[In the following essay, Ainsa traces Onetti's career and his considerable impact on Latin American writing.]

Now that Juan Carlos Onetti has left us—when we had already come to believe that he was immortal—we ask ourselves, from where within a country in which narrative is traditionally polarized between rural realism and modest urban incursions did this writer emerge? What was his literary heritage? And, most important, how could he establish, based on a “territory of the imaginary,” Santa María, a fictional tradition in which a good many Uruguayan and many other Latin American writers can recognize themselves, an exclusive world that today is the inheritance of universal literature?

If going from the regional to the universal is the privilege of good literature, then in Onetti's case everything began in 1939, in the unkempt room of a tenement house, where a man smokes and paces incessantly through a hot and humid summer night, after a day of celebration. Bored with lying in bed and with smelling alternately one armpit then the other while grimacing in disgust, the man takes stock of his life on the eve of his fortieth birthday: he has no work or friends, he has just divorced, and his neighbors seem “more repugnant than ever”; it's been more than twenty years since he lost his ideals, and, according to news he has heard on the radio, “it appears that war is imminent.”

Any human being confronted with a similar life circumstance could not avoid the most somber of reflections. Nevertheless, Eladio Linacero, the protagonist of El pozo (1939; Eng. The Pit, 1991), Juan Carlos Onetti's first novel, succeeds in evading his sad reality. For him, it is enough to begin writing a dream (“the dream of the log cabin”), although to do so he feels obliged to recognize that, in his words, “I am a solitary man who smokes anywhere in the city,” a confession with which he ends his monologue. In the space of fifty-six pages, narrated in the first person throughout that insomniac night, he not only frees himself from the most menacing ghosts of solitude but also establishes another reality, thanks to his simple formula of acceptance: “I am a man who turns toward the shadow on the wall at night in order to think of foolish and fantastic things.”

This salvation through writing portends a destiny that Onetti would fulfill with exemplary precision. Twelve years later, in 1951, another man also paces while suffering insomnia in a small apartment in the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires, “a small and timid man” who has said “no to alcohol, no to tobacco” and that there is “nothing like women.” José María Brausen, the protagonist of La vida breve (1951; Eng. A Brief Life, 1976), appears to be the direct descendant of Linacero. Like the latter, Brausen maintains a mediocre existence and, after five years of marriage, comes to discover the end of his relationship, ruined by indifference. The pretext of this sudden revelation has been the mastectomy which his wife Gertrudis has just undergone, but the reality of his solitude appears much more profound than the scar that cruelly marks her amputation. Without feeling compassion or affection and while listening to her moan as she dreams, Brausen accepts his failure with “the expected resignation that comes with being forty.”

Nevertheless, within the four walls of his apartment and through successive nights during which, plagued by insomnia, he paces between the kitchen, the bedroom, and the bathroom, Brausen is capable also of freeing himself from his present circumstance. “Any sudden and simple thing was going to happen, and I could save myself by writing,” he says the night he decides “to do something.” He sits at a table where, by his own account, “I had under my hands the paper necessary to save myself, a blotter, and a fountain pen.” Unlike Linacero, for whom it sufficed “to tell a dream” with the “event” that preceded it, Brausen simultaneously undertakes a twofold escape. On the one hand, he doubles as Arce, a makeshift macró (pimp) who bursts into the apartment of his neighbor, a prostitute whose noises he has heard through the thin partition walls that separate their bedrooms, as if their two beds were end to end. At the same time, he assumes the identity of a character he has created (Díaz Grey) in a city (Santa María) imagined with such perfection that at the end of the novel he is able to flee to it without forcing the ambiguous reality of the fiction he invented. Beginning with La vida breve, this mythical city with recognizable archetypes of the River Plate region—synthesized by Onetti as a true paradigm—becomes the setting for the rest of his work. Brausen, its “founder,” will have a monument erected in his honor in the principal plaza in La novia robada (The Stolen Bride; 1968), and in Cuando ya no importe (When It No Longer Matters; 1993) his name will be invoked during religious processions.

Through the evasion of the sad personal circumstances of Eladio Linacero and José María Brausen, Onetti establishes a formal, tense universe, a world enclosed existentially on itself, rigorous in style and without concessions yet saved by the act of writing placed at the disposal of its antiheroes. Disoriented beings (when not frustrated), uprooted noncomformists, outsiders, and marginal figures face the difficulty of communicating with others and feel that authenticity is repressed by society. They take refuge with their anguish in the space of a small room and carry out a solitary, intense “descent into themselves,” having been preceded by the first outsider in modern literature, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.

Born 1 July 1909 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Onetti is a member of a kind of lost generation of the River Plate that reached maturity in the 1940s and could be characterized as somewhat nihilistic. To the extent that he was able to create characters who were authentic spiritual pariahs, morally banished and politically disenchanted, his total rejection of the ruling values is among the most radical. His antiheroes go much further in their forsaking all belief. Abandoned beings, “amoral, indifferent” men “without faith or interest in their destiny,” as he would define them in his foreword to Tierra de nadie (No Man's Land;) 1941), they are depicted, Onetti admits, “with an equal spirit of indifference,” although in reality he has always been empathetic to their sadness through an expressive pity and has discovered with them that the freedom such characters as Linacero or Brausen attained only served to make their isolation more obvious.

In Onetti, solitude is the result not of a deliberate calling for independence but rather of a kind of paralyzing lucidity. All impulse to “action” is denied by a thoroughgoing introspective analysis. In this position there is an inevitable failure, a negation of all that could become delightful, vitalistic enthusiasm, a call to analyze and reflect instead of openly enjoying life. Protagonists who are confined to their rooms like Linacero and Brausen, uncommitted observers of other people's business like Díaz Grey or Jorge Malabia, impresarios destined for defeat like Larsen, eternal planners of projects that are never carried out like Aranzuru—all seem to have come to the conclusion that, as H. G. Wells said, “there is no escape or getting around it or getting through it.”

In Onetti's work there is no place for a man of universal values, even if these values appear to be threatened, problematic, or alternative. His disillusionment is total and absolute; there is no possible faith, no imaginable response to crisis, no question worth posing. His dispossession brings him close to the essential dead-end truths of Samuel Beckett's characters. Linacero is, in effect, not unlike Molloy.

Onetti's characters, moreover, live “marginalized” on the muddy banks of the River Plate, “expelled” from Europe, and “fallen” into “an uncharted land, void of spirit.” H. A. Murena defines the situation of the River Plate in El pecado original de América (America's Original Sin): “America is made up of exiles, is the land of exile, and all who are exiled know profoundly that in order to live, one must be done with the past, must erase memories of this world to which one's return is forbidden, for to do otherwise is to remain suspended from memories, unable to live.” Therefore, Onetti ironically asks himself, “Why here? Preceding us there is nothing. One gaucho, two gauchos, thirty-three gauchos,” making a clear, irreverent allusion to the Uruguayan national myth, historically founded on the landing of the “thirty-three gauchos from the east bank of the River Plate.”

Onetti not only affirms the lack of a perceptible historical past, but he also disavows the expression of traditional culture. In a weekly newspaper column, symptomatically called “La Piedra en el Charco” (The Rock in the Puddle), he severely criticizes his era for lacking originality, for the sterility into which regionalism, costumbrismo, and social realism have fallen. Devoid of all rhetorical weight, history is transformed into a tabula rasa, where everything remains to be written, but where, in reality, nothing is worth writing.

Onetti's antiheroes proclaim that “nothing can be done,” or, what seems more serious still, that “nothing is worth doing.” Far from anguish, nausea, and even détresse, one can speak only of fatalism and resignation. Onetti himself declared as an elemental philosophical principle that “the whole art of living lies in the simple ease of accommodating ourselves within the hallow of events that we have not provoked by our own will; not forcing anything; simply being each minute.”

In conclusion, it is not worth struggling for some other future, since “An enlightened man should do nothing. Look at construction workers, at any number of things. It breaks your heart. All life wallowing in misery. Look at politics, literature, or what have you. All is false, and the autochthonous is the falsest of all. If there's nothing to do here, don't do anything. If gringos like to work, let them break their backs. I don't have any faith; we don't have faith. Some day we'll have a mystique, for sure; but in the meantime, we're happy.”

The formulation of a philosophy of existence in Onetti can, consequently, seem weak. One must wade through sundry isolated paragraphs of his works in order to construct a scheme that surprises by its simplicity and its coherence. For the moment, one discovers that, like a good inhabitant of the River Plate region, Onetti understands that synonymous with virility is a certain contentiousness, a certain obligatory terseness of emotional expression and its mysterious reasons—a constant that appears in the works of authors as diverse as Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar, as well as in many tango lyrics.

In essence, more than a form of deracination, Onetti translates the profound frustration of the inhabitants of the River Plate region, maladjusted as a result of expectations and legitimate aspirations and the sad proof of their surrounding reality, a reality which he judges with a severe, hypercritical focus. His is a criticism that opens its doors to the skepticism of “withdrawn men who shun the masses with taciturnity,” about whom Juan Carlos Ghiano has written. In this self-reflection one recognizes not only a single esthetic stance but also a generalized attitude, even at the popular level, where one vacillates between denunciation and acceptance, the confirmation that “things are as they are and there is no recourse but to accept them as such.”

One reality Onetti himself had to face came in 1973, when, during the coup d'état of 27 June, he was forced to leave Uruguay and take refuge in Spain, where he resided until his death. In Madrid, far from the Buenos Aires where he had worked as a correspondent for the Reuters news agency, or from his native Montevideo, where he had written for the weekly Marcha and the daily Acción and where he was director of the municipal library, he received the 1978 Cervantes Prize and, thanks to numerous translations, international recognition.

The fame that was to arrive late did not change Onetti's view of life at all, that vision that Díaz Grey outlined in El astillero (1961; Eng. The Shipyard, 1968): life “is nothing more than this: what we see and what we know.” There is no transcendence or philosophical meaning worth insisting upon. The important thing is that “nothing makes sense.” The meaning of this view of existence is quite simple: men are beings who, refusing to accept clarity, complicate everything with “words and anxieties.” Resignation, not at all anguished, must lead to admitting death itself as part of a routine.

Onetti's fatalism seems to lead to a certain passivity. Here we are far from all demonic existential anguish; we are close to a kind of beatific, transcendent understanding of all human and earthly anxieties, an attitude that could be religious had it been nurtured by faith. This insistence on the precariousness of existence, which provides the basis for the title of one novel, La vida breve, and is implied by the title of another, Los adioses (The Goodbyes; 1954), makes one recall the lyrics of a song which points toward maturity: “Las marionetas, dan, dan / dan tres vueltas y se van” (The marionettes turn, turn, / turn three times and are gone).

From the impersonal rooms or boarding houses the evasion projected by solitary men has led to boredom or sadness, the expression of a resigned fatalism, far from all anguish and despair. At the end of the dream there is nothing left but to “watch oneself parsimoniously, calmly, growing old without drawing conclusions,” or perhaps to “bore oneself smiling,” as Díaz Grey suggests with a certain sadness—a sadness which can also be a “state of love” that assures a balance between hopelessness and rebelliousness and foretells a possible individual salvation.

And for what purpose is one saved? The answer rests in literature alone, that form of writing which frees Linacero and Brausen and which Onetti makes his own with a rigorous vocation, for what matters is to write, but not in any old way. In Onetti, beneath the guise of anti-intellectualism, one discovers a compendium of many of the techniques of the best contemporary narrative: the ambiguity of Herman Melville, the multiple points of view of Henry James, the interior monologue of James Joyce, the collective characters of Sherwood Anderson (Does Winesburg, Ohio influence Santa María?), the rounded perfection of a story by Stephen Crane, the atmosphere of William Faulkner. The lack of faith in any philosophical, religious, or political dogma does not keep Onetti from believing in the essential condition of the writer. As Lucien Goldmann would say of Jean Genet, one could also say of Onetti: “Only art and appearance can constitute the esthetic compensation of a deceptive and insufficient reality.” The exaltation of the powers of imagination through literature would, therefore, constitute more than escape; it would constitute authentic liberation. One could add, from a gnostic point of view, that if to tell a story is to understand, then to understand is to create—an understanding and a creation that, in Onetti's literary praxis, has been translated into a brief yet intense saga. If his work appears to be an enterprise of evasion, made acute with mechanisms that go along with the able management of the best techniques and procedures of writing, it does not constitute an easy escapism, for to escape from one specific reality does not imply abandoning man's essential reality, to let fall into “moral indifference” his existential problematic, which is valid in all time and space.

Herein lies the true meaning of Onetti's work: to arrive at the crux of the individual's intimate solitude, at the metaphysical sadness of the human condition, through the progressive awareness of the uselessness of most human action and through the stripping away of all the trappings that surround us and create for us false dependencies on our surrounding reality; and, in arriving at this crux, to grasp the essence of the human condition in order to distill in an original and solitary way a true existential allegory of contemporary man, not just of the River Plate region or of Latin America but of universal man.