SOURCE: Lewis, Bart L. “Realizing the Textual Space: Metonymic Metafiction in Juan Carlos Onetti.” Hispanic Review 64, no. 4 (fall 1996): 491-506.

[In the following essay, Lewis examines truth and reality in Onetti's metafictional narratives.]

Throughout a closely-observed and honored writing career that began in 1933 (Onetti Goodbyes [Goodbyes and Stories] xvii), Uruguay's Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994) has hewed with unitary consistency to the belief that putting a tale down on paper is a troubled matter, loosening lives that are only virtual, possible deceits, scant sufferings, posed, languid beings. It is this attention to the making of the text itself that must surely lead the critic to see in Onetti not only the modernist reformer of the Latin American novel, but more significantly, the metafictionist theoretician who “explore[s] a theory of fiction through the practice of fiction” (Waugh 2).¹ Analysis of four exemplary works by Onetti along the trajectory of his stories and novels permits a clear, focused understanding of his use of the metafictional technique, grounded in the power of metonymy to realize the space of the text and to engender the communication of any messages concerning the fiction/reality dichotomy that the author may seek. “Un sueño realizado” (1941), Los adioses (1954), Dejemos hablar al viento (1979) and Cuando entonces (1987) distinguish the Onetti canon by the varied revelations of their creator's metafictional commitment.

Onetti's early attempts in Marcha (1939) to draw Uruguayan literature away from quaint, provincial styles and themes are rightly credited with generating the first rumblings of the vaunted boom of Latin American letters. His insistence on a new language for a new novel had predated by decades similar recognitions by two “boom” apologists, Carlos Fuentes and José Donoso.² Onetti states:

the belief that the language of the River Plate is that of its nativist authors not only is naive but simply false. I am not speaking about taking down stenographic versions for characters' dialogue. That is local color, for the consumption of tourists we do not have. I'm speaking about the writer's language; when this language is not born spontaneously and unmistakably of its own land like the fruit of a tree, it is not an apt instrument for total expression.

(“Selections” [“Selections from ‘Ripples in the Pool’ and Other Writings”] 21)

This “total” language that Onetti desired for his generation was the language of the artistic text, born to serve the creation of a literary heterocosm and to promote the cause of Ortega's “arte artístico,” the auto-referential artifice of modernism.

Beginning in 1939 with the confessional El pozo, a memoir related by the self-conscious fabulist Linacero, Onetti undertook to expose the world of the writer's imagination as one that comes alive only in the telling. All elements of the act of narration therefore must be assembled noisily before the eyes of the reader, with particular attention claimed by the code of composition, language itself. Onetti's emphasis on fictional reality as a transcendent linguistic construct in fact honors his desire to break with the Latin American novel of previous generations and validates his metafictionist credentials, in that “metafiction sets up an opposition, not to ostensibly ‘objective’ facts in the ‘real’ world, but to the language of the realistic novel which has sustained and endorsed such a view of reality” (Waugh 11).

In granting primacy to language in the construction of the textual world, Onetti necessarily puts its parts and uses up for inspection, first establishing a metalanguage with which his verbal sites come into imaginative view. We appropriately acknowledge in this an influential presence of Jakobson's metalinguistic code, which in Onetti precedes and legitimizes the dominant poetic one. This is Onetti's position in defining the modes of metafiction along the evolutionary axis of modernism-postmodernism: the narrator in Onetti awakens to his circumstance by giving an account of it, in such a way that “the emphasis is on the development of the narrator, on the modernist concern of consciousness rather than the post-modernist one of fictionality” (Waugh 14). In the mind of the narrator, the world must be recounted as memory, recollections of motion enacted by beings animated also by the residue of their prior sentience. These characters are themselves thus overtly partial, defined “in terms of their omissions. … They are passing fancies that flicker in and out of existence like dream figures” (Harss and Dohmann 184). Onetti's metafictional allegiance comes into further focus, then, in that:

ultimately, there is no reality but consciousness, and consciousness is conceived as a tireless maker of poetic constructs, an inventor of endless imaginary—or if you will, fictional—events that order the data of experience, make the world real. … The implicit conclusion … is that, finally, fiction is our reality.

(Alter Partial Magic 154)

The fiction that is Onetti's reality is then a project, an assembling of materials, a draft, raw material to be refined later, fiction that will lead to fiction, that just anticipates closure, a finality. As Harss and Dohmann observe: “[Onetti] is less interested in arriving at the truth of a situation than in isolating its components—its alternatives—which are likely to yield as many falsehoods as facts” (181). The lack of concrete nouns and topical references, the scarcity of proper names and toponyms create the impression of a landscape of traces, partial and lingering remembrances, spectral presences, so that “all of Onetti's fiction leaves the reader at a loss, never quite telling the whole story” (Goodbyes ix). In Onetti's metalanguage it is the contiguity trope, metonymy, that illuminates the process whereby the author continually conceives a fiction as recollection, which then necessarily exists in the autonomous textual realm as suggestion to the reader. Onetti's metafiction—project and consciousness—is well served by “that quality where one thing is said and something contiguous is meant, and metonymy is just the device by which that can happen” (Tambling 46). Because Onetti reveres and elaborates the tentative—the promise of “aventuras,” several possible conclusions for one narrative, controversial dualities, unresolved dilemmas—, he advances the modernist cause, which sees “that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures” (Waugh 7). Metonymy is an apt instrument for his cultivation of modernist ambiguity because “figures of thought have less to do with outward style, and deal rather with the way that thought keeps becoming double, non-unitary in sentences, and in Derrida's terms, characterized by différence” (Tambling 103).

Roman Jakobson's work with metonymy in literary analysis, specifically applied to Pasternak's prose, offers significant conclusions for the study of this trope in Onetti, linking two modernist masters and certifying the usefulness of linguistic criticism in the study of metafiction.³ Beginning with Pasternak's true metafictional summation that “genuine works of art, while relating all sorts of things, are really telling of their own birth” (307), Jakobson identifies a spareness of modern prose attributable to the controlled play of metonymy at work in the text:

The basic impulse of narrative prose is association by contiguity, and the narrative moves from one object to an adjacent one on paths of space and time or of causality; to move from the whole to the part and vice versa is only a particular instance of this process. The more the prose is stripped of material content the greater the independence achieved by these associations. For metaphor the line of least resistance is verse, and for metonymy it is a prose whose subject matter is either subdued or eliminated.

(310)

The fit among Jakobson, Pasternak, and Onetti is exact, if not breathtakingly so. Jakobson's “independence” clearly finds its analogue in the autonomy of metafiction—the assembled elements of art on display, immeasurably subordinate to the act of telling. Blurred or effaced subject matter rests at the very center of Onetti's chary style: all is composition, proximity, recalling Borges' evaluation that “la literatura es fundamentalmente un hecho sintáctico” (Ulla 358). From the first short narratives at the outset of his writing career to his last prose piece, Cuando ya no importe (1993), this is Onetti's vision of life and art. A story will be told, Onetti feyly announces; yet there is so little from which to craft it. These postures will do, these transits through space, these barely recalled scenes. The story must be told for life to continue its poor imitation of art.

Although the inaugural El pozo (1939) is correctly held to be the announcement of the metafictional project (a consciousness at large, seeking to relate), Onetti's 1941 short story, “Un sueño realizado,” refines the idea of “aventuras” from El pozo into a prominence of the performing space, not mimetic action. What El pozo contributes to a metonymic understanding of Onetti's metafiction is the sense of fragmentation and alienation that was to inform Onetti's work from that point forward. Ian Adams points to these two features and allows that “upon starting an attempt at communication [Linacero] sees [his room] again, with new perspective. … When he is looking at the room as though it were for the first time, he does not generalize on what he sees. Instead he describes isolated parts, substituting them for a totality of vision” (42). Any such certainty of conclusiveness has eluded Onetti throughout his career, and we are thus in “Un sueño realizado” in the presence of an ostentatious fiction-making that predictably rests on a few collected elements, actors, and the several objects of their drama. Onetti's use of metonymy to conduct the reader into his alternate world of fiction, to suggest to him that an existence beyond empirical reach lies adjacent to the thin and mistakable words of this literary text is evident from the first line. Just as la Queca in La vida breve pronounces its opening words, “mundo loco,” as a challenge to reality, so the narrator in “Un sueño realizado” asks us at the outset to enter this ludic world: “La broma la había inventado Blanes” (Tan triste 41).

The “broma” referred to is one that the actor Blanes has fabricated concerning the narrator Langman, a theatrical empresario, and his alleged financial ruin due to an unsuccessful staging of Hamlet. Langman's misfortune rests with poor receipts for every production he has mounted, not for a Shakespeare extravaganza. In the course of the story a woman comes to Langman to ask him to stage a theatrical work, “un momento, una escena se puede decir, y allí no pasa nada” (Tan triste 46). The play turns out to be a dream the woman had, says Blanes, “[y] la mayor locura está en que ella dice que ese sueño no tiene ningún significado para ella. … Dice que mientras dormía y soñaba eso era feliz, pero no es feliz la palabra sino otra clase de cosa. … Así que quiere verlo todo nuevamente” (Tan triste 54). After the scene is performed, with no audience in attendance, the woman dies. The tableau, presented in an empty theater, is a play, a dream that sprang from life. Death at the end of the play, and within the story told by Langman, given life by Onetti, is the death of fiction after its recounting.

But is death within the fiction of a fiction like death in life? The distance that metafiction puts between story and reader would lead us to say no. Metonymic metafiction would prompt us to say that this death is veritable, standing in artistic proximity to life, with something to teach us concerning finality that we would never learn in life. In the same way that Pirandello in Six Characters in Search of an Author creates a veiled woman who seeks the eternity of art, so Onetti sends an anguished dreamer in like garb to ask that stylization give her happiness (or some approximation) again. Metonymy in Onetti purifies the things of the material world outside the text, making them suitable for fiction, which is, in short, defiantly alternate to life. The figures of this critical passage from the story assume the autonomy of art: “Bajo la luz suave y limpia, la cara de la mujer y también lo que brillaba en su cuerpo, zonas del vestido, las uñas en la mano sin guante, el mango del paraguas, el reloj con su cadena, parecían volver a ser ellos mismos, liberados de la tortura del día luminoso” (Tan triste 50). The dream that comes true is the recollection of an oneiric fantasy inserted into a world of objects poised to serve its telling. The narrator animates the parts, and we are given an account of something like life.

Los adioses (1954) is utterly remarkable in Onetti's production as his only work with anything approaching a “realistic” setting, a progression of action with a beginning, middle, and end, and sustained temporal references. This short novel, alive with natural detail, takes place in a mountain resort where marked seasonal changes occur, trains and buses operate regularly, and “La vie en rose” floats languidly through the air. Indeed the rest of Onetti's production is defined consistently by its overt removal to a metafictional plane outside recognizable time and space, the artistic realm, access to which is gained by metonymic contact.

How then are we to come to terms with the seeming anomaly that is Los adioses, an exercise in mimesis not seen before or after? A tentative answer may lie in the fact that, unlike Onetti's customary pattern, the ostentatious transit from story to story-telling does not occur here until the end of the novel, and only then as a surprise, an ontological charge to the reader: what is finally true about the characters we have gotten to know? Onetti's other narrators displace themselves at will, affirming the reader's confidence that the telling, not the teller, is supreme. The unreliable narrator of Los adioses settles himself into the apparent predictability of a realist narrative, draws on reports delivered to him by two important informants, a male nurse and a maid, concentrates maniacal attention on his subject, a former basketball player who has come to this mountain town to live out his last days, and imparts the entire account with a rich appeal to the senses. Surpassing all other considerations, however, is the metonymic certainty of the Onetti style. The narrator does not disclose his machinations until the end; the story-telling is subordinate to the story throughout the work, and we grow fascinated with a character for his verisimilitude, not his heuristic presence. But the parts of this brief life are again supreme. We understand Onetti's heterocosm to be like ours, thanks to the paths of specific access.

The metonymic structure of Los adioses has been understood alternately as a “cubist collage” (Maio 178) and a “fragmented presentation” (Richards 164), the fictional construct of a narrator whose selectivity of detail and moment of disclosure is revealed to be highly manipulative. This is indeed true, but in keeping with an analysis of Onetti as metafictionist who creates his concentric fictions with figures of adjacency, the seeming mimesis of Los adioses springs from a greater concentration of metonymic detail, of:

metonymical devices … from the whole to the part and vice versa, from the cause to the effect and vice versa, from spatial relations to temporal ones … an action instead of an actor, a man's condition, or one of his remarks or attributes, rather than the man himself, and the consequent separating off and objectifying of these abstractions.

(Jakobson 308)

Jakobson has also said that the metonymic is “more applicable to the realist novel” than is metaphor, which has a more ample play in poetry (Tambling 48). Although metonymy is ever-present in Onetti, its full force here gives the impression of a “realist novel,” whereas in Onetti's other works we pause over the contiguous features for their obvious signalling of a fictive reality. In speaking of Pasternak, Jakobson's words imply a contrast that would well describe the one between Los adioses and the rest of Onetti's fiction: “all images are in some way potentially contiguous. … The more unrecognizable this affinity and the more unusual the community that the poet creates, the more the juxtaposed images, and whole series of images, fall to pieces and lose their spellingbook clarity” (312).

It is true that the plasticity of Los adioses tends to give it a composed, settled quality absent from other of the author's narratives. But in this pictorial display, we are given an opportunity to appreciate the genius of Onetti's style in weaving appropriate images as the story unfolds. Animating the exposition of detail further is Onetti's strong reliance in this novel on present participles. States of being and experience transpire in metamorphosis, ever becoming. Tambling has remarked that “verbal items are deverbalized [as] participles or infinitives … the less ‘verbish’ the verbs in the poem are, the greater their lexical power tends to be, lexical power being in inverse proportion to the number of different terms with which a given term is habitually associated” (62). The suggestion of transformation offered by the participial form promises us again the fullness of artifice.

Putting aside the question of the problematic, deceitful narrator and his motivated speculations in favor of a focus on limned portraits of nature—a clear contact between the world of empirical reality and the alternate world of fiction—, we understand Onetti's artistic excellence. It is his undeniable skill in creating beauty, the beauty of distant fixity and transcendence, that surely animates this self-styled “indiferente” who explains his work by saying that “yo escribo por el puro placer de escribir” (Verani 330). The effective accumulation of detail in Los adioses to suggest the death of the hero builds most movingly (does a modernist text allow such?) in the final two chapters of the novel. The ill former athlete, designated only as “el hombre,” has come down from his mountain retreat to request home food service of the narrator. They meet just as the narrator has stepped onto the street in front of his store: “Salí al frío azul y gris, al viento que parecía no bajar de la sierra, sino formarse en las copas de los árboles del camino y atacarme desde allí, una vez y otra, casi a cada paso, enconado y jubiloso” (Los adioses 168). As we read the passage, we encounter the synesthetic “frío azul y gris,” affirmation by negation in “que parecía no bajar de la sierra,” and the personification of the wind in “enconado y jubiloso.”

But the narrative is powered by the suggestions of contiguity: “frío,” “viento,” “copas,” “árboles,” “camino,” and “paso.” Jakobson's “paths of causality” loom before us; we understand how literary language is arranged to simulate reality outside the text and stimulate the reality of metafiction. The cold wind of the treetops spins around the narrator's steps; animate nature harasses consciousness; death intrudes on life; something must remain to give an account: art. The day the narrator goes to the cabin where “el hombre” has just committed suicide, he states that “el aire olía a frío, y a seco, a ninguna planta” (Los adioses 175). This is one of Onetti's proudest metonymic moments. The first contiguity of “planta” is with all botanical life, and that of “aire,” the whole of the human environment. An artist in creating his work makes paradigmatic choices and sends them along the syntagmatic line of presentation. The reader then recreates the artist's world by reading it, interpreting his intention. Between creation and recreation lies the sublimity of art, and the artful suggestion of death brought by the juxtaposing of “aire,” “frío,” “seco,” and “ninguna planta” is total: all creation is extinguished in this fictive world first given life by an innocent reader led by a duplicitous narrator.

Dejemos hablar al viento (1979) is appropriate for a study of metonymy in Onetti's metafiction for two persuasive reasons: a strong presence of intertextuality (fictional mass grafted onto fictional mass) and desultory auto-referential narrative (a present part for an expected whole, “a novel of non-events” [Millington 317]). Toponymic substitution occurs as well: “por primera vez, Onetti se deja vencer por los recuerdos y nostalgias y renuncia a Santa María para ubicarnos en Montevideo. … La ciudad de Dejemos hablar al viento se llama Lavanda, pero él expresa: ‘Estamos en Agraciada y 19 de abril, en Montevideo/Lavanda’” (Juan Carlos Onetti 10). Metonymic plot devices figure in significant ways also, giving us the puzzle of uncertainty about characters and actions that characterizes Onetti's metafictional texts. And in some final exhibition of admitted adjacency, Dejemos hablar al viento is the work in which “several of the characters discover that they are not real people but characters in a novel” (Balderston 17). As Onetti's production decreased in his later years, especially since his residency in Spain that began in 1975 (“Desde su exilio Onetti ha escrito muy poco” [Verani 331]), he seems more willing to exploit his established store of characters and settings, not in service to the perpetuation of heterocosmic Santa María as in earlier works, but in an effort to put its constituent parts into a kind of final confrontation.

Particularly active in this metafictional apocalypse is the notion of intertextuality, Onetti's use of his own previous work to structure this novel. The partitive presence is quite obvious and capricious.⁴ Hugo Verani has called Dejemos hablar al viento a “palimpsest,” in which “los modos de autorreferencialidad se dan tanto a nivel léxico, sintáctico, semántico como estructural” (331). Most striking, perhaps, is the insertion in Chapter vii, Part i, of the first two paragraphs of Onetti's first novel, El pozo, with only one change, “taller del Mercado Viejo” substituted for “cuarto” of the original. In both cases the artist is pacing in search of inspiration. Mark Millington has noted that Chapter viii, Part i, “was published with the same title, ‘Justo el 31,’ in Marcha, 1220 (August 1964), and it was included in Cuentos completos (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1968)” (307). Verani has also discovered paragraphs from La vida breve and Juntacadáveres (331) present in this novel. Additionally, the wind that Medina awaits at the end of the novel, the “llegada retumbante de Santa Rosa” (253), “Santa Rosa con su tormenta” (252), recalls Macondo's ravaging wind at the conclusion of García Marquéz's Cien años de soledad, an allusion to the work of another Latin American patriarch of the new novel. In short, this reliance on fragments of previous texts is a supreme deference to Onetti's fictive world. Santa María, Lavanda, the colony of Swiss farmers, the mountain resort, a bare stage in an empty theater, the sick room of the first chapter of Dejemos hablar al viento: these venues will forever suggest to the reader that the life of fiction commands attention because it is as ubiquitous as the other life, and as incomplete.

What narrative there is in Dejemos hablar al viento collects into often unrelated chapters which, even if brought into an elusive coherence, cannot speak a univocal truth. But Onetti's metafiction reigns. In Chapter vi, Part i, the narrator Medina relates that “yo buscaba un hermano, un descastado, un apátrida como yo; alguien que hubiera escapado de Santa María sin permiso de Brausen, por asco a Brausen y a todo lo que de él fluía” (50). Medina has achieved independence from the baleful Brausen, but the creator's avatars are everywhere. A resuscitated Larsen, somewhat the worse for his mimetic death, with “un agradable olor salvaje a tierra húmeda” and “gusanos que le resbalaban de nariz a boca” (139-40) manipulates the actions of Medina's companion Gurisa, obliterating her temporarily while he commiserates with Medina over their fictional (in)subordination. He hands Medina a slip of paper that comes from “esos libros en el Centro de Residentes” (141): it is a description of Brausen's founding of Santa María. When Medina protests that he and Larsen were both there at one time, Larsen disenchants him: “está escrito, nada más. Pruebas no hay. Así que le repito: haga lo mismo. Tírese en la cama, invente usted también. Fabríquese la Santa María que más le guste, mienta, sueñe personas y cosas, sucedidos” (142). Once back in (Brausen's) Santa María, Medina sees a sign in the old market: “Escrito por Brausen” (147). The world and the word: Onetti's fiction leads us to the reality of its creation, just that.

Sustained and deliberate confusions in character and plot serve Onetti's metafictional intent further by bringing into question the legitimacy of any text that would dare to appear conclusive, reduced to a “mere product level that ignores process” (Hutcheon 5). Process is indeed privileged in Onetti, and the various ambiguous identities and actions that arise in the reading of Dejemos hablar al viento mock realist fiction. But what is the effect of multiple possibilities in a metafictional text whose meaning is created by metonymy? A safe assumption is that traces, suggestions, replacements, and likenesses have not been allowed to proliferate thoughtlessly. The metafictionist is, after all, powerfully in control, doling out, with calculated indifference, his visions of life and art, blended appropriately. It is rather that Onetti's overarching metonymy has been the brief life for the complete life: the brief and successive lives of mimetic characters, to the degree that we can claim that they are recognizable as such, the brief life of the reading of the text, all potential, all promised. The shifting biographies of his characters in this novel are no less tentative than those in his other books; here they are more loosely arrayed than ever, as if the characters' recognition of their fictional status had somehow undone their faith in textual dissembling.

The life of Julián Seoane is typical here. Medina hints from the beginning that Julián is his son, but later Julián says to him that “quisiste jugar a que yo era tu hijo” (187). Two chapters are in fact titled “Una infancia para Seoane” and “Una infancia para Seoane, ii,” and in them Medina imagines for the boy a life in which his father was a “gringo suizo” (217), an interpolated tale worthy of the promised “aventuras” of El pozo. Additionally, Díaz Grey, a founding citizen of Santa María, reports on the death of a major character in the work, Frieda, offering that she died where the mother of Mersault died, “aunque sea imposible” (237). This possible leap into the fictional world of Camus gives further evidence that Onetti's later work tends to the ludic, latent always in that “en todo rito hay un elemento lúdico” (Lagmanovich 79). Indeed Onetti's rituals of composition—a night, a thought, a glimpsed life, the desire for salvation, the word—have led to a liberation, jocose speculation in realms exceeding this one. Other characters materialize and recede, among them Gurisa, who, when so named by Medina, responds “lo que quieras. Cualquier cosa menos un insulto” (49) and Juanina, conjured up because “aquí en esos meses remotos que se me antoja evocar, aparece otra mujer, Juanina” (70).

The supposed or casual deaths of these characters—reported, disputed, forgotten—give us a final look at the intensified ludic metafiction of Dejemos hablar al viento. A judge comes to investigate the murder of Frieda and the suicide of Julián Seoane. He sees Seoane's note in which he claims to have killed Frieda, and he views Julián's lifeless body. Medina had said of this “desconocido” that “odiaba a aquel hombre, sin haberlo visto nunca, desde el principio de su vida, tal vez desde antes de nacer” (248). The judge himself had spent the entire morning with Díaz Grey, whom “sigo queriendo como si fuera mi hijo. Un hijo fiel” (250). It must be Brausen.

The ludic quality of Onetti's 1987 nouvelle, Cuando entonces, hits a peak not heretofore seen, a moment of playful, almost innocent fantasy about the act of writing. It is fitting that this overt metafictionist (Hutcheon 154) Onetti should combine career-long techniques—various narrative voices, time discontinuity, metonymic prevalence, auto-referentiality, studied ambiguity—into this recent fiction that pronounces and sharpens these very instruments of creation. The novel is stunning as well for an identifiable topical reference (a military dictatorship somewhere close by) and the depiction of a woman not altogether enervated and meretricious in a position of some authority. The framing of the story and the subsequent emplacing of brief lives are again present, however, and the fabulist will once more spin out his telling tale.

The concerns of Onetti's metafiction, his reliance on metonymy, and his heterocosmic naming are reassuringly evident in the work's first two sentences: “una vez más la historia comenzó, para mí, en el día-noche de Santa Rosa. Estábamos, con Lamas, en una cervecería bautizada Munich, en Lavanda” (15). “Una vez más” indicates that the cycle continues, and the “historia” will be transformed into a life as the story unfolds. “Día-noche” is the perfect metonymic replacement for artistic time, which is eternal and repetitive, and Onettian time, a twilight of experience that darkens into a night of recollection. Santa Rosa, it will be remembered, is the awaited eponymous wind of Dejemos hablar al viento, appearing now “bromeando a Lavanda y Buenos Aires. … Pero es necesario soportarla como amiga y sudar, casi boqueando, calores y humedades” (15): intertextuality again makes clear the designed nature of these recurring fictions. With the pronouncing of a curse on Santa María in Dejemos hablar al viento, Lavanda is now designated as Onetti's alternate sphere, and the narrative begins. Lamas begins to tell the story of Magda to a companion, the principal narrator who begins and ends the first part, but with predictable confusion Lamas can't be sure of her name: “No juro que se llamara Magda, Magdalena” (18); but he can be sure of her nightly association with the “militar” in a bar. After discussion between the two friends about the newspaper for which both work, the narrator regrets that he could never reunite with Lamas, “el hombre de Santa Rosa” (29), the man of the wind and the coming summer, the man who brings revelation.

Lamas takes over as the principal narrator in the second part, “Donde Magda es amada.” He befriends Magda and is taken into her confidence to the extent that she allows him to visit the apartment that the “comandante,” forced to return to the “selva,” has left her, “[un] departamento … regio y en la mejor calle” (45). In relating the story of Magda and the “comandante” to a third party, Lamas concludes a statement about Magda's lover with “inventé” (53), a locution that occupies a narrative slot more commonly supplied with an inflected form of “decir” or “contar.” This metonymic substitution of standard verbs of relation with “inventar,” or in other cases “imaginar,” has been common throughout Onetti's production, and signals the real meaning of his metafiction: telling is artful lying, all confessed mendacity with a transcendent truth beckoning beyond the ruins of mimesis. References to Magda's wigs and the false teeth of another character, Cayetano, remind us further of the contiguous nature of Onetti's fictional reality: it lies alongside our own.

A lengthy episode in Part ii is the occasion for Onetti's most fanciful and nostalgic surrender to the strong ludic potential that metafiction always holds. Lamas has been summoned to answer questions about Magda and the “comandante” by the “patrona” of the cabaret where the two lovers meet for their assignations. Madame Safó, a possible name for the questioner, has many of the qualities of the Onetti female (“la voz. … Me era fácil imaginarla untuosa, alegre, insinuante sin molestar” [61]), but she exercises an uncharacteristic control over Lamas. In her office, however, is a large desk that sends the narrator into his flight of metafictional delight:

El botiquín escritorio me puso momentáneamente nostálgico y suprimió años. Porque, nunca poseído, había sido mío en un pasado cada día más remoto. … Y me imaginé, muy vagamente, sentado frente al mueble y escribiendo en un atardecer. … Nunca supe qué estaba escribiendo; posiblemente la novela total. … Cada cajoncito tenía un letrero de papel porque yo era un novelista esclavo del orden y la disciplina. Un cajoncito estaba reservado para coleccionar adjetivos gastados. También disponía de refugios provisorios para adverbios, sustantivos y fetos de frases.

(60-61)

This is a gratuitous insertion, but it is unique in Onetti's fiction for its ingenuous playfulness. It reminds us of “El Aleph” and rings with a tone of valediction: a career remembered in the midst of an unfolding fiction.

The nouvelle's third part is narrated by one Pastor de la Peña who will report to “señor comisario” the monologue of the woman sitting on the bar stool, who we know by ambient suggestion is la Magda. There is something of Manuel Puig in this police report offered to tell a story as one of other disparate channels of relating; again, Onetti appears to be extending the boundaries of his fictive world. His story turns out to be a miniature detective story about la Magda's death: “el tapado sobre la butaca, la mujer vestida, verde, y sin cabeza. El enorme revólver militar a su lado” (91). “¿Fue suicidio o crimen?” will read the headline in Lamas' paper as revealed in “Donde la teletipo escribe el final,” the last section of Cuando entonces. La Magda was Petrona García: artificial names for artificial lives, just as we were uncertain of Madame Safó's identity, or Gurisa's in Dejemos hablar al viento, or that of “el hombre” in Los adioses.

It is this vagueness, this ambiguity of outline, that marks Onetti's metafiction and that come into focus in “Un sueño realizado,” Los adioses, Dejemos hablar al viento, and Cuando entonces as metonymic potential. There are openings to be filled in this fictional scheme, says Onetti, because fiction is characters leading lives amidst a tangle of words. A character's name goes here, a verb of reporting is called for there, some part of nature needs to be evident there: the process leads the reader to the plot and back out again. Thus in making his substitutions for life (recalling is secondhand, alternate, inexact, appropriate to writing), Onetti displays his surpassing skill in creating art, “arte como artificio … el objeto artístico [libre] del automatismo mediante una percepción nueva de él: la singularización” (Ulla 358). We see Onetti and his various narrators at work putting crafted truth, fiction, alongside its incomplete forebear, unmediated reality.

Notes

1. See my 1989 article, “Juan Carlos Onetti and the Auto-Referential Text,” (Hispanófila 96: 73-86) in which I attempt to establish a legitimacy for this assertion by viewing the metafictional project in six representative works by Onetti. This present study is meant to complement the previous one by pointing to the practice of metafiction at additional key points along the Onetti chronology, moments that individually define the author's reflexive predilection, depart markedly from its practice elsewhere, pronounce annihilation to its textual locus, and signal its presence in Onetti's recent work.

2. I refer to Fuentes' La nueva novela latinoamericana (México: Cuadernos de Joaquín Mortiz, 1969) and Donoso's Historia personal del boom (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1972).

3. It is not my intent to employ an extensive critical apparatus based on other theories of Jakobson, the Prague School, or Formalism in this study of Onetti. Jakobson's work with metaphor and metonymy is exceptionally germane to Onetti's practice of metafiction, and references to the former's theories will be limited to their applicability in this regard.

4. Robert Alter's discussion of the terms “allusion” and “intertextuality” deserves mention at this point in order to help clarify what Onetti has done in intercalating old texts in new narrative: “whereas allusion implies a writer's active, purposeful use of antecedent texts, intertextuality is something that can be talked about when two or more texts are set side by side, and in recent critical practice such juxtaposition has often been the willful or whimsical act of the critic, without regard to authorial intention” (Pleasures 112). It is safe to say that Onetti has done the juxtaposing here.

Works Cited

Adams, M. Ian. Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: U of Texas P, 1975.

Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.

———. The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Balderston, Daniel. “Juan Carlos Onetti.” “Fires Down Below.” Ed. Michael Ventura. L.A. Weekly June 6-12 (1986): 15-17.

Donoso, José. Historia personal del boom. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1972.

Fuentes, Carlos. La nueva novela latinoamericana. México: Cuadernos de Joaquín Mortiz, 1969.

Harss, Luis and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. London: Methuen, 1984.

Jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Juan Carlos Onetti. Ed. Pedro Amorín y Beatriz Pereda. Montevideo: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, 1985.

Lagmanovich, David. Códigos y rupturas: textos hispanoamericanos. Rome: Bulzoni, 1988.

Maio, Eugene A. “Onetti's Los adioses: A Cubist Reconstruction of Reality.” Studies in Short Fiction 2 (1989): 173-81.

Millington, Mark. Reading Onetti. Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1985.

Onetti, Juan Carlos. Cuando entonces. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1987.

———. Dejemos hablar al viento. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980.

———. Goodbyes and Stories. Trans. Daniel Balderston. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.

———. Los adioses. Triple espera. Ed. Djelal Kadir. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. 121-78.

———. “Selections from ‘Ripples in the Pool’ and Other Writings.” Intro. Hugo Verani. Trans. Peter Egelston. Review 29 (1981): 21-25.

———. Tan triste como ella y otros cuentos. Prólogo Joaquín Marco. Barcelona: Lumen, 1982.

Richards, Katharine C. “Playing God: The Narrator in Onetti's Los adioses.” Studies in Short Fiction 2 (1989): 163-71.

Tambling, Jeremy. What is Literary Language? Philadelphia: Open UP, 1988.

Ulla, Noemí. “La recepción de la escritura coloquial rioplatense.” Nuevo Texto Crítico 2 (1988): 353-60.

Verani, Hugo. “El palimpsesto de la memoria: Dejemos hablar al viento de Onetti.” Nuevo Texto Crítico 2 (1988): 329-42.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984.