SOURCE: Lewis, Bart L. “Tales Told: Narrator, Character, and Theme in Juan Carlos Onetti's Juntacadáveres.” Chasqui 20, no. 1 (May 1991): 17-22.

[In the following essay, Lewis explores the influence of Onetti's narrative strategy on his themes in Juntacadáveres.]

The genius of Latin America's revered contemporary novelist and influential stylistic innovator, Juan Carlos Onetti, lies in his telling stories whose only reality is artistic and transcendent. In his first short stories and the landmark El pozo, first-person narration predominates: the storyteller is at the center of his tale, with the freedom to elaborate and imagine, to defer and efface. From the early works in the 1930s through El astillero in 1961, Onetti gives his narrators the freedom to create, but the sense of the prose is univocal, with metafictional scaffolding clearly visible and a controlling presence immanent. With Juntacadáveres in 1964, Onetti broadens the narrative base to establish three distinct voices: a first-person singular introspective, a third-person ominscient, and, in a departure from previous narrative tones, a first-person plural chorus that is plainly moralistic and censorious.

As he prepares to leave Santa María, Jorge Malabia, Onetti's first-person singular narrator in Juntacadáveres, reflects: “Pensé en Julita y en mis padres, en mi afán rabioso de despojarme, en mi creencia en las vidas breves y los adioses, en el vigor hediondo de las apostasías. Aún no me había alcanzado el remordimiento. Sabía que iba a llegar, en cuanto apareciera ese tren sin horario, fantasmal, y yo lo tomara para quedarme solo” (231). Onetti's creation of alternate realities throughout his literary production, his metafictional drive, is a fundamental point of critical interest, and underscores his belief that the novelistic text is born of process, invention, and self-examination. Regrets, good-byes, brief lives, solitude, anticipations, and conclusions are the thematic keys that structure Onetti's works, and specifically Juntacadáveres. But significantly in this work, visible construction of narrative, doing as relating, is dispersed among several tellers. The space between the metafictional beginnings and endings in Juntacadáveres is populated by multiple narrators, yearning for beginnings and endings. In Onetti the act of literary creation materializes the mental space occupied by imagination and memory. By establishing distinct points of view through various narrators, Onetti turns reflection and anticipation, mental activities that challenge linguistic reduction, into substance that can only exist as a work of art. In Juntacadáveres, the subjectivity of Jorge Malabia's first-person narration, the objectivity of a third-person omniscient narrator, and the solemn first-person plural voice of historical observation flow together to expose the erosion and concomitant regeneration of life in art.

Juntacadáveres forms part of Onetti's saga of mythical Santa María, brought fully to life in La vida breve (1950). Díaz Grey, Santa María's physician and the principal inhabitant of the town to emerge in La vida breve, plays a subordinate role in Juntacadáveres to Larsen, the novel's eponymous protagonist, Jorge Malabia, son of Santa María's influential newspaper publisher, Julita, Jorge's mad sister-in-law, Father Bergner, and Marcos, Bergner's nephew and Julita's brother. Larsen has been summoned to Santa María to open and administer a brothel, which is approved by the town council. The moral outrage that follows provokes a campaign led by Father Bergner and the “Liga de Caballeros” to rid Santa María of this curse, and a barrage of anonymous letters alerting the citizens to the brothel's corruptive influence follows the declaration of this holy war. Larsen's “hundred days” in Santa María come to an end, and he leaves the town, accompanied by his three feckless and unbeauteous employees. Interspersed with Larsen's musings on lost vitality and the pondered actions of the novel's other significant characters is the first-person narration of Jorge Malabia, a sixteen-year old poet and substitute lover for his dead brother's wife, Julita. The slim anecdotal thread of a plot, common to all of Onetti's works, is subservient to a design for novel-making, to a linking of fictional character and metaphysical truth, in spite of the Uruguayan critic Mario Benedetti's generous allowance that “esta novela es mucho más entretenida que cualesquiera anteriores” (148). Malabia, then, is the classic Onettian first-person introvert who examines himself and others through the painful illuminations of detachment.

Mindful that Onetti's novels, like most modern artistic fiction, concentrate on form rather than on mimetic originality, we are drawn to a necessary consideration in any critical appraisal of Onetti's works: “The [modern] reader is no longer satisfied with an impersonal tale, delivered to him impeccably in its final form. He demands that he be given access to the artist's inner working and to the process of the art's formation” (Kadir 34). Because Onetti, like Faulkner, chooses to follow the same characters through several novelistic incarnations, alive in a single mythopoeic cosmos, there is, as a primary postulation in this study of Juntacadáveres, the necessary claim that diverse points of view signal the disintegration of reality so that one theme may be highlighted: a transcendent moral truth lies within the narrative rubble as solitary and luminous shards. In Juntacadáveres three narrative voices come together to delimit the space that art must occupy in human experience, the arranged space that precedes analysis. When the insane Julita is found hanged by her own hand at the end of the novel, Jorge says: “Asquerosamente muerta era por fin mía, amiga sin límites. Estábamos entendiéndonos, se iba formando un pacto indestructible” (238-239). Only with death, literary death that annuls the character's life of art, can there come contemplation. It is as if Onetti says that the act itself of writing fiction, bringing characters to life, is truthful only if it recognizes its own impossibility. Madness, other lives, dream, detachment: there is never a definitive placement of a settled reality onto the page. Only when characters die, or the narration ends, can there be a sustained analysis of their lives or the meaning of their lives. The reader's reaction or the critic's examination is the only channel of clear definition, once the novel is completed and placed into the context of cultural discourse, accessible as art. The three distinct points of view in Juntacadáveres require the reader to reintegrate reality, to capture its alternate forms, unite them and place them whole alongside life, “la aventura del hombre” (Benedetti 132) that Onetti states as his novelistic theme.

The possible alternate forms of human existence, conscious and unconscious substitution, “escape, huida de la mediocre realidad” (Rodríguez Monegal 111), are the pursuits of the characters in Juntacadáveres. These virtual configurations occur in all three of the narrations, the third-person omniscient, Jorge's first-person discourse, and the first-person plural accounts, these last a kind of moral asseveration, the voice of the race that speaks for history. It is critical in this analysis of the novel's various points of view to note that the principal contrast lies between Jorge's narration and the other two. The third-person discourse is a narrative surface, a way to enter the story, to legitimize the existence of Santa María. Interior monologue cuts along this surface, allowing intimate revelations to arise from the interstices. The “we” narration, which is distinct from Jorge's perceptions and cannot be viewed as his arrival on the scene with narrative reinforcements, begins midway through the novel, as the anonymous letters make their appearance in Santa María. It is the unified sensibility of the community that listens to Father Bergner's sermons against the brothel, that shrinks in fear from the lascivious pleasure of the “casa de la costa,” and views the massing of school girls who march in protest. The first-person plural narrative is the witness to history, strangely collective and suggestible in this novel of solitary searching. Counterpoised to objectivity and outrage are Jorge's personal views on his youth and the decay, actual and potential, that lies around him. As his voice speaks in the shadowy silence of introspection, we are reminded of the coming doom of Larsen's enterprise, the falsity of fictional characters, and the vacant promise of language. Jorge lives to cater to his sister-in-law's madness; he views his life in terms of others, and thus is the individual who links the coming of experience to its abolition. The third-person narration sets the tale in motion, the first-person plural summarizes the effect of the novel's action, and Jorge interiorizes the conflicts between appearance and its changing basis, reality.

Jorge's first-person insights form the principal point of contact for the testing of the alternate realities proposed in the novel. His first sustained self-analysis reveals detachment, a trait of all of Onetti's characters: “Yo soy yo, este ser, este ‘muchachito’ de ellos, triste, distinto … tan aparte y por encima de todos ellos. Yo soy este al que miro vivir y hacer. … No quiero aprender a vivir, sino descubrir la vida de una vez para siempre” (34). Just as other first-person Onettian narrators, Brausen in La vida breve and Linacero in El pozo, subordinate their lives to troubled women, Jorge denies his existence in Julita's madness: “Ella eligió estar loca para seguir viviendo y esta locura exige que yo no viva; yo no soy más que un sueño variable” (34). Jorge's youth, which he insists upon in contrast to the aged others, marks him as the ideal narrator of intimacy, as he guards and examines his adolescent curiosities. He is detached from his own person, as are Onetti's characters typically, but his years, placing him at the edge of responsibility and mature awareness, invest in him the value of awakening, accompanied by his contact with Julita's insane parody of life and with the degeneration of others. In the scheme of Onetti's beginnings and endings, Jorge begins the examination of the lives of Santa María. He is on the train platform the day Larsen arrives with the three prostitutes, although he is not identified until some chapters later. His awareness of inauthenticity, separation and distance, traits that he notes in Larsen, reaches a clear concentration as he observes the elderly Lanza, a newspaper employee and failed author who reads and criticizes Jorge's verses: “Está viejo, es un viejo; desde hace años todo lo que hizo estuvo tan separado del hombre que él fue como el eco de una campana del momento del tañido. … Aunque el viejo no lo sepa, equilibramos las bocas en un borde de mi desesperación, donde es posible que él, muerto, juegue a entenderse conmigo, con este que no va a ser nunca” (57). His own age, Jorge calls “ridículo” (94), another parody that fictional life imposes on the real life that it takes as its subject. And on viewing Lanza once more, Jorge repeats the conjecture that circumstantial attachments take human beings through distinct, self-extinguishing stages, forcing us to live forever in an insubstantial zone of transition: “Es viejo y yo soy menos que joven; no es una diferencia de tiempo, sino de razas, de idiomas, constumbres, moral y tradiciones; un viejo no es uno que fue joven, es alguien distinto, sin unión con su adolescencia, es otro” (94).

Jorge's relation to Julita certifies the particular first-person subjectivity that he brings to the narration of lives that once were and that now exist only in search of themselves or an alternate embodiment. Her madness dates from the burial of her husband Federico, Jorge's brother. She imagines that she is expecting a child, and when the outraged women of Santa María come to her house to write their anonymous letters against the brothel, she creates charades of life by exhibiting Federico's clothing. Her physical posture when she is with Jorge is that of a timid and suppliant child. Jorge's evaluation of her leaves no doubt that his particular narrative voice intones the responsibility of an Onettian narrator to record the ineffable: “sentí que todo lo que acababa de pasar—ella y yo, las palabras y las situaciones del secreto, de la incomprensible mentira que nos juntaba—no tenía más valor que el conjunto de sucesos de un sueño” (534). The relationship between Jorge and Julita exists at a marginal point, where lives are conflated at the edge of vital experience: “Jorge Malabia y su cuñada Julita viven una historia que el primero de los dos narra para transmitirnos lo que tiene de encuentro, de soledad y temor, de impotencia de los seres ante el tiempo, y cómo no, de lujuria, que aparecen como un último intento de ser y de existir” (Chavarri 531). As he leaves for a rendezvous with Julita, he speaks the words that will equip him for another encounter with her distant and depleted fiction, words that confer on him the status of communicator of the estranged: “Cruzo el jardín … descubriendo que los pensamientos no nacen de nosotros, que están ahí, en cualquier parte fuera de nuestras cabezas, libres y duros, y que se introducen en nosotros para ser pensados y nos abandonan cuando tienen bastante, caprichosos e invariados” (177). Jorge is a poet, an impostor for his dead brother, a searcher who would leave Santa María if Julita's death had not called him back. He is the one inhabitant of Santa María whose struggle with understanding only touches on the question of the brothel and its controversial administrator. Rather, his desire for escape is embedded in the larger tripartite narrative structure that demands of all characters removal from present circumstance. It is his particular effacement that we witness from an altogether personal perspective.

The pictorial, composed quality of the novel's first scene—the arrival of Larsen in Santa María—presents the proper frame of observation and scrutiny that the third-person point of view brings to the telling of the tale. Woven into this omniscient narration are interior monologues, of Larsen and Díaz Grey primarily, that are voices of personal revelation sounding across the dark settings of watchful Santa María. The dialogues are words directed at one character by another, not purposeful turn-taking to arrive at comprehension. Characters talk at each other; each is absorbed either in analyzing the other's posture or motives, or in his own introspection. Onetti's skill as a teller of tales derives precisely from his ability to achieve a panorama of voices, places, surfaces, and minds, a narrative landscape where isolation and vanishing define the fictional space, a fragmented plane of negation (“los puntos de vista opuestos, de acuerdo con cualquier criterio mensurable, son todos equivalentes y anulan entre si” [Harss 247]) whose parts are kept in motion by a language that is “una especie de constante arrobo por el que circulan mil tensiones en equilibrio precario” (Harss 247). This third-person narration is particularly important in providing a textual birth for Díaz Grey and Larsen, trapped as they are in the eternity of fiction and on the edge of annihilation at every moment. An omniscient telling of the events of Santa María's reaction to the brothel, a conventional way of getting at a story, anchors Onetti's tale in a narrative tradition. But Malabia's first-person introspections that run parallel to the third-person text open it to the possibility of varying levels of simultaneous occurrence. In a world of tentativeness, alternate possibilities are embodied in multiple points of view.

To understand the involvement of Díaz Grey's and Larsen's reported monologues within the omniscience of the framing third-person point of view, we are obliged to consider the presence of the implied author in the work. Especially in Onetti does the silent, indifferent creator meet the dour and inert creation. The only salvation is in writing. As a member of the River Plate generation that witnessed the financial and ideological turmoil in the West in the 30s and 40s, Onetti expresses through his characters the dread, anguish, and displacements of these cultural upheavals: “Hipotéticamente incapacitado para la acción, Onetti entonces reflexiona. Y toda su obra, que es, en definitiva, una poderosa reflexión, nos precipita en el desarraigo, en la pasividad y en el aburrimiento” (Cerdán Tato 119). With this in mind, we concur with Wayne Booth's assessment of the motive for interpreting a narrator's role, especially a narrator who promotes such a consistent world view: “If the reason for discussing point of view is to find how it relates to literary effects, then surely the moral and intellectual qualities of the narrator are more important to our judgment than whether he is referred to as ‘I’ or ‘he,’ or whether he is privileged or limited” (158). This blurring of the purpose of varying points of view is particularly noticeable in studying Onetti's fiction, because his theme, the metaphysical question informed by the “moral and intellectual qualities” of a narrator, is so strongly stated in his works. It is important to note, however, that the voices of Díaz Grey and Larsen, Onetti's meditative escapists, do constitute single oppositions to the other characters of Santa María who operate under certain sustained delusions. As noted earlier, Jorge's searchings, spoken in first person, also serve as contrast, but he is essentially a youthful version of what Larsen and Díaz Grey have become. Díaz Grey's omniscience is that of a creator: “De modo que es necesario que me esfuerce y me apresure, quwe corra todos los riesgos de error para cumplir mi pacto con Dios, según el cual debo mirar y conocer a cada uno, y saber que lo estoy haciendo, aunque sólo sea una vez y esta dure un segundo” (28). He was after all the first avatar of Brausen's imagination in La vida breve, but his is now a subordinate creativity. He delivers messages to Larsen, devises a theory of fear, and speculates on his next incarnation: “entre todos los Díaz Grey … el más deseable, el más conveniente … es aquel desconocido Díaz Grey, capaz de conquistar otro aire” (91).

Junta's musings, an imbedded part of the larger third-person omniscient narrative frame, are scarcely more imposing. Because his dreams for the success of the brothel are thwarted by the popular sentiment against him, his life of memory and anticipation takes precedence over present involvement. The omniscient narrator consigns to him the status of a recollected self: “podía mediante el recuerdo jugar a que estaba vivo” (141), and finds him fully approachable “ahora muerto y susceptible de comprensión” (142). Junta, like Díaz Grey, is displaced as a character in that his former lives as a procurer in the capital, his life of waiting to open the brothel spent working for the Santa María newspaper, and his life as the controversial administrator of the “casa de la costa” all assure him perpetual passage from one “vida breve” to another, and the separation of sensibility and existence evident in his portrayal leave him “queriendo examinarse separado y otro” (64). The focus of the novel at the end falls on Jorge and Julita. Junta is an object of derision, left in the besieged brothel, spat upon and denounced by Marcos Bergner. Jorge Ruffinelli says of Larsen: “En Santa María lo embarcan, finalmente, en el proyecto ambicioso de levantar el prostíbulo, y, ya viejo y cansado, ‘Juntacadáveres’ encuentra en ese proyecto la última ratio de su existencia, la justificación, el triunfo que la vida puede finalmente devolver a la vejez” (114). Larsen is exiled at the end of the novel.

Two stylistic devices serve to aid the reader in accepting and understanding the fragmentation of reality that is advanced through these multiple points of view in Juntacadáveres discussed above. Onetti's use of metonymy imparts the notion of substitution, incompletion, replacement, and remainders. In describing the landscape of Santa María in the first chapter, Onetti speaks of “los campos de avena paralelos a los rieles” (13). Jorge's poems are “los cuatro versos” (54). When Irene and Nelly, two of the prostitutes of Santa María shop in town, “el miedo les había hecho recorrer Santa María sin mirar a los habitantes; sólo habían visto manos y pedazos de piernas, una humanidad sin ojos que podía ser olvidada en seguida” (77). At one point there is “una luz que no podía ser colocada en ningún recuerdo” (80). This evidence of traces, along with Onetti's repetition of the phrase “con los ojos entornados” and the words “instante,” “otro,” “separado,” “muerto,” “fracaso,” “pérdida,” and “recuerdo” join to sketch a world that lies between perception and recollection, the only world that fiction dares honestly to portray.

Jorge Ruffinelli speaks of the multiple lives that are displayed within the boundaries of Santa María: “Juntacadáveres alterna dos historias fundamentales: la de ‘Junta’ y su propósito de instalar el burdel sanmariano, y la de Julita y … Jorge Malabia. Sólo por los personajes … ambas historias se relacionan; por lo demás siguen su curso en carriles separados” (113). Multiple lives are reported on by multiple narrators, each with a structural role to play. It is appropriate to speak of “carriles separados” in this novel, and to view this separation as the course that narrative development follows therein. Onetti fragments reality in order to expose its tentative, arbitrary nature, a nature that is made certain by the narrative accounts that reality engenders. An intimate first-person voice, longing and regretting, an omniscient third-person narrator who traces the outline of this particular frame around reality, while allowing two others to intrude personal recollections, and a chorus of outraged judges: these are the voices of Juntacadáveres. Taking a technique common to the artistic novel of the twentieth century, several points of view to narrate a closed fictional time, Juan Carlos Onetti in Juntacadáveres has added another series of episodes to his extensive account of existence and identity effaced and reintegrated in the autonomous realm of art.

Works Cited

Benedetti, Mario. Literatura uruguaya siglo XX. Montevideo: Alfa, 1969.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1961.

Cerdán Tato, Enrique. “Santa María de Onetti: la soledad cercada.” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 292-294 (1974): 118-130.

Chavarri, Raúl. “Juntacadáveres.” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 292-294 (1974): 527-534.

Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. Los nuestros. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968.

Kadir, Dejlal. Juan Carlos Onetti. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

Onetti, Juan Carlos. Juntacadáveres. Madrid: Editorial de Occidente, 1969.

Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. Narradores de esta América. Vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Alfa, 1974. 2 vols.

Ruffinelli, Jorge. “Notas sobre Larsen.” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 292-294 (1974).