939) and Lucía Láinez Varela (1883-1975).He had a younger brother, Roberto Lucio (1913-1993).
His mother, who was fluent in the French language, wrote plays. That is why Manuel had his literary beginnings at the age of six, writing a play. His father was a man who "was always a kind of bachelor"; according to the same "Manucho" She could have been his grandfather and was a wealthy "clubman", since she was his father when he was forty years old, being much older than his mother.
His paternal grandfather was Eleuterio Santos Mujica y Covarrubias—a descendant of Juan de Garay, who was governor of Nueva Andalucía del Río de la Plata from 1578 to 1583 and founder of the cities of Santa Fe in 1573 and Buenos Aires in 1580. — who instilled in him a love for his native land. His maternal grandfather was Bernabé Láinez Cané, who transmitted to him a taste for literature. His maternal grandmother was Justa Varela, a niece of Juan Cruz and Florencio Varela.
Manuel Mujica Lainez's childhood was greatly influenced by an accident he suffered: when he was very young he fell into a saucepan with boiling water, which burned a large part of his body, and during his convalescence his relatives told him to console him stories, many of them based on real anecdotes from Argentine history. In this way, his four aunts influenced him greatly and he always remembered them with great affection; For example, Ana María Láinez influenced him with his orientalism, telling him Asian beliefs. His maternal grandmother was also very influential. He had a brother who, after growing up in Paris, dedicated himself to being a journalist in the United States.
In 1923 his family moved to Europe, a common custom of the upper class of the time. They resided first in Paris, where he studied at the École Descartes, and later in London, where he continued his training with a tutor, Mr. White. He returned to his native country in 1928 along with his younger brother and his father, and finished his studies at the Colegio Nacional de San Isidro. At the insistence of his family, he began a career in Right.
Beginning of his career
In 1932, the same year that he abandoned his law career, he became an editor at the newspaper La Nación, initially in the society news section. He would continue to collaborate both in La Nación and in other publications (such as the magazine El Hogar ) as an art critic and travel chronicler. Many of his articles were collected and published in books.
In 1936 he married Ana de Alvear Ortiz Basualdo, also from an aristocratic family, with whom he would have three children (Diego, Ana and Manuel). That same year he published his first book, Glosas castellanas, a series of essays focused mostly on Don Quixote.
In 1939 he published his first novel, Don Galaz de Buenos Aires. It is followed by the biographies of his ancestor Miguel Cané (father) (1942) and of the gaucho poets Hilario Ascasubi (Life of Aniceto el Gallo, 1943) and Estanislao del Campo (Life of Anastasio el Pollo, 1947).
Porteña saga
In 1949 and 1950 he published two books of stories that, due to their similarity in themes, forms and style, mark the beginning of his literary maturity. The first, Here they lived, covers, through stories set in different periods, the history of a country house located in San Isidro, from its construction to its demolition. The second, Misteriosa Buenos Aires, follows a similar structure, although instead of a house it traces the history of the Argentine capital, from its founding in 1536 to the year of the centenary of the May Revolution, in 1910. They are stories in which historical events and real characters are mixed with fictional characters, and range from historical realism to the fantastic. In both books, characteristic elements of Mujica Lainez's prose are present, which also appear in his novels, such as the use of cultivated and elegant language without being ostentatious or opaque, the interest in history (both Argentine and European). and the portrait of the rise and decline of the Argentine high bourgeoisie.
In the following years he published a tetralogy known as Saga porteña or Ciclo porteño: The idols (1953), The house (1954), The travelers (1955), and Guests in Paradise (1957). They are novels that can be read as autonomous pieces, in which the world of the Argentine aristocracy is evoked, from a perspective that many consider decadent. A sector of critics even considers them as the best of his production, "not only for their masterful literary construction, but also for what they contain of deeply felt testimony. They are luminous narratives, populated by characters viewed with humor, with a look that is neither grim nor devastating but pious and even jovial.»
European cycle
Considering the Argentine issue exhausted, Mujica Lainez maintained a creative silence for five years, during which he dedicated himself to traveling the world and writing chronicles for La Nación. The experience of these trips motivated him to write a second series of historical novels set in Europe between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and which foreign critics consider to be his most successful works: Bomarzo (1962), The Unicorn (1965), The Labyrinth (1974) and The Beetle (1982).
Bomarzo is a story about the Italian Renaissance narrated by a dead man, Pier Francesco Orsini, the hunchbacked nobleman who gave his name to the famous and extravagant Italian gardens of Bomarzo, known as Monster Park. In this novel we witness the coronation of Charles I of Spain, the battle of Lepanto, passing through the unedifying customs of popes and characters of the time and crimes of cup and dagger. It is often cited as the most successful of the series, and its best novel. It served as the basis for an opera, with music by Alberto Ginastera and a libretto by Mujica Lainez himself. It premiered in Washington D.C. in 1967 and was banned by the military dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía, so it was not released in Argentina until 1972.
The Unicorn is set in the French Middle Ages of the troubadours. Its protagonist is the fairy Melusina, victim of a curse by which, every Saturday, she adopts the body of a snake and the wings of a bat; Witness to the vicissitudes of the time of the Crusades, he follows the adventures of his Lusignan offspring until the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin.
The Labyrinth stars Ginés de Silva, the boy who holds a lit candle and looks at the viewer in the lower part of the painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz by El Greco, and in which, according to some authors, Jorge Manuel Theotocopuli, El Greco's son, would be portrayed. This novel presents Spanish society in the time of Philip II, its splendor and its misery, before the protagonist left for America. He declares to be the son of the Illustrious Mop Cervantes, and nephew of the Knight with the Hand on the Chest, and with these names he presents characters ranging from Lope de Vega to Inca Garcilaso, through Fray Martín de Porres or Juan Espera-en-Dios, the Wandering Jew (who, in one way or another, appears in all the works of the trilogy formed by Bomarzo, The Unicorn and The Labyrinth).
At the end of the decade, the stories of Crónicas reales (1967) and the novel Of miracles and melancholies (1968) appear. Exhausted by the work of documentation and period reconstruction of his previous novels, in these works Mujica Láinez adopts a deliberately burlesque, ironic tone, rewriting European history (in Royal Chronicles) and that of the conquest of America (in Of miracles and melancholies).
Retirement to El Paraíso and final years
In 1969 he retired from his job at La Nación, sold his house in the Belgrano neighborhood, where he had lived since 1936, and moved with his family to a colonial-style house located in the area of Cruz Chica, about 3 kilometers from the center of La Cumbre, Córdoba, called "El Paraíso", designed by León Dourge and built in 1922. Once settled there, he wrote the novel Cecil (1972), autobiographical story narrated by his dog, the whippet Cecil.
Later he published The Journey of the Seven Demons (1974), a novel with an esoteric theme (Mujica Láinez was a great fan of the occult sciences, and it is known that in his library he owned some old books of demonology, which are still preserved), and a series of novels (Sergio, Los cisnes, El Gran Teatro) that take up the aristocratic atmosphere porteño of his first works.
His last novel, The Beetle (1982), closes the cycle of historical novels. Resorting to a procedure already used previously, the novel stars an Egyptian ring that, sunk at the bottom of the sea, tells of its life and that of its possessors, from Queen Nefertari to an American millionaire, passing through the hand of one of the assassins of Julius Caesar or that of Michelangelo, among others. His last book of short stories, A novelist in the Prado Museum (1984), in turn takes up fantastic topics: the paintings in the Madrid museum come to life at night.
Death
He died at home on April 21, 1984, at the age of 73, due to pulmonary edema, and was buried in the cemetery of the nearby town of Los Cocos. He left an unfinished novel, Los libre del sur, which he was working on at the time of his death.
Writer's House Museum
By the idea and management of his widow, Ana de Alvear, the house became a museum and opened to the public in 1987, creating a private foundation in 1989 that could take care of its maintenance. Ana de Alvear was the president of the foundation until her death in 1994.
During the administration of Eduardo Arnaud and Inés de Goyanes Allende (1994-2006), thousands of books from the writer's library and many of his objects were stolen and sold illegally by the president of the foundation, giving rise to a case which as of today is out of date and from which few objects have been recovered.
In July 2014, the Mujica Láinez Foundation (chaired by the writer's daughter) announced the imminent closure of the Museum due to lack of resources to maintain it, to which the Minister of Culture Teresa Parodi expressed her intention to grant a monthly subsidy to the institution, while a project was presented in Congress to declare it a National Historical Monument, something that was finally carried out in 2015, although the first financial aid - segmented - arrived only in mid-2022. In September 2016, Ana Mujica met with the Minister of Culture, Pablo Avelluto; Although there were collaboration agreements, no aid was granted. As of March 2017, the situation remained precarious, due to bureaucratic difficulties and disinterest from the provincial government.
Currently, the house museum is supported exclusively by the sale of tickets and the rental of two properties that are within the property and belong to the foundation.
Work
Mujica Láinez's prose is considered 'fluid and cultured, with a somewhat archaic, detailed and precious flavor; it avoids the word that is too common, without however seeking the one unknown to the reader." He is especially skilled in reconstructing environments, thanks to a gifted descriptive talent and a great training as an art critic, apart from his rich inventiveness and literary exquisiteness, enriched by the knowledge of history inherited through his ancestors.. The author, seduced by esoteric doctrines, firmly believed in reincarnation and declared he wrote 'to escape time'. That is the theme of most of his works.
In his narrative two main aspects can be established: the Argentine theme (The House, The Travelers, Guests in El Paraíso, The Great Theater) and the historical novels (Bomarzo, The Unicorn, The Labyrinth and The Beetle i>).
A recurring characteristic in his work is the treatment of sexuality and eroticism. Cultivator of an image of a frivolous and ambiguous dandy, Mujica Lainez never hid his homosexuality, and there are numerous anecdotes about his relationships with young men. In his literature, this orientation is present in several books, where on more than one occasion he narrated encounters with homoerotic characteristics (as in Bomarzo or Sergio) or presented characters who embodied some type of homoerotic dissidence, as in the case of Melusina, protagonist of the novel The Unicorn. She also wrote allegorical stories such as Black Hair, where the concealment of gender references about the protagonists of the story allows us to infer that it is about of two male lovers.
Novels
- Don Galaz de Buenos Aires (1938)
- Saga porteña
- Idols (1953)
- The house (1954)
- Travelers (1955)
- Guests on Paradise (1957)
- Bomarzo (1962)
- The unicorn (1965)
- Miracles and Melancholy (1968)
- Cecil (1972)
- The maze (1974)
- The Journey of the Seven Demons (1974)
- Sergio (1976)
- The swans (1977)
- The Great Theatre (1979)
- The beetle (1982)
Stories
- The Galera (1936)
- Here they lived. (1949)
- Misteriosa Buenos Aires (1950)
- Real Chronicles (1967)
- The bracelet and other stories (1978)
- A novelist at the Museo del Prado (1984)
Tests
- Castilian balloons (1936)
- Héctor Basaldúa (1956)
- The porters (1979)
Biographies
- Louis XVII (1925). First book written in French for his father's birthday. Tiped and bound by his mother, this unique book disappeared from the Manuel Mujica Lainez Foundation during the presidency of Eduardo Arnau and Inés de Allende de Goyanes (1994-2006).
- Miguel Cané (father) (1942)
- Life of Aniceto the Gallo, biography of Hilario Ascasubi (1943)
- Life of Anastasio el Pollo, biography of Estanislao del Campo (1947)
Translation
- Forty-nine sonnetsWilliam Shakespeare (1962)
- The wise women de Molière (1964)
- The false confessionsby Pierre de Marivaux (1967)
- FedraJean Racine (1972)
Journalistic chronicles
- Travel pleasures and fatigues I (1983)
In collaboration
- Canto a Buenos Aires (1943), poems. Kraft Ltda Edition, with illustrations by Héctor Basaldúa.
- Estampas de Buenos Aires (1946), texts on Buenos Aires. Editorial Sudamericana, with illustrations by Marie Elisabeth Wrede.
- Bomarzo (1967), libretto for an opera with music by Alberto Ginastera (including in Pages of Manuel Mujica Lainez selected by his author1982)
- Letra e Imágenes de Buenos Aires (1977), texts by Manuel Mujica Láinez and photography by Aldo Sessa.
- More lyrics and images of Buenos Aires (1978), texts by Mujica Láinez and photography by Aldo Sessa.
- Our Buenos Aires (1982), texts by Mujica Láinez and photos by Aldo Sessa.
- Jockey Club a century (1982), texts by Mujica Láinez and photos by Aldo Sessa.
- Life and glory of the Columbus Theater (1983), texts by Mujica Láinez and photos by Aldo Sessa.
Posthumous works
- Travel pleasures and fatigues II (1984)
- The yellow portrait (1987), Friends of Mujica Lainez with illustration of Raúl Alonso.
- Unpublished stories (1993), Planet Library of the South (includes The yellow portrait).
- Genius and figure of Manuel Mujica Lainez (1996) - 2a Edit. Author: Jorge Cruz. Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires. (Includes The South Free, unfinished novel that Mujica Láinez was composing until his death)
- Porters II (1998), trials.
- Full stories I and II. Alfaguara, with Jorge Cruz prologue (2001)
- Bright spirituality, Subject Print Editions, collection of drawings (labyrinths) and texts by Mujica Lainez with prologue by Guillermo Whitelow (2004)
- The little man of the tile. Reissue of the Story Misteriosa Buenos Aires for the Pan Flauta Collection of South American Editorial, with illustrations by Alejandro Ravassi (2004)
- The Widow of the Greco. Editorial Asppan / Kliczkowski-Onlybook - Collection Mini letters - Selection with stories: Ubaldo, The Widow of the Greco and Paul's wife (2005)
- The domains of beauty, Fund for Economic Culture, Storytelling and Journalistic Chronicles selected by Alejandra Laera (2005)
- The Art of Travel, Fund for Economic Culture, journalistic chronicles selected by Alejandra Laera (2007)
- Manuel Mujica Lainez in "El Paraíso", Maizal Editions with the Manuel Mujica Lainez Foundation and participation of the National Arts Fund. (Includes the diary of Mujica Láinez on the purchase of the stay "El Paraíso"). (2009)
- Tales chosen, Editorial Sudamericana, selection of Jorge Cruz and Gregory Clemons (2009)
- The little man of the tile. Reissue of the story in a four-tongue version (Spanish, English, French and German), Maizal Editions with the support of the National Arts Fund, with illustrations by Sophie le Comte (2010)
- The Great Theatre. Republished jointly by the Foundations of the Colon Theatre and the Fundación Mujica Lainez with photographs of the Colón Theater, reproductions of the sketches of Parsifal by Héctor Basaldúa and unpublished notes by the writer. Design by Sophie le Comte (2011)
- The naive painting. Art Criticism (2019)
Filmography
- Performer
- ...(Supensive points) (1970)
- Broken comedy (1978)
- Book
- Of the mysterious Buenos Aires (1981)
Recognitions
- Electo miembro de la Academia Argentina de Letras (1956)
- Elect member of the National Academy of Fine Arts in 1959.