as Bovaristic illusion or as creative, poetic figuration. That mythical, poetic geography is the world of Santa María, invented by one of Onetti’sprotagonists inA Brief Life—a world of the imagination that carries within it the “givens” of historical reality, much like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and into which Onetti himself enters to chart its annals. Onetti’s novels become the record of that itinerary.

The Pit

Published in December of 1939, Onetti’s first novel, The Pit, is a reconstituted version of the misplaced and lost original from 1932. As a first novel, it is paradigmatic of the author’s oeuvre. The Pit dramatizes the trial and error of an attempt at self-mastery. In this sense, it is revealing not only of the hero’s circumstances (a protagonist who feels compelled to write his autobiography now that he has reached the age of forty) but also of Onetti’s conception of his task as a writer. The protagonist’s self-characterizations, his halting and reticent attempts at self-writing, his disengagement from the world of reality and human relationships around him, even as he is obsessed with these things, reflect the circumstances of his author and of other, subsequent protagonists in Onetti’s fictional cosmos.

The novel’s hero, Eladio Linacero, is obsessed with an autobiography and its self-conscious impossibility. In his reticence and self-deprecation, he confesses to his shortcomings as a writer as well as to the necessarily fictional nature of the details of his life that have become committed to his writing. He thus opts for recording not factual detail, which offers a mere pretense of re-creating reality, but the fantasies that have no such claims and that may well be more “true” as a result. He not only spurns historical particulars but also rejects, with a Sartrean “nausea,” the concrete, “objective” details that surround him, including his own bodily existence and his neglected apartment, with its dusty furniture and faded newspapers.

The novel’snarrative, then, becomes the record of a juxtaposition between the concrete (whether in historical remembrance or in immediate objectivity) and the imaginary, fantasy world of his daydreams. By the end of the novel and of the night (the span of narrative time is one night), Eladio Linacero admits to the impossibility of autobiography, of self-mastery in writing. What he has produced becomes the record of that impossibility, a record that extends the self in the act of recording what writing attempts to contain. Implacably, time vitiates the attempt to freeze oneself in time: “I would have liked to pin the night on paper, like a nocturnal butterfly. But, in turn, it was the night that carried me off amid its waters, like the livid body of a dead man.” The problematics of Linacero’s attempt and its vicissitudes attained full significance in later works, such as A Brief Life and the subsequent novels from the saga of Santa María.

No Man’s Land

A collective social portrait of a historical period, No Man’s Land is Onetti’s most explicit work. Written in the late 1930’s, when the lost generation came of age, Onetti’s second novel captures, in the manner of cinematic montage, the ambience of the epoch. Despite the value of the novel as a social document, its technical achievement may be even more significant. If The Pit showed Onetti as a master of first-person narration, of a stream of consciousness restricted to a single voice, No Man’s Land displays his mastery of simultaneity, in the manner of John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer (1925).

No Man’s Land is a congeries of parallel paths, multiple destinies, refracted perspectives, desultory points of view that crowd the world of the novel, that occasionally converge but rarely result in any meaningful human communion. As the title suggests, the urban setting is an anonymous no-man’s-land, and its sundry inhabitants are alienated individuals whose relationship to a collective community is all but obliterated by indifference, ennui, and individual fantasies. On occasion, those fantasies converge, even if tangentially, and therein lies the seed for an imaginary world, which becomes a communal fantasy in Onetti’s later novels. For the first time, too, certain characters who will emerge as protagonists in works from the saga of Santa María, such as Junta Larsen, hero of The Shipyard and of Body Snatcher, make a fleeting appearance. No Man’s Land was hailed at the time of its publication as a genuine Río de la Plata novel, an indication that Buenos Aires and Montevideo had finally produced a novel equal to their teeming life.

Tonight

While No Man’s Land has been hailed as a social novel, Tonight, Onetti’s third novel, has often been read as an expression of political solidarity. In the late 1930’s, when Onetti was affiliated with Marcha and later with Reuter’s, he frequented the Café Metro in Montevideo. There, Onetti would meet with other intellectuals and there, too, he encountered a number of exiles from the Spanish Civil War and its infamous aftermath.

Onetti said that his conversations with those exiles found their fictionalized echo in Tonight, a novel of political terror and oppression. Onetti had made an attempt in 1936 to go to Spain to fight in the civil war. Perhaps this novel is a form of compensation for his failure in that attempt as well as for his comfortable distance from yet another tragic war that was then under way. Ironically, the state of siege, the military terror, the political machinations and victimization of ideals, and the fugitive haunts of idealistic and ambiguous characters depicted in the novel were all too prophetic of what was to befall Argentina two years after the novel’s publication. That state of affairs changed little, with Onetti’s Uruguay falling victim to the same fate. Even more ironic is that some thirty years later, Onetti himself became the victim of this scourge and, reversing the pattern, went to Spain as an exile.

Technically, Onetti’s third novel is not the most accomplished of his works. It suffers from the rhetorically melodramatic, unambiguous dichotomies of good and evil, the idealistic and the corrupt, the victim and the villain. Nevertheless, the perspectivist juxtaposition of narrative points of view and the intensity of terror that builds with the manhunt and concludes with the hero’s death make the novel interesting.

A Brief Life

Onetti’s fourth novel, A Brief Life, opened a new epoch in his novelistic cycle. Santa María, the mythical realm of this and subsequent works, while adumbrated in earlier pieces, has its genesis in A Brief Life. As the title suggests, the narrative consists of a series of brief lives, “real” or fantasized, harking back to the multiple, imaginary lives of Eladio Linacero in Onetti’s first novel. In contrast to the predicament of Linacero, however, the hero of A Brief Life, Juan María Brausen, succeeds in finding a way out of the worldly “here and now” of space and temporality.

Like Linacero, Brausen is a brooder; unlike Onetti’s first hero, however, he is also a man of action. His acts of evasion are not merely fantasized mental states. Brausen breaks out of his humdrum existence by physically breaking into the ambit and life of the prostitute who lives next door. Thus, Juan María Brausen becomes Juan María Arce upon “penetrating” the wall to another life, a life that proves as desolate as the respectable normalcy he has left behind. In oscillating between these two lives, the protagonist discovers the impossibility of evasion and the now compounded nature of his entrapment. Real transcendence from the strictures of the existential trap, Brausen discovers, is to be found only in imaginative potency, in the creative powers of the imagination. As a scriptwriter with a commission for a particular film script, Brausen invents the world of Santa María, an imaginary world into which he flees, a fugitive from the authorities following the murder of the prostitute. Not only does he interpolate himself into his invented world, crossing from a fiction of reality to a reality of fiction, but his created world becomes, thereafter, the novelistic cosmos of his creator, Onetti. In this sense, A Brief Life may well be Onetti’s most significant novel, the gateway to all of his subsequent works.

The Shipyard and Body Snatcher

There is common agreement among critics that The Shipyard, Onetti’s fifth major novel, is his best-formed work; it may well be the masterpiece of his career. The Shipyard is the first full-blown treatment of the saga of Santa María; in the internal chronology of the saga, it follows the events related in Body Snatcher. Onetti said that when he was halfway through the writing of this latter work in 1957, he was assailed by the vision of the hero’s death. He then abandoned Body Snatcher and wrote The Shipyard.

The novel recounts the story of Junta Larsen and his return to Santa María. He was expelled from there five years earlier by the town fathers because of his less-than-respectable activities in running a brothel. The Shipyard, then, is a redemptive work, a seeking after salvation in the ashes of a failed dream. The redemption sought by the hero is not a phoenixlike rebirth but a pursuit of some admissible meaning in failure. Junta Larsen emerges as an ennobled hero, a tragic figure who has already endured the blows of the implacable fates. His deep pessimism is not cynical but philosophical. He accepts fate, not with bitter resignation, but with knowing perspicacity. There is an allegorical parallel to Junta Larsen’s search for self-salvation in self-surrender to the inevitable: his engagement in salvaging the hopelessly defunct shipyard of Petrus.

The shipyard is beyond salvation. Its owner and management play out the farce of running a going concern even while they surreptitiously junk useless pieces from the carcass of the shipyard to survive. Junta Larsen shuttles between Santa María and the docks, between his own disintegrated past and the concretely visible disintegration of the shipyard. His attempts to marry Petrus’s daughter prove futile; she is dim-witted or downright mad. He settles for a sordid relationship with the maid in the servants’ quarters. In the face of an impossible future, the most meaningful acts are recollections of the past. In his lucid flashbacks, in his silent monologue, Junta Larsen emerges as a savior, hopeful but hopelessly fated, and knowingly so, a Christ figure in the house of Petrus: The biblical allusion to Saint Peter and the church built upon a rock is transparent. Petrus’s rock, however, has become a heap of sand, and Larsen, the savior, can find only a quietus, a final reckoning, rather than a resurrection.

Although published three years later than The Shipyard, the episodes narrated in Body Snatcher antedate the events of the earlier novel. Onetti’s sixth major novel evinces, at least in the first half, the vigor and dynamism of a pursuit: Junta Larsen’s dream to found and operate the perfect whorehouse. The language of the novel is wry, at times satirically imbued with irony and frequent humor. The hero is in his prime, his energies at their apex. The novel begins with Junta Larsen’s arrival in Santa María with his female cargo—three or four women in varying degrees of decrepitude. The town dubs the hero with the nickname that gives the work its original title, Juntacadáveres, the Corpse-Gatherer (or body snatcher). The town’s reaction to Junta’s enterprise ensues, with the final expulsion of the hero and his charges from Santa María and the crumbling of Junta’s dream in a bathetic denouement.

Interwoven into the rise and fall of Larsen’s enterprise is the story of Jorge Malabia, a young man who was the protagonist of an earlier Onetti novella, A Grave with No Name. This novella has often been considered a blueprint for Onetti’s fiction: It embraces all of his recurring preoccupations, particularly his obsession with the relativity of truth. In Body Snatcher, Jorge Malabia is engaged in a guilt-ridden relationship with the widowed wife of his brother. His attempts to patronize Junta Larsen’s establishment and his eventual participation in the downfall of that “institution” also form part of the novel’s plot. Thus, Body Snatcher is an intricately woven novel that gathers various threads from the annals of Santa María. Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal notes that to appreciate the chronological order of events, one must first read Body Snatcher, then A Grave with No Name, and then The Shipyard. Monegal also noted that the second part of Body Snatcher is more somber, its language more weighty, its humor darker; the change is attributed to the fact that this second part was written after Onetti had interrupted the novel’s composition to write The Shipyard.

La muerte y la niña

If the sequence of publication violates the internal chronology of the saga of Santa María, La muerte y la niña, Onetti’s seventh novel, violates all logical order with impunity. The result is a hermetic involution, a scrambled code that can have intelligibility only for those already initiated in Onetti’s fictional system. La muerte y la niña is yet another farce played out with the knowledge of its futility in the face of implacable time, guilt, relative truth, and irrevocable fate. The episodes of the plot (the attempts of Augusto Goerdel to exonerate himself and assuage his guilt for the death of his wife, Helga Hauser, by returning to Santa María with suspect documents aimed to prove that he is not the father of the girl whose birth proved fatal to her mother) are less significant than the “resuscitation” of ghosts from earlier novels in the saga. Onetti deliberately violates objective temporality by having characters whose death was narrated in earlier works and episodes reappear, “posthumously,” to reflect on the fate of Santa María.

While not Onetti’s best work, La muerte y la niña is a significant novel insofar as it divulges the author’s deliberate destruction of objective reality even in the world of fiction, to point to yet another level, one more demonstration that literature is literature, with no obligations to any order outside itself. Accordingly, the language of the novel is deliberately artificial, studied, and rhetorical.

Let the Wind Speak

Let the Wind Speak takes its title and epigraph from the last fragment of The Cantos (1972) of Ezra Pound, who wrote

I have tried to write ParadiseDo not moveLet the wind speakthat is paradise.Let the Gods forgive what Ihave made.Let those I love try to forgivewhat I have made.

From the outset, then, there is a sense of an ending, a morbid finality, an intimation of doom in this apocalyptic work. The cycle of Santa María, deliberately scrambled in the previous work, now closes in on itself. Characters return—some from death—to haunt the novel, and whole passages are repeated from earlier volumes in the saga.

In some cases, this recursiveness extends even to works that predated the genesis of Santa María. The protagonist of Let the Wind Speak, Medina, who appeared in previous works as a police official, returns from Santa María to Lavanda (a homonymic suggestion of La Banda, Uruguay, which is commonly known as La Banda Oriental). His return, reminiscent of Junta Larsen’s return in The Shipyard, erases all boundaries between the real world and the world of Onetti’s fiction, Santa María. There is a peculiar conflation of worlds when, for example, Medina narrates, word for word, whole passages from Onetti’s first novel, The Pit, and one recognizes scenes and dialogues from the narrative context of Santa María now outside that phantasmagoric geography. The textual boundaries collapse, the dead and the living intermingle, past and present fuse. The cycle has run its course and begins to overtake its own tracks.

Symbolically, the novel is the apocalypse of a literary career, of its enchanted geography (Santa María is consumed by fire in this novel). All that remains is the specter of language. In the end, if this is indeed the end, Onetti reaffirms once again the creative potency of the imagination (the power to create and to destroy its own invention) and the enabling potency of the author to enter and fade into the world of his imaginary creation.