[In the following essay, Millington examines the ways in which Onetti's female characters, although they are marginalized in his texts, serve to define and support male identity and experience.]

“… the difference of the woman is the visibility of the man …”

—Stephen Heath

In Onetti we read a narrative of male subjectivity. It is a narrative founded on male characters' heterogeneity, incompleteness and difficulties. In a crucial sense, women characters barely exist—their containment within the categories of a male discourse is what constitutes them as well as what denies them. They have no independence of the male problematic, so that even the privileged, marginal women are to be understood as marginal to the male centre. The male value system maps the entire terrain of the narrative, his are the only coordinates. Hence women characters are given no intrinsic interest by the narrative.

But women are not therefore irrelevant, indeed they are an essential element in the structure of male experience in Onetti. The importance of women is that they are precisely different, and their difference defines and supports male identity and therefore also male power. A woman's location may be privileged within the discourse as that of an unorthodox outsider, or it may be derided as that of a futile conformist, but in neither case has the location any intrinsic interest for the male characters—there is no wish to occupy the woman's place. On the contrary, the woman is a marker, a token of what is happening to a male character. Hence, when the women characters are conformists they must be abandoned, when they are outsiders they can facilitate escape. Their meaning is thus defined by male movement in relation to them. And there is no reciprocity: women characters are functions, they help to articulate a male signifying system. As a result it is inevitable that women very rarely have their own concerns or problems in Onetti. Women never initiate action in Onetti's fiction with a view to changing their situations, but they frequently stimulate male characters to move, and it is that movement which creates the narrative dynamic of the fiction.

The characterization of women in Onetti is therefore essentialistic. Women occupy static positions and, with very rare exceptions, they are identified with functions. Hence their identities are homogeneous and largely stable, and that contrasts very markedly with male identity, which is conflictive, heterogeneous and problematic. This contrast in characterization between male and female is posited on underlying polarizations: homogeneous/heterogeneous, passive/active and unconscious/conscious. Women are passive, with little or no awareness, and if they are aware of their difficulties they tend to take refuge from them in the past without considering undertaking any innovatory action. Their absence of consciousness is part of their basic characterization. Male characters, by contrast, can be active, and the important ones generally are. Their activity is founded on desire, and their desire is the propelling force of Onetti's narratives. Their desire is in turn founded on lack, on the incompleteness of the self and an awareness of this. Their activity is inextricably related to consciousness.

Women characters serve to help men to articulate their desire, and this takes two forms: negative and positive. In the negative form, the women characters help to define what it is men wish to reject—they are perceived as representing all that constricts men and creates their incompleteness. These are the non-privileged women in Onetti. In the positive form, the women characters seem to galvanize men into movement. They help to define the desire to alter and supplement the self, and thus stimulate action. This second type of woman character is the privileged sort and is more generally in evidence. These privileged women are outsiders, that is they have unofficial, non-social roles: they are not mothers, wives or daughters. The vital question to ask about them is: “What do men want of these women?” And the answer is that men have a desire not for them but via them. These privileged women assist in the formulation of male desire for a renewed self—they are not objects of desire in themselves, they are not the “truth of man.” These women may suggest the possible attainment of an other self, an imaginary fulfilment, and so they are vehicles of male desire rather than its object.

Hence women characters are crucial signifiers in male discourse, but these are women as constituted by the male. In a very real sense women are outside these representations of them: the representations do not “mirror” or “reflect” a reality so much as help construct a certain sort of reality. The woman's status as a signifier in male discourse is clear from this key fact: there seems to be no need for emotional reciprocity in the relationships with women, there is no stress on love. The nature of relationships between men and the privileged women are not examined under a shared focus: what happens to the male is the crucial thing.

This stress on the male response to a relationship is linked to Onetti's reticence about sex. Sexual relationships are frequently implied in the narratives but there is a perennial silence about them. The narratives elide reference to sex, indeed there is little mention even of physical contact. This is the counterpart of the narratives' centering on the male, on his mind, emotions and needs. All that happens matters to him and that is the angle of representation in the narratives. This stress on the male perspective gives concrete sense to the notion that his desire is via the woman and for a (new) self. This male desire is essentially narcissistic. The male self matters, and the male seeks a new self-reflection through contact with certain women privileged by the male value system. The self-reflection sought is imaginary and ideal, and (not surprisingly) is never attained.

Onetti's is a discourse centred on and conterminous with a male problematic. The mastery and writing of the woman means that she has no independent concerns: male subjectivity and its ramifications not only dominate but are totally exclusive. Within this male discourse woman is different: she is positioned and given identity in relation to man, and this identity is more constricting than identity normally is. So woman has a certain significance for the male in terms of her position and her gender: her position helps to define and articulate male situations and movement; and her gender is significant in that she is other—to be a woman is to be outside the male domain, and therefore there can be no wish to occupy those positions she is represented as occupying. Her gender appears to make no other independent or intrinsic contribution—it is not male, it is other.

It might be possible to argue that within these male narratives women characters are little more than actants. That is, the female characters have little in excess of their attributes as functions. It is as if their functionality accounted for more or less the whole of their construction. There is certainly hardly ever any sign of that crucial heterogeneity of identity which is so frequent in the male characters and which renders them of interest as characters. All that is female in Onetti's narratives is more or less contained within the solid homogeneity of four roles, or four actantial functions: the wife, the prostitute, the girl and the mad woman. Hence female characters figure for their use value—their use value for male characters. When the use is completed the female character can be dismissed, murdered or simply forgotten.

Rita in Para una tumba sin nombre (1959) is a prime example of female functionality. She is narrated by Godoy, Jorge (three times) and Tito, that is she figures in five distinct, male versions of a supposedly identical story. The point is that she has no existence independent of these narratives and they only coincide in a few details (her telling a story for money in a railway station accompanied by a goat). In fact the name “Rita” is a kind of hook on which different male characters (in Jorge's case three different stages of himself) can hang their own ideas. Their different ideologies totally reformulate the nature of “Rita”, to such an extent that “Rita” can hardly be said to exist—there is no possible referent on which all these narratives could coincide. In other words, “Rita” is a signifier with shifting and contradictory signifieds according to the context in which it occurs. Hence even the grave which initially seemed to contain her body may contain that of another person or even nothing at all: it is a tomb without a name just as “Rita” is a woman without an identity. Essentially each male narrative tells us about its teller but not about its ostensible subject: “Rita” and the goat.

Tito, for example, is associated explicitly and forcefully with the orthodox values of Santa María. This is clear from his physical shape—he is emulating the obesity of his father, taking on the form of patriarchy—, and also from the fact that he is studying law, an obvious identification in Onetti's discourse with the status quo. Hence the sort of narrative that Tito tells about “Rita” attempts to marginalize her and bolster his own position. Tito casts “Rita” as a prostitute because this is illegal and thus allows him to avoid making any more profound sense of her. So her telling of stories in the railway station in order to deceive unsuspecting travellers into giving her money is seen by Tito as simply lying and worthy only of disdain. In telling his story, Tito implicitly reinforces his own ideological position within the traditional order of Santa María.

By contrast, Jorge tells a different sort of story about “Rita.” In his first version, Jorge is attempting to perpetuate his own position as a rebel, as someone outside the order of Santa María, and “Rita” is used as part of that personal iconoclasm. For Jorge in this vein, “Rita” represents a bridge out of the legal world, out of the traditional values of his parents, and she is therefore invested with decisive value. Her telling of stories, far from being disdained, is seen as creative and part of the enterprise of disrupting, even of destroying, the constrictions of Santa María. In his second and third versions of the narrative, when Jorge is moving more and more towards the values of Santa María, he modifies his viewpoint on “Rita” and in doing so he domesticates and ultimately eliminates all that was previously seen as positive and rebellious about “Rita's” position. The point is not that his version of events finally coincides with that of Tito, but that his identity gradually changes and that, as a result, he attempts to eliminate the impression of himself created by his previous narratives.

“Rita” is therefore a function of male narratives in Para una tumba sin nombre, she is a polyvalent device. She is only what male characters make her, and any independent identity is not even an issue. The different ideologies tell us nothing about her—they obscure whatever truth might be supposed to attach to her. In this way, the male narratives are not so much miss-apprehensions as miss-appropriations, since they take her over. In the multiplicity and contradictions of the versions “Rita” disappears, and that invisibility is not untypical of female characters in Onetti.

“Rita” is a clear case of invisibility brought about by the multiplicity of uses to which she is put. Most female characters in Onetti are given one stable function, without that leading to anything like a high degree of visibility as we can see by looking at the four major functions in turn.

THE WIFE

The first function that I am going to consider is that of the wife. It must be stressed that there are fairly few wives in Onetti (for example, Cecilia in El pozo [1939], Beatriz in Para esta noche [1943], Gertrudis in La vida breve [1950], and señora Gálvez in El astillero [1961]), but their roles have similar implications in each of the narratives in which they appear. The existence of a wife is never associated with a family—Onetti's narratives do not include a familial dimension, so that what children there are appear independently for their connotative link with youth. In this connection it is worth bearing in mind what Brausen feels about Raquel, his sister-in-law, in La vida breve when he discovers that she is pregnant. He has previously felt affection for her, partly because of her youth and partly because she reminds him of the girl whom he married, but now he senses that something has happened to destroy all that:

La sensación repugnante y enemiga había estado brotando de la panza que le habían hecho, del feto que crecía anulándola, que tendía victoriosamente a convertirla en una indistinta mujer preñada, que la condenaba a disolverse en un destino ajeno.¹

The unequivocal sense of destruction brought about by the pregnancy (even though it may in fact be Brausen himself who has caused it) is a sign not only of the general unease in Onetti about the family, but also of the inherent dangers of marriage. For the overriding characteristic of the function of wives in Onetti is to create a sense of frustration and futility in male characters. Marriage stultifies and frustrates, it is a trap from which those male protagonists who are married try to escape. Brausen in La vida breve makes a point which applies generally in Onetti. Brausen sees himself as a victim trapped by the decision to marry Gertrudis:

… había empezado a arrugarme desde la noche en que acepté abrazar a Gertrudis por primera vez en Montevideo … había provocado la vejez en el momento en que admití quedarme en Gertrudis, repetirme, dar la bienvenida a los aniversarios, a la seguridad, regocijarme porque los días no eran vísperas de conflictos y elecciones, de compromisos novedosos.

(p. 623)

The repetition, the growing old, the sense of a comfortable opting out of life, are all characteristic of the married protagonists, and are the immediate cause of the desire to move and to supplement the self for the loss suffered. This desire is always focused through the male consciousness, and the dismissal of the marriage and the constricting wife create the male superiority: his is the awareness, his the revulsion, and his the desire to act.

Indeed the male's urge to act is generally what inaugurates narrative in Onetti—it creates the breach which the narrative action will try to fill in, or repair. Failure to break out of the constrictions caused by an unproductive marriage leads to total defeat and the destruction of the individual, as shown by the case of Morasán in Para esta noche. To get out of marriage, out of the trap created by the ossified relationship with a wife, is to create some hope, some possibility of renewal. This hope of renewal in overcoming the obstruction of a wife is given particular force since it is precisely the negation of an official bond sanctioned by social norm. And it is crucial to note that Onetti's male protagonists achieve whatever it is they do achieve outside of marriage, and, more generally, outside of official, legal constraints. In Onetti, to abandon marriage is a positive value, an opening, and it is important to note that, as a result, no Onetti narrative finds its culmination and closure in marriage. To that extent, Onetti is operating against cultural norms, where marriage is generally figured as a point of balance and fulfilment, even though his treatment of women generally displays much of the ideology of his cultural environment. In Onetti's discourse, marriage is inscribed as unequivocally negative, and the greater reality is always outside, in that vague, unofficial terrain his narratives seek to occupy. His discourse valorizes unofficial, even illegal bonds as alternatives to the bondage of the officially sanctioned bonds. And this is partly because relationships with women in Onetti are never viewed or experienced as permanent or even potentially so: they are means to a male end.

THE PROSTITUTE

This final point is also decisively true of the next female function in Onetti, that of the prostitute, where impermanence and male advantage are key defining features. The prostitute seems to represent the immediate and obvious alternative to marriage in Onetti. The prostitute is used in the search for something different from the restrictions of marriage and represents something like its reverse side. But this obvious alternative presents something of a paradox in that the prostitute is the official alternative, as Jane Gallop trenchantly puts it: “Prostitution for money has a place in the phallocentric sexual economy …”² The point is that this otherness of the prostitute is an important part of the dominant order from which the male protagonists in Onetti seem to be trying to escape. Prostitution is a more or less sanctioned unorthodoxy and therefore has a somewhat equivocal status within the efforts of the protagonists to redefine themselves.

There are two features of the relationships with prostitutes which need to be pinpointed. Firstly, the relationship with them is essentially short; in no sense is the alternative to marriage seen as a potentially permanent liaison—the prostitute might help the protagonist at a particular moment, without there being anything to bind the two together for more than this functional effect. Secondly, the relationship with prostitutes is sometimes associated with fantasies of wishfulfilment, and this helps to locate the real significance of these relationships, since the alternative with the prostitute is frequently no more than a frustrated striving for an imaginary alternative which never materializes in any sustained way. In this respect the sanctioned nature of the unorthodoxy clearly also contributes to the failure to achieve some kind of comprehensive reorganization of experience.

The temporary nature of these relationships and their fantasy elements are both manifest in El pozo with Linacero and the prostitute Ester. The meeting between Linacero and Ester occurs in the period after he has left his wife and is leading a sort of marginal existence. It is important that for Linacero the liaison does not simply represent the possibility of sexual intercourse but also that of telling a story, which contains one of his recurrent fantasies about himself as an heroic adventurer, that is as an idealized, fulfilled being. Indeed, the intercourse and the story are closely connected in their significance, since he refuses to pay Ester for her services with money, preferring instead to pay her with the fantasy. The relationship with this alternative woman and the attempt to share his fantasy with her are part of a combined project to achieve self-fulfilment by breaking out of his past. But Ester cannot understand his story since the fantasy is essentially private—it cannot be shared.

The use of a prostitute as an alternative to an orthodox relationship, and as a way of realizing an escape, however temporary, from the normality of life is implied in the description in Juntacadáveres (1964) of the young men of Santa María emerging from the brothel:

… se introducían deslumbrados en la blanca luz de verano y vacilaban un largo rato sobre el fondo celeste de la puerta, como si acabaran de nacer o regresaran de un país lejano y se les hiciera doloroso readaptarse a la ciudad …

(p. 909)

The period with the prostitutes seems to reorient the young men away from the orthodoxy of Santa María, but it is only a brief escape and the official world reasserts itself.

The most sustained treatment of a prostitute in Onetti is in La vida breve. For Brausen, la Queca represents the possibility of a slow reformulation of the self. She lives in the flat next door to Brausen's and it has one crucial characteristic: it is a mirror image of his own flat, her bed being like a reversed extension of his own. The connotations of this arrangement are obvious in establishing the prostitute as the negative of all that happens in Brausen's flat. Moreover, la Queca arrives to occupy the empty flat next door at a particularly important moment: Brausen's wife has just had her left breast removed, thus destroying a certain symmetry, and it is as if the void left in Brausen's life by the operation were filled by the arrival of la Queca in the identical flat, thus forming a new symmetry.³

The alternative world holds out the hope to Brausen of changing his life after the frustrations created by marriage to Gertrudis. With la Queca he can make a new self, for which reason he gradually acquires the new name and identity of Arce. This is the negation of his old identity as Brausen, and it is through the relationship with la Queca that he is able to carry out the negation. To achieve his new identity Brausen/Arce immerses himself in the culture of the world of prostitution, and specifically he undertakes certain calculated acts of violence against the prostitute. And, given the importance of the reformulation of his character, this violence is in no way censured by the novel: the prostitute is there to facilitate what the male is trying to do.

Even though the relationship between Brausen/Arce and la Queca takes shape over a lengthy period there is no suggestion that it can ever acquire permanence. Indeed, it is probably true to say that there is little evidence of an emotional bond between them. What matters is Brausen/Arce's state of mind and his capacity to manipulate the relationship with la Queca. This absence of emotion is underlined by the end which Brausen/Arce envisages for their relationship: he decides to kill the prostitute in order to confirm his new identity and to achieve total commitment to it. Again he is using la Queca as a means to his own end. To kill la Queca means finally and definitively to abandon Gertrudis and to cross the bridge into some alternative world. Now, it seems to me that the question of whether Brausen/Arce actually achieves this passage into an alternative world is highly debatable, and that is not just because it is not Brausen/Arce who kills la Queca but another of her lovers, Ernesto. But this is not the point that matters here. The point here is that the prostitute is used as a bridge, she is a function within a structure of male thought and experience, so that no intrinsic interest attaches to her and no moral implications are suggested in respect of the treatment which she receives.

This use of the prostitute figure as a bridge out of respectability and orthodoxy is explicitly formulated in Juntacadáveres where the adolescent Jorge forms a relationship with the prostitute María Bonita. Díaz Grey pinpoints the fact that Jorge is using her as part of his rebellion against Santa María, part of his desire to get away from the town. In answer to María Bonita's question Díaz Grey excludes any reference to a possible emotional bond between them:

—¿Qué está pensando, doctor?—dijo María Bonita—. ¿Cree que me dedico a robar menores?

—No, perdone—repuso Díaz Grey—. Creo que [Jorge] se va porque quiere, que ya juntó motivos suficientes para dejar Santa María.

(p. 976)

Like all Onetti's male protagonists Jorge is absorbed in his own needs. His liaison with the prostitute is part of a well-defined male itinerary: the prostitute can be a temporary evasion of the status quo or of the constrictions inherent in conventional life, in which case there is a return to normality after contact with her; or the prostitute can represent the hope of a permanent escape from orthodoxy, a bridge to something radically other which would be a renewal of male experience of the self. In either case, the prostitute is posited as a means, as a fixed position: she is what she is but that is of interest only insofar as it might produce new meaning for the male.

THE GIRL

The third function amongst the female characters is that of the girl. The girl is in early adolescence and seems always to possess certain crucial characteristics. Those characteristics can be defined in terms of certain major polarities: orthodox/unorthodox, legal/illegal, insider/outsider, and the girls are always privileged by association with the second term of these polarities. They are the focus of difference as gauged by the dominant values of the male characters. Their difference is centred on the fact that they are perceived as not having subscribed to the orthodoxies of the adult world, in that sense they are outsiders, they have not accepted adult (and, by implication, bourgeois) standards. There are one or two examples of girls who do come to subscribe to these despised standards (Nora in Tierra de nadie (1941), and Cecilia in El pozo), but these figures are simply dismissed from male interest once their symbolic value as outsider has ceased to exist.

More generally, girls act as markers for the adult male, as markers of what the male has lost, the price that has been paid by being an orthodox adult. The male desire which adopts the girls is a sign of this lack, of what has been lost. There is then an idealistic regression in the wish to possess the girl, in the desire to possess what is now seen to have been important in adolescence. And this idea of (re)possession is usually associated with sexual possession of the girl.

The example of Victoria in Para esta noche shows this quite clearly. Victoria is associated with a radical political party because she is the daughter of Barcala who is one of its leaders. She herself is too young to understand the political situation in the novel, but she acts as a symbol of the youthful ideals which prompted Ossorio to join the party. In the severe political conflict being played out in the novel it seems that Ossorio is in danger of abandoning those ideals and compromising in order to save himself from being killed. In fact, his compromises and self-interest are already apparent insofar as he betrays Barcala to the opposition under the pretext of “saving” the party from Barcala's fanaticism, and insofar as he obtains tickets to escape from the conflict and so from his commitment to the political struggle. Victoria is entrusted to Ossorio by Barcala, who fears for his own life, and this act is a sign of the difficult relation with his ideals that Ossorio is living through. The link with Victoria, the need to protect her, is an acute reminder of his past and why he joined the party. The relationship between Ossorio and Victoria is basically the relationship between Ossorio and his conscience. As he and Victoria grow closer together through the course of the novel (their physical proximity and intimacy gradually increase through the second half) it is as if Ossorio were slowly reaffirming his relation to the party. To draw physically closer to Victoria is to draw closer to redemption. Victoria acts as a stimulus for Ossorio's awareness of his position, she unconsciously leads him to reconsider his alignment, to see himself in the light of his own past. His final position in the novel, embracing Victoria during a severe attack by the enemy, is a sign of his desire to reaffirm the commitment that took him into the party. Whether this reaffirmation can be viewed positively is open to debate, since the affirmation in the process of dying does not appear a very practical position, but that does not alter Victoria's connotative function in helping to define Ossorio's dilemma.

In Los adioses (1954) one discovers a similar sort of symbolic function in the girl associated with the basketball player. If one reads the novel ignoring the interpretative difficulty created by the narrator's equivocal position,⁴ then it is clear that there is a polarization between the girl and the woman, who is also associated with the basketball player. This polarization has meaning only in terms of the basketball player's life and his personal struggle with a premature death. With the woman, an adult, the man is a conformist; with the girl, an adolescent, the man refuses to play the game of the other adults. The narrator makes the girl's position as outsider absolutely clear:

… no necesité mirarla para ver su cara, para convencerme de que la cara iba a estar, hasta la muerte en días luminosos y poblados, en noches semejantes a la que atravesábamos, enfrentando la segura, fatua, ilusiva aproximación de los hombres … la cara había sido hecha para enfrentar lo que los hombres representaban y distinguían …

(pp. 738-39)

Her symbolic status as other to men could hardly be more clearly formulated: she acts as a stimulus to the basketball player in his struggle against death, against the acceptance of the compromise which the other adults around him have all accepted—this is the sense of his relationship with the girl. His final commitment to the girl is consistent with his prior behaviour, but has all the idealistic and problematic overtones of Ossorio's commitment to Victoria since it is likewise made at the moment of dying.

It is clear from the cases of Victoria and the girl in Los adioses that the girls acquiesce with male need. They play a willing, or at least passive, part in the attempt to alleviate the male problem. However, the reality of achieving fulfilment via the girl is far from clear—in both Para esta noche and Los adioses death curtails the life of the male protagonists leaving their affirmative commitment to the girls and what they represent in a somewhat problematic impasse. In Dejemos hablar al viento (1979) there is a different kind of difficulty relating to a similar sort of situation. Medina is in Lavanda leading a rather unorthodox existence (in this novel Lavanda seems to be a place of unorthodoxy counterbalancing Santa María's orthodoxy), and part of that unorthodoxy is the attempted relationship with Juanina, an adolescent girl. This attempted relationship is a sign of the kind of configuration Medina is trying to create in his life, but he experiences a real distance from her. He cannot control Juanina's otherness, her indifference to his advances. She teases him, partly by not resisting him and partly by eluding him completely. His frustration is an indication of the failure inherent in all these relationships between an adult male and an adolescent girl in Onetti. In all these relationships the girl appears to be a vehicle, a means to an end. The girls may prompt a self-examination, or coincide with a pre-existent desire to return to an idealized past self, but the crucial factor is the difficulty for the male in achieving any lasting contact with the idea of a more real self. There is a strong element of regressive fantasy in this experience which is persistent but frustrated in different ways.

Perhaps the clearest example of the regressive fantasy focused on a girl is that of Linacero in El pozo. This novel is particularly revealing of the male desire for an other self and of the position of the girl as different from man in both gender and position. The relationship of Linacero with Ana María hinges on two encounters. The first encounter occurs in reality during Linacero's adolescence. It is New Year's Eve and Linacero leaves the adult world of dull celebrations and goes out into the garden. He meets Ana María and tricks her into entering the gardener's hut. He takes great pleasure in fooling her, and when inside tries to humiliate her more by pushing her to the floor in a kind of physical assault which he claims is not sexual. After the two emerge from the hut, Ana María shows her disdain for Linacero by spitting in his face and then running off. This act is a decisive judgment on Linacero and it also creates a sort of identity for him, precisely as inferior to Ana María—she has assumed the dominant position. It is as if by spitting at him she had assumed the male role (the spitting may be seen as a displaced ejaculation) and this disturbs Linacero: where his own actions towards Ana María had no sexual climax (or content, he claims), her actions towards him are quite the opposite.

This real encounter, with its unsatisfactory outcome for Linacero, leads him to construct another encounter, a fantasy, in later life in order to compensate. The second encounter seems to have a dual function. On the other hand, it is created to restore his position vis à vis Ana María, to reestablish her difference and inferiority; and on the other hand, it provides a means for creating a whole image of the self (a full identity) after the frustrations and repressions of marriage. This second encounter is explicitly sexual. Ana María comes to Linacero in the fantasy naked and he is clearly not threatened by her sexually:

… me siento en el borde de la cama y clavo los ojos en el triángulo negro [de Ana María] …

Miro el vientre de Ana María … apenas redondeado … A veces, siempre inmóvil, sin un gesto, creo ver la pequeña ranura del sexo.

(p. 56)

Ana María is decisively repositioned here in Linacero's fantasy as the female: her belly is rounded, in other words she has no penis. And this reinstatement restores Linacero by implication to the role of power and security which he lost in adolescence. That reinstatement also coincides with the second aspect of Ana María's function, which is to help mobilize an image of Linacero: the fantasy also contains an image of Linacero as an “adventurer”, as a fulfilled, active self, which serves to supplement the less than fulfilling experience of his marriage. Ana María is therefore, like Victoria and the girl in Los adioses, a symbol of lost adolescent integrity. Hence the two encounters together reveal the two basic motifs of the relationship between adult males and adolescent girls in Onetti: in part, the girl is an image or a reminder of what the male has lost, and what he wishes to regain; and in part, the girl is simply a vehicle, an other, who stands apart from the orthodoxy which the males inhabit—her gender and her position are different and inferior, and can be mobilized within male thinking to define the male situation.

THE MAD WOMAN

The fourth function of the female characters in Onetti is that of the mad woman. This function is the least definite and the least numerous of the four, but nonetheless it does have some consistency. Madness is almost exclusively associated with female characters in Onetti. Its major examples are Beatriz in Para esta noche, Angélica Inés in El astillero, Julita in Juntacadáveres and Moncha Insurralde in “La novia robada” (1968). The only male character who is mad is Petrus in El astillero, and the reasons for his madness seem to be roughly similar to those of the female characters.

The common ground of all the mad characters is a resistance to, or a refusal of the shared reality of the sane characters. Madness is a refusal to compromise, a refusal to repress the truth. As a result of this refusal, the mad characters inhabit private worlds in which they manage to preserve something like an integral self. By refusing the social game, they cling on to a certain sort of identity, with childlike connotations, although this necessarily marginalizes them. The proximity to the meaning of the adolescent girl is apparent in this. The crucial point is that their refusal is a withdrawal from the world, and is therefore passive. The male characters in Onetti who try to resist the world do so in an active way, however fruitless it proves to be. But the mad women are contemplative and withdrawn, and so function as complementary figures to the male protagonists—there are important shared motives, but contrasted responses.

With Beatriz in Para esta noche the passivity and withdrawal are clear. On each of her appearances in the novel Beatriz is isolated in her own room in a kind of religious ecstasy. This withdrawal makes communication with her husband, Morasán, impossible, and, above all, it prevents any possibility of sexual intercourse between them. The cause of her condition is not specified, but her position and behaviour seem to be part of an articulation of Morasán's dilemma—again the female character is a function, a marker of the male situation. Her withdrawal is the most acute sign of Morasán's isolation and the breakdown of his world. The situation he lives through is intractable since he has betrayed the political party he was once committed to and is now working for the other side, the party in power. This betrayal of his youthful ideals is seen to be the cause of his current total isolation, so that the withdrawn state of Beatriz is the signal of his complete lack of redemptive potential. It is vital, in this respect, that Ossorio, who appears to be on the point of imitating Morasán's betrayal, does find the possibility of redemption through Victoria, a redemption with implicit sexual undertones. In Morasán's case, the betrayal has occurred and that is that. Hence Beatriz is a symbol of his total isolation, and is not therefore of intrinsic interest. As a result her madness has no history, the cause of her present situation is not explained, simply because it does not have any bearing on Morasán.

Angélica Inés in El astillero plays a similar role to Beatriz: she is a sign of the state of Larsen, of the fact that he is trying to run away from reality. In the terms of the novel, the shipyard which Larsen joins as General Manager is a fantasy of fulfilment, it is a structure which helps Larsen to organize his life, but it is completely devoid of meaning since it is not operational and has no prospect of being so. Just as Larsen plays the game of pretending that the shipyard is real, so he embarks on a slow courtship of Angélica Inés. These two activities are both part of his strategy to ingratiate himself with the owner of the shipyard, Petrus, who is also Angélica Inés' father. This strategy is designed to win his future security by marrying the daughter and inheriting Petrus' fortune. But the entire project is futile since Petrus is bankrupt and there is no hope of the shipyard ever returning to operation. Petrus' own belief in the future is a patent and permanent withdrawal from reality and hence he is seen as mad too. Larsen's project is a futile piece of wishfulfilment and flies in the face of reality as the novel poses it. In this context, the courtship appears pointless since there is no possible communication with Angélica Inés, and all that passes between them is an empty ritual in which Larsen has apparently invested his hopes for a better future. Again, the cause and the nature of Angélica Inés' madness are not really examined since she is subordinate in her role in the novel to the unfolding of Larsen's situation.

By contrast with Beatriz and Angélica Inés, Julita in Juntacadáveres is a more completely drawn portrait of madness, and that is because she has a certain independent history. Her madness is a withdrawal from the world after the death of her husband Federico and the destruction of their shared love. Without him, her life seems to be impossible, and so she immerses herself in memory and fantasy. Even though her position is similar in some ways to that of Beatriz and Angélica Inés, there is clear evidence here of the character of Julita being constituted by an individual problem so that she is more than just a function of a male situation. Moreover, she ultimately reveals her consciousness of her decision to withdraw from the shared reality of others, and this consciousness is almost unique in a woman character in Onetti. For much of the novel, Julita sustains an intimate relationship with Jorge Malabia, who speculates that her madness is a stratagem to help her survive after the death of Federico: “Ella eligió estar loca para seguir viviendo …” (p. 797). Later in the novel, Julita seems to confirm that Jorge's speculation is right, and that she knows that other people think she is mad. But she claims to be aware of something which is not accessible to those who think they are in the real world:

“Y todo … porque yo no necesito de nadie, me basta con este cuarto, y estar sola para vivir lo que ellos no van a poder aunque se mueran de cien años.”

(p. 933)

Julita's madness is actually a sort of awareness, something special outside the confines of the “real” world shared by others, and her assertion is not questioned within the novel: Julita's point of view is allowed to stand as a privileged declaration, and it is easy to see how it coincides with the frequent need of male characters to set themselves apart. However, despite the undoubted difference and independence of Julita's position with respect to the other mad women in Onetti, it is important to note that Julita's problem is precisely the absence of the male, and that without him she is able only passively to withdraw from the world. Again the underlying symbolic division is between active and passive poles, in which the woman is identified with the latter term. Julita's final suicide is the recognition that she can do nothing to alleviate her dilemma, even though her suicide is still a refusal to accept what others take to be normal. To this extent the treatment of the female characters is still consistent.

The slight degree of independence in Julita's character constitution is unusual in Onetti, and that is a salutory reminder that, despite the consistency of the use of the different female functions, there are certain limited individual features in each case. In other words, the function does not always entirely exhaust the female characterization, even if it accounts for a large proportion of it. There is another idiosyncratic characterization in “Tan triste como ella” (1963).⁵ Here the female character is given the function of wife, and her husband seems to react to her as male characters in Onetti do react to wives: he discovers that she has grown old and he loses interest in her. But the familiarity of this state of affairs is registered from an unusual angle, since it is the woman who is the main focalized character. The estrangement that affects their relationship is shown by concentrating on her, and the story shows her collapse under the neglect of her husband. Here for once an Onetti story shows the response of a woman to one of the basic problems with which his stories and novels deal. But in essence the position of the woman in “Tan triste como ella” is analogous to that of Julita. She can find no satisfactory alternative to married life (her extramarital sexual activities are unsuccessful) while the husband is active in his professional and sexual life outside the home. In addition, the woman here finds no temporary outlet in madness as does Julita, but ultimately looks for a way out of the situation in suicide—that is the only real alternative to an intolerable situation which Onetti's discourse seems to allow a female character. So there is inscribed here the same structure of relations and power as in Onetti's other works, and that is also made manifest in the very title of the story which actually refers to the husband rather than to the woman who is apparently the focus of the story!

Onetti's fictional discourse is fundamentally posited on the dominance of male characters. The male situation is that of a post-Oedipal self-consciousness, when the knowledge of a prior acceptance of the dominant, patriarchal order is formulated. The male characters struggle continually with their status as adults within the symbolic order, and their struggles with that order frequently lead to projections of escape and fulfilment which are imaginary and fleeting. The women characters figure within the male struggle to achieve and perpetuate some solution to or denial of the frustrations which they become acutely aware of.

In fact, I would suggest that the roles of women characters can be seen as part of the problem with which the male characters are dealing. Their roles and positioning are a mark of a crucial blind spot in Onetti's thinking. This is a specific ideological foreclosure: the representation of woman in Onetti's narratives constitutes a revealing contradiction. Male discourse and action marginalize woman and fix her in a position very similar to that which the male himself is attempting to resolve. The roles and positioning of women characters reiterate (as far as the discourse is concerned, in an entirely unproblematical way) the very oppression which the male wishes to alleviate for himself. The implicit, patriarchal power structure is not overturned but is actually reinscribed in the representation of women. And this ideological blindness, this contradiction, is never resolved. The unthinkable seems to be that the experience of the male and the female could have similarities, or that female subjection (as represented in Onetti's narratives themselves) could be a more pressing issue than male subjection. And this underlines the absence of any collective consciousness in Onetti, the heavy concentration on isolated male subjectivity. The investigation of male subjectivity is in itself interesting enough, but it produces this internal contradiction whereby the key problem is simply displaced on to the woman and so perpetuated within male thinking. The subjection of woman within Onetti's representations is one sign of the absence of an explicit social or political dimension in the writing. Without confronting the possible social and political causes of the basic male dilemma, the texts of Onetti get locked into and return again and again to the same difficulties of how to cope with that dilemma. Hence the texts frequently repeat the same basic moves, and narrative dynamism becomes extremely attenuated since all seems to have been decided in advance.⁶ There is, within Onetti, a certain regime of repetition, which is a sign of the nature of the limits in his discourse.

This paradoxical subjection of women characters is one of the major impasses of Onetti's thinking. One might speculate that not until the hierarchy is reversed and woman is put into the superior position, that is, not until the specifically invisible problem of woman within Onetti's discourse is pushed into the foreground, will any progress be made beyond the repetition of the same male difficulties. For what alleviation of, or even liberation from their problems, can the male characters hope for if their acts and thinking are dependent on the subjection of women? The answer is that it could only be a male and highly partial alleviation or liberation, which had not broken with the basic structures that created the male dilemma in the first place. In this respect, we come up against one of the ideological closures in Onetti. My point is that the way Onetti represents woman (that is, creates a configuration of elements called “woman”) is highly paradoxical, since it so places woman as to make man alone have meaning. And my purpose in emphasizing this point is to open the texts of Onetti on to the historical moment of his writing, to denaturalize this repeated treatment of women characters. It seems to me that to make the representation of women visible, to call attention to it, goes hand in hand with the need to see that Onetti is writing from within a particular, male dominated society and is conditioned by that. If his representation of women is not problematized it too easily takes on a natural, invisible status—it becomes an abstract, deracinated, neutral and imperceptible “fact”. The ultimate rationale of this article is to see the productivity of Onetti's representation (it is a produced, cultural phenomenon) and to understand it as part of an historical process.

It would be inconsistent therefore not to take my own position into account. My article seeks to represent and highlight the subversive underside of Onetti's “system”. It seeks to show that one of its corner-stones is placed over a void and that it will not hold securely in place—the void creates continual subsidence. In doing this, my article has (paradoxical) pretensions to mastery over Onetti: it attempts to invoke a larger horizon, and this implies the exercise of power. But this is so only to a limited extent. My aim is not to provide a new and improved blueprint for Onetti's discourse, but to encourage the subsidence within it, to help to open up the tensions within its thinking. Hence, the mastery is strategic, not absolute. It is a strategy designed to trace the (il)logic of a repeated process of thought, and to make visible what is not made visible by the texts themselves; the underlying, larger problematic that is only implicit.

Notes

1. Juan Carlos Onetti, Obras completas (Mexico: Aguilar, 1970), p. 631. All subsequent page references to Onetti's work figure in parenthesis in the text.

2. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. The Daughter's Seduction (London: MacMillan, 1982), p. 90.

3. See Josefina Ludmer, Onetti. Los procesos de construcción del relato (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1977), pp. 20-22, for a full discussion of the breast and flat motifs.

4. See chapter 6 of my Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative and the Subject (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1985) for a discussion of the narrator's position in Los adioses.

5. There are also certain rare female characters who do not seem to correspond to the four major functions at all; notable amongst these are: the girl-friend in “Jacob y el otro” (1961), Josefina in El astillero and Frieda in Dejemos hablar al viento.

6. See my Reading Onetti, especially chapter 10, for a discussion of this loss of narrative.