[In the following essay, Millington discusses masculinity and narrative discourse in “Jacob y el otro.”]

INTRODUCTION

The fact that Onetti's writing in ‘Jacob y el otro’ is dense and allusive can be immediately corroborated by a curious and resistant textual detail.¹ On two separate occasions (1376 and 1394), one of the characters mentions the canvas of a wrestling ring and alludes to the existence of two words to refer to it, ‘tapiz’ and ‘alfombra’. The purpose of this double designation and of the double mention is far from clear, though just how one might respond to this detail in reading is something to which I will return when the question of reading is explicitly addressed. In seeking to read ‘Jacob’, I have drawn on certain notions from psychoanalysis (particularly post-Freudian psychoanalysis), not in an effort to render the story transparent, but in order to establish a flexible and questioning attitude towards it and towards reading itself. For, if Lacan's re-reading of Freud has shown anything, it is notably the complex interaction that takes place in the analytical process.² Moreover, one of the crucial elements of my reading of Onetti's short stories is its insistence on the importance of sexuality, and in ‘Jacob’ that importance seems to relate to the problems of masculinity. In highlighting the importance of masculinity in ‘Jacob’ I also seek to open up the story to something of its own hidden logic: in other words, the analytical approach to the story seeks to uncover what the story itself is not explicitly saying but which is nonetheless crucial to its discourse. Not that this is intended to be the last word on ‘Jacob’—merely a word which ‘Jacob’ may not be able to speak itself.

‘Jacob’ begins by recounting the aftermath of a wrestling match in Santa María. Against all the odds, the doctor saves the life of a very badly injured wrestler, and on his way home from the hospital casts his mind back to the origins of the fight one week before. As part of a tour of Latin America the ageing, ex-world champion of heavy-weight wrestling Jacob van Oppen arrives in Santa María with his manager, Orsini, and issues the standard challenge: a five hundred peso prize for any man who gets into the ring and lasts three minutes with him. Slightly unexpectedly a challenger emerges whom Orsini judges capable of resisting Jacob long enough to win the five hundred pesos which, in any case, he does not possess. Orsini tries to buy off the challenger, Mario, but his bride to be, Adriana, is intransigent and insists that they need the money for their wedding and that the moribund Jacob is too old to resist the vigorous and youthful Mario. Thinking that they stare defeat in the face, Orsini tries to persuade the volatile Jacob that they should withdraw from Santa María. Jacob cannot comprehend the notion that he might be defeated, insists on fighting and coolly produces the necessary five hundred pesos from his shoe. In the ring, amid the hubbub of the crowd, Jacob fights Mario and, by apparently infringing the rules, manages to throw him out of the ring and deep into the spectators. Jacob is not defeated despite expectations, and the almost fatally injured, unnamed wrestler of chapter one turns out to have been Mario, and not Jacob as the story had led the reader to believe.

THE LOGIC OF THE STORY

For all but its final page, ‘Jacob’ seems to encourage the reader to follow Orsini's point of view on Jacob and the fight. Orsini's pessimism, reinforced by the doctor's in chapter one, strongly stresses the inevitability of Jacob's defeat. In that sense, the operating theatre is simply the extension of the ring: a locus of physical vulnerability. Central to this process of shaping the reader's expectations are periodic assessments made by Orsini of Jacob's physical condition. He perceives the decline which has taken place beneath the surface:

‘Toda esta carne’—pensaba Orsini … ; ‘los mismos músculos, o más, de los veinte años; un poco de grasa en el vientre, en el lomo, en la cintura. Blanco, enemigo del sol, gringo y mujer. Pero estos brazos y esas piernas tienen la misma fuerza de antes, o más. Los años no pasaron por allí; pero siempre pasan, siempre buscan y encuentran un sitio para entrar y quedarse. A todos nos prometieron, de golpe o tartamudeando, la vejez y la muerte. Este pobre diablo no creyó en promesas; por lo tanto el resultado es injusto’

(1383)

There are three points to be made about this. Firstly, Orsini is the principal focalizer of the story and as such his assessment is almost always the dominant one. Secondly, Jacob's body is a major focus of attention in the story: it is read as a source of signs about the future. The body is seen to be caught in a process which is controlled by time and age, and the crucial thing is that the story's other important body, Mario's, is much younger and therefore brings Jacob's condition into sharp focus. Thirdly, it is worth noting that the problem of putting on weight and therefore losing fighting edge is indirectly related to feminization: this is a hint at a nexus of concerns which I shall be developing later.

Matching Jacob's physical decline, Orsini also deduces a mental decline. Jacob's violent and unpredictable behaviour, and his excessive drinking are signs of a profound inner crisis:

El gigante movió la cabeza para mirarlo; los ojos azules estaban turbios y parecía usar la boca entreabierta para ver. ‘Disnea otra vez, angustia’ pensó Orsini. ‘Es mejor que se emborrache y duerma hasta mañana …’

‘Ahora empieza’—continuó Orsini—, ‘la última vez fue en Guayaquil. Tiene que ser un asunto cíclico, pero no entiendo el ciclo. Una noche me estrangula y no por odio; porque me tiene a mano …’

(1367)

This combined physical and mental deterioration in the ex-world champion is matched by Orsini himself who is also rather weary with the situation he finds himself in. Orsini devotes much of his energy to fighting off the truths consequential on his perception of Jacob's condition, and is committed to trying to negotiate a course around Jacob's decline. He is also committed, come what may, to happiness, which seems like an investment in illusion: ‘Había nacido también para la felicidad, o por lo menos para creer obstinadamente en ella, contra viento y marea, contra la vida y sus errores. Había nacido, sobre todo, lo más importante, para imponer cuotas de dicha a todo el mundo posible’ (1364). But this position clearly inserts him in the contradiction of desiring against his own knowledge: this is the story's apparent metaphysical framework. The consequence for Orsini is that he is propelled by this contradiction to minimize the effects of his knowledge, to try and avoid it, and this means constant movement and constant pretence.

The movement and pretence are perceptible as a continual performance of the self for others. Both Orsini and Jacob (to some extent) put on a display of themselves for others as supremely confident and in control. Their exhibitionism is apparent from the very first moment of their presence in Santa María: it is the first thing that the doctor remembers about them in chapter 1. They appear in the central square parading ceremoniously in an ostentatious display of themselves:

Avanzaban indiferentes a la curiosidad que hacía nacer la bestia lenta de dos metros; sin apresurarse pero resuelto, el movedizo marchaba con una irrenunciable dignidad, con una levantada sonrisa diplomática, como flanqueado por soldados de gala, como si alguien, un palco con banderas y hombres graves y mujeres viejas, lo esperara en alguna parte. Se supo que dejaron la coronita, entre bromas de niños y alguna pedrada, al pie del monumento a Brausen.

(1364)

This performance continues as long as they remain in Santa María. Jacob performs himself as heavy-weight wrestling champion of the world, in which role his body is the supposed transmitter of a message of power and control, although Orsini is well aware that Jacob's body is no longer capable of being read in this way: ‘—Ciento diez animales abriendo la boca porque el campeón salta a la cuerda, como saltan, y mejor, todas las niñas en los patios de las escuelas’ (1380). But not all of Santa María is deluded by Jacob's performance, for that is precisely what Orsini cannot control: Adriana for one reads a very different message transmitted by Jacob's body and perceives the imminence of defeat.

While Jacob performs his role, Orsini performs another as manager, and he does this even more elaborately than Jacob. He is massively courteous, externally self-confident and pretentious. He continually smiles and pretends, especially when it comes to the need to deposit the five hundred pesos as the guarantee for the challenge. In his case, the bigger the problem he faces the bigger the smile that he produces to minimize it. But his performance is the symptom of the gap between what he knows and his desire for things to be otherwise. The excess in the performance is the sign that he knows the gap cannot be filled in. For much of the story Orsini proposes his knowledge as superior to Jacob's—for example, ‘“No puedo decirle que alguna vez tuve éxito amenazando y también pagué para que la cosa no durara más de treinta segundos; pero acaso no tenga más remedio que decírselo”’ (1386)—but in fact the story's ending suggests that Jacob knows the same thing about himself as Orsini, he knows that the gap between knowledge and desire cannot be overcome.

It is important that this masculine exhibitionism is undercut by the narrator of chapters 2-5, important because this consolidates the strength of the underlying knowledge being proposed. The narrator of chapters 2-5 occasionally reminds the reader that the truth lies elsewhere than in Orsini's games:

Tal vez las burlas, nunca dichas en voz alta, rodearon todo el día al príncipe Orsini, a sus ropas, a sus modales, a su buena educación inadecuada. Pero él había apostado a ser feliz y sólo le era posible enterarse de las cosas agradables y buenas. En El Liberal, en el Berna y en el Plaza tuvo lo que él llamaría en el recuerdo conferencias de prensa; bebió y charló con curiosos y desocupados, contó anécdotas y atroces mentiras, exhibió una vez más los recortes de diarios, amarillentos y quebradizos. Algún día, esto era indudable, las cosas habían sido así: van Oppen campeón del mundo, joven, con una tuerca irresistible, con viajes que no eran exilios, asediado por ofertas que podían ser rechazadas.

(1371-72)

And Adriana is also part of this deflationary tendency: with her terseness and directness she cuts through and denies all purpose to Orsini's pretence.

The ‘knowledge’ of the story is, therefore, carefully placed and creates an almost inevitable position for the reader: the narrator, Adriana and Orsini all know the same thing. Add to this certain other details and the manipulation of the reader is quite marked. Not only does Orsini constantly anticipate defeat, but the badly injured body in chapter 1 is unidentified, and the doctor describes Jacob as ‘el gigante moribundo’ twice in that chapter (1364 and 1365). Orsini anticipates that Jacob will be subject to an autopsy (1392) and he also describes Jacob as ‘difunto’ (1394) just before the fight. The whole situation of their staging exhibition fights in obscure Latin American locations after the renown of the world championship reinforces the idea of imminent defeat, and Orsini's own ‘defeat’ at the hands of Adriana in trying to ‘buy off’ the challenge looks like a pre-echo of the actual fight. All these details lead the reader to the almost inevitable conclusion that Jacob will lose catastrophically in the fight. That this is not so should lead to the reconsideration i) of the story's tactic of manipulation, and ii) of all the framing ‘knowledge’ that is carefully put in place. Rather than simply accept the metaphysics of Jacob's and Orsini's situation, on the grounds that it too may be a manipulation of the reader, it seems appropriate to reread the story, and I want to propose that a possible focus of rereading should be gender, and specifically masculinity, which is something about which, I would suggest, the story itself does not seem consciously to know.

REREADING FOR MASCULINITY

Rereading ‘Jacob’ is crucial because Jacob does not lose the fight, although it is not clear that he wins it in any real sense (something to which I shall return). The fact that he does not lose seems to cut against the very strong logic set up by the story. By breaking the rules Jacob seems able to eliminate the threat of opposition, as if the decline of his body could be kept at bay. But the strongly resisting attitude of the crowd (they express extreme disapproval at what happens) suggests that there is no simple victory for Jacob. Rereading will reveal that there is an important textual and political unconscious in play here. And to begin the rereading process the nature of space needs to be investigated.

The fight takes place in a ring, a delimited space and, moreover, a space within which Jacob can be isolated from others while remaining at the same time in full view. What happens at the end is that Jacob survives in that space: he emphatically avoids the need to leave the ring and negotiate with those outside it (as his manager, Orsini, has done throughout the story). It is as if Jacob were trying to reaffirm what he has been in the past: a unique individual, the world champion. In the space of the ring Jacob seems to seek to stand alone, literally (and metaphorically) unchallenged. His ejection of Mario from the ring is a theatrically obvious rejection of any doubts or questions about himself. The ejection of the challenger leaves Jacob as the monadic male, so characteristic of Onetti's fiction. And this position is strongly narcissistic, seemingly seeking to affirm self-sufficiency. One might go further in unravelling the importance of the ring as the space for Jacob's identity and see it as the image of his desire for clear-cut ego-boundaries. The importance to masculinity of such boundaries is well documented in psychoanalysis and studies of gender, being contrasted with an ability to empathize and negotiate with others.³ The connotations of the ring's outside—the Other, the cultural and social world of Santa María—are significantly rejected by Jacob's act. The narcissism of masculinity is also characteristically associated with aggressiveness: the aggression against the other (the individual Mario) is suggestive of Jacob's desire for extreme control over his identity. In Kleinian terms, one might argue that the ejection of Mario is (by implication) a defence against the depressive feelings of recognizing that he is not in complete control. The (apparent) win over his opponent is reminiscent of a manic defence to protect his identity against the challenge of Mario and Santa María. In her commentary on Melanie Klein, Hanna Segal explains the nature of manic defence:

The manic relation to objects is characterized by a triad of feelings—control, triumph and contempt. These feelings are directly related to, and defensive against depressive feelings of valuing the object and depending on it, and fear of loss and guilt. Control is a way of denying dependence, of not acknowledging it and yet of compelling the object to fulfil a need for dependence, since an object that is wholly controlled is, up to a point, one that can be depended on. Triumph is a denial of depressive feelings of valuing and caring; it is linked with omnipotence …⁴

Hence the violence against Mario can be seen to take on crucial psychological connotations. And in that respect, Orsini's acquisition of the narrative voice may be the equivalent of Jacob's ‘success’, in that he takes control of language in the final chapter. In the same way one might also see consistency in the story in that the doctor in chapter 1, in his operating to save Mario's life, seems to acquire a certain masculine control and heroism in the eyes of the other male characters, even though he ironizes their reaction to him as part of his class role of superiority and condescension.

Returning to Jacob in the ring, it is important to note the sort of performance he gives. From his viewpoint, training and fighting in public view are a way of soliciting a look, he puts himself forward to be seen, not as an object of desire, but as the source of signs that bespeak power and control. The problem for him is that his body may be read in ways which he does not seek, and his inability to control the reception of the message of his body points to the inevitable dialectic of identification that Jacob tries to reject by his treatment of Mario.

Before the fight in the ring there occurs the crucial long scene between Orsini and Jacob in chapter 5. During that scene, a shift in power takes place whereby Orsini's view of their situation is rejected and Jacob refuses to take his advice and leave Santa María. Before this scene the relationship between the two characters is already complex. Orsini is variously cast as protector of Jacob (1366-67), as nursemaid (1385), and even as a sort of ‘lion-tamer’ (1367), since Orsini tries to guide him but needs to contend with his fear of Jacob's volatile aggression. In general, Orsini acts as Jacob's interface with the world, and so he is the one to deal with the public, the newspapers and any challengers who appear. He is the one to assess the nature of reality and the best strategy to adopt in responding to it. Even though he treats Adriana with disdain, he can read the clear message that Mario's body is sending, and he knows immediately that he must bargain with her in order to save Jacob.

By contrast, Jacob is not verbally interactive with the world, and barely even with Orsini. He simply tries to dominate the Other, which is a source of potential challenges to be overcome. He makes no effort to modify his view or behaviour in order to accommodate any aspect of reality which might prove problematic; tacitly, this function is delegated to Orsini. There is a clear demarcation between himself and others. In this contrast with Orsini, the true nature of their interdependence is manifest: it is not so much that there is a bond or communication between them (of a physical or emotional sort), but that they fulfil different functions which complement each other. Which is not to deny that certain adjustments need to be made: though Orsini appears to be the manager, his position is precarious, and his judgement is subject to Jacob's veto, since Jacob is in a position to make their hotel room the equivalent of the ring and impose his view on Orsini physically.

The complementarity of Orsini and Jacob can be seen in (at least) two ways. Firstly and most simply, the relation can be seen to be less that of two individuals and more that between the mind and the body: the one who thinks and the one who acts, though this division is somewhat simplistic given Jacob's ultimate imposition of his will on Orsini. Alternatively, one might see the relation in terms of the psychic apparatus. In this description, the two characters could be taken to represent different areas of complementary function within one subjectivity. In this sense, Orsini has certain attributes of the ego, negotiating with the world, projecting a clear personality, building up the standing of the pair, and Jacob has certain features of the id, the source of drives and energy. Again it is worth emphasizing that any absolute limit drawn around these functions would be misleading: the division is a way of highlighting general tendencies. In both these descriptions, however, the pair can be profitably seen as parts of one figure, interactive and mutually dependent, though not necessarily working in harmony. If one does choose to read the relationship in psychoanalytical terms as being that between elements of one subjectivity, it might help to give perspective on the problematic and unresolved outcome of the fight, to probe beneath the manifest content.

In the long scene before the fight, the interactions and the struggle between the two is seen at its most revealing. In this scene the revolver (as elsewhere in Onetti⁵) is of some significance in locating the shift in power through the scene. The revolver is prepared by Orsini in anticipation of Jacob's hostile reaction to the suggestion that they should run away from Santa María before the fight. The revolver is an equivocal sign of the nature of the relationship between them: on the one hand it suggests Orsini's recognition of the urgency to extricate themselves from what he feels to be a lost cause; but, on the other, it is a clear sign of the fragility of his control over Jacob. Throughout the scene the revolver is periodically mentioned as a reminder of both these aspects. But it becomes clear that, despite Orsini's attempts to conceal it, Jacob is well aware that he has it in his pocket. By the morning after the scene, the revolver has been unloaded as a definitive signal of Orsini's powerlessness.

Running parallel with the revolver motif, is the shift that occurs in the location of the smile in the scene. Orsini is conspicuous almost throughout the story for the smile which he presents to the world, but in this scene it is Jacob who, after expressing his determination to stay on in Santa María and fight, acquires possession of the smile and even of laughter. This change underpins the apparent rejuvenation of Jacob, which runs counter to the logic of his physical condition: it is as if in reacquiring the smile and laughter he were going back in time: ‘Van Oppen se puso a reír y el sombrero cayó sobre la cama. Su risa había sido descuidada por los años, era la misma’ (1392); and: ‘Me bastó verlo—los ojos aniñados, limpios y sin nada; la corta curva de la sonrisa—para entender que no quería hablar conmigo, que no deseaba prólogos, nada que lo separara de lo que había resuelto ser y recordar’ (1394). Quite how this happens is far from clear.⁶ But it seems evident that at this point there becomes visible the underlying textual logic cutting against the logic of the body previously set up. The rejuvenation is backed by the sudden deus ex machina resolution of Orsini's seemingly insuperable problem of providing the five hundred peso guarantee for the fight when Jacob simply produces it from the savings concealed in his shoe (1393).

This question of the rejuvenation of Jacob is closely linked to masculinity and its crisis in ‘Jacob’, the context for which is signalled early in the story in Jacob's self-assessment during his bout of heavy drinking with Orsini. Summing himself up he says: ‘—Nadie … El footing, las flexiones, las tomas, Lewis. Por Lewis; por lo menos vivió y fue un hombre. La gimnasia no es un hombre, la lucha no es hombre, todo esto no es un hombre. Una pieza de hotel, el gimnasio, indios mugrientos. Fuera del mundo, Orsini’ (1368). Jacob's doubts appear to vitiate his wrestling career, which by the end comes to look like a desperate attempt to fill the gap in gender identity. And the image of the champion is crucial here. Jacob's reimposition of boundaries, his casting aside of the doubts and the challenge to him signals the drive to coincide with the plenitude of the identity of champion. Here the designation ‘champion’ (repeated several times) has a particular significance. One can see Jacob pinning his ideal of identity on the apparently neatly circumscribed public title—the title is as delimiting as the ring he stands in. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan clarifies this particular, precarious nexus of Imaginary and Symbolic in the identificatory process:

In adult life subjects constantly reconstitute their identities within a synchronic, cultural signifying context—a Symbolic order—to secure themselves a fixed value in terms of their Imaginary ‘self’-fables. A subject represents him- or herself to another person as signifying something cultural (a title, a profession) within a given Symbolic order, or something more basic and personal in terms of his or her own narcissism, and tries to confirm the merit of the Symbolic and Imaginary aspects of identity in light of Real events. When a subject's Imaginary ideal is confirmed by Symbolic labels and approved by Real events, the accompanying feeling is one of wholeness or jouissance. But the ever-jostling, power-bent signifying chain of society continually threatens the constancy and fixity of any subject's Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real constellation of joy.⁷

Jacob's effort to impose boundaries and to pin identity on the title is also illuminated by recent research into the psychology of sport in men's lives. Sport acts as a key source of identification for many men; it becomes a means of achieving self-validation.⁸ But this research into sport makes clear that this is a hazardous and ephemeral process, so that the key question is how to go on winning, how to sustain the source of identity, how to ward off threats and challenges. The desire for perpetual success and stability is just that: desire, which cannot be definitively satisfied.

This perspective might be productively applied to Jacob. At first sight it does appear that he gains a triumphant victory—Mario is emphatically overcome and physically damaged. Indeed Gabriel Saad talks of Jacob and ‘el milagro de su resurrección’.⁹ But, on close inspection, this is neither a clear victory nor a resurrection. There are three crucial elements which render Jacob's win rather equivocal. Firstly, Jacob appears to have to break the rules in order to beat Mario: ‘Contra todas las reglas, Jacob mantuvo los brazos altos durante diez segundos’, and ‘No habíamos llegado a los cincuenta segundos y el campeón había ganado o no, según se mira’ (1395). The suggestion of cheating reinforces the sense that what is primarily in play here is desire. The unwritten logic appears to be that Jacob can only afford to follow the rules as long as he is sure of winning. When winning is doubtful the rules are infringed just enough to permit an unchanging desire to be acted upon. I would suggest that by implication Jacob seems to know that he will not (perhaps cannot) win fairly, hence he cheats: he will at least avoid defeat. In this implicit tension between desire (to win) and knowledge (of probable defeat), Jacob is clearly opting against knowledge. The knowledge is of unstable identity, an identity that is decentred and incomplete, perhaps (following the metaphor) removed from the illusion of control in the ring. What seeks to cover over this knowledge is a desire to perpetuate the narcissism and ignorance of apparently fulfilled and stable masculinity. Not that the two are exclusive positions since the ignorance of full masculinity is interdependent with the forgetting of the knowledge of its unattainability.

Secondly, the reaction of the crowd, its utter hostility to Jacob (1395-96), seems to refuse him all recognition. But the status of the regained identity as unquestioned champion is equivocal if it is not recognized by others, and this is a strong element undermining the significance of Jacob's win. While Jacob seems not to pay attention to the hostility, the crowd's reaction underlines his retreat from any negotiating with the Other.

Thirdly, seen in its full context, this win is only one in a long, indeed in an endless, series. The question then is how Jacob can continue to win. And the question must be posed and reposed in each town and with each challenge. Jacob and Orsini are on a tour which signifies continual movement, and the outcome of any one fight is temporary: the tour is inherently unstable. In fact, the tour represents an endless chain of desire, with each town as just one more link. In Lacanian terms, Jacob's desire is unending, it cannot be controlled and fulfilled in the ring in Santa María. Its logic is of constant striving and non-fulfilment, of excess to any attempt to satisfy it.¹⁰ The very fact that Jacob and Orsini have left Europe means (implicitly) that they have already lost. By touring obscure parts of Latin America, they have moved to evade any prospect of a real challenge. And the very fact of touring means a lack of permanence: it is a constant sliding, a constant repetition of the desire to hold on. All that Jacob and Orsini can do is to talk and delude themselves about the prospect of a return to Europe and to the status of champion of the world, and about the possibility of sustaining the identity of masculinity. Whence, in part, the significance of the song that Jacob forces Orsini to sing: Lili Marlene is strongly nostalgic.

In this context, the ‘win’ over Mario is significant in ways that Jacob and Orsini do not wish to recognize. Superficially, Jacob wins over ‘el otro’, over Mario. But one might also say that it is an attempted win over ‘lo otro’, the Other: in other words, over all that is alien and liable to make a demand on the individual.¹¹ Jacob's attempt to impose his desire for (narcissistic) victory would therefore seem to put Orsini's efforts to negotiate survival with the Other into the domain not of realism but of ‘weakness’ and ‘non-masculinity’. In addition to these aspects, I would also argue that Jacob's win is over ‘la otra’, Adriana, and so has further crucial gender implications. In the first place, Mario fights in the ring as the representative of Adriana: they are to marry and she has decided to try and secure their future by this means. In this context, Jacob's ejection of Mario from the ring is a refusal of Mario's position: the male body in the service of a woman and marriage. All that conventional behaviour is rejected and held at bay outside the ring. At a more abstract level, Adriana's putting up of Mario to fight goes beyond the wish to secure their future: it is like a challenge to masculinity and the patriarchal order. In that light, one might see Adriana and Mario as an indivisible pair cognate with Jacob and Orsini, with Adriana as the managerial figure and Mario as the body given credit for no brains (1374). And the stereotypical characterization of Adriana underpins this: she is made of iron (1370), and is a tough, calculating manipulator of Mario—she goads him with her nails when Orsini applies pressure on him to back down (1377-78). Hence also the characterization of her in chapter 6 as almost crazed with resentment against the defeated Mario (1396): it is significant and belittling that her reaction to the badly injured Mario omits the marker of loyalty to her future husband. In overcoming Adriana and Mario, therefore, Jacob maintains a gender hierarchy: in part, what Jacob survives is the direct challenge to his masculinity, and Rius' scorn for Adriana at the hospital consolidates the sense of male solidarity against the ‘scheming’ woman (1362). With the woman finally reduced to the condition of a screaming, spitting and hysterical caricature there is no need to negotiate with her any more, and Orsini's earlier efforts to do so come to appear rather unnecessary. In this characterization of Adriana, the implied author is evidently writing in complicity with hierarchical masculinity.

By stressing the gender aspects of ‘Jacob’, I am trying to go beyond its implicit invitation to read it as a story about the problem of human ageing and loss. The dilemmas faced by the characters might begin to look rather different and perhaps more politically freighted if they are seen as partially (or even largely) based on problems of masculinity and gender relations. This is one way of trying to promote a resisting reading. With that objective of demystification, ‘Jacob’ might be seen as a narrative about a crisis of masculinity and its bid for exclusivity and power. In not questioning the nature of Jacob's and Orsini's understanding of their actions, ‘Jacob’ tends to overlook the way in which it reproduces certain notions to do with gender. In recreating a certain myth of masculinity, ‘Jacob’ is close to the deep structure that Teresa de Lauretis claims for all narrative:

in its ‘making sense’ of the world, narrative endlessly reconstructs it as a two-character drama in which the human person creates and recreates himself out of an abstract or purely symbolic other—the womb, the earth, the grave, the woman … The drama has the movement of a passage, a crossing, an actively experienced transformation of the human being into—man …¹²

This is a broad statement but it does reveal a certain fundamental tendency in narrative, which is not simply a formal structure but which serves cultural and social purposes. Applied to ‘Jacob’, it emphasizes how Jacob strives to recreate himself in a certain image against what is represented by Adriana and Santa María, which is seen as contemptible and debilitating. Jacob tries to project on to them those inherent problems within himself which he does not wish to recognize and then to destroy them. As in all Onetti's fiction, there is a profound (and contradictory) reliance on the function of women characters in enabling masculine narrative and action.¹³ By contrast, in ‘Jacob’'s own terms, what Jacob does is seen to have less to do with myths of masculinity, potency and control than with the inevitability of human (men's?) ageing.

What I am proposing in my reading of ‘Jacob’ is that there is rather more involved here than the story seems to know. This may appear a paradoxical position given what the story actually tries to do. In setting up a certain knowledge only to undermine it and so surprise the reader, the story may seem to suggest its own ultimate mastery in controlling information. But just as Orsini's knowledge is not complete and he is taken aback by the outcome of the fight, I want to suggest that the story itself at the end does not know everything either. I propose that the story's structure (the movement from knowledge established to knowledge reformulated) does not connote the story's mastery, but the fact that no knowledge is substantively whole, that there is always more, always another reformulation, always an ignorance within knowledge, a knowledge that ‘Jacob’ itself cannot see. I have insisted on gender issues as a way of widening understanding of the mechanisms of meaning involved in ‘Jacob’. That is not an attempt to treat it as a delimited space (as a circumscribed ring) for critical muscle flexing over ‘definitive’ meaning, but rather an attempt to open up the gaps and silences in the story. It is an attempt to deny clear, conscious boundaries to the story and to politicize what on the surface is a somewhat idealized thought process. Here one might draw an analogy from within ‘Jacob’. In Orsini's discourse, Jacob's body has the status of an empty signifier to which he attempts to attach a certain signified, but it turns out that Orsini has not foreseen certain attributes of that signifier. In this way, Orsini is seen to fill that signifier only to discover that in it there is a strength of desire which is in excess of what he had allowed. It is not that he was wrong, but simply that he did not know this desire. In a sense, therefore, at the end Jacob insists bodily and, in so doing, reveals some of the blindness of Orsini's discourse, how its signifiers cannot be held to the signifieds. Precisely the same partial emptying also takes place in chapter 5 when Orsini's revolver is unloaded by Jacob. In reverse, one can see the double designation of the canvas in the ring (‘tapiz’, ‘alfombra’), to which I alluded at the start, as an unconscious allusion to this slippage of signifiers over an apparently single referent—in reverse, but connoting the same notion of multiple relations between signifiers, signifieds and referents. To consolidate this idea of multiplicity, one might also draw an analogy between reading the story and the encounter of Jacob and Mario in the ring. It is possible to see Jacob and Mario as performing in the ring as signifiers circumscribed by the framing of the ropes: they constitute a figure in the carpet/canvas. But the story emphasizes that the carpet/canvas itself is not fixed: it vacillates between ‘alfombra’ and ‘tapiz’. And moreover, the apparent containment of the signifiers' movement is shown to be illusory when Jacob ejects Mario from the ring and into the public. The ‘private’ nature of the contest, of reading, of this ‘analytical session’, is thoroughly disturbed and the ring is revealed as not the only scene of encounter, but as one link, one moment, in a potentially endless chain of signification. The figure in the carpet is not constant. Hence, by ejecting Mario, Jacob is making space for the next contest, the next reading, the next ‘analytical session’.

The underlying proposition of my reading is that the story needs to be negotiated and renegotiated endlessly, on the analogy with interminable psychoanalytic interpretation.¹⁴ As with Jacob, Orsini and their tour, there can only be a series of encounters, never a single, final coming together of reader and text. Rather than my trying to draw a boundary, to establish a clear division between the inside of the text and its outside, between what it does and does not mean, what I want to suggest is that the story is teaching an unconscious lesson about relations between subjects and objects, and about the internal workings of both. What it teaches might be that a subscription to myths of control and dominance is the inherent, crucially unacknowledged, contradiction and source of ignorance within masculinity. Such a subscription is a lure that a regendered mode of reading might learn to be aware of and to question … if not to avoid.¹⁵

Notes

1. Juan Carlos Onetti, ‘Jacob y el otro’, in Obras completas (Mexico: Aguilar, 1970), 1359-96. All page references will be to this edition and bracketed in the text. I shall refer to the story as ‘Jacob’. I should like to thank Bernard McGuirk and the students in a seminar at the University of Michigan for their helpful reactions to earlier versions of this paper.

2. See Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1985), and Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard U.P., 1987), especially chapter 1. For a general introduction to the psychoanalytical concepts underlying this article see A. Wilden, System and Structure. Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock, 1972).

3. See Drury Sherrod, ‘The Bonds of Men: Problems and Possibilities in Close Male Relationships’, in The Making of Masculinities. The New Men's Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 213-39 (especially 222-25).

4. Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 83-84.

5. Other important revolvers in Onetti appear in El astillero and ‘Tan triste como ella’.

6. Other rejuvenations of this sort in Onetti occur in El astillero, Los adioses, ‘La cara de la desgracia’, and ‘El infierno tan temido’.

7. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1986), 223.

8. For a survey of this work see Michael Messner, ‘The Meaning of Success. The Athletic Experience and the Development of Male Identity’, in The Making of Masculinities, 193-209.

9. Gabriel Saad, ‘“Jacob y el otro” o las señales de la victoria’, in En torno a Juan Carlos Onetti, ed. Lídice Gómez Mango (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1970), 91-105, at 104.

10. On desire in this sense see Ragland-Sullivan, 68-89.

11. On the Other see Ragland-Sullivan, 15-16.

12. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: MacMillan, 1984), 121.

13. See my article ‘No Woman's Land. The Representation of Woman in Onetti’, Modern Language Notes, CII (1987), 358-77.

14. On interminable reading and its parallel with psychoanalysis see Felman, ch. 4.

15. On reading and gender in general see Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Gender and Reading. Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London: The Univ. of Johns Hopkins Press, 1986).