Nothing to See in Buenos Aires: Henri Michaux and the 1936 PEN Club Congress

ABSTRACT: The Belgian-French writer Henri Michaux traveled to Buenos Aires in September 1936 to participate in the PEN Club Congress. The event reunited writers from all over the world to dialogue with Latin American authors. Ultimately, it attempted to de-peripheralize Buenos Aires by inviting foreign writers to identify and validate the city's particular cultural modernity. Michaux protested against the highly politicized and spectacularized literary event and criticized the un-picturesque and un-exotic city. After the event, he wrote two texts ("L' hôte d' honneur du Bren Club" and "Un peuple et un homme") that portray the PEN as an attempt to achieve cultural modernity through mimicry. In this article, I take a transnational approach that inscribes Michaux's texts in the signifying network of the PEN in Buenos Aires and reads them face-to-face with Michaux's Latin American interlocutors (Victoria Ocampo, Alfonso Reyes, and Manuel Gálvez). By doing so, I show how the texts mirror local discourses that represented Buenos Aires (a metonymy for the whole country's identity) as an empty city with no cultural or natural particularity to show to its foreign visitors, with "nothing to see" in it.