[In the following essay, Millington attempts to decipher the meaning of “Tan triste como ella” and discovers the “implications” of finding such a meaning.]

1. INTRODUCTION

‘Tan triste como ella’¹ is a dense and difficult story. It is particularly tricky to negotiate in view of the fact that there is little interpreting carried out within the story itself. The writing of ‘Tan triste’ places a stress on reference to objects and physical movement as if it were simply ‘raw material’, simply registered as being or happening. I propose to confront this difficulty of reading explicitly, and, after a summary, to begin with an examination of certain of the story's recurrent objects. This will allow me, on the one hand, to make an initial opening in the story, and, on the other, to begin to see the implications of such a search for a system of coherent meanings. What I will ultimately attempt to establish is an open, interactive reading which is alert to the problems of trying to control and objectify the story.

‘Tan triste’ centres on the relationship between a married couple, known as the woman and the man throughout. Their marriage is empty, she being confined at home all day with her baby son, and he not returning from work until very late after he has spent the evening with any woman whom he has managed to arrange to keep him company. The major event in the story is the carrying out of the man's plan to convert their garden into a series of large fish tanks. While the spring moves into the summer workmen replace the grass and plants of the garden with cement and glass. As the marriage becomes more and more tenuous, the man reproaches the woman for her past relationship with a man called Mendel, who appears to be the father of her baby, and the woman tries to establish sexual relationships with two of the workmen. On the failure of these relationships the woman confronts the man about his motives for marrying her and he points out that he can no longer believe in their marriage as she is not now the girl whom he married. Eventually, late in the summer, the woman commits suicide.

2. SYMBOLIC READINGS

The density of reference to objects in ‘Tan triste’ is such that it seems a worthwhile strategy to concentrate first of all on the possible ways of negotiating them. The most obvious, if necessarily speculative, way of reading these objects is as symbols.² There are a number of them to which repeated reference is made: the garden, the ‘cinacinas’, the revolver and (arguably) the dream, and it is worthwhile considering each separately.

The garden is notably wild and unruly, ‘salvaje y enmarañado’ (p. 1309), and those characteristics are linked with the woman's childhood: this seems to be the same garden she knew as a child. In fact, the garden seems to have been a place of refuge in which she hid from the world: ‘Y cuando el mundo vino a buscarla, no lo comprendió del todo, protegida y engañada por los arbustos caprichosos y mal criados, por el misterio—a luz y sombra—de los viejos árboles torcides e intactos, por el pasto inocente, alto, grosero’ (p. 1312). The garden is a place of enchantment and plenitude set up against the world. Her ‘stability’ of identity in it is disrupted when she is summoned by the world outside.

Crucially, the woman now clings to the same view of the unruly garden. For instance, even when the cement has been spread over it she walks on it as if the paths through the garden were still there (p. 1315). And this clinging to the past brings her into direct conflict with the man's plans: ‘—Puede quedar, cerca de los ventanales, un rincón para estirarse y tomar cosas frescas cuando vuelva el verano. Pero el resto, todo, hay que aplastarlo con cemento. Quiero hacer peceras’ (p. 1312). The man's decision to build the fish tanks could be seen as a crisis in their relationship in two respects: firstly, he takes no account of her wishes; and secondly, the garden to which she attaches such importance is destroyed for ‘commercial’ reasons.

The woman rationalizes his action in transforming the garden, in destroying her past, as an attempt to take revenge on her. To destroy the garden is to destroy her. And that is linked to the dispute about the parenthood of the child. Hence, in his bitterness about the baby, the man takes the only thing that really matters to her (p. 1318). In the absence of the garden the woman continues to desire the rebirth of the past; she even asks the first workman if the garden could grow again (pp. 1322-23).

In this elaboration, the garden becomes readable as a sign of the woman's imaginary relationship with the world. She is drawn to try and seclude herself from its demands, to pursue images of former fullness, and the implicit author seems to naturalize this articulation of her position with a symbol loaded with positive connotations: like so many other literary gardens, this one connotes free growth and pleasure. This implicit support is part of the ideological position of ‘Tan triste’ to which I shall return.³

The ‘cinacinas’ seem to have clear links with the garden. The attributes of the hedge are rather precisely figured in the story: the ‘cinacinas’ are all round the house like a ‘cerco’, and the trunks have an adolescent slimness (p. 1316). These two attributes enable a link to be made with the garden as a place of entrapment in the past. The story makes it clear that the woman could get out of the house and garden but that she chooses not to:

Podía marcharse por el gran portón de hierro que usaban los poceros, las imaginarias visitas; podía escapar por la puerta del garaje, siempre abierta cuando el coche estaba fuera.

Pero elegía, sin convicción, sin deseo de verdad, el juego inútil y sangriento con las cinacinas …

(p. 1317)

She chooses this ‘game’ with the ‘cinacinas’, and it is as if even in choosing, in being active, she were lacking in energy and will. Furthermore, the search for a way through the hedge seems oddly perverse and doomed to failure: if she could leave by the iron gate why choose the hedge? The effort to get through the hedge constitutes precisely the ‘game’, and that can hardly be read literally—‘making sense’ of this motif is necessarily highly abstract. The ‘game’ might be read, for instance, as a sign of her psychological state in which she chooses to inflict pain on herself. But the ‘game’ is not really projected as negative in this way within the system of the story. This game of extracting blood with the thorns of the hedge (a sort of self-inflicted crucifixion), produces pleasure (p. 1328), as if the important thing is that this is at least a sign of life, a minimum affirmation, even though its form and its repetition seem numbing and entropic. It may be best to read this ‘game’ as an enactment of the death instinct: it is one of the few things which she has chosen to do, though by clinging to this restricted space she prevents herself from engaging with the otherness of the world—she very precisely cannot find a way through the thorns.

Balanced with the space of the garden is the space upstairs in the house. The woman's seclusion and isolation in an imaginary world is also suggested here. It is from upstairs windows that she watches the activities of the men in the garden. Frequently in Onetti upstairs locations associated with women characters connote withdrawal from adult engagement with the world.⁴ Hence the sexual relation with the first workman which fails occurs upstairs where she has insisted it take place (pp. 1323-24), and her suicide occurs there also (pp. 1329-30). By contrast the pleasurable sex with the second workman occurs downstairs in the garden shed (p. 1328), which seems to be the equivalent of the idealized ‘casitas’ of fulfilment and subversion in other Onetti texts—Para una tumba sin nombre, for example.

A further recurrent object is the revolver, which has one striking attribute: on its first appearance in the hands of the man it does not work, and at the end it fails again three times for the woman. In this light a possible reading of the revolver is as a sign of their failed relationship, of the absence of a sexual relation. Clearly one could argue that this failure or absence leads to the woman's death. And it is precisely the revolver which is the instrument of her suicide.

One final ‘object’ that seems to allow this type of symbolic reading is the dream which the woman has near the start of ‘Tan triste’ and again in the moments of her dying. It seems to encapsulate the futility of her life, as it figures her progressing slowly towards nothing:

Soñó, al amanecer, ya separada y lejos, que caminaba sola en una noche que podía haber sido otra, casi desnuda con su corto camisón, cargando una valija vacía. Estaba condenada a la desesperanza y arrastraba los pies descalzos por calles arboladas y desiertas, lentamente, con el cuerpo erguido, casi desafiante …

… Casi desnuda, con el cuerpo recto y los pequeños senos horadando la noche, siguió marchando para hundirse en la luna desmesurada que continuaba creciendo.

(p. 1308)

The dream first occurs after the refused vaginal intercourse with the man before they were married. That failure is followed by the dream of the woman alone in the tree-lined urban landscape, so different from the garden motif of her regressive desire. This dream seems not to be one of wish-fulfilment, but rather a metaphor of her current state. What sustains her is ‘el gusto del hombre’ (p. 1308), a point repeated in the dream's reappearance: ‘creyó que volvía a tener derramado en su garganta el sabor del hombre …’ (pp. 1329-30). The obvious suggestion is that the sexual relation on their first attempt turned into the act of fellatio when the woman refused to allow the man to enter her: ‘Pero un miedo que nada tenía que ver con el dolor antiguo la obligó a decir no, a defenderse con las manos y la rigidez de los muslos’ (p. 1307). Hence there is a certain symmetry at the end when the penis is replaced in her mouth by the revolver which finally fires and kills her.

What I have done so far in this section is to transpose into symbols all these specific objects in the text, which homogenizes them into more or less stable and coherent meanings. At a more general level, the quantity of reference to physical objects could be read as suggesting inertness, as creating a mood of resistance and lifelessness in the couple's experience. And this would fit with the emergent pattern of meaning of the specific objects.

3. SEXUALITY AND OBJECT RELATIONS

This question of objects and their possible meaning in the story can also be seen to be relevant at the level of character. So the notion of the object can be taken further and used to develop a reading of ‘Tan triste’ which will eventually be more flexible and less homogenizing than the simple assigning of meaning in section two. It will also start to enable a reading against the textual logic, which is what I am initially establishing. This notion of the object is useful in respect both of the self as object of a reflexive hyperconsciousness, and of the relation to the other.

The woman's orientation in the world is seen as one of passivity. She thinks at one point that life is not made by people but is simply ‘there’ beyond human will: ‘la mujer empezó a encontrar consuelo, a creer que la existencia está, como una montaña o una piedra, que no la hacemos nosotros, que no la hacían ni el uno ni el otro’ (p. 1311). There is little in her by way of an active engagement with the world. In Lacanian terms, by choosing to cling to the Imaginary in the garden the Symbolic is held at bay: she tries to avoid the demand of the social world and articulates her view of herself as a victim (p. 1318). By this logic, the woman's end, her suicide, is inevitable even before the concrete is laid on the garden: ‘en la mitad del verano, llegó la tarde prevista mucho tiempo antes, cuando tenía su jardín salvaje y no habían llegado poceros a deshacerlo’ (p. 1329). So the dream suggesting her death first occurs before she is married and well in advance of anything which the marriage produces to cause it.

Turning to the man, in the time covered by the story, he relates to himself as to one who is changed, one who has lost all that mattered. At thirty-two, he feels that he has no more illusions about his position in the world (p. 1310). He sees no hope of improvement in his life because it is too arbitrary. And yet he looks for a sexual relation outside the home in a systematic way, which is clearly a search for a new object against which to fix himself. In contrast to the woman's passivity in relation to the world about her, he is active in his recognition of the importance to him of the lost object (the woman's younger self). Underpinning that activity, the man has the world outside the home to provide an area in which to move: it gives him stories, it rings him up, it allows him the distraction of making money. By contrast, the woman has no other space, and eventually renounces what little space she has altogether.

The man and the woman can also be considered in their relating to each other. If the man feels changed he also views the woman as having changed—he can no longer take her as an object for sexual relations. This is the nub of the problem in the story for the man. When the woman confronts him near the end with the demand for an explanation as to why he married her, he eventually responds by asking if she wants to hear the whole of his point of view:

—¿Todo?—se burló el hombre—. ¿Más todo?—hablaba hacia la copa en alto, hacia momentos perdidos, hacia lo que creía ser—. ¿Todo? Tal vez no lo comprendas. Ya hablé, creo, de la muchacha.

—De mí.

—De la muchacha—porfió él …

—Eso dije—continuó el hombre, despacio, vigilante—. La que todo tipo normal busca, inventa, encuentra, o le hacen creer que encontró. No la que comprende, protege, mima, ayuda, endereza, corrige, mejora, apoya, aconseja, dirige y administra. Nada de eso, gracias.

—¿Yo?

—Sí, ahora; y todo el maldito resto …

(p. 1327)

The woman is no longer the girl. She is no longer the object which he had desired. Hence his wish to replace her. The mysterious Másam is the main figure of this fantasy of replacement. Appropriately, it is far from clear whether Másam is real or just a figment of his imagination since she is only referred to in a piece of the man's writing which the woman comes across by chance: ‘Al pie de Másam el hombre había escrito con tinta roja: “Tendrá dieciséis años y vendrá desnuda por encima y debajo de la tierra para estar conmigo tanto tiempo como duren esta canción y esta esperanza”’ (pp. 1319-20). The man longs for the return of the girl whom he considers the woman once to have been—an image of adolescent plenitude: ‘El, en cambio, esperaba el milagro, la resurrección de la chica encinta que había conocido, la suya propia, la del amor que se creyeron, o fueron construyendo durante meses …’ (pp. 1314-15). In fact both the man and the woman desire a return to the imaginary plenitude of the past. For them time is loss, not movement forward. But the retrospective desires of the man and the woman refer to different sorts of past: she clings to an idealized image of her younger self before she even met the man, while he clings to an image of her in order to enable a narcissistic fantasy of a self which has not aged. Both, in other words, are suffering from a loss of object, and struggle with their wish not to accept their present identities.

These strongly self-referential attitudes, with their divergent utopian desires, pinpoint the lack of relation between them. The title of the story and the sentence within the story which the title partially quotes (‘Tan triste como ella, acaso’ (p. 1317)) propose an equivalence between them, but not something shared. In fact, the very opening of the story figures the gap between them quite graphically. It presents a sort of cameo, especially as it concentrates upon sexual contact: ‘(Ella) quería ir, deseaba que ocurriera cualquier cosa … cualquier cosa útil para su soledad y su ignorancia. No pensaba en el futuro y se sentía capaz de negarlo. Pero un miedo que nada tenía que ver con el dolor antiguo la obligó a decir no, a defenderse con las manos y la rigidez de los muslos’ (p. 1307). Even at the very start there is a fundamental discrepancy (perhaps even an inexplicable one since the ‘un miedo’ is highly imprecise) between what she wants and what they can actually achieve.

The man seeks to emphasize this discrepancy in his attitude towards the baby, which appears not to be his but Mendel's. There is a strong irrational strand in his attitude: ‘Pero, por qué tuvo que nacer varón? Tantos meses comprándole lanas rosadas y el resultado fue ése, un varón’ (p. 1313). Further, this irrational resentment that the woman could not produce a daughter is the basis for his casting himself in the role of ‘caballero’ and ‘pobre diablo’ for supporting the baby financially when it is not his, and for casting the woman in the role of ‘putita astuta’ (p. 1313) for having someone else's baby. The baby and Mendel both appear to be elements used by the man to separate him from the woman, to drive a wedge between them. They are third terms which break up the imaginary dyad which he projects them as forming in the past. The baby and Mendel epitomize that present triadic relation in the Symbolic which both the man and the woman find so hard to bear.⁵

Much of the discrepancy between them is articulated at the micrological level in the dynamic of the look.⁶ At this level their asymmetry is constantly apparent. The woman looks at the man, she passively observes him and waits for his actions. Her looking at him connotes her dependence, since he is where things happen. The man, on the other hand, either avoids looking at the woman or simply allows his eyes to be seen:

A escondidas ella le miraba los ojos. Si puede darse el nombre de mirada a la cautela, al relámpago frío, a su cálculo. Los ojos del hombre, sin delatarse, se hacían más grandes y claros, cada vez cada mañana. Pero él no trataba de esconderlos; sólo quería desviar, sin grosería, lo que los ojos estaban condenados a preguntar y decir.

(p. 1308)

Durante aquellas mañanas él no trataba, en realidad, de mirarla; se limitaba a mostrarle los ojos, como un mendigo casi desinteresado, sin fe, que exhibiera una llaga, un muñón.

(p. 1310)

He shows her his eyes, he allows them to be seen, but he does not look at her. Repeatedly his refusal to look at and see her is a denial of her existence; he gives her no confirmation, no hint of reciprocity, and this might be read as part of the implicit logic of her suicide. By humiliating her and refusing her his look, the man contributes to her elimination. There is, in this context, a very telling moment when the man does look at the woman, after she has asked the fundamental question of the story:

[La mujer] estaba de espaldas cuando dijo:

—¿Por qué te casaste conmigo?

El hombre le miró un rato las formas flacas, el pelo enrevesado en la nuca; luego caminó hacia atrás, hacia el sillón y la mesa.

(p. 1326)

Here, momentarily, the structure of power between them falters and he occupies the weaker position. But he quickly recovers and things continue as before.

In sum: the absence of the look from the man is a sign of the lack of reciprocity, the absence of sexual relation. What is enacted is a dual and discrete search to cling to images and fantasies of the self. The link between the man and the woman is perceived by him as broken and that leads him into a crisis. The break with the woman creates a breach in the horizon of his sense of self, the beginnings of an awareness of the lack of correspondence between his desire and its object. It turns out that the desire is in excess of the object that he has chosen and so he seeks out new ways to fix an idealized image of the self. This involves him in a nostalgic mystification. And the implicit author of ‘Tan triste’ is complicit here with the character. So the man looks elsewhere for a place to attach his desire, precisely to Másam, whose name connotes her exotic difference from the woman. This is a sort of disavowal of the division he has discovered with the woman and in himself (between his view of his present and past selves): he seeks another idealized object to try and restore a sense of plenitude. But the fact of the mobility of his desire is a sign of the extent to which his fantasy is attached to images, to an idea of ‘woman’, and not to a specific person. Hence, the woman or Másam are more like symptoms than realities, since neither can be said truly to exist for him as independent subjects.⁷ And the woman, revealingly enough, does not react to this crisis in the man by trying to break out of her imaginary circle and by looking to alternative roles (to motherhood, for example, though that is potentially heavily idealized, of course). In the absence of the man to maintain her present state, the woman opts for regression to an image of herself in a secluded childhood. And it should be noted that it seems to be his crisis and withdrawal that trigger her problem.

Now ‘Tan triste’ is not mounting (even implicitly) a critique of these characters: it is fixed in an entropic view of the pain of discovering non-correspondence. This is the nub of its negative metaphysics. The understanding of ‘Tan triste’ that I want to propose, which underlines the problematic nature of its representations, comes from a position that is articulated through psychoanalysis and which is resisting the metaphysical grain of the story. To elaborate that understanding is to uncover the unspoken sexual politics of ‘Tan triste’ which show themselves through the formulation of the crisis itself and through the different reactions to that crisis. It is this which I shall now try to do.

4. IMPLICIT SEXUAL POLITICS

The man moves outside the space shared with the woman in order to reappropriate and restore an identity which he is conscious of having lost. He can articulate his problem, though with difficulty. The woman almost throughout remains in the space shared with the man and reacts by internalizing her situation passively. Hence the importance of her dream as an articulation, but hence also the relation to two of the workmen as crucially disruptive (something which I will discuss later). These contrastive responses begin to sketch in the conventional sexual hierarchy which is not posed as problematic by the story. A phallic economy underlies the whole structure and the dynamic of all movement. But there are ample grounds for contesting that economy and that hierarchy, and there is a moment in the story that seems to enable both that close questioning and a radical shift and reengagement with the story. I refer to the moment of the suicide.

En el dormitorio, envolvió en (la bolsa de agua caliente) el Smith and Wesson, aguardando con paciencia que el caño adquiriera temperatura humana para la boca ansiosa.

Admitió, sin vergüenza, la farsa que estaba cumpliendo. Luego escuchó, sin prisa, sin miedo, los tres golpes fallidos del percutor. Escuchó, por segundos, el cuarto tiro de la bala que le rompía el cerebro. Sin entender, estuvo un tiempo en la primera noche y la luna, creyó que volvía a tener derramado en su garganta el sabor del hombre, tan parecido al pasto fresco, a la felicidad y al verano.

(pp. 1329-30)

In the story the revolver is first associated with the man: it is part of his family history in which it has been provided for the protection of women—it is a sign of male power when men are absent. It is not just a phallic symbol, that is, a symbol of the penis (though its failure to fire (p. 1309 and p. 1329) is connotative of the failure of the sexual relationship between the man and the woman). Above all, the revolver is a symbol of the phallus, that is, in Lacanian terms, of the symbolic power of the Father, of patriarchy. In that sense, one can read the woman's suicide as a privileged moment revealing the implicit power structure in place in ‘Tan triste’. With the revolver in her mouth, the woman can no longer speak. On one level, this alludes to the act of fellatio that may have occurred on the occasion of the first sexual encounter (pp. 1307-08), but on another this blocking of the mouth with the revolver can also be read as a silencing of the woman, as her destruction by patriarchy. Her weakness is the result of a position made available to her in the patriarchal system, which ‘Tan triste’ inscribes but cannot articulate consciously. It is above all this socio-sexual, phallic economy which underpins the workings of the story. In this way, the woman's death comes as the extension of her prior silence and dependency, that is, the fact that her situation in the story is determined as a reaction to the man's withdrawing himself and belittling her.

In this way, ‘Tan triste’ can be seen as a text of male desire: it contains not a/the woman's crisis but a/the man's, and the title of the story reinforces that view since the point of reference is the man, the woman (‘ella’) being merely a term of comparison. The dynamic desires derive from the man: the woman's death simply enacts the realization which the man makes at the start relating to the lost object—the woman is no longer the girl. In Lacanian terms, this realization is the symbolic tear in the man's Imaginary which he tries to repair via other women/girls.⁸

Here, I would claim that I am beginning to articulate something which is not consciously known by the implicit author of ‘Tan triste’. The story works at the level of the operation of desire but without talking about it—the story registers movement and tension but cannot explain aetiology or structure. Nor, above all, does it assess the potential destructiveness of the forces it represents. But the psychoanalytic frame can help to make sense of the underlying structure. In these terms, the suicide is not a moment of emotional sadness or defeat: it is a textual nexus which reveals ideology.

Further to this, I would say that it is crucial that the woman cannot be simply silenced by the underlying sexual economy. And this is because she represents a danger to it. This insight might lead to a further questioning of and reengagement with the story.

Firstly, the man's neglect and abandoning of the woman is already a sign of a problem: she does not coincide with the man's imaginary scheme, she has a certain specificity and independence which are excessive to his control. Secondly, there is a faltering of the dominant phallic economy in the woman's relation to two of the workmen. The relation with the first workman is a failure, but it does begin to release something. When the two are alone together she makes a discovery:

Nunca había imaginado que un hombre desnudo, real y suyo pudiera ser tan admirable y temible. Reconoció el deseo, la curiosidad, un viejo sentimiento de salud dormido por los años. Ahora lo miraba acercarse; y empezó a tomar conciencia del odio por la superioridad física del otro, del odio por lo masculino, por el que manda, por quien no tiene necesidad de hacer preguntas inútiles.

(p. 1324)

Her mixed reactions include hostility to the male, which is the beginning of the possibility of demarcating an independent space. Also of interest with the first workman is that the woman seems to be in charge of the relation: ‘Lo llamó y tuvo al pocero con ella, hediondo y obediente’ (p. 1324). It is also the woman who takes the first step to initiate the relation, and in this sense she appears less passive. It is significant that the implicit author terminates this first relation seeming to view its failure as inherent, as a matter of principle or destiny: ‘Pero no se pudo, una vez y otra, porque habían sido creados de manera definitiva, insalvable, caprichosamente distinta’ (p. 1324). The use of the word ‘creados’ here may lead to the question ‘who is it that has created this determination in the story if not the implicit author?’ In which case the word ‘caprichosamente’ seems revealing and potentially overdetermined.

Interestingly, between the relationships with the first and second workmen, the woman's switch out of passivity affects even the relation with the man. Very unusually, the woman confronts the man about their marriage at that point (pp. 1326-27), and the man is weakened by this and unable to answer very adequately.

With the second of the workmen, the woman again takes the initiative, and this leads to a far stronger and potentially subversive relation. She is dominant and positive, even sadistic, with the second workman, who is little more than a boy, and who is a willing victim of her violence and humiliating behaviour.

Desnudo, [el segundo pocero] se hacía niño y temoroso, suplicante. La mujer usó todos sus recuerdos, sus repentinas inspiraciones. Se acostumbró a escupirlo y cachetearlo, pudo descubrir, entre la pared de zinc y el techo, un rebenque viejo, sin grasa, abandonado.

Disfrutaba llamándolo con silbidos como a un perro, haciendo sonar los dedos. Una semana, dos semanas o tres.

(p. 1328)

Not only is the story's underlying power structure shifted here, but these activities are a source of pleasure, as if this were the excess, the unacknowledged, which the phallic economy cannot control.⁹

But if the story allows this shift of power, it is only a glimpse since the woman decides to give up the relation with the second workman:

Sin embargo, cada golpe, cada humillación, cada cobro y alegría la introducían en la plenitud y el sudor del verano, en la culminación que sólo puede ser continuada por el descenso.

Había sido feliz con el muchacho y a veces lloraron juntos, ignorando cada uno el porqué del otro. Pero, fatalmente y lenta, la mujer tuvo que regresar de la sexualidad desesperada a la necesidad de amor. Era mejor, creyó, estar sola y triste.

(p. 1328)

This is an absolutely vital moment in the textual logic of ‘Tan triste’. The woman decides to give up her activities with the workman and to resume her previous position. And characteristically the story explains remarkably little of this decision. Fundamentally one may suspect that the story simply needs to reappropriate her for the phallic economy. It does not explain adequately why she abandons the pleasure she has found—it becomes vague and mystificatory by stating what it proposes simply in the form of principles: ‘en la culminación que sólo puede ser continuada por el descenso’ and ‘la mujer tuvo que regresar de la sexualidad desesperada a la necesidad del amor’. What the story does at this point is to open out to a possible subversion of its system, only very quickly to close up the gap thereby created. It is far from clear why the pleasure she experiences with the workman is incompatible with the other parts of her experience: ‘Era mejor, creyó, estar sola y triste’. She is made to opt for love, although, as so often with that term, it is unanalyzed and, in this context, simply suggestive of the nostalgia for imaginary unity with the man. Given that she does not now possess that unity with the man (she is after all ‘sola y triste’) it is hard to see why on those grounds she abandons the pleasure she finds with the workman which cannot be said to be endangering what remains of her marriage. In short, the overriding need here seems to be to reinstate her within the phallic economy.

‘Tan triste’, therefore, seems to offer a glimpse of a subversive move only quickly to repress it and reinstate the woman's subservience. ‘Tan triste’ cannot accommodate either the power of the woman's pleasure or the pleasure of her power: those excesses are recontained. Her opting for ‘love’ and the ‘belief that it is better to be alone and sad’ are tell-tale signs of the textual logic which lacks an entirely credible causality. Her choices are contrived to homogenize with the story's dominant entropic metaphysics. And it is worth noting that metaphysics is also discernible in the narrative structure of the story. Barely anything in the story happens in a clearcut, causal sequence. Time is homogenized and generalized via a notable amount of temporal juggling. The dominant devices controlling time in the story preclude any secure sense of linear development. ‘Tan triste’ mixes the temporal techniques of summary, iteration and random scenes in moving back and forth across a barely defined period of time between spring and summer. The impression created is that nothing can happen, so that everything inevitably remains where it started within the structure of the phallic economy: the woman still wants to be wanted by the man, and even her suicide was inevitable before the whole transformation of the garden began (p. 1329).

Ultimately, therefore, there is an underlying intuition in the story that the disposition of the current Symbolic order may create certain problems, but the reaction to that is not to seek some new possibility but is rather retroactive and imaginary. There is no rechannelling towards a new future. Hence ‘Tan triste’ cannot explore the woman's choices but can only state that she makes them. So the story finds a formal ending (the woman's suicide) which is actually mystificatory since it suggests its inevitability (hence the repetition of the dream) but it is unable to say why this particular ending had to occur. That is the ideological crux. This article wants to say that there is rather more involved here than the implicit author seems to know. Hence the article is making ‘Tan triste’ into a more complex object than it thinks itself to be.

5. READING

The position that reading has reached at the end of section four is rather different from that of section two: section three begins to cut against section two and to work as a corrective to it, and section four consolidates that movement. The strategy of reading for symbols in section two ‘dematerializes’ specific objects and renders them abstract. In that sense the garden was transformed into a coded meaning, or, at a more general level, the quantity of physical objects in ‘Tan triste’ was read as suggesting inertness, the resistance and lifelessness of the couple's ‘experience’. But there is another object in the story which can be read so as to start undermining this way of reading for essential meanings altogether. I refer to the suitcase in the dream. On its first appearance it is registered in this way: ‘Soñó al amanecer, ya separada y lejos, que caminaba sola en una noche que podía haber sido otra, casi desnuda con su corto camisón, cargando una valija vacía’ (p. 1308). And on its other appearance it is registered in this way: ‘Avanzaba pertinaz en cada bocacalle del sueño y el cerebro deshechos, en cada momento de fatiga mientras remontaba la cuesta interminable, semidesnuda, torcida por la valija’ (p. 1330). There is an obvious ‘existential’ reading of the suitcase in both these dream sequences which may seem very attractive, namely that the suitcase is a burden weighing her down and preventing her from moving with complete freedom. But the problem there is clearly that the suitcase is ‘vacía’, which cuts against the idea that the suitcase is a burden.¹⁰ What I want to propose is the avoidance of simply forging substantive ‘fillings’ for the suitcase. The alternative is to try and signal something of the Real of the text and so produce a more interesting response which examines reading itself and what is involved in making sense.¹¹ In other words, the suitcase can be seen as a privileged moment in which the deceptiveness of the objects within the story is manifested, and any too rapid an attempt to render those objects transparent vehicles of meaning is preempted. This suitcase seems to have no necessary symbolic freight or content. Perhaps by extension all the objects have an empty centre. In this (suit)case the materiality of the object seems to insist, to resist the imaginary presumption on the part of the critic to turn it rapidly into the ‘freight of life of the woman’. If reading, on the other hand, aims not to dematerialize these objects, how might it proceed?

The answer to that question has already begun to take shape in section four, which aims to see ‘Tan triste’ as a sort of empty suitcase, as a structure with space and gaps within it, as a process of constructing meanings, as a form of making sense within certain cultural and ideological limits. Section four tries to uncover the form of the limits, the form of the space within the patriarchal structure underlying the story: what those inner spaces and gaps seem to signify. This shift in strategy between sections two and four is crucial in order to keep in view the productive process of recreating ‘Tan triste’ as an object in reading. And the use of the term object here is a helpful reminder of the framework of object relations discussed earlier in respect of the characters within the story, and a salutory reminder therefore of the libidinal aspect in the reading process—a sort of return of the repressed.

There is more than one way in which ‘Tan triste’ itself can be seen as an object. Firstly, its verbal densities and opacities render reading a slow and consciously achieved process. There is also a calculated vagueness of terminology and a notable difficulty about the collocation of certain words which creates a sort of material obstruction to the rapid formation of sense. The prose tends to use abstract nouns in strings and to avoid adjectival attribution which leaves sense rather vague and generalized. And the story is very reluctant to provide pointers about the articulation of meaning: there is little internal point making, few interpretative signals. All these features create a strong verbal surface and stress the story's material status: a sort of resistance of the Real prior to any attempted appropriation by the Symbolic and Imaginary in reading.

Another way of viewing the object status of ‘Tan triste’, and so of engaging it not as a virtually transparent tissue of symbols which just need ‘working out’, can issue from the ideas in the story's epigraph. This epigraph is a very brief piece of text which does not form an integral part of the story material, but which if not inside the story is clearly not outside it either since it is located beneath the title.

Querida Tantriste

Comprendo, a pesar de ligaduras indecibles e innumerables, que llegó el momento de agradecernos la intimidad de los últimos meses y decirnos adiós. Todas las ventajas serán tuyas. Creo que nunca nos entendimos de veras; acepto mi culpa, la responsabilidad y el fracaso. Intento excusarme—sólo para nosotros, claro—invocando la dificultad que impone navegar entre dos aguas durante X páginas. Acepto también, como merecidos, los momentos dichosos. En todo caso, perdón. Nunca miré de frente tu cara, nunca te mostré la mía.

J.C.O. (p. 1307)

The story is addressed as a woman. It is as if the story had been the lover of J.C.O.. And the separation of J.C.O. and Tantriste parallels that of the man and the woman in the story. Similarly, the refusal to look at Tantriste or to show his face to her echoes the asymmetrical play of looks within the story itself. Moreover there is no rancour in J.C.O. but a good deal of self-justification: he takes the initiative and measures his distance from her. This controlling of the positions by the male is perceptible within the story too where the implied author is also male. At the start of the story, the man and the woman are both objects of focalization, but after page 1314 the man becomes much less important. Thereafter, for the bulk of ‘Tan triste’, the woman is the central object. There are certain brief moments that derive from her focalization but almost always she is the object of focalization whether from within or (mostly) from without. This mode of representing her clearly helps in manipulating her for the underlying phallic economy—it tends to preclude her own independent position.

This framing of the story from a masculine position prompts an urgent question. If the story is structured from such a standpoint, how is the reading this article proposes gendered? I would suggest that the initial attempt to read the story ‘into symbols’ and to provide substantive interpretations of characters (even though not in the terms provided by the story) is a way of trying to frame and control it. Rather like J.C.O. with Tantriste, that first reading is redolent of masculine control. But the later move towards resistant critique may start a reexploration and repositioning of reading that allows the story much more complexity and independence. The superseding of that first reading suggests the need not to idealize the story into a neat object which the (masculine) critic can easily manipulate for ‘triumphal’ insights. The story's opacities and gaps need to be stressed in order to contain that tendency, otherwise the story becomes a mere tool for the critic's method and a mirror for self-reflection. The return of the text, of the repressed, undermines that pretension to stability, that effort to objectify. Cynthia Chase states this point with some lucidity:

To ‘plunge into the minutest details’ of a text and context, in quest of the ‘hidden meaning’, is indeed to transfer onto the text in such a way that its modes of expression and condition of knowledge—its transferences or tropes, and its status as trope—may never come to be known. Instead the text will be experienced as a message in which we have an interest; not read as a set of mechanisms and process of displacement, but seen or heard like a dream or a voice. The transference ‘peremptorily demanded’ by the hermeneutic enterprise of interpretation, in short, conflicts with the poetics of the enterprise of textual analysis, which would have to trace, by means of displacements or transferences, not the meaning but the devices of meaning, the transferential process, of the text.¹²

Hence it may be necessary to carry out the problematic enterprise of interpretation in order to see the possibilities and the limits of analysis, of not being able simply to seek meaning. That, in any case, is the logic of my text. Hence, at the end of this article, ‘Tan triste’ is no longer quite the object it seemed to be in its early pages. The relationship between article and story has shifted and diversified. And the heterogeneity of responses precludes the illusion of a transparent object relation: precisely the problem within the story's phallic economy. The final question is: can that heterogeneity ever be anything but a series of attempts at some sort of (deceptive) mastery? That danger (or perhaps just that simple reality) may be the transferential logic of all reading, the inevitable libidinal investment, unless one can also commit oneself to trying to find some of the countertransferential potential, the disruption of the transferential system, in the text and in the text of reading.

Notes

1. Juan Carlos Onetti, ‘Tan triste como ella’ in Obras completas (Mexico: Aguilar, 1970), pp. 1305-30. All page references will be to this edition and bracketed in the text. I shall refer to the story as ‘Tan triste’.

2. In fact, precisely this way of reading forms the backbone of M. Ian Adams' discussion of ‘Tan Triste’ in Three Authors of Alienation. Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1975), pp. 56-72. His reading of symbols could be characterized as positivistic, something from which this article will ultimately aim to distance itself. See sections 3-5.

3. For Adams' treatment of the garden see op. cit. p. 63 and pp. 66-67, where he is prepared to read rather more into the object than me.

4. See the discussion of this motif in the chapters on Para esta noche, Para una tumba sin nombre, El astillero and Juntacadáveres in my Reading Onetti. Language, Narrative and the Subject (Liverpool: Francis Cairns Publications, 1985). It could be noted as well that the withdrawal of women characters into secluded places upstairs is associated with ‘madness’ or religiosity. Julita in Juntacadáveres, Angélica Inés in El astillero and Beatriz in Para esta noche are all relevant points of reference here. In ‘Tan triste’ the woman thinks that she is ‘loca’: “‘Estoy loca, o estuve y lo sigo estando y me gusta’” (p. 1323), and before committing suicide she prays (p. 1329).

5. It is far from clear if Mendel really exists and if the woman really had a relationship with him that produced the baby: he may simply be a device used by the man which the woman does not bother to refute. On the one hand, there seems to be a story about Mendel (presumably told by the woman) (p. 1314). But, on the other hand, some statements about him are rather ambiguous: ‘Por la tarde, luego del rito con las espinas y las perezosas líneas de sangre en las manos, la mujer aprendió a silbar con los pájaros y supo que Mendel había desaparecido junto con el hombre flaco. Era posible que nunca hubieran exisitido. Quedaba el niño en la planta alta y de nada le servía para atenuar su soledad. Nunca había estado con Mendel, nunca lo había conocido ni le había visto el cuerpo corto y musculoso; nunca supo de su tesonera voluntad masculina, de su risa fácil, de su despreocupada compenetración con la dicha’ (p. 1319). It is not clear here who it is who has not been with Mendel, whether it is the woman or the baby. If it is the woman who has never been with him, then this physical description of him seems to derive from the narrator-focalizer.

6. The look is often important in Onetti. See, for example, ‘La cara de la desgracia’ and my article ‘Negotiating the Text: Onetti's “La cara de la desgracia”’, Dispositio, XIV, 36-8 (forthcoming).

7. See J. Lacan, ‘God and the Jouissance of The Woman’ in Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 138-48.

8. See Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 60.

9. It is difficult to adjudicate, without falling into banal moralizing, on the humiliations the boy receives. But I find it hard not to retain some doubts about the nature of the momentary shift of power to the woman which involves such violence, although it is clearly legitimate to see it as a reversal of the habitual violence done to her by the phallic economy. On the other hand, given the location of the story within masculine discourse, this brief release of violence could be seen as a further sign of male fear of the ‘uncontrollable’ and ‘threatening’ nature of women's sexuality.

10. For Adams' treatment of the suitcase see op. cit. p. 60 and pp. 70-1 where he reads it as a positivistic symbol of sexual deficiency. While this is one possible reading, it is of the sort which I think the suitcase can also be read more interestingly as undermining.

11. On the interactions of the Lacanian concepts of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, see Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 187-89.

12. Cynthia Chase, ‘“Transference” as trope and persuasion’ in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. S. Rimmon-Kenan (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 212-13.