SOURCE: Kadir, Djelal. “The Shrouded Somnambulists: Onetti and Characterization.” In Juan Carlos Onetti, pp. 33-53. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

[In the following essay, Kadir discusses Onetti's characterization in his fiction in terms of the development of the modern novel, with its focus on the inner lives of both the characters it portrays and the author who creates them.]

Virginia Woolf has argued “… that all novels … deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.”¹ If we accept the emphatic significance that Woolf claims for the character in the novel, and I think we could indeed, very justifiably, then the manner of characterization is where the novelistic peculiarities of a writer are primarily revealed to us. As we have already seen in the cursory treatment of Juan Carlos Onetti's stylistic traits, the link between the author and his characters is so vital that it blends the realm of the two into a singular style of experience. If we take the art of the novel to be, like other forms of art, a manner of self-expression, it is where the gap is narrowest between creator and creation that we can unveil the greatest meaning with regard to the artist and the craftsmanship of his art. Onetti is not unique in this respect.

It is true of the genre of the novel as a whole that the artist often stands in the closest relation to his subject matter, as compared to other forms of art. This closeness of course should not be too surprising. The novelist deals with human beings and their world. As opposed to a composer who works with more abstract forms, therefore, there is a greater affinity between the novelist and his subject matter, which has a greater human density. This semblance is greater than ever in the contemporary novel. By contemporary, I mean novels since Proust, Joyce, and their inheritors of whom Juan Carlos Onetti is one of the most devout. It is precisely within the realm of this affinity, that hitherto neutral field between the artist and his creation, that the contemporary novel has made its greatest headway, and it is within this sphere that the genre has found its greatest innovation and the assurance of its perpetuity. This trend is one very much tied to the subjectivism of the twentieth century. The 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 workings and to the process of the art's formation. Consequently, the writer is constantly forced to expose not only his work but himself as well. He can no longer remain aloof and absent from his tale. The reader refuses to accept the hidden presence of an omniscient creator and lives in what Nathalie Saurraute calls “the age of suspicion,” and no one is more aware of this suspicion than the writer who speaks to his times.² For most current novelists, even E. M. Forster's observations, that contain so much truth, are no longer unquestionably sound. His comment that a character in a book “is real when the novelist knows everything about it”³ seems to have little validity for today's novels and authors. It is a product of great effort and viewed even as an accomplishment when a writer succeeds in conveying to the reader that he knows no more than the reader about his characters, and that he is watching them develop and unfold, just as the reader is doing while reading the work. This, of course, introduces novelties of drastic proportions into the technical elements of the art of the novel, especially with regard to time and point of view. It means essentially the obliteration of the past perfect and of the removed third-person perspective.

Juan Carlos Onetti is very much a part of this development. He represents an early stage of it and is, in the case of the South American writers, an initiator of this phenomenon and thus a precursor to the most recent Latin American writers. From the very beginning of Onetti's career we see his heroes and heroines reveal themselves independently of their creator, with a culmination of this tendency in La vida breve where the characters begin to create themselves or each other. Onetti, the author, is allotted a menial fleeting part inside his tale. He does not allow himself (or is not allowed by his creatures) to rise above the reader's level of awareness or the characters' existence. In a work like Tierra de nadie, where the narrator is a detached voice recounting in the third person, there is no attempt, even here, to depict the characters with any background or antecedents. Only their present existence of that moment in time is revealed to us. As Jaime Concha observes: “The reader apprehends only actualized pasts and futures.”⁴

The phenomenon of allowing the personages in fiction to evolve for themselves while both reader and writer look on is further emphasized in Onetti by the way in which we get acquainted with the characters, and what we learn about them upon our initial encounter with them.

The most direct and overt manner of presenting a character is through a name. It is the most traditional and most recurrent method. The way in which Onetti confronts this problem is aptly revealing of his peculiarities in characterization.

I THE SELF-DEFINING CHARACTER

Beginning with El pozo, the protagonist speaks to us directly. This absolves the author from any responsibility. In the process of the narrative, however, we know little of the character other than the subjective sphere of his existence. His name he mentions for the first and last time in the second to the last paragraph of the novel.

In Los adioses we are only made aware of the names of the secondary characters. We know neither the name of the witness-narrator nor the names of the protagonist and the two women who are the central figures of Onetti's story.

The main characters of Para una tumba sin nombre are introduced no less inconspicuously. A couple of pages after the narrative is begun by a nameless witness-narrator, whom the initiated recognize as Dr. Díaz Grey, the main characters appear in a matter-of-fact way, casually in a conversation with the undertakers: “‘… this Malabia boy, the younger one’”; “‘Rita García I believe, or González, single, an infarct, 35 years old, ruptured lungs. Do you understand?’” (oc [Obras completas], 990).

Even in a work where a case could be made for the absence of any protagonist or hero like Tierra de nadie, with as many characters as it has, none are introduced to us by the author by name. Often we have no idea about whom we are reading until a name casually falls from the mouth of another character in a dialogue. Especially in Tierra de nadie, the character's name, that convenient tag of identification, is always secondary to the description of that character and the setting around him. What particularly occupies the primary attention of the narrative voice is the subjective and inner state of being which emanates from the personages. It is especially through this focus on the realities of man's inner tumult that we derive our knowledge of the author's characters.

This technique, so frequent in Onetti, demonstrates both his contemporaneity and his sensitivity to the new trends of the novel. He is thus in the venerable tradition of Kafka, whose protagonist has no other name than the initial “K”; and of James Joyce whose hero in Finnegan's Wake is simply H. C. E.

Most of all, Onetti reflects the idiosyncrasies of his most immediate and acknowledged mentor, William Faulkner, and the ambiguities intentionally thrown into the reader's path, as in The Sound and the Fury, where two sets of characters go about with the same names of Quentin (the uncle and the niece), and Caddy (the mother and the daughter), or as with the happenstance name of Joe Christmas, the “hero” of Light in August.

This ambiguity in character identification ironically serves to illumine the reader more than the traditional clarity did. The absence of a name or the intentional muddling of it eliminates the possibility of the reader's too readily forming an impression on the identity of the character. In the absence of such a convenience, the reader is forced into a “complicity” with the author and must observe more closely the makeup of the characters in a novel. The operant factors determining the development of a character therefore become other than the a priori notions the reader ordinarily projects upon the identity of a personage.

The openness of mind resulting from the removal of this traditional crutch enables the writer to expose the characters' makeup in a way more faithful to his conception of the reality and essence of that figure. For a writer (like Faulkner, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Robbe-Grillet) who is attempting to portray a deeper reality, a more profound essence, psychological and “spiritual,” through a special brand of realism, achievement of this is crucial. It was even more fundamental for writers at the turn of the century like Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson whose readers were still accustomed to the ready-made character identities of the nineteenth-century novel. This might explain what then seemed to be drastic measures. In works where the writer has most nearly achieved the conveyance of this inner subjective or psychological reality, the hero's name is an obscure entity, a collectors' item for students of literature. The question has been asked before, how many people remember the name of Camus' hero in L'Etranger? In the same vein we might inadvertently ask, Who is the hero of Onetti's Tierra de nadie or of Los adioses?

The technique of portrayal discussed so far and adhered to by Onetti is in keeping with his overall aesthetics of characterization and with the nature of the human beings he attempts to render.

The emphasis is invariably on the inner psyche of the character. We are not given Eladio Linacero's name until the end of the novel, or we might not know anything about the birth, childhood, or adolescence of a Junta Larsen, but we do have a comprehension of the protagonists' spiritual essence, their subjective turmoil, fantasies, and psychological convulsions.

In keeping with this purpose of depicting humanity from within, Onetti's characters can only be seen and solely expose themselves through their subjective experience. This might account for Onetti's never abandoning narration through the “I,” the first-person interlocutor, even in the novels of third-person narration. Thus, the accurateness of Jaime Concha's statement: “the characters are not aware of anything except their precise field of subjective experience.”⁵ Since there is no interference on the part of the author, what the reader observes is precisely this cognizance of the characters' subjective experience.

While Juan Carlos Onetti is deeply involved in using the devices of characterization prevalent in the contemporary novel, we should also note that like his contemporaries he is aware of the newly expanded power that an author has over his fictional system and its characters. In other words, we should not lose sight of the fact that even though Juan María Brausen created Arce and fantasized Díaz Grey, it is Onetti who has created Brausen and embued him with the power to create others. The point to be made is that it would be a misconception on our part to assume that because the character of the modern novel is seemingly given the utmost autonomy and independence by his creator, the latter has less omniscience than before. The recourse is a matter of technique for producing a literature more in keeping with the psychic consensus of the epoch. Even Nathalie Saurraute's antinovel novels and her anticharacter characters are products of an author's imagination that wields a pen and gives “life” to the antihero. Literature is art and as such emanates from the creative imagination and its intention. If a character were able to come into being and exist by himself he would have no need of the writer, and finally would cease to be an emanation from art and become a phenomenon of the everyday world, just like every one of us. It should also be noted that because we are made aware of a more profound reality, and the characters of a novel reveal themselves at greater subjective and psychological depths, the consciousness and awareness level of the writer are proportionally more intense. The author's technical skill is obviously as great, since it has become necessary for us to reassure ourselves as to who created whom. (This becomes reminiscent of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author or Unamuno's Niebla.) With no intention of plunging into paradoxes, one could say that commensurate with the autonomy that a contemporary writer like Onetti grants his characters, the power he wields over them is increased. He has access to greater recesses of the characters' inner world, just as we do as his readers.

Interestingly enough, the criticism of Juan Carlos Onetti's work focuses on this phenomenon, and seems to be unanimously in agreement that the author's characters have no autonomy whatsoever. Luis Harss is under the impression that there is only a semblance of autonomy for the characters in Los adioses; Mario Benedetti and James Irby link Onetti to Faulkner and to the fatality of time, the past predetermining any existence in the present or future; Jaime Concha considers Onetti an embalmer of his personages, halting them in their existence; Caracé Hernández sees Onetti's characters as “instruments or demiurgical personifications, without any glitter of their own.”⁶ All of these critics have also unanimously failed to point out what or who it is that deprives the Onettian characters of their autonomy. The nature of their statements seems to indicate that they confuse Onetti the craftsman with the vision of the world and the nature of a reality that Onetti happens to believe in and by which he is governed. As I have tried to demonstrate, Onetti the writer is most generous in his willingness to give his characters a vast autonomy and independence before the reader. As a craftsman of characterization, he accomplishes this liberation for his characters. What deprives them of the human freedom that these critics miss is the nature of reality, the way of the world that Onetti is committed to. Because he is able to infuse his personages with a sense of futile liberty which taunts the human predicament, Onetti is a successful writer. Technically he manages to characterize his personages with an air of freedom which at times reaches an exasperating degree of “indifference” and all-pervasive pathos. Contrasted with this technical recourse that some critics overlook is a vision of reality which is devastatingly fatalistic and obliterates all possibility for human freedom, canceling every likelihood of choice, self-determination, or chance in the future. This dialectic in the work of Onetti is both aesthetically and philosophically at the heart of his vision as an artist. Through this dialectic the author expresses the existential predicament of modern man: the impossibility of human autonomy or freedom. It is this fatality that subjugates and dominates Onetti's characters, as well as Onetti himself.

II METHOD AND MESSAGE

The distinction must be made between the method or technique of characterization and the human condition of the characters as a metaphor for man's predicament. The relationship between these two aspects of a work should also be kept always in mind by those who sincerely aspire to an understanding of a work and the cosmos of a writer.

There is no question about it; the fate of the characters that populate Onetti's fictional world is laden with a futility and choked desperation which results in an attitude of disinterest and indifference, or somnolent fantasizing on the part of these characters, the latter perhaps being the sole saving factor which intervenes between life and death. Insofar as Onetti is subject to his own vision of human reality, he has equated himself and his own fate to that of his characters.

The hero of his first novel, Eladio Linacero, proclaims the fate of the Onettian man when he tells us, “I am a solitary man that smokes in any old place of the city; the night surrounds me, it fulfills itself like a rite, gradually, and I have nothing to do with it” (oc, 75). As Mario Benedetti points out, none of Onetti's subsequent protagonists cease being that solitary man, whose obsession is to contemplate how life surrounds them without their having anything to do with it.⁷

This lot of Onetti's characters has its source in the fortune of the author himself and the circumstances which forced him to create these personages. Onetti's own life is one of almost total absence from the world and those around him. According to Luis Harss, “it was this physical and emotional isolation, he has said, that turned him into a writer in the first place, in spite of himself, for unknown reasons out of habit.”⁸ With such a point of departure it is inevitable that Onetti's heroes should be fated to endure the solitude and alienation which characterize their creator, and in his tenet, every modern man. This conviction is what destines all of the inhabitants of Onetti's fictional world to a similar fate. His brand of fatality, therefore, comes to be generic, irrespective of individual destinies and paths of life. With such an inevitable fate, the future for Onetti's characters is clearly defined and holds no surprises. Where men differ for Onetti, as for William Faulkner, is in their past, the past which irrevocably draws each one to the common end of solitude, alienation, misunderstanding, and death. Both James Irby and Mario Benedetti have pointed out that the unknown variable in this algebraic equation with a constant resolution, is the past. Unlike the traditional order, the resolution itself is given before the unknown elements of the problem are presented. The narrative of Onetti is comprised of reconstructing the problemata which yield the resolution. Thus, beginning with Eladio Linacero, we turn back to the youth, adolescence, and childhood of the character until by the end of the novel we reach the actual moment of narration with which the story begins. The sequel novels, El astillero and Juntacadáveres, function in the same manner. In El astillero (1961) we witness the fatal end of Junta Larsen; in Juntacadáveres, (1964) we view the reconstruction of the events of five years earlier which led to this end. As in the stylistic structure of El pozo, we see a closed circular system, a vicious cycle at that, with no way out. The fact that at every point of articulation in Onetti's literary career, with each new novel, we have to return to his first work in order to relate to his fictional system, and to grasp its expanding perimeter, is also an emphatic indication of the circularity.

It is in this strong umbilical tie to the past that William Faulkner has had the greatest influence on Onetti. Sartre's evaluation of the American writer, as related by R. W. B. Lewis, suits Onetti perfectly: “Faulkner wrote … as though man were completely without a future, possessed only of a past; but he should write as though man might have a future. The glance was all backward in Faulkner; and human life … appeared as a road watched despairingly as it flowed away, from the rear window of a moving car.”⁹

III THE EVERPRESENT PAST AND PRECLUDED FREEDOM

Within the confines of such a straightjacket, of a past sealed by the fatality of a predictable end, we observe the characters of Onetti in a cycle of inane gesticulations. The helplessness engendered by such circumstances becomes the only impetus for the characters' continued survival. And yet, despite the similar nature of the fate which they share, Onetti's characters find it impossible to achieve a human communion that can ease or free them from the clutches of an oppressive solitude and alienation. Thus the fatality of these quarantined destinies becomes even more tyrannical. In the end it all turns into a complacent nightmare, complacent because eventually each personage realizes the futility of action and thus falls back into an irrevocable state of passive resignation.

In certain works this oppressive tyranny is depicted in more than symbolic terms. Para esta noche (1943) portrays a city literally under siege. The novel, with its alternating perspectives which present the same situation from the point of view of the antagonist as well as that of the protagonist, is basically the story of man imprisoned within the city by a ruthless military siege. As the circumstances entrap the hero and his companions, the intensity of the situation builds up, only to reach a denouement of futility and death. In this third major work by the author there is a last desperate gesture toward the end of the novel at action and human communion, which accentuates this futility to its utmost. The protagonist, Ossorio and, ironically enough, Victoria, meet their brutal and inescapable fate. It is an unheroic end devoid of the last vestiges of human communion, initiative, or dignity. Though circumstantially this last scene of Para esta noche is similar to that memorable episode of André Malraux's La Condition Humaine, it lacks the heroism demonstrated by those doomed human creatures who attempt to take death into their own hands by sharing, with dignity, a cyanide tablet.

Freedom of choice and individual initiative does not exist for Onetti, either in life or in the face of death. And even if man appears to act out of self-initiative, that freedom is still within the bounds and dictates of a predetermining fate; it is of no use. This sentiment reaches its culmination in Onetti's El astillero, a work which is the portrayal of an end, a symphony of human futility conducted by Fate and performed by Junta Larsen as well as by Juan Carlos Onetti.

Junta Larsen has a distinguished career as a character in Onetti's cosmogony. El astillero is both the apotheosis and nadir of this protagonist. Leaving his failures behind, Junta Larsen undertakes the management of a defunct shipyard, owned by the demented Jeremías Petrus, and for a time participates in the ideal (madness, self-delusion) of resuscitating the derelict. In the end, this final undertaking proves to be a parting gesture, a flight into the face of the inevitable and inexorable fate of those characters who attempt to counter the Onettian vision of destiny. As this realization dawns on Junta Larsen, this is the way in which it is articulated:

Larsen pushed the files aside and went over to the window to stick one hand and then the other into the fog. “It just can't be,” he kept repeating. He would have preferred an earlier date, a more youthful time for what was about to happen: he would have preferred another type of faith to do it: “But they never let one choose, only afterward does one realize that he might have chosen.” He stroked the trigger of the gun under his arm while he listened to the harshness of silence. …

(oc, 1101-2)

What we come to realize along with Larsen is that a man cannot even choose his own death in Onetti's world. As this character admits shortly after this realization, “There are no surprises in life, you are right; at least for real man. We know it by memory, like a woman, if I may say so. And as far as life's meaning, don't think that I am talking in vain. I understand a bit. One does things, but cannot do other than what he does. Or, in other words, one can't always choose” (oc, 1117).

As if this painful awareness were not sufficient, Juan Carlos Onetti goes a step further in tantalizing the consciousness, Larsen's, ours, and his own by positing two alternative endings to the novel and to Larsen. Onetti proceeds as if it mattered one way or another, knowing full well that it does not. Yet he insists on dangling a fruitless alternative before the reader's and his characters' eyes. This is not a novelty with El astillero, for the same occurs at the end of La vida breve. Though it might seem redundant, the technique is effective. It reassures everyone that it cannot happen any other way but in the way that it has actually occurred, and even if it should happen differently, the end result is always the same: defeat and death.

In the face of such a fateful impasse, Onetti's characters respond in the same way that their creator has chosen to face this futile human condition, by turning to the sphere of fantasy, the dream world, the realm of creative imagination. Thus, in the same way that Onetti creates the fictitious world of these figures, they in turn invent theirs by resorting to fantasies and to the imagination, to the world of make-believe, and to a reality which seemingly differs from that of their human condition and from that of our daily lives. Once again, Onetti's characters and fictional cosmos are an ectoplasm of himself. Very much like Proust, Juan Carlos Onetti puts his faith in art, in human creativeness, and in the capacity of man to transcend the predicament of his worldly existence through his inventions. There is only one marked difference between Proust and Onetti, however. Whereas Proust succeeds or feels that he succeeds in transcending the ephemerality of human existence, Onetti transposes the fatality of the human condition to the realm of artistic creation, to the imaginary. As we see in El pozo, La vida breve, and El astillero, man temporarily and in fleeting moments manages to console himself through his fantasy. But in the long run, even within this sphere of the imagination, the futility haunts the end of man and reduces him to no different a finality from that of his original existence which he sought to escape. And even while in the process of fantasy and dissimulation, Onetti's men are fully cognizant of their chimera, as is El pozo's Eladio Linacero: “I am a poor man who, in the night, turns to face the shadows on the wall and think of fantastic and absurd things” (oc, 74). Or with Dr. Díaz Grey of El astillero: “Everyone knowing that our way of life is a farce, capable of admitting it, but not doing so because each of us needs to protect a personal farce besides. I also, of course” (oc, 1118).

Díaz Grey's statement attests to what “Jeremías Petrus, Sociedad Anónima” represents to the human beings the author placed in this desolate mooring. Through Díaz Grey's statement, then, the work signifies a double make-believe.

Along with the stylistic uniformity, another constant which is omnipresent in Onetti's work is the evocation of the oneiric. Through a realism which recognizes that the makeup of every human psyche is partially constituted and nourished by dreams and the imagination, Onetti manages to transport the reader to the realm of the characters' fantasy world. For Onetti the realist, the oneiric world is just as real as the concrete world of his and his characters' existence. We can conclude that for Onetti, the world of his fiction is as real as the reality in which he carries on his daily activities. From the very beginning of Onetti's fiction we see an interwoven pattern comprised of the oneiric and the concrete, what we can rightfully call a “complete” reality, the reality which is the existence and human condition of the men and women who populate Onetti's world.

IV LOST SOULS

The realms of dream or fantasy in Onetti's work constantly multiply in the progression of his career. The multiplication is in direct proportion to the increase in the “realities” or characters within his fictional system. Whereas in El pozo there is only a single “reality,” that of Eladio Linacero, and thus a single fantasy world, in Tierra de nadie this phantasmal sphere multiplies to correspond to each “reality” operating in the work: that of Aránzuru, of Casal, of Nora, of Balbina, of Ernesto, of Llarvi, of Nené, of Mauricio Offen, of Demetrio Sata, of Martín, of Samuel Rada, of Violeta, and last but not least, that of Pablo Num, the embalmer. We of course should not forget to add to the list one last “reality” to which each one of these is inextricably tied, that of Juan Carlos Onetti himself that engenders all the rest.

Onetti's second novel is in the tradition of those works which are a part of every national literature and which attempt to capture a quintescence of a national character, a mode of being within a society in a given time. Tierra de nadie is in this respect Onetti's version of Joyce's Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. The roster of characters is an embodiment of Buenos Aires. They are Buenos Aires. They are the “wandering rocks” of Ulysses in their River Plate rendition. It is difficult to distill a synopsis of Onetti's second work for the simple reason that nothing happens in it. The novel is precisely about what does not happen, about the impossibility of anything coming from this lost generation of alienated city dwellers who exist on their individual and individuated “realities” that are more oneiric than real. Tierra de nadie is a kaleidoscope of disjointed human elements that float in the impure sea of a modern urbanity. Occasionally these disparate elements coincide, enjoin superficially, primarily through the shallow contact of epidermises, and then disengage once again, retreating to face the complicated consequences of social existence now made more perplexing by the inanity apparent in the incidental contact. The work itself has no unity, nor do the lives and the social “order” it depicts. While the characters can be viewed as alienated, marginal elements estranged from society, in reality they are society, they are the city. They are the disoriented, amoral, indifferent mass of failures, daydreamers, utopians, men and women who are sustained by the power of their fantasies. On a more symbolic plane, the city these personages represent is itself marginal to the world, estranged from the human struggle of a world across the Atlantic in the throes of war, in a desperate battle of survival. A way of life, a world view, the very foundations on which the New World was founded are being threatened as Buenos Aires must look on from the distance.

With the multiplicity of dreams, and the inevitable contact between the somnambulists, whose only visible ligature is through the flesh and the sexual act, there arises, to use Jaime Concha's phrase, “the possibility of the shared dream,”¹⁰ the potentiality of a world whose inhabitants coexist at the oneiric plane through a series of shared dreams and fantasies.

In effect, the possibility does not remain a mere possibility. Through the oneiric and the imagination we see for the first time certain bonds forming between Onettian characters. Casal, the aspiring artist, creates a painting depicting monstrous and deformed lepers. The motif of Casal's lepers corresponds to a dream of Nené. This coincidence between the dream of the woman and the artistic figures of Casal creates a kind of bond between the two characters.

The greatest bond which emanates from fantasy, however, is through the dreamed island, a figment of old Num's imagination invented as an inheritance for Nora, his daughter. For the characters involved, this dream takes on the proportions of actual reality in which they come to believe. Aránzuru, the lawyer who is managing the affairs of Nora's inheritance, legalizes the dream and makes it official through his public position. Num thus confesses to Aránzuru: “Well, Aránzuru. You are philosophical. See how curious. … Because, I had invented the inheritance for her, so that the girl would be happy. And she goes and invents it so I can be happy, and I pretend that I believe it …” (oc, 99).

The inheritance-dream shared and sustained by the characters in the novel is an island, Faruru. Interestingly enough, twenty years later, and as many years after Aránzuru's suicide and Tierra de nadie, Juan Carlos Onetti still vicariously nourishes the illusion of the institutionalized dream; there is mention in El astillero of an island near the port of Santa María which housed “el palacio de Latorre” and to which Jeremías Petrus aspired. We are informed, however, that Petrus was not able to acquire his dream palace: “It was decided behind destiny's back to declare the Latorre palace a historical monument, to buy it for the nation and to pay a salary to a substitute professor of national history to live there and report regularly on leaks, threatening weeds, and the dialogue between the tides and the solidity of the foundations. The professor's name, although it is now immaterial, was Aránzuru. They said that he used to be a lawyer but he no longer was one” (oc, 1135).

Aránzuru's fleeting apparition in the dream or nightmare world, whose chief protagonist is Junta Larsen, complies with Onetti's rules of reciprocity in the sphere of the oneiric, and to the author's undying dedication to his characters' dreams. Junta Larsen makes a similar fleeting appearance in Tierra de nadie when he is invited by Aránzuru to accompany him to the Nums' imaginary island. At the time, Larsen's response is, “It's better to go rut in any old place” (“Más vale irse a pudrir a cualquiera parte”) (oc, 234).

It would appear that dreams are not simply the bond among characters only within a given novel of Onetti, but rather the ligature and cohesive element which runs through and unifies all of his work. This phenomenon is most emphatically manifest in Onetti's intentional and willing attempt to create within the realm of the dreamed and oneiric inventions of his characters. The tendency reaches its culmination with La vida breve and with the creation of the mythical Santa María. It should be noted, therefore, that dreams do not only function as the communion ground of Onetti's characters, but they also occasion a bond between Onetti himself, his characters, and their world. Jaime Concha has scribbled a very appropriate annotation in the margins of his lecture notes on Onetti which he delivered at La Universidad de Concepción, Chile in 1966 that I would like to include here: “Onetti speaks of a fate of transcendence (he does not use that word) through the creation of characters. … Better yet—he says that the author loses himself in his characters in order to save himself. He cites the scriptures: those who wish to save themselves will face perdition.”

By his fourth novel, La vida breve, it seems that Onetti and his heroes are convinced that the only answer to the human condition lies in the realm of the oneiric and the world of fantasy. Both the author and his characters seek their salvation, then, and are irrevocably convinced of their lot within the realm of the imagination. Though Onetti stylistically is still a “realist,” as are his heroes in “imitation” of their creator, the realism is transposed to a world of fantasy. Given the assimilation of these elements (realism, imagination, and the oneiric), it is inevitable that a mundane cosmos with all its trite details should emerge in the dream world. This, of course, is the world of Santa María and all of its inhabitants and their lore, all emanating from the tormented life of solitude, alienation, and the fertile imagination of Juan María Brausen of La vida breve.

Juan María Brausen is a key character in Juan Carlos Onetti's literary gallery: as an alienated, solitary human being, he reflects Onetti's vision of man; as a man who finds his condition in the world oppressive and turns to the world of fantasy, to the creation of other worlds and other “selves,” he reflects Onetti himself; as a creative human being who invents a cosmos and projects his own existence into it, a cosmos which would provide a setting to his creator's subsequent “fantasies,” he is Onetti himself. Brausen represents an incarnation of the poetics and metaphysics of Onetti; the poetics of the dreamworld and the metaphysics of subjectivity, the inner self as the only realm in which man can find his salvation. Through Brausen, the author is reasserting the belief that man's salvation is to be found precisely within that terrain of solitude and the solitary self from which man seeks to transcend. Since we are equating literature with the oneiric and the imaginative inventions (writing literature with dreaming) an Uruguayan critic's statement about Onetti and his heroes is apt here: “it is solitude that generates the imperious necessity to write. One is a writer when he is in absolute solitude.”¹¹

Alienation appears to be all-pervasive within the Onettian metaphysics. The problem put before us and his protagonists is, Can there be salvation through perdition, as Onetti seeks for himself according to Jaime Concha, or as his protagonists' predicament implies; can man escape alienation through solitude, through self-consciousness and reliance on the subjective, oneiric fantasy world?

V PATHETIC IMPASSE

Neither the author nor his characters seem to be very optimistic in this quest. There are two explicit moments in Juan Carlos Onetti's career, and a myriad of implicit ones (the author's entire work is a metaphor for this problem), in which he and his protagonists overtly reflect on the metaphysics of this predicament. One is in Tierra de nadie and the other in La vida breve.

In Tierra de nadie, Llarvi is by far the most acutely intellectual of all the characters. Onetti utilizes Llarvi, in a very Gide-like manner, as a touchstone for certain technical recourses: as an indication of time, as a consciousness which reflects the human predicament of all the characters. Llarvi is useful in this way mainly for his journal. As Edouard in Les Faux Monneyeurs, he is a mirror of his creator. In the end, at the age of thirty-five, Llarvi, disillusioned with life and his own subjectivity, does away with himself. Prior to this finality, however, in an undated entry in his journal, he musters the courage, or indifference, to offer a summation of his own awareness with regard to human existence. Very keenly aware of the potential of that moment when man can feel free and unabashed to speak as honestly and as sincerely as he can at no other time, Llarvi offers his résumé of the human experience through the description of his relationship with Labuk, an early involvement of shadowy psychological implications. The Chilean critic Jaime Concha sums up the implications of Llarvi's last entry into his journal in this fashion: “With an analysis that hangs halfway between being cold and pathetic, Llarvi has been able to pinpoint three instances within the process of self awareness: the forsaking of all that is social, the consciousness of one's own flesh, and the experience of the deceitful nothingness of the inner being.”¹² At the moment of this articulation, Llarvi finds himself suspended (like Carlos Fuentes' Artemio Cruz) between being and nonbeing, in that Rilkean twilight which borders on both sleep and wakefulness. We can attribute the acuteness and clarity of his final analysis to the magical quality of this moment when nothing is at stake and everything hangs in the balance. The potential of his dictum being applicable to the entire work of his creator, connotes that Llarvi is echoing the sentiments of Onetti himself.

The other instance in Onetti's career in which the question of redemption and the possibility of salvation through oneiric invention is taken up occurs in La vida breve. The principal leitmotiv of La vida breve is the novelistic development and the unfolding of precisely the summa vitae that Llarvi leaves to posterity in Tierra de nadie. The novel's protagonist, Juan María Brausen (“legitimate descendent of Eladio Linacero,” according to Emir Rodríguez-Monegal),¹³ embarks on an odyssey which is the incarnation of what Llarvi, in his final moment of illumination, relates almost as a posthumous afterthought.

Brausen, husband, bureaucrat, and member of the respectable and responsible urban bourgeoisie views his world of responsibility and respectable existence with a repugnance bordering on revulsion which has become an obsession. Through the wall of his apartment he listens to the occurrences of another world. This shady world of the adjoining apartment becomes the mechanism and the alternative through which he discards his own identity; it becomes both the mode and the end of his “social catharsis.” In this new world and new life Juan María Brausen becomes Arce, existing concurrently, simultaneously yet separate and distinct, from Brausen. As Rodríguez-Monegal points out, the world of Brausen is one of responsibility and routine, while that of Arce is one of escape.¹⁴

Interestingly enough, as if Llarvi has sketched for Onetti the work which was to follow Tierra de nadie, the novel begins with Brausen standing naked after a shower, conscious of his wet flesh and the water droplets on his skin while he listens to the woman through the wall and trys to reconstruct the world implicit in the woman's talk. Simultaneously, Brausen reflects, and in a stream-of-consciousness monologue which typifies Onetti's confessor-narrators, articulates his feelings and thoughts about his wife Gertrudis' scarred body. The horrid descriptions of her abdomen and her amputated left breast intensely attest to Brausen's “consciousness of one's flesh” to use Llarvi's terminology.

Brausen, in addition to this new, other identity and life he adopts, seeks refuge from his humdrum, senseless existence in the realm of fantasy. There is a cinematographic plot (a script he is supposed to be writing for the agency in which he is employed) that he recurrently evokes as an obsession and which, as we have since come to know it, is the world of Santa María, the realm of the Onettian saga. Brausen's involvement in this imaginary realm is as complete as is his involvement in his lives as Brausen and Arce. There is only one difference between the world of the imagined and the other two lives. Unlike the latter two, the existence in this fantasy emanates from the deep recesses of Brausen's subjectivity and inner private world. Thus, Brausen is now potentially on the verge of fulfilling the third step of Llarvi's dictum: “the experience of the deceitful nothingness of the inner being.” Effectively, as it turns out, this potential is fulfilled as it was articulated by Llarvi. In the fictitious world of Santa María and Díaz Grey, its first and most distinguished denizen, Brausen discovers that the human condition cannot transcend the existential predicament of misunderstanding, senselessness, routine, and surfeit that plague man in his daily existence. The world that he has created for his “protagonist,” Díaz Grey, ends up being “a transparent stylization of the reality that oppresses Brausen.”¹⁵ This outcome may well be symbolic of Onetti's own predicament as he himself envisions it. Perhaps it might be his assessment of his own chances of achieving salvation through perdition, that is, through the loss of self in the world of his characters.

Returning to Brausen and his imaginary creations, we see that as the imagined cosmos of Díaz Grey takes on the lineaments of a world unto itself, life there too becomes a sordid affair. By the end of the novel this becomes quite convincing, and we see both Onetti and Brausen also believing that the reality of man resides both within and without him, and that he carries this reality wherever he ventures, whether it be into the escapist world of dreams or into the structured realm of the creative imagination. The last chapter of La vida breve entitled “El señor Albano” leaves no doubt as to the self-deception and disillusionment in which the inner, subjective self finds itself in the final analysis. Life as depicted here is a masquerade, each man as isolated and misunderstood as in the world of Brausen the bureaucrat or Arce the “criminal.” In a sentence of the novel, which is both an assessment of the events of this work and the entire oeuvre of Juan Carlos Onetti, it is all summed up in this manner: “Nothing is interrupted, nothing ends; even though the myopics are thrown off the track with the change of circumstances and characters” (“Nada se interrumpe, nada termina; aunque los miopes se despisten con los cambios de circunstancias y personajes”) (oc, 709).

Interestingly enough, it is not only the humdrum world of Brausen that fuses into the world of Díaz Grey and Santa María, but the world of Arce, his alter ego, is involved as well. Fleeing with the murderer Ernesto who committed the murder he himself was meditating, Arce-Brausen seeks refuge in the imagined Santa María. The flight, however, is desperate. Even in this imaginary world they must seek disguises. Thus, Brausen, who was forced to look for another identity and found that of Arce, is once again in that same predicament. This is why the novel concludes in the imaginary world of Santa María at a masquerade in which “—escape, salvation, the future that unites us and which only I can remember—is dependent on our not making a mistake while choosing the disguise” (oc, 696). Even the disguise, however, proves futile in the end, for this is the same voice which sixteen pages later will say, “Nothing is interrupted, nothing ends; even though the myopics are thrown off track by changes of circumstances and characters” (“Nada se interrumpe, nada termina; aunque los miopes se despisten con los cambios de circunstancias y personajes”).

Brausen's wishful statement is now futile: “This is what I was looking for from the very beginning, since the death of the man that lived for five years with Gertrudis; to be free, irresponsible toward others, to conquer myself without a struggle in true solitude” (oc, 694). The outcome of his longed-for liberty, of “the self-conquest in solitude,” has led to the same impasse as that which the Brausen, who lived with Gertrudis for five years, had to confront. Brausen never really liberated himself as a result of discarding his old life and identity. It is as if, during all of this time since he became Arce and Brausen of Santa María, he were standing still. For in the stroke of one moment and one utterance he is flung back to the old Brausen he abandoned. When he finds himself in Santa María and the thought just cited is in the process of going through his mind, he is told, “You are the other. … Then you are Brausen” (“Usted es el otro. … Entonces usted es Brausen”) (oc, 694) a statement which returns him to the time prior to Arce, prior to Díaz Grey and Santa María. It is all an emphatic reminder that despite his fantasy, his new identity, his “self-liberation,” he never ceased to be what he was: Juan María Brausen, bourgeois, husband, bureaucrat, a slave to the boredom, routine, and misunderstanding of a senseless existence.

In the end Brausen realizes that he is a nobody, a mere incarnation of Juan María Brausen. He thus has come full circle, back to the starting point. Whether he be Brausen in Buenos Aires, or reincarnated as Díaz Grey in Santa María, his lot as a man is the same, no better in the world of the “imaginary” than in the world of “reality.” Once again Onetti's implication is that there is no difference between the real and the imaginary; the first is as real or as unreal as the second. One thing is certain, however, that in both an inevitable futility awaits man.

La vida breve, then, may be said to be a crucial midpoint in Onetti's career as artist and metaphysician. All works prior to it (El pozo, Tierra de nadie, Para esta noche) contain the implicit elaborations of the metaphysics that becomes overtly manifest both in the content and form of La vida breve. All other major works which follow this crucial midpoint (Los adioses, Para una tumba sin nombre, El astillero, Juntacadáveres, La muerte y la niña) have as their fundamental construct La vida breve, which is their springboard. We need cite only one factor to justify this claim. Of the works here named as subsequent to La vida breve, only Los adioses stands apart from the rest in terms of characterization. All the other works have in common a world and its inhabitants which emanate from Juan María Brausen's oneiric subjectivity: Santa María and its people.

By adapting Brausen's fantasy into the official world of literature, Juan Carlos Onetti once again evokes the phenomenon of “the shared dream” (“el sueño compartido”) which we witness in Tierra de nadie. Only now Aránzuru is Onetti himself, sanctioning and sharing the dream of Brausen. Thus, the familiar figures of Dr. Díaz Grey, Junta Larsen, Jorge Malabia, Father Bergner, Jeremías Petrus, and among them denizens of shorter works like Jacob Van Otto and Prince Orsini of “Jacob y el otro,” all are the offspring of that dream shared by Juan María Brausen and Juan Carlos Onetti. In the end, however, as with El pozo and Eladio Linacero, even though the oneiric and fantasy world has refracted and multiplied, the outcome is the same indifferent destiny which carries everyone and everything “inexorably downstream”; man's fate, like the night which surrounds Linacero, “fulfills itself as a rite” irrespective of dreams, poesy, wishes, or gesticulation of the men which convulse in it. All of which is quite reminiscent of Jean Paul Sartre's comment concerning John Dos Passos: “The lives he tells about are all closed in on themselves. They resemble those Bergsonian memories which, after the body's death, float about, lifeless and full of odours and lights and cries, through some forgotten limbo. We constantly have the feeling that these vague human lives are destinies.”¹⁶

The “body's death” that Sartre speaks of is as crucial in Onetti's narrative as in that of Dos Passos. This brings us to another juncture of misunderstanding between Onetti and his critics. What is frequently referred to as Onetti's obsession with the sexual relationships between his characters is not precisely an obsession in itself, but rather a necessary manifestation of a more encompassing preoccupation with the human body. In the final analysis, as I have attempted to demonstrate, Onetti's man exists in his own inner world, and he manifests himself from that interior. As I also pointed out, however, and as Sartre asserts with respect to Dos Passos, Onetti's narrative process of revealing is itself a “hybrid,” the duality arising from the characters being introspective, introverted, and confessional, thus functioning in the realm of the subjective, and from the realism which marks the narrative of Onetti himself. This realism is at the heart of the author's preoccupation with the body and the corporal, of which the sexual is inherently a part. Moreover, Onetti's attempt to depict a kind of human being who lives within is also necessarily a cause for his constant obsession with the body. To achieve the purely subjective, it is imperative to obliterate the objective, the vulgar, the anatomical, which hinders a type of existence that Onetti is attempting to portray: the existence of the characters' inner recesses, or that inner world which is the character. Thus, the Onettian cosmos is a series of bodily negations which begins with Eladio Linacero's nausea over his body and his ill-fated corporal relationship with Ana María and later with Cecilia Huerta, and ends with Junta Larsen's revulsion toward the pregnant belly of Gálvez's woman. Between these two chronological points is another series of bodily and sexual entanglements which imply the disillusionment for the men and perdition of the women: in Tierra de nadie, Nené abandoned by Aránzuru, and Nora violated by Larsen; in Para esta noche, the ill-fated flight of Ossorio with Barcala's daughter; in La vida breve, Brausen's nausea and disgust with his wife's body, and also his youthful adventure with Raquel; to say nothing of the sordid entanglements in Para una tumba sin nombre and Juntacadáveres which will be discussed shortly. I shall develop further the theme of innocence and experience, innocence-purity and puberty-disillusionment, in the female character especially, in my discussion of character change as a function of plot in Onetti's work.

It is readily apparent that one of the greatest impetuses for the characters' flight into the subjective, oneiric, inner fantasy world is precisely the negative and repugnant confrontation with the sordid bodily and objective existence. This is, after all, precisely one of the three stages on the path to self-awareness and self-realization that Llarvi posits in Tierra de nadie: “consciousness of one's own flesh.” The phrase implies more than just one's own body; it implies bodily existence in general which surrounds one and gives a definition to the flesh and objective dimensions of one's own self, whether it be through the sexual act or through the imposing sight of an overripe pregnancy in hemorrhage. Thus, the bodily and the objective are as necessary to the subjective and to the oneiric as is reality to the imagination or death to life. It is, as Sartre would have it, an “antivalue.”¹⁷

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in Approaches to the Novel, ed. Robert Scholes (San Francisco, 1961), pp. 211-30.

2. Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel. Translated by Maria Jolas (New York, 1963).

3. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), p. 63.

4. Jaime Concha, “Sobre Tierra de nadie de Juan Carlos Onetti,” Atenea 417 (1967), 179: “El lector aprehende únicamente pasados y futuros actualizados.”

5. Ibid., p. 175: “los personajes no reconocen sino el campo preciso de su experiencia subjetiva.”

6. Caracé Hernández, “Juan Carlos Onetti: pistas para sus laberintos,” Mundo Nuevo 34 (1967), 65-72: “instrumentos o personificaciones demiúrgicas, sin fulgor propio.”

7. Mario Benedetti, “Juan Carlos Onetti y la aventura del hombre,” in his Literatura Uruguaya del siglo XX (Montevideo, 1963), p. 76.

8. Harss and Dohmann, p. 174.

9. R. W. B. Lewis, “William Faulkner: The Hero in the New World,” in Faulkner, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 206.

10. Jaime Concha, “El sueño compartido en Tierra de nadie,” unpublished manuscript, 1966.

11. Ángel Rama, “Epilogue” to El pozo, 2d ed. (Montevideo, 1965), p. 66: “es la soledad la que genera la imperiosa necesidad de escribir. Se es escritor … cuando se está en soledad absoluta.”

12. Concha, “El sueño compartido …” “Con un análisis entre frío y patético, Llarvi ha podido precisar tres momentos en el proceso de la autoconciencia: el despojamiento de lo social, la conciencia de la propia carne y la experiencia de la nadidad engañosa del ser interior” (p. 20).

13. Rodríguez-Monegal, Narradores de esta America (Montevideo, 1961), pp. 155-73.

14. Rodríguez-Monegal, prologue to Obras completas of Onetti, p. 21.

15. Ibid., prologue, p. 24

16. Jean Paul Sartre, “John Dos Passos and 1919,” in Literary Essays (New York, 1957), p. 91.

17. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York, 1956), pp. 608-11.