SOURCE: Hayes, Aden W. “Onetti's El Pozo, Imagination, and Image.” Hispanofila 31, no. 1 (September 1987): 43-54.

[In the following essay, Hayes discusses existentialist traits of El pozo as well as the visual mode of reality Onetti grants to his protagonist.]

Juan Carlos Onetti's first novel, El pozo,¹ is the confession of Eladio Linacero, who divorces himself from quotidian reality and retreats to a world of fantasies which become the most important facet of his life. Linacero creates his alternative world much as a photographer creates a series of pictures—selecting his subjects, cutting them off from their contexts, emphasizing certain of their qualities and minimizing others, reshaping the images to conform to his vision of them. He names, catalogues and files these images in his memory so that he can recall and view them. It is this visual mode of apprehending both the world of “reality” around him and the world of images he has created that Linacero finds most difficult to communicate adequately in his confessions.²

On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Linacero is alone in his squalid room in Montevideo. As night falls, he proposes to write his memoirs, which turn out to be nothing more than three daydreams or, as he calls them, aventuras. The narrator's term hints at the immediacy which these invented scenes have for him. The first aventura is told directly to the reader; the second and third are revealed in the context of Linacero's story of his earlier attempts to tell them to other characters—Ester, a prostitute, and Cordes, a poet. The text is amplified with intercalations drawn from Linacero's recollections from the past—his marriage, now ended; his job, now lost; his acquaintances, now disappeared or dead.

El pozo shares with other existentialist novels of its time—La Nausée (1938), L'Etranger (1946), Dangling Man (1944)—a preoccupation with boredom and the impossibility of ending it, the protagonist's feelings of entrapment in a meaningless existence, and his hostile, but somewhat envious view of other characters who do not share his anguish at the unceasing conflict between intention and reality. But Eladio Linacero possesses something which Sartre's Roquentin, Camus' Meursault and Bellow's Joseph lack: an alternative life to which he can retreat, in which he can act as the world will not let him act in real life, a world in which he can dominate his circumstances and even play the hero.

Introducing his first aventura, Linacero recalls how, some twenty-five years earlier, on a hot New Year's Eve, he lured a young acquaintance, Ana María, into a gardner's shed on the grounds of his family's home in the Capurro section of Montevideo. Once inside, young Eladio attacked his victim, pulling her to the ground, clutching at her breasts; “busqué entonces la caricia más humillante, la más odiosa” (p. 13). But he disclaims any interest in raping her: “no tenía nunca … la intención de violarla; no tenía ningún deseo por ella” (p. 13). Ana María escaped, and Eladio spent the rest of the night walking outdoors, under a clear sky. He tells us that he never saw her again; six months later she was dead. This scene from his boyhood in Uruguay has its avatar in the “aventura de la cabaña de troncos” (p. 8), which Linacero imagines to take place in the Klondike, in Alaska, or in the mountains of Switzerland, where he must battle cold and snow to reach his log cabin, isolated in the woods. He enters and squats down to light a fire. Just then Ana María, totally nude, runs in from the outdoors, and lies on Linacero's rough bed. He walks over, sits beside her, and stares at her genitals while she lies back passively, her hands behind her head. Neither speaks.

Linacero tries to explain another aventura to Ester, a prostitute with whom he has just spent the night. He imagines he is in Holland; boats pass on a river, rain falls, but all is silent. He is keeping an appointment or assignation made years before. He is also a smuggler, and has a shipment of rifles to take across the border. As he tells her of this vision, Ester cuts him off abruptly—“¿Pero por qué no reventás?” (p. 39)—perhaps because she suspects that he uses these fantasies as masturbation images.³ Linacero here invents an original context which he does not explain in terms of his own background, but nevertheless we can see elements which correspond to those of the “cabaña de troncos” adventure. The site is Holland, another distant, cold, country of the northern hemisphere. The time lapse between arranging the assignation and its fruition corresponds to the period between his attacking Ana María and his recalling and enjoying her image. As in the “cabaña de troncos” adventure, here he transforms himself into a daring man of action, whose job and entire life involve the movement and energy which is missing from his stagnant life in Montevideo. There is not a sound in either vision. Linacero never visits Ester again, but he turns this experience with her into another fantastic image which reverses the terms of reality: she comes to visit him and “nos hablamos como buenos amigos” (p. 39). She then tells him her dreams or illusions, which are like children's stories in their purity.

Linacero recounts a third aventura, which he calls “La bahía de Arrak,” to the poet Cordes. It seems even more disjointed than the first two because it lacks coherence among its various parts, and is simply the enumeration of different isolated and narrow views: “Las velas del Gaviota infladas por el viento, el sol en la cadena del ancla, las botas altas hasta las rodillas, los pies descalzos de los marineros …” This group of highly focused visions then seems to give way to a scene from a fairy tale: “el capitán Orlaff hizo disparar 21 cañonazos contra la luna que, justamente 20 años atrás había frustrado su entrevista de amor con la mujer egipcia de los cuatro maridos” (p. 49). Suddenly realizing the discontinuity of his monologue, Linacero becomes embarrassed, then confused. He makes a joke at his own expense, quickly breaks off the description, and sees Cordes on his way home. Following the pattern established with Ana María and Ester, Linacero never sees Cordes after this.

It is as remarkable to other characters as to the reader that these incongruous and inconsequential daydreams constitute the part of his life that Linacero considers worth recording and placing before a public. After listening to “La bahía de Arrak,” Cordes hesitantly asks if that aventura might be the outline of a story, or something of the kind. The reader shares this confusion, since Linacero's words seem to stand for no identifiable reality beyond language itself; they do not communicate any developed idea, but simply enumerate disparate elements with no common thread, or source. The difficulties of “La bahía de Arrak” are emblematic of the problems encountered in the larger text, El pozo.

As autobiography Linacero's enterprise early on opposes itself to other works of the genre. “Esto que escribo,” he says, “son mis memorias” (p. 6), but unlike confessional literature from Augustine to Genêt, Linacero's memoirs are not aimed at enlightening an imagined or implied reader; instead they somehow respond to the psychological needs of their narrator.

Linacero's justification for undertaking the project is rather hollow: “un hombre debe escribir la historia de su vida al llegar a los cuarenta años, sobre todo si le sucedieron cosas interesantes. Lo leí no sé donde” (p. 6). But Linacero does not write the story of his life; instead he mainly recounts his fantasies. Nor has he “interesting” things to tell about; rather, his existence seems to have been particularly vacuous and devoid of emotion. His memory is imperfect, his concentration lapses, and he never explains the significance of his material in any context wider than that of his own psyche.⁴

These distinctions between autobiographical tradition and Linacero's own confession are important because they are a measure of the writer's agitated state of mind and of his separation from humanity in general. Coming, as it does, after three torpid failures to communicate, his text confirms his isolation rather than penetrates it.

Linacero's medium for El pozo is verbal language, but in fact he is somewhat of a lexiphobe. Often he does not express himself coherently, as in his conversation with Cordes: “le conté vacilando al principio como vacilaba el barco al partir, embriagándome enseguida con mis propios sueños” (p. 48). Taciturn, at times even morose, he is a poor and infrequent conversationalist. In his “memorias” his vocabulary is not adequate to represent his vision. At one point he says “no sé si cabaña y choza son sinónimos … como quiero evitar un estilo pobre, voy a emplear las dos palabras, alternándolas” (p. 16), which he then forgets to do. He claims he cannot explain the true significance of his vision of Ana María in the log cabin, saying “yo no puedo, no conozco las palabras” (pp. 20-21). Linacero apparently cares very little for language, for communicating with other characters, for relating to lives beyond his own; “Cordes, Ester, y todo el mundo, menefrego” is his attitude (p. 51). He prefers to build up his own inner world of aventuras, the interconnected visions which are his escape from a barren daily life of unemployment, visits to prostitutes, and endless cigarettes. Each vision has a title by which Linacero files it in his mind—he mentions “El regreso de Napoleón,” “Las acciones de John Morhouse,” and “La bahía de Arrak,” among others (p. 23). They are linked by their common protagonist and his created identity, and there is some interpenetration among them. Linacero explains that he is able to build a fire quickly in the “cabaña de troncos” adventure because he learned this skill from an Indian in the “aventura de las diez mil cabezas de ganado” (p. 18).

Linacero's invented identity is the prototype for later Onetti protagonists, who elaborate more complete imaginary lives of great detail, and who give those lives more of their psychic energies. In El pozo, the narrator's aventuras are solely visual: silent, static images on which he focuses with the exclusivity of a lens.⁵ In fabricating his images Linacero uses a photographer's way of seeing, by which any aspect of reality may be transformed into an acceptable and meaningful vision by the proper application of the processes of selection, manipulation or distortion. In Capurro and in the “aventura de la cabaña de troncos” the subject is Linacero's domination of Ana María. But in Montevideo this young woman resists him, spits on him, hates him; in his vision she submits to him without a word. The prostitute Ester ridicules him, scoffs at his stories, walks out of their hotel room and never returns. Linacero captures her image in his vision, but changes her character completely—in the role he creates for her she has become his friend.

Linacero's photographic transformations of reality reflect a way of seeing and relating to the world which, as he admits, his language cannot reveal fully. Struggling to express not just his private thoughts, but his personal way of seeing his world, Linacero time and time again comes up against his lack of the proper medium, the insufficiency of his language to his task. In his frustration he produces a document which faithfully reflects his hesitant, vituperative, hostile attitude.

Linacero's visual method is discovered to the reader on the first page of El pozo. He begins his story: “Hace un rato me estaba paseando por el cuarto y se me ocurrió de golpe que lo veía por primera vez” (p. 5, emphasis mine). A brief listing of the elements of his visual composition follows: “… dos catres, sillas despatarradas y sin asiento, diarios tostados de sol, viejos de meses, clavados en la ventana en el lugar de los vidrios” (p. 5). The visual image set, Linacero calls into play his other senses to establish his own position within the scene.

Me paseaba con medio cuerpo desnudo, aburrido de estar tirado, desde mediodía, soplando el maldito calor que junta el techo y que ahora, siempre, en las tardes, derrama adentro de la pieza. Caminaba con las manos atrás, oyendo golpear las zapatillas en las baldosas, oliéndome alternativamente cada una de las axilas. Movía la cabeza de un lado a otro, aspirando, y esto me hacía crecer, yo lo sentía, una mueca de asco en la cara. La barbilla, sin afeitar, me rozaba los hombros.

(p. 5, emphasis mine)

This last detail jogs his memory, and he returns to another visual image, the recollection of a prostitute who suffers because none of her customers ever shaves before visiting her. Linacero does not remember an incident or an action; rather, he focuses on a single detail, taking it out of its physical context and amplifying it:

No puedo acordarme de la cara; no veo nada más que el hombro irritado por las barbas que se la había estado frotando, siempre en ese hombro, nunca en el derecho, la piel colorada y la mano de dedos finos señalándola.

(p. 6)

The prostitute is not identified, nor is she mentioned again; apparently the incident serves no narrative purpose other than as a confirmation of his visual mode of apprehending and recording the world. Its presentation exemplifies the difficulties of many aspects of this narrative for the audience (the fictitious audience—Cordes and Ester—as well as readers), and re-confirms the notion that these confessions are directed primarily at the narrator himself.

Linacero's way of “reading” articles in North American news magazines also demonstrates the primacy he gives to visual representation over verbal expression. For Linacero it does not matter that he cannot understand the accompanying text, because “basta ver las fotos … nada más que las fotos … para comprender que no hay pueblo más imbécil que ése [North Americans] sobre la tierra” (p. 42). In the aventura of the log cabin, Linacero sees an image of himself which corresponds to an interpretive photograph, one which reveals psychological as well as physical character. Studying his visage illuminated by firelight, he sees “… mis pómulos, la frente, la nariz casi tan claramente como si me viera en un espejo, pero de una manera más profunda” (p. 18). These are examples of the narrator's photographic way of perceiving single images. More crucial to an understanding of his way of seeing, and its effect on his confessional text, is an exploration of his imagistic aventuras in terms of the photographic processes which Linacero uses to fabricate them. His eye is the lens, excluding all but the desired segment of reality, and the image is printed in his mind, where it can be recalled and viewed at will.

Photography is by nature an aggressive medium. It is omnivorous, its subjects are everything. Susan Sontag believes that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.”⁶ She argues more emphatically that “… the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape … It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing.”⁷

The English verb for the operation of the camera's shutter—to “take” a photograph—hints at this underlying attitude. To print, mount, and observe an image is to isolate the subject in time and space, to give it limits (a border or a frame), to highlight some of its facets and to diminish others, and to remove it from the context of values in which it functions in reality and give it new values based upon aesthetic standards. Just as the original, captured image, the negative, reverses an original scene so that signs read backwards, left is right and west is east, so the photograph can also reverse, or at least change, a viewer's learned reaction to its subject so that the commonplace, the ugly, or the atrocious may appear to be pleasing or even beautiful. In this regard we might think of Edward Weston's cabbage leaves or bell peppers. Photographed against highly contrasting backgrounds, their original identities nearly lost in abstraction, they are transformed into formalist objets d'art.⁸ Or, more to our point, we should recall those photographs of battles, crimes, or human suffering which, with the passage of time, are removed from their historical context and are viewed principally as aesthetic objects and, as such, are reproduced, interpreted, hung in museums and sent around the world in glossy books.

Like a photographer, Linacero isolates and protects his images. He cuts them off from any referentiality by living in isolation and avoiding the characters who are his subjects. Conveniently for this process, Ana María died when she was eighteen. In his aventura he captures her as she appeared on the night that he attacked her. “Ana María era grande. Es larga y ancha todavía cuando se extiende en la cabaña …” (p. 13). As with the prostitute whose shoulder he describes at the beginning of his “memorias,” the subject herself is of no consequence, nor was she ever. We can now understand why Linacero says he had no intention of raping her—grappling with her he simply was appropriating her image, dominating her physically as he would later dominate her in his aventura. As a youth he did not use her body to satisfy carnal desires, but, as Ian Adams tells us, as an adult Linacero has used her image for twenty-five years for that very purpose.

In order to preserve her in a role which is psychologically acceptable to him, Linacero has altered the nature of the original scene and given its components new identities. His method recalls those photographs—particularly numerous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—in which images were manipulated by a variety of methods in order to make them correspond more closely to the photographer's idea of what was acceptable or pleasing. These photographers deliberately deformed the image derived from nature by painting on the photographic plate itself, by bleaching or darkening the print, by employing deliberately soft or imperfect focus, or by using a lens which would distort the image captured.

The English photographer Henry Peach Robinson sought to justify this type of alteration of the image when he argued that “it is [the photographer's] imperative duty to avoid the mean, the bare and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject, to avoid awkward forms and to correct the unpicturesque … A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial …”⁹ Linacero's method parallels theirs, but his aims are his own. He does not pursue beauty, but seeks to affirm his own importance and, since he cannot change himself, he changes the circumstances which surround him. Like the photographic plate, Linacero's visions mute some and reverse other fundamental aspects of the original experiences.

The December heat in Uruguay becomes the cold of Alaska or the Swiss mountains. The sophistication (or decadence), of the party in Capurro—Linacero mentions champagne, a musical group, his father's showing off a new suit—becomes the tough, ascetic life in the pure, arctic climate where Linacero wears clothes made of animal hides. The boys from whom Linacero feels estranged (“entonces nada tenía que ver con ninguno” p. 10), become the imaginary friends Sheriff Maley, Raymond el Rojo, and Wright, with whom Linacero always gets along, even when they cheat at cards (“nunca nos enojamos” p. 17). The family's summer house in Capurro becomes the rustic “taberna del ‘Doble Trébol’”and the gardener's shack into which Linacero coaxes Ana María becomes the log cabin which she visits willingly. Both the original scene and Linacero's image are framed by the protagonist's solitude, and his night-long journey out under the open sky.

Within the image itself, Linacero's photographic eye always focuses on the same part of Ana María's body, which he captures, or appropriates, as she lies posing for him, concealing nothing of herself.

Lentamente, sin dejar de mirarla, me siento en el borde de la cama y clavo los ojos en el triángulo negro donde aún brilla la tormenta … Miro el vientre de Ana María … suavemente los gruesos muslos se ponen a temblar, a estremecerse … Yo … manteniendo fijos los ojos en la raya que separa los muslos … siempre inmóvil, sin un gesto, creo ver la pequeña ranura del sexo … Ella continúa con las manos debajo de la cabeza …

(p. 19)

The image has withstood twenty-five years of recall and repeated viewing because Linacero never has been forced to confront a reality which contradicts his vision. But other images which he has captured and catalogued are not so easy to protect.

We see the photographic process of image creation at work, in a slightly different way, in Linacero's encounter with his wife Cecilia, at the corner of the rambla and Eduardo Acevedo in Montevideo. Here, instead of manipulating the image once it has been taken and printed, as he does in the aventura with Ana María, Linacero follows another photographic technique—that of manipulating the subject itself before taking the photograph. This process of trying to imitate, then capture, the evanescent past was a favorite of many amateur photographers in the nineteenth century (Julia Margaret Cameron was one), who liked to dress up their friends as characters from myths, stories or from history, then photograph them in highly stylized attitudes. Linacero's method here recalls not only this photographic process, but also more general aspects of photographic art.

Photography recalls the past since, from the moment it is taken, a given scene is superseded temporally by an infinite series of other scenes, each of which constitutes a present. Susan Sontag believes that “to take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged,” and, more categorically, “photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art … All photographs are memento mori.”¹⁰ This understanding corresponds precisely to Linacero's explanation for recreating the street scene with his wife—making Cecilia seem to become Ceci again, trying to “atrapar el pasado” (p. 36), and preserve it against time's passing and Ceci's growing older. Linacero protests that, once they were married, Cecilia's character no longer corresponded to the image he had formed of her as a young woman. He recalls that when they were novios “Cecilia era una muchacha, tenía trajes con flores en la primavera, unos guantes diminutos y usaba pañuelos de tela transparente que llevaban dibujos de niños bordados en las esquinas” (p. 31). When she became his wife, Linacero complains, she lost the innocence of youth; she became a woman who would argue with the butcher about different cuts of meat.

His arranged encounter with Cecilia on the street-corner is calculated to re-establish his original image of her, which he had lost: “una imagen exacta que ya no podía ser recordada” (p. 35). He has her dress as she dressed when she was a girl, and forces her to walk down the street assuming the same pose and posture she did before they were married. He makes her repeat several times the act of walking toward him—that is, until the vision is fixed indelibly in his mind. The session over, “no había nada que hacer y nos volvimos” (p. 36). Since he never sees Cecilia after their divorce, there is no threat that her current reality will impinge on his vision. As with Ana María, the original subject disappears from his life, and only the image remains.

Despite Linacero's protectiveness, and his physical inactivity which allows him to concentrate on his aventuras instead of being engulfed by new experience, reality never ceases to threaten the narrator's imaginary life. This threat explains Linacero's hatred of his roommate, Lázaro, who represents the antithesis of his way of apprehending the world. Linacero says at one point that “los hechos son siempre vacíos, son recipientes que tomarán la forma del sentimiento que los llene” (p. 34). The extreme relativity of this way of thinking and making judgments corroborates Linacero's deformation of reality in his aventuras. It is a view which Lázaro, the political activist, can never accept. Linacero thinks Lázaro's life is impoverished by his literal-mindedness. Contrasting his roommate to himself, Linacero complains that Lázaro lacks imagination (p. 40). But with his Marxist readings, his workers' cell meetings, and his political manifestoes, it might be argued that Lázaro uses his imagination in ways that Linacero cannot comprehend. Linacero reveals that Lázaro loves life—“ama la vida” (p. 51)—while the narrator hates “la gente, la vida, los versos con cuello almidonado” (p. 50), and prefers illusions to life. Lázaro stridently calls Linacero a failure, “¡Fraa … casado!” (p. 42), for his fear of action. Lázaro waits and works for the Revolution; “cada día falta menos” (p. 42) he tells Linacero with confidence, affirming what Linacero would most like to deny—that passing time dictates change.

Linacero is not unaware of time's passing, but he sees no continuum between suceso and aventura. His life is reduced to a series of moments, the flashes of time captured by the photograph: “mi vida no es más que el paso de fracciones de tiempo, una y otra, una y otra, como el ruido de un reloj, el agua que corre, moneda que se cuenta” (p. 52). Linacero measures his life by instants, and those instants overtake him: “Yo estoy tirado y el tiempo se arrastra, indiferente, a mi derecha y a mi izquierda” (p. 52). As Linacero ends this narrative which has been centered on his timeless, imaginary aventuras, reality begins to invade his room, and to besiege him. The emphases of the text's first paragraph are reversed; visual perception is abandoned, other senses are heightened. He sees nothing, for it is still before daybreak, but evidence of encroaching reality comes through an open window:

Hay en el fondo, lejos, un coro de perros, algún gallo canta de vez en cuando, al norte, al sur, en cualquier parte ignorada. Las pitadas de los vigilantes se repiten sinuosas y mueren. En la ventana de enfrente, atravesando el patio, alguno ronca y se queja entre sueños … Un ruido breve, como un chasquido, me hace mirar hacia arriba. Estoy seguro de poder descubrir una arruga justamente en el sitio donde ha gritado una golondrina. Respiro el primer aire que anuncia la madrugada. …

(p. 52, emphasis mine)

He is exhausted; he cannot now take refuge in an aventura in Alaska, in Switzerland, in Holland. His defense can be only retreat—retreat from reality and from his imagination—to sleep, a suspension of consciousness: “Voy a tirarme en la cama … buscando dormirme antes de que llegue la mañana” (p. 53). His text, like his frustration at the inappropriateness of his medium to his vision, trails off into fatigue and resignation.

Linacero's imagined alternatives to reality are more meager, even, than those of his chronological predecessor, Baldi, who creates a “possible” self so vivid that he can think of him as an acquaintance.¹¹ Later, other Onetti protagonists will take up the struggle against their real circumstances with more vigor and greater ambition, and will advance the campaign further. But Linacero stands behind them all, at the nocturnal barricade that divides the narrow world of their reality from the infinite possibilities of their imaginations. In Onetti's El astillero (1961), an inscription on his statue in Santa María proclaims Juan María Brausen the town's founder. But if we could look into the psyche of this imaginative creator of his own avatars Díaz Grey and Arce, we might read there the acknowledgement of their common ancestor: “Linacero—Fundador.”

Notes

1. Some critics call El pozo a novella. The work is short, comprising only 53 pages in its second edition (Montevideo: Editorial Arca, 1965). All citations in this paper are from the second edition, and will be noted in the text, with appropriate page number. According to Onetti, he had finished a version of another novel, Tiempo de abrazar, by 1935 (four years before El pozo was published), and he showed it to Roberto Arlt in Buenos Aires (Juan Carlos Onetti, “Semblanza de un genio rioplatense,” in ed. Jorge Lafforgue, Nueva novela latinoamericana 2 [Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós, 1972], pp. 368-9). However, Tiempo de abrazar was not published until 1974.

2. The singularity of Linacero's method, compared to the visual mode of presentation of the works of many nineteenth and twentieth century writers (Flaubert is one outstanding example), should become apparent in this essay. One major difference can be noted here. The well-known technique that has been called cinematographic narration represents an author's way of apprehending and communicating the world he creates; it is intended to appeal to the reader's sense of the familiar or recognizable and, often, to tell the story through visual details rather than through generalizations and judgments. (For a discussion of this technique, see, for example, Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye [Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1976]). Linacero's jealously private way of seeing, which he reveals only reluctantly and partially, has the opposite effect of—at least initially—disorienting the reader and distancing him from the character-narrator.

3. This idea is advanced by M. Ian Adams in his Three Authors of Alienation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 52). Ester asks Linacero “¿Y no pensás a veces que vienen mujeres desnudas, eh?” (p. 39).

4. Angel Rama, comparing Linacero to Dostoevski's Underground Man, finds that in both cases the structure and presentation of their works are functions of the narrators' social and psychological isolation. See Angel Rama, “Origen de un novelista y de una generación literaria,” in Juan Carlos Onetti, El pozo (Montevideo: Editorial Arca, 1965), pp. 62-68.

5. In a more general discussion of the cinematographic effects used in some of Onetti's later novels, Djelal Kadir mentions El pozo's “unfolding through a microscope,” and the novel's “technical practice of delimitation.” Linacero's highly focused vision contributes significantly, as we will see, to that technique. Djelal Kadir, Juan Carlos Onetti (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), pp. 61-62.

6. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta Books, 1978), p. 4.

7. Sontag, On Photography, p. 24.

8. Weston wrote of this work in his “Daybook” entry for August 8th, 1930: “It is a classic, completely satisfying—a pepper—but more than a pepper; abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter … all the new ones [photographs of peppers] take one into an inner reality—the absolute—with a clear understanding, a mystic revealment. This is the ‘significant presentation’ that I mean, the presentation through one's intuitive self, seeing ‘through one's eyes, not with them’; the visionary.” In ed. Nancy Newhall, Edward Weston, the Flame of Recognition (Millerton, New York: Aperture Monographs, 1975), p. 34.

9. Henry Peach Robinson, The Pictorial Effect in Photography (London, 1869), quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1964), p. 61.

10. Sontag, On Photography, pp. 12 and 15.

11. Juan Carlos Onetti, “El posible Baldi,” first published in La Nación (Buenos Aires) on September 20th, 1936, and later collected in Onetti's Cuentos completos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 1976), pp. 43-52. For a discussion of the importance of this and other early stories to Onetti's novels, see Hugo Verani, “Los comienzos: Tres cuentos de Juan Carlos Onetti anteriores a El pozo,” Hispamérica 2 (1972), pp. 27-34.