¿Usted está borracho o temulento?: Ebriedad, civilité y cultura letrada en Argentina

Abstract

In 1887 an unexpected and unwelcome poem, El borracho, was published in Buenos Aires. At that time, its author, Joaquí­n Castellanos, left poetry for politics. During the three following decades, the poem spread successfully in the new circuit of popular criollista literature. In 1923 Castellanos returned surprisingly to literature -to a very different literature from that of his youth - with a strange new edition of El borracho. Full of explanatory notes, the new edition replaced the original title with a euphemism which certainly demanded explanations as well: El temulento. Taking the singular anachronisms in Castellanos' poem as a starting point and following Norbert Elias' thesis on the "civilizing process", this article analyzes the relationships between drunkenness and barbarism established by the lettered culture in the Rí­o de la Plata before its democratization -symbolically legitimized in the cult of Parisian bohemia- dissolved them in the last years of the nineteenth century