[In the following essay, Maier provides a Freudian interpretation of identity and sexuality in La vida breve.]

A critical reading of Onetti's La vida breve (1950) reveals the very special value the creative process has in the narrative trajectory of both the novel and its protagonist, Juan María Brausen. Brausen, at the outset, is an employee in a publicity agency, but he is about, for reasons never disclosed to us, to lose his job. A friend, Stein, commissions Brausen to write a movie script, but as he begins to write, Brausen does not limit himself to a mere cinematographic script. Instead, he writes a fiction in which he creates a double, a provincial doctor named Díaz Grey. This displacement of life into art—within a fiction—entails a transformation of the world into a stage and echoes the Borgesian concept of life as “una eterna y confusa tragicomedia en la que cambian los papeles y máscaras, pero no los actores.”¹ The roles proliferate even further when Brausen enters into a sexual relationship with the prostitute living next door, thus obliging him to invent his third identity, Arce, a small-time hoodlum or pimp.

Although critics have unanimously affirmed the importance of this process of creation, they have overlooked a recurring image—the mirror—which appears in the critical moments of Brausen's first experiments with the creative process. The mirror, with all its adjunct notions—mirror image, reflection, reversal, inversion, and the “mirror stage” of psychoanalysis—enhances our understanding of the novel and reflects Onetti's attitude toward his art. Perhaps the most illuminating study of mirrors and mirror images has been offered by Jacques Lacan. An examination of Brausen, prototype of Onettian man, within the theoretical perspective of the French psychoanalyst proves instrumental and compelling in a revision of the widely accepted notion of the essentially escapist nature of his artistic creation.

A thorough analysis of the salient characteristics of Onetti's male protagonist in each of his three incarnations reveals his childlike dependence on the Woman, in the generic, depersonalized sense of the word.² Indeed, the woman provides the means through which her masculine counterpart demonstrates his fundamentally fixated state of development. Despite his reliance upon her, each individual woman is represented as belonging, or having previously belonged to, another man. Brausen is married to Gertrudis, but he first met her in Montevideo through his co-worker, Julio Stein; Julio had formerly felt an amorous attachment toward her which she broke off for no accountable reason. Likewise, when Brausen later attempts to recommence a romantic liaison with Gertrudis's younger sister Raquel, he finds her not only married but expecting her husband's child. Like his creator, Díaz Grey is linked to two different women, Elena Sala and Annie Glaeson, both of whom are already committed to other men in one way or another. Elena is the wife of Horacio Lagos, while Annie, who joins the recently widowed Lagos in his flight to Buenos Aires, is the seemingly innocent daughter of the Englishman Míster Glaeson. On the other hand, any man may possess the prostitute Queca, but Arce desires to dominate her sexually, as did her previous procurers Ricardo and Ernesto.

Thus sexually discredited, each woman is reduced to the status of harlot. Brausen is initially preoccupied with the sexual act when he will have to feign indifference to the effects of Gertrudis's recent mastectomy, and he repeatedly envisions this horrible moment of truth.³ Later, Brausen is overwhelmed with disgust at the sight of the pregnant Raquel, and her pregnancy clearly indicates her degradation and sexual promiscuity. During Raquel's trip to Buenos Aires, she visits Brausen, and he immediately senses a change in her which he finally attributes to her condition (p. 213). Díaz Grey's female companions are no more virtuous than Gertrudis or Raquel, and, in fact, Elena Sala's coquetry is evidenced by her “sonrisa prostibularia” (p. 67). Although Annie appears naive, we know that she cannot be completely ignorant when it comes to sex, since Elena's widower Lagos speaks of “la sensación de su cuerpo desnudo” (p. 259). And naturally, due to her profession, Arce's mistress Queca is no stranger to casual sexual encounters.

Following the Freudian model for this particular type of male-female relationship, we see that the man desires to “rescue” the beloved. In other words, “The man is convinced that the loved woman has need of him, that without him she would lose all hold on respectability and rapidly sink to a deplorable level. He saves her from this fate, therefore, by not letting her go.”⁴ Brausen in all of his manifestations believes he dominates in his relationships with women. After her operation, Brausen must console the depressed Gertrudis, while as Díaz Grey he takes a more active role in Elena's service by leaving his medical practice to help her search for the mysterious “Inglés” and by prescribing morphine to support her drug addiction. Brausen, when playing the part of Arce, enters the violent underworld of Buenos Aires to “save” Queca from her previous exploiters and reserve her for himself.

As Freud points out, these feelings can be traced to a fixation of infantile tenderness toward the mother, and in effect these women represent nothing more or less than mother surrogates. Because the mother is already coupled with another man, the father, an “injured third party”⁵ always results when the male child endeavors to define himself as the third element in a love triangle. And in each of Brausen's situations the third male—Stein, Lagos,⁶ Glaeson, or Ernesto—comes to signify much more than mere plot complications in the novel. Rivalry springs up between the two males when the child realizes there is no difference between his mother and the whore: they both do the same thing. The mother's infidelity—that is, her granting of sexual privileges to the father instead of to the son—further fosters the Oedipal relationship. Ultimately, the impulse to “rescue” the beloved stems from the child's desire to restore to his mother the unique gift she presented him with, his life: “The mother gave him his own life and he gives her back another life, that of a child as like himself as possible. The son shows his gratitude by wishing to have a son by his mother that shall be like himself; in the rescue fantasy, that is, he identifies himself completely with the father. All the instincts, the loving, the grateful, the sensual, the defiant, the self-assertive and independent—all are gratified in the wish to be the father of himself” (original emphasis).⁷

Simply stated, this wish to be one's own father serves as a model of the artist at work. As Freud aptly observes in his study of Leonardo da Vinci, “Whoever works as an artist certainly feels as a father to his works.”⁸ The artist Brausen, in later Onetti novels honored by a statue inscribed “BRAUSEN—FUNDADOR,” through this act of literal “self-creation”⁹ feels responsible for all his creatures. Referring specifically to Ernesto, Brausen thinks to himself, “No es más que una parte mía; él y todos los demás han perdido su individualidad, son partes mías” (p. 227). But the creative production is only insured after the sacrifice of someone else, generally a woman.¹⁰ Therefore, Elena's suicide and Queca's murder guarantee Brausen's new identities as Díaz Grey and Arce.

Not only Brausen, but many of the secondary characters as well, strive to return to earlier, less mature periods of their existence. For example, Gertrudis vainly yearns to become once again the young and attractive Gertrudis with two breasts by going “home to mother's,” Temperley, to recuperate. Queca is constantly haunted by the presence of “ellos,” the spirits of her male visitors, and playing the map-game with Levoir in which they must trace imaginary paths through the streets of Paris affords Mami the opportunity to relive her youth there.¹¹ Nevertheless, only Brausen the artist regresses to such an extreme degree that he becomes altogether fixated on the maternal figure. In fact, the adjective “maternal” has been applied to each of the four major women in the novel.¹²

All other textual evidence leads us to the maternal figure, thereby resolving the curious problem of the naming of Onetti's fictional world. Oddly enough, Brausen's wife Gertrudis personifies the mother figure, and he even refers to her in religious terms as the suffering Mother of Christ, “stábat máter, stábat máter” (p. 102). She is recovering from an “ablación de mama,” and therefore a new paternity in the form of Brausen as creator will replace her subsequent loss of fertility.¹³ Furthermore, Stein's Mami, otherwise known as Miriam, is his lover, protector, and substitute mother (p. 28). In his search for a woman to take his mother's place, it is not uncommon for the young man to show a preference for a more mature woman,¹⁴ as in the case of Stein. But perhaps the Virgin Mary, or Santa María, symbolizes the mother figure par excellence. Many hypotheses have been proffered to explain this particular name for Onetti's universe of the imagination, but an acknowledgement of the Virgin's basic maternal character unravels this perplexing enigma.¹⁵

As a result of his regression to an infantile state of dependence upon the mother, Brausen is impelled, by forces beyond his control, to begin the process of imaginary procreation to compensate for his mother's original gift of life to him. In Part I, Chapter 2, entitled “Díaz Grey, la ciudad y el río,” Brausen embarks on his first creative adventure as he attempts to conjure up an appropriate plot for Stein's script. Concerned about his wife who has just returned from the hospital, Brausen, suffering from insomnia, lies awake in bed in the middle of the night. He reaches over to the night table next to the bed, picks up the crystalline ampoule containing Gertrudis's medicine, and aimlessly begins to play with the shiny vial. It is at this crucial moment that the idea of writing about a doctor who illegally sells morphine occurs to him:

Ahora mi mano volcaba y volvía a volcar la ampolla de morfina, junto al cuerpo y la respiración de Gertrudis dormida, sabiendo que una cosa había terminado y otra cosa comenzaba, inevitable: sabiendo que era necesario que yo no pensara en ninguna de las dos y que ambas eran una sola cosa, como el fin de la vida y la pudrición. La ampolla se movía entre mi índice y mi pulgar y yo imaginaba para el líquido una cualidad perversa, insinuada en su color, en su capacidad de movimiento, en su facilidad para inmovilizarse apenas se sosegaba mi mano, y refulgir sereno en la luz, fingiendo no haber sido agitado nunca.

Estaba, un poco enloquecido, jugando con la ampolla, sintiendo mi necesidad creciente de imaginar y acercarme a un borroso médico de cuarenta años, habitante lacónico y desesperanzado de una pequeña ciudad colocada entre un río y una colonia de labradores suizos, Santa María, porque yo había sido feliz allí, años antes, durante veinticuatro horas y sin motivo.

(p. 18)

Josefina Ludmer also points out that the vial of morphine serves as a springboard for Brausen's entrance into the imaginary world of Santa María; she suggests moreover the possible symbolism of “morphine,” which derives from Morpheus, the Roman god of sleep and dreams.¹⁶ But it must be remembered that Brausen does not inject himself with the drug; rather, the crystal vial and the transparent liquid it contains serve as his visual inspiration.

Brausen elaborates the story line by having an unidentified woman enter the doctor's office and step behind a screen to remove her clothes in preparation for a physical examination. Brausen gives a rather detailed description of the physician's office, and he even tells us that behind the folding screen there is “un espejo de calidad asombrosamente buena” (p. 19) in which the woman inspects her teeth as she disrobes.

Pleased at finally having begun his fantasy, Brausen goes to the window and gazes out upon the nocturnal view of Buenos Aires spread out before him. As he leans against the windowpanes, the would-be screenwriter continues to ponder his newly created world; he imagines that, “Díaz Grey estaría mirando, a través de los vidrios de la ventana y de sus anteojos … [c]on la frente apoyada y a veces resbalando en la suavidad del cristal de la ventana, próximo al rincón de las vitrinas …” (p. 23; emphasis added). The reflecting surface appears to be a leitmotif in this key chapter in which Brausen first postulates a second existence.¹⁷

Brausen's next creative endeavor occurs in Part I, Chapter 7, “Naturaleza muerta,” when he returns home late one night and enters his neighbor's unlocked apartment. He has once more stayed out late with Mami and Stein in order to avoid the now-depressing Gertrudis, and while he rides up in the elevator, he examines his reflection in a mirror. As he leaves the elevator, Brausen notices that Queca's apartment door is ajar with the keys hanging from the lock. He cannot resist the urge to enter her apartment, so he goes inside to reconnoiter and perhaps learn something more about the character of the woman who inhabits it. He wanders through the rooms and pauses at the sight of his own image reflected in the bathroom mirror:

[M]e inmovilicé frente a mi cara en el espejo, distinguiendo apenas el brillo de la nariz y la frente, los huecos de los ojos, la forma del sombrero. Luego dejé de verme y contemplé, sola en el espejo, libre de mis ojos, una mirada chata, sin curiosidad, apacible. Quizá mi corazón golpeara indiferente y aquella especial alegría que me había llenado los pulmones estuviera moviéndose dentro de mi cuerpo, sin entusiasmo ni propósito, bajando y subiendo, yendo y viniendo como pinceladas; quizá los ruidos retrocedieran en los distantes bordes de la noche, dejándome solo en el centro del silencio. Cuando mi mirada estuvo extendida y fija desde el sombrero hasta la barbilla, como un ardor o una palidez, salí del cuarto de baño, me acerqué a la mesa y volví a inclinarme.

(pp. 56-57)

Thus we receive our first glimpse of Brausen's third identity, as yet unnamed, into which he will later transform himself as he enters Queca's world.

Just as the mirror figures prominently in Brausen's creative moments, it also serves as the basis for the novel's structure. The complex interplay between symmetry and its corresponding specular inversion is apparent throughout the work. Among its more striking dualities, the novel is divided into two parts and relates two separate fictions, one narrated by the narrator (or the author Onetti) and the other by Onetti's own protagonist, Brausen. These two narratives become inextricably intertwined when Brausen establishes a bogus business and shares an office with a man named Onetti, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the author of the same name. Thus, in a most unique act of self-creation, Onetti the author, in a Cervantine manner, becomes a character of his own invention. Moreover, this creative process takes place in two different apartments—Brausen's and Queca's—and in two separate locales—Buenos Aires and Santa María.

Even the characters and situations of Brausen's alter-identities are hardly more than displaced reflections of people and places from his own existence. As Hugo J. Verani observes: “Como en un juego de espejos que repiten la imagen interminablemente, la realidad se refleja y se bifurca en variaciones de la situación original; la novela se renueva sin cesar, en una reiteración exploradora sin fin. Cada nuevo episodio de La vida breve ejemplifica una variación del mismo conflicto básico, duplica la ficción precedente en una simetría perpetua. …”¹⁸ Each of Brausen's successive metamorphoses, therefore, produces variations on a single theme, as evidenced by the duplication, and occasional triplication, of certain motifs: the love triangle (Brausen/Gertrudis Stein—Brausen/Raquel, Díaz Grey/Elena Sala/Lagos—Díaz Grey/Annie Glaeson, Arce/Queca/Ernesto), the death of the woman (Queca's murder and Elena's suicide),¹⁹ and the theme of escape (Arce and Ernesto flee to Santa María whereas Díaz Grey, Lagos, Owen, and the “joven violinista” seek refuge in the opposite direction, towards Buenos Aires).²⁰

We may ask the same question that Gabriel Saad posed: “¿Qué es, entonces, La vida breve? ¿Un juego de espejos?”²¹ And in response, Lacan tells us, life is precisely that—a mirror game. According to Lacan, the mirror stage (or “le stade du miroir”²²) is essential in the normal development of the individual, and it is at this moment that a relationship of division is initially established between the “I” and the “self.” At a time occurring between the ages of six months and eighteen months, when the child first sees his reflection in a mirror, he experiences two conflicting emotions: anguish and an intense rapture. As Benoist explains, “it follows that this dual split (separation from himself and ambivalence of feelings) determines the future structure of the ego as one of division.”²³ The Lacanian conception of a break in the subject's unconscious consequently presupposes at least the two discourses of the “I” and the id.

This process of bifurcation is similarly paralleled in the linguistic code. The young child, as yet still lacking the ability of speech, hears his proper name but is unable to enter the speaking world and accordingly experiences the same ambivalent emotions. Therefore, since the unconscious is originally diffracted, we can no longer speak of the transcendental ego, as have phenomenologists such as Jean-Paul Sartre. It must be recognized that the mirror stage's “specular structure is the mark of a fatal non-coincidence with oneself, of a gap between ego and imago, delineating the trace of an original divergence where traditionally subjectivity in all its plenitude had been located.”²⁴ We are obligated, then, to renounce such misconceived statements as Sartre's “l'enfer, c'est les Autres”²⁵ in favor of the Lacanian notion that the self is the “Other.” The original diffraction occurs within the subject himself rather than between two different individuals.²⁶

Brausen, the adult male artist fixated at an early phase of development, more concretely the mirror stage, exemplifies this primary splitting of the self. The novel commences as Brausen, the nonspeaking subject, overhears his new neighbor's conversation through the thin walls dividing their two apartments. Queca's words, “Mundo loco” (p. 11), are the first words of the novel, and although Brausen conducts an interior dialogue, he continues to eavesdrop on his neighbor and her male companion. In fact, we do not hear Brausen's own voice until after his pseudoschizoid adoption of a second personality, Díaz Grey.

The shifting narrative voice heightens our confusion about Brausen's true identity, and the inadvertent reader may easily fail to perceive the imminent change. Brausen, submerged in his imaginary world of Santa María, quite literally becomes Doctor Díaz Grey, as we can see at the conclusion of Part I, Chapter 4. As Chapter 5 begins, Díaz Grey has usurped Brausen's narration, but Brausen quickly regains control and once more distances himself from the physician. As the novel advances—and as his identities multiply—Brausen ceases to maintain any distance, and a definitive inversion occurs when, in the final chapter, Díaz Grey assumes the narrative authority.²⁷

Who, then, is the real Brausen? Ostensibly, the creative process culminates in the total disintegration of the creator and his escape into the world of fantasy. But Brausen himself, speaking with Gertrudis after her return from Temperley, comes to a realization of the individual's multi-faceted nature: “Es otra cosa, es que la gente cree que está condenada a una vida, hasta la muerte. Y sólo está condenada a un alma, a una manera de ser. Se puede vivir muchas veces, muchas vidas más o menos largas” (p. 173; emphasis added). Brausen, a product of the mirror stage, is himself and the “Other,” or “others,” as the case may be. The words of the police detective who finally overtakes Arce and Ernesto in their flight from justice proclaim the fact: “Usted es el otro. Entonces, usted es Brausen” (p. 276).

Naturally, though, the demarcation between the separate entities appears obscured since they are hidden beneath a single exterior, a single mask—the face of Brausen. And his apparent self-destruction is nothing more than a never-ending masquerade. As Verani declares: “La vida aparece convertida en una fabulosa mascarada y detrás de la máscara o disfraz no hay nada: sólo la multiplicidad y los desdoblamientos del ser, la representación de un papel tras otro.”²⁸ Each of Brausen's transformations, Verani continues, gives rise to new vital possibilities with “distintas circunstancias, distintos nombres, pero siempre la repetición cíclica del mismo ser.”²⁹

This concealed multiplicity of identities is quite literally mirrored in the “carnaval,”³⁰ the season of the year in which the novel both begins and ends. Initially, Brausen listens to Queca's account of how her former lover, Ricardo, stood her up for their date to go to the first dance of the festivities, and she even tells us what kind of costume she wore. On the other hand, in the concluding chapter we watch as Díaz Grey and his cohorts select appropriate disguises to make their getaway. And most fittingly, he chooses to masquerade as a bullfighter wearing a “traje de luces,” whose glittery, reflecting “lentejuelas” (p. 280) seem almost to blind Annie. In such manner, the narrative is brought full circle by the return to the “carnaval,”³¹ just as Brausen reverts to an earlier period of his existence.

Connecting the scattered fragments of the mirror image, then, reveals a portrait of the artist, not merely as a young man, but as an adult fixated at an infantile stage of development. The writer, more keenly aware of the original diffraction of his unconscious, exhibits the normal inner workings of his psyche in one of two ways: through dispersion or doubling. Brausen first perceives the self as other, just as a child in the mirror stage, and is compelled to reflect this process in his work. In a parody of divine creation, Brausen takes responsibility for the many dismembered facets of himself while at the same time realizing that, although many, they are one:

[Y]o podía … mirar hacia Santa María, volver a pensar que todos los hombres que la habitaban habían nacido de mí y que era capaz de hacerles concebir el amor como un absoluto, reconocerse a sí mismos en el acto de amor y aceptar para siempre esta imagen, transformarla en un cauce por el que habría de correr el tiempo y su carga, desde la definitiva revelación hasta la muerte; que, en último caso, era capaz de proporcionar a cada uno de ellos una agonía lúcida y sin dolor para que comprendieran el sentido de lo que habían vivido. Los imaginaba jadeantes pero en paz, rodeados por el contradictorio afán de empujar y de retener que reflejaban las caras húmedas de los deudos, llenos de generosidad y humildes, sabiendo, no obstante, que la vida es uno mismo y uno mismo son los demás.

(p. 264; emphasis added)

Brausen, the artistic creator, proves to us that he intends, not to evade reality, but rather to depict accurately the natural condition of his diffracted unconscious. A Lacanian approximation to the issue of Brausen's creativity confirms the ceaseless human potential for multiplicity and assures us that the series of “brief lives” will continue ad infinitum.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, Otras inquisiciones, Vol. 8 of Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1960), p. 86. Cited in Hugo J. Verani, Onetti: El ritual de la impostura (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1981), p. 93.

2. Although Onetti's female characters have been studied extensively and can be quite satisfactorily categorized, in the context of La vida breve it seems most rewarding to reduce the female to her essence. For a concurring opinion see also Zunilda Gertel, “The Fragment as Disintegrated Unit,” trans. Andrée Conrad, Review, No. 16 (Winter 1975), p. 28.

3. Juan Carlos Onetti, La vida breve (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1971), p. 15. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in parentheses within the text.

4. Sigmund Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” in On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 165. It is interesting to note this theme—redemption of the harlot—in Russian literature; Dostoevsky, for example, parodies it in Notes from the Underground.

5. Freud, “A Special Type,” p. 167.

6. Josefina Ludmer in Onetti: Los procesos de construcción del relato (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1977), p. 99, also underscores Brausen's repeated attempts to invoke the presence of Elena's husband.

7. Freud, “A Special Type,” p. 171.

8. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence, trans. A. A. Brill (London: Kegan Paul; Trench, Trubner, 1922), p. 99.

9. See Hugo J. Verani, “The Novel as Self-Creation,” Review, No. 16 (Winter 1975), pp. 13-18.

10. This idea is treated by both Alfred J. MacAdam, Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 108, and Hugo J. Verani, “Dos ensayos en torno a dos novelas de Onetti,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, nos. 292-294 (Oct.-Dec. 1974), pp. 456-57.

11. Verani, “Dos ensayos,” p. 447.

12. Verani, Onetti, p. 110.

13. Ludmer, Onetti, p. 31.

14. Freud, “A Special Type,” p. 166.

15. Ludmer, in Onetti, pp. 28-34, even likens Juan María Brausen to the Virgin because, as she asserts, both are impregnated through the ear. As we shall see, Brausen's eavesdropping has very different implications. Nevertheless, the reference to the Virgin Mother of the Catholic Church is quite apropos. See also James E. Irby, “Aspectos formales de La vida breve de Juan Carlos Onetti,” Actas del Tercer Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas (México: El Colegio de México, 1970), p. 458.

16. Ludmer, Onetti, p. 70.

17. Gertel, p. 26, has also focused on the windows overlooking Santa María in Díaz Grey's office. She declares them to represent Brausen's wish for escape and freedom and opposes them to the small windows covered by Venetian blinds in Brausen's own apartment, which, she says, serve to separate and isolate him from the outside world. This explanation does not seem convincing since in Part I, Chapter 2, where Brausen first projects his alter ego Díaz Grey, his vision is completely unobstructed as he stares into the night.

18. Verani, Onetti, p. 96.

19. Although Gertrudis does not suffer a physical death, the mutilation resulting from the surgical removal of her breast may be considered equivalent to death itself. The original Gertrudis is all but dead to Brausen, and he even ponders the idea of killing her (p. 64). In this case, though, it is unnecessary to carry out the act.

20. Josefina Ludmer, “La vida breve, Entre la lengua y el texto: Ficción, subficción y ficción teórica,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, nos. 292-294 (Oct.-Dec. 1974), pp. 468-74.

21. Gabriel Saad, “Texto, pre-texto y contexto en La vida breve,” Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brasilien, 24 (1975), 75.

22. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), pp. 1-7.

23. Jean Marie Benoist, The Structural Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), p. 17.

24. Benoist, p. 132.

25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos (Scene V) in Théatre, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 167.

26. Benoist, p. 17.

27. This new authority is further extended when Díaz Grey relates his own narration nine years later in the short novel, Una tumba sin nombre.

28. Verani, Onetti, pp. 128-29.

29. Verani, Onetti, p. 129.

30. In his examination of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin explains the ambivalent quality of carnival images: “All of the images of carnival are two-in-one images, they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis. … Paired images, chosen for contrast … and for similarity (doubles and twins) are characteristic of the carnival mode of thinking. The utilization of things in reverse is also characteristic.” Carnivalistic life, says Bakhtin, is life turned upside down, a distortion and inversion of normal, everyday existence. (Borges, in “La muerte y la brújula” [1942], similarly incorporates the carnival season as a backdrop to the fateful encounter between two equal, but opposed forces: Erik Lönnrot, the police detective, and the criminal he is pursuing and is pursued by, Red Scharlach.) See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (n.p.; Ardis, 1973), pp. 101-05.

31. Verani, Onetti, p. 129.