Mad Toy; the tensions of living in a world of survival

This week’s reading of Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy was very interesting because Arlt’s style of writing is something that I am not usually familiar with, but still enjoyed nonetheless. I can see how Arlt’s writing can be seen as a betrayal of typical literature. There are often times when it feels like the reader is not given a satisfying answer, like for example how Silvio seems to be striving in his new job at the military aviation school and then randomly gets let go from his position for no justifiable reason as well as the mysterious Leonor. Also how the writing itself would jump from paragraph descriptions to just straight lines of dialogue created hiccups of pacing in the story. However, I think it was rather refreshing to almost feel awkward at times when reading this story because it felt like jumping back and forth between the “real world” and your internal dialogue.

One of the major themes I think I picked up during this story was the idea of a life of beauty versus a life of survival. Specifically when Silvio and his friends form their little thievery gang, this theme is established. Silvio loves books, literature, and poetry, however, they are the very things that he needs to steal and sell in order to survive. Here he still saw thievery as something beautiful, but perhaps it was only beautiful because it constituted their survival. After all, they would have money. Is a life of survival one of beauty as well? I think Silvio later in the book would disagree with this. “It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a suit or money or anything, and almost embarrassed I confessed: What I want is to be admired by others, praised by others” (95). In other words, I imagine Silvio wants to be the very poets and inventors whose beauty would make the world tremble.

I think what leads to Silvio’s betrayal of Rengo is when he meets up with Lucio again. Here he has seen the two sides that choice has destined his friends with. On one hand, you have Enrique who has been imprisoned for continuing a life of thievery, and on the other hand, you have Lucio who is now the police and enforcing the very laws they would break as children. I think seeing Enrique’s fate is one of the reasons why he chooses to rat out Rengo as he makes a moral decision to explore the beauty of his own capacities and of life and not succumb to a future of guilt.

The question I would ask regarding Mad Toy would be as follows: How do Arlt’s narrative choices, such as the shifts in pacing and the portrayal of Silvio’s internal struggles, enhance or maybe even limit the reader’s understanding of how a life of survival was like in Argentina during the early twentieth century?