SOURCE: Murray, Jack. “Plot and Space in Juan Carlos Onetti's ‘Tan Triste como Ella’.” Symposium 37, no. 1 (spring 1983): 68-83.

[In the following essay, Murray explores Onetti's narrative devices in “Tan Triste como Ella.”]

It has often been observed that Juan Carlos Onetti's unhappy lot is to represent trends before their time. He was writing fantastic stories before the fashion for the fantastic, New Novels before the New Novelists came along. While Onetti's penchant for setting yet-to-be vogues has doubtless created difficulties for him, for his admirers such a tendency denotes something positive and lasting: his broad and profound representativeness of what is typical and abiding in twentieth-century fiction. No one should be surprised that it could only be a South American, and specifically a platense, author who should possess this quality. In the cultural setting of Western literature, only writers from that part of the world seem able to combine intertextual currents and influences so diverse and unexpected as to be unlikely anywhere else. In the case of the object of the present study, Onetti's “Tan triste como ella,” for example, we must speak in the same breath of William Faulkner and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

The specific problem we wish to examine is both Onettian and typical of twentieth-century fiction: how is the story told when the events are fragmented and blurred, the viewpoint partial and obscured, and the authorly position toward the story's contents aloof and often uncomprehending? In other words, how do we answer the reader's question “What is happening?” or “What has happened?”¹

A review of Onetti's fiction shows that such blurring and fragmentation are typical. We find them as much in an earlier work like Tierra de nadie as in a recent one such as Dejemos hablar al viento. Because Onetti consistently uses similar techniques and authorly strategies in all his fiction, and also because all his works essentially exploit the same restricted repertory of themes, I shall concentrate on a single short story, “Tan triste como ella,” instead of a longer or better known work such as the renowned Vida breve or El astillero. Anything I say about this particular work will have a broad application to the rest of his fiction—particularly the problem of how, in Jonathan Culler's terms, a logic of signification becomes imposed upon the events of a story (especially when these events are fragmented).² What I say about Onetti will be enlightening for other twentieth-century novelists in other times and lands.

When Ivonne Bordelois reviewed “Tan triste” shortly after its publication as the title piece for a collection of short stories in 1965, she noted how much the work reflected certain developments in European film and fiction of that period. (Presumably, she was thinking of the New Novel and its recent entry into film, Last Year at Marienbad.) She was more interested in the symbols found in “Tan triste” than in the plot, saying only that the latter seemed to consist of “una falsa venganza apoyada sobre celos falsos.”³ She felt a shadowy impersonal force was pushing its characters on. Specifically, she noted Onetti's refusal to indulge in psychological dissections of character and his invocation of a modified symbolic mode that recalled medieval legend. And she suggested that he was leaving up to the reader the task of unraveling the meaning of the tale.

The last supposition is most assuredly true. All of Onetti's fiction might be described usefully as undergoing a constant process of “self-deconstruction,” with the events not only fragmenting but with vital pieces of information actually being withheld from the reader.⁴ Hence, the reader's task is to reconstruct the tale from the “disjecta membra.” It will be my major argument that Onetti displaces the meaning of his story from the shattered events to the rigorously, if not exhaustively, observed space in which the story takes place. On this matter, it should come as no surprise that “Tan triste,” like most of Onetti's fiction, takes place in his equivalent of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: Santa María. Imaginary space becomes the arena in which psychological truths are objectified and symbols attain concrete life.

Here is a synopsis of what we may glean the story is about. A man, never named, is sick, perhaps dying, and has formed the obsessive conviction that his wife (also unnamed) has been unfaithful to him with a certain Mendel. (All the narrative tells us is that the woman went home once with a man a few months before her marriage but did not yield herself to him.) The husband claims to have a piece of evidence that will put Mendel in jail. Meanwhile, he has taken to staying away from home, not only during the day when he is at work but also for most of the night (with a succession of mistresses). He presents his wife with a revolver for her protection during his absences but, when it fails to fire, he throws it in the bottom of their bedroom closet. A side project of his is to remove the weed jungle in back of the house, cement it over, and install tanks in which to raise exotic fish. For this project he hires three workmen—two young men and their employer, a problematical man who in the past has falsely represented himself as a priest and architect. They are assigned to carry out their work in the husband's absence. The wife, who has already perceived this absence as spitefully directed against her, is especially dismayed at the destruction of the garden. She has been a dutiful housewife and mother until this point. Now she begins to debase herself both by abortive intimacies with the two young men and also by mutilating herself on the Jerusalem thorn hedge surrounding the garden. One day her husband returns and announces triumphantly that Mendel has been arrested, though without his personal intervention. The woman goes down to the garden to find the hedge has wilted and will no longer prick. She then goes up to the bedroom closet, takes the gun, and shoots herself in the mouth.

This shocking tale may be better understood if we see it as a fragmented and eroded version of the ancient motif of the Eaten Heart. The prototypical version is found in the vida of the Provençal troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh (c. 1190-1212). He fell in love with, and was loved in return by, Soremonda, wife of Raimon de Castel Rossillon. Raimon, learning of the affair, captured the troubadour, had him killed and served his heart to his wife in a stew, telling her what it was only after she had eaten it. In dismay over her unwitting deed and as reprisal for her husband's cruelty, she threw herself to her death from an adjoining window.⁵ The essential components of the story are three: crime (adultery), punishment (murder of the lover, entrapment of the wife), reprisal (the wife kills herself).

Here is what is left in “Tan triste” of those elements that appear so clear in the medieval version.

The crime. Because the story is told mainly from the wife's perspective, we see the husband's conviction over her infidelity as delusional. The story says only that she went home with a man before her marriage. But the reader's trust in the accuracy of her viewpoint is tested by a chance sentence in which she is described as erasing from her mind not only her husband but also Mendel: “Mendel había desaparecido junto con el hombre flaco (her husband) … Nunca había estado con Mendel, nunca lo había conocido ni le había visto el cuerpo corto y musculoso,” (p. 1310). The description of Mendel's body is too precise for this denial not to read like an oblique confession of familiarity with him.⁶ Elsewhere, we see the husband trying to hear again the story of her meetings with Mendel. In the face of this uncertainty, the reader finds himself confronted by the enigma so typical of detective stories that Josefina Ludmer finds basic to Onetti's fiction—the lack of a sentence that says all.⁷ But none of this explains away the irrational aspects of the husband's jealous behavior. For instance, he interprets his wife's having had a boy instead of the girl they were expecting (even to the point of having invested in a sizable layette in pink) as a further infidelity.

The punishment. The husband's efforts to have Mendel arrested by denouncing him to the police with an incriminating document prove to be unnecessary. Fate takes the matter out of his hands. One notes the wife's skepticism over his effectiveness here. As for the entrapment the husband sets up for her through the two young workmen in the garden, she at once goes along with it (as if to say: “if this is what you expect of me, then this you shall have”) but she is not fooled into it. As we shall see, the only act of punishment that appears totally successful is the husband's perhaps fortuitous and unmotivated decision to have the garden cut down. This blow finds its mark.

The reprisal. The woman's suicide is as enigmatic as the infidelity. She seems only to be play-acting when she pulls the gun out of the closet and not to expect that it will fire, since it failed to fire for her husband before. But this effort does coincide with his crowing announcement that Mendel has been arrested.

Each of the three main elements in the tale, then, is puzzling or has broken down. Onetti deliberately obscures the main superstructure of the story in order to force the reader to apply even deeper readings.

First of all, of course, the story as I have told it may only be apparent and cover over another narrative stratagem. For example, we may be dealing with something like the subplot of a Clouzot or Hitchcock film: what the husband really wants to do is drive his wife to kill herself by hounding her with the false accusation that she has been unfaithful. Ivonne Bordelois invites this interpretive tactic when she speaks of false vengeance based on false jealousy. The accusation of adultery is a bogus plot that lures the woman into a fatal ambush. The episodes the ambush entails, from the woman's vantage point, do not seem related, appear arbitrary. First, the husband throws the gun in the closet. Then, he decides to remove the weed jungle and announces this to his weakly protesting wife. For this purpose, he calls in the three workmen.

This subplot suggests Bluebeard pretending to go away while leaving all the keys to the palace in his new wife's charge, telling her she may use all but one. Bruno Bettelheim has seen the element of the forbidden room as a disguised version of the theme of infidelity.⁸ Both Bluebeard and Onetti's husband apparently think of the wife as curious, disposed to infidelity, if not wanton. Neither is disappointed in his low esteem.

But why does the gun fire for the wife when it does not for the husband? And is he not too inept to bring off so complex a plot? Even on the level of subplot it would seem that Onetti has structured his story so that everything seems to fragment or remain in the air.

In order to see how the story has both logic and meaning we may usefully compare it with another mystery story as construed by Jacques Lacan: his famous analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Purloined Letter.”⁹ Culler (p. 176) has observed that the dynamic tension in a tale comes from the interplay between a logic of event and a logic of signification. This interplay generates meaning. In the Poe story Lacan shows that it is the movement of the letter that produces signification. A similar chain of meaning might be seen as emerging from both the main and the subplot of “Tan triste” as well. In this context, cutting down the garden is the most significant event, since it corresponds to the theft of the letter in Poe, a matter we shall investigate shortly in greater detail.

The relation between this tale and Onetti's is clearest if we consider Borges's stratagem in “La muerte y la brújula” as a point of transition. Here the detective (who, incidentally, is described by the author as taking himself for an Auguste Dupin) falls victim to his killer Red Scharlach because he reads a cunning logical design into Scharlach's random and spontaneous acts. The design falls into place when the detective is killed. This mortal outcome has a direct bearing upon “Tan triste,” since it shows that accidental events may produce the same logic and signification as ones that are carefully planned and perpetrated by a story's protagonists. While Onetti's story, in appearance, is the least structured of the three tales, it has the same fatal logic. The signification is more problematical, however, if only because there is no detective in the story to explain it all to us. It is now to this that we turn.

Plainly the actions in the story's plot do not speak for themselves or enlighten us as to what motivates the characters to act as they do. Moreover, the author offers the reader no psychological explanation for their behavior.¹⁰ The reader is therefore led to seek that explanation in other elements, and in his search he may well be attracted by the insistently intrusive spatial elements in the story. Indeed, Josefina Ludmer, among others, has sanctioned an investigation of these elements by pointing out (p. 170) how much topography offers a key to Onetti's writings. It is now my intention to show that, far more than the mechanics of plot or of meaning as generated through plot, it is space that projects the author's point, particularly since it provides an arena in which antagonistic forces are affirmed or enfeebled, compete with or flee from each other.¹¹

As in Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie, the locus of the entire story is the house and the compound surrounding it. It consists of the hedge-bound garden, garden shed, garage, and house itself (we see only the downstairs kitchen, the stairs going up, the upstairs bedrooms with connecting hall, all in the back of the house facing the garden). This locus, however, is not an inert backdrop—something like what we would see on a stage—but provides the medium through which the psychological forces at work in the story achieve the recognizable outline of the classical male-female confrontation lying at the thematic center of Onetti's works. The confinement of the story to this one spatial setting not only emphasizes its restriction to the woman's vantage point but also reinforces the claustrophobic sense of her unending imprisonment within the house.¹² The house is the place from which the husband seems almost continually to be away, the place in which the wife sits waiting for his return.

At first sight it would appear that the husband is in command of this space. He can order that the garden be destroyed. He may come in and go out of this space as he pleases. But the house and his money come from his wife. Hence, his commanding position may simply be empty swagger. The ambiguous and undermined title he has to the space is a correlative not only of his physical, moral, and even intellectual weakness but also of his wife's potential superiority over him. This purely virtual advantage possessed by the wife has meant that, for him, she has turned into a kind of evil genius haunting the place, poisoning his enjoyment of his powers, and driving him away. But she can hardly be said to be deliberately trying to eclipse her husband, if only because her upbringing in a paternalistic society has left her without any idea of how to assert herself or take the initiative and see the house as partially hers: she has been raised to believe it was her father's before, it is now her husband's (who has simply stepped into the father's place). The woman's confinement inside the paternally controlled home throughout her life has made her unaware of having any rights or power. She seems totally under her husband's sway, in this regard. Quite clearly we are in the thematic setting of the “woman question” dating at least back to Ibsen in modern literature.

The wife in Onetti's story, just like Brígida in “El árbol” by the Chilean author María Luisa Bombal, finds confinement to male-dominated space is to be sentenced to what Hernán Vidal calls its “rutina anestesiante y traicionera.”¹³ Vidal (pp. 105-106) sees the husband's paternalistic administration of property and money as setting up a tight hierarchical order in which everyone has a strictly limited and permanently assigned place. In the present instance, the woman in Onetti's story is to occupy herself with her duties in the kitchen and nursery and not concern herself with anything else. A system so rigid is bound to turn everyone into a mutilated stereotype. Exceeding the stereotype in any way is grounds for abject humiliation. While both Bombal's and Onetti's wife have been trained to submit to a paternalistic regime, Onetti's character is not so ready as Brígida to be convinced of the validity of her husband's negative assessment of her. But neither woman seems able to achieve individuation on her own, at least in a positive sense, and is limited to the closed space of home, a space that seems to be a correlate of the limitations of her own mind. Almost in spite of themselves, both women are kept in a state of dependent infantilism imposed upon them by the seemingly male-dominated social order.¹⁴

Onetti emphasizes the symbolic value of his use of space by having the woman in “Tan triste” try to escape her confinement by choosing, not the husband's garage door or the garden gate used by the workmen, but an attempt to find a way out through the resisting needles of the Jerusalem thorn hedge. Her inability to break free of this enclosure betrays a general inability to think of herself in autonomous terms. It does not seem to occur to her to be anything more than a wife and mother. It is only in the rather Emma Bovary-like activity of reading that she becomes able to articulate her feelings, but this is because they are spelled out for her by someone else in a book: “Figúrense ustedes el pesar creciente, el ansia de huir, la repugnancia impotente, la sumisión, el odio” (p. 1317).¹⁵

The house, then, is a place in which the struggle between husband and wife has reached a stand-off. Both are alienated from it: the husband, because it came to him from his wife, the wife, because the house has always been, and continues to be, the place of male domination. While each partner has a relative kind of power over the other, an equal weakness prevents this power from becoming dominant.

The wife's confinement within the house and the husband's absences from it underscore an even deeper level of conflict which spatial concepts help elucidate. If we imagine a pole with internalization at one extreme, externalization at the other, then we see that the wife and husband are situated at opposite poles. The husband's drive toward externalization may be seen not only in his absences from the house but also in his need to affirm himself through power in his world, to possess, to dominate. The wife's equivalent tendency toward internalization is expressed in her privatization of being in the face of alienation caused by her assigned role in life and also by her husband's aggressive behavior toward her.

In his efforts toward externalization the husband not only seeks to dominate the home but also to attain financial success in the world at large. The text pointedly expresses his effort to increase his domain outside the home in spatial terms: “se iba extendiendo, desde las nueve hasta las cinco, a través de oficinas de un local enorme” (p. 1390). As for sexual self-affirmation, here we find a compulsive need to enlarge his area of conquest, partly in compensation for supposed failure in this domain at home. Yet all these efforts to assert himself in the business or sexual world tend to miss their mark as much as his efforts at home (“inútil” is an adjective frequently applied to the man). In the long run, his sense of alienation is unrelieved and he is brought back again to confront his own powerlessness to escape from it.

In Onetti the male's sexual crisis is almost always related to the parallel theme of death, just as it is in so much of modern literature. From the husband's viewpoint, the wife's growing from a girl into full maternal womanhood signals the passage of time and consequent mortality. He has been unable to halt this advance and retain his wife as a little girl fetish figure. Rubén Cotelo has noted, in Onetti's works, the presence of Nabokovian nymphets who retain medieval overtones of the female as depraved and corrupt. In such a figure, Cotelo claims, we see a perverse version of the Marian personage. She is not only related to sin and grace, however, but also serves as an extension of the myth of youth.¹⁶ The husband clings to such a figure because she offers the fleeting impression of being a miraculous bulwark against time, although time corrodes the husband's body throughout the story in the form of (fatal?) sickness and visible signs of aging. Therefore, a relationship with the girl will always be characterized by what Aínsa has called “dolorismo.”¹⁷ As the husband puts it: “La muchacha, la casi mujer que puede ser contemplada con melancolía, con la sensación espantosa de que ya no es posible” (p. 1327). Aínsa reminds us that ecstatic love for a virgin may not be repeated with the same girl. Once touched, she is already defiled and in full decomposition. As her husband tersely puts it: “El pelo se va, los dientes se pudren.” One can only agree with M. R. Frankenthaler that the assumption of womanhood necessarily entails the fall of an ideal.¹⁸

As in Maria Luisa Bombal's “El árbol,” the relationship has incestuous overtones, particularly since we are dealing with an older man marrying a younger girl. The husband seems to transfer all the blame for the defilement to the wife. Specifically, he seems to feel she has lost her capacity to symbolize innocence and youth and furthermore has deprived him of the possibility of renewing his fantasy (essentially a salvation fantasy) by failing to bear him a daughter. Hernán Vidal, in discussing Bombal's story (p. 106), sees transgression against the incest taboo as implicit in bourgeois marriage. This, in turn, leads to an ever greater degeneration, a loss in vitality, and an inability to renew order, once decay has set in.

In short, the husband feels he has lost control over his world when he sees his wife has grown into the fullness of womanhood. She has assumed those very qualities that he (and all normal males, he claims) are not looking for: “la que comprende, protege, mima, ayuda, endereza, corrige, mejora, apoya, aconseja, dirige y administra” (p. 1327). Such qualities would denote a full person, a fellow being, a companion who shares his life with him. But woman in the plenitude of the human person the husband can only perceive as a challenging and alienating force. She not only threatens his masculinity; she brings out its pathetic vulnerability.¹⁹ Hence, we note the typical misogyny of the insecure male.²⁰ In spatial terms, this means he is not in total control of his space.

The internalization I have attributed to the wife takes place when she can only withdraw inside herself in the face of such resistance against her integrity as a person. But the husband, restricted to the external, hence superficial, aspect of his world, perceives this move as a sexual turning away from him. If she is now aloof from him, it can only be for sexual reasons. She has given herself to someone else. Seeing her retreat within herself as simple sexual infidelity, he lapses into self-pity and spiteful behavior. Such conduct is not without its masochistic side. His brooding over his wife's defection verges on delectation. He goads her to make further, and more painful, disclosures. But she has become totally inured to his supplications of this matter: “La frase no vendría” (p. 1320).

On a far more primitive level, the woman's tendency to internalize may suggest to the husband a kind of voraciousness, possibly cannibalistic in nature. While it is true that he perceives his feelings toward his wife in the mode of jealousy, he also may fear being consumed, at least on a subconscious level, and must attempt to escape her. On this matter, we might well ponder the deeper implications of Raimon de Castel Rossillon making Soremonda eat his rival's heart. In a wry—and indeed ghastly—way, he seems to be recognizing the cannibalistic aspect of the woman's sexuality (inevitably one thinks, in this context, of certain female spiders or else of the nineteenth-century femme-vampire).²¹ In this light, the woman comes to appear as wild, primitive, and fatally cunning. She possesses a power for which the husband is no match, particularly in his present debilitated condition. If he is to be rid of her, it must be by clever and oblique means. It is here that he falls, perhaps unconsciously, on the expedient of cutting down the garden, an oblique strategy that eventually sends her to her death. Dimly, he senses that the garden is a correlate of her being, and, in destroying it, he robs her of her power in much the same way as people in more primitive societies shaved the heads of women suspected of witchcraft.²²

Josefina Ludmer has spoken of the cut that produces Onetti's fiction, and the cutting down of the garden in “Tan triste” fits into this pattern. The garden comes to have meaning by being irreversibly altered. Or, as Ludmer puts it, the assassination of the thing gives rise to the sign (pp. 14, 20, 26, 35). The cut, of course, figures in the Guillem de Cabestanh legend and even in “Bluebeard” (where it stands as a threat: the bride has seen the hacked up bodies of her predecessors in the forbidden room). The cut is the horrible awakening from a long sleep.

It is not until after the garden is gone that the woman realizes it has been the only place where she was ever happy (“desde la infancia no había tenido otra felicidad verdadera, sólida, aparte de los verdes arrebatados al jardin” [p. 1318]). And she seems convinced that her husband has intuited this. The blow he strikes at the garden is really one he is striking at her.

As long as the garden existed, the woman could feel in some respects that time stood still. Left untouched, the garden would have permitted her to persevere in a world unchanged since childhood and to go on enjoying an undisturbed kind of innocence and narcissism. Hence, her internalization is not simply a strategy adopted against her husband's cruel mistreatment of her in marriage, but must be seen as a tendency surviving from childhood. In this context, we may consider her ongoing inclination to internalize as having, at least in part, the same goal as the husband's toward externalization: the arresting of time. But when such a disposition takes an inward direction, we must see it as autistic in character. Unfortunately, the very withdrawal that autism involves suggests the kind of ingesting of the external world that has so misled and frightened the husband.

For her own part, the woman's edenic image of the childhood garden entails not only free-growing grass but a sense of communion with a father who is totally unthreatening and never gets around to cutting it, thus declining to thwart her continuing bliss in the autistic realm. The security of this possibly incestuous (but never aggressive) relationship came to be associated with the taste of grass in the mouth, hence internalized through that orifice that ingests nourishment from the external world. Freud has spoken of this type of orality in infants as one of the first expressions of sexuality, the eventual aim being incorporation and identity.²³ In the story, the traces of this primordial sexuality are seen in the woman's happy memory of going home with the man at the beginning of the story and her recollection of his taste and the happy sense of security it gave her. The same reassuring taste appears again during the recurrence of the dream at the end of the story, where it is explicitly associated with grass. Regrettably, the oral side of her sexuality has entirely different, and far more sinister, overtones for the woman's husband.

Perhaps the woman was first drawn to her husband because of his paternal aspect, imagining that the happy idyll first begun with her father and the garden would continue. Instead, she was plunged into the cruel world of the phallus which summarily ejected her from the “locus amoenus” where she had been the joyous center of a narcissistic realm. When we see her in the story, the objectification of her place in the world has produced so complete a sense of alienation in her that she cannot identify with what she has become in her husband's mind: the cunning, unfaithful wife (“putita astuta” [p. 1313]), a person so threatening and perhaps frightening to him that he would want to kill her. While the garden still existed, she could escape inside herself from this horrible counterfeit being he would force upon her; cut down, she no longer can. In such a dilemma she disowns life itself: “Pero recordaba, aún ahora y con mayor fuerza, la sensación de estafa iniciada al final de la infancia … Nunca había sido consultada respecto a la vida que fue obligada a conocer y aceptar. Una sola pregunta anterior y habría rechazado, con horror equivalente, los intestinos y la muerte, la necesidad de la palabra para comunicarse e intentar la comprensión ajena” (p. 1318).

Josefina Ludmer has spoken (p. 8) of the problem that arises with the “phantom limb” after the cut and of the search for the prosthesis to take its place. For example, the woman continues to walk across the cement as if all the vegetation were still there. And we note a certain inconclusiveness, even impulsiveness, about her behavior after the garden is cut down that suggests the troubled effort to find something to replace it. The woman, a creature of internalization, tends mostly to withdraw—the autism of which I have spoken. Hence, she does not fight back. Indeed, the anger she ought to be directing at her husband she directs at herself in various acts of self-flagellation. At times, she almost appears to be trying to conform to, and so confirm, her husband's loathing opinion of her.

The most obvious form of self-flagellation is the wife's daily self-mutilation on the Jerusalem thorn. The thorns, of course, must be understood as phallic:²⁴ the organ epitomizing male domination is here transposed into something sharp that invites masochistic self-debasement. But throughout the story Onetti insists on the impotence that may beset the male. In the case of the thorn hedge, he has it go soft at the end so that, when the wife runs to it to tear her flesh again, she finds that “las espinas no tenían ya fuerza para herir y goteaban, apenas, leche, un agua viscosa y lenta, blancuzca, perezosa” (p. 1329).

As for the three workmen—or “poceros”—they seem to represent three aspects of the male, and specifically of the woman's husband, from which she is alienated. In this context, her dealings with each constitute an enlightening parody of the main relationship in the story. The old man, in his complexity, raises more problems than we can deal with here, but at least we must point out that he offers the wife Christian fellowship at one point, a spiritual gift of the sort she could never expect from her husband. The giant well-digger appeals to her because his very size and huge muscularity are phallic, and she will devour him in the sort of raw sexual act the husband cravenly expects of her (she is especially aroused at the sight of the giant standing in a hole he is digging in the garden). He also appeals to her because of the emblematic piece of grass he characteristically chews upon or tucks over his ear. His attack of impotence at the crucial moment seems to epitomize a male failing which, in the husband, takes place on the psychological level. Specifically, we are dealing with the male's sense of powerlessness before the female's emasculating glance. Here she is the symbol of alterity for the male. In the case of the wife's sado-masochistic games with the younger well-digger, she is simply inverting her husband's treatment of her and, at the same time, reducing the love relationship to a brutal game of master and slave.

On a yet deeper level we come upon one of the most startling aspects of “Tan triste”: the true enforcers of the reign of the phallus and the consequent assassins turning against the wife are the women lurking in the background of the story. If I have correctly interpreted the underlying symbolism of the story, the efforts of the wife's mother to get the easy-going father to cut the grass must be seen as an effort on her part to impede her daughter's evolution toward individual identity. The husband's destruction of the garden, then, is but a pale copy of an idea coming from the female side. With respect to her marriage, her having begot a male rather than a female child not only suggests her willfulness and contrariness but, more perfidiously, has created a gap in the female chain of generations. The suggestion of an inter-generational chain of hatred on the female side is confirmed, finally, by the gun the woman kills herself with: it belonged to her husband's mother and grandmother (hence, its feminine mother-of-pearl decoration); it expressly would not fire for the husband, so that he presumably could not have used it directly on his wife; it does fire for her when she uses it on herself. Paradoxically, then, it is the female line that supports the reign of the phallus in the story, the abject subservience and depersonalization of woman, and even intervenes when the male stumbles in his role or loses his power. One notes the female recourse to technological substitutes for male muscle: the lawn mower, the gun. This perverse role of the female element in the story is perhaps the most sinister of its underlying horrors.²⁵

This final closing in upon the woman from every side leads us to the heart of the logic of signification in the story. The husband, as Onetti portrays him, cannot embody the avenging force that overcomes the wife because of a fundamental impotence. He therefore must leave all to chance: “el hombre solo creía en la desgracia y en la fortuna, en la buena o en la mala suerte, en todo lo triste y alegre que puede caernos encima, lo merezcamos o no” (p. 1314). It is on this point that the woman's superiority over the man shines through: “Ella creía saber algo más; pensaba en el destino, en errores y misterios, aceptaba la culpa y—al final—terminó admitiendo que vivir es culpa suficiente para que aceptemos el pago, recompensa o castigo.” Awakening into consciousness, from her viewpoint, is awakening to guilt. And the woman's crime has at last been named: vivir.

The fetish-object has come to life. As a full person, the wife becomes the Other in her husband's world: the daunting presence of alterity, that living and judging glance that emasculates him, reduces him to impotence. This consuming, if unintended, aggression against him on the ontological level is so painful that he must displace it to the more manageable (and banal) level of sexual infidelity. We have seen how unconvinced the wife is by this stratagem, how ineffectual it turns out to be. The true dilemma lies elsewhere: in the presence of a consciousness behind the glance across the breakfast table. In spite of herself, the wife has driven her husband to wish this witness she is for him were dead. In this respect the entire story may be seen as the husband's wish-fulfillment, the hoped-for death being motivated by his perception of her living individuality as an assault against him. He leaves it to her (and the female line, as it turns out) to carry this wish out.

In “Tan triste,” we have found ourselves confronted by a particularly apt example of what Jonathan Culler perceives as the conflict between the logic of the structure of events and the logic of the structure of meaning. Culler quotes Peter Brooks's statement that the relationship between fable (an ordering of events conceivable outside a particular telling) and its narrative form is one of “suspicion and conjecture, a structure of undecidability.” Culler adds: “This undecidability is the effect of the convergence of two narrative logics that do not give rise to a synthesis (p. 181). In the present analysis of “Tan triste,” I have endeavored to show these two lines of logic by considering separately the fragmented story (or plot of events) and the psychological forces at work underneath as displaced to the spatial elements.

The fragmentation underscores the undecidability of the basic fable as construed through the narrative form (illustrated by my comparison of “Tan triste” with the motif of the Eaten Heart). Onetti seems to have stressed purposely the mystery story effect that the fragmentation procedure produces. Somewhat like Robbe-Grillet, he strews details along the path which virtually beg for analysis. Against the anonymity of the primary couple in the story, for example, we have the strange fact that their “rivals” have names beginning with “m”: Mendel and Másam (to say nothing of Montero, a secondary character, or the mysterious “M.C.” of the story's dedication). Másam invites all sorts of conjectural interpretations. There is also the fanciful association of pOcerOs/pEcerAs to intrigue us. Finally, the Argentine term for Jerusalem thorn—“cinacina”—is a reduplication that suggests the mirroring of the husband's and wife's mournful situation in the other's, reinforced by the comparison contained in the story's title and illustrating a phenomenon Ludmer has masterfully examined in Vida breve (pp. 14-16, 165-66).

Yet, as demonstrated, the story nonetheless yields a signification and does so, first of all, through the same process at work in Poe's “Purloined Letter” and Borges' “La muerte y la brújula.” In this respect, it is pertinent to show how many techniques Onetti might be seen to have borrowed from Faulkner. James Irby (pp. 76-77) has seen significant traces of the Mississipian in his fiction: the intersection of different narrative planes, the use of an indirect narrator, the emphasis on gestures and signs, a static and obsessive conception of character, and, particularly, the fragmentation of the story so that it is seen from many different angles. Like Faulkner, Onetti rejects the typical narrative sequence. The progression of the story often appears arbitrary, although the Uruguayan author shares the North American's view that fate is sealed before the story begins. But Onetti is more like Robbe-Grillet, in subjecting this random presentation to a masked, though calculated, intellectual order that the reader is invited to unravel. In this respect, he seems to anticipate the elegantly designed labyrinth of Julio Cortázar's Rayuela. At all events, the fragmentation technique appears to be a widely representative feature of twentieth-century writing.

As for what the signification of the story is, I have shown that the very process of degrading its episodes and facts to inconclusive enigmas causes the signification to be displaced elsewhere: in the case of “Tan triste,” to the spatial aspect. My analysis has shown the extraordinary results that can emerge from a strategy that Onetti has used repeatedly in his fiction, although nowhere more masterfully than in Vida breve in which a spatialization of Brausen's conflict gradually fills the whole novel.

Even through a shorter and perhaps lesser work like “Tan triste como ella,” Onetti manages to be broadly representative of what is characteristic of twentieth-century fiction. I have stressed the narrative, the structural, and the psychological aspects of this question. I might have stressed other aspects as well, particularly the spiritual, so apparent in the wife's prayers to the Virgin or the husband's irrational and obsessive search for salvation through young girls.²⁶ It is in this framework that we must perceive the many pained relationships seen in Onetti's longer and better-known works that are mirrored in “Tan triste como ella,” since the doomed love relation between man and woman stands at the thematic center of his work. The man suffers from failure and impotence, the woman from being the scapegoat for what Onetti is fond of characterizing as fracaso. Few writers have succeeded as well as Onetti in displaying, in a profoundly unified and coherent picture, the sexual, psychological, and spiritual aspects of this confrontation. Onetti has succeeded in communicating so rich and complex a theme by his skillful use of what we have seen as a typical technique of fragmentation, causing traditional story elements to atrophy, while displacing the more profound impact of the story to the spatial dimension.

Notes

1. James Irby sees this technique of fragmentation and obfuscation in the narrative as one Onetti has acquired from William Faulkner, in La influencia de William Faulkner en cuatro narradores hispanoamericanos, thesis typescript, Universidad Autónoma de México, 1956, p. 80. However, both authors are employing a widespread contemporary narrative technique.

2. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 169-87.

3. Ivonne Bordelois, “Tan triste como ella de Juan Carlos Onetti,” Cuadernos (Paris), 98 (1965), pp. 85-86. This is a review of the Alfa edition (Montevideo: 1963). I refer to the story as found in Obras completas (México: Aguilar, 1970), pp. 1307-13. All parenthetical page references are to the latter edition.

4. Enrique Anderson Imbert, Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (México: Fondo de cultura económica, 1961), II, 227. Mario Benedetti sees Onetti as anticipating Robbe-Grillet's device of omitting a central detail while constructing a minutely described narrative around it, in “La aventura del hombre” in Jorge Ruffinelli, ed., Onetti (Montevideo: Biblioteca de la Marcha, 1973), p. 43. The husband himself in Onetti's story waits for his wife to speak and clear up the mystery—e. g., “Cuando el hombre se hartaba de esperar la frase, la palabra imposible, se movía para besarle la frente,” etc. (p. 1310).

5. For this version we have consulted Raymond T. Hill and Thomas G. Bergin, Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), pp. 111-12. See also Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1957), V, 238 (item Q478.1).

6. This sentence may contradict the more prevailing “truth” in the story that the husband's conviction his wife has had an affair with Mendel is false. Wolfgang Luchting detected a similar sentence in Onetti's Los adioses and was rewarded by a congratulatory letter from the author himself for his discovery. See Luchting's “El lector como protagonista de la novela,” in Ruffinelli, pp. 218-19.

7. Josefina Ludmer, Onetti, Los procesos de construcción del relato (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1977), pp. 88-89.

8. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 300.

9. Jacques Lacan's analysis of Poe is to be found in “Le séminaire sur La Lettre volée,” in Ecrits I (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 20-75. See also Culler, p. 179.

10. James Irby (p. 11) sees this feature as an influence of Faulkner who, like Onetti, may elect to communicate the characters' thoughts to the reader. But these do not tend to reveal the inner workings of their minds but only suggest even more opaque mysteries hidden inside.

11. Gabriel Saad speaks of the “concepción agónica de la existencia” in Onetti, in “Jacobo y el otro o las señales de la victoria” in Lídice Gómez Mango, ed., En torno a Juan Carlos Onetti, Cuadernos de Literatura 15, Fundación de Cultura Universitaria (Montevideo), 1970, p. 105.

12. Anderson Imbert (p. 226) speaks of the “vidas encerradas” in Onetti's writings.

13. Hernán Vidal, María Luisa Bombal: La femineidad enajenada (Barcelona: Aubí, 1976), p. 113. Bombal's story is found in La última niebla (Santiago: Nascimento, 1962).

14. Vidal, p. 106.

15. In this respect, the wife is a particularly good example of the Lacanian idea of language coming from outside the self and articulating, bringing to consciousness, the unreleased matter of the unconscious.

16. Rubén Cotelo, “Cinco lecturas de Onetti,” in Ruffinelli, pp. 59-60.

17. Fernando Aínsa, Las trampas de Onetti (Montevideo: Editorial Alfa, 1970), p. 39.

18. Marilyn R. Frankenthaler, J. C. Onetti: La salvación por la forma (New York: Ediciones Abra, 1977), p. 76.

19. As Aínsa puts it, the chauvinist male is unable to give up his urge to dominate woman and so join her in her world. Hence the fundamental lack of love in this type of relationship, pp. 120-21.

20. James Irby (pp. 9-10) sees Onetti's men as sharing such mysogyny (and a certain morbid eroticism) with Faulkner's characters.

21. It is no doubt Onetti's stressing this aspect of female sexuality that leads Aínsa to state (pp. 111-13) that, in his works, merely being a woman is sufficient to be considered in a state of sin. Hence, the customary abuse to which women are subjected.

22. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 790.

23. Sigmund Freud, The Basic Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 597.

24. Emir Rodríguez Monegal has noted the phallic obsession in “Tan triste como ella” in “La fortuna de Onetti,” in Helmy F. Giacoman, ed., Homenaje a Juan Carlos Onetti (Long Island City, N.Y.: Anaya, 1974), p. 32.

25. I am indebted to my colleague Ursula R. Mahlendorf for her help in unraveling these psychological details.

26. Ángel Rama, “Origen de un novelista y de una generación literaria,” in Giacoman, p. 32.